‘I need a receipt,’ I said to my Russian driver, who had spent the last ten minutes telling me what was wrong with the world.
‘How much for?’
‘Eight.’ I was generous. It was Christmas morning.
He nodded, scribbling, as I watched a man on the sidewalk watching me, near Bellevue’s fence. Unshaven, with wild long hair, he wore a blue jean jacket lined with fleece, the cuffs of stained army pants caught in the tops of battered cowboy boots.
He began playing an imaginary guitar and singing as I got out of the cab.
‘Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the day. OHHH what fun it is to ride to Galveston today-AAAAAYYYYY . . .’
‘You have admirer,’ my amused driver said as I took the receipt through an open window.
He drove off in a swirl of exhaust. There was not another person or car in sight, and the horrendous serenading got louder. Then my mentally disfranchised admirer darted after me. I was appalled when he began screaming, ‘Galveston!’ as if it were my name or an accusation. I fled into the chief medical examiner’s lobby.
‘There’s someone following me,’ I said to a security guard decidedly lacking in Christmas spirit as she sat at her desk.
The deranged musician pressed his face against the front door, staring in, nose flattened, cheeks blanched. He opened his mouth wide, obscenely rolling his tongue over the glass and thrusting his pelvis back and forth as if he were having sex with the building. The guard, a sturdy woman with dreadlocks, strode over to the door and banged on it with her fist.
‘Benny, cut it out,’ she scolded him loudly. ‘You quit that right now, Benny.’ She rapped harder. ‘Don’t you make me come out there.’
Benny backed away from the glass. Suddenly he was Nureyev doing pirouettes across the empty street.
‘I’m Dr. Kay Scarpetta,’ I said to the guard. ‘Dr. Horowitz is expecting me.’
‘No way the chief’s expecting you. It’s Christmas.’ She regarded me with dark eyes that had seen it all. ‘Dr. Pinto’s on call. Now, I can try to get hold of him, if you want.’ She headed back to her station.
‘I’m well aware it’s Christmas’ – I followed her -‘but Dr. Horowitz is supposed to meet me here.’ I got out my wallet and displayed my chief medical examiner’s gold shield.
She was not impressed. ‘You been here before?’
‘Many times.’
‘Hmm. Well, I sure haven’t seen the chief today. But I guess that don’t mean he didn’t come in through the bay and didn’t tell me. Sometimes they’re here half a day and I don’t know. Hmm. That’s right, don’t nobody bother to tell me.’
She reached for the phone. ‘Hmm. No sir, I don’t need to know.’ She dialed. ‘I don’t need to know nothing, no not me. Dr. Horowitz? This is Bonita with security. I got a Dr. Scarlett.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know.’
She looked at me. ‘How you spell that?’
‘S-c-a-r-p-e-t-t-a,’ I patiently said.
She still didn’t get it right but was close enough. ‘Yes, sir, I sure will.’ She hung up and announced, ‘You can go on and have a seat over there.’
The waiting area was furnished and carpeted in gray, magazines arranged on black tables, a modest artificial Christmas tree in the center of the room. Inscribed on a marble wall was Taceant Colloquia Effugiat Risus Hie Locus Est Ubi Mors Gaudet Succurrere Vitae, which meant one would find little conversation or laughter in this place where death delighted to help the living. An Asian couple sat across from me on a couch, tightly holding hands. They did not speak or look up, Christmas for them forever wrapped in pain.
I wondered why they were here and whom they had lost, and I thought of all I knew. I wished I could somehow offer comfort, yet that gift did not seem meant for me. After all these years, the best I could say to the bereft was that death was quick and their loved one did not suffer. Most times when I offered such words, they weren’t entirely true, for how does one measure the mental anguish of a woman made to strip in an isolated park on a bitterly cold night? How could any of us imagine what she felt when Gault marched her to that ice-filled fountain and cocked his gun?