McCloskey, the youngest man on the staff, is now working up the little cadaver. The Chief hovers there behind him, a little self-consciously, and watches. Several times the young pathologist pauses from the painstakingly meticulous work, a lapidarist laboring in miniature, and gazes up at the frosted ceiling windows.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Konig murmurs over the shoulder of the young man.
“Lousy,” McCloskey replies. His back still to the Chief, he bends once more to his task. “Nearly a hundred separate contusions. Liver ruptured. Face a pulp. Nearly every bone broken—even the fingers.”
“By all means the fingers,” Konig says, a touch of spiteful levity in his voice. “They never forget the fingers. That’s often the most painful. Particularly in young children. Parents claim the kid fell out of his crib.” Konig chuckles.
“Spare me any reference to the parents, please.” McCloskey’s powerful frame swells. “If I ever set eyes on them—get my hands on them—”
“Mama’s probably preggers right now with the next.” Konig laughs again and wonders why it makes him feel better. “I’ll finish up for you.”
McCloskey flushes. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll finish this one myself.”
Konig passes up an embolism, talks a young assistant through a very delicate arterial survey, then pauses for a moment to watch Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Carl Strang work up the remains of what was once a dignified Lebanese gentleman. Strang is inserting a syringe into the corner of the cadaver’s eye, then very deftly draws off a few cc’s of vitreous humor.
“Get me a spec report on this,” he snaps at a young assistant. “Tell them I need it quick—Oh, hello, Paul.”
The smile, the lethal smile, flashes, then the pointedly assessing glance. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look a little peaked.”
“Been up and running since five.” He studies Strang’s sharply chiseled face. “I have a feeling I’m going to be called up before the grand jury.”
“Oh?”
“The Robinson business.”
“They’re not going to prosecute, Paul.”
“They’re not?”
“Too sticky—too political.”
Konig tastes the bitterness rising in his gorge. “Carl, tell me something—Blaylock didn’t talk with you at any time before you did the Robinson job?”
“Certainly not.”
“And you still feel your conclusion of asphyxiation by hanging will stand up?”
“I have no doubt of it.” The Strang smile is more radiant than ever.
It’s just one smile too many for the Chief. Suddenly he lashes out. “But why in God’s name couldn’t you at least have done a tissue study?”
“No need to. The abrasions were superficial.”
“Superficial? Around the head—superficial?” Konig’s voice grows harsher. Several Indian doctors in the area turn. “Oh, forget it.” His voice drops and he gazes down now at the dignified-looking Lebanese gentleman on the table. “What’s the story on this?”
“Diabetic—pancreatic lesions—insulin tracks—”
“Look at the chancre scar on his belly.”
“It’s old—at least ten years.”
“Exactly why I’d do a lumbar—he’s a syphilitic.”
The impertinent smile wavers on Strang’s features as the Chief turns abruptly and strides from the room.
Now 10:30 a.m. and a procession of assorted mankind all with vested interests marches in and out of Konig’s door. First, an insurance adjuster clamoring for a verdict of suicide on a death certificate. Konig is no friend to the insurance companies, with their actuarial tables and their wheedling, obsequious adjusters. Always quick to extract their annual tithe at premium time, but squirming desperately, dragging their feet, trying to weasel out when their day comes to pay off. He is determined to make it hard for the man.
Next a young pathologist, just out of residency and full of the kind of gushing idealism Konig knows will shortly disappear. Then a Messianic salesman from a medical supply house, hawking expensive machinery, evangelizing “the new technology.”
“Revolutionary,” he calls it. “It will change everything.” It is nearly eleven o’clock when Konig permits several brochures to be pressed upon him, with promises to read them that night, all the while easing the man gently toward the door.
Then at last he slips with a sigh into his jacket and makes ready to stroll the short distance across First Avenue to the University lecture hall where his students await him.
»3«
“There are very few amenities observed in the autopsy room, ladies and gentlemen.” Konig stands bathed in a cone of white light at the center of an amphitheater on the ground floor of the University Medical School. The course he is teaching is Forensic Medicine 320. He has taught i now for nearly a quarter of a century to a generation of medical students, most of whom had little altitude or interest in the subject, having had their eyes on more lucrative specializations, and there only because the University made it obligatory for them to be there—at least for a year.
One hundred and fifty youthful, intent faces peer down on Konig now as he whips back, magician-like, the sheet covering the waxen cadaver of a rather handsome middle-aged man.
“Everything is reduced to its most basic and elemental,” Konig continues, “and unlike the diagnostician, who deals in the luxury of hypotheses, the pathologist deals only in final truth. The cause of death is all that is at issue here.” His eyes sweep up and down the length of the cadaver as he speaks, encompassing in one glance a multitude of detail.
“All we know about this pleasant-looking gentleman,” Konig continues, “is that he was forty-five years of age with no prior history of cardiovascular disease. There is no history of hypertension, seizures, or convulsions. He was not diabetic and he was on no medications. He had an annual checkup, the last of which took place three weeks ago, was pronounced fit as a fiddle by his internist, and the last time his wife spoke with him, two days ago, he was in a cheerful frame of mind.” Smiling, Konig gazes around at the bright young faces of his audience, then nods to an assistant. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I believe we are now ready to begin.”
With a nine-inch-long scalpel, Konig makes three lightning-swift incisions. Two proceeding from each tip of the scapulae, bisecting at a point above the sternum, and from that point plunging straight downward to the pubic symphysis. The three deft slashes form a large letter Y—sort of a cosmic-joke-of-a-Y to denote a man already marked by fatal destiny. Like the Y that stands for YOU.
Several more slashes of his blade and Konig flays open the neck and chest. With bone cutters, he severs the cartilage joining ribs to sternum, tears asunder a series of small clavicle joints, and then, with a queasy ripping sound, yanks away the whole front of the chest. In no more than a minute, the livid, rigored thing on the table has been split apart like a chicken with all its internal organs gleaming brightly there in place like a bowl of fruit.
Blood has begun to seep into the small trenches lining the table and collects there in tepid little pools. Konig swings his scalpel round through the inside of the lower jaw, disconnecting the tongue. He tugs sharply downward on the muscle, releasing the larynx behind it, then pulls it out through the yawning neck. Another stroke severs the gullet and two or three more free the heart and lungs. Next he hauls the whole grisly concatenation of things out, holding them up by the windpipe for all his audience to see—once more the cosmic magician producing rabbits from a hat There’s an audible gasp of admiration and some scattered applause as he drops the whole business into a steel bowl held out to him by an assistant.