The Dead Man’s Drawer

Leo Maddox's office smelled of cheap cigars and coffee that had been left on a hot plate since the previous administration, and I have since come to think of it as the smell of a certain kind of honesty.

He did not take out the file at once. He shut the cabinet door again, leaned against it, and lit the cigar he had been holding all morning. The match flared, and for an instant his tired face was lit from beneath, craggy and orange, like a carving. He drew on it until the tip glowed. The smoke rolled upward and hung in the shaft of afternoon light from the window, and in it, slowly, tiny motes of dust turned over and over.

"You made my day yesterday," he said. "I want you to know that. Whatever else I say."

"You said it twice already, Captain."

"I'm saying it a third time because I'm about to be a pain in the ass." He took the cigar out of his mouth. "The Commissioner signed. You're ours. Special behavioral consultant to Major Crimes. That's the official line."

"And the unofficial line?"

"The unofficial line is that I've got a thing I can't take to the lab, can't take to the DA, and can't take to a single guy in this building." He crossed to the desk and sat, heavily. "And you're the only person I know who might actually read it."

He opened the cabinet again.

…

It was a folder. That was all. A thick manila folder, bound with string and a faded rubber band, soft as cloth at the corners where it had been handled. The cover was yellow with age and spotted with something that might have been coffee. A name had been written across the tab in a hand I did not recognize, a long upright script in black ink, firm and fine, as exact as a surgeon's incision.

K — M. — 3.

He laid it on the blotter between us.

I did not touch it. I looked at it for a while, the way one looks at a dog that has not yet decided about you.

"You know the name Kane?" said Leo.

"Dr. Magnus Kane." I heard my own voice go level. "Chief Medical Examiner of Philadelphia for six years. He was before my time here. He was before my time everywhere, if I'm honest. I read his monographs at Cambridge." I paused. "'Terminal Cardiac Events Without Structural Lesion.' 'The Silent Heart.' There was a long paper in the Journal of Forensic Pathology on arrhythmia of unknown origin. My supervisor made us read it twice."

"They called him the Ice Scalpel."

"I know."

"You know why?"

"Because his hands never shook. Because he could make a Y-incision in nine seconds and describe the weather while he did it." I swallowed. "I had a pinboard in my room with his picture on it. It's rather embarrassing. I was nineteen."

Leo gave a short laugh without any humor in it. "He's dead."

"I heard."

"Four months back. Car went off the Schuylkill bridge in the rain." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Single vehicle. Bad weather. No witnesses. The brake lines were fine. The tires were fine. They said he fell asleep."

There was a pause.

"He didn't sleep," said Leo.

"No?"

"Man hadn't slept a full night in ten years. He kept a cot in his office." He tapped the folder with one thick finger. "I'm not saying it wasn't an accident. I'm saying I knew him, a little. And in the months before he died he was working on something. Something he didn't tell anybody. He was at the morgue every night until three. And the week before the crash he sent this over to me, by courier, without a note."

I looked at the tab again.

K — M. — 3.

"Three what?"

"Three cases. He pulled them out of the system himself. Open and shut. Heart attack, accidental drowning, suicide. The kind of thing that goes to a drawer and stays there." His voice dropped. "And he decided, somewhere along the line, that he didn't like how clean they were."

I should explain about the pinboard.

I was nineteen, in my second year at Cambridge, living in a freezing room above a bakery on Trinity Street, and I had read two things in my life that had changed it. One was a paper by Magnus Kane on sudden cardiac death in the young. The other was a letter from my father, who had written four lines on cheap blue paper to tell me that he had remarried, and that he hoped I was well, and that he did not suppose I would wish to attend. I read the paper in the morning, and the letter in the afternoon, and I took the paper to bed. I do not think I have ever been so grateful to a stranger.

What Kane understood, and what almost no one in his field had troubled to say aloud, was that a body keeps a record. The dead do not speak, but they do not lie either. A heart that has stopped is a document, and the proper question is never what killed him? but what was he doing in the minute before? The scalpel was only a pen.

I had written to him once. Three paragraphs, deferential and awful. I never posted it.

…

I want to be exact about what happened to my hand.

I was reaching for the folder. That much I remember. I had made up my mind to open it, as one makes up one's mind to jump into cold water, and my right hand had begun to move toward the cover. And in the instant when Leo said the name, Magnus, the second time, my fingers stopped.

They stopped for one-tenth of a second. Perhaps a little less.

It is a trivial interval. A man with a clock would not catch it. But I am a man who has trained himself for fifteen years to notice precisely such intervals in others, and the knowledge that I had just produced one myself, in a room with a man who was looking directly at me, gave me a small unpleasant lurch of exposure, like a man who discovers in the middle of a dinner party that he has put on his shirt inside out.

Leo said nothing. He went on smoking.

I took the folder.

It was heavier than it looked. The paper had a dry, mineral smell, faintly sweet, like old books and old rooms. The string was knotted in a bow I did not undo; I slid the rubber band off, instead, and it crumbled in my fingers. I laid the cover back.

On the first page, in the same black upright hand, was a sheet of pale yellow paper. It was a summary. A name, a date, an address. A diagram of a bedroom, with a few precise annotations in the margin.

I read the first line.

Subject: KOWALSKI, Arnold J. ("Scar"). Age 33. Resident: 4 Larchwood Circle, Chestnut Hill.

Beneath it, in the margin, a small flat note in red.

"Red ink," I said.

"What?"

"Nothing. Go on."

…

It was a little after one in the afternoon when I finished reading the first page.

I read it twice. I do not read quickly, not documents of this kind; I read as one eats a meal in a foreign country, slowly, watching for what might be hidden in the sauce. The Chestnut Hill house was a modern brick mansion with a wall, two gates, a guard dog, an alarm system on every door and window, and a bedroom on the second floor which locked from inside. Kowalski, called Scar for the long white seam that ran from the corner of his left eye to the point of his jaw, was a loan shark. He did not break legs. He took houses. He took them from old women and drivers and parents of sick children, quietly, at the end of a very long month, with a tidy set of papers in a leather folder.

And on the night of the fourteenth of January he had gone into that locked bedroom, in that guarded house, and died.

"Natural causes," I said.

"Heart attack."

"At thirty-three."

"It happens."

"It does. Rarely. To heavy smokers with a family history." I turned the page. "Was he?"

"Smoker? Packet a day." Leo shrugged. "Family history, nobody knew. He had no family."

I turned another page.

The sheets went on, in the same careful hand, with the autopsy diagrams in pencil, charts of the heart's four chambers shaded in fine hatching, a column of figures that I took for lab values. Six pages. Eight. Magnus Kane had, it seemed, examined the dead man's heart under a microscope and found something he did not care for. A small scrap of notes in the margin said: contraction bands, mid-myocardium; not consistent w/ ischemia. A line below: see Mallory.

I looked up.

"Who is Mallory?"

"Next case."

"And the third?"

"Hensley."

"All three, that is, dead of what appeared to be natural or accidental causes."

"All three," said Leo. "And all three people you'd throw a party for."

He said it so lightly that for a moment I did not take it in.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Read them." He nodded at the folder. "Go on. Take a minute. I'll wait."

I looked at him. He looked back, unblinking, with his bloodshot eyes and his unlit cigar, and I knew with a small cold click of the mind that he had not brought me into this room to read a dead man's notes. He had brought me here to see whether I would read them as he had.

I read.

…

I turned to the first sheet, to the name at the top, and let my eyes rest on it.

Subject One.

The file listed, in the neat black script, a brief biography: the mother’s name, the place of birth, the fact that Arnold Kowalski had never once, in thirty-three years, been convicted of anything.

I turned over the leaf.

On the reverse was a photograph.

It showed a bedroom. I have seen perhaps four hundred death scenes, in photographs and in life, and I have never grown accustomed to the way in which the furniture goes on looking ordinary. A wide bed with a gray silk coverlet. A lamp on a bedside table. A glass of water with a faint film on it. And in the middle of the bed, on top of the covers, in a rumpled gray T-shirt, a large man lay on his back, one arm flung out and the other curled against his chest, with his eyes open and his mouth wide.

There was nothing wrong with him. That was the dreadful part.

I counted the details without wanting to. The knuckles of his right hand, white; the fingers of the left, bent into claws. The T-shirt twisted at the collar, as if something had been dragging at it. A long fresh scratch across his chest, bloody at the edges, where a nail had gone in. The sheets torn from the corner of the bed. The wall by the headboard scored with four long grooves.

Somewhere in that room, in the thirty minutes before he died, a man had been fighting for his life against a thing that was not there.

I looked up.

"Doc," said Leo quietly. "You okay?"

"Yes," I said.

I turned the page to the second subject. A woman with dyed hair and a lacquered smile, and a hotel bathtub, and a man with a camera standing in a door. I turned to the third. A schoolroom, abandoned. A scrap of rotting carpet. A pair of hands.

I laid the three of them side by side on the blotter, like cards. Then I did something I do very seldom. I took off my spectacles and pressed my fingers against my eyes.

"They are very clean," I said.

"That's what Magnus said," said Leo. "The word he used was clean."

"Yes."

"Meaning what?"

I opened my eyes.

On the first page of the first file, in the margin, the red ink had been written in a rapid furious hand, a hand that did not belong to the firm black script of the rest. It had been set down quickly and without pause, as one scribbles a thing one is afraid to forget. Three words, underscored twice.

Why so clean?