“I don’t intend to bleed.” I pushed my plate away.
“Doc” – he blew out smoke – “you’re already bleeding. And common sense tells me that if you’re swimming with sharks and start bleeding, you ought to get the hell out of the water.”
“Might we converse without speaking in cliches, at least for a minute or two?”
“Hey I can say it in Portuguese or Chinese and you’re not going to listen to me.”
“If you speak Portuguese or Chinese, I promise I’ll listen. In fact, if you ever decide to speak English I promise I’ll listen.”
“Comments like that don’t win you any fans. That’s just what I’m talking about.”
“I said it with a smile.”
“I’ve seen you cut open bodies with a smile.”
“Never. I always use a scalpel.”
“Sometimes there isn’t a difference between the two. I’ve seen your smile make defense attorneys bleed.”
“If I’m such a dreadful person, why are we friends?”
“’Because I’ve got more walls up than you do. The fact is, there’s a squirrel in every tree and the water’s full of sharks. All of them want a piece of us.”
“Marino, you’re paranoid.”
“You’re damn right, which is why I wish you’d lay low for a while, Doc. Really,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You want to know the truth, it’s going to start looking like a conflict of interests for you to have anything to do with these cases. It’s going to make you come off looking worse.”
I said, “Susan is dead. Eddie Heath is dead. Jennifer Deighton is dead. There is corruption in my office, and we aren’t certain who went to the electric chair the other week. You’re suggesting I just walk away until everything somehow magically self-corrects?”
Marino reached for the salt but I got it first.
”Nope. But you can have all the pepper you want,” I said, sliding me pepper shaker closer.
“This health crap is going to kill me,” he warned.
“Because one of these days I’m going to get so pissed I’m going to do everything at once. Five cigarettes going, a bourbon in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, baked potato loaded with butter, sour cream, salt and then I’m going to blow every circuit in the box.”
“No, you’re not going to do any of those things,” I said. “You’re going to be kind to yourself and live at least as long as I do.”
We were silent for a while, picking at our food.
“Doc, no offense, but just what do you think you’re going to find out about damn feather parts?”
“Hopefully, their origin.”
“I can save you the trouble. They came from birds, “he said.
I left Marino at close to seven P.M. and returned downtown The temperature had risen above forty, the night dark and lashing out in fits of rain violent enough to stop traffic. Sodium vapor lamps were pollen-yellow fudges behind the morgue, where the bay door was shut, every parking space vacant. Inside the building, my pulse quickened as I followed the brightly lit corridor past the autopsy suite to Susan’s small office.
As I unlocked the door, I did not know what I expected to find, but I was drawn to her filing cabinet and desk drawers, to every book and old telephone message Everything looked the same as it had before she died. Marino was quite skilled at going through someone’s private space without disturbing the natural disorder of things. The telephone was still askew on the right corner of the desk, the cord twisted like a corkscrew. Scissors and two pencils with broken points were on the green paper blotter, her lab coat draped over the back of her chair.
A reminder of a doctor’s appointment was still taped to her computer monitor, and as I stared at the shy curves and gentle slant of her neat script, I trembled inside. Where had she gone adrift? Was it when she married Jason Story? Or was her destruction setup much earlier than that, when she was the young daughter of a scrupulous minister, the twin left behind when her sister was killed? Sitting in her chair, I rolled it closet to the filing cabinet and began slipping out one file after another and glancing through the contents. Most of what I perused was brochures and other printed information pertaining to surgical supplies and miscellaneous items used in the morgue. Nothing struck me as curious until I discovered that she had saved virtually every memo she had ever gotten from Fielding, but not one from Ben Stevens or me, when I knew that both of us had sent her plenty. Further searching through drawers and bookshelves produced no files for Stevens or me, and that’s when I concluded that someone had taken them.