Michael Baden - Remains Silent

Jake joined her, still wearing his scrubs. “There you are!” he said. “I have to go to the pathology lab. Want to come with me or stay out here?” He brandished a glass jar.

She pointed to it. “What’s in that thing?”

“Part of Mrs. Alessis’s liver.” His tone was serious, his expression troubled. “It’s wrinkled and underweight. Important, given the yellowish color of her eyes.”

“For the record,” Manny said, “I’m sorry I asked.”

“So you coming with me or not?”

She listened to the sounds of the night. The crickets were out in full force, and she thought she heard an owl. Creepy. “With you.”

She followed him to the pathology lab, where he headed to a machine the size of a microwave and switched it on. “It’s for making frozen sections. Works in a matter of minutes. During surgery, for example, you use it to make sure you’ve removed enough of a cancerous organ. Normally, I’d wait for the permanent slides made from the paraffin blocks, but that takes a couple of days and I want to look at this tonight.”

Something was bothering him. His demeanor was grim, perplexed. “Why?”

“I think the cause of death is related to the liver. There’s her jaundice, the fact that the liver’s wrinkled and underweight- a thousand grams instead of the normal twelve hundred fifty or so. But the only way to pinpoint the cause is to look at the liver under a microscope, and I want to do it before we leave.” Jake inserted the liver section in the machine.

“I guess I still don’t understand.” Struck by his manner, she realized there were to be no more jokes. “Why do her kids feel so strongly about an autopsy? Do they think she was killed?”

“First off,” he said, “the next of kin can request a private autopsy, even if the authorities don’t think it’s necessary.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Actually, I doubt if Mrs. Alessis’s children would have thought of it if she hadn’t been smitten with my brother, Sam. He talked me up to her; she told her kids about my work. Voilа.”

The machine beeped. He carefully cut a thin sliver of tissue from the frozen block of liver tissue, as though it were deli meat. “This is called a microtome blade,” he explained. “It’s very sharp. I’ll put the tissue section on a slide, add some dye, put a cover slip over it, and it’s ready to go.” He inserted the slide under the microscope and adjusted the focus. After a minute he stood, that same troubled expression in his eyes. “Here. Take a look for yourself.”

“I’m fine right where I am.”

“Don’t be a baby, you’ve been through an autopsy. This is just a slide. Besides, I may need you as a corroborating witness.”

That did it. She felt a surge of excitement, even pleasure, and put her eye to the microscope. “What am I looking for?”

“You see those pink pie-shaped areas? They’re called the liver lobules. Normally, under this stain each cell nucleus is blue, surrounded by pink cytoplasm.”

“But some of them-”

“Are a mess.” His voice was hoarse. He was pacing now, clearly fighting to keep his emotions under control. “You can see where the nuclei have been destroyed. It’s dead tissue, what we call necrotic. Because it’s in the center of the liver, we refer to this kind of damage as centrilobular necrosis.”

“And what does it mean?”

“It means,” he said, “that Mrs. Alessis was poisoned.”

IT TOOK HER until they had once again gone outside and he had changed into civilian clothes for her to adjust to the shock. Murder was as much her territory as his, and its presence focused her mind.

“What was the poison?” she asked.

“Probably carbon tetrachloride. There aren’t many that could cause this particular harm to the liver.”

“You mean the cleaning agent?”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“It was once used by dry cleaners. There were lawsuits by families of people who died from inhaling its fumes, so it was banned.”

“Exactly right,” he said. “Good for you.”

The compliment made her absurdly pleased. “And you really think Mrs. Alessis died from it?”

Jake took a sip of the coffee he had bought from a hallway vending machine on his way out and poured the rest on the ground. “It’s a clever method. You have to be able to get close enough to give it surreptitiously. The victim doesn’t die until a couple of days later. And since the compound itself can no longer be detected through toxicology tests in the body after three days, no one’s really hunting a killer.”

“Could this have been an accident?”

He shrugged. “Unlikely, but of course possible. We should go to her apartment to see if she has older cleaning products there containing the poison.”

“You want to go now?”

“Absolutely. I told her family I’d want to look at the place where she died, and now there’s an urgent reason. What’s wrong? Are you tired?”

Strangely, she wasn’t. She rejected a sarcastic answer. “Why should I be tired?”

Jake smiled at her; Manny got the feeling it was genuine. “You’re a trouper,” he said.

“Baby, darling, honey, sweetheart,” Manny called, approaching the Porsche. She opened the door. Mycroft shied away, whimpering. “Don’t be afraid. It’s Mommy.” She turned to Jake. “What have you done to my dog?”

He held out his hands, palms up. “Nothing. I swear.”

“Then why is he acting like this?” She made kissy noises. Mycroft leaped from the car and hid under it.

“I can’t imagine.”

The odor of her jacket wafted up. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “I smell like death.”

“Then Mycroft must be an unusual animal. Dogs usually like clothing that’s been in the autopsy room.”

“What? Why?”

“They think it smells like food.”

“That,” she said, “is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.”

“But it’s true. It’s not you he’s scared of-”

“I should say not!” The idea! “- it’s somebody or something else.”

They peered into the dark. Manny turned on the headlights. The bushes in front of the car were indented, as though someone had fled through them.

Theresa Alessis had lived in the basement apartment of a two-family house on a run-down street three blocks from downtown Turner. The upper floors were vacant; a sign out front said 2 APTS 4 RENT. Manny didn’t imagine there’d be many takers. Even in the dark she could see that the paint was flaking and the front lawn overgrown.

“Are you sure this is okay?” she asked, as they crept their way down the uneven concrete stairs that led to Mrs. Alessis’s front entrance.

“Yes. Why are you whispering?”

“Because it’s three o’clock in the bloody morning.”

Jake fumbled with a flowerpot outside the door and produced a key. “Right where her son said it would be.”

He unlocked the door, reached in, and groped for a switch. The lights blazed on, as startling as a scream in the darkness.

The small apartment was shabby but neat. An ornate cross Manny recognized as Greek Orthodox dominated the wall over the couch, and a china cupboard contained what appeared to be a large collection of sewing thimbles.

“My grandparents were tailors,” Manny said, touched. “These thimbles make me feel a certain kinship with Mrs. Alessis. Even a responsibility.”

“A coincidence,” Jake said. “My grandparents were tailors, too.” He didn’t add that, as union members, they had been beaten nearly to death because they belonged to the ILGWU.

“Maybe it’s fate that we’re in this together… Oh!”

Jake came to her side. “What is it?”