Danny got out his billfold and peeled off two tens; Carty went for his inside jacket pocket, whipping out a deck of glossies. Danny said, “Nix. The guy I want is on a tray over there.”
“What?”
“I’m doing the prep. _Now_.”
“Sonny, you ain’t a certified County morgue attendant.”
Danny added a five-spot to his bribe and handed it to Carty; the old man kissed a faded snapshot of a dead movie star. “I guess you are now.”
o
o
o
Danny got his evidence kit from the car and went to work, Carty standing sentry in case the duty ME showed up pissed.
He stripped the sheet off the corpse and felt the limbs for postmortem lividity; he held the arms and legs aloft, dropped them and got the buckle that indicated rigor mortis coming on. He wrote, “Death around 1:00 A.M. likely,” on his notepad, then smeared the dead man’s fingertips with ink and rolled his prints onto a piece of stiff cardboard, pleased that he got a perfect spread the first time around.
Next he examined the neck and head, measuring the purpled ligature marks with a caliper, writing the specs down. The marks encompassed the entire neck; much too long and broad to be a single- or double-hand span. Squinting, he saw a Side 4
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The fiber under the chin; he picked it off with a tweezer, nailed it as white terrycloth, placed it in a test tube and on impulse forced the half-locked jaws open, holding them wide with a tongue depressor. Shining his penlight into the mouth, he saw identical fibers on the roof, tongue and gums; he wrote,
“Strangled and suffocated with white terrycloth towel,” took a deep breath and checked out the eye sockets.
The penlight beam picked out bruised membranes streaked with the gelatinous substance he’d noticed at the building site; Danny took a Q-tip and swabbed three slide samples from each cavity. The goo had a minty medicinal odor.
Working down the cadaver, Danny spot-checked every inch; scrutinizing the inside crook of the elbows, he tingled: old needle scars–faded, but there in force on both the right and left arms. The victim was a drug addict–maybe reformed–none of the tracks were fresh. He wrote the information down, grabbed his caliper and braced himself for the torso wounds.
The six ovals measured to within three centimeters of each other. They all bore teeth mark outlines too shredded to cut casts from–and all were too large to have been made by a human mouth biting straight down. Danny scraped congealed blood off the intestinal tubes that extended from the wounds; he smeared the samples on slides and made a speculative jump that Doc Layman would have crucified him for:
The killer used an animal or animals in the postmortem abuse of his victim.
Danny looked at the dead man’s penis; saw unmistakable human teeth marks on the glans, what Layman called “homicidal affection,” working for laughs in a classroom packed with ambitious off-duty cops. He knew he should check the underside and scrotum, saw Ralph Carty watching him and did it, getting no additional mutilations. Carty cackled, “Hung like a cashew”; Danny said, “Shut the fuck up.”
Carty shrugged and went back to his _Screenworld_. Danny turned the corpse onto its back and gasped.
Deep, razor-sharp cuts, dozens of them crisscrossing the back and shoulders from every angle, wood splinters matted into the narrow strips of caked blood.
Danny stared, juxtaposing the front and backside mutilations, trying to put them together. Cold sweat was soaking his shirt cuffs, making his hands twitch. Then a gruff voice. “Carty, who is this guy? What’s he doing here?”
Danny turned around, putting a pacify-the-locals grin on; he saw a fat man in a soiled white smock and party hat with “1950” in green spangles. “Deputy Upshaw. You’re Dr. Katz?”
The fat man started to stick out his hand, then let it drop. “What are you doing with that cadaver? And by what authority do you come in here and disrupt my workload?”
Carty was shrinking into the background, making with supplicating eyes.
Danny said, “I caught the squeal and wanted to prep the body myself. I’m qualified, and I lied and told Raiphy you said it was kosher.”