Marino doesn’t offer to help her carry anything. He ignores her the same way he does me when he is stung or resentful or jealous. I unlock the door leading inside as the attendants wheel the stretcher in our direction, and I recognize the two men but can’t recall their names. One of them stares at Berger with starstruck eyes. “You’re the lady on TV,” he pipes up. “Holy smoke. That lady judge.”
“‘Fraid not. I’m no judge.” Berger looks them in the eye and smiles.
“You ain’t the lady judge? You swear?” The stretcher clatters through the doorway. “I guess you want him in the cooler,” one of the men says to me.
“Yes,” I reply. “You know where to sign him in. Arnold’s around here somewhere.”
“Yes ma’am, I know what to do.” Neither attendant makes any indication that I might have ended up in their van last weekend as another delivery had my destiny turned out differently. It is my observation that people who work for funeral homes and removal services aren’t shocked or even moved by much. It is not lost on me that these two guys are more impressed with Berger’s celebrity than with the fact that their local chief medical examiner is lucky to be alive and is faring rather poorly in the public eye these days. “You ready for Christmas?” one of them asks me.
“Never am,” I reply. “You gentlemen have a happy one.”
“Lot happier than he’s gonna have.” Indicating the pouched body, they roll off in the direction of the morgue office, where they will fill out a toe tag and sign in the newest patient. I push buttons to open several sets of stainless steel doors as we walk over disinfected floors, passing coolers and the rooms where autopsies are done. Industrial-strength deodorizers are heavy-handed in their presence, and Marino talks about the case from Mosby Court. Berger asks him nothing about it, but he seems to think she wants to know. Or maybe he is showing off now.
“First, it looked like a drive-by since he was in the street and his head was bloody. But I gotta tell you, now I’m wondering if maybe he got hit by a car,” he informs us. I open doors leading into the dim silence of the administrative wing while he goes on to tell Berger every detail of a case he hasn’t even discussed with me yet. I show them into my private conference room and we take off our coats. Berger is dressed in dark wool slacks and a heavy black sweater that does not accentuate but certainly can’t hide her ample bosom. She has the slender, firm build of an athlete, and her scuffed Vibram boots hint that she will go anywhere and do anything if work re-quires it. She pulls out a chair and begins arranging briefcase, files and books on the round wooden table.
“See, he’s got burns here and here.” Marino points to his left cheek and neck and pulls out Polaroid photographs from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He makes the smart choice of handing them to me first.
“Why would a hit-and-run have burns?” My question is a rebuttal, and I am getting an uneasy feeling.
“If he was pushed out while the car was moving, or if he got toasted by the exhaust pipe,” Marino suggests, not sure, not really caring. He has other matters on his mind.
“Not likely,” I reply in an ominous tone.
“Shit,” Marino says, and it begins to dawn on him as he meets my eyes. “I never looked at him, was already in a bag by the time I got there. Goddamn, I just went by what I was told by the guys at the scene. Shit,” he says again, glancing at Berger, his face darkening with gathering embarrassment and irritation. “They’d already bagged the body by the time I got there. Dumb as a bag of hammers, all of ’em.”
The man in the Polaroids is light-skinned with handsome features and short, tightly curled hair dyed egg-yolk yellow. A small gold loop pierces his left ear. I know instantly that his burns were not made by an exhaust pipe, which would leave elliptical burns and not these, which are perfectly round and the size of silver dollars and blistered. He was alive when he got them. I give Marino a long look. He makes the connection and blows out, shaking his head. “We have an ID?” I say to him.