Morgue Drawer Four (4 page)

Martin was actually managing not to constantly stare at her nicely shaped bazooms but look her in the eyes. How was he doing that? I searched his brain for the order printed in bold black capital letters:
LOOK HER IN THE EYES
! But there wasn’t anything in there. He was just managing it. Was this guy queer?

“How was your weekend, Martin?” the fair maiden asked.

“Fantastic,” Martin said. “And successful. I found four new maps.”

“New new-maps, or new old-maps?” the Dream Woman asked.

“Old,” Martin answered with a stupid grin.

What kind of garbage were these two blathering about? New old/new maps?!?

“And how was your weekend, Katrin?” Martin asked.

“Challenging,” she replied, and I was about to start imagining what a challenging weekend with this woman looked like, but then she kept talking. “My brother and I had to clean out my parents’ house, now that they’ve passed away.”

“Doesn’t she have a boyfriend?” I asked Martin.

Martin was in the middle of murmuring something that sounded like an apology and condolences, but my interim question threw him off. He hesitated mid-sentence and quickly took a sip from his mug.

“Push her down on her back,” I challenged him. “A good screw will help her through her problems more than a bunch of crap condolences.”

He snorted with a start into his tea, which slopped over the edge and ran down his sweater and pants.

Katrin reacted quickly, turning around to grab a towel.
All right!
I thought, into it. Now she was rubbing Martin’s pants dry. He likely saw that coming, but instead of closing his eyes in pleasure and letting things run their course, he took the towel out of her hand and hectically tried to wipe his coat dry himself. How stupid can a guy be? An opportunity to get one rubbed out good by small, fast, feminine hands isn’t something you pass up! What kind of issues had I stumbled across here, exactly?

“Aren’t you feeling well?” Katrin asked.

The question had crossed my mind as well, although I had been thinking more about the mental and hormonal health of my fleshly friend, but she was surely asking because Martin’s nose had gone pale and his cheeks were softly flushed, and he was acting all agitated.

“Yes, yes,” Martin answered much too quickly. “I’m just fine, thank you.”

Katrin didn’t look convinced, and I couldn’t blame her. It seemed like she wanted to say something else but thought better of it and said goodbye with a friendly, “See you this afternoon?”

Martin nodded.

“Have you no sense of decorum?” Martin hissed at me. And he really hissed it, even though thinking it would of course also have sufficed. “I would be truly grateful to you if you would refrain from interfering in my conversations.”

I wanted to draw his attention to the fact that someone was standing in the door to the break room, but Martin kept on chewing me out.

“In particular I would like to request that there not be any dirty commentary or sexual innuendos from you when I’m speaking with female colleagues.”

The man who was still standing in the doorway craned his neck forward a bit so he could get a view of the whole break room. Of course, he found no one in there apart from Martin.

“Hi, Martin. Everything OK?” the white lab coat asked as he walked in.

Martin spun around; now there was no further trace of paleness in his face—he was red as a lobster. “What? Oh, yes, yes, everything’s just fine. How are things with you?”

The white lab coat nodded, stepped over to the coffee machine, glanced askance at Martin once more, and poured himself a mugful. Then something apparently occurred to him.

“Hey, did you catch the latest scoop on our favorite Bundestag representative, Dr. Christian Eilig?” he asked.

“No,” Martin replied, sipping his tea.

“The paper has started calling him ‘Dr. Christian’ for short, and he wants to ban autopsies now.”

“You’re joking,” Martin stammered, speechless.

“Unfortunately not,” Martin’s colleague said. “He says it violates the ‘dignity of the human body’ to cut it open.”

Well, I could see where that guy was coming from, actually, but how did
he
know anything about it? Did they have Bundestag representatives who were dead, too? I wondered. And if so, how’d that bastard get back into his body?

Martin shook his head; whether out of aversion to the notions of their favorite Bundestag representative or just to shake himself free from my thoughts, I couldn’t tell. “Didn’t we have this debate already?” Martin asked. “About a thousand years ago?”

“Well, it’s a hot topic again,” his colleague said. “The TCP has been hitting seventeen percent in the latest polls.”

“The ‘True Christian Party,’” Martin muttered. “Ugh, how did we get stuck with a Bundestag representative like that?”

“Because the wise voters in Cologne elected him,” his colleague replied. “Cologne Cathedral is apparently more important to them than forensic medicine.”

“That man should stick to collecting all his high-end cars and let respectable people do their jobs,” Martin grumbled.

His colleague nodded, patted Martin on the shoulder, picked his coffee mug back up, and left the break room.

Martin dumped the rest of his tea out into the sink and stormed in long strides down the hallway and into the stairwell, skipping every other step down, and finally arriving slightly out of breath in the morgue’s refrigerated storage area. He pulled out Drawer Number Four and stared at me—or more precisely, at my body.

“How is that you’re not dead?” he asked the body, which looked so dead it couldn’t possibly look deader. Especially because of the really roughly resutured seam extending from my chin to my—well, you already know. His intonation was somehow irritated, and I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. First of all, in contrast to the assertion he had just made, I was indeed quite dead; to that extent Meticulous Martin was mistaken—plus, I was the one who was in the really shitty situation here and not him. So if anyone should be irritated, clearly it should be me.

“Fuck you,” I snarled at him. “I’m dead and no one knows that better than you; after all you’re the one who sliced me clean open from top to bottom, ripped out every organ in my body individually, and then stuffed them all back inside, and you sewed me together so inelegantly that Dr. Frankenstein himself would be embarrassed about that suture.”

By the time I finished talking, Martin was leaning against the morgue drawers next to mine; his legs were shaking so badly he could hardly stand. “But you’re talking to me,” he objected.

“Yeah, because it’s pretty boring being all alone without any entertainment,” I replied, although I knew very well what he was getting at. But I didn’t have an explanation, either. I didn’t remember missing a turnoff at any point. I hadn’t been given any choice between moldering around here or hopping into a conga line with some procession of cherubim to convey me to the Pearly Gates, where Saint Peter would fling them open and ask if I’ve been a good boy. How was I supposed to answer? Anyway, I didn’t know why I was hanging out around here, myself, and I didn’t know where all the other souls were, either. If they were anywhere at all. An old souls’ home, a haunted house, some kind of heavenly Halloween hotel. So I couldn’t explain anything to renowned no-clue-ologist Dr. Martin here, either; too bad for him.

“Do you believe in God?” Martin asked.

“Which one?” I asked, because I had gotten into the habit of giving that answer at some point, and I still thought it was clever. Plus, I haven’t seen any cause to change it, for the reasons I’ve already given you. If there is some kind of chief overlord for the whole ball of wax, he had not introduced himself to me yet, in any case.

Although Martin had stopped talking, his thoughts were slowly ordering themselves into a serious bit of reflection. How, he was wondering, can I get rid of this guy? The question was entirely justified. Imagine being surrounded every day by about thirty corpses. That’s your job, and you’ve gotten used to it. Well, it’s actually not that bad, because at least dead people don’t talk your ears off with whatever petty complaints, the way living patients do to their doctors. So things are actually pretty easy. Until the day a body suddenly shows up that’s not quite as dead as it’s supposed to be. For a scientist, that must surely be a terrible ordeal in and of itself, but the proposition that this errant soul may be just the beginning of some brand-new trend could make even one of your more-inured guys like Martin break out in a cold sweat. A vision of legions of specters swirling around him flashed through Martin’s brain briefly, and he actually started trembling.

Of course now, in hindsight, I recognize that Martin’s anxiety at that point was justified. He was just overwhelmed with the situation, and it’s quite natural to wonder how to get rid of a ghost you didn’t even summon. At that moment, however, as we stood in sweet communion before my refrigerated morgue drawer, I found what he was reflecting on nothing but revolting. I was dead, I had a problem, and he was wondering what the easiest way was to get rid of me again. Disgusting, right?

“Do you believe that your soul will be able to find peace if we solve your murder?” he said, wording his question carefully.

Ha! Did he really think the wool can so easily be pulled over my eyes? Whether or not my soul found peace was totally beside the point for him. What he wanted was for my soul to disappear—no matter, heaven or hell, as long as I was gone. That’s how I felt at the time, at least.

“I think so,” I said, because if he was hoping to get rid of me again by solving the crime, then he would certainly make an effort to find my murderer and restore my reputation. My reputation as a person who was important enough for someone to kill. Who didn’t plunge off the bridge out of sheer stupidity. A martyr, a war victim of Cologne’s brutal underworld.

Martin sighed. “OK, then please recount the sequence of events for me, the backstory, everything you know.”

Now I had a problem, because even if I really, really do like to go boozing now and again, three point seven is pretty high, even for me, and I had only hazy recollections of many of the details.

But I told Martin about my last day in as much detail as possible.

“You didn’t see anyone at the station or on the overpass?” Martin asked.

“Of course I saw people,” I said. “But no one that I knew.”

“And the person who pushed you, you didn’t see them, either? Not even—” Martin hesitated. “Not even as you were falling?”

“You mean after I was already lying dead in the snow and my soul slowly started wafting up, I should have been able to get a good look at the murderer from that vantage?”

He nodded.

“Well,” I replied after a moment’s thought. “Maybe I did see him, but I didn’t recognize him. You don’t become all-knowing just because you’re dead.”

Too bad, Martin thought, and I had to agree with him on that. In general my condition was subject to considerable limitations. I was able to make contact with only one single human being, and although I could sense his thoughts, I wasn’t able to speak out loud. Plus, I had to actually move from place to place, so I couldn’t beam myself up or move objects around, either. I hadn’t imagined it like this at all.

“Then we’ll have to approach the issue in a different way,” Martin said. He was no longer trembling, but he was still pale. “Who might have had reason to kill you?”

I should’ve expected that question to come up, but it threw me for a second, all the same.

Try it out yourself: At some quiet moment in your life, ask yourself who might feel like offing you. Well? Weird, right? So right off the bat obviously all the usual suspects occurred to me. My ex, who I played for a couple hundred smackers. Mehmet at the casino, who I owed money. Pablo, which isn’t his real name, but that’s the name I knew him by, he’d been my dealer before he landed in the pen—which he blamed me for! Of course, on lengthier reflection other names would occur to me, and of course it might also be possible that stealing the SLR with the body in the trunk might have resulted in a certain irritation when it reached its intended destination. The only question was, what destination. The owner of the car? Olli? His Eastern European buyer?

“My ex threatened many times, and in front of witnesses, to knock me off one day,” I let drop, with forced casualness. “That bitch thinks I played her.”

“Di-did you?” Martin asked, stammering out of nervousness.

“Well,” I started slowly, immediately glinting into Martin’s brain for the answer: he thought I did!

“Put the heat on her, then we’ll see what turns up,” I said. I was overcome by a certain joyous anticipation. I pictured grim, beautiful images in my head: a drill team of the boys in blue marching in unison up to Nina’s door, knocking, dragging her out into the hall as soon as she opened the door, and then asking her the same question over and over again: “Why did you kill your ex-boyfriend?”

She would smoke until she didn’t even have any butts left, the cops wouldn’t let her out to get any new ones, and hour by hour she would have to answer the same question over and over again. Sweet.

“We can’t involve the police,” Martin explained.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because the autopsy report didn’t indicate any signs of foul play, and the police are also assuming it was an accident. The investigation into your death has been concluded.”

“Then you have to open the case up again,” I said.

“We’ve already discussed that issue,” Martin countered. “I can’t tell the police that the murder victim himself told me that he was killed.”

“Then you have to talk to my ex,” I said, but my excitement had already waned. Martin was a wuss. He’d politely ask Nina in his cautious way whether she might possibly have killed her ex-boyfriend, and she would ask him if his brains were in his ballsack. Then she’d get some idea into her head and start licking her tongue over her lips, wrapping a strand of hair around her finger, and looking around discreetly for the hidden camera. And when she realized there wasn’t any camera, she’d glare at him like he was a rat with a boil at the base of his tail and then throw him out, plain and simple. Sayonara, O you beautiful third degree.