But caffeine, cigarettes and cholesterol, the grim reapers of the common man—God forbid I should give them up. I go to a national meeting and sit at a banquet with three hundred other forensic pathologists, the world’s foremost experts in disease and death. Seventy-five percent of us don’t jog or do aerobics, don’t walk when we can ride, don’t stand when we can sit, and assiduously avoid stairs or hills unless they’re on the decline. A third of us smoke, most of us drink, and all of us eat as if there is no tomorrow.
Stress, depression, perhaps a greater need for laughter and pleasure because of the misery we see—who can be sure of the reason? One of my more cynical friends, an assistant chief in Chicago, likes to say, “What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?”
Vander went to the drip coffee machine on the counter behind his desk and poured two cups. He had fixed my coffee countless times and could never remember I drink it black.
My ex-husband never remembered either. Six years I lived with Tony and he couldn’t remember that I drink my coffee black or like my steaks medium-rare, not as red as Christmas, just a little pink. My dress size, forget it. I wear an eight, have a figure that will accommodate most anything, but I can’t abide fluff, froth and frills. He always got me something in a six, usually lacy and gauzy and meant for bed. His mother’s favorite color was spring green. She wore a size fourteen. She loved ruffles, hated pullovers, preferred zippers, was allergic to wool, didn’t want to bother with anything that had to be dry-cleaned or ironed, had a visceral antagonism toward anything purple, deemed white or beige impractical, wouldn’t wear horizontal stripes or paisley, wouldn’t have been caught dead in Ultrasuede, believed her body wasn’t compatible with pleats and was quite fond of pockets—the more the better. When it came to his mother, Tony would somehow get it right.
Vander dumped the same heaping teaspoons of whitener and sugar into my cup as he dumped into his own.
Typically, he was disheveled, his wispy gray hair wild, his voluminous lab coat smeared with black fingerprint powder, a spray of ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers protruding from his ink-stained breast pocket. He was a tall man with long, bony extremities and a disproportionately round belly. His head was shaped remarkably like a light bulb, his eyes a washed-out blue and perpetually clouded by thought.
My first winter here he stopped by my office late one afternoon to announce it was snowing. A long red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and pulled over his ears was a leather flight helmet, possibly ordered from a Banana Republic catalogue and absolutely the most ridiculous winter hat I’d ever seen. I think he would have looked perfectly at home inside a Fokker fighter plane. “The Flying Dutchman,” we appropriately called him around the office. He was always in a hurry, flying up and down the halls, his lab coat flapping around his legs.
“You saw the papers?” he asked, blowing on his coffee.
“The whole blessed world saw the papers,” I dismally replied.
Sunday’s front page was worse than Saturday evening’s. The banner headline ran across the entire width of the top of the page, the letters about an inch high. The story included a sidebar about Lori Petersen and a photograph that looked as if it came from a yearbook. Abby Turnbull was aggressive enough, if not indecent, to attempt an interview with Lori Petersen’s family, who lived in Philadelphia and “were too distraught to comment.”
“It sure as hell isn’t helping us any,” Vander stated the obvious. “I’d like to know where the information’s coming from so I could string a few people up by their thumbs.”
“The cops haven’t learned to keep their mouths shut,” I told him. “When they learn to zip their lips, they won’t have leaks to bitch about anymore.”
“Well, maybe it’s the cops. Whatever the case, the stuff’s making my wife crazy. I think if we lived in the city, she’d make us move today.”
He went to his desk, which was a jumble of computer printouts, photographs and telephone messages. There was a quart beer bottle and a floor tile with a dried bloody shoe print, both inside plastic bags and tagged as evidence. Randomly scattered about were ten small jars of formalin, each containing a charred human fingertip anatomically severed at the second joint. In cases of unidentified bodies that are badly burned or decomposed, it isn’t always possible to get prints by the usual method. Incongruously stationed in the midst of this macabre mess was a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion.
Rubbing a dollop of the lotion on his hands, Vander pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves. The acetone, xylene and constant hand-washing that go with his trade were brutal on his skin, and I could always tell when he’d forgotten to put on gloves while using ninhydrin, a chemical helpful for visualizing latent prints, because he’d walk around with purple fingers for a week. His morning ritual complete, he motioned me to follow him out into the fourth-floor hallway.