“Not a chance,” he said. “Okay, it’s none of my business, but I bet the university doesn’t pay you half as much as it pays the football coach.” In fact, UT didn’t pay me one-tenth as much as it paid its head coach, whose salary was more than $2 million a year. What’s more, UT was also paying $2 million a year to a coach it had recently fired. One year after signing a four-year, $7 million contract with coach Phil Fulmer, UT asked him to step down…and agreed to pay his salary for the remainder of his contract. In other words, Fulmer was being paid $6 million not to work for three years. I didn’t say all that to Sinclair, but I did say, “It would be nice if anthropology professors were considered as valuable as coaches or medical examiners or lawyers.”
“Hear, hear,” he said, raising his glass in toast. “To prosperous anthropology professors.” I clicked my Coke against his scotch, hoping my strained smile didn’t look too phony. “So I’m wondering if you do any consulting on the side? The university doesn’t prohibit that, does it?”
“Generally not,” I said. “Not unless it’s a conflict of interest, or unless it averages more than two days a month. But they don’t have to approve honoraria at all, so if you wanted me to do a lecture for you…”
“Hmm. We might be able to work it that way,” he mused. “This morning I mentioned putting on small trainings for surgeons. We actually get a lot of requests for those. Would you be interested in working with me on something like that?”
Careful,I told myself.Don’t look too eager. “I’m sure it’d be interesting, but I’m not qualified to teach surgeons. Not unless they want to know about postmortem decomposition and time since death.”
“You’re far too modest,” he said. “I’m sure surgeons could learn a lot from you. But not to worry. We’d also have a surgery consultant there, an expert in the procedure we’d be teaching.”
“I don’t mean to seem dense, but if you have a surgery consultant and you’re teaching surgeons a procedure, why do you need me?”
He raised his glass in a slight salute. “I do like a man who cuts to the chase, Bill. What I’m hoping is that you might be able to bring along some material.”
“What did you have in mind?”
He leaned across the end table toward me. “We have a one-day training for orthopedic surgeons coming up in a few weeks in Asheville,” he said. “Just across the mountains from Knoxville. We’re teaching microsurgery techniques for reattaching small blood vessels and nerves in the arm. He swirled the glass in one hand, frowning slightly at how little of his scotch remained. “Right now we’ve got the enrollment capped at ten, and we’re turning people away. If we had enough specimens, we could double or even triple the class size.”
“So you’re asking if I could haul ten or twenty arms to Asheville?”
“Like I said, I’ll ask anybody anything. Is that an impossible thing to ask?”
“Possibly impossible,” I answered, “but maybe just complicated. So the surgery consultant demonstrates the technique, then each of these surgeons practices it on an arm?”
He nodded.
“And where does this take place?”
“In a ballroom at the Grove Park Inn.”
“The Grove Park?” It was the most elegant hotel in Asheville, a massive stone lodge built in the 1920s. Several U.S. presidents had stayed there, as had dozens of Hollywood stars. “The Grove Park lets us waltz in with a bunch of cadaver arms and carve them up?”
“Well, we don’t exactly pile them on a baggage cart at the front entrance,” he chuckled, “but basically yeah. I’ve done this at convention hotels plenty of times. We pack the material in leakproof shipping cases, on ice, and bring it up the service elevator. We don’t allow hotel staff into the room, so nobody but the docs sees anything. End of the day, we pack everything up, haul it down the freight elevator and out the service entrance and back to where it came from. Piece of cake.”
“And you’re envisioning that I’d bring the material over just for the day, then take it back to Knoxville?”
He shrugged. “Your choice,” he said. “You want to send it home with me, great—we’d be glad to be the
‘designee’ your donor consent form mentions.”
I sipped my watery Coke and frowned. “I’d need to take it back with me. It would look pretty strange if a dozen skeletons in the collection were missing their arms.” As I said it, I thought of Trey Willoughby’s limbless corpse.
“Then take ’em back at the end of the seminar. If we can borrow or rent them for a day, that’s great. So you’re saying this is possible?”
“Possible. Wouldn’t be easy. We’d have to stockpile the material in a freezer.”What else? I asked myself.What else do I need to do to reel him in? “And those arms aren’t going to amputate themselves.”
“It would be a lot of work,” he conceded, “but I think you’d find that the honorarium would make it worthwhile.”
I stalled, studying the last of my drink. “How worthwhile?” I took another small sip. He didn’t hesitate. “A thousand an arm. Twenty arms, twenty grand.”
A stray droplet of Coke water went down my windpipe, and I found myself coughing convulsively. The coughing fit was so intense it brought tears to my eyes.
Once the coughing finally subsided into throat clearing, Sinclair added, “Does that mean you’d consider such an arrangement worthwhile?”