Morgue Drawer Four (7 page)

Slowly the offices emptied out, and I peeked in on Martin again; at some point he also powered down his computer, grabbed his duffle coat, and made his way to the basement. With me quickly in tow. After we got downstairs I pretended I’d spent the whole day like a good boy in my morgue drawer and I was now extremely happy that someone had finally come to visit me. Martin fell for it.

“Martin,” I said in a tone I hoped sounded trustworthy and serious, the way the news anchors on public television like to come off. “Now, finally, we really have to get cracking with our investigation, otherwise all our leads will be cold, and the truth about my murder will never come out.”

I was proud of the seriousness of my statements and my absolutely professional diction. Of course, I was also just as proud of my self-control, because I’d actually spent a long time coming up with that until phrases such as “lazy pigs,” “boil-ridden, rat-assed murderers,” and the like stopped occurring to me.

Martin hemmed and hawed, writhing like an earthworm in between the blades of someone’s garden shears.

“I’m not entirely certain whether…” His nicely pre-formulated sentence construction ended there, but since I could read the pulses from his brain clearly, I detected the rest of what he had wanted to say among the unraveling streams of thought: he didn’t believe a single word in my entire story.

“Martin, where’s the problem?” I asked, still under self-control and proud of it. I even used his name—did you notice?—because whenever you address someone by name, then you establish a certain connection with him. I learned that from a movie once.

“All investigations point toward your death being an accident. No one saw anyone push you.”

“Martin,” I said again. “Whether or not someone sees something doesn’t matter. Look, if I weren’t such a thorough person I wouldn’t have seen the body in the trunk, either.”

“What body?” Martin asked. “In what trunk?”

Now I totally wasn’t expecting that. In my mind’s eye—the only eye I still have—I quickly ran back through our previous conversations and realized I hadn’t told Martin anything at all about stealing the car or the body in the trunk! I remedied that now as fast as I could.

Martin seemed totally distraught.

“OK, you see,” I said, trying to get him back on track, “I discovered this body in the trunk only by accident.”

Martin just couldn’t grasp what I was trying to tell him. Oh my God, sometimes academics are really slow on the uptake.

I explained it again, enunciating clearly. “The body was in the trunk. I happened to look in there and find her. But the body would still have been in there if I hadn’t checked. Then no one would have seen her, but she would still have been there.”

Now I thought I had expressed myself quite clearly, but Martin was still hemming and hawing: “But if there was in fact a body, it would have had to turn up at some point here at the Institute.”

I don’t know what was wrong with Martin, but apparently he enjoyed having brain farts the minute anything even remotely had to do with me. I tried to explain it to him in simpler words.

“If your mother died, would you pack her into your trunk?” I asked.

“Of course not. She wouldn’t even fit in there,” he replied.

“But you wouldn’t try to, either, right?” I asked with the patience of a saint (finally I know where that expression comes from—if only I still had adrenalin in my arteries…).

“No.”

“What would you do?”

“Call the mortuary.”

“
AH HA
!” We were slowly getting somewhere.

“So what do you think?” I continued, choosing my words carefully. “What might the reason be for someone to stash a body in the trunk of a car?”

“Her death hasn’t been reported,” he said after thinking a bit.

“Exactly!” I was relieved. He had managed to get there on his own. “And for what purpose does one stick an unreported dead body into the trunk of an automobile?”

“To take her somewhere and bury her in a shallow grave,” Martin whispered.

Unfathomable. The man deals with unnatural deaths day in and day out, sees bodies that would make any other normal person’s stomach and whatever else turn, but when it comes to imagining why such bodies end up on his autopsy table in the first place, he goes all wobbly-kneed.

“Exactly,” I said, praising him. “The body may never turn up; that is exactly why the whole trunk procedure is used.”

“Hmm.”

“Also interesting is the question of where the car ended up.”

“The car?”

We could have easily turned this conversation into a sitcom. Guaranteed to be a hit.

“That kind of car costs a half million euros. If it gets stolen, you report it to the insurance company, right?”

“I would certainly assume so.”

Ah ha, we were again achieving complete sentences. Good.

“So, find out whether anyone has reported that kind of car stolen,” I suggested.

“And if not?” Martin asked.

“Then it’s because it had a body in the trunk, and people prefer to avoid mentioning that kind of thing on the incident report forms for the insurance.”

He was not a hundred percent convinced, but I was sure he would look into it. And then he would finally start helping me solve my murder with a bit more conviction and verve. At least, I hoped so.

I considered riding home with him, but I decided to stay and try my luck with the TVs again. I’d hung out during the day for a while in the conference room while they were playing a video presentation, and I thought I could sense some of those waves. Maybe I could figure out how to get the TV to turn on. I accompanied Martin to the door and then made my way upstairs.

I’d hardly started making my way toward the TV when I heard a distant shriek for help. OK, fine—at first I wasn’t sure if it really was a shriek for help or if some wave rushing through the area had upset my thoughts. After all, if you believe the people wearing aluminum-foil helmets, there are millions of radio, television, and of course cell phone signals flitting through the air all the time, so the likelihood that I might fly through one of those waves at some point and be able to interpret it was more than probable. At least, I thought so. Science wasn’t really my kind of thing in school, but I had always liked the experiments with loud bangs, big whooshes, or bad smells. Although ultimately the question of
why
the bangs, whooshes, or smells occur always really irritated me.

Anyways, I focused my attention on what I thought I had heard, and in fact I heard the shriek again. Clearly a shriek for help. From Martin. Uh-oh, foul mischance!

I raced to the door that he had disappeared through and flashed through it as well without even looking for the crack or keyhole first. An ice-cold hurricane-force wind was whistling through the front courtyard—at least that’s how it seemed to me. I was afraid. Afraid that the wind would just sweep me away somewhere I’d be all alone. Afraid I might even be blown apart and no longer exist—just like that, poof, Pascha’s gone. Afraid of losing the rest of my wretched existence. I clung to my life, although it wasn’t a real one anymore.

Martin was apparently also afraid, because although I couldn’t hear him anymore I was receiving signals from him, and they were sheer terror. I whizzed in the direction I was getting the signals from, to the shoulder of the road where only a single wannabe car was parked: Martin’s ugly little trash can. The lighting here wasn’t the best; behind me was the Institute for Forensic Medicine and right next to that was Melaten Cemetery, a gruesome setting that might have sent a shiver down my spine if I had still had a back. Instead I focused on keeping all the molecules or whatever I was made of together and not letting myself be blown apart or away so I could make it to Martin, who was being pressed onto his car by a not very tall but extremely obese man.

“I’ll cut your ugly pig ears off if you show up at my woman’s place again asking stupid questions about that little chicken shit, got it?” the guy was just telling Martin.

Of course, it wasn’t a real yes/no question—no one in that situation would answer no, and Martin didn’t, either. He just nodded.

“Good. Then let’s have a nice little chat, man to man, about what kind of shit you were trying to pull off at her place.”

The guy was still leaning on the trash can car, and Martin was wedged in between it and him. He didn’t look like he wanted to have a nice, man-to-man chat; he looked more like he really wanted to smash in the face of someone he considered cowardly and weaker than him, but I kept that observation to myself.

“I’m here,” I said. “Stay cool, he’s not going to do anything to you.”

“Ha ha,” Martin countered. “So he’s just playing around?”

I was impressed. Having a sense of humor in a situation like this was evidence of a certain toughness that Martin otherwise seemed to totally lack. But maybe he was just slowly cracking up.

“If he’d wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead,” I said to console him, but Martin’s brain waves weren’t calming down. To the contrary. Maybe I shouldn’t have said the D-word out loud.

“What were you doing at my little lady’s place?” the guy asked. His voice was so hoarse I was certain he’d expire from lung cancer long before his statistical life expectancy, but we didn’t have time to wait for that.

“Bend his ears in your finest medical-doctorese and make clear to him that you were at Nina’s as part of an official visit,” I suggested. “Once he realizes you’re a cop, he’ll piss himself.”

“I performed the postmortem on the body of Sascha Lerchenberg and in doing so was not able to resolve a few questions sufficiently,” Martin began with all the authority he could muster. It was already quite a show; I was amazed. The response by the fat jellyfish was direct and unambiguous. He stood up straight, thereby releasing Martin’s constrained body, and even took a step backward. Martin straightened his shoulders, which did not really look all that impressive in a duffle coat, and raised his chin.

“Body butchers don’t do investigations,” the jellyfish said in a tone I knew well. He was going to the trouble to sound self-confident and superior, but there was doubt there. I could hear it in him. Still, I was amazed that Nina had apparently noted both Martin’s name and his mention of the Institute for Forensic Medicine, and the jellyfish seemed stupefied that the name and profession weren’t a bluff. He tried not to let on about his surprise and accordingly kept jabbing his finger into Martin’s chest when he spoke. But Martin pushed his hand away.

“Systemically inherent situational constraints have resulted with progressively increasing frequency in much more active involvement by forensic pathologists in the investigative work of our colleagues in criminal investigation units.”

I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him correctly. Martin had unleashed the full, unmitigated linguistic power of his medical education. Cool.

“But…” the jellyfish tried to blabber in between, but my forensic pathology adviser kept going right on at him, interlocuting as trenchantly as he cut.

“Multidisciplinary competencies have long formed part of the professional profile in academic environments, and this trend has been steadily gaining in relevance. Investigative teams today no longer consist solely of narrow-minded specialists. But if you have a problem with the management of the case-oriented knowledge here, you can file a complaint with the oversight board.”

Wow! And he came up with that without even having to look anything up in a Latin dictionary. Point to Martin, but apparently he didn’t quite know how to bring the matter to a victorious conclusion, because the jellyfish was still standing in front of him exuding aggression.

At first I kept my trap shut because I didn’t really understand this situation. In my world an argument runs like this: two people one-up each other, the register of discourse declines a step with each additional utterance, and when there aren’t any variations left of “rat-fucked elephant-cock-sucker,” you duke it out. The version we had going here wasn’t bad, either. I just couldn’t predict what would come next. Jellyfish apparently didn’t either: his crest began to deflate, if you’d like to phrase it poetically. And with that, Martin became master of the situation. Just by droning on! I think this was the very moment when my slow learning process with language truly began. After all, verbal communication was the only thing I still had going for me in my current form of existence. I couldn’t ram my knee into someone’s crotch, pick up a chick, or take part in any of the beautiful, purely physical forms of expression at all anymore. Language was the only thing I had left, and that’s why I urgently needed to elevate this form of expression in myself above the three-hundred-word threshold that I had sunken into in recent years. Well, at the time I still lacked any epically broad awareness of all this, so please keep reading.

I’ll omit the abundantly brainless “ums” and “hmms” that Jellyfish uttered—ultimately I don’t want to bore you, and they didn’t contribute much to the progress of the negotiation anyway.

“Your turn,” I said at some point to Martin, who did not appear to have gotten that he was in charge.

“Let’s get out of here,” Martin thought, trying to go around the car to the driver’s side. However, that was too abrupt for Jellyfish; he hadn’t yet processed what Martin had said. He took another step forward.

“If you’re looking for someone who had a burning hatred for Pascha, sir, then you should probably talk to Pablo,” Jellyfish said. He’d managed to find his way to a new, more civilized mode of discourse after all, even addressing Martin as “sir.”

“Your intended did mention that name,” Martin said, and I swear on every beer I’ve ever downed that he actually said
intended
. “Is he that dealer?”

Actually all Martin wanted was to get away, but he’s just so polite and doesn’t interrupt a conversation midway through. Even if he’s chatting with a small-time criminal who has just threatened to cut off his little pig ears.

“Exactly.”

“I think he’s in prison,” Martin said.

“Not anymore,” Jellyfish said, apparently feeling super stoked because he finally knew something that might be of interest. “Good behavior and all that shit. He’s out. For the last two or three weeks or so.”

“Thank you,” Martin said, now pushing his way past the tub of lard to get into his car. I was quick to dart in, too, and looked back as Martin pulled out into traffic. My ex had clearly gone downhill, I thought. Her fat jellyfish just got blabbered down by a chubby little man in a duffle coat. Lame, Girl. Totally lame.

“You really kept on him,” I said, and Martin turned the steering wheel the wrong way, almost taking out a guy on his bike. In my view that wouldn’t have been a bad thing; bike riders in traffic are about as pleasant as boils in your armpit, but Martin would likely have viewed this differently.

“Oh God, you’re here?” he moaned. And when I say he moaned, then that’s what he did, because he didn’t say anything out loud but only thought it, and in your thoughts you can also moan a short phrase like that. I figured he didn’t have much of his eloquence left over. Maybe he had only a certain quantity available per day, and he had burned himself out between writing clever reports all day and now talking down the fat “I’ll save the honor of my disreputable girlfriend” dude.

“I don’t want to have anything to do with types like that,” Martin said. “Investigations are for the police.”

His voice was trembling a little, and the persuasiveness he had just been using to weave jargon and borrowed words into a delicate chain of language was flushed down the toilet. I vacillated between feeling irritated and sorry for him, though actually I was tending quite uncharacteristically toward feeling sorry, but in my situation that was not something I could really afford. If I were to pat his head and say everything will be OK and he didn’t have to talk to that nasty scumbag anymore, then my case would never be resolved; a murderer would continue to walk free and—even worse—Cologne’s alternative crowd would forever remember me as that floor gymnast who fell off the bridge totally drunk. So, stay firm, no feeling sorry.

“Weeping is for women, that’s why they both start with
w
,” I said—not very eloquent, I admit, but I’m also just starting to further my study of language. “So act like a man, and embrace challenge.”

Big words that I got out of some made-for-TV movie. Presumably a movie where all the heroes were wearing cowboy hats and never walked on foot but only rode horseback. But maybe also a movie where a totally regular citizen is under threat from some maniac, so for the first time in his life he rustles up his shotgun out of the sock drawer where it’s been since his grandfather handed it down to him, and he suddenly turns into an ice-cold killer. Totally Hollywood in any case, and thus an excellent guide for how to behave in my current situation, traveling within a millimeter per hour of the velocity prescribed by the posted speed limit, sitting inside a rolling trash can weaving through a snow-covered Cologne with a duffle-coated forensic pathologist at the wheel. High time that I find my way back to reality.

“The police have decided to leave my murder not only unpunished but also uninvestigated,” I said in a voice so chilling a Hollywood hero could not have been more ominous. “A human being with alcohol in his blood and the broken remains of a schnapps bottle in the pocket of his jacket apparently doesn’t deserve any further consideration.”

Of course I knew saying that stupid passive-aggressive stuff wasn’t fair, first to the system in general, and second—and especially—to Martin personally, but I was desperate and determined to tighten any screw I could reach. And the only thing in reach was Martin, who was now zigzagging through traffic like a monkey on a scooter under fire all because his cell phone had started ringing.

“Gänsewein.” He actually answered very nicely and courteously with his name—and he was following the moving-vehicle code to a T by using his hands-free device, to boot.

“Hi, it’s Gregor. We had talked about grabbing a beer. How about now?”

“Um, well, you know, I’m not feeling very well right now…”

“Is everything OK, Martin? Are you sick?”

“No, I’m not sick,” Martin said. His voice sounded like he had at least one bullet lodged in his diaphragm.

“Last night you were a bit off, too,” Gregor said, sounding him out. “You can tell me if something’s wrong. Is something not OK?”

“It’s green,” I interrupted, because the stoplight that had allowed him to stop and talk had since turned again.

“I know that it’s green,” Martin said out loud and irritated into the phone.

“What’s that?” Gregor asked back.

“Nothing, just the stoplight is green,” Martin replied. “So, everything is just fine with me, I’m just feeling a little wiped.”