I walked down the remaining six or seven flights toward the lobby of the building, where outside, beyond security and the sliding glass doors, I saw the waiting hullaballoo: the TV and radio crews, the crowds and well-wishers waving placards that said, WE LOVE YOU CHARLIE. I wasn’t planning to join them. I was going to head down into the basement parking lot and out that way, when Ward Jenssen appeared from around the side of the elevators, with her cameraman, Zed, trotting alongside her. She was wearing jeans again, with cowboy boots, and a tweed jacket today that had hairs on it, with a dinky little leather vest beneath. It was the same microphone she held toward my face, asking how I felt about the verdict.
“Great. Justice took its course. How do you feel as a woman watching a guy get away with something like this?”
“But he wasn’t guilty. The jury found him not guilty.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Are you engaged in some sort of vendetta against Charlie Corcoran?”
“Why would you think so?”
I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t fair, that the guy had killed his wife and here she was coming after me; but I knew fair didn’t come into it. Zed’s grin told me how greedily the camera was gobbling this up.
“You don’t like Mr. Corcoran, do you? Maybe you were thinking about a little payback — by trying to frame him, take him down?”
“This is absurd,” I said, hurrying past them both, down the stairs toward the parking lot, where it was chill and the ground was slippery, dangerous with oil-slicked puddles. I looked for Drew, wanting to tell him that we were both on the same side, that I’d been astonished by the dizzy vehemence with which I’d willed Corcoran to be convicted. Between cops there was supposed to be brotherhood.
“Hey, Drew. Thanks for waiting.”
The dim neon lights crackled and made an angry fizz. Drew was sitting on his own in his Jag, arms spread wide across the bench seat in the back. His eyes were wide. “Fuck you, you two-faced prick. Fuck you, Billy.”
THE NEW County Coroner’s Office was a low rectangle in beige concrete. On the edge of East Los Angeles, snug beneath a curve of the Golden State Freeway, as architecture the building was neither tasteful nor the reverse; it was anonymous as a factory, across the parking lot from the old building, a rather more impressive structure in birdshit-spattered red brick that had been badly damaged in an earthquake in the 1970s, and a thrift shop in whose doorway a drenched cat was taking shelter and where, if you desired, you could buy the unclaimed clothes that dead people had come in wearing; of course they’d been washed and fumigated. Round the back there were deserted picnic tables with rain bouncing off the top of them.
Randy Juster met me at the door to his office and took me down in the elevator to the basement. Following a busy weekend, bodies lay beneath blue and pink sheets in the docking area, lined up and ready to be weighed. Bodies were in the report room, waiting for their toe tags. The door to the crypt opened to reveal each steel shelf filled, a hundred or more bodies swaddled in thick, clear plastic. Some bodies were white and doll-like. Others were bloated, flesh squeezed against the wrapping, and some were already decayed and dehydrated. It all depended on how long after death they’d been found. A brown toe stuck out from one package, like a rotten stump waiting to be broken off. An orderly came by and shut the crypt door, leaving in the corridor a cold smell of decay barely contained.
This was Randy’s kingdom, and he strode through it like Patton visiting the countryside. Graying, a guy of about my age, he was the coroner’s chief investigator, responsible for determining who all these people were and how they had died. He treated everybody alike, both the dead and the living, as though they were highly contagious. He had a huge, round, pockmarked face that drooped at the cheeks as if the air had been let out, and I’d never seen him when he wasn’t smiling. He’d said to me once, “You think you know about death? I guess you think you do, being a murder cop. And I guess that in your career you’ll handle two hundred cases, three hundred tops. I see more death than that in a week, every week.” Upstairs, in his office, he had a vast library on the subject. He liked to keep himself up to speed.
We were in the changing room when he said, “So what’s up? Who was this lady anyway? I mean, I know her name. Mae Richards. But there’s a guy from the FBI here and one from the DEA. She’s got herself an audience.”
“Her son’s a big time dope dealer.”
“He’s here, too.”
I paused while loosening my tie. “Ricky Lee?”
“Yeah, that’s his name.”
“You let him in?”
“Hey, Billy, how many times you been to one of these? A hundred, a hundred and fifty. But it always lives with you, right? You think I’d let a son watch his own mother get sliced and diced? Give me credit for not being an asshole the size of Hollywood.”
After that Randy went on for a while, riding his hobby horse, muttering about how even though the soul had left the temple the body still had to be treated with as much dignity as was feasible while the job was getting done. There was something about the guys who worked here. They spent their days cooped up with bodies, weighing bodies, photographing bodies, cutting them up or scraping skin from beneath their fingernails. No wonder they were a little kooky. I’d seen Randy once with a mad Peter Lorre look pumping a tray of shriveled fingers full of a chemical brew of his own devising so that they’d swell up again, become supple and pliant, and prints could be taken. Sometimes months went by before the formula achieved its effect — depended on the state of the finger. While doing this portion of his job, he sat in a former broom closet surrounded by severed digits in jars.
Randy mopped at his forehead with a tissue and slipped his fingers into surgical gloves. He put on a green cotton surgical suit and helped me into one. He picked out a mask, handing it to me as if it were a bridal bouquet, and we passed into a secured area leading to the autopsy suites.
The naked body of Mae Richards, clean and slightly blue, was laid out on a table. The dewed flesh seemed already less than human. The sleeve of Randy’s green paper suit went straight and crackled as he reached forward to touch a scar above the hairline on her forehead. “That’s old,” he said. He peered into the ruined jelly of her eye before introducing me to the three others who were already there — the doctor and the guys from the DEA and the FBI, indistinguishable in their protective gear. I’d no right to be smiling. With our big surgical boots and masks with conelike filters on either side, this was probably the closest any of us had ever come to being mistaken for a rocket scientist.
The doctor, impatient at having been kept waiting, was all brisk purpose. “Whatta we got here? Head shot, mmm, mmm. I assume I’m checking for the ordinary? I see your perpetrator didn’t leave us any fingernails to clip. Inconsiderate; clever. Look at these burn marks.” With a scalpel he scraped skin into a jar from one of the burns on Mae Richards’s breast. “Hey, I’ll get my money down on Havana. Any of you been in Cuba?” He pronounced this Hoooba, not expecting a reply. “Check it out. You can vacation there now, and the fishing’s excellent. Just excellent.”
He got his little buzz saw going and did the Y-cut, popping out the chest plate. He cut from the vagina to the anus, turned the corpse on its side, and cut out the anus itself while the guys from the DEA and the FBI traded looks beneath the masks. Randy Juster meanwhile watched with feigned nonchalance. He didn’t show anything at all.
The doctor perked up. “Well, here we