The story merited thirty seconds. An unidentified man had lain across the MetroRail tracks just east of the city limits, squarely in the path of an empty passenger train. The engineer spotted him and put on the emergency brake, but not in time.
Choo choo.
I called Milo.
He picked up right away. “Yeah, yeah, the little train that couldn’t. Probably nothing. Or maybe Peake really is a prophet and we should be worshiping him instead of keeping him locked up. Nothing much else on my plate, so I called the coroner.
The deceased is one Ellroy Lincoln Beatty, male black, fifty-two. Petty criminal record-mostly possession and drank and disorderly. The only thing that intrigued me was that Beatty spent some time in a mental hospital. Cama-rillo, thirteen years ago, back when they were still open for that kind of business. No mention of
Starkweather, but you never know. The accident happened in Newton Division. I wish
Manny Alvarado had the case, but he retired and the new guy isn’t great about returning calls. I figured I’d head over to the morgue before lunch. Feel free to join me. If it gets you hungry, we can have lunch later. Like a big rare steak.”
“Basically, the head and the lower extremities,” said the attendant. He was a short, solidly built Hispanic named Albert Martinez, with a crew cut and goatee and thick-lensed glasses that enlarged and brightened his eyes. The crucifix around his neck was gold and hand-tooled, vaguely Byzantine.
The coroner’s office was two stories of square, smooth, cream stucco, meticulously maintained. Back in East L.A. Back at County Hospital. Claire’s old office was a few blocks away. I hadn’t realized it before, but she’d come full circle.
“The rest of him is pretty much goulash,” said Martinez. “Personally, I think it’s amazing we got what we did. The train must have hit him at what-forty, fifty miles per?”
The room was cool, immaculate, odorless. Empty steel tables equipped with drain basins, overhead microphones, a wall of steel lockers. A junior high student would recognize all of it; too many TV shows had dimmed the shock. But television rarely offered a glimpse at the contents of the lockers. Dead people on TV were intact, clean, bloodless props resting peacefully.
I hadn’t been down here since internship, wasn’t enjoying the experience.
“How’d you identify him?” said Milo.
“Welfare card in his pocket,” said Martinez. “The lower extremities still had pieces of pants on and the pocket was in one piece. All he had on him was the card and a couple of bucks. The interesting thing is, you could still smell the booze on him.
Even with all the other fluids. I mean, it was really strong. Only other time I smelled it that strong was this woman, died in childbirth, must have drunk two bottles of wine that night and she arrested on the delivery table. Her amniotic fluid was red-wine-red, you know? Almost purple. She must have been saturated with
Thunderbird or whatever. The baby was dead, obviously. Probably lucky.”
Martinez touched his crucifix.
“When’s Beatty’s autopsy scheduled?” said Milo.
“Hard to say. It’s the usual backlog. Why?”
“It might be related to something. So you’re saying Beatty must have been pretty juiced.”
“To smell that strong? Sure. My guess would be way over the limit. He probably got blasted, wandered onto the tracks, lay down for a nap, and boom.” Martinez smiled.
“So, could I be a detective?”
“Why bother?” said Milo. “Your job’s more fun.”
Martinez chuckled. “Those tracks-they really should do something about them, no fence, no guardrail when they get close to the train yard. I grew up around there, used to play on the tracks, but they weren’t running trains back then. You remember last month? The little kid who wandered on, walking home from school? Not far from where Beatty got hit. That kid, we didn’t get anything recognizable on him. They should put a fence up, or something…. So, anything else?”
“I’d like to look at Beatty.”
“Really? How come?”
“I want to think of him as a person.”
Martinez’s thumb and forefinger closed around the bottom of the crucifix. “A person, huh? Well, maybe looking at him isn’t the right way to do that, you know?”