Part 20 (2/2)
”Well, sure,” I say. ”Yeah. Yes.”
”Real and good and right, and I won't forget it,” she says. ”Okay? No matter how it ends.”
”Okay,” I say.
She leans over me and kisses me hard on the lips, and she goes.
”Palace.”
”What?” I say, sitting up, looking around. ”h.e.l.lo?”
I'm so used to being woken from a dream by the telephone that it takes me a moment to realize that I was dreaming not of Alison Koechner but of Naomi Eddes, and then it's the next moment that I figure out that it was not a dream, not this time-Naomi was real, is real, and then I look around for her, and she's gone. My shades are open, the winter sun is sending wavering yellow rectangles across the crumpled sheets on my old mattress, and there is a woman on my phone yelling at me.
”Are you familiar with the current statutory penalties for impersonating a state official?”
Oh, G.o.d. Oh, no. Fenton.
”Yes, ma'am, I am.”
The blood, the vial of blood. Hazen Road.
”Well, I'll quote them for you.”
”Dr. Fenton.”
”Impersonating a state official carries a sentence of ten to twenty-five years and is prosecuted under t.i.tle VI, meaning automatic imprisonment pending trial, which will never occur.”
”I know that.”
”The same penalty pertains for impeding a criminal investigation.”
”Can I explain?”
”No, thanks. But if you're not at the morgue in twenty minutes, you're going to jail.”
I take two minutes to get dressed and two minutes to remove and replace the wad of paper towels over my eye. Before I close my front door, I take a look around: the beach chairs, the empty bottle of wine. No sign of Naomi's clothes, of her pocketbook, her coat, no traces of her boot heels on the rug. No trace of her scent.
It happened, though. Close my eyes and I can feel it, the trace of her finger tickling the back of my neck, drawing me in. No dream.
Twenty minutes, Fenton said, and she was not kidding. I push the speed limit all the way to Concord Hospital.
Fenton is precisely as she was when I saw her last, alone with her rolling cart of medical equipment in the stark cold brightness of the morgue. The steel drawers with their gray handles, the strange sad locker room of the d.a.m.ned.
I walk in and she looks at her watch. ”Eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds.”
”Dr. Fenton, I hope that you-I hope-listen-” There are tears in my voice, somehow, for some reason. I clear my throat. I am trying to formulate an explanation that will satisfy, trying to explain how I could have stolen blood and had it tested under false pretenses-how sure I was that this was a drugs case, how imperative it was to prove or disprove that Peter Zell was an addict-and of course now it doesn't matter, turns out never to have mattered, it was about insurance claims, about insurance all along-and I am meanwhile melting under the combined effect of her glare and the brightness of the lights-and there, too, is Peter, she's taken his body out of its drawer and laid it on the cold slab of the mortuary table, stone dead and staring straight up into the lights.
”I'm sorry,” is all I can muster, at last. ”I'm really sorry, Dr. Fenton.”
”Yes.” Her face is neutral, impa.s.sive, behind the perfect O's of her gla.s.ses. ”Me, too.”
”What?”
”I said that I am also sorry, and if you think I'm going to say it a third time, you are deeply mistaken.”
”I don't understand.”
Fenton turns to her cart to pick up a single sheet of paper. ”These are the results of the serology tests, and as you will see they have caused me to revise my understanding of the case.”
”In what way?” I ask, trembling a little bit.
”This man was murdered.”
My mouth drops open, and I can't help it, I am thinking the words and then I am saying them aloud. ”I knew it. Oh, my G.o.d, I knew it all along.”
Fenton pushes up her gla.s.ses slightly where they have slipped down the bridge of her nose and reads from the paper. ”First. The bloodwork reveals not only a high blood-alcohol level but also alcohol in the stomach itself, which means he had done some heavy drinking in the hours before he died.”
”I knew that,” I say. J. T. Toussaint, in our first interview: they went to see Distant Pale Glimmers. They had a bunch of beers.
”Also present in the blood,” Fenton continues, ”were significant traces of a controlled substance.”
”Right,” I say, nodding, mind buzzing, one step ahead of her. ”Morphine.”
”No,” says Fenton, and looks up at me, curious, surprised, a little irritated. ”Morphine? No. No traces of opiates of any kind. What he had in his system was a chemical compound called gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.”
I squint over her shoulder at the lab report, a thin sheet of paper, decorated with calculations, checked-off boxes, someone's precise backward-slanting handwriting. ”I'm sorry. What kind of acid?”
”GHB.”
”You mean-the date-rape drug?”
”Stop talking, Detective,” says Fenton, pulling on a pair of clear latex gloves. ”Come here and help me turn over the body.”
We slip our fingers under his back and carefully lift Peter Zell and flip him over onto his stomach, and then we're looking at the broad paleness of his back, the flesh spreading away from the spine. Fenton fits into her eye a small lens, like a jeweler's gla.s.s, reaches up to adjust the hallucinogenically bright lamp overhanging the autopsy table, aiming it at a blotchy brown bruise on the back of Zell's left calf, just above the ankle.
”Look familiar?” she says, and I peer forward.
I'm still thinking about GHB. I need a notebook, I need to write all this down. I need to think. Naomi stopped in the doorway of my bedroom, she almost said something, and then she changed her mind and slipped away. I experience a pang of longing so strong that it momentarily buckles my knees, and I lean against the table, grasp it with both hands.
Easy, Palace.
<script>