Empties (2 page)

“What’s with you?” Benek heard Silvera ask.
 

“I dunno,” Didsbury began. “Last night I had one suspect threaten to jump out the winda if I came into his place—over a mild assault complaint, would you believe? Another guy—just a crank caller, really—was hiding under the bed when I found him and just wouldn’t crawl out.”
 

“So?” Silvera asked. “Little stuff like that bothers you?”
 

“Little stuff like that wears away at you. It wears you down and wears you out. Little stuff like that can bury you.”
 

“How so?” Silvera asked. He was always in a good mood in the morning, ready to lead anyone on into a swamp of questionable assertions. “Wears you down if you let it. I don’t let it.”
 

“Makes you wonder about people when you don’t want to. You have no say in how it wears at you.”
 

“Don’t sweat it. Little stuff takes up time and gets you through to retirement.”
 

“Yeah, you’re right, you gotta use up the time. Who gives a shit. I just wish I wouldn’t think about it so much.”
 

“Then don’t.”
 

There was a sudden silence. Didsbury had gotten his fix of whatever reassurance he needed and was back in his alcove, ready to go.
 

A door closed loudly at the end of the hall, signaling that Captain Reddy had arrived.
 

All the phones, including his own, started to chirp, and people began shouting in the main room downstairs as citizens and suspects started to come in, pounds of flesh and those looking to get their pound of flesh. It was just 9:00 A.M. as Benek reached for the phone and knocked his now cold coffee into his lap.
 

He sat there for a few moments, thinking as he mopped it up with a paper napkin that there were people who felt things keenly, as a result of deep observation, and people who resisted their feelings and prattled about how over-insistent the first kind of people were. To this second kind of person every strong reaction was a dramatic exaggeration of some kind. They were sincere and cool, this second kind, and he did not blame them; feelings could be misleading, but then so could rational constructions that had little or nothing to do with reality, or just enough connection to fool you. The “pitch” of self-possessed people seemed to be set too low, but they had no way to know it, since in their condition they dismissed sharp contrasts.
 

Benek had tried to imitate the second kind of person, to be dispassionate and controlled, never to get personal with himself, especially about himself. But his self-rule was failing, and had been failing for some time before the unavoidable lessons of his job. A conquering horde was encamped on his frontiers, and had for years been sending threatening emissaries to his inner court calling for surrender; now they were sending raiding parties into his heart. He was beginning to see that the cool-headed ones of the world were rarely poor but always impoverished in a way they didn’t care about. They lived by the law, but they were free of honor’s demands, by which individuals were joined to each other’s domains. The coldest ones ruled the world; they ruled the law, and did not knock over their coffee in the morning.
 

Captain Reddy tried to be a cold one, but he failed in joining the coldest. Silvera, Abrams, and Didsbury were only pretending and suffered in private. They were what the ruling hierarchy wanted, except when the violence and graft got out of hand and became partially public; then the top wanted what the thinkers called socially concerned officers with some heart, fellow citizens of the people they policed, living in the same streets as the law-abiding and the waiting criminals, officers who would go home and be seen to be tired out from their job, send their uniforms and laundry to the local cleaner, pay the same rents, get married and raise the same new hostages to fortune.
 

Who was anybody? How did anyone know that there were others like them behind peoples’ faces? Clues led to assuming that awarenesses boiled behind eyes, but no one
knew
in the same way as they knew themselves. Even that sense of one’s innards seemed too little. He was not an empty shell because there was a spongy three pounds of stuff inside that called itself a brain, an electrical filing cabinet and switching device; but where was the thing that knew itself and knew that it knew? It flickered in the soft circuits, looked out through light-adapted watery eyes, felt with bony fingers and porous skin, smelled through a nose that collected dirt on behalf of the lungs. But the awareness was trapped, once believed to have come from somewhere else but still trying to escape... perhaps alone, the only one of its kind, lying to itself about all the others. There was no one home anywhere. Just things of some kind imagining themselves...
 

“You’re all alone,” his drunken father had once said to him, sprawled on his cot in the basement. “It’s all a put up job around you, made to fool your eyes. There’s no one out there. Take my word for it, son, there never was anyone there. You don’t believe me? Go look outside. I mean really look outside. There’s nothing there! It’s all dark!”
 

“Then why are you talking to me?” Benek had asked.
 

The drunk had roared with laughter and said, “You don’t get it, do you?” It had not been a question, but an arrogant assertion of fact. Logic was long gone. “You really don’t get it at all?” he had repeated, as if catching a simple mistake in addition.
 

“What?” Benek had asked.
 

“I’m talking to myself,” the drunk had mumbled as he fell asleep.
 

2

“I want to ask you about this autopsy report,” Benek said from the doorway. The large office was well stocked with plants, clearly belonging to a man who had made something pleasant of his workplace.
 

The overweight, balding coroner did not look up from his desk. “You can want all you want, but my open door does not mean you don’t have to knock. Who are you?”
 

“Sorry,” Benek said as he came forward and put the report on the man’s neatly arranged desk. “Detective Benek, homicide, 6th Precinct, annex A.”
 

“Annex A?” He smiled to himself, as if the annex address had a special meaning.
 

“Yes,” Benek said.
 

The coroner glanced at the file and sighed. “It’s exactly as I put it down, Detective Benek.”
 

Benek said, “I’d like more on this one.”
 

“More of what?” the man said softly.
 

In the week since the report had arrived on Benek’s desk, no one at the precinct, including Captain Reddy, had shown the slightest curiosity about the odd details. So Benek had decided to use some of the initiative that Reddy was always prattling about. If something smells, Reddy would say, then follow it up—but try not to waste the city’s money.
 

The coroner looked up finally, obviously irritated. “What do you want from me?” His blue eyes were youthful, and seemed happier than the rest of his face, as if he were living somewhere else. “Why complicate your life and mine with this nonsense?”
 

“What’s your opinion?” Benek asked, trying to sound polite.
 

The coroner smiled. “Don’t waste any more of our time on what’s obviously a medical student’s prank.”
 

“But your report seems to rule that out.”
 

The coroner sighed again and put his work aside. “Sit down, Detective.” The look of living somewhere else faded from his eyes and he seemed resigned to the here and now.
 

Benek lowered himself into the wooden chair. It creaked under him.
 

The coroner asked, “How long have you been with homicide?”
 

“Three years.”
 

“And before?”
 

“I was a sergeant.”
 

“Married?”
 

“No.”
 

“Girlfriend?”
 

Benek didn’t answer. He had always been suspicious of the game between the sexes, whatever that meant. Men were the predators, sex an invasive physical act, pleasure the reward for the mere attempt to reproduce, with no guarantees. About as much fun as picking flowers. The players had no choice about playing the game, whose rewards shone in the short term, and the difficulties were revealed when it was too late to back out. Good looks made men and women mad and stupid, ill with each other, as Aristotle put it, and to see through the game left you with nothing to see in your wise unhappiness.
 

“If you were married, or had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t worry about things like this. You’d do your job and go home, eat, and get laid. Must have taken you at least half an hour to get down here. Think of the crooks you might have stopped in that time.”
 

“I’m on my lunch hour,” Benek said, then leaned forward and asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
 

The coroner sighed even more impatiently and replied, “No, I haven’t, ever—but so what? Have you?”
 

“Then how was the skull emptied without being opened?”
 

“You don’t read very well,” the coroner said with a wave of his hand. “I didn’t say it wasn’t opened.”
 

Benek sat back. The wooden chair creaked now as if it were going to break. The man was obviously a fan of fine, oracular distinctions. “You didn’t say anything,” Benek said. “Or rather, you didn’t write anything down about it.”
 

The coroner gazed at him sternly. “The brain could have been sucked out through the nostrils, like raw eggs through a small hole in the shell. The ancient Egyptians had a way of doing it as part of
 

their embalming process. It’s nothing new.”
 

“But was there any sign of that kind of... emptying?”
 

“No.”
 

“So what do you conclude?”
 

“Nothing.”
 

“Nothing at all?”
 

“The procedure might not have left marks. A fluid might have been injected into the head to ease the extraction. Or they might have used another method entirely.”
 

“Did you test for foreign fluids?” Benek demanded.
 

“I won’t waste city money on a hoax. It wasn’t a homicide. No signs of violence anywhere on the body. Can’t tell what actually killed him,
before
the brain was removed.”
 

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Benek said. “Was it a murder?”
 

“I don’t think so.”
 

“Then what?”
 

“You have my sympathy for being so curious,” the coroner replied, “but don’t ask me to speculate. How it was done would probably turn out to be foolishly obvious. I have no idea and I don’t care. And you shouldn’t care. For all I know, you’re pulling a gag on me and plan to sell the story to some junky rag to supplement your pay.”
 

Benek smiled at him. “Now you don’t really think I would be doing that?”
 

The coroner glanced at him. “No, I suppose not. But you seem ready to suppose much too much.”
 

“Did you examine the body yourself?” Benek asked.
 

“Briefly. Johansen and his assistant did the actual autopsy.”
 

“Were they surprised?”
 

The coroner shrugged. “I really don’t know.” He sat back and looked bored. “Each case barely gets the attention it seems to deserve and no more. We’re too busy to look beyond what it seems to be unless it reaches out and bites us.”
 

“And this has no... bite?”
 

“None.”
 

Benek said, “I want to see the findings for myself.”
 

“Some coffee?” the coroner asked, taking out a fat thermos from his desk drawer. “Maybe it’ll make you less persistent. Funny, you don’t seem the overly nervous type.”
 

“No.” Benek stared as the man poured, not knowing what else to say. “They dragged me out too early when they found the body. Made me feel I owed him something.”
 

“Okay, Detective,” the coroner said after taking a sip. “Because you’re a fine human being we’ll go look at the stiff together, and I’ll bet you a closer look will show us how it was done. The skull was probably opened and crazy-glued back shut. Don’t laugh. I once did that with a deep flesh cut on my thumb. Worked fine, with no stitches to remove. Went to a dress-up dinner without even a Band-Aid.” He shook his head and took another sip. “I’ll grant you, who would have expected an empty skull?” He smiled. “What about fingerprints?”
 

“Not on file,” Benek said.