“The dead may not care, but some of us do.” She tipped her head toward Birdie. “Behave!” She placed a soft hand on Birdie’s and turned her head to Jasper. “So. What did you have in mind?”
He took a deep breath. If he played this poorly, he would not be seeing Birdie or Allene ever again. But he needed them. Birdie was poor, sure, but that face could open doors. And Allene was a treasure chest of opportunity. They both owed him for kicking him out of their lives.
“I want to take a sample of tissue from Florence and test it for cyanide.” He swallowed and saw Birdie squeeze Allene’s hand. Funny, he’d thought it would be Allene, with her hoity-toity life, who would balk at the idea, but she was the one listening with calm regard. Her steady gaze chilled him.
She asked questions. Where the sample would come from, whether Barston could be trusted to make sure Florence’s corpse would be perfectly presentable at the wake in two days, and if he and the mortician could be trusted to keep quiet. Jasper answered them one by one, and finally she nodded with satisfaction.
“The autopsy room is this way. Barston put Florence in there. Come on.”
The autopsy room was large and clean. Shining copper taps rose at the head of each marble table. Each table owned its own hanging light, and a wheeled cart laid out with shining sharp instruments for dissection waited nearby. Florence’s strawberry-blonde hair peeked out, once again, from the white sheet over her body.
Jasper took off his jacket and found a chair for Birdie to sit on, far away from the tables. He took down two waxed aprons and handed one to Allene.
“I’ll need an assistant. You won’t faint, will you?”
“The dead won’t make me swoon and neither will you, Mr. Jones.”
“Pity,” Jasper said.
“A little respect, please!” Birdie chastised them from the far end of the room. Apparently she couldn’t bear to watch and was facing the corner, like a misbehaving schoolchild.
“Let’s start.” He handed Allene some ill-fitting gloves and picked up a scalpel. They stood on either side of the table.
“The stomach?” Allene verified.
Jasper nodded.
“Have you done an autopsy before?”
“No. But I’ve watched about three today.”
“I thought you were a janitor!” Allene said.
“I was. I got promoted only yesterday. I’m now an assistant in the medical examiner’s office.”
“You are? That’s splendid!” Birdie chimed from her corner.
“That’s awfully convenient, Jasper. Congratulations,” Allene added, but she didn’t sound as happy for him as Birdie was.
His limited experience would have to be good enough. Allene peeled back the sheet to Florence’s bare waist. It was both shocking and ordinary to see her like this. She was a woman like half the people on God’s earth, and yet she was Florence. Florence, with that terrible, biting wit that was a whip to the cheek whenever she wielded it. But then again, it wasn’t her. Florence was gone. This was a body. This was clay. Or so he reminded himself.
“We’ll make only a small incision. I just need a sample.”
Jasper picked up a scalpel. It cut through the skin like it was supple kidskin leather, and the blade sliced muscle and fat that was already softening from death. He asked Allene to keep the incision open with a pair of retractors, which she did without complaining or turning green. When he flicked his eyes to her, he saw that she also kept her eyes fixed on the area at hand. Neither of them looked at Florence’s face to see how she felt about the whole affair. From a distance, Birdie whimpered every time an instrument clanked on the tray.
Jasper pushed aside omental fat and slippery intestines before cutting higher up toward her rib cage to finally locate her stomach. He grasped its sagging mass with forceps and jabbed it with the scalpel. Black liquid bubbled out, smelling of sour rot and iron.
“Oh, God in heaven,” Allene gasped, lifting one of her gloved hands to shield her mouth. “What on earth is that?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s old, curdled blood.” Sweat beaded over his lip and forehead, and he tried to ignore the smell, but it was impossible. Jasper sawed and jabbed with the knife until he came away with a good-sized piece of raw, purplish stomach, with that same liquefied black ooze clinging to it. Black pudding-like liquid leaked out over the incision and pooled on the table. He put the sample in an enameled pan and draped a cloth over it. They withdrew their instruments and covered Florence up decently—as decently as one might do after stealing bits of someone’s internal organs. That smell was still in the air. They washed their hands and hung up the aprons. Jasper took the pan and led them out the door.
“Are we going to the lab now?” Allene asked. She offered her arm to Birdie, who leaned on her gratefully and wiped away a tear.
“Yes.”
They followed Jasper up the few flights of stairs, noting the shadow of Mr. Barston walking into the morgue to “fix up” Florence before shipping her off to the undertaker. Up in Dr. Gettler’s laboratory, Jasper set the covered enamel pan down.
He looked to Allene and Birdie, the former who was hardly paying attention and already sniffing around the bottles of chemicals up on the shelf above the main table. The latter was gaining a little color and sat at Dr. Norris’s desk and chair, folding her hands in her lap.
“Now,” Jasper began. “We’ll have to—”
“We’ll have to do an extraction. The sample needs to be macerated first,” Allene interrupted.
“Well, yes, and then—”
“You’ll do a Prussian blue test, won’t you?” she interrupted again. She was a trolley with no brakes, this girl.
“Good Lord. You’ll run off and do this without me if I don’t keep an eye on you. Take a look at this book. It’s a beaut.” He handed Allene a thick tome, and she smiled.
“A Manual of the Detection of Poisons. 1857. Splendid, though a bit outdated.” She licked her fingertips to riffle through the pages. It was hard not to notice how incandescent her expression had become.
“Look at her, having a jazzy time!” Jasper teased. “You’d think that book was her beau instead of Andrew.”
“Enough, you two.” Birdie seemed to have recovered from their trip to the morgue and stood between them. “Now. What are we to do? We have to be quick about it. That chap said we had four hours tops.”
Allene pointed and read aloud. “Chapter three. ‘On the detection of hydrocyanic acid.’ Let’s see . . .” She instructed Jasper to cut the tissue sample into strips, add distilled water and a touch of sulfuric acid. “You need a retort.”
“But he didn’t say anything rude,” Birdie commented.
“Not that kind of retort,” Jasper said. “A retort is a flask with this long gooseneck—”
“Here you go.” Allene had already fetched a clean one—a beautiful thing that looked like a pointed flask that had bowed a curtsy and stayed that way. “And you’ll need to heat it up and gather the distillate. Then add some caustic potassium and a few drops of green vitriol, then cook it with some sulfuric acid to reveal the Prussian blue—”