“His gun and wallet. I got both of them here with me,” he replied. “Over there in the bag. How many pairs of gloves you got on?”
“What about a camera, film, anything like that?”
“What’s in the boat is all there is. Looks like you got on more than one pair of gloves.”
He leaned close, his shoulder pressing against mine.
“I’ve double-gloved.” I moved away from him.
“I guess I need another pair.”
I unzipped Eddings’ soggy dive boots and said, “They’re in the cabinet over there.”
With a scalpel I opened the wet suit and dive skin at the seams because they would be too difficult to pull off a fully rigorous body. As I freed him from neoprene, I could see that he was uniformly pink due to the cold. I removed his blue bikini bathing suit, and Danny and I lifted him onto the autopsy table, where we broke the rigidity of the arms and began taking more photographs.
Eddings had no injuries except several old scars, mostly on his knees. But biology had dealt him an earlier blow called hypospadias, which meant his urethra opened onto the underside of his penis instead of in the center. This moderate defect would have caused him a great deal of anxiety, especially as a boy. As a man he may have suffered sufficient shame that he was reluctant to have sex.
Certainly, he had never been shy or passive during professional encounters. In fact, I had always found him quite confident and charming, when someone like me was rarely charmed by anyone, least of all a journalist. But I also knew appearances meant nothing in terms of how people behaved when two of them were alone, and then I tried to stop right there.
I did not want to remember him alive as I made annotations and measurements on diagrams fastened to my clipboard. But a part of my mind tackled my will, and I returned to the last occasion I had seen him. It was the week before Christmas and I was in my Richmond office with my back to the door, sorting through slides in a carousel. I did not hear him behind me until he spoke, and when I turned around, I found him in my doorway, holding a potted Christmas pepper thick with bright red fruit.
“You mind if I come in?” he asked. “Or do you want me to walk all the way back to my car with this.” I said good afternoon to him while I thought with frustration of the front office staff. They knew not to let reporters beyond the locked bulletproof partition in the lobby unless I was asked, but the female clerks, in particular, liked Eddings a little too much. He walked in and set the plant on the carpet by my desk, and when he smiled, his entire face did.
“I just thought there ought to be something alive and happy in this place.” His blue eyes fixed on mine.
“I hope that isn’t a comment about me.” I could not help but laugh.
“Are you ready to turn him?”
The body diagram on my clipboard came into focus, and I realized Danny was speaking to me.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
He was eyeing me with concern while Roche wandered around as if he had never been inside a morgue, peering through glass cabinets and glancing back in my direction.
“Everything all right?” Danny asked me in his sensitive way.
“We can turn him now,” I said.
My spirit shook inside like a small hot flame. Eddings had worn khaki range pants and a black commando sweater that day, and I tried to remember the look in his eyes.
I wondered if there had been anything behind them that might have presaged this.
Refrigerated by the river, his body was cold to my touch, and I began discovering other aspects of him that distorted the familiar, making me feel even more disturbed.
The absence of first molars signaled orthodonture. He had extensive, very expensive porcelain crowns, and contact lenses tinted to enhance eyes already vivid.
Remarkably, the right tens had not been washed away when his mask had flooded, and his dull gaze was weirdly asymmetrical, as if two dead people were staring out from sleepy lids.