Morgue (6 page)

But I was a reserved kid, more inclined toward reading than sports. I would often walk ten blocks to the public library, check out a stack of books, and then bring them home, where I'd lie in a hammock on our massive porch and voraciously consume every word. That was another of my mother's habits that stuck. Nothing distracted me from my journeys to Thermopylae, Belleau Wood, Waterloo, and a thousand other places my books took me.

I was a good student, but I didn't love school, so I made the best of it. Mostly. My first day of school reflected how I'd feel about classrooms for the rest of my days: The teacher introduced herself and turned her back to write on the blackboard. I saw my chance. I walked out of the classroom and ran all the way home. My mother marched me right back, and maybe out of respect for my mother, I spent the next nineteen years of my life in some type of classroom.

When the time came, my parents sent me to a private, all-boys Catholic high school, St. John's Prep in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In our parochial little 1950s world called Brooklyn, it was so far away it might as well have been in a different state, but in reality, it was only about five miles as the crow flies. I walked five blocks and took two trains and a bus to school and back every day. I couldn't have played sports, even if I'd wanted to, and I didn't work after school because I simply didn't have time between all the buses and trains. All my classmates lived outside my neighborhood, and none of my friends on the block went to St. John's, so high school was a solitary time for me.

Because I didn't really ever get to know any of the other boys at school—my introverted nature and hair that started turning prematurely gray at thirteen played big roles in that—I spent a lot of time in the school's vast library, reading. My favorite topic was history … until I discovered the section about guns. I didn't own a gun, and other than small-caliber plinking at cans on occasional upstate outings with my dad, I hadn't really spent much time around them. But I was fascinated by these machines—how they worked, how they were made, and what they could do.

My first gun, a Remington Model 513S bolt-action .22 rifle, was a gift from one of my father's colleagues, a big-game hunter who sent it when he heard of my budding interest in guns. I still have it.

I didn't know back then how important guns would be to the rest of my life.

At home, our lives weren't necessarily what you might expect from a household headed by a doctor and a lawyer. In time, my three younger sisters came along, and our house buzzed with constant activity. My mother commanded the child-rearing like General Patton, while my father ran off to fight different wars.

My frugal father always turned over his paychecks to my equally frugal mother, who managed all the finances. We were a solidly upper-middle-class family, but we didn't look like it to the rest of the world. My mother deplored ostentation. Quiet, austere, and very intelligent, she even dressed plainly. She didn't like jewelry, but on special occasions she'd wear pearls. She didn't think she was pretty, and she never wore makeup, her wedding ring, or a watch. She kept her hair cropped short.

Our house was filled with books, though. My mother read endlessly, especially history books, and she believed it was the key to her children's success, too. If she had to choose between buying a book or indulging in a new dress, it was no contest. Always the book.

Something else I remember about her: I never saw her cry in public, even when her parents and siblings died. She believed crying in public was undignified and showed weakness, and she chastised all of us when we cried.

It's funny, sometimes, the things that stick.

*   *   *

Dominick Di Maio lived in perpetual motion. He always came home for dinner, but often went back out afterward and on weekends. He worked part-time jobs in all of the small private hospitals all over Brooklyn and Queens, running from one to another, seven days a week and twelve hours a day. None had pathologists on staff, so he'd drop in, examine their day's lab reports, render his diagnoses, then move on to the next. At one point, he worked five different jobs simultaneously. Around the same time, he also took a part-time job, just $4,500 a year, doing autopsies for the New York medical examiner.

In his work, he was a dogged investigator with a sharp mind. Although he was undeniably a full-blooded New York Italian, he seldom exhibited the stereotypical flamboyant passion. The few times he ever truly exploded in full-throated anger tended to be when his sense of justice had been betrayed, and that was most often when an innocent child was dead.

Privately, he had an outgoing personality, but he never dominated the room. He didn't make many friends because he was always working, but more important, he didn't make many enemies, either. He didn't rattle easily, couldn't be bullied, and remembered slights. He collected stamps. He loved to relax by swimming, so he'd often go the beach and swim way out. The son of an Italian opera singer who also wrote music, my father could play piano by ear, mostly jazz and Big Band stuff. He once loved fishing and boating, but he gave them up when they started to impinge on his work.

My father was also a taskmaster who took a special interest in his kids' studies. He expected me to shine in the classroom, but he expected no less of his three daughters. He believed they were equals in every way and could achieve just as much. And they did: They all became doctors, too.

But work was never truly separate. In our house, death and life coexisted. Death was just something we lived with.

He'd developed an interest in forensic pathology even before it was a recognized specialty. Cases of child abuse particularly unnerved him, long before child abuse became a cause célèbre in the modern media.

And when he started his medical career in 1940, forensic medicine had far fewer tools than today. They had fingerprinting, blood typing, dental comparison, X-rays, and comparatively primitive toxicology. The best tools were a scalpel, a microscope, and a doctor's own eyes.

Dad started working part-time for the Chief Medical Examiner of New York in 1950, and was hired full-time in 1957 to be the deputy ME for Brooklyn, the most populous of the boroughs and therefore the morgue's busiest division.

My father dragged me and my three younger sisters to hospitals and morgues at a young age. He didn't want us to be afraid of death. It was partly because he just assumed that we'd all be doctors someday, but also because his own relationship with death was casual. He wanted us to respect the tragedy of dying, but be drawn to its mystery, too. He considered his grim work a lifesaving pursuit, an early warning system against epidemics, killers, and the simple human tendency to snap to judgment without the benefit of facts.

He needn't have worried about us. We kids often stole clandestine glances at Dad's gruesome crime scene and morgue photos, which he kept in files in his closet. We ransacked his bookshelves for surreptitious glimpses of corpses and fatal wounds. More than once, we were told to stay in the car when he was called to inspect a fresh body, and we strained mightily to see it.

To me, it was just life. It was a sad side of reality, but it was reality.

I recall a picnic on Staten Island when I was ten. At the time, my father was the deputy medical examiner for the largely rural borough south of Manhattan, and in those days his morgue was surrounded by open fields and undeveloped land. On weekends, the whole family often took the ferry to Staten Island—the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge hadn't yet been built—so my energetic father could squeeze in just a little more work. Afterward, we'd park in some shady spot behind his morgue, open the car windows, and listen to the radio while we ate lunch and played in what seemed to me, a Brooklyn kid, to be a vast wilderness.

On this particular day, we parked behind the morgue and piled out for another glorious outing. My father opened the trunk to retrieve the picnic basket and sitting right beside it, like some ordinary piece of luggage, was an open box containing a human skeleton.

He thought nothing of it. But more important, the little boy standing next to him—me—thought nothing of it either.

*   *   *

By the time he became New York City's fourth-ever Chief Medical Examiner in 1974, my father had a special phone under his bed for emergency calls. Cops would show up at the front door at all hours to take him to the latest killing floor.

Every night, he walked through the deepest, darkest hallways of the morgue to roust intruders who frequently sneaked in for macabre thrills. He even rooted out a secret call-girl and gambling ring that was operating out of the ME's office at night. And even though he managed the world's biggest and most political morgue, he still performed more than occasional autopsies alongside his 129 medical examiners, morgue assistants, investigators, drivers, and secretaries. All for just $43,000 a year, which was low even in those days, especially for the top forensic detective in a city that never sleeps and never stops dying. (As Deputy Chief Medical Examiner in Dallas at the time, I earned significantly more than my father.)

New York was broke, and the ME's office was slowly decaying. It was underfunded, understaffed, and inbred. My father was undeterred. Death didn't take a holiday.

Still going a mile a minute, he taught classes in medicolegal investigation at Brooklyn Law School, has staff privileges at several local hospitals, and lectured at St. John's University.

Through it all, his compassion and his coolness under fire remained intact. Not many people knew that whenever he got a new overcoat or pair of shoes, he didn't throw out the old ones. He took them down to “The Basement” and gave them to the low-paid dieners, the morgue attendants and autopsy assistants—diener being a term derived from the German word
Leichendiener
, which means “corpse servant”—who did the dirtiest work for the least reward.

My father didn't play political games well. In fact, he hardly played at all. He didn't back down from a fight, but he didn't pick them. And he didn't run to the
New York Times
with every high-profile death.

And there was death. Always death. Plenty of it. My father played a role in some of the biggest death cases in New York City history. Ironically, many of his cases would echo in my own career decades later.

In 1975, he reopened an investigation into the bizarre suicide of CIA scientist Frank Olson, who experimented with various biological weaponry for the government. In 1953, CIA agents secretly dosed Olson with LSD, and nine days later he plunged to his death from the thirteenth-floor window of his Manhattan hotel. The CIA told police Olson had suffered a nervous breakdown, and in a delusional, paranoid fog, he committed suicide. Based on the police investigation, my father, then only an assistant ME, declared it a suicide. Case closed.

Not quite. When my father learned twenty-two years later about the CIA's illicit drug experiments, he was angry. The Olson family sued the federal government, and my father took a fresh look at the case, which opened the door to an eventual exhumation in 1994. While no definitive conclusions could be reached forty years after Olson's death, many forensic experts believe Frank Olson was murdered by shadowy American agents who were never brought to justice.

During the four decades my father worked in the ME's office, bizarre and violent death was commonplace. The serial killer known as the Son of Sam paralyzed the city. He examined various remains thought to be Jimmy Hoffa (they never were). Mob hits happened with frustrating regularity. Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom. Famed designer-to-the-stars Michael Greer was murdered in his Park Avenue apartment during an anonymous homosexual encounter, a 1976 case that remains unsolved to this day. Then as now, celebrities like gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, poet Dylan Thomas, and troubled actor Montgomery Clift made headlines when they turned up dead in their hotel rooms, brownstones, or Upper East Side apartments. My father worked on many of them.

And he solved some mysteries, too. Take the strange 1954 death of Emanuel Bloch, famed defense attorney for atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, found dead in his Manhattan bathtub at age fifty-two, just a few months after the Rosenbergs were executed. Bloch, the guardian of the late couple's two young sons, had made his bones defending unpopular figures. So it wasn't the first or the last of my father's death cases in which the media and public didn't wait for evidence before bubbling over with breathless cold war rumor-mongering. While the media cooked up anticommunist conspiracy theories, my father determined that Bloch had died of ordinary cardiac arrest. The headlines stopped quicker than Mr. Bloch's heart.

In the summer of 1975, the bodies of twin brothers Cyril and Stewart Marcus—both prominent gynecologists, bachelors, and peculiar geniuses who shared a thriving Manhattan practice—were founded dead on the floor of their luxury East Side apartment. They'd been dead for a week. Their inseparable, parallel lives ended just as they had started forty-five years before: together.

With no sign of foul play, detectives guessed it was a double suicide. Some blamed a simultaneous drug overdose, and the media had its own fanciful theories.

But my father revealed the real answer. The Marcus twins were barbiturate addicts, a secret kept by their closest associates. When their twin dependency threatened to leak out, they decided to go “cold turkey,” just quitting one of the world's most powerful behavior-altering drugs.

Problem is, barbiturate withdrawal is a killer. It's worse than heroin withdrawal. An addict suffers convulsion and delirium, and his heart literally collapses. That's how the Marcus twins died. Their story alerted America to the problem of drug-addicted doctors and inspired David Cronenberg's 1988 movie,
Dead Ringers.

Then something happened that for most of us would be unimaginable, but not for my father. It wasn't caused by a mysterious virus, a natural catastrophe, terrorists, or an especially prolific serial killer, but it thrust my father into the center of unspeakable carnage.