The Morgue and Me (11 page)

Breakfast went well until I took the plates to the sink. My mom leaned over my shoulder as I was rinsing them.

“Gail tells me you’re going to a party tonight with Julia?” she said.

 

 

I slept the morning away and headed for the morgue around two. I hadn’t been there for three days, since finding the death certificate and getting a close look at Mitch’s bullet wounds. The morgue was cold, as always. It had the same ammonia smell and the normal paperwork in Dr. Mobley’s tray. The everyday details unnerved me: a man had been killed, and life at the hospital just rolled on. Soon enough, Mitch’s murder would be lost in an unremembered past.

The morgue was a good place to think through the case—there was mindless work to do and a blank white silence in the air. I was cleaning underneath the autopsy table they had laid Mitch out on, reviewing what little we knew about him, when an electronic jangling sliced through the room and scared me half to death. My cell phone. Tina.

“Get over here,” she said. “The shyster called back.”

Lawrence Lovell was staring into Tina’s eyes. He was shaking her hand, holding on to it for a few seconds too long. The guy rubbed me wrong already.

“Like I said, I’ve only got a few minutes.” His voice was even silkier in person.

Lawrence Lovell was a pretty man, maybe forty years old, obviously doing anything he could to preserve his looks: dyed hair, manicured nails, an expensive pink shirt.

His office was the half-empty one I had noticed before on our way down the hall to Kate Warne’s. There were framed pictures on his desk, ready to be packed away. In one of them, Lovell stood at the stern of a sailboat, staring dramatically into the wind while his unbuttoned shirt flapped wildly against his body. He must have had no idea how cheesy it looked. There were other pictures—on lakes, in log cabins, and one with a jagged mountain peak in the distance. With apple cheeks and a sun-blocked nose, Lovell pointed triumphantly to the summit. All of the pictures looked recent. The sheriff wasn’t in any of them.

Lovell knelt down by a pile of legal books, athletic in his khaki shorts and leather moccasins, and folded together a moving box. He gave Tina a smile. “So what’s all this about?”

Tina gave him a vague line about doing some background on Mitch Blaylock for a piece in the paper, and how we were talking to all of Mitch’s contacts.

Lovell looked at me for the first time. “No child labor laws at the
Courier
?”

“I’m an intern,” I said.

“Hey, just kidding, sport.”

Tina gave me a warning look. Maybe I had said it a little harshly. Lovell didn’t care; he fixed the sides of the box into place and rose heavily to his feet.

“Mitchell Blaylock. I was his lawyer a few years ago.” He looked up at the ceiling, his face glowing with fond memories as he continued. “That guy, he was a character. I had only been practicing for two years . . . I went to law school in my thirties, you see.”

“Enterprising of you,” Tina said. She was buttering him up.

“Well, thank you. My grandfather started the firm. With Kate’s grandfather, actually.” He reached for a black-and-white picture, a yellowed shot of the original Warne & Lovell out on Main Street. Tina drew over for a look, standing quite close to Lovell. “After Kate got divorced, she decided to carry on her grandfather’s firm. Her maternal grandfather. She took on the Warne name and went to law school.”

That explained why Kate and the sheriff didn’t have the same last name, even though they were brother and sister. Tina didn’t seem to care—her eyes had gone a little hazy as she stared at Lovell. She didn’t move away when he put down the picture.

“I came a couple of years later,” Lovell continued. “I never planned to be part of the legacy myself, but plans change sometimes.”

“Hmmm,” Tina said.

“Anyway, I was just cutting my teeth then, picking up any criminal assignments I could from the court. Poor Mitch, he got picked up on some two-year-old rap for a gas-station robbery.”

“Right, I heard about that,” Tina said.

She didn’t need to prod him, though. Lovell was relishing the chance to be helpful to Tina. He set his phasers to charm and continued. “The evidence was solid. Mitch wouldn’t take the plea the state offered, even though I begged him to.” Lovell’s fingertips bounced softly on the desk. It was like a casting director had called out:
All right, Lovell, now show me wistful!

“He would call me at two in the morning, saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we say this,’ or ‘Hey, let’s invent this alibi.’ It would always be some insane idea,” Lovell said. “Not to mention illegal, usually. I told him I’d do my best, but I wouldn’t cross the line. And he never pushed me on it.”

“Ethical of you,” Tina said.

He shrugged.
Awww, shucks.

That’s when I started to wonder:
Is she actually . . . flirting? With this guy?

“What a character Mitch was,” Lovell said. “I remember sitting there waiting for the jury to get back. I’m sweating bullets. Mitch is facing three years in prison. We’re at the counsel table, waiting there for the judge to come in, and he turns to me and says, ‘That suit looks great on you, Lawrence.’ I mean, what a thing to say. Broke my heart. I felt so bad for him when the jury came back.”

“What kind of suit?” Tina said. Her eyes were all over his body—putting him in different outfits, taking them off. I had to stop this train, and quick.

“Were you in touch with Mitch after he got out of prison?” I said.

Lovell looked at me like I had just beamed in from Pluto.

“As a matter of fact, I was,” he said. “Mitch called a few times, asked me if I knew about any jobs. I think he just wanted somebody to talk to. It was really hard not to like the guy, even though you knew he was up to no good. So yeah, we talked a few times.”

I’d been hoping for a lie, but his story fit the phone records from the hotel perfectly.

A knock sounded at the door—Kate Warne, standing at the edge of Lovell’s office, giving Tina and me a smile as tight as her skirt. “I see you’ve found him,” she said. “We’ll talk later?”

“Sure,” Lovell told her.

She disappeared, and Lovell amped things up another notch for Tina. “Mitch looked up to me, I guess. He used to say things about how smart I was, things like that. It could get kind of embarrassing.” So embarrassing that he’d repeat them to hot girls, hoping to impress them. “But, you know, Mitch just wanted a connection with somebody.”

“Everybody wants that,” Tina said, with far too much subtext.

I cleared my throat. “What did you talk about with him?”

“Not much. Jobs, but I didn’t know of any. I offered to help him find a place.”

I left him a silence to fill, but Lovell had nothing else to say. He checked his watch. “I can’t imagine any of this is important. What’s this—”

“No, you’re right,” Tina said, “it’s probably not. But . . . do you know how Mitch was planning to make money? Anything he might have been planning? Maybe something illegal?”

“Another robbery?” Lovell said with a start. “No, he was trying to find a real job this time. I mean, Mitch always had a scheme in the back of his mind, usually involving money. But I don’t know anything about that. Anyway, I may have given you too much information already, as Mitch’s former attorney. Our discussions were privileged, of course.”

“So, if Mitch was waiting on some kind of score,” I said, “you don’t know anything about it?”

Lovell laughed at me. “I know a few things about Mitch Blaylock, but that’s not one of them.”

“Well, you’ve been very helpful,” Tina said.

Maybe he had. What he’d told us felt like the truth, but it meant that we couldn’t tie Mitch to the sheriff or Kate Warne. We had just faced a major setback, but Tina was beaming. At Lovell.

He shied from her intense look. The world adored Lawrence Lovell, and he could hardly stand it.
I
could hardly stand it.

Tina handed him a card. “Here’s my number.”

“A pleasure.”

 

 

“Was that an act?” I said by the elevators. “Please tell me that was an act.”

Tina shushed me. The doors opened and she pressed the button. On the way down, a shiver ran through her body.

“What a fox,” she said.

I
avoided the topic of Lawrence Lovell on the way back.

When I got home, my mom was cooking about fifteen different items on the stove. They were meals for Daniel and me to eat while they were gone. Every once in a while my dad would come downstairs and hold up an item of clothing. My mom would either look at him like he was an alien or say, “Yes, pack that.”

The hubbub over their trip preparations was getting a little much, so I took my camera out to the lake and snapped some pictures of the lighthouse. I needed a filter I’d left in my room, and the pictures looked washed out and uninspiring. Daniel would be merciless.

My heart wasn’t in it, anyway. I was thinking about Mitch Blaylock. I set up under a tree in Duncan Woods and glanced through the gruesome pictures of his body on my camera, just to remind myself that he’d really been murdered. It hardly seemed possible out in the sunlight with little kids playing in the grass and dashing under picnic tables, making their parents laugh.

The tree had warmed in the sun—it felt soft and improbably comfortable, and my mind was slipping away to a dreamy place, when crunching sounds came from the gravel lot at the entrance to Duncan Woods. A police car. Driven by Sheriff Harmon. He parked, lurched out into the sunlight, and masked his black-pebble eyes behind a pair of cop sunglasses.

He sized up the crowd, thumbs hooked in his belt. I half expected the little kids to start crying and run to their parents. At the picnic benches, the sheriff folded his arms and scouted the grassy area like he was protecting us all from snipers. He probably acted like that all the time—he probably made doughnut runs feel like a matter of national security. I can’t say I was surprised when his sunglasses stopped on me and stuck. He gave me the death-stare for a full minute before he took his first lazy step in my direction.

The tree started scratching at my back. I was trying to remember what I could about search-and-seizure law from all the cop movies I’d watched—I had those pictures of Mitch right on my camera, and if the sheriff saw them, I’d be toast.

He didn’t stop until he was just a foot away, standing tall above me. I could barely see his face past the bulge of stomach hanging over his cinched waist. He waited to speak. I pulled the camera to my side.

“Havin’ a good summer?”

A fake smile flashed on his face and disappeared just as quick.

“Lovely, thank you.” The guy brought something out in me. He didn’t seem to like it.

“How’s your work?”

“Tremendously instructive, I’d say.”

He nodded very slowly. He continued nodding. He kept it up until I thought his neck might give and his head would roll off toward the monkey bars. My hand was getting sweaty against the camera strap.

Finally, he said, “Well, be careful.” And then he walked away.

I guess he thought he’d proved something. But something in me hardened as he sauntered back to his car. I wasn’t going to listen to Mike, or my parents, or anyone else who told me to give it up—I wanted to know everything that had happened to Mitch.

 

 

I’d cut my work short when Tina beckoned me to Lovell’s office, and now the whole afternoon had slipped away. I drove to the morgue, wishing I could be like those B-list stars on bad TV crime shows who commune with the dead through their psychic powers and/or female intuition. They had one about a girl who worked in a morgue, and the dead people told her all their special secrets. Maybe Mitch would talk to me like that through the pictures on my camera. Maybe he’d tell me what the sheriff had done to him.

It was getting late by the time I got to the paperwork and checked Dr. Mobley’s things for clues. There was nothing of note in the desk. The plastic casing for the Vista View memory card sat in the same place, starting to collect dust. Maybe I could do a good deed and point Dr. Mobley toward a better brand, I thought, as I organized the last of the papers and shut the filing cabinet.

On my way out, a shadow was outlined on the frosted glass of the entrance. A thin, feminine figure. Knocking lightly on the door.

I was hoping it was Tina and not a hospital nurse with some question I wouldn’t be able to answer, when I opened the door and found Julia.

“Surprise,” she said.

Big surprise.

“Uhhh, yeah. Hi?”

She peered down the hallway behind me. “You alone?”

“Uhhh, yeah.”

“Oh, good. I stopped by your house. Your mom said you might be over here, so . . . well, I took a chance. You mind?” I was too flustered to stop her. She edged past me into the hallway, staring wide-eyed into the autopsy room. “So creepy. Can I go in there?”