To the City Morgue
I’m a walker—there are more chances for drink—but I take the occasional subway or taxi as required. What I loathe are the buses. The stop and go, stop and go. And the people! They are no good, the rush of bodies and bags, coats and hats...it’s all something I would rather avoid. But time was wasting, bodies were decomposing, and ladies were missing their loved ones, so getting up at the dawn-cracking hour of 10 AM, I showered, shaved, and hopped onto the cross-town line, making my way towards the ends of the earth: Bellevue Hospital. The bus was clearing out by 2nd, and at 1st Avenue only me and the crazies were left. Next stop was the East River, so we all got off.
I stepped into the hospital and weaved back through the halls until I arrived at the door marked morgue. Inside, it was a bright, antiseptic room lined with white tile, white clothed nurses, and white wooden chairs. I assume that the chairs were for sitting, but given that the space smelled like it was oozing formaldehyde, I stayed standing at the counter as the white-shirts buzzed about, pushing their steel carts back and forth.
Morgue is the popular parlance, but in New York City, its proper title was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. How is the OCME different than a meat locker? For starters, when it opened in the teens, they established the first toxicology laboratory in the country. Instead of being a fridge in the basement of the sheriff’s office, the lab business, with all its slicing and dicing, required a hospital’s inviting amenities, so the office moved its operations up from City Hall to the glorious, beautiful, Bellevue. Let’s be straight—people who want paperwork head downtown. But if you want the body, you came east to Bellevue.
No one seems in much of a rush to cater to their clients, dead or living. Finally, a homely looking 45-year-old lady appeared at the post behind the desk, and asked, “Name, Occupation, Relation to Deceased.”
“Look honey, I have been here a thousand times.” I brought my hat to my chest and smiled as best I could through the stench. “I just want to see if the floater from yesterday is someone I’ve been looking for.”
Without looking up, she asked again “Name, Occupation, Relation to Deceased.”
At that moment, Dr. Sherman walked through the double doors. I waited for him to ditch the gloves before taking his hand.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t my favorite private eye? What brings you to the bowels of hell?” Even the good doctor smelled like the preserving juice. I grinned and bore it.
“Thought the guy you pulled out of the East River might be connected to something I am working on.”
“Really? Hard to imagine, he wasn’t local. In any case, you just missed the body. Sent him to Hart on the last boat. When it gets crowded back there” he thumbed behind him, to the swinging doors of the lab proper “—and believe me, today’s been a busy one—only tax payers get to stay on the cold slabs.”
“He’s moving pretty fast for a dead guy. Anyway, can I come back there and look at the records?” I patted his shoulder.
“Well, as you are a tax payer, and one that pays exceedingly well...” I had helped Sherman find a supplier back in the early days of Prohibition, and he’d since hooked up with a pretty solid ether distribution ring, “— feel free to come on in. You can even lay on a slab if you want, I’ve got one that’s just opened up.”
Knowing not to protest the doctor’s orders, the receptionist threw a nasty scowl in my direction, but said nothing as I walk by. If looks could kill, I’d have needed that slab.
Once in the refrigerated belly of the OCME, I showed him the two-inch picture to the resident slicer.
He recognized him immediately. “Sure, that was the Floater. Good hair, nice spleen, bad nose.”
“What put him in the cooler?”
“Two to the chest. Blew him wide open. Then came the dump. But what got him there, I don’t know. I ain’t no gumshoe like you. The why don’t pay my bills.”
“Funny, the whats and whys don’t matter much to me, neither. It’s the whos I usually chase, and only until I know where they’re going.”
“Or in this case, where they’ve gone.”
I took a quick glance at the chart, thanked the doctor for his time, and split out of that joint as fast as I knew how. In my life, I had never been so happy to get on a bus as I was when I boarded that westbound carrier.
