Edward Lee: Dahmer's Not Dead

DAHMER, J.

Helen felt something crawl up her skin when she read the nefarious name, something she could only describe as a hot chill.

“I wonder what the official C.O.D. was,” Beck queried.

“Probably not a heart attack,” Helen offered.

Beck’s tongue curiously traced her lower lip as she studied the corpse’s face. “Repeated blunt trauma,” she estimated. “But, Christ, it said on the radio he was beaten with a broom handle. I’ve seen enough head traumas to tell you, this was no broom handle.”

“And, Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” a voice drifted up behind them. It was Tom, wielding, as usual, his off-key sense of humor. Off-key because this was a morgue. “Multiple cou-counter-cou strike impacts, to respond to your insightful observation. Evidence is plain due to the extent of irregular pupillary dilation. Two blunt trauma impactations against the cranial occipital bone and the inion process. Multiple fractures and abundant spalling of inner calculi also in acute evidence. How’s that for fancy talk?”

Beck frowned. “The occipital bone is in the back,” she pointed out. “And it would take a man of some strength to crack the inion process with a broom stick. ”

“Then you need to see the assailant,” Tom replied. “A genteel young man by the name of Tredell Rosser. He’s six-three, probably two-percent body fat and weighs in at two-twenty-five. Prison beefcake. This guy’s been lifting weights six days a week for the last four years. He makes Hulk Hogan look like Richard Simmons.”

“But the procumbent skull process?” Beck continued. “That mess wasn’t caused by any broom stick.”

“In my professional estimation, which of course is lauded as undisputable medical fact throughout the world’s community of pathology, the rest of the job was caused by a cinderblock wall.” Tom traipsed forward, snapping on pre-doubled pairs of Becton-Dickinson neoprene examination gloves. “ And a concrete floor.”

Then Helen remembered more bits from the incessant radio coverage. Considerable amounts of blood reportedly were found on the floor and wall where Dahmer’s body was discovered. “Rosser took Dahmer down with the broom handle,” Helen ventured. “Then finished the job by—”

“By ramming his big mug into the wall and floor, with all his God-given might. Keep in mind, Rosser routinely bench presses three hundred and fifty pounds. And the rec superintendent at the prison claims that the guy is no longer allowed to practice on the heavy bag because he frequently breaks it open.”

“He just grabbed Dahmer’s ears and went to town,” Beck morbidly added.

“But we mustn’t misjudge,” Tom said. “Maybe he was just trying to knock a little sense into Jeff.” Then Beck: “Or maybe he was actually using Dahmer’s head to try and break out of prison.” He and Beck cackled, then, like witches.

Helen felt waylaid. “There’s a dead body in the room,” she complained. “How can you tell jokes in front of a corpse?”

“Because they don’t groan when you tell a clunker. Sorry, Jeff,” Tom apologized. “We get a little carried away here sometimes.”

“But, honestly,” Beck added to the fest, “we’re really very nice people once you get to know us.”

You’re both whacks, Helen thought. Only then did she turn to fully view Tom, in his “butcher’s blues,” as those in his field called them. He wore the morgue’s ghastly fluorescent light like a pallor; he could’ve passed for a corpse himself, here in such company. But his sense of humor, she realized, came as necessity. Jovial in a locker full of death, day after day. Sure, Helen knew the routine—her own job wasn’t dissimilar, only in that she got to see the corpses before he did, and she didn’t have to autopsy them. But she had to wonder, now in this strangest of rooms, amid the cloying fetor of formalin and cold blood: How does he keep it together? Here was a man who cut up dead people for a living, who autopsied children and weighed wet, extricated livers the way women weighed potatoes in the grocery store. He’s seen more guts than a fish market dumpster, Helen thought. How can he stand doing this every day?

The answer, of course, was reflective. He did it the same way Helen did her own job every day. He did it simply because it was his occupational responsibility. And by now, she suspected, looking at human innards was no more repulsive to him than the mechanic at the Exxon when he looked into an open hood.

Ranks of storage shelves behind him sat heavy with big smoke-colored glass bottles: JORE’S, ZENKER’S SOLUTION, PHENOL, FORMALIN 20-PERCENT. A tin tray marked AMYLOID/FAT NECROSIS PREP held several bottles of iodine and copper sulphate. A large sink and heat-sealing iron hung on the same wall.

“It’s an incredible head trauma,” Beck went on, refocusing back to the business at hand.

Tom added: “I’ve seen a lot of them, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this bad. Not from blunt trauma, probably not even from a car wreck.”

Helen, to herself, agreed; she’d seen her share herself. But, of course, she saw corpus delectus much differently from a medical examiner or a forensic tech. Helen didn’t need to look close —that was Beck’s job. Helen realized she’d probably never seen a dead human body in such stunning detail.

But key words replayed, something snagging in her subconscious. They’re right, she realized. This is an extraordinary head trauma. The damage is so severe that—

“Wait a minute,” she said. “The investigator in me can’t resist this question. The face is unrecognizable. ”

“Indeed,” Tom quipped.

“So how do you really know this is Dahmer?”

“Many reasons, my dear. For one, that’s his name and ident number on his coveralls.”

“Big deal,” Helen countered. “It wouldn’t be hard to put Dahmer’s clothes on someone else’s body.”

“No, but it would be a tad more difficult to put Dahmer’s teeth in someone’s else’s mouth, wouldn’t it?” Tom, then, held up an evidence bag full of teeth. The bag rattled like a baby toy. “The cavity and filling schemes on these teeth matched Dahmer’s prison dental records.”

“But the teeth were broken out of his mouth during the beating,” Helen argued. “It’s not inconceivable that a third party could’ve put Dahmer’s teeth in the mouth of another corpse.”

“After breaking the teeth out of that other corpse before transport,” Beck suggested. “And beating him to death similarly.”

“Sure,” Helen replied. “Why not?”

Tom laughed. “Women are so suspicious! ”

“Hey, I’m paid to be suspicious,” Helen said. “I’m a state homicide investigator.”

“Have no fear, ladies. The body before you was also positively ID’d as Jeffrey Dahmer, not once, not twice, but three times, by his fingerprints. We’re pretty thorough around here.”

“Oh, well,” Beck chuckled. “It was fun while it lasted.”

“The state regs border on ridiculous, Helen,” Tom offered next, lining scalpels neatly on a shiny tray. “I even had to do a sex-chromatin test on this bastard—”

“You’re kidding?” Beck cut in.

“I wish I was kidding, and after having had the rather immodest opportunity of seeing Mr. Dahmer’s penis with my own eyes, I think I can safely say that the decedent is of the male gender. Or perhaps Helen suspects that a third party attached Dahmer’s penis to someone else’s body.”

Helen made a face like someone sucking a lemon wedge. “Jesus, Tom, you’re so gross. ”

“Hey, I’m paid to be gross,” he cited. “I’m a medical examiner.” Whereupon both Beck and Tom laughed out loud.