Postmortem(81)

He was here, inside this house, at the scene, when I arrived. No wonder he was so quick to respond. His interest was more than professional. He wasn’t merely doing his job. He would have recognized Abby’s address. He probably knew whose house it was before anybody else did. He wanted to see, to make sure.

Maybe he was even hoping the victim was Abby. Then he would never have to worry this moment would happen, that she would tell.

Sitting very still, I willed my face to turn to stone. I couldn’t let it show. The wrenching disbelief. The devastation. Oh, God, don’t let it show.

A telephone started ringing in some other room. It rang and rang and nobody answered it.

Footsteps were coming up the stairs, metal making muffled clangs against wood and radios blaring unintelligible static. Paramedics were carrying a stretcher up to the third floor.

Abby was fumbling with a cigarette and she suddenly threw it and the burning match into the ashtray.

“If it’s true you’ve been having me followed”—she lowered her voice, the room filled with her scorn— “and if your reason was to see if I was meeting him, sleeping with him to get information, then you ought to know what I’m saying is true. After what happened that night I haven’t been anywhere near the son of a bitch.”

Marino didn’t say a word.

His silence was his answer.

Abby had not been with Bill since.

Later, as paramedics were carrying the stretcher down, Abby leaned against the door frame, clutching it with white-knuckled emotion. She watched the white shape of her sister’s body go past, stared after the retreating men, her face a pallid mask of abject grief.

I gripped her arm with unspoken feeling and went out in the wake of her incomprehensible loss. The odor lingered on the stairs, and when I stepped into the dazzling sunshine on the street, for a moment I was blind.





Chapter 12




HENNA YARBOROUGH’S FLESH, WET FROM REPEATED rinsings, glistened like white marble in the overhead light. I was alone inside the morgue with her, suturing the last few inches of the Y incision, which ran in a wide seam from her pubis to her sternum and forked over her chest.

Wingo took care of her head before he left for the night. The skullcap was exactly in place, the incision around the back of her scalp neatly closed and completely covered by her hair, but the ligature mark around her neck was like a rope burn. Her face was bloated and purple, and neither my efforts nor those of the funeral home were ever going to change that.

The buzzer sounded rudely from the bay. I glanced up at the clock. It was shortly after 9:00 P.M.

Cutting the twine with a scalpel, I covered her with a sheet and peeled off my gloves. I could hear Fred, the security guard, saying something to someone down the hall as I pulled the body onto a gurney and began to wheel it into the refrigerator.

When I reemerged and shut the great steel door, Marino was leaning against the morgue desk and smoking a cigarette.

He watched me in silence as I collected evidence and tubes of blood and began to initial them.

“Find anything I need to know?”

“Her cause of death is asphyxiation due to strangulation due to the ligature around her neck,” I said mechanically.

“What about trace?” He tapped an ash on the floor. “A few fibers—” “Well,” he interrupted, “I gotta couple of things.” “Well,” I said in the same tone, “I want to get the hell out of here.”

“Yo, Doc. Exactly what I had in mind. Me, I’m thinking of taking a ride.”

I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. His hair was clinging damply to his pate, his tie was loose, his short-sleeved white shirt was badly wrinkled in back as if he’d been sitting for a long time in his car. Strapped under his left arm was his tan shoulder holster with its long-barreled revolver. In the harsh glare of the overhead light he looked almost menacing, his eyes deeply set in shadows, his jaw muscles flexing.

“Think you need to come along,” he added unemphatically. “So, I’ll just wait while you get out of your scrubs there and call home.”

Call home? How did he know there was anyone at home I needed to call? I’d never mentioned my niece to him. I’d never mentioned Bertha. As far as I was concerned, it was none of Marino’s goddam business I even had a home.

I was about to tell him I had no intention of riding anywhere with him when the hard look in his eyes stopped me cold.

“All right,” I muttered. “All right.”

He was still leaning against the desk smoking as I walked across the suite and went into the locker room. Washing my face in the sink, I got out of my gown and back into skirt and blouse. I was so distracted, I opened my locker and reached for my lab coat before I realized what I was doing. I didn’t need my lab coat. My pocketbook, briefcase and suit jacket were upstairs in my office.