The Day the Music Died (15 page)

I
DIDN’T HAVE FAR
to go to find the morgue; it’s in the basement of the courthouse.

They try to disguise it as much as possible. There’s a nice-looking middle-aged receptionist. There’s a waiting area with a plump, comfortable wine-colored couch; a table filled with current issues of magazines; and a coffeepot that’s always percolating.

Doc Novotony is a distant relative of Cliffie, Sr., and as such his credentials have been questioned a few times. Exactly what
is
the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics, anyway? And exactly where is the Thayer Medinomics Hospital where he interned? The state medical board wouldn’t give Novotony his license until he battled them all the way to our state supreme court, which decided, be-grudgingly, that Novotony was more or less qualified to practice medicine here. But it was a split decision, with the minority report being pretty scathing.

Cliffie, Sr., installed Novotony as the county medical examiner. Novotony then proceeded to shock everybody by being a pretty decent M.E. with but two failings—anytime Cliffie, Sr., wanted results to come out a certain way, that was exactly how those results came out.

And then there’s the matter of how he dresses.

Iowa isn’t the equal of Texas in its football fervor but for some folks around here, it comes damned close. Doc Novotony, all 260 pounds and five-foot-six of him, is a good example. No matter what the occasion, and I include funerals here, you almost always see him in his black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeye football jersey and his black-and-gold cap and his black slacks with the thin gold piping down the side. He gets kidded a lot, but apparently not enough to change his clothes.

He came out to greet me after Rita, his secretary, had walked back to tell him I was here. He has psoriasis on one side of his face. It has spread over his hands. He has obligingly dispensed with handshaking. He smelled of death, or those morgue chemicals that I associated with death. They smell the same in the places where they put animals to sleep. I took a cat in once and followed the vet back to his special death room. I wished I hadn’t.

“Hear you had a little trouble last night, McCain,” he said. Then smiled. “Little skinny-dipping with that pretty Mary Travers, huh?”

Rita shook her head and rolled her eyes. She always looked embarrassed by her boss.

“Too bad you got the eye for Pamela Forrest, McCain,” Doc Novotony said. “That Mary’s a good-lookin’ gal. Plus she’s got some nice wheels on her, if you know what I mean.”

Rita did some more eye-rolling.

“I just said that to get Rita’s goat,” he laughed. “Got to liven this place up a little bit.” He picked up Rita’s package of Chesterfield’s and lit one. “I owe you one.”

“You owe me a carton,” Rita said. This time she shook her head, but I sensed genuine amusement with her boorish boss. He wore you down and won you over. Like professional wrestling: you watched despite all your best judgment.

“I’m here about the girl in the canoe.”

“You want to see her?”

“Not especially.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot you’ve got a queasy stomach.” He looked over at Rita. “He shoulda been here to see that guy that fell into that corn grinder last week. Now, there was a mess for you.”

“Maybe you could let me borrow some photos sometime,” I said.

He grinned. “I don’t know why Cliff hates you so much. I think you’re pretty funny, McCain. And Rita’s always tellin’ me how cute you are.”

“I’ve never said that in my life, McCain,” Rita said.

“I was just teasin’ her again. Hard as hell to get her goat, you ever noticed that, McCain?” Then, he nodded to the back and said, “C’mon.”

“I actually do think you’re cute, McCain,” Rita said as we were leaving. “It’s just that I’ve never said it to the doc here. I like short guys.”

“Does that include me?” the esteemed graduate of the Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics said.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “you just get me all hot and bothered.”

“I should fire her someday, don’t you think, McCain?”

The morgue wasn’t big. There were six body drawers and two tables. There was a new tile floor and a desk and two military-green filing cabinets. The shades were drawn. Everything was shadowy. Only one of the tables had a body on it, concealed beneath a sheet. I thought of that great scene in
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
my favorite movie, where the man sees his duplicate laid out on a pool table—after suddenly pulling the sheet back. Ever since then, Kevin McCarthy has been my favorite actor. And Dana Wynter, his costar, became my favorite actress, gorgeous and elegant beyond compare.

Doc had remarked about my queasy stomach. I guess he figured something was wrong with me for not liking to look at dead people. Or smell them.

When he drew back the sheet, and I got a look at her, all of her, I said, “My God, what did they do to her?”

“Abortion. Bad one. Some butcher.”

“Son of a bitch.” I was thinking of my sister.

“Cliff, Jr., called the sheriff over in the next county. This is the missing girl. They finally ID’d her because of a long surgical scar on her back. This is her. Sixteen. Melinda Carnes. Her dad’s a dairy farmer near Alburnett.”

“What the hell did he do to her?” This time, I didn’t get sick. I got angry.

“You never know about these amateurs,” he said, covering her up again. “They use all kinds of instruments when they try and abort these girls. Some of them know what they’re doing, some don’t. The worst thing’s usually infection. It can kill a girl a few days down the line. But you see a butcher job like this and you wonder.”

“About what?”

“About if it was on purpose.” He took his Hawkeye cap off and scratched his head.

“Why the hell would somebody do this on purpose?”

His eyes narrowed as he looked up at me. “Maybe he hates women. Or maybe he hates sinners. You know, one of those religious types, figures a girl’s got it coming for sleeping around before she’s married, and he decides he’s gonna help God out a little and punish her right here on earth. So he cuts her up.”

“But could this have been an accident?”

“Oh, sure. That’s the hell of it. One of these amateurs gets lucky a few times and he thinks he’s a doc. But then his luck runs out and he gets frustrated and he panics a little, and boom, the girl hemorrhages and dies. Most cases like this, the cutter gets scared and runs off and it takes the girl a while to die. Only thing that could save her is somebody passing by and gettin’ her to a hospital on time. This gal didn’t have that kind of luck, unfortunately.” He put his Hawkeye cap back on. “Her parents are on their way over to identify her for sure. I’m only gonna show them her face. Figure that’s the humane thing to do.”

He clipped off the light. We walked back through the cool and shadowy room to the reception area.

Rita was on the phone. Everything still smelled of death. I wanted to leave.

“I’m earnin’ my money this week, I’ll tell you that,” he said as he walked me out into the hallway. “First, Kenny Whitney and his wife and now this.”

I thought of what Judge Whitney had said, that somehow the two cases were related. That still didn’t make any sense to me.

The doc smiled at me. “I don’t know why the judge wanted you to come down here, McCain.” He winked at me. “She probably knows somethin’ we don’t.”

“She didn’t want me to come over here,” I lied.

“Right. You came down here because you like dead people so much.” Before I could say anything, “And tell her that as a newly eligible bachelor, I’d love to take her to the Valentine’s Ball the Jaycees are puttin’ on this year.” He was currently separated from wife number three.

“I’ll give her the message,” I said.

I’d give her the message. And then she’d give me the response, and it’d be one that the doc sure wouldn’t want to hear.

I automatically started to shake hands and then I remembered the psoriasis and how he spent his time handling corpses. I just gave him a little wave and got out of there, taking the steps two at a time.

I
WALKED AROUND DOWNTOWN
for ten minutes. The fresh air restored me. It was sun-golden with life. Quite a contrast to the bowels of death in the morgue.

I smiled at all the pretty ladies who worked in the various stores, trapped behind plate glass in their starchy blouses and fashionable bows. I wanted to set them all free. We’d have a parade down Main Street. We’d be happy and immortal. It was like being drunk and I realized it was irrational, some kind of life-affirming panic reaction to the morgue, but so be it. I doted on the hitching posts. I was old enough to remember when farmers still occasionally rode horses into town and latched them to these posts. I stood in front of the Civil War memorial. I could remember a stirring program Alistair Cooke had done on it for
Omnibus
one Sunday afternoon. And how on the local news that night, they’d read a list of all two hundred boys and men from this county who’d died in that war. And then I stood in front of the Methodist church staring up at its looming spire and I felt a stirring of deity in my irreligious heart. I wanted so badly to believe and it was with great sorrow that I did not.

And then the exhilaration was gone. I wasn’t leading a parade and I certainly wasn’t immortal. I was a hayseed standing on a hayseed street in a hayseed town and just then a manure wagon lumbered past spewing dung-tinged bits of hay as if to confirm my hayseed status. Maybe I needed to hang out in the morgue more often to appreciate my life. Then the beautiful frenzy was gone.

I walked over to a phone booth and called the hospital where Lurlene Greene worked. She sounded scared when they finally got her to the phone, scared as if I was going to tell her bad news. I felt sorry for her. Her color and her husband had both put her through unimaginable hells.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Lurlene, but I’m trying to find Darin.”

A pause. “He didn’t come home last night, Mr. McCain.” She was whispering. She obviously didn’t want to share her business with coworkers. She sounded weary and worn.

“Any idea where I could find him?”

“You know where the Trax is?”

“Yes.”

“They serve coloreds there. That’d be my only guess.”

“I’ll try it. Thanks.”

Her voice got even lower. “You see him, Mr. McCain, you tell him his little daughter is running a bad fever and he should be home where a father belongs.”

“I’ll tell him, Lurlene.”

She was crying, then. “I just don’t know what to do no more, Mr. McCain.”

I wanted to be back leading my parade down Main Street. I’d have Lurlene and her little daughter in my parade right up front and we’d all be happy and immortal together.

“I’m sorry, Lurlene.”

Life is like that sometimes, I thought. But why does it always seem to be like that for the good people instead of the bad ones?

“I better get back, Mr. McCain.”

“Thanks again, Lurlene.”

I got in the car and headed for the edge of the city that had once been the site of a large railroad roundhouse. There’d been a lot of Negroes and Mexicans working the railroad in those years and some of them had stayed on to raise families. Each group had its own trailer court. The Trax was a tavern that sat right between the two trailer courts. Cliffie always sent his white boys out there when they were eager to kick a little ass without the respectable citizens getting too upset. The white boys always won, being the possessors of badges, guns and billy clubs, but they never escaped unscathed. They sported black eyes and split lips and limps for a week or so after each skirmish. Nights, they hung out in downtown taverns, amusing all their fawning friends with their tales of derring-do, though being one of two white cops on a lone Mexican isn’t something I’d necessarily want to brag about.

Years ago, the Trax had been a storage building for the railroad. But when the railroad changed hands right before the war, and the new company divested itself of a lot of its holdings, including the roundhouse and support buildings, the Trax became a tavern.

A glance at the cars parked around the aging wooden building told you all you needed to know about the social status of the regulars. There were even two Model-Ts, one a black box with a roll-out windshield, the other a black box with the back end sawn off and a bed of two-by-fours laid in to turn it into a truck—the kind of clanking, clattering Okie-mobiles you always read about in Steinbeck. The other cars were rusted-out Chevrolets and Fords that dated back before the war. A number of them had smashed windows and doors and back-ends. Darin Greene’s Olds was in the back.

When I opened the front door of the place, a variety of smells and sounds assaulted me, from the brine in which the pickled pig’s feet floated, to the choking heavy odor of cheap cigars. The men’s room wasn’t exactly smelling like spring flowers either. It was like the old joke: it got cleaned once a year whether it needed it or not. The song on the jukebox was “Work with Me Annie,” a very suggestive black rhythm and blues song that two local church groups demanded be taken out of the record store. The darkness was blinding, the only real light being the small display of middle-priced whiskey bottles behind the bar, the light above the shuffleboard table and the jukebox. All eyes were on me and few were friendly. Most just looked curious. I couldn’t have looked more like a tourist if I’d been wearing a lime-green short-sleeved shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts and had a camera strap slung around my neck.

I walked over to an open section of bar and ordered a beer. I didn’t plan on drinking it. The bartender, who had a series of scars on his face, and who was missing a couple of front teeth said, “I think you took a wrong turn somewhere, my friend.”

The men along the bar smiled and winked at one another.

“I’ll have that beer, please,” I said.

“He’s that lawyer,” somebody from the shuffleboard table said.

“Lawyer?” the bartender said, sounding concerned.

“Nothing to worry about,” I said. “I’m trying to find Darin Greene.”

The bartender waved a hand around. “Don’t look like he’s here, does it? Or do we all look the same to you?”