David Dean - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

A severe-looking older woman with her hair slicked into a tight little bun that probably never got a vacation looked up, then came to the counter. If the place smelled like anything worse than hot bricks, fortunately the surrounding refineries covered it up with their industrial stench. She looked sour and thin-lipped. I thought she was going to be tough, like trying to pry a giant clam open with a set of blunt nail clippers, but when I handed her the card, she smiled brightly and asked what she could do for me. Maybe she didn’t get a lot of visitors — well, not the kind you could talk to. “I’m on a story about funeral options,” I explained. “With overpopulation and real-estate prices and all, so many people are going the cremation route—” I gestured globally — “and I wondered if you could tell me something about it — like, how’s business?” I smiled expectantly, and she shrugged.

“It’s steady,” she deadpanned, and I smiled appreciatively, wondering if she got a lot of mileage from that line at trade shows.

We talked about the expense of plots and the decline of some religious groups’ objections to cremation, talked about a few of the scandals like the place down in Georgia where they decided putting dead folks out in the fresh air was an economically sound alternative to getting their incinerator repaired, and I turned the conversation around to the local business, peppering her with questions: “Do you ever deal directly with families or individuals? Any institutional customers other than funeral homes?”

“All of the above. We have contracts with a couple of hospitals, you know, teaching hospitals attached to medical schools.”

“Oooh,” I said, “bet that’s interesting.”

“Well, not really. Most of ’em’s pretty straightforward, lots of paperwork for an entire body, the State of California requires it. Human remains get respect.”

“Good,” I gulped. “And the others?”

She made a wrinkle-nosed expression that brought out the rodent in her appearance. “That’s kind of, you know, icky.”

Icky? I waited, knowing that silence is a vacuum into which most people will pitch their darkest secrets if you let them.

“We get these sealed boxes from the hospitals, and we’re not allowed to look inside.”

“Really? What’s that about?”

“When they have various parts, like when medical students dissect an arm?”

I was getting greener and greener thinking about an arm lying there all by itself, maybe with its palm heavenward. It wasn’t easy, this death business, and I tried not to think of Daniel Mason, his arm.

The lady was saying, “When it’s all mixed up like that, different people’s body parts, they just throw ’em into a box labeled ‘Anatomical Waste’ to be incinerated, and it’s actually against the law to open the box. Not that I’d ever want to, but—”

The telephone rang, and I froze like a memorial statue in Forest Lawn. The lady cleared her throat, apologized that she had to get back to work, and I thanked her and almost ran to the door. Another time, I wished I could get a look at their records, wished I could get more out of her about how they documented the process. The heat outdoors was like an oven opening wide, but I was shivering and glad to get out of there. Daniel’s label had said “Anat. Waste,” not his name. Something was definitely wrong, at the very least the medical school’s record keeping, but possibly more.

Daniel had died by overdose, not murder, but — I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but — talk about the perfect crime. When you can cut people up and nobody can legally look at what’s in there before it’s burned beyond identification? I walked right past my car and caught myself and had to turn back.

I figured if I was going to go back to the medical school undercover, I’d need to look right to get Ludlow’s attention, so he’d see me as friendly to his weird personal style. Now, black leather can certainly mean different things to different people, and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. I settled for a super-hip, semi-nihilistic, modified Goth/punk/vampire look. I spent the evening constructing it, and the heat wave broke as quickly as it had started, the Santa Anas out of breath in thirty-six hours. I returned to the basement elevators’ palm jungle in a short black leather dress and clumpy boots. I’d added some temporary Asian tattoos — a dragon curling around my left biceps, some calligraphy the box claimed meant “warrior spirit lives in this one” on my right calf, my newly recommissioned nose ring back in place, plus dark burgundy lipstick, very white face makeup, black charcoal eyes, and what I liked to think of as my white-girl dreadlocks, mouse brown rendered jet black with a temporary rinse. On the street in New York City, the look would undoubtedly have both a name and its own boutique, but I hoped the effect on Nick Ludlow would be to seem vaguely familiar but not too easy to pin down to an actual subgroup in a subculture.

I walked in at eight A.M. on the nose and introduced myself as Madison, the office temp sent to help him with the computer files.

He looked me up and down, his face a study of mixed emotions. “I didn’t ask for any office temp,” he observed.

“I know. I’m a surprise,” I said flatly. “They say you can use some help since you’re supposed to be so busy.” I implied he shouldn’t be wasting time arguing about it. I wished I’d got some gum, just to seem dumber and more sullen, and to have some stage business, but you can’t think of everything.

He frowned, and the dandruff revealed on his eyebrows didn’t improve his looks any. His haircut sort of looked like a strawberry-blond retro Beatles cut, but not as flattering. Of course, he might be a prince on the inside, but before I could find that out, I had to convince him I was legitimate. I handed him an official-looking work order from “temphelpfast,” all lower case and very avant-garde typography, another of the belly-up businesses my firm now operated. “You can call ’em if you want,” I said, looking like I got paid by the hour and didn’t give a flying whatever about who paid me.

He was reading it with suspicion. “I don’t see anyone’s name from here as the person who placed the order.” His eyes narrowed nastily. “Did Dr. Cannon do this?”

Whoever Dr. Cannon was, that was good enough for me. “I dunno,” I said. “It mighta been.”

“Well, let’s go ask her.” You could tell he hated this Dr. C. He started to leave, and I clumped daintily behind.

Dr. Gwen Cannon looked familiar. Then I recognized her as the woman who’d tried to help me find where I was going the day before. She was wearing a grey tone-on-tone dress with a matching jacket, exquisitely pieced and embroidered. As before, she looked tired, but she wasn’t looking at me. She gave Ludlow what you might call a withering look, then took me in with an “and you are?” lift of her aristocratic brows. I didn’t think she recognized me from my previous incarnation.

Ludlow handed her the work order. “If you thought I needed help, you might’ve asked me,” he said evenly, though I could see that his jaw was clenched.

The lady was smart. She read it, looked at him, looked again at me, a little longer. “Actually, there are several different assignments I had in mind for Ms. Madison.”

She was pretending she knew about it!

I was too nonplussed to tell her Madison was my first name, with the last name left blank. It was an anti-system statement by my persona, but that seemed somewhat moot here. Dr. Cannon waved Nick Ludlow to the door. “She should have reported to me first. Well, never mind. I’ll bring her in and explain it all to you in a few minutes.”