I put down the book and went out into the long dark hallway. When I had put on the hall light, I felt a little better. I could see somebody standing outside the glass-paned door at the end of the hall. A tall thin man whom I didn’t know. He wore glasses and was carrying a gold-headed cane.
“My name is Burke, Roger Burke,” he said when I opened the door. “I phoned early this evening about my brother being missing. Uh—may I—”
“Of course,” I told him. “Come this way. When you didn’t come for so long, I thought you had located your brother.”
“I thought I had,” he said hesitantly. “A friend said he had seen him this evening, and I quit worrying for a while. But when it got after one o’clock and he wasn’t home, I—”
We had reached the coroner’s office by then, but I stopped and turned.
“There’s only one unidentified body here,” I told him, “and that was brought in this afternoon. If your brother was seen this evening, it couldn’t be him.”
The tall man said, “Oh,” rather blankly and looked at me a moment. Then he said, “I hope that’s right. But this friend said he saw him at a distance, on a crowded street. He could have been mistaken. So as long as I’m here—”
“I guess you might as well,” I said, “now that you’re here. Then you’ll be sure.”
I led the way through the office and unlocked the door.
I was glad, as we started down the stairs, that there seemed little likelihood of identification. I hate to be around when one is made. You always seem to share, vicariously, the emotion, of the person who recognizes a friend or relative.
At the top of the stairs I pushed the button that put on the overhead lights downstairs in the morgue. The switch for the showcase was down below. I stopped to flick it as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and the tall man went on past me toward the case. Apparently he had been a visitor here before.
I had taken only a step or two after him when I heard him gasp. He stopped suddenly and took a step backward so quickly that I bumped into him and grabbed his arm to steady myself.
He turned around, and his face was a dull pasty gray that one seldom sees on the face of a living person.
“My God!” he said. “Why didn’t you warn me that—”
It didn’t make sense for him to say a thing like that. I’ve been with people before when they have identified relatives, but none of them had ever reacted just that way. Or had it been merely identification? He certainly looked as though he had seen something horrible.
I stepped a little to one side so that I could see past him. When I saw, it was as though a wave of cold started at the base of my spine and ran up along my body. I had never seen anything like it—and you get toughened when you work in a morgue.
The glass top of the display case had been broken in at the upper, the head, end, and the body inside the case was—well, I’ll try to be as objective about it as I can. The best way to be objective is to put it bluntly. The flesh of the face had been eaten away, eaten away as though acid had been poured on it, or as though —
I got hold of myself and stepped up to the edge of the display case and looked down.
It had not been acid. Acid does not leave the marks of teeth.
Nauseated, I closed my eyes for an instant until I got over it. Behind me, I heard sounds as though the tall man, who had been the first to see it, was being sick. I didn’t blame him.
“I don’t—” I said, and stepped back. “Something’s happened here.”
Silly remark, but you can’t think of the right thing to say in a spot like that.
“Come on,” I told him. “I’ll have to get the police.”
The thought of the police steadied me. When the police got here, it would be all right. They would find out what had happened.
AS I reached the bottom of the stairs my mind started to work logically again. I could picture Bill Drager up in the office firing questions at me, asking me, “When did it happen? You can judge by the temperature, can’t you?”
The tall man stumbled up the stairs past me as I paused. Most decidedly I didn’t want to be down there alone, but I yelled to him:
“Wait up there. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
He would have to wait, of course, because I would have to unlock the outer door to let him out.
I turned back and looked at the thermometer in the broken case, trying not to look at anything else. It read sixty-three degrees, and that was only about ten degrees under the temperature of the rest of the room.
The glass had been broken, then, for some time. An hour, I’d say offhand, or maybe a little less. Upstairs, with the heavy door closed, I wouldn’t have heard it break. Anyway, I hadn’t heard it break.
I left the lights on in the morgue, all of them, when I ran up the stairs.
The tall man was standing in the middle of the office, looking around as though he were in a daze. His face still had that grayish tinge, and I was just as glad that I didn’t have to look in a mirror just then, because my own face was likely as bad.
I picked up the telephone and found myself giving Bill Drager’s home telephone number instead of asking for the police. I don’t know why my thoughts ran so strongly to Bill Drager, except that he had been the one who had suspected that something more than met the eye had been behind the hit-run case from the Mill Road.
“Can—will you let me out of here?” the tall man said. “I—I—that wasn’t my—”
“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “Until the police get here. You—uh—witnessed—”
It sounded screwy, even to me. Certainly he could not have had anything to do with whatever had happened down there. He had preceded me into the morgue only by a second and hadn’t even reached the case when I was beside him. But I knew what the police would say if I let him go before they had a chance to get his story.
Then Drager’s voice was saying a sleepy, “Hullo,” into my ear.
“Bill,” I said, “you got to come down here. That corpse downstairs—it’s—I—”
The sleepiness went out of Drager’s voice.
“Calm down, Jerry,” he said. “It can’t be that bad. Now, what happened?”
I finally got it across.
“You phoned the department first, of course?” Drager asked.
“N-no. I thought of you first because—”
“Sit tight,” he said. “I’ll phone them and then come down. I’ll have to dress first, so they’ll get there ahead of me. Don’t go down to the morgue again and don’t touch anything.”
He put the receiver on the hook, and I felt a little better. Somehow the worst seemed to be over, now that it was off my chest. Drager’s offering to phone the police saved me from having to tell it again, over the phone.
The tall man—I remembered now that he had given the name Roger Burke—was leaning against the wall, weakly.
“Did—did I get from what you said on the phone that the body wasn’t that way when—when they brought it in?” he asked.
I nodded. “It must have happened within the last hour,” I said. “I was down there at midnight, and everything was all right then.”
“But what—what happened?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Something had happened down there, but what? There wasn’t any entrance to the morgue other than the ventilator and the door that opened at the top of the stairs. And nobody—nothing—had gone through that door since my trip of inspection.
I thought back and thought hard. No, I hadn’t left this office for even a minute between midnight and the time the night bell had rung at two o’clock. I had left the office then, of course, to answer the door. But whatever had happened had not happened then. The thermometer downstairs proved that.