C is for Corpse

I returned to the stairs, descending. What was that little voice in the back of my head murmuring? It was like a radio playing in the next room. I could pick up only a faint phrase now and then.

When I reached the basement, I crossed to the radiology office and tried the knob. Locked. I got out my key picks and played around for a while. This was one of those "burglar-proof locks that can be picked, but it really is a pain in the ass. Still, I wanted to see what was in there and I worked patiently. I was using a set of rocker picks, with random depth cuts spaced along the top, the back side of each pick ground to an oval. The whole idea is that with enough different cut combinations, together with an applied rocking motion, somewhere along the way all the pins will, by chance, be raised to the shear line at the same time, popping the lock.

Like hiding, the only way to approach the whole process is to give oneself up to it. I stood there for maybe twenty minutes, easing the pick forward, rocking it, applying slight pressure when I felt movement of any sort. Lo and behold, the sucker gave way and I let out a little exclamation of delight. "Oh, wow. Hey, that's great." It's this sort of shit that makes my job fun. Also illegal, but who was going to tell?

I eased into the office. I flipped the overhead light on. It looked like ordinary office space. Typewriters and telephones and file cabinets, plants on the desks, pictures on the walls. There was a small reception area where I imagined patients seated, waiting to be called for their X rays. I wandered through some of the rooms in the rear, picturing the procedures for chest X rays and mammograms, upper G.I. series. I stood in front of the machines and opened one of the manuals I'd brought in from the car.

I checked the diagrams against the various dials and gauges on the X-ray equipment itself. It was a match, more or less. Maybe some variation according to year, make, or model of the actual machinery installed. Some of it looked like the stuff of science fiction. Massive nose cone on a swinging arm. I stood there, manual open in my arms, pages pressed to my chest while I stared at the table and the lead apron that looked like a baby bib for a giant. I thought about the X rays I'd had taken of my left arm two months ago, just after I'd been shot.

It wasn't as if the idea came to me all at once. It formed around me, like fairy dust, gradually taking shape. Bobby had been out here all by himself, just like this. Night after night, searching for the handgun that had Nola's fingerprints on it. He knew who had hidden it, so he must have formed some kind of theory about the hiding place. I had to guess that he'd found the gun and that's why he was killed. Maybe he'd actually retrieved it, but I didn't think so. I'd been operating on the assumption that it was still hidden out here and that still seemed like a good bet. He'd made some little notes to himself, doodling the I.D. number of a corpse in his little red book and again in the pages of a radiology manual he'd acquired.

The phrases ru

I left my handbag and the manuals on one of the X-ray tables and went next door to the morgue. In the refrigerated storage room, I spotted a gurney against the right wall. I was on automatic pilot by now, simply doing what I knew had to be done. There was still no sign of Alfie Leadbetter and no one was going to help me. I might be wrong, so maybe it was just as well that no one knew what I was up to. The building was deserted. It was early yet. Even if I fumbled the X-ray procedure, it couldn't hurt the dead man.

I rolled the gurney over to the fiberglass bunk where the body lay. I pretended I was a morgue attendant. I pretended I was an X-ray technician or a nurse, some thoroughly professional person with a job to do.

"Sorry to disturb you, Frank," I said, "but you have to go next door for some tests. You're not looking so good."

Tentatively, I reached out and eased a hand under Franklin's neck and knees and pulled, slipping him from his resting place onto the gurney. He was surprisingly light, and cold to the touch, about the consistency of a package of raw chicken breasts just out of the fridge. God, I thought, why do I plague myself with these domestic images? I'd never be motivated to learn to cook at this rate.

It took incredible maneuvering to get the gurney through the morgue and out into the corridor, then into the reception area of the radiology offices and into one of the X-ray rooms in the rear. I lined the gurney up parallel to the X-ray table and shoved the body into place. I raised and lowered the nose cone a couple of times experimentally, sliding it along its overhead track until it was right over Franklin's abdomen. At some point, I was going to have to figure out how far away from the body it should be. Meanwhile, since I intended to take some pictures, I thought I better find some film of some kind.

I looked through the four cabinets in the room and found nothing. I circled the room. There was a shallow cupboard mounted on the wall, like a fuse box with double doors. A strip of masking tape was pasted on one side, with the word exposed printed on it in ballpoint pen. A second strip of tape said unexposed. I opened that door. There were film cassettes of varying sizes lined up like serving trays. I took one out.

I went over to the table and studied the layout of the machinery. I didn't see any way to slide the cassette into the apparatus above the table, but there was a sliding tray in the table itself, just under the padded edge. I pulled it out and inserted the cassette. I hoped I had guessed right about which side should be up. Looked right to me. Maybe I could fashion a whole new career out of this.

I figured Franklin didn't need protecting, so I picked up the full-length lead apron and put it on myself, feeling somehow like the goalie in a hockey match. Actually, I'd never seen an X-ray technician ru

I checked the manual again, leafing through until I found diagrams that seemed relevant. Thefe were numerous gauges with little arrow-shaped pointers at rest, ready to whip into the green zone, the yellow, or the red at the flick of a switch. There was a lever on the right marked "power supply," which I flipped to the "on" position. Nothing went on. A puzzlement. I flipped it off and then checked the wall to my left. There were two breaker boxes with big switches that I shifted from "off" to "on." There was a murmur of power being generated. I flipped the power supply lever to "on" again. The machine came on. I smiled. That was great.

I studied the panel in front of me. There was a timer that would apparently have to be set on a scale from 1/120 of a second to six seconds. A gauge for kilovolts. One marked "milliamperes." God, three rows of lighted green squares to choose from. I started with a midrange setting on everything, figuring I could use one gauge as a control and adjust the other two in some sort of rotating system. In between, I would check my results on the finished film and see what kind of picture I was getting.

I peered around the screen. "O.K., Frank, take a deep breath and hold."

Well, at least he got the "holding" part right.

I pressed the switch on the handgrip. I heard a brief bzzt. Cautiously, I came out from behind the screen as though X rays might still be flying around the room. I crossed to the table and removed the cassette. Now what? There had to be some kind of developing process, but it didn't appear to be in here. I left the machine on and carried the cassette with me, checking into rooms nearby.