THE OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER-the city's principal morgue-is at 520 First Avenue. After getting out of his car, Chief Driscoll hesitates, unwilling to face what he knows is ahead of him. He glances at his driver, at his car with its bristling aerials, at traffic passing in the street. Finally he goes into the building.
The waiting room is distinguished from other waiting rooms he knows, his dentist's for instance, principally by the boxes of Kleenex, their tongues sticking out, that stand on all the end tables, the coffee tables too. There are people on one of the sofas even now, both sniffling, an old woman and a younger one, perhaps her daughter. He flashes his shield at the receptionist, whom he does not know, goes past the snifflers and through the door at the end of the room.
Downstairs is the business level of this place. He knows where he is going. He does not need a guide. His shoes ring cheerfully on the steps, and the sound seems to him obscene. To his left now is a wall of stainless steel doors to the refrigerated lockers, 126 doors, someone told him once. It takes no great imagination to visualize what lies behind them: nudes on trays with tags on their toes. Men, women, children, white, black, brown-former people of all ages and kinds, none of them personal to him. Against the opposite wall rise stacks of the cheap wooden coffins most of them will eventually be nailed into.
He tries to get his thoughts off himself, off his grief, off what he is here for. This place is like a store, he tells himself. The lockers contain the inventory, so to speak. The coffins are the eventual packaging. Above the lockers, as if attesting to the freshness of the goods, a digital thermometer monitors the refrigeration inside, its figures flickering between 33 and 35 degrees. The corpses are kept just above freezing. When their turn comes in the autopsy room no one wants them to blunt any knives.
Chief Driscoll is 53 years old, and if he were in uniform there would be three stars on his shoulders. In a 30,000-man department only one cop outranks him, plus the commissioner and his deputies, all of whom are civilians. Driscoll is stocky, baldish, heavier than he once was. He likes to smoke cigars. By the end of the day his clothes tend to smell of them. If a man's career is like a railroad line, then this morgue, for him, has been a regular stop for 30 years. He witnessed his first autopsy when still a patrolman. He has witnessed dozens, but the one coming up he never wanted to see.
He goes through the door into the autopsy lab. White tile walls, and a row of eight stainless steel dissection tables with naked stiffs stretched out on most of them, either waiting their turn or being actively worked on by men in white coats and rubber aprons.
The table he wants is the third one along. Two pathologists, one of whom he has met before, watch him approach.
"Gabe," says the man he knows, offering his hand, "we've been waiting for you, as your secretary requested."
Driscoll, who cannot remember the man's name, nods.
"Now that you're so high and mighty, we don't see you here anymore. Congratulations, by the way."
In New York the world of street detectives is delimited by corpses. Gabe Driscoll was a street detective for most of his career, meaning a student of death, and each unexplained corpse that he was obliged to investigate brought him to this room to watch the autopsy and to ask questions that the official report, when he received it later, possibly would not answer. But now, as commander of several of the department's most sensitive units, including Internal Affairs, he has risen to a level where he is no longer concerned with what happens on these tables. Until today.
"This is Dr. Paget."
Driscoll shakes hands with Paget.
The corpse on the table is scrupulously clean, but looking at it makes Driscoll wince. Jagged white bone protrudes from the no longer bloody thigh. The broken jaw gives the face a rather wry grin. A disarticulated shoulder lies six inches lower and at a different angle than it should be. The back of the skull is caved in, as are some ribs on the right side. The x-rays would most likely show other damage as well.
"He doesn't look too bad for a jumper," says the pathologist.
"Maybe it was a car crash," says Driscoll.
"You're kidding me."
Driscoll remembers that the man's name is Levin.
"A jumper," says Dr. Levin. "Can't be anything else. Fourth floor I would guess. Am I right?"
Driscoll has a detective's distaste for people who jump to conclusions before the evidence is in. Forced to reply, he says: "I don't know. I haven't seen the building yet. I came here first."
"A free-falling body accelerates at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, did you know that? You must have studied it in physics class."
Driscoll never studied it until he became a cop.
"Newton's Law," Dr. Levin says. "From the fourth floor your speed when you hit is not too bad. About thirty-five miles an hour."
Gabe Driscoll does not like the image this presents. The man on the table, alive, in the air, flailing.
"Any higher up he'd look much worse," says Dr. Paget.
"You better believe it," says Levin, who begins to expound on Newton's Law, and how it relates to jumpers.
"Not a bad way to go," says Paget. "Can't get much quicker in fact."
They are joking about it.
Pathologists working on corpses are almost always lighthearted, and sometimes funny. Presumably it is how they stay sane, and in the past, at this table or another, Driscoll himself has contributed a joke or two. But in the presence of this corpse here he cannot bear to listen to jocular comments. So he interrupts. "I'm in a bit of a hurry, Dr. Levin. I'd appreciate it if we could get started."
Levin seems to feel he has been rebuked. For a moment his fingers toy with his tools. He has a number of them laid out, scalpels, bone saws, loppers that could take the branch off a tree. Tools uglier than corpses, Driscoll thinks.
A microphone hangs over the table. Levin turns it on and begins to dictate what will be, once it is typed up, the official autopsy report: "Body is that of a well-developed white male about fifty years old-"
"Fifty-three."
"Oh," says Levin, switching off the mike, "you knew him."
Driscoll nods.
"And that's why you're here. How do you know him? What was he, a cop?"
"A priest. Father Redmond. Frank Redmond."
"Catholic priest?"
"What other kind is there?"
"Priests don't normally jump off roofs. It's against their religion."
"We don't know yet what happened."
"I don't think I've ever worked on one."
Driscoll says: "Can I ask you to look for signs indicating a struggle?"
"Foul play, you mean. Someone pushed him off, threw him off. Murder not suicide. External trauma compatible with a life-and-death struggle. That what you want me to find?"
"I want to know what happened."
"He was a friend?"
"Yes."
"Close friend?"
"Yes."
"I see."
Levin doesn't see at all. Grief is a private emotion. Driscoll can't share it with Levin, or with anyone.
The pathologist moves his tools around. "What did he land on?"
"Part of the stoop, the sidewalk."
"You want to know about lacerations, surface hematoma, something of that nature. It's difficult to tell. The landing would have covered it up, whatever it is."
"No stab wounds, bullet wounds? Nothing like that?"
"He's got three broken teeth on the left side. But the fall could have done that."
"You can't be sure?"
"No."
Dr. Paget hands Levin a scalpel. "Height six feet three inches tall," Levin says into the microphone. "Scale weight 202 pounds, obvious visible trauma include compound fracture right femur-" Again switching off, he says to Driscoll: "He was a big guy."
"Yes."
"Nice musculature."
"He worked out regularly."
"It shows."
"He was a priest. He was such a decent man."
Levin makes the Y-shaped incision into the abdominal cavity.
Driscoll says: "Any abnormalities you might find in there, I want to know about that too. Maybe he was dying of cancer, or some goddam thing. If he jumped, which I don't believe, maybe that's why."
Levin's scalpel moves up and down. He dictates. From time to time Paget hands him other tools. Bones crack.
"You all right, Gabe?"
"Just do your job."
"You don't look so good."
Copyright © 2005 by Riviera Productions Ltd.
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