The Collection (91 page)

He
had been killed on the Mill Road, presumably by a hit-run driver. A Mr. George
Considine had found the body and he had also seen another car driving away. The
other car had been too distant for him to get the license number or any description
worth mentioning.

Of
course, I thought, that car might or might not have been the car that had hit
the man. Possibly the driver had seen and deliberately passed up the body,
thinking it was a drunk.

But
the former theory seemed more likely, because there was little traffic on the
Mill Road. One end of it was blocked off for repairs, so the only people who
used it were the few who lived along there, and there were not many of them.
Probably only a few cars a day came along that particular stretch of the road.

Mr.
Considine had got out of his car and found that the man was dead. He had driven
on to the next house, half a mile beyond, and phoned the police from there, at
four o'clock.

That's
all there was in the files.

I
had just finished reading it when Bill Drager came in. Bill is a lieutenant on
the police force, and he and I had become pretty friendly during the time I had
worked for the coroner. He was a pretty good friend of Dr. Skibbine too.

"Sorry
to interrupt your game, Doc," he said, "but I just wanted to ask
something."

"What,
Bill?"

"Look--the
stiff you got in today. You've examined it already?"

"Of
course, why?"

"Just
wondering. I don't know what makes me think so, but--well, I'm not satisfied
all the way.
Was
it just an auto accident?"

Dr.
Skibbine had a bishop in his hand, ready to move it, but he put it down on the
side of the board instead.

"Just
a minute, Harold," he said to Mr. Paton, then turned his chair around to
stare at Bill Drager. "Not an auto accident?" he inquired. "The
car wheels ran across the man's neck, Bill. What more do you want?"

"I
don't know. Was that the sole cause of death, or were there some other
marks?"

Dr.
Skibbine leaned back in the swivel chair.

"I
don't think being hit was the cause of death, exactly. His forehead struck the
road when he fell, and he was probably dead when the wheels ran over him. It
could have been, for that matter, that he fell when there wasn't even a car
around and the car ran over him later."

"In
broad daylight?"

"Um--yes,
that does sound unlikely. But he could have fallen into the path of the car. He
had been drinking plenty. He reeked of liquor."

"Suppose
he was hit by a car," Bill said. "How would you reconstruct it? How
he fell, I mean, and stuff like that."

"Let's
see. I'd say he fell first and was down when the car first touched him. Say he
started across the road in front of the car. Horn honked and he tried to turn
around and fell flat instead, and the motorist couldn't stop in time and ran
over him."

I
had not said anything yet, but I put in a protest at that.

"If
the man was as obviously drunk as that," I said, "why would the
motorist have kept on going? He couldn't have thought he would be blamed if a
drunk staggered in front of his car and fell, even before he was hit."

Drager
shrugged. "That could happen, Jerry," he said. "For one thing,
he may not have any witnesses to prove that it happened that way. And some
guys get panicky when they hit a pedestrian, even if the pedestrian is to
blame. And then again, the driver of the car might have had a drink or two
himself and been afraid to stop because of that."

Dr.
Skibbine's swivel chair creaked.

"Sure,"
he said, "or he might have been afraid because he had a reckless driving
count against him already. But, Bill, the cause of death was the blow he got on
the forehead when he hit the road. Not that the tires going over his neck
wouldn't have finished him if the fall hadn't."

"We
had a case like that here five years ago. Remember?"

Dr. Skibbine grunted. "I wasn't here five years ago.
Remember?"

"Yes, I forgot that," said Bill Drager.

I had forgotten it, too. Dr. Skibbine was a Springdale man,
but he had spent several years in South American countries doing research work
on tropical diseases. Then he had come back and had been elected coroner.
Coroner was an easy job in Springdale and gave a man more time for things like
research and chess than a private practice would.

"Go
on down and look at him, if you want," Dr. Skibbine told Bill.
"Jerry'll take you down. It will get his mind off ghouls and
goblins."

I took Bill Drager downstairs and flicked on the lights in
the display case.

"I can take off the end and slide him out of there if
you want me to," I said.

"I guess not," Drager said and leaned on the
glass top to look closer at the body. The face was all you could see, of
course, because a sheet covered the body up to the neck, and this time the
sheet had been pulled a little higher than usual, probably to hide the
unpleasant damage to the neck.

The face was bad enough. There was a big, ugly bruise on
the forehead, and the lower part of the face was cut up a bit.

"The car ran over the back of his neck after he fell
on his face, apparently," Bill Drager said. "Ground his face into the
road a bit and took off skin. But--"

"But what?" I prompted when he lapsed into
silence.

"I don't know," he said. "I was mostly
wondering why he would have tried to cross the road at all out there. Right at
that place there's nothing on one side of the road that isn't on the
other."

He straightened up, and I switched off the showcase lights.

"Maybe you're just imagining things, Bill," I
said. "How do you know he tried to cross at all? Doc said he'd been
drinking, and maybe he just staggered from the edge of the road out toward the
middle without any idea of crossing over."

"Yeah, there's that, of course. Come to think of it,
you're probably right. When I got to wondering, I didn't know about the
drinking part. Well, let's go back up."

We did, and I shut and locked the door at the head of the
stairs. It is the only entrance to the morgue, and I don't know why it has to
be kept locked, because it opens right into the coroner's office where I sit
all night, and the key stays in the lock. Anybody who could get past me could
unlock it himself. But it's just one of those rules. Those stairs,
incidentally, are absolutely the only way you can get down into the morgue
which is walled off from the rest of the basement of the Municipal Building.

"Satisfied?" Dr. Skibbine asked Bill Drager, as
we walked into the office.

"Guess so," said Drager. "Say, the guy looks
vaguely familiar. I can't place him, but I think I've seen him somewhere.
Nobody identified him yet?"

"Nope," said Doc. "But if he's a local
resident, somebody will. We'll have a lot of curiosity seekers in here
tomorrow. Always get them after a violent death."

Bill Drager said he was going home and went out. His shift
was over. He had just dropped in on his own time.

I stood around and watched the chess game for a few
minutes. Mr. Paton was getting licked this time. He was two pieces down and on
the defensive. Only a miracle could save him.

Then Doc moved a knight and said, "Check," and it
was all over but the shouting. Mr. Paton could move out of check all right, but
the knight had forked his king and queen, and with the queen gone, as it would
be after the next move, the situation was hopeless.

"You got me, Dwight," he said. "I'll resign.
My mind must be fuzzy tonight. Didn't see that knight coming."

"Shall we start another game? It's early."

"You'd beat me. Let's bowl a quick game, instead, and
get home early."

After they left, I finished up my work on the card file and
then did my trigonometry. It was almost midnight then. I remembered the man
who had phoned that he was coming in and decided he had changed his mind.
Probably his brother had arrived home safely, after all.

I went downstairs to be sure the refrigerating unit was
okay. Finding that it was, I came back up and locked the door again. Then I
went out into the hall and locked the outer door. It's supposed to be kept
locked, too, and I really should have locked it earlier.

After that, I read
The Golden Bough,
with a
note-book in front of me so I could jot down anything I found that would fit
into my thesis.

I must have become deeply engrossed in my reading because
when the night bell rang, I jumped inches out of my chair. I looked at the
clock and saw it was two in the morning.

Ordinarily, I don't mind the place where I work at all.
Being near dead bodies gives some people the willies, but not me. There isn't
any nicer, quieter place for studying and reading than a morgue at night.

But I had a touch of the creeps then. I do get them once in
a while. This time it was the result of being startled by the sudden ringing of
that bell when I was so interested in something that I had forgotten where I
was and why I was there.

I put down the book and went out into the long dark
hallway. When I had put on the hall light, I felt a little better. I could see
somebody standing outside the glass-paned door at the end of the hall. A tall
thin man whom I didn't know. He wore glasses and was carrying a gold-headed
cane.

"My name is Burke, Roger Burke," he said when I
opened the door. "I phoned early this evening about my brother being
missing. Uh--may I--"

"Of course," I told him. "Come this way.
When you didn't come for so long, I thought you had located your brother."

"I thought I had," he said hesitantly. "A
friend said he had seen him this evening, and I quit worrying for a while. But
when it got after one o'clock and he wasn't home, I--"

We had reached the coroner's office by then, but I stopped
and turned.

"There's only one unidentified body here," I told
him, "and that was brought in this afternoon. If your brother was seen
this evening, it couldn't be him."

The tall man said, "Oh," rather blankly and
looked at me a moment. Then he said, "I hope that's right. But this friend
said he saw him at a distance, on a crowded street. He could have been
mistaken. So as long as I'm here--"

"I guess you might as well," I said, "now
that you're here. Then you'll be sure."

I led the way through the office and unlocked the door.

I was glad, as we started down the stairs, that there
seemed little likelihood of identification. I hate to be around when one is
made. You always seem to share, vicariously, the emotion, of the person who
recognizes a friend or relative.

At the top of the stairs I pushed the button that put on
the overhead lights downstairs in the morgue. The switch for the showcase was
down below. I stopped to flick it as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and
the tall man went on past me toward the case. Apparently he had been a visitor
here before.

I had taken only a step or two after him when I heard him
gasp. He stopped suddenly and took a step backward so quickly that I bumped
into him and grabbed his arm to steady myself.

He
turned around, and his face was a dull pasty gray that one seldom sees on the
face of a living person.

"My God!" he said. "Why didn't you warn me
that--"

It didn't make sense for him to say a thing like that. I've
been with people before when they have identified relatives, but none of them
had ever reacted just that way. Or had it been merely identification? He
certainly looked as though he had seen something horrible.

I stepped a little to one side so that I could see past
him. When I saw, it was as though a wave of cold started at the base of my
spine and ran up along my body. I had never seen anything like it--and you get
toughened when you work in a morgue.

The glass top of the display case had been broken in at the
upper, the head, end, and the body inside the case was--well, I'll try to be as
objective about it as I can. The best way to be objective is to put it bluntly.
The flesh of the face had been eaten away, eaten away as though acid had been
poured on it, or as though --

I got hold of myself and stepped up to the edge of the
display case and looked down.

It had not been acid. Acid does not leave the marks of
teeth.

Nauseated, I closed my eyes for an instant until I got over
it. Behind me, I heard sounds as though the tall man, who had been the first to
see it, was being sick. I didn't blame him.

"I don't--" I said, and stepped back.
"Something's happened here."

Silly remark, but you can't think of the right thing to say
in a spot like that.

"Come on," I told him. "I'll have to get the
police."

The thought of the police steadied me. When the police got
here, it would be all right. They would find out what had happened.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs my mind started to
work logically again. I could picture Bill Drager up in the office firing
questions at me, asking me, "When did it happen? You can judge by the
temperature, can't you?"