Jack Kerley - The Hundredth Man

Seconds before one of the most long-awaited events of Alexander Caulfield's adult life, an event he'd spent years planning and pursuing, an event marking his ascension into professionalism, a decent salary, and the respect of his peers, his left eye started winking like a gigolo in a third-rate Italian film. tic Caulfield cursed beneath his breath. A physician, he recognized a manifestation of transient hemifacial spasms: eye tics or flutters in response to events sparking anxiety or posing a threat. tic Anxiety was ludicrous, he lectured himself, squeezing the offending eye shut; he'd performed or assisted with hundreds of autopsies during his internship. The only difference was this was his first professional autopsy. She was sitting twenty feet away.

Caulfield slowly opened his eye… tic He angled a glance at Dr. Clair Peltier. She was opening a letter in the autopsy suite's utility office, apparently absorbed in correspondence. Caulfield felt blindsided, unprepared, fumble fingered: Today had been scheduled for procedural reviews and meeting new colleagues at the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau.

Then she'd casually suggested he take her place during a procedure. tic Caulfield refocused the ceiling-mounted surgical lamp over the body of the middle-aged white male on the table. Water rinsed beneath the corpse, sounding like a small brook playing over metal. He glanced at Dr. Peltier again: still studying her mail. He mopped his sweating brow, adjusted his mask for the third time, and studied the body. Would his incision be perfectly midline? Would it be straight? Smooth? Would it meet her standards?

He drank in a deep breath, told his hands, Now. The blue-white belly opened like a curtain between pubis and sternum. Clean and straight, a textbook opening.

Caulfield slipped another glance at Dr. Peltier. She was watching him. tic Dr. Peltier smiled and returned to her correspondence. Caulfield pushed his fear to a far corner of his mind and focused on inspecting and weighing organs. He spoke his findings aloud, the tape recorder capturing them for later transcription to print.

"On gross examination the myocardial tissue appears normal in size and wall thickness. Areas of myocardium in the left ventricle are suggestive of past myocardial infarction…"

The familiar sights and words steered Caulfield onto a trusted path; he didn't notice when the spasms melted away.

"… liver mottled, early indication of cirrhosis… kidneys unremarkable…"

The man had been found sprawled in his front yard after a 911 call. The EMTs followed aggressive resuscitation procedures for a heart attack, but the man entered University Hospital as a DOA. Caulfield's initial findings supported a massive cardiac event, though the nondamaged tissue appeared healthy and free of epicarditis or atherosclerosis. Caulfield moved lower in the cavity.

"An obstruction is noted in the descending colon…"

Caulfield pinched the lump in the bowel. Hard and regular in shape, a man-made object. It wasn't uncommon, emergency-room physicians were forever sending patients to the ER to extract vibrators, candles, vegetables, and suchnot; people were inventive in their quest for erotic sensation.

"Using a number-ten blade, a ten-centimeter vertical incision was made through the anterior wall of the descending colon…"

Caulfield retracted the bowel to reveal the source of the obstruction.

"An object can be visualized, silver and cylindrical, resembling a section of flashlight casing…"

Wet metal gleamed through the slit in the intestine, black fabric wrapping one end. No, not fabric, friction tape. Caulfield's finger tentatively tapped the casing. Something about the object glimmered with threat, an intruder in the house. tic He heard Dr. Peltier's chair push back and high heels start toward him. She'd been listening. His fingers slid into the passageway and grasped the object. He tugged gently. It slipped easily through the slit, then resisted. Caulfield tightened his fingers around the object and pulled harder. tic Simultaneous: white flash, black thud. Caulfield's head whiplashed and the floor slammed his back. Red mist and smoke painted the air. A woman's scream spun through the roaring in his ears. Someone above him waved a blunt stick, a club.

No, not a club…

The light flickered twice and failed.

When the autopsy was transcribed to printed form, transcriptionist Marie Manolo was uncertain whether to include Dr. Caulfield's final six words. Trained by Dr. Peltier to be clinically detached and thorough, Marie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued typing:

My fingers. Where are my fingers?

"A guy's walking his dog late one night…"

I watched Harry Nautilus lean against the autopsy table and tell the World's Greatest Joke to a dozen listeners holding napkin-wrapped cups and plastic wineglasses. Most were bureaucrats from the city of Mobile and Mobile County. Two were lawyers; prosecution side, of course. Harry and I were the only cops. There were dignitaries around, mostly in the reception area where the main morgue rededication events were scheduled. The ribbon cutting had been an hour back, gold ribbon, not black, as several wags had suggested. "What kind of dog?" Arthur Peterson asked. Peterson was a deputy prosecutor and his question sounded like an objection.

"A mutt," Harry grunted, narrowing an eye at the interruption. "A guy is walking his mutt named Fido down the street when he spots a man on his hands and knees under a streetlight."

Harry took a sip of beer, licked foam from his bulldozer-blade mustache, and set his cup on the table about where a head would be.

"The dog walker asks the man if he's lost something. Man says, "Yeah, my contact lens popped out." So the dog walker ties Fido to a phone pole and gets down on his hands and knees to help. They search up and down, back and forth, beneath that light. Fifteen minutes later the dog walker says, "Buddy, I can't find it anywhere. Are you sure it popped out here?" The man says, "No, I lost it over in the park." "The park?" the dog walker yells. "Then why the hell are we looking in the street?"

Harry gave it a two-beat build.

"The man points to the streetlamp and says, "The light's better here."

Harry laughed, a musical warble at odds with a black man built like an industrial boiler. His audience tittered politely. An attractive redhead in a navy pantsuit frowned and said, "I don't get it. Why's that the world's greatest joke?"

"It has mythical content," Harry replied, the right half of his mustache twitching with interest, the left drooping in disdain. "Given the choice of groping after something in the dark, or hoping to find it easily in the light, people pick the light ninety-nine times out of a hundred."

Peterson lofted a prosecutorial eyebrow. "So who's the hundredth guy, the one always groping in the dark?"

Harry grinned and pointed my way.

"Him," he said.

I shook my head, showed Harry my back, and walked to the reception area. It was loud and crowded, local VIPs churning like a bucketful of mice as they scrambled for position beside an Even More Important Person or in front of a news camera. Guests huddled three deep around the buffet table. I watched a heavy woman in evening wear slip two sandwiches into her purse before puzzling over meat-balls in gravy. A dozen feet away a florid county commissioner babbled proudly for a news crew.

"… like to welcome y'all to the dedication of the new faculties..

one of the uniqueist in the nation… proud to have voted thefundage… the tragedy of Dr. Caulfield should remind us to be ever vi ligent.."

I saw Willet Lindy across the hall and plunged into the roiling bodies, excusing and pardoning my way his direction. A reporter from Channel 14 stared, then blocked my path.