Jose Latour - Havana Best Friends

Dr Valverde frowned when she noticed the curvilinear bite-marks on the neck. She studied them for a while under a magnifying glass.

‘Osvaldo, get on the radio and ask Graciela to call the odontologist and tell him to come to the Institute. There are indentations to cast here.’

The tallest assistant marched to the van. The other was measuring temperature and humidity.

She inspected the lacerated temple under the magnifying glass before swabbing nostrils, mouth, and ears, and depositing each swab into evidence bags which she labelled with a marker. She swabbed the blood on the sidewalk as well, then palpated the top of the head, the rib cage, thighs, legs, and ankles before closing the scene case and rising to her feet.

‘What have we got here, Dr Valverde?’ Captain Trujillo asked. He stood a few feet from her, legs spread apart, right elbow resting on his holster, a lighted cigarette held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The pathologist suspected he had catnapped in his uniform: his light grey, long-sleeved shirt and blue pants showed dozens of creases and wrinkles. She admitted to herself that he was attractive in an unprepossessing, rather virile way. He tried to establish a non-professional rapport every time they worked together, but Félix was too young for her – and married, on top of everything. She lifted the case and, followed by the captain, took it back to the van, then yanked her gloves off.

‘What we’ve got here is a broken neck, a severe blow to the right temple, lacerated lips and chin, loose teeth, bite marks on the neck.’

‘Time estimate?’

‘Preliminary. Between four and eight hours.’

‘You planning on doing the autopsy immediately?’

‘Yeah. I’m on the six-to-two shift.’

‘Then I’ll drop by, or send someone later on, to collect his things and take them to the LCC. If the identity card is missing, will you have a ten-print card ready for me?’

‘Lift him up, comrades,’ Dr Valverde told her assistants. The two men slid a stretcher out from the van. She followed them with her eyes.

‘Doctor?’ said Trujillo, realizing that she hadn’t been listening.

‘Sorry, Félix.’

‘Will you have a ten-print card ready for me if the stiff wasn’t carrying his identity card?’

‘Sure.’ After a pause she added, ‘Dollar bills fell from his pocket.’

‘So I noticed.’

‘The one on top looked like a fifty.’

‘Is that so?’

‘But when I palpated him I didn’t feel a wallet. And his left wrist has a pale band, like a watch strap, but there’s no watch.’

Captain Trujillo had a crush on Dr Valverde because she had a perfect body and her face was out of this world. But she was competent and bright too, and he liked that. ‘So, your reasoning is whoever kills for a watch, a wallet, and a pair of shoes searches all the pockets.’

‘Right.’

The captain took a puff on his cigarette and mulled this over as the stretcher was slid into the van. The driver turned the ignition, the attendants stripped off their gloves.

‘I’m thinking sex, sodomy maybe,’ the pathologist added. ‘That might explain the bites. I’ll check for evidence of intercourse. But if he didn’t have sex in the last twelve hours, you’ll have a tough nut to crack: a killer who bites without sexual motivation and steals valuables but leaves cash behind. Pretty weird, don’t you think?’

‘Yeah, I guess so. See you in a while, Doc.’

‘Not before noon, Félix. Not before noon.’

The Institute of Legal Medicine, on Boyeros between Cal-zada del Cerro and 26th Street, is a two-storey prefab building hidden from view by a psychiatric clinic and big laurel trees. Before its experts located, exhumed, and identified the remains of Ché Guevara and his men in Bolivia, it claimed the dubious distinction of being the least known of Havana’s public institutions.

Back at her place of work, Dr Valverde had a buttered bun and a glass of orange juice for breakfast, followed by a cup of espresso. Next she smoked a cigarette in the hallway, standing by one of several ugly aluminium ashtrays. She dropped the butt in it before marching to the locker room to step into a gown, don sleeve protectors, shoe covers, a surgical cap, a face shield, and three pairs of latex gloves.

The autopsy suite had four tables, an efficient air-conditioning and ventilation system, and the standard paraphernalia of Stryker saws, a source lamp with a fibre-optic attachment, multiband ultraviolet lamps, surgical and magnifying lamps, pans, clamps, forceps, scalpels, sinks, hoses, and buckets. On the tiled walls, cabinets and cupboards of all sizes, plus light boxes for X-rays. A steelworker would define it as a stainless steel palace, a chemist as the kingdom of formaldehyde, a pathologist as a place to make a living. This last definition is a troubling one for most people.

The body was on a gurney to the right side of table number three. Dr Valverde’s two assistants sat on the autopsy table, legs dangling, face shields lifted to avoid fogging them up while commenting on last night’s baseball game at the Latin American Stadium. On table number one, another team was doing a twenty-five-year-old woman who had died at home, possibly from a heart attack. Osvaldo handed Dr Valverde a mike which she clipped to her gown. René pressed the record button.

The assistants lifted the body on to the autopsy table as the pathologist steadied the gurney; next they broke the rigor mortis in the arms and legs. Hair and substances under the fingernails were collected first. The cadaver was then undressed and the pockets searched. Four cocaine fixes, a key ring with five keys, a half-full packet of cigarettes, a lighter, a handkerchief, and nine coins, were found and put into evidence bags. After dipping the dead man’s hands in a pan of warm water for a few minutes, Osvaldo dried them, then inked each finger, rolled them on to a ten-print card. All the evidence that had to be transferred to the Central Laboratory of Criminology was ready.

The body was measured and weighed, its temperature taken. René photographed the neck, temple, and bite-marks – with Osvaldo holding a ruler as a scale – as Dr Valverde inspected the injuries again, this time under a fluorescent magnifying lamp. The odontologist, a short, bearded man, arrived. He joked for a couple of minutes before taking the bite impressions.

When he was done, the pathologist carefully checked and swabbed the cadaver’s knees, elbows, the underside of the arms, penis, and testicles. She had it turned over and examined the back, buttocks, and anus, then swabbed the rectum for seminal fluid. Dr Valverde put on tinted glasses, ordered the lights turned off, and used the fibre-optic attachment of the source lamp to look for the fluorescence which semen, blood, saliva and urine display under the high-intensity beam.

An hour and a half had passed. Without a word, Dr Valverde unclipped the mike. René stopped the recorder and the team moved to a corner. Once they had yanked off their third pair of gloves they had a smoke while discussing the postmortem’s next stage. It was agreed that little of it would bear any relation to the cause of death, but it had to be done anyhow.

Seven minutes later, again wearing the mike, the pathologist ran her scalpel from the clavicles to the sternum, down to the pelvis, then removed the breastplate of ribs.

After thirty minutes of work the major organs had been extracted. All were within normal limits. The dead man’s lungs revealed that he had been a heavy smoker. Half-digested beef, plantains, rice, and red beans were identified in the stomach. Dr Valverde adjusted a surgical lamp to stare at the fractured vertebrae and the injured spinal cord. She sighed, asked for the Stryker saw to start working on the skull, then decided against it. An X-ray of the right temporal bone would be enough. The job was completed three hours and ten minutes after it began, as René tied a tag which said ‘Unknown man 4, 2000’ to the cadaver’s toe prior to wheeling him to a sliding drawer in the cold room.