C is for Corpse

"Heellloo!"

No response. He'd buzzed me in, so he had to be around here someplace.

I closed the door behind me. The fluorescent lighting was harsh, giving the illusion of winter sunlight. There was a door to my left. I crossed and knocked before I opened it to find an empty office with a dark brown Naugahyde couch. Maybe the guy on the graveyard shift snagged some shut-eye in here when nothing else was going on. There was a desk and a swivel chair. The outside of the window was covered with ornamental wrought-iron burglar bars, the daylight blocked out by a mass of unruly shrubs. I closed the door and moved over to the refrigerated room where the bodies were kept, peering in.

No Alfie in sight. Inside, the light was constant, occupants laid out on blue fiberglass berths, engaged in their eternal, motionless naps, some wrapped in sheets, some in plastic, necks and ankles wound with what looked like masking tape. Somehow, it reminded me of quiet time at summer camp.

I returned to the main room and sat for a while, staring at the autopsy table. My customary procedure would have been to snoop into every cabinet, drawer, and storage bin, but it felt disrespectful here. Or maybe I was afraid I'd stumble onto something grotesque: trays of dentures, a Mason jar chock-full of floating eyeballs. I don't know what I thought I'd see. I shifted restlessly. I felt as if I were wasting time. I went to the door and looked out into the hall, tilting my head to listen. Nothing.

"Alfie?" I called. I listened again, then shrugged and closed the door. It occurred to me that as long as I was there, I could at least verify that the number Bobby'd written down was, in fact, the same as the number on Franklin s toe tag. That wouldn't do any harm. I took the address book out of my handbag and turned to the penciled entry on the back cover. I went into the cold-storage room again, moving from body to body, checking I.D. tags. This was like some kind of bargain-basement sale only nothing was marked down.

When I got to the third body, the numbers matched. Kelly was right. Bobby'd shifted the hyphen over so the seven-digit code looked like a telephone number. I stared at the body, or what I could see of it. The plastic that Franklin was wrapped in was transparent but yellowing, as though stained with nicotine. Through the swaddling, I could see that he was a middle-aged black man of medium height, slim, with a face of stone. Why was this corpse significant? I was feeling anxious. I figured Alfie would be back shortly and I really didn't want to be caught nosing around in here. I went back to my chair.

Coming out of the cold-storage room was like leaving an air-conditioned theater. It made the autopsy room feel balmy by comparison. I was getting itchy to explore. I couldn't help myself. I was irritated that no one was there to help me and feeling edgy from the quiet. This was not a fun place. Ordinarily, I don't hang out in morgues and it was making me tense.

Just to soothe my nerves, I peered into a drawer, testing the contents against the grisly images I'd conjured up. This one contained scratch pads, order blanks, arid miscellaneous paper supplies. Reassured, I tried the next drawer: small vials of several drugs, the names of which I did not recognize. I was warming up here and I checked on down the line. Everything appeared to be related to the business of dissecting the dead; not surprising, given the locale, but not very enlightening.

I straightened up and looked around the room. Where were the files? Didn't anybody keep records around this place? Somebody had mentioned that there were medical charts stored out here, but where? This floor? Somewhere on one of the floors above? I didn't relish the idea of creeping through the empty building by myself. I'd been picturing Alfie Leadbetter at my side, telling me what was accessible and where I might start. I'd even pictured slipping him a twenty-dollar bill if that's what it took to enlist his aid.

I glanced at my watch. I'd now been here forty-five minutes and I wanted some results. I grabbed my handbag and went out in the hall, looking in both directions. It was getting darker down here, although I could see through a window at the end of the hall that it was still light outside. I found a wall switch and flipped on the lights and then I wandered along the corridor, reading the small white signs mounted above each office door. The radiology offices were right next to the morgue. Beyond that, Nuclear Medicine, and nursing offices. I wondered if Sufi Daniels had occasion to come out here.

Something was beginning to stir at the back of my brain. I was thinking about the cardboard box full of Bobby s belongings. What was in it? Medical texts and office supplies and two radiology manuals. What was he actually doing with those? He hadn't even been a medical student and I couldn't think why he'd need the manuals for equipment he might not be using for years, if ever. He'd indicated no particular interest in radiology.