Public Anatomy (16 page)

Virginia’s husband lingered, as if he had more to say.

“My wife had been upset about the death in the hospital. She was there that day, working as a nurse in the operating room.” He shook his head. “She even talked about quitting her job. It was so unlike her. And now this. Someone took her life. There’s no sense to it.”

Eli took the man’s hand, held it with both of his own. “I’m so sorry.”

The man remained there another moment, searching Eli’s eyes as if hoping Eli had some information that would ease his pain. When Eli said nothing, the man descended the steps toward the waiting hearse.

Liza French entered the basement corridor of Gates Memorial Hospital. She looked each way before fully stepping from the stairwell into the hallway. A sheen of moisture glistened from the concrete flooring. She considered it appropriate that the basement was reserved for pathologists and other personnel who attended the dead—the precise reason she never ventured to the basement. She had no reason to. Until now.

She wandered through a maze of halls until she found a solitary M
ORGUE
sign with a thick black arrow pointing the way. She passed a janitor, stepping around his mop, which jutted from a bucket of brown water, and soon reached a set of double glass doors. P
ATHOLOGY
was printed on the left door, S
UITE
on the right.

Inside, she found a heavyset woman sitting behind a desk, looking at her over the top of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. She adjusted her eyewear and gazed at Liza’s leopard skin skirt, her high heel pumps.

“This ain’t Macy’s,” Ms. Conch told her. “You lost, sweetheart?”

“Is this where I can sign a death certificate?”

“Death certificate? You might find that here. Who’s asking?”

“I’m Dr. French. Liza French.”

Ms. Conch stood, which raised her up only a foot or so, a portion of that gained from the thick soles of her shoes, part business pump, part army boot. She took in a full view of the female chief of OB/GYN. “Well, I’ll be.”

“I’m here to sign the death certificate on—”

“I know which one,” Ms. Conch said, interrupting her. “Everybody and their dog knows about that death.”

“Gee, thanks. Can you just get it for me?”

“Sure.” Ms. Conch continued to stare at Liza’s shoes. “Just like they say.”

“What?”

“You are quite a sight.”

Liza snapped her fingers. “The certificate, please.”

Ms. Conch turned, waddled toward a filing cabinet, and returned with a thin stack of papers.

“Death certificate’s on top, autopsy reports on the bottom.” Ms. Conch pointed at the papers in Liza’s hand. “Might want to read the report, so you put the correct cause of death.”

Liza smirked. “I’ve done this before.”

“So I hear.”

Liza thumbed through the pages until she found the autopsy summary page.

Ms. Conch sat at her desk pretending to work at her computer until Liza interrupted the silence.

“That bitch.”

“Scuze me?”the Conch said.

Liza riffled through the pages again. “Where is this doctorrrr—Daily?

“She’s not in at the moment. Something I can help you with?”

“This report, it’s screwed up.”

“Screwed up?” Ms. Conch asked, her furry eyebrows scrunched toward her nose, as though she was actually concerned. “You must be mistaken. Screwed up best describes what happened in the OR.”

“Get her out here,” Liza demanded.

“Something wrong with those ears? I said she’s not here.”

From the autopsy room rang the sharp clang of steel on steel.

They both looked toward the door.

Then at each other.

“Sometimes,” Ms. Conch said, “they’re not as dead as we think.”

Liza made a quick move toward the autopsy suite.

Ms. Conch tried to block the way but succeeded only in knocking over her chair. “You can’t go back—”

But Liza was already through the swinging doors. “You’ve got to change this report,” she said, shaking the papers in the air.

Ms. Conch was right behind her. “I told her she couldn’t come back here, Dr. Daily.”

Meg stood behind a table of instruments. She continued to wipe an autopsy knife with a towel, linear crimson stripes staining the cloth.

“Your description,” Liza said, “is all wrong.”

Meg stepped from behind the table, wiping her gloved hands on the dirty towel.

“Dr. Daily calls it as she sees it, Frenchie.”

Meg held up one hand. “I’ve got this, Ms. Conch.”

The bulky receptionist turned to leave, then glanced back at Liza French. “Hope Formalin seeps into that leopard skirt and you stink to high heaven.” She let the double doors swing freely behind her.

Meg stood not three feet from Liza. “You’ve got a problem with my autopsy report?”

“Reading this,” Liza said, waving the report in Meg’s face, “you make it sound like I practically killed the woman.”

“The patient’s aorta was skewered with a long instrument,” Meg declared. “I just report what I find.”

“What I found,” Liza said, inching closer to Meg’s face, “as her doctor, was a diseased, bleeding uterus. That’s what caused her death.”

“Are you suggesting I change my report?”

“Not suggesting,” Liza said, slapping the papers against Meg’s chest. “Ordering.”

Meg glanced down at Liza’s hand, felt the pressure of Liza trying to push her backward. Then Meg swiped the bloody towel across Liza’s face.

Ms. Conch banged through the doors. “I’ve called security on her, Dr. Daily.”

Liza wiped her face and spit in the direction of Ms. Conch. “I’ll take care of this myself,” she said, and flattened the death certificate against the wall. She filled in the cause of death and signed it. As she left the autopsy suite, she threw the papers at the battle-ready shoes of Ms. Conch.

Eli felt a gradual sense of relief as he departed Memphis. The heat intensified a degree or two as he traveled south on Interstate 55 through northern Mississippi. Abandoned warehouses and low-income housing changed to flat, rich Delta farmland. The toll taken by the drought and scorching heat was evident. Whole fields of soybeans curled their leaves trying to hide from the sun. Even King Cotton, normally resistant and thriving in such conditions, had this year made only hard white knots of fruit.

After discussing the two murders with Meg, and seeing the bodies firsthand, Eli now had postmortem confirmation of the sequence of removed body parts—bone, and then muscle—a sequence he hoped could be interpreted by an old professor and colleague in Oxford.

It wasn’t the mere detail of a bone removed that had triggered his trip from the Bluff City. It was Meg’s confirming identification of the bone as the navicular. The sleek bones of the femur or humerus, prone to fracture during sporting events or motor vehicle accidents, and commonly splinted in a plaster cast, served as models for display and illustration of the entire bone family. The navicular bone, however, was a small, oddly shaped, underappreciated bone in the foot named for its resemblance to a boat. From his comparative anatomy course at University College London, Eli remembered that the navicular was an important bone in the horse, located in the hoof just behind the coffin bone. But in humans, it was just one of a handful of bones in the foot. Of all the ways to mutilate a body, to show the conquest of murderer over victim, why take the time to locate, dissect, and remove the entire navicular bone?

Eli had developed his appreciation for anatomical detail as a young boy from his father, an anatomist at the medical school, who emphasized the importance of proper nomenclature and precise details of origin and insertion of muscle into bone. When it came time for Eli to enroll in college, his father arranged for him to study under Dr. Aldous Salyer at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. A scholar in the history of anatomical dissection and anatomical art, Dr. Salyer had served on the faculty at the medical school in Jackson for nearly twenty years, when his personal habits began to interfere with his teaching. He’d been asked to leave. He landed in the history department at the undergraduate campus in Oxford.

At Ole Miss, Dr. Salyer’s classes soon became legendary for their full-scale productions, including detailed drawings of historical dissections projected on the wall. To the delight of his students, Salyer brought the dissections to life by contorting his own body, arching his back, and twisting his neck sideways, imitating anatomical art.

The students laughed the first time Salyer performed his demonstrations, until they realized that it was no joke, that he was absolutely serious. A thin man with a wiry, muscular build, Salyer used his physique to illustrate the location of a muscle or even demonstrate its function, lifting his pants leg to show the gastrocnemius, rolling his sleeve and locking his triceps, showing too much skin at times around his protruding hip bone.

Always one to make class interesting, Salyer had each student examine his or her own body before the course was over. The snuffbox, for example. Open the palm of your hand like you’re about to shake hands with someone. Then rotate your hand back against your wrist. A small pocket develops between the base of your thumb and wrist, just big enough for a pinch of salt, or a dip of snuff.

As the son of Elizer Branch, professor of anatomy at the University of the Mid-South Medical School, Eli was already known to Salyer before he attended Ole Miss. At Ole Miss, Eli was drawn to Salyer’s passionate study of anatomy and anatomical dissection and he enrolled in the professor’s class as a sophomore. He would have enrolled his first year except that freshmen were not allowed to take the class.

Salyer became his mentor and Eli his graduate student, assembling scholarly papers—even substituting for him in class when Salyer’s absences became more frequent. Although Eli always credited his father, it was upon Salyer’s urging that Eli applied for and was accepted in a prestigious comparative anatomy fellowship and year abroad at University College London, a crucial step in his path to becoming a surgeon.

On Highway 78 toward Holly Springs, Mississippi, he passed the town of Byhalia. Just off the highway, he looked for a double-wide trailer at the edge of a parking lot. The rural medical clinic appeared the same as when Eli was a second-year medical student and worked there one summer, providing hypertension and diabetes care for the underprivileged. The only improvement was a new sign over the cinderblock steps that announced the Byhalia Free Clinic.

Past Holly Springs, on Highway 7, as the miles flowed behind him, so did past decades. Ahead of him, the Mississippi landscape unfolded and a crossroads came into view, a grove of trees stood on one side, a green Dumpster on the other, paper trash scattered between. Beside the Dumpster on the two-lane road, a man sat on a discarded recliner. He leaned forward, smoking a cigarette, and watched cars pass while his dog sniffed and scratched in the rubble. Beside him sat a lonely straight-backed chair as if recently vacated by a lost companion.

This image of the man and the dog and the empty chair stayed with Eli as he neared the town of Oxford. He wondered how he would find Professor Salyer or if he even still lived in Oxford. It had been over ten years since Eli last saw the man. The professor would be well into his late sixties now, if not seventies. Salyer could be retired, in a nursing home, or dead, for all he knew.
It’s not as if someone would have called to tell me if the old man died
. Salyer had no family that Eli knew of. He’d probably pissed them off at some point. He could be dead and no one would care.

On the outskirts of Oxford, Eli passed St. Peter’s Cemetery. He liked to enter Oxford by the cemetery where the creator of Yoknapatawpha County was buried. Traveling this route, with its representative literary history, seemed to ground him. He stopped at the roadside across from
the historical marker that told of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize. The author’s gray headstone lay a few paces away.

The smell of cut grass lingered in sunlight that reflected off grave markers scattered on the rolling hillside. Across the road, newly constructed condominiums revealed progress for Oxford, Eli guessed. He pulled his car forward slowly, past the gravesites, and wondered what Faulkner would think about his hometown of Oxford today, new con-dos beside his grave. Eli zigzagged over to Lamar and gained speed toward downtown. Oaks and magnolias prayed over the sidewalks in front of magnificent homes with wraparound porches and spacious yards.