“You’ve got your lab at the University at eleven and you’re due at court by two.”
“I know. So what?”
“You asked me to remind you, so I’m reminding you.”
“So you reminded me. Good for you.”
“The Skardon people are here now. Wanna see them?” He sighs dismally. “I s’pose this is as good a time as any.”
“Up on the Thruway.” Konig again ignites the cold ashes of his expired cigar. “Just north of Pelham—about a mile south of the exit.” Over the flame of his lighter Konig’s eyes search the harried faces of two people—a man and a woman—seated opposite him. “About thirty feet from the road, in some bushes. Have any idea what she was doing there?”
“Where?” the man snaps. “In the bushes?”
“No. On the Thruway.”
“Coming home from school. She was coming home for spring vacation.”
The woman whimpers softly into a handkerchief. Red, teary, sleepless eyes show above the expensive fabric. Cambric, Konig observes and says, “Hitchhiking?”
“I s’pose so.” The man nods impatiently. “She always hitched. Said it saved money. What the hell she had to save money for, I don’t—”
The woman sobs out loud. The man glares at her. “For Chrissake, Emily, will you quit the goddamned, whining. We don’t even know yet if this girl is actually—”
Konig makes a grunting sound. “You say she’s been missing about three days?”
“That’s right,” Mr. J. Phelps Skardon says. “Started out Tuesday afternoon right after classes.”
Probing outward from beneath the craggy, beetled brow, Konig’s eyes continue their careful appraisal of the Skardons. Upper middle class. White Protestant. Undoubtedly wealthy. Family wealth, he imagines. Never lifted a goddamned finger for it. Skardon, Konig surmises, is a professional. A lawyer, undoubtedly, from the way the man questioned him at the start of the interview, his manner brusque, impatient, behaving as if being called down to identify what might be the remains of his daughter was an embarrassment, an inconvenience. His attitude toward Konig, the civil-servant doctor, is vaguely contemptuous.
Mrs. Skardon is a small, pretty woman. Her eyes seem puzzled and terribly frightened. Neurasthenic, Konig imagines, the victim of innumerable psychogenic disorders—palpitations, cold sweats, insomnia, chronic constipation—all generated no doubt from twenty-five years of marriage to a bully. Konig can see the bully now, barely repressed inside the man, but already beginning to show in the beet-red flush in full bloom above the collar of his shirt and in the somewhat cyanotic lips. Mr. J. Phelps Skardon would die in roughly two years, Konig estimates, the victim of a stroke.
“Any idea what she was wearing when she left school?” he asks.
“Now how the hell would I know that?” Skardon lashes out, then sees something flicker in the cool, steady gaze of the pathologist that makes him sit back a bit, subdued, miffed, a little contrite. “We don’t know what she was wearing. What was this other girl wearing?”
“Not very much,” Konig says. The woman moans and Konig rises. “Well, I s’pose we ought to go and have a look.”
The Skardons rise too, he bounding up, she somewhat more tentatively.
“You stay here,” the man bawls at her.
“But I want—”
“No need for it.” Skardon cuts off all further discussion. “This’ll just take a minute.”
A small, feckless puff of air falls from Mrs. Skardon’s lips, a word unspoken, and she sinks back into her seat. Konig can still hear her whimpering as the door closes behind them.
Silently they walk from Konig’s office across a reception area to a small room at the back of the building. There is nothing there but a long, rectangular plate-glass window beyond which lies a wide, gray dumbwaiter shaft. Konig presses a button beside the window. Instantly, a motor whines; the steel cables beyond the glass begin to move upward, and then from the floor somewhere below them, a dumbwaiter platform rises, bearing the waxen, yellow cadaver of a young girl. The motor turns off and the platform stops behind the glass before them.
For a long while they don’t speak. Then Skardon, his eyes riveted on the figure behind the glass, suddenly says, “Was she raped?” His face has gone white, the color of parchment.
“Several times.” Konig eyes him coolly. “We found three distinct semen types inside her.” He gazes for a moment at the badly battered features of a girl approximately seventeen years of age, face twisted in the rictus of violent and painful death. She had clearly once been a pretty, vital child, in her first year of college, with a privileged background and the world just beginning to open before her. She’d been beaten viciously.
Gaping through the plate glass at the body, J. Phelps Skardon’s face twists with hate. “Were they niggers?”
“Beg pardon?”
“The animals who did this to my daughter. Were they niggers? This is their kind of thing.”
Konig watches the man steadily. He appears to be on the verge of apoplexy. “I’m afraid I couldn’t say. I can tell you the type semen. Hence the blood type. But I’m afraid science has yet to find any physiological difference between black and white semen.”
Skardon hangs there, leaning against the green wall, stupefied. His features wear an expression of betrayal.
Konig sighs wearily. “From what I have to go on, there’s no way of saying who her assailants were. Anyway, it’s all now in the hands of the Bureau of Detectives.”
Locked in awkward silence, Konig walks the Skardons back to the First Avenue exit At the door they stand about, shuffling their feet, avoiding one another’s eyes. No one speaks. At last, grunting, truculent to the very end, J. Phelps Skardon barges down the front steps, leaving the poor, tremulous, craven Mrs. Skardon to fumble along behind.
Suddenly, not knowing why, and stunned at his own anger, Konig cries out after the two figures just stooping to enter a cab. “Why in God’s name did you permit her to hitchhike?”
Skardon turns and stares back at him. It is at that moment that the man begins to cry.
Almost 10 a.m. now, and along with April sunshine pouring through the front door comes a torrent of troubled, querulous humanity—pathologists, policemen, lab technicians, reporters, and, of course, mourners. The mourners are always easiest to spot They wear their apprehension and their grief like carnations in their lapels.
Ambulances and police vans are pulled up at the sides and the back of the building. Patrol cars are everywhere around the place. Gurney carts roll out; canvas sacks roll in. “The meat delivery,” the police call it.
Inside, the noise all along the green corridors is deafening. Clatter and gonging of metal doors. The incomprehensible garble of a PA system with the susurrant static and crackle of loose wires summoning people from one place to another.
Konig weaves through this torrent, limping a little from the ache in his leg. Sciatica. APC’s and Valium. Nothing else for it but to wait it out. He greets several of his colleagues on their way down to the autopsy rooms—the deputy medical examiners—Pearsall the amiable, Bonertz the melancholy, Delaney the bigot-prig (will work only on white corpses), and then, of course, shifty-eyed Carl Strang, pompous and grandiloquent, who watches the Chief closely and covets his job.
There are a number of other men—Indians, Orientals, Slavs—good men who have come halfway around the world to study with the Chief. There are also newly appointed associates, officious and bumbling, anxious to please, and medical students sporting rumpled gowns with stethoscopes conspicuously placed for highest visibility—badge of rank sort of thing. The Chief smiles inwardly to think of the usefulness of a stethoscope at a morgue.