Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

1

“…sometimes the bodies leak.”

I looked over at the man driving the meat wagon in which I was currently a court-required passenger and said, ever the fellow armed with a witty retort: “Huh?”

The driver—a fifty-something guy named Fred Dobbs (I’m not kidding; just like the character Bogart played in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, swear to God), a man built like a walk-in freezer who was also a twenty-two-year veteran driver for the County Coroner’s Office—nodded his head and sighed as if empathizing, though he was trying hard to conceal a grin. “Yeah, whenever we get a call like this one—y’know, when the folks have been dead a day or two—sometimes you’re gonna find that the bodies have been laying in the bed or on the floor, and if the weather’s all hot and humid like it’s been and they ain’t got air-conditioning, the internal gasses build up a whole lot faster and then things start to strain and tear and rupture and the bodies, well…sometimes they leak when you move ‘em.” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his tone was much lighter, as if telling a joke: “I once had so much trouble trying to get this one old gal out of her bed—her bedsores were so bad that I thought her skin was gonna peel off and dump her guts right on my shoes—I finally just had to wrap her up in the sheets she’d died in before transferring her to the bag. If it’s bad, then we let the wizards in the doc’s office do the peeling. Our job is to just get in there and remove the bodies.”

“Which sometimes leak.”

Another nod: the teacher pleased that the student wasn’t as dim as he’d feared. “I’m not trying to make you sick or nothing, understand, but I figured maybe you ought to prepare yourself for the possibility.” He shrugged, honked the horn for reasons I‘d never know at someone or something I couldn’t see, then removed one of his hands from the steering wheel and flexed his fingers, the bones crackling like dry twigs on a campfire.

I reached out to turn down the radio; the news had been talking about a massive (what they called “…spectacular”) eight-car accident in Columbus on the I-71 loop last night that so far had left five people dead. The radio station had someone broadcasting live from the scene which still hadn’t been cleared. It appeared the accident had been caused when someone driving a Hummer cut across all four lanes without signaling and slammed into a Ford Gargantua or some other four-wheeled yuppie tank that in turn hit a semi...and I didn’t want to hear about it. There’s only so much death and destruction I can take when the sun is shining and there’s still the possibility of having a nice day.

“‘Course, now,” said Dobbs, “if the bodies’re on a rug or carpeting, that makes it a bit easier in some ways. If they’re leaking all over a rug, we just roll ‘em up in it and save the county the cost of a bag.”

“And if they’ve leaked onto the carpeting?” Pause for a moment and consider: how many people get to start their workday with conversations like this? Was I the luckiest guy on the planet, or what?

“Then we haul out the carpet cutters and…” He mimed scissoring around a body. “But then you’ve got the added problem of some extra weight if they’ve really been leaking, and especially if it’s shag carpeting.”

I shook my head. “Damn the shag carpeting!”

“Oh, you got that right. Me, I think that shit makes any room look like something that belongs in a porno movie—not that I’ve seen all that many pornos, you understand, it’s just there’s something kinda…I dunno…sleazy and tacky about it.”

Gas-ruptured bodies and home decorating tips. With lunch still hours away. My life was an embarrassment of blessings.

I looked in the back of the wagon where a crate hand-labeled Retrieval Gear sat with its unlocked lid bouncing up and down every time we drove over a pot-hole. Symbolic thoughts of Pandora’s Box notwithstanding, the sight gave me the creeps, knowing as I did what was inside.

“Do you think we’ll have to use any of the science-fiction paraphernalia?”

Dobbs seriously considered this; I knew he was considering it seriously because the right side of his face knotted up as if he were having a stroke. “Hard to say. I kinda like putting on them HazMat suits myself. Scares the hell out of people and they keep outta your way. I used to feel silly wearing that stuff until the doc explained to me that dead, leaking bodies produce their own kind of toxic waste.” He looked at me and, for the first time that morning, outright smiled; there was a lot of genuine kindness it. “Don’t you worry none. If it’s bad, I’ll walk you through it. I know this ain’t exactly what you had in mind, and I may act like a royal horse’s ass most of the time—at least according to anyone who’s known me for more than twenty minutes—but I got sympathy.”

“You’ve had assistants like me before?”

He barked a loud laugh. “Hell, buddy, how do you think I got started on this job?” “You’re kidding?” “If I was kidding, don’t you think I’d try to come up with something funnier than that?” “Good point.”

He gave a short, sharp nod. “They got me same way as you. Had one too many before hitting the road one night and got stopped by Johnny Law. Since I’d drove an ambulance in Vietnam, judge figured that me and the meat wagon was a perfect community-service match.” He shrugged. “When my CS period was done, they offered me a permanent job.” He looked at me. “I actually kinda like it. Dead folks’re quiet, and I treat them with respect, even when I gotta roll ‘em up in sheets or rugs.”

“Or shag carpeting.”

He almost grinned. “I don’t make no jokes when I’m taking care of them. The doc likes that, likes my attitude, which is why I can get away with some of the shit that I pull, and whenever the city does its budget-cut dance, like they done here last quarter, I don’t have to worry about being left out of work.”

“That explains why I wasn’t given a choice in the matter.” My lawyer had told me that the courts try to match your own individual abilities to a county department where those abilities could best be used, which is why I’d expected to find myself cleaning offices—I’m a crew manager with a local janitorial company—but Judge Walter Banks was in a bad mood, evidently being pressured to assign more defendants to CS duty (damn the budget cuts!), and said he’d had his fill of “…people who think they’ve got the constitution of an ox so they don’t think twice about getting behind the wheel while under the influence…” and slapped me with both a five hundred dollar fine and one hundred hours of community service. My lawyer argued that, by law, I was to be given a choice of assignments; Judge Banks pointed out that the matter of being offered a choice was up to the discretion of the bench, and his particular bench felt that I damned well ought to be exposed to the dead in order to remind me of what could have happened had I hit a pedestrian or another car.

So I was assigned to the budget-strapped County Coroner’s Office. As Fred Dobbs’ assistant. In the passenger seat of the meat wagon. Talk about your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

“By the way,” I said, “I wasn’t drunk.”

“Of course you weren’t. And every man on Death Row is innocent.”

“I’m not trying to say I didn’t deserve my fine and the rest of it, I just want it made clear that I wasn’t drunk.”

“But you were half-snowed on Demerol.” “I’d gotten slammed with a migraine, I went to the ER, they gave me a shot—” “—and probably told you not to drive yourself home, isn’t that right?” I shrugged. “I thought I could make it home before the stuff really kicked in.” “Appears you were mistaken.”

I shrugged. “Hell, I was probably more dangerous driving to the hospital than I was driving home afterward.”

“Hate to be the one to break the news to you, but ‘under the influence’ don’t just refer to drinking, you know.”

“I do now.”

Dobbs sighed, rubbing one of his eyes. “You’re not gonna grouse like this for the next three weeks, are you? Unless it’s the sound of my own voice—which I find soothing and not without a certain musical quality—I kinda prefer to keep the conversation upbeat.” “I didn’t think I was complaining.” “Maybe not, but you were in the neighborhood. Speaking of—double-check the address for me, would you?” I picked up the clipboard and read the address to him. “You sure that’s right?” I offered the board to him; he stopped at a red light, took the board, and read it for himself. “Huh. That’s odd.” “What?”

“When Doc said East Main, I just kinda assumed it was the Taft Hotel. A lot of old folks and welfare cases wind up croaking there.”

I was familiar with the Taft; hell, anyone who’s lived here for more than a year knows about it. Once the most popular and expensive hotel in the city (named after William Howard Taft, who’d frequently stayed there), the last fifty years have seen it slide not-so-slowly into disrepair and decay, becoming nothing more than a glorified flop-house where those who’ve reached the end of their rope can crawl into poverty’s shadow and just give up. I’d assumed, as well, that the Taft was our destination, but it turned out we were headed for The Maples, an apartment building located two miles farther down East Main Street. The Maples’ residents were exclusively those elderly who still had their wits and retirement funds very much about them, and who were capable of living unsupervised. The Maples had good security, two doctors who lived on-site, an exercise room, a small chapel for Sunday services (some residents could not drive to church, so church came to them), and touted itself as the place to go for “…those seniors who can still do it on their own.” My grandmother had lived there until her death three years ago. Though I hadn’t set foot in its lobby since then, I had no reason to think that The Maples had suffered a fate similar to that of the Taft.

“Well,” said Dobbs, tossing down the clipboard as the light turned green, “I think we can rule out having to wear the spacesuits today.”

“Another thrill my life will have to do without.”

“I can feel your heartbreak all the way over here.”

I picked up the clipboard and looked at the sheet again. Under Caller’s Name, the space was blank.

“Aren’t they supposed to take the name of whoever calls it in?” I asked.

“Supposed to. The city’s supposed to have fixed all the potholes in the road, I’m supposed to weigh thirty-five pounds less than I do, and you’re supposed to be doing something else besides helping me. For that matter, this whole to-do was supposed to be handled by the book, but there ain’t been nothing about this has gone like it’s supposed to.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning that the doc was ordered by the mayor to examine the body hisownself. Doc doesn’t do that unless it’s a murder scene. Some old lady croaks in her apartment or a hotel room or at a nursing home, he sends one of his flunkies to look over the body and make the call to whatever funeral home is gonna be handling it.” He shook his head. “Not this time, no sir—this time the doc is ordered to do it personally. Mayor called him at home around five this morning, made the man get out of bed and go to it pronto. Doc was awfully tight-lipped about everything when he called me about the paperwork. Can’t say I’m too happy about being kept out of the loop.”

I remembered the call; it had come into the office just as I arrived for work. Dobbs had seemed confused as he looked at the forms left on his desk by the coroner—his end of the conversation consisted of, “Yes sir”, and “But why—?”, and “We’ll get on it right now.” It seemed like an awfully short exchange, considering what we were being sent out to do.

“So,” I said, “you’re supposed to be given more information than this?”

Dobbs nodded. “Yeah, but like I said, supposed to don’t always cut it. My guess is that one of the neighbors found her, told the building manager, and the manager called the police, cha-cha-cha—though why in hell the mayor got involved in this is beyond me. We can always ask whatever poor doofus the department left on the scene.”

“There’s gonna be a cop there?”

He nodded. “There’s always a cop there until we show up. Once foul play has been ruled out—and that’s already been done—what you’re left with is a body that’s just laying there stinking up the place and making everyone else nervous as hell. The law doesn’t require that an officer remain with the body until it’s picked up, but it ain’t exactly like Cedar Hill is Miami. They can spare an officer to corpse-sit for an hour or so.”

“I’ll bet that puts them in a cheery frame of mind.”

“Well, we’re gonna be finding out here in a minute or three.”

He drove the wagon into the Maples’ underground parking garage, expertly backing up so that the rear doors faced the freight elevator. We got out, unloaded and unfolded the collapsible gurney, grabbed the clipboard, Latex gloves for each of us, some scissors in case there was carpet work to be done, a couple of filter masks, and then, finally, the body bag.

Dobbs pressed the button, stood waiting for a moment, then shook his head and said, “Shit, I forgot, come on.” He started walking toward one of the parking garage doors that led into the lobby. “We have to get the elevator key from whoever’s manning the front desk.”

A set of glass doors opened into a warmly-lighted hallway with gold carpeting. On the walls hung bulletin boards with announcements and fliers tacked on them—Bingo Night, a pot-luck dinner at a local church, a lecture on living wills to be given at the library next week—as well as tastefully-framed prints of bowls of fruit, glamorous cityscapes, and myriad pastoral scenes. The furniture was clean and over-stuffed, the sofa pillows fluffy, the doilies and afghans perfectly folded and arranged, the whole setting designed to make you feel Right At Home. Smells of soup, cornbread, and meatloaf wafted from the cafeteria (The Maples Dining Room, as it was called by the sign), and the murmuring of the voices coming from the dining area suggested that it was filled with people who’d known each other for decades and could easily fall into the kind of familiar, friendly conversation that, between lifelong friends, becomes a kind of art unto itself.

Despite my increasing anxiety over what Fred and I were about to do, I slowed down, chancing a glance into the dining room, then stopped in my tracks entirely when I saw how everyone was dressed; the women wore either dresses or attractive suit outfits, while all the men were in slacks, jackets, and ties. I looked around, trying to see if there were anything posted about a dress code, and then just as quickly realized there wouldn’t be. This dining room was filled with people who remembered what it was like to treat mealtime as an event, every day. You dressed for meals not only out of respect for yourself, but for those with whom you would share the meal. Looking at the diners at that moment, I found myself wondering when, how, and why we’d come to view what was meant to be a sociable event of the day as just another excuse to grab some chow. Me, I frequently ate alone while wearing only my underwear, and the last time I’d had a dinner date, I’d worn khakis and a polo shirt, while my date arrived resplendent in her jeans, sandals, and OSU sweatshirt. Maybe we think it’s too old-fashioned or outright corny to dress like this for meals every day, but I’d’ve bet a week’s salary that every person in there had spent a lot of time deciding what to wear, then just as much time getting ready, and were probably enjoying their meal more than we of the jeans-and-T-shirted pizza nights could or would ever understand.

Somebody has to come up with these commonplace profundities. Might as well be me.

I smiled at an old woman who looked up and saw me looming in the doorway, then double-timed it to catch up with Dobbs, who was speaking to the receptionist at the front desk.

“…moved in about seven months ago,” the woman was saying, “and in all that time I don’t remember her ever having a single visitor.”

Dobbs gave his head a slow, sad shake. “That’s terrible,” he said, sounding like he meant it.

“One of the things we try to do here at The Maples is make sure that none of our residents feel isolated—it’s a terrible thing to be getting on in years and feel alone and lonely. We encourage everyone to interact with their neighbors—you know, sort of keep an eye on each other’s well-being so that no one feels ignored or forgotten…but Miss Driscoll never really allowed herself to become part of The Maples’ community. Oh, she’d be pleasant enough at meals and come to the weekly residents’ meetings, but aside from those times, she rarely left her room.”

Fred put on his stroke-face again, considering this. “And she never had any visitors?”

The woman behind the desk shook her head. “Not unless you count delivery people. And the thing is, she has—had—one of our bigger apartments. People who can afford anything on 7 or above are, well…comfortable, you know? They’ve been careful with their money. And—oh, God, this is going to sound so mean—our older residents who have a little money, they tend to get visitors. You know—family and friends who want to be left a little something in the will. Not to imply that they don’t love their grandma or grandpa or great aunt or whoever, but…oh, my; I’m really putting my foot in it here, aren’t I?”

“Not particularly,” said Dobbs.

The woman shook her head. “But not Miss Driscoll. Never a visitor, just the deliveries. I’ll bet she had two, three packages a week delivered to her. And some of those packages were fairly sizeable. On days when she had deliveries, she never came down for meals, just called the desk and said she wasn’t feeling well and could she have her meals sent to her room. We do that here, send meals to a resident’s room if they’re not feeling good enough to come down.”

“So she’d sometimes miss, what—three meals a week?”

“More, if it was a big delivery day.”

I couldn’t help but wonder why Dobbs was asking all these questions, unless it had something to do with what he’d told me about treating the dead with respect; maybe asking questions gave him some sense of what kind of person they had been while alive, and helped him decide how best to treat their remains. And maybe he was just a good, old-fashioned, first-class nib-shit. The woman behind the desk gave the freight elevator key to Dobbs. “Your gurney doesn’t squeak, does it?” “No, ma’am, it certainly does not.”

She nodded her head. “That’s good. I wouldn’t want the other residents to be disturbed by this—at least, not any more than they already have been.”

Dobbs thanked her for the key, turned to leave, then looked back. “You don’t by chance know who called this in, do you?”

“I know it wasn’t me, I just came on-duty a couple of hours ago, but…wait a second, please, I’ll check the phone log.” She called up something on her computer. “We have to keep records of who makes this kind of call, and when, all that good stuff.” She found was she was looking for, scrolled up, then down, then said, “Huh.”

“Something wrong?” asked Dobbs.

“There’s nothing here. If the call had been made from this desk or the manager’s office, it would be entered in the phone records. But…there’s nothing.”

“So maybe it was one of her neighbors?”

“Let me check.” She called up another file, then another, then one more. “Okay, this is odd.”

Dobbs gave me a quick look, then went back to the desk. “You’re not gonna actually make me ask, are you?”

The woman looked at him, then back at the computer screen as if she expected the information she’d been searching for to have suddenly appeared during the interim. “We have certain rules that all our residents abide by, and one of those rules is that in a situation like this, if they make the call to the police, they are to immediately inform us so that we can enter it into the records. When a resident passes away on the premises, it’s vital that we record every bit of information—not just for the family’s peace of mind, but to protect ourselves should any legal questions arise.” She looked back at Dobbs. “There’s nothing here about Miss Driscoll’s dying—and I mean nothing.” Her eyes narrowed. “This is lazy and thoughtless and inexcusable. We could get into a lot of trouble for this.”

“I won’t say anything,” said Dobbs. “But it looks like maybe this’d be a good time for you to enter some information, huh?”

“I…I don’t know any of the specifics, I wouldn’t know where—”

Dobbs handed her a photocopy of the forms given to him by the Coroner’s Office. “Most everything’s there; when we got the call, when the doc arrived here, the estimated time of death, the doc’s official conclusion, all of it.” She took the forms from him. “Do you always carry extra copies of this stuff?” “All the time. You’d be surprised how many people forget to write this stuff down when someone dies.” She pressed the forms against her chest and sighed with relief. “You’re a life-saver, you know that?” “All part of my famous curmudgeonly charm.” And with a wave, he left, gesturing me to follow. “Why all the questions?” I asked him as we re-entered the parking garage.

“You mean about Miss Driscoll?” He shrugged. “I dunno, it’s just something I do on jobs like this. Seems like, since I’m gonna be the last human contact their bodies will ever know outside of a funeral home, I ought to know a little something about them. It’s a terrible thing, to have your last human contact be with a total stranger. Just seems right somehow, knowing a few things.” Another shrug. “Or maybe I’m just a nib-shit.”

I laughed, but not too loudly.

Dobbs inserted and turned the key, pressed the button, and the freight elevator doors opened. We maneuvered the gurney into the too-wide, too-deep, too brightly-lit compartment and Dobbs pressed 7. The doors closed with a thump! that seemed so loud I actually started.

“Easy there, Rambo,” said Dobbs. “This ain’t the time to get a case of the willies. You just follow my lead once we’re up there, okay? Let me do the talking with the officer, and once we get inside, don’t do a thing unless I say so, okay?”

“Okay.” I sounded just as anxious as I felt.

“Hey, look at me. The first time I had to go along on one of these, I was so scared I thought I was either gonna piss my pants or throw up. I surprised myself by doing both.”

“If that was meant to make me feel better, it needs a little work.”

“I’m just saying that it’s okay to be nervous. Do yourself a favor and don’t fight it. Fighting it’s what makes it worse. If it’ll help, just pretend that you’re moving a piece of antique furniture. I know that sounds cold-hearted as all get-out, but if you can put yourself into that frame of mind—that you’re moving a thing, not a person—it’ll go easier. Besides, when you get right down to it, that is all we’re doing, moving a thing. It’s not really a person, it’s just something they once walked around in.”

“Then why bother asking all those questions like you did?”

“We’re not talking about me, Einstein, we’re talking about how you can handle this. I’ve been doing this a helluva lot longer, and asking questions is how I deal with it so I can get to sleep at night and not feel so soul-sick and sad when I wake up the next morning that I can’t get out of bed.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Fred.”

“I know. And I apologize if my tone was a bit harsh. But that’s my advice for you; if worse comes to worst, just think of them as being a piece of furniture, got it?”

I swallowed—a bit too loudly for my nerves—and nodded. “Thanks.”

“Look, on an average month the Coroner’s office only gets maybe one or two calls like this. Mostly what you and me will be doing is hauling bodies from the morgue to whatever funeral home they’re going to. We might have to maybe drive a body over to another county, or go to another county to bring a body back here, but mostly what we do is fill out paperwork and sit around waiting for Doc to call us with a job.”

“Filling out paperwork sounds delightful right about now.”

Dobbs reached across and patted my arm. “You’ll be fine. Just do me a favor—you feel anything coming up or your bladder starting to do the Watusi, you make a beeline for the toilet. Oh, I forgot to mention—the first two things you locate once we’re inside are, 1) the body, and, 2) the toilet. Long as you know where both of them are at all times, you should be okay.”

The elevator came to a groaning stop and the doors opened. We rolled everything out into a concrete corridor, following the signs past custodian closets and storage rooms until we came to a set of heavy swinging metal doors that led into another warmly-lighted hallway with gold carpeting. Its design and decor was an almost exact replica of the lobby.

According to the wall-mounted signs, 716 (Miss Driscoll’s room) was to our left. We rounded the corner (making almost no noise whatsoever; Dobbs was right, this gurney was quiet) and the police officer sitting watch outside the room rose from her chair and gave us a nod.

“Been waiting long?” asked Dobbs when we got there.

“About forty-five minutes,” said the officer, whose nametag identified her as Carol Seiler. She pushed some blonde hair back from her almost-cherubic face (the only thing marring the “cherubic” image being the heat she was packing) and said, “I guess I have to earn my salary now and ask you if you’ve got some official-type paperwork to show me.”

Dobbs handed her the forms. She looked them over, nodded, initialed the bottom of each, took her copies, then gave back everything else.

“You’ve got quite the show waiting for you in there,” she said.

Dobbs looked at me with an expression that was, for him, wide-eyed: Maybe we’re gonna need the sci-fi gear, after all?

“Is it bad?” he asked.

“The body is fine, but the rest of it is…well, a little strange.”

“‘A little strange’?” said Dobbs. “I don’t like starting my Mondays with ‘strange’. Doc didn’t say anything to me about ‘strange.’ But then, he didn’t say much of anything to me. Don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on this ‘strange’?”

Officer Seiler shook her head. “And ruin the surprise?”

By now, I was getting a serious case of the jitters; maybe these two dealt with stuff like this frequently enough that they could afford to be flippant, but my composure was just about at the breaking point.

“Could you just tell us, please?” I said, a bit more loudly than was probably called for. Officer Seiler looked at me, then back at Dobbs. “Let me guess, your new CS sidekick?” “He’s a bit uneasy.” “Think maybe he’s wound too tight?” “Could be, but he seems like an okay guy.” Don’t you just love having people talk about you like you’re not there? Does wonders for the old self-esteem.

The two of them continued chatting about this and that—how the department was still trying to track down family members, the weather, the accident in Columbus that was all over the news, the recent budget cuts (Damn the budget cuts!)—so I turned around to lean against the wall and nearly jumped out of my shorts when I found myself face to face with a small, slightly hunched, bespectacled man who immediately reminded me of the drawings of Mole from The Wind and the Willows. “She was an odd’n,” he said, nodding toward room 716. “Hello,” I said, nothing if not quick on my feet. “I’ll not speak ill of the dead,” said Mole, “but I have to tell you, I’m not going to miss the power outages.” I looked toward 716, then back at him. “Okay…?”

He gave out with one of those exasperated sighs that suggests the listener should have been able to figure out the rest for themselves already, if they had half a brain and were paying attention, which obviously I had not been so he was going to explain it to me very slowly, taking pity on my lack of common sense. “Them packages she was always getting. Every time she got a delivery, you could count on the power on this floor going out sometime that night. Got so bad that the management company had the custodians install a breaker box down by the laundry room so they wouldn’t have to keep going to the basement. Thought it was damned considerate of them, myself. Power goes out, one of us’d just grab a flashlight, go down to the laundry room, flip a switch. Still, you couldn’t stay mad at her, not hearing the way she cried some nights.”

I didn’t want to know this. One of my greatest fears is that I’ll end up old, sick, alone, and forgotten, living out the remainder of my shabby days in some dim little room with no one to talk to or care whether or not I wake every day to the promise of more loneliness, feeling like my whole life has meant nothing.

Just spreading my sunshine. Hence the daily doses of Zoloft.

I was about to go into this woman’s home and remove her body. The last goddamn thing I needed to hear was that she kept some of her neighbors awake because she cried every night. It was just too much.

“Yeah,” said Mole when I made no response, “that old gal could caterwaul with the best of ‘em, I swear. I mean, some nights, she’d wail like nobody’s business.” He stopped talking for a moment, something having just occurred to him. “Huh. You know, now that I think of it, it seems like the worst nights were those right after she got a big delivery.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking hard, then nodded his head. “Yes sir, that’d be right. Anytime she got a big package delivered to her, you could count on two things: the power going out, and her crying up a storm. Like I said, she was an odd’n. You got any idea if someone from her family’s gonna be dropping by for her stuff? Don’t mean to sound morbid, but I’d sure like to get a look at whatever it was she had going on in there.” This last said in a tone suggesting Miss Driscoll had some kind of juicy, dirty little secret that he was just dying to be the first to know about.

I felt even more nervous now. “I, uh…as far as I know, they’re still trying to track down her family.”

“Damn shame. Don’t think I ever saw a visitor come to her door, aside from the delivery people.”

“That’s what I heard.” I wanted him to go away. I was trying to think of a tactful way to tell him as much when Officer Seiler stepped in to serve and protect.

“Come on, Mr. Boyle,” she said, gently taking his arm. “Let’s stay out of their way so these two gentleman can do their jobs.”

“Damn shame,” he said again as she led him away.

“It sure is,” she replied, casting a quick glance over her shoulder and winking at me. Even packing heat, she looked so gorgeous right then I wanted to bear all of her children. “You ready?” asked Dobbs, opening the door. “No.” “Good answer.”

We righted the gurney and rolled it into the apartment, closing the door behind us should any curious eyes decide to sneak a peek. I found myself hoping that Officer Seiler hadn’t actually left, that she’d stick around long enough to make sure no crowd formed in the hallway, that maybe she’d thought it over and decided I was just the guy to carry her offspring.

The apartment had a small foyer with a polished wood coat rack, telephone stand, and single chair for callers to use. A framed photograph on the wall over the phone showed a very striking woman surrounded by what looked like dozens of children, all of them smiling the type of forced, could-you-hurry-up-and-take-the-picture-puh-leeeeze smile that we’ve all plastered on our faces at one time or another as suited the occasion. I wondered if Miss Driscoll had been a grade-school teacher at some point in her life, because all of the children in the photo looked to be between the ages of 7 and 12. The glass covering the photo was cracked, the break running down the center of the woman’s face. I wondered why Miss Driscoll had never bothered replacing the glass.

“All right,” said Dobbs, letting go of his end of the gurney and walking into the living room, “let me make sure we’ve got a clear path before we…”

“Before we what?” I asked, trying to squeeze around the gurney to join him.

“…hol-ee shit…”

“What is it?”

“You are not going to believe this.”

You heard it here first.

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting to see—a room filled with stuffed animals, or priceless antiques, maybe porcelain figurines of angels or those little statues of children with those really big eyes that are supposed to warm your heart but personally give me the creeps; whatever it was, it’d be something lonely-old-lady-like, that was for certain—

—I’d sure like to get a look at whatever it was she had going on in there—

—but I think even Mole a.k.a. Mr. Boyle would have started at the sight of what took up a full eighty percent of this old woman’s living room.

Table-mounted HO slot-car racing tracks.

It wasn’t just the sheer amount of track—though that in itself was enough to drop your jaw (lay all the individual pieces end to end, and my guess is you’d easily have a quarter-mile or more of the stuff)—but the configurations. These tracks weren’t arranged in anything so banal as circles or ovals or figure eights, but in complex, looping, multi-layered patterns, complete with overpasses, off-ramps, and even rest areas. Model buildings were placed at various points along and around these tracks (there were a half-dozen tracks set up throughout the spacious living room) depicting small townships and bigger cities, including HO-scale trees and human figures.

“Good Christ,” said Dobbs, looking around the room. “There must be about three or four thousand dollars’ worth of track and…stuff.”

“At least,” I replied, still trying to absorb all of it. Then thought: No wonder the power was always going out.

The biggest track—a four-lane job—was wired for individually powered lanes, with power taps located at three different points around the track, all of the wires running underneath the table to a variable 20-amp power supply that was mounted to a small metal shelf running between two of the table’s legs.

I used to be a slot-car racing fool when I was a kid, and I knew damn well that you can only run a power supply for so long before it starts to really heat up, and if you push your luck (like I always did) you were apt to blow a fuse before you were done.

And if for some reason you had several tracks and power supplies running at the same time…you could blow out the electricity to the entire floor of an apartment building.

I was so caught up in my own amazement that I didn’t even realize Dobbs had left the living room until he came back in and said, “Oh, man, you gotta see the rest of this place! She’s got tracks mounted everywhere—in her bedroom, the guest room, the kitchen…hell, she’s even got a little one set up in the bathroom!”

“We’re never going to get the gurney through here,” I said. “There’s barely room to walk around.”

Dobbs nodded his head. “Yeah, I already figured that out. We’re gonna have to move a couple of these tables. But not just yet.” He squeezed past me, pressing the clipboard into my hands, heading for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“You just stay here, all right? Miss Driscoll’s laid out in the bedroom, so you wait and take a look around. I don’t think she’s gonna mind.” He stopped, then turned to face me. “I got a digital camera in my bag down in the wagon. I have got take some pictures of this place. My wife’ll never believe me.”

I stared at him, blinked, then asked: “Why would anyone working a job like this carry a camera with them?”

He grinned. “Because every once in a while I come across something really weird, and my wife requires proof.”

“Do you lie to her that much?”

“I don’t like to think of it as lying. I…embellish. I embroider. I exaggerate.”

“You lie.”

“I lie. Just to keep her guessing, mind you. Believe me, after 32 years of marriage, nothing I do surprises her anymore, so I gotta do something to make it interesting for the old gal.” “So you carry a digital camera to work in case something weird comes up.” “That’s it. Don’t you ever fib to your wife?” “I’m divorced.” “Oh, sorry. Well, didn’t you ever fib to her when you were married?” “Probably.”

I was tempted to ask him what other weird things he’d encountered that required him to take pictures so his wife would believe him, then decided that some things were better left as mysteries. “I’d rather not stay here by myself, Fred. Okay if I come along?” “Sorry, my friend, but once we’re on the premises, at least one of us has to be with the body at all times. Them’s the rules.” “Then let me go and get the camera.”

“Oh, no, sorry. I paid a pretty penny for that thing and nobody but me handles it. Look, you’ll be fine. Back in a couple of minutes. Take a look around, it’s pretty interesting.”

And with that, he left me alone with a dead body, several thousand dollars’ worth of custom-made slot-car racing track, and what felt like a solid rod of iron running from the top of my throat to the bottom of my stomach.