The Morgue and Me Read online

  “So let’s do something,” Dana said. “Unless this parking lot is more exciting.”

  It was just the excuse Mike needed. He was halfway out of the car before she even finished. “Sorry, dude, but I’m gone.”

  “No problem.”

  “Come with, Newell,” Dana said, but I made some grumblings about needing to put some hours in at work, which was actually true.

  They said good-bye and drove away in Dana’s Jetta, with the Top 40 station blasting into the wind. After that, it felt pretty ridiculous to just sit there alone.

  Things at the morgue were back to normal. With Dr. Mobley at lunch I could have searched the whole place, but there was nothing to look through other than his trench coat (pockets empty) and an old pair of winter boots (also empty). The brown briefcase was gone. The desk had no new infusions of cash. Dr. Mobley had left some documents for filing, but that was about it.

  The only item I noticed was in the top drawer—an empty plastic case for a Vista View digital photo memory card. I could hardly imagine Dr. Mobley using a digital camera, but it made sense that he would buy the cheapest brand. I tried a Vista View card once, and my pictures reeked.

  I had planned to save the best part of the day—taking another look at the dead guy—for last. Work first and all that. But my curiosity got the best of me and I headed to the autopsy room.

  I had no idea how long a dead body stayed at the morgue, but Mitchell Blaylock had come in just yesterday. I tried the body coolers one by one. The first two were locked, but the third one opened at my pull. The drawer glided open until the whole body, covered in a white sheet, slid out into the stark light and bumped to a stop.

  I covered my nose against the sweetish smell coming off him. The sheet ended at the ankles, where a pair of bony feet stuck out. He had a tag on his toe—it looked like a luggage claim—with his name written in green ink: Mitchell A. Blaylock, No. 09-341.

  Squiggles of shiny black hair peeked out from the top of the sheet. The guy had been dead for more than a day and still could have starred in a Pantene ad. I grabbed the edge of the sheet and thought for a good three seconds about whether I was being disrespectful. With a breath, I drew it away from his face.

  There’s no way around it: Mitch Blaylock was an ugly guy. His nose was too long and his eyes were set too far apart and he had wispy little eyelashes. A scar ran through his lip. Worry lines spiked his forehead and a smudged blue tattoo colored his chest. He had puffy muscles in his upper body, the kind you get doing construction instead of at the gym.

  His body told a story I would never know. It made me slightly sad, and then disgusted with myself for disturbing his peace. I returned the sheet over him and slid him back, dazed and eager to get done with my work.

  I filed Dr. Mobley’s papers: correspondence with the medical examiner in Washtenaw County, copies of a budget proposal, and some reports from the state. At the bottom was a death certificate for Mitchell Blaylock. Original death certificates got filed with the county, a copy went to Lansing. We held our own copy in the office, and after a while it would be sent to storage somewhere and then forgotten about, like the bodies themselves.

  The certificate, one page long, had even less information than the Courier article—just his name, dates of birth and death, not much more. The surprising item was typed at the bottom, not far above Dr. Mobley’s narrow, chicken-scratched signature. This is what it said:

  “Cause of death: Deceased shot self.”

  I turned right around, returned to the autopsy room, and pulled Mitch out again.

  “Me again,” I said apologetically as I checked for evidence of the suicide. He hadn’t shot himself in the mouth, or the temple. Or anywhere else I could see. I held my breath and nudged his head just a little, to check the back. Nothing there.

  Consumed with a morbid curiosity, I pulled the sheet down to his knees. For a minute, I had trouble processing what I saw.

  The five bullet wounds made a raggedy circle on his torso. They were tidy and small—polite looking, you could say. I counted the five entry points again. One of the bullets had probably entered his heart. One of them, perhaps, his liver. My stomach revolved on itself.

  There was a conspiracy after all, and I had just found it.

  4

  This called for the police.

  Dr. Mobley was covering up a murder. I mean, it was obvious. A guy can’t shoot himself five times in the chest. Think about it.

  I would have gone to the police, too, but then I realized I couldn’t.

  Sheriff Harmon—he’d been there the whole time. He had stood right there in the autopsy room, right next to Dr. Mobley, looking at Mitch Blaylock’s body. He had chased me out of the morgue. Whatever had happened to Mitch Blaylock, the sheriff was deeply involved.

  For all I knew, he was the one who paid off Dr. Mobley to rule Mitch’s death a suicide. For all I knew, Sheriff Harmon had put those bullets in Mitch’s midsection.

  I don’t know what other people would do when faced with this situation, but my natural instinct was to take a bunch of pictures. If the “Cop Dramas” section of University Video has taught me nothing else, it’s that a murdered body is technically a crime scene, and you have to preserve any evidence of it that you can. Failure to respect this principle usually gets you yelled at by a grizzled detective with an alcohol problem and/or an acne-riddled forensic technician eating Chinese food over a Petri dish, so you’re wise to obey. Anyway, they’d be putting Mitch in the ground any day now, and those bullet wounds might be the only proof of his murder.

  Lucky for Mitch, I had my camera in the car. Nobody in the hospital batted an eye when I scurried out to the Escort and returned moments later, hiding my Nikon under my shirt as best I could. I went with the portrait setting and fired off forty pictures of Mitch’s body (this was no time to be skimping), trying to capture the evidence just right. I drew the sheet over him and pushed him back into place, my heart still ticking with the fear of being caught and the strange, illicit thrill of uncovering a major crime.

  Back in the Escort, I was too keyed up to think. I headed out onto Mercury Drive with no destination in mind.

  There was one policeman I could have gone to—a guy I could trust. Tim Spencer. He graduated Petoskey High four years ahead of me, when the Spencers still lived next door to us. He had once been a towering figure in my life, back when I was seven and he taught me how to throw a curve with a Wiffle ball. A few years later he starred as running back for the Petoskey Falcons; he ran for 2,000 yards and scored 24 touchdowns the year they won the Class D state championship. I went to every game just to watch Tim. But he was Julia’s brother, and we hadn’t talked since things went sour. Something in me seized up at the thought of approaching him now.

  The article that I had torn from the paper that morning swirled around the dashboard, blown by the wind. I trapped it with my hand, pulled to the side of the road, and read it again. The name of the reporter was Art Bradford.

  I was in no mood to go home just yet, and it was barely past noon. Maybe Art Bradford could shed some light on the subject. Maybe Art and I would become crime-fighters together.

  I pulled a U-turn on Mercury and headed to the Courier. Where things would lead after that, I didn’t know. Maybe Art and I would buy capes.

  5

  The newsroom of the Petoskey Courier reeked of microwave popcorn.

  Newspaper minions were marching documents back and forth to the beat of ringing phones and a stereo set on Petoskey’s Lite Rock 95. The room had a big wooden table, perfect for heated editorial meetings on the affairs of the day, and a patchwork of flimsy cubicles behind it. Maybe a quarter of the cubicles had bodies in them. Most of those were male, thin of hair, dressed in business shirts rolled to the elbow. Many of them had phones to their ears.

  Nobody noticed me, which I took as an invitation to nose around. Halfway through my self-guided tour I found a nameplate on one of the perimeter offices: “Art Bradford, Senior Reporter.�
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  Unfortunately, the office was empty. It didn’t look like Art was in crime-fighting shape, to judge from the seaside photo of himself and a woman occupying the better part of their mammoth beach towels. I took a pen from his WORLD’S BEST FISHERMAN mug and jotted a note on his pink memo pad:

  I placed the note near his computer. Art had furnished his office with a clock radio playing nature sounds (“Brazilian Rains,” according to the display), which blocked out the busy atmosphere quite nicely. I was just standing there, soaking up the smooth vibe in Art’s island of calm when I met her for the first time.

  “Screw you, Art!”

  I spun toward the voice, coming at me from just outside the office.

  “Screw! You!”

  She held a page with lots of red ink on it in her hand. She was wagging it in my general direction as she burst in. “Whoops, sorry,” she said, looking me up and down with a not-actually-that-apologetic look on her face. “You from China Palace?”

  “Uhhh . . . China Palace?”

  “I’m seriously going to murder someone if my egg rolls don’t get here soon. Seriously.”

  “Egg rolls?”

  I was having trouble forming thoughts.

  She had damaged hair and fishnet hose. Her fingernails had chipped blue paint on them, chewed down to nothing. She wore a leather bracelet with spiky things on it, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn she’d just come from a bar fight. And still . . . she was insanely hot.

  I can’t really explain it. Torn jeans can look better than new ones, and scars can be sexy—that’s about the best I can do.

  There wasn’t much room in the office; we were standing a foot apart. I tried to clear out of the way and whacked my knee against the chair, hitting a funny bone in my leg that I didn’t realize existed until that moment. The chair wobbled as I clutched my knee, and by that time she was full-on cackling at me.

  I stood up and blood rushed to my head, making me woozy.

  “Got you good, eh?” she said.

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks.” I have no idea why I thanked her.

  She removed a sparkly purple pen from behind her ear and started toying with it in her hands. I got the impression that I was amusing her, the way a helpless victim amuses a villain in a James Bond movie. In a second she would laugh darkly and pull a lever, and the floor would open beneath me to a pool of man-eating sharks.

  “So, who are you?” she said.

  “Umm, I was just looking for Art Bradford.”

  “Makes two of us.” She waved the red-marked page again. “Guess I can’t help you. Sorry about the knee.” Then she shrugged and wandered away, and suddenly the office felt horribly empty.

  I scurried out with my head down, feeling a need to escape quickly and without further incident. I heard something on my way out to the parking lot—the voice of the insanely hot woman, yelling “Hey!”—but I figured she wasn’t calling for me, and even if she was, it would only lead to more embarrassment.

  The Escort was hot from sitting in the sun. I bathed in the sauna conditions with my head against the steering wheel, picturing her face, trying to think of suave lines I might have said to hold her attention. I couldn’t come up with anything.

  “Hold still,” my mom said, adjusting my tie.

  Daniel and my dad had been waiting in the car for ten minutes. My mom was wearing a dress and pearls, one of her few nice outfits. I could never get used to seeing her in them. She taught, and did most everything else, in denim and flannel. Now she smelled of perfume and wore lipstick that looked bright and awkward on her face. Beads of sweat had broken out on her brow as she worked my collar; she always got unduly nervous for formal events.

  Satisfied with the knot, she patted my chest and said, “There, let’s go.”

  We headed for the east side of town, where Mayor Julian Ruby Jr. lived. He hosted the annual ceremony at which the NWMU Regents bestowed their scholarship upon its lucky recipient. Those Regents are pretty crafty—they give it to you before your senior year, so that you’ll get lazy and won’t even bother applying to other schools. It worked on me last year. The Regents encouraged previous winners to attend the ceremony, and as much as I wanted to disappoint them, my parents would hardly let that happen. I stared out at the A-frame houses and a swath of unpurchased vacation properties on the ride over, preoccupied with thoughts of Mitch Blaylock. In the background, Daniel was expounding some kind of theory about Euclidian math for my parents’ evaluation and comment. The time for telling them about the money and the body already seemed long past.

  The Rubys’ front lawn rose elegantly up to their fieldstone house, which loomed high over the street. Behind it, white tents sprang up from a lush backyard greener than a traffic light. Chemicals, no doubt.

  The mayor was handing out programs by double doors as thick as unabridged dictionaries. His glasses sat high on his chipmunk cheeks, shining with fake cheer.

  “Aha, the Newell family,” he said as if we were all old chums. “Place cards are in the living room. Enjoy a drink before we head outside.”

  He was so stiff and nerdy, the polar opposite of Dana. She used to complain about him in school, telling Mike and anyone else who’d listen about the fights they got into over money, her curfew, whatever. In Dana’s stories, the mayor always came off as strict and vaguely jealous of the fabulous life that Dana was destined to have after getting out from under his thumb. It struck me as mean back then, but I shouldn’t have judged her; five seconds of the guy was more than I could take.

  I followed in my parents’ wake to a sunken living room cleared of furniture. A wagon-wheel lighting fixture illuminated the assembled mix of town and gown, which was pimpled with University Regents in red jackets with crests on the pocket.

  A photographer from the Courier stood in the middle of it all. He was shooting pictures for the society page with a Canon EOS 30D that made me envious of him, beer gut and all. I considered asking if he knew anything about Mitch Blaylock but discarded the thought when I saw the indiscreet way in which he ate a miniature spinach turnover.

  Daniel dragged me over to the table with the place cards, where a Regent with red Brillo-pad hair was chatting up a blonde who qualified as glamorous by Petoskey standards. She held an empty cup in her hand, her eyes wandering about for a drink tray as she lolled at the Regent’s side.

  My dad broke off from a collection of professors at the fireplace to give me a clap on the back. “Christopher, get your mother and me a glass of red wine, would you?”

  “Sure.”

  Daniel proudly presented him with our place cards and followed me, wide-eyed and hip level to the crowd, to the bar. “Two red wines, please,” I told the bartender.

  He poured them and handed me two plastic wineglasses. “For your folks, right?”

  “No. The little guy.”

  Daniel beamed at the bartender. “And two fingers of Cuervo, please.”

  The bartender laughed and told Daniel to scram. Just then the blonde woman sidled up beside him. Her hair fell in a lustrous curtain to her shoulders. She winked at the bartender as she poured a drink for herself. “I’m doing your work for you,” she said.

  He leered back at her. “Guess I owe you a tip, then.”

  From across the room, the mayor gave them a cold stare.

  “Let’s go,” Daniel said. He led us back through the chattering crowd where, at points, I had to turn my shoulders to get through.

  Halfway across the room, a finger tapped at my shoulder.

  “Hey, I was hoping to see you here.” The guest of honor, Julia Spencer.

  Bright, sparkling eyes. Chipper as ever. Like nothing had ever happened between us.

  I went numb for a second. The only thing I felt was a warm buzzing across my skin, the faint residue of humiliation.

  Julia was wearing a turquoise dress, with her nails done in immaculate pink polish. Her hands played at a drawstring around her waist, while her extra-white teeth glistened in the light. The
fact that I hadn’t yet managed a response, I could see from her frozen smile, was getting weirder and weirder by the second.

  Daniel tugged at my pant leg. From across the room, my mom gave me a tender look. The nervous energy built until I resigned myself to the fact that this conversation was actually going to happen. I entrusted the glasses to Daniel.

  “Later, Lothario,” he said, and took off.

  Julia eyed me cautiously.

  “So, congratulations on the scholarship and all,” I said finally.

  She dipped her head. “Oh, thanks. This is weird, huh? All these people.”

  “You get used to the fame after a while.”

  She paused for a second, then laughed nervously. “Still funny, I see.”

  She played at her belt some more, a twitchy smile flashing on her lips. The jostling crowd forced us uncomfortably close.

  A Regent bumped into Julia and she turned a little pirouette. “Ugh. This is annoying. Come on.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me through the milling bodies toward the front of the house.

  People at school thought she was just vanilla—a good girl so shy she blended into the wall. I’d been around her long enough to know it was only a shell. Underneath was something bolder, something headstrong and fearless and fun.

  Her hands were pale and cool and soft, like they’d been the night I’d held them for the first time, when she convinced me to go night-swimming in the lake. We’d been hanging out most of the summer. She pulled me along and we ran off the dock together, and by the time we hit the cold, dark water, I was halfway in love with her. I thought that night meant something. But when I asked her to Homecoming two weeks later (abandoning, for once, my well-advised anti-school-dance policy), she’d looked at me as if I was a curiosity. “Christopher, please . . .” She’d looked sad about something, which didn’t make sense to me. So I asked her again.