Hot-Wired in Brooklyn (8 page)

“Hey, Eddie.”

“Evening, Pickle.”

Pickle’s eyes made quick, eager passes between me and Caroline, turning lecherous each time they settled on her. Nobody in
the morgue was known for tact, and Pickle was probably the worst. The way his pill-eyes were ogling Caroline, I figured he
was imagining her naked on a slab. When Caroline’s eyes briefly left the gurneys, Pickle took notice and tried to get conversational.

“What’s the little lady shoppin’ for?”

She wouldn’t answer, so I did. “A brother. Fifteen years old.”

Pickle spread his arms expansively, as if to sum up the contents of the corridor. “We got a great selection tonight,” he said.
“Must be a full moon.”

“Fifteen year old boy,” I reminded him.

Pickle scratched his chin. “Could be a half-dozen of those, between the stiffs out here and the ones in the cooler. Had a
bad fire up in Bed-Stuy, coupla shootings, a jumper on Fulton, big smash-up down on Avenue U…”

A set of double doors swung open down the hall, somebody called Pickle’s name, and he toddled off. “You folks feel free to
browse if you like,” he said as he left, like a furniture salesman bouncing between customers. “Won’t be more than a minute.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked Caroline. Without answering, she approached the first gurney, lifted the sheet,
and looked into a dead face. I was ready to catch her if she swooned, but she surprised me and didn’t even flinch. The body
was male, mid-fifties, shabbily dressed. It smelled of shit and liquor.

She glanced at the single-page form that the ambulance attendant had placed next to the body, dropped the sheet and walked
to the next gurney.

A burn victim rested on it, scorched face, mouth agape, tongue protruding. Middle-aged colored woman. Caroline didn’t react.
She moved on to the next gurney, and I followed, more like a tag-along now than a protector.

I winced at the next body. Male accident victim, early twenties, face gashed in a dozen places, shards of windshield embedded
in its ruined features. Still recognizable. A handsome kid until he’d hit the glass. Crew cut, good clothes. Someone would
come soon to claim him, and to grieve.

Caroline moved on systematically, never looking long enough to let her feelings accumulate, to think: this used to be a human
being. It was like she’d had combat experience, but that was impossible.

We went through five more gurneys the same way. We’d started on the other side of the corridor when Pickle returned.

“Made any friends yet?” he asked cheerfully. I tried to
bother him with a frown, but it didn’t faze him. The innocuous little jerk had long since lost his sensitivities among the
living. Caroline was lifting another sheet when Pickle added, “Those ones along that wall, they’re all from the fire. Up in
Bed-Stuy. All niggers. You wasn’t lookin’ for niggers, was you?”

Caroline didn’t react, but I did. Because of Desiree and Watusi, it was a word I didn’t like to hear. I held back a reprimand,
but not before Caroline caught the fierce glow in my eyes. Her own eyes fell hard on Pickle.

“Where are the others?” she asked curtly.

“Others?”

“The ones you’ve already processed. The ones with the toe tags. In the drawers.”

“Oh. The drawers. Sure, sure,” said Pickle, his furniture-salesman smile re-emerging. “Right this way.”

The refrigeration room looked like what it was: a meat locker. I kept my attention on Caroline, still impressed by her resolve,
but waiting for it to crack. She knew the protocol here, waiting for Pickle to open the drawers and pull down the sheets.
Pickle was thinking out loud.

“Teenager, huh?”

“Male. Fifteen,” I said.

Pickle scratched his head. “Only one like that in here, but it ain’t got no face.” Pickle waited for a reaction, didn’t get
one, and continued. “Gunshot wound, back of the head, close range, .45 caliber, hollow-point probably. Blew the whole face
right off. What’s left is just mush. You gotta go with fingerprints on this one, believe me.”

He walked to the far end of the room, opened the middle
drawer of the last row, slid out its contents and pulled down the sheet to just below the chin. He was right. The exit wound
was as big as a grapefruit, the face utterly gone. Caroline looked at the wound without any reaction, but when Pickle went
to cover the face again, she said, “Pull it down lower, please. Down to the elbows.”

Pickle shrugged and pulled the sheet lower.

“Rotate the left arm, please.”

Pickle complied.

She went pale instantly, and I caught her as she collapsed.

I
carried her to the cot in Pickle’s back room. While the cobwebs cleared from her head, I asked Pickle the obvious questions.

“When’d the body come in?”

“Coupla nights ago.”

“Who found it?”

“Beat cop.”

“Where?”

“Alley off Sands Street, by the bridge.”

“Find the slug?”

“Sure. Didn’t go far when it came out.”

“Any other wounds?”

“Naah,” said Pickle. “Hey, the little lady’s awake.”

Caroline sat up and scowled as if she’d caught Pickle looking up her dress. When she spoke to him, her words were clear and
hard, her eyes full of venom. “I’m certain that the young man in there is my brother, James
Hutchinson, but you’ll need more than just my word. Will the finger and toe prints from his birth record be adequate?”

“Them’ll do,” said Pickle.

She gave Pickle her address on Sutter Avenue, the address of a funeral home in Brownsville when the coroner was ready to release
Jimmy’s body, and then we left.

“Some detectives from the 84th precinct will probably want to talk with you,” I explained as I drove her home. “The body was
discovered on their turf. If you don’t want to deal with them by yourself, you can call me. I can also bring a lawyer.” She
didn’t respond, so I kept silent all the way back to Brownsville.

It was past midnight when I pulled up outside her building. “Would you like some tea?” she asked. I didn’t have an exit line,
so I just nodded and said, “Okay.”

The apartment was empty when we arrived. I assumed that Charlotte was out tearing up the town somewhere, and it was probably
better that way. No infusions of wild abandon to break the perfect funereal mood that Caroline had set. After ten minutes
of silence broken only by the sound of a tea kettle, she finally spoke.

“Do you take sugar?”

“Sugar?”

“In your tea. I seem to have forgotten if you had a preference.”

For a moment, our eyes met and held. Her face had turned sickly pale. Her voice was still steady, but hollow, like the sound
of a Dictaphone. That part of her that was machine had taken over, mercifully, I guess.

“I don’t usually drink tea,” I answered. “I take my coffee black, if that’ll help.”

“Plain, then,” she said absently, and went on with her preparations. A minute later she set the cup and saucer down in front
of me. We’d taken the same seats as before, she on the couch with the afghan, me in the chair. She sipped her tea once and
centered the cup on its saucer.

“How’d you know?” I asked. “About your brother.”

“His elbow. A bad scar he’d had since he was seven. He fell off his bicycle in the street. He needed stitches, but we couldn’t
afford a doctor, and I wasn’t trained as a nurse yet. It healed, but it left a jagged scar.”

“That answers another question I was going to ask.”

“Oh?” She took another sip.

“That was pretty gruesome stuff at the morgue.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t even flinch. Not until you saw…”

“The scar on his elbow.”

“When’d you go into nursing?”

“During the war. My husband was in the service. I was working as a file clerk during the day and studying nursing at night.”

“What branch?”

“Branch?”

I realized I’d lost her and tried to apologize in my tone. “Of the military. What branch was he in?”

“The Marines,” she said. “He died on the beach at Tarawa.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And you?”

“Hundred and First Infantry. Airborne.”

“A hero of Bastogne,” she said with an ironic half-smile.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?”
The word carried a chill.

“Sorry. Just trying to be polite.”

“I see. Are you deferential to war widows in general, or just to me?” I didn’t answer, she let the question hang icily in
midair, and the thin-shelled eggs I’d been walking on all evening felt like they might be cracking. She walked back into the
kitchen with long, deliberate strides and lifted the kettle off the stove.

“More tea?” she asked flatly.

“No, thanks. You said before your name was Hutchinson, and that it was Jimmy’s name, too. But you were married.”

“I took back my maiden name,” she said, colder. “Isn’t that allowed?”

“I guess.”

“Thank you.”

“So, you’re alone now?”

“I have no man, if that’s what you mean. Is that what you were hoping I’d say?” The dullness in her eyes turned suddenly to
a fire hot enough to boil thin-shelled eggs.

“I’d better be going,” I said.

A flash of anger crossed her face. “Aren’t you waiting for me to ask you to stay? Isn’t that what happens next for someone
in your line of work? To comfort the poor, grieving, brotherless war widow between her… sheets?”

“I already told you I was leaving.”

“So you did. And I was expected to beg you to stay, wasn’t I?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea about detectives…”

“But not about men.”

“I wouldn’t know about anybody else,” I said, as glacial as I could make it. “I just know about me.” I started for the door.

“Wait, please,” she said, stepping toward me. “I didn’t say that. That is, I didn’t mean what I said. I’m just upset… and
confused. Do you understand?”

“Sure.”

“I’m expected to handle little things like death, Eddie. Parents, a husband, a kid brother. Overcoming tragedy is supposed
to be run-of-the-mill for me, like being a frontier wife or one of those old, stoic women in Greek plays. I’m cursed with
this strength to continue on, to survive, but never to win. It’s a false strength, Eddie, and it’s cruel.”

I was looking directly into her eyes. “I understand.”

“I believe you do.”

“I still need to be going.”

“Eddie?”

“Yes?”

“Despite what I said, I really
would
feel better with someone here tonight. With anyone… here tonight. I could make up the couch for you. It’s a lot more comfortable
than it looks.”

I glanced at the door, then at my watch. “Won’t Charlotte be back pretty soon? It’s well past midnight.” That brought silence.
She turned and walked slowly back to the kitchen. I heard the sound of running water, and another sound. Sobbing. I walked
to where she was standing, reached around
her and turned off the tap.

“I don’t guess Charlotte would be much of a comfort, would she?” I said softly. Caroline tried first to smile, then to speak.
Finally, failing both, she turned her face into my waiting chest and buried it there, sobbing and helpless, like an abandoned
child.

C
aroline was wrong about the couch. Even Letty’s Queen Anne chair had smaller bumps. I didn’t catch a wink, so my nightmare
didn’t return, along with whatever ghoulish permutations the trip to the morgue would’ve added. But I needed sleep so badly,
I was almost willing to risk it in my own bed.

I looked in on Caroline around three. She was in a dead sleep, covers primly tucked up to her chin, the way little Desiree
slept with her cat. I wrote her a note, short and professional, offering what help I could in finding her brother’s killer.
It didn’t figure to be a separate case anyway. Somehow, it tied in with Arnold and the stolen car and Shork’s murder. Everything
evil seemed to tie in with Arnold’s problem, no matter what I thought or did about it. It was my curse, and I was already
sick to death of it.

I got home around three-thirty, slept fitfully and without dreams until seven-thirty, then staggered off to early mass.
Usually I went to the ten o’clock, or I skipped mass altogether, but that morning I went early. I sat in the last pew, ignored
Father Giacomo’s sermon about the meaning of Christ’s suffering, and tried to figure out the meaning of my own. I left, unnoticed,
just before communion.

I started making lasagna around nine-thirty. It was Sunday morning, my favorite time of the week, usually, doing what I love
best. But mass hadn’t set my thoughts in order, and by eleven the lasagna had become a chore. My mood went from foul to fouler,
and when Tony and Angelo arrived at noon, I barely grunted a hello. They were arguing about polar bears, but I didn’t care.

Gino arrived half an hour later. He hit me with Mr. Pulaski’s troubles the minute he walked in, and I hit right back with
my own.

“You wanna know somethin’, Gino?” I growled, stirring the sauce pot like a devil over a cauldron. “I don’t give a rat’s ass
about Mr. Pulaski or his Polack prick of a son. Whaddaya think about that?”

“What the hell’s wrong with
you!”

“Lay off.”

“Okay, okay. Be a big jerk if you want.” He turned and walked briskly into the living room, where Tony and Angelo were waiting
for an umpire. He quelled their argument about polar bears and started reading them the Sunday comics, like Mayor La Guardia
on the radio during the newspaper strike.

I put the lasagna together as if I were assembling a weapon. The big stewing pot between my ears finally reached the boiling
point when Sal and Frankie came in. Sal had his wife’s fresh garlic bread tucked under his arm, and Frankie
had a case of beer on his hip. It’s supposed to be Schaefer, but it wasn’t. I stopped him with my arm as he passed me in the
kitchen.