The Bone Bed

five

DRESSED IN COTTON FIELD CLOTHES NOW, DARK BLUE, with the CFC crest embroidered on my shirt and on the bright orange jacket draped over my arm, I board the elevator beyond the break room, and for a moment we are alone. Marino sets down two black plastic Pelican cases and stabs the button for the lower level.

I understand you were here all night,” I comment, as he impatiently taps the button again, a habit of his that serves no useful purpose.

Caught up on some paperwork and stuff. Was just easier to stay over.”

He shoves his big hands into the side pockets of his cargo pants, the slope of his belly swelling noticeably over his canvas belt. He’s gained weight, but his shoulders are formidable and I can tell by the thickness of his neck, biceps, and legs that he’s still pumping iron in that gym he belongs to in Central Square, a fight sports club or whatever he calls it, that is frequented by cops, most of them SWAT.

Easier than what?” I detect the stale odor of sweat beneath a patina of Brut aftershave, and maybe he drank the night away, went through a carton of Crystal Head vodka mini skull ornaments or whatever. I don’t know. “Yesterday was Sunday,” I continue in a mild voice. “Since you weren’t scheduled to work this weekend and were just getting back from a trip, what exactly was easier? And while we’re on the subject, I’ve not been getting updated on-call schedules for quite some time, so I wasn’t aware you were taking calls yourself and apparently have been—”

The electronic calendar is bullshit,” he interrupts. “All this automated instant bullshit. I just wish Lucy would give it a rest. You know what you need to know, that someone’s doing what they’re supposed to. That someone being me.”

I’m not aware that the head of investigations is on call. That’s never been our policy, unless there’s an emergency. And it’s also not our policy to be a firehouse, to sleep over on an inflatable bed while waiting for an alarm to clang, so to speak.”

I see someone’s been narking. It’s her fault, anyway.” He puts his sunglasses on, wire-frame Ray-Bans he’s worn for as long as I’ve known him—what Bryce calls Marino’s Smokey and the Bandit shades.

The investigator on call is supposed to be awake at his or her work station, ready to answer the phone.” I say this evenly and with no invitation for the argument he is giving me. “And what is whose fault?”

F*cking Lucy got me on Twitter, and that’s what started it.”

When he says “f*cking Lucy” I know he doesn’t mean it. The two of them are close.

I don’t think it’s fair to blame her for Twitter if you’re the one tweeting, and I understand you have been,” I reply in the same bland tone. “And she didn’t exactly nark on you, or some things I would have known before now. Anything she’s said, it’s because she cares about you, Marino.”

She’s out of the picture and has been for weeks, and I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, as we slowly descend through the center of the building.

Who is?” I puzzle.

The twat I was tweeting, and that’s all I have to say about it. And you really think people don’t sleep when they’re on call? I didn’t miss nothing last night. Every time the phone rang, I answered it and handled it. The only real scene to respond to was the guy who fell down the stairs, and Toby took care of it, a cut-and-dried accident. Then I sent him home. No point in both of us being there. And besides, he gets on my nerves. I can never find him where he’s supposed to be, either that or he’s on top of me.”

I’m just trying to understand what’s going on. That’s all. I’m making sure you’re okay.”

Why wouldn’t I be?” He stares straight ahead at smooth shiny steel, at the illuminated LL on the digital panel. “I’ve had things not work out before.”

I have no idea what things or who he’s talking about, and now is not the time to press him about some woman he met on the Internet, or at least this is what I suspect he’s alluding to. But I do need to talk to him about what I worry could be a breach of professional discretion and confidentiality.

While we’re on the subject, I’m wondering why you went on Twitter to begin with, or why Lucy supposedly might encourage such a thing,” I say to him. “I’m not trying to pry into your personal life, Marino, but I’m not in favor of social networking unless it’s primarily for news feeds, which is the only thing I follow on Twitter. Certainly we aren’t in the business of marketing what we do here or sharing details about it or making friends with the great outdoors.”

I’m not on Twitter as me, don’t use anything that can be identified to me. In other words, you don’t see my name, just the handle The Dude . . .”

‘The Dude’?”

As in the Big Lebowski character played by Jeff Bridges, whose avatar I use. Point being, no way you’d know what I do for a living unless you literally do a search for Peter Rocco Marino, and who’s going to bother? At least I don’t use some generic egg avatar like you do, which is retarded.”

So you represent yourself on Twitter with a photo of a movie star who played in a movie about bowling . . . ?”

Only the best bowling movie ever made,” he says defensively, as the elevator settles to a stop and the doors open.

Marino doesn’t wait for me or offer anything further as he grabs up the scene cases, one in each hand, and steps out, his baseball cap pulled low over his tan bald head, his eyes masked by the Ray-Bans. All these years I’ve known him, more than two decades now, and there’s never been a question when he feels slighted or stung, although I can’t imagine what I might have done this time, beyond what I just attempted to discuss with him. But he was already out of sorts when he appeared in my office a little while ago. Something else is going on. I wonder what the hell I’ve done. What exactly this time?

He was gone all last week at the meeting in Florida, and so there wasn’t anything I might have done during his time away. Before that Benton and I were in Austria, and it occurs to me that’s more likely the root of Marino’s displeasure. Well, of course it would be, dammit. Benton and I were with my assistant chief medical examiner, Luke Zenner, in Vienna, at his aunt’s funeral, and I feel frustrated and next I feel annoyed. More of the damn same. Marino and his jealousy, and Benton, too. The men in my life are going to be the end of me.

I’m careful what I say to Marino, because there are other people around. Forensic scientists, clerical and investigative staff are entering the building from the parking lot in back and moving along the wide windowless corridor. Marino and I say little to each other as we walk past the telecom closet and the locked metal door that leads into the vast mechanical room, and then the odontology lab, everything in the CFC’s round building flowing in a perfect circle, which I still find tricky at times, especially if I’m trying to give directions. There is no first or last office on the right or left, and nothing in the middle, either.

We wind around to the autopsy and x-ray rooms, our rubber-soled booted feet making muffled sounds, and then we are in the receiving area, where there are walls of stainless-steel intake and discharge refrigerators and decomp freezers with digital displays at the tops of their heavy doors. I greet staff we encounter but don’t pause to chat, and I notify the security guard, a former military policeman, that we’ve got a potentially sensitive case coming in.

Something that involves what appears to be unusual circumstances,” I tell Ron, who is powerfully built and dark-skinned and never particularly animated behind his glass window. “Just be aware in the event the media or who knows what shows up. I can’t predict how much of a circus this might be.”

Yes, ma’am, Chief,” he says.

We’ll let you know when we get an idea of what might be headed this way,” I add.

Yes, ma’am, Chief. That would be good,” he replies, and I’m always ma’am and Chief to him, and I think he likes me well enough even if he doesn’t show it.

I check the sign-in log, a big black ledger, and one of the few documents I won’t permit to be electronic. Looking over what I recognize as Marino’s small snarled handwritten entries for bodies that have arrived since I checked when I first got here around five, I’m reminded that what Lucy reported is only partially true. While there was no need for an investigator to respond to any scenes after hours, there are cases, four of them, that require autopsies. The person who would have decided to have the bodies sent in for postmortem examinations was the investigator on call, who I now know was Toby for the suspected blunt-force trauma from a fall and Marino for the rest of them.

The ones he handled occurred in local hospitals or were DOAs, two motor-vehicle fatalities and a possible drug overdose suicide, and responding to the scenes of the fatal events or actual deaths wouldn’t have been necessary unless the police requested it. Marino must have got the information over the phone, and I turn around to ask him about the cases we have so far this day, but the person I sense nearby isn’t him after all. I’m startled to find Luke Zenner inches from me as if he traded places with Marino or materialized out of nowhere.

I didn’t mean to scare you.” He’s carrying his briefcase and wearing a white shirt with the sleeves folded up to his slender elbows and a narrow red-and-black striped tie, sneakers, and jeans.

I’m sorry. I thought you were Marino.”

I just saw him in the parking lot scouting out one SUV or van and then another, whatever looks the best and has the biggest engine. But thanks for thinking I was him.” He gives me an ironic smile, his eyes warm, his British accent belying his Austrian roots. “I’ll accept you meant it as a compliment,” he adds wryly, and I’m not sure if he dislikes Marino as much as Marino dislikes him, but I suspect their feelings are mutual.

Dr. Luke Zenner is new in more ways than one, recently board-certified, not even three years ago, and I hired him this past June, much against Marino’s wishes, I should add. A talented forensic pathologist, Luke also is the nephew of a friend of mine whose funeral we just attended, Dr. Anna Zenner, a psychiatrist I became close to more than a decade ago, during my Richmond days. That connection is the source of Marino’s objection, or at least this is what he claims, although resentment likely is the more accurate reason for why he is blatantly unkind and unhelpful to a very nice-looking young blond-haired blue-eyed doctor who is a citizen of the world with a personal tie to me.

You heading off? A scene? A SWAT situation? The firing range? A reality show?” Luke notices the way I’m dressed, taking in every inch of me. “No court after all?”

We’ve got a case in Boston, a body in the harbor. It may be a difficult recovery because of fishing gear and whatever else it’s tethered to,” I reply. “I don’t know about court, but I’ll probably have to be there. There’s not much choice these days.”

Tell me about it.” He watches a group of forensic scientists heading to the elevator, young women who greet us shyly and can scarcely take their eyes off him. “You so much as initial something and get summoned to appear.” His attention lingers on the women, reminding me of what Marino accuses, that Luke takes what he wants, doesn’t matter who she is or her marital status. “Much of it is harassment.”

Some of it is,” I agree.

I can go with you if you need some help. What kind of case? A drowning?” His vivid blue eyes are fastened to me. “I remind you I’m a certified scuba diver, too. We can buddy dive. The visibility in the harbor is bound to be quite bad, the water cold as hell. You shouldn’t be alone. Marino doesn’t dive. I’m happy to go.”

I’m not sure at the moment what we’ve got, but I think we can handle it,” I reply. “I’ll trust you to manage morning rounds and oversee the assigning of cases to the other docs. That would be much appreciated.”

Of course. When you’ve got a moment, can we talk about the on-call schedule or lack of one?”

He stares at me as I open the door that leads into the bay, his keen face so much like his aunt’s that I find it unsettling. Or maybe it’s the way he looks at me, the way he helps himself to me and how it makes me feel and the difficulties it has caused.

It’s a bit of a problem.” He’s saying Marino is, and maybe saying something else.

It is the something else I fear, and I’m reminded of Vienna after the service, when Luke guided Benton and me along the graceful tree-lined paths of the Zentralfriedhof to show us the graves of Brahms and Beethoven and Strauss. Benton got palpably unhappy. I could feel his upset like sleet stinging my face.

I understand, and plan to take it up with him.” I promise Luke I will deal with the electronic calendar problem, that if need be I’ll have Bryce take it over, and while I’m saying all this I’m remembering what happened.

It was awful. Benton’s visible displeasure was triggered by nothing more than Luke’s ability to speak perfect English and German and serve as a thoughtful, affectionate guide on a very sad occasion, the burial of his aunt, whom I dearly loved. But Luke, her only nephew, was gracious and brave and unflappably charming, and as we stopped to look at the monument to Mozart, where people had placed candles and flowers on its marble steps, Luke hooked his arm around me to thank me for coming to Vienna for the funeral of Anna, his only aunt and someone I could never forget.

That was all, a hug that pulled me close for a tender moment. But it was enough. When Benton and I returned to our hotel near the Ringstrasse, we drank and didn’t eat, and we argued.

Where is your respect?” my FBI husband began to interrogate me, and I knew what he meant, but I wouldn’t own up to it. “You really don’t see it, do you, Kay?” He paced the room furiously as he opened another bottle of champagne. “Things start this way, you know.” He wouldn’t look at me. “The nephew of a friend, and you treat him like family and give him a job and next thing . . . ?” He drank half a glass of champagne in one swallow. “He’s not Lucy. You’re projecting as if you’re his only aunt the way Anna was his only aunt, and somehow that makes you his de facto mother the same way you’re Lucy’s de facto mother, and next thing . . . ?”

Next thing what, Benton? I go to bed with him? That’s the logical conclusion if I mentor people and am their de facto mother?” I didn’t add that I don’t sleep with my niece, either.

You want him. You want someone younger. It happens as we get older, it always does, because we hold on to vitality, fight for it and want it back. That’s the problem; it will always be a problem and gets only worse. And young men want you because you’re a trophy.”

I’ve never thought of myself as a trophy.”

And maybe you’re bored.”

I’ve never been bored with you, Benton.”

I didn’t say with me,” he said.

I walk through the beige epoxy-painted bay, the size of a small hangar, and it crosses my mind as it has a number of times this past week that I don’t feel I’m bored with my job or my life, and not with Benton, never with him. It’s not possible to be bored with such a complex elegant man, whom I’ve always found strikingly compelling and impossible to own, a part of him inaccessible no matter how intimate we could ever be.

But it is true that I notice other attractive human beings, and certainly I notice them noticing me, and since I’m not as young as I was, maybe noticing has become more important. But it’s simply not true that I don’t have insight about it, I certainly do, am insightful enough to know that it’s damn harder for women. It’s hard in ways men will never understand, and I hate being reminded of our fight and how it ended, which was with Benton’s assertion that I’m not honest with myself.

It occurs to me that the person I could be completely honest with is the one who inadvertently caused the problem, Anna Zenner, my confidante of old, who used to tell me stories of her nephew, Luka, or Luke, as the rest of us know him. He left Austria for public school in England, then Oxford, and after that King’s College London School of Medicine, and eventually made his way to America, where he completed his forensic pathology residency at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, one of the finest facilities anywhere. He came highly recommended and had many prestigious job offers, and I’ve had no trouble with him and can’t see why anyone would question his credentials or feel I hired him as a favor.

The roll-up bay door is retracted, and through the concrete space and out the big square opening is the tarmac and the clean blue sky. Cars and CFC vehicles, all of them white, shine in the fall morning light, and enclosing the lot is the black PVC-coated anti-climb fence, and over the top of it, rising above my titanium-skinned building on two sides, are brick-and-glass MIT labs with radar dishes and antennas on the roofs. To the west is Harvard and its divinity school near my house, which of course I can’t make out above the barricade of dense dark fencing that keeps the world away from those I take care of, my patients, all of them dead.

I emerge onto the tarmac as a white Tahoe rumbles toward me. The air is cool and clear like glass, and I pull on my jacket, grateful that Bryce chose my attire for the day. I’m reminded of how unexpected it is that I’ve grown accustomed to a chief of staff who cares about my wardrobe. I’ve come to like what at first I resisted, although his attending to me encourages forgetfulness on my part, a complete disinterest in relatively unimportant details he can easily manage or fix. But he was right, I will need the jacket because it will be cold on the boat and there’s a very good chance I will get wet. If anyone has to go into the water, it will be me. I’m already convinced of that.

I will insist on seeing for myself exactly what we’re dealing with and making sure the death is managed the way it should be, precisely and respectfully, beyond reproach and in anticipation of any legal accusations, because there are always those. Marino can help me or not, but he’s no diver and doesn’t do well in a wetsuit or a drysuit, says they make him feel as if he’s suffocating, and he isn’t much of a swimmer. He can stay on the boat, and I will take care of things on my own. I’m not going to squabble with him or anyone. I’ve had my fill of squabbling and worrying about the slightest thing that can be misinterpreted. As if I would have an affair with Anna Zenner’s nephew, who, even if I were single, would be far more compatible with Lucy, were she inclined that way.

I’m not Luke’s de facto mother, and what continues to cut me to the bone about Benton’s remark is the suggestion that I’m old.

Old like a Eurostile font evocative of a past era, the fifties and sixties, which I scarcely can recall and don’t want to believe I’m from.

I feel Benton’s implication like an internal injury that chronically smarts, a depressing symptom of being damaged and not knowing it until he spoke those angry words to me in Vienna. I’ve perceived myself differently since he said it, and I’m not sure I can get over the deeper wounding it has done.