clear the sidewalks, haul out that car and lever the trunk.
Assistant Medical Examiner Emerson was there to see a can of worms opened right up, and even the cop who stood beside him – hard-bitten and weatherworn though he was – even he took a raincheck on dinner.
So they levered the trunk, and inside they found some guy, couldn’t have been much more than fifty years of age, and Emerson told anyone who’d listen that he’d been there for three, perhaps four days. Car had been there for three if the boy’s observation was correct, and there were sections of the trunk’s interior, bare metal strips, where the man’s skin had adhered in the heat. Emerson had one hell of a job; eventually he decided to freeze the metal strips with some kind of spray and then peeled the skin away with a paint scraper. The trunk vic looked like mystery meat, smelled worse, and the autopsy report would read like an auto smash.
Severe cerebral hemorrhaging; puncture of temporal, sphenoid and mastoid; rupture of pineal gland, thalamus, pituitary gland and pons by standard dimension claw hammer (generic branding, available at any good hardware outlet for between $9.99 and $12.99 depending on which side of town you shopped); heart severed at inferior vena cava through right and left ventricle at base; severed at subclavian veins and arteries, jugular, carotid and pulmonary. Seventy percent minimum blood loss. Bruising to abdomen and coeliac plexus. Lesions to arms, legs, face, hands, shoulders. Rope burns and adhesive marks from duct tape to wrists, left and right. Rope fibers attached to adhesive identified beneath an infrared spectraphotometer as standard nylon type, again available from any good hardware outlet. Estimated time of death Wednesday 20 August, somewhere between ten p.m. and midnight, courtesy of New Orleans District 14 County Coroner’s Office, signed this day . . . witness . . . etc, etc.
The vic had been beaten six ways to Christmas. Tied at the wrists and ankles with regular mercantile and hardware nylon rope, beaten about the head and neck with a regular mercantile and hardware claw hammer, eviscerated, his heart cut away but left inside the chest cavity, wrapped in a regular sixty percent polyester, thirty-five percent cotton, five percent viscose bed-sheet, dumped in the back seat of a ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, driven to Gravier Street, moved to the trunk and then left for approximately three days prior to discovery.
There were interns to see to the arrival of the body at the Medical Examiner’s office, to watch over it for the couple of hours before it was moved to the County Coroner for full autopsy. Fresh-faced they were, young, and yet already beginning to get that world-weary edge of madness in their eyes, the kind of look that came from spending your life moving the dead from the scene of their misfortunes. They kept thinking This is no work for a human being but perhaps had already joined that happy, foolish crowd of folks who believed that, if they were not there to do these things, then no-one else would take care of them. There would always be someone to take their place, but they – in their infinite and very mortal wisdom – could never see them. Due, perhaps, to the desperation of looking.
The Crime Scene Security Officer was the man who stood sentinel over the dead to ensure this mortality was not violated further, that no-one would walk through the spilled blood, no-one would move the torn clothing, the fibers, the fragments, that no-one would touch the weapon, the footprint, the microscopic smudge of vari-colored mud that could isolate the one thread that would unravel everything; selfishly, with some sense of internal hunger, he would clutch these images and visions to his chest. Like a child protecting a cookie jar, or candies, or threatened innocence, he sought to make permanent the very impermanent, and in such a way lose sight of the real truth of the matter.
But that would be tomorrow, and tomorrow would be another day altogether.
And by the time darkness edged its cautious way towards morning the people who had crowded the sidewalks had forgotten the story, forgotten perhaps why they went down there in the first place, because here – here, of all places in the world – there were better things to think of: jazz festivals in Louis Armstrong Park, the procession from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, St Jude Shrine, a fire out on Crozat by Hawthorne Hall