than later at the city morgue.”
Putting aside his paperback, Toledano said, “This guy I grew up with, last year he gets himself thrown out of a car at like ninety miles an hour. It’s hard losing a good friend young.”
Ethan couldn’t pretend to grieve, but he was grateful for any conversation that took his mind off Rolf Reynerd. “We hadn’t been close in a long time. Didn’t talk for twelve years, then only three times in the past five.”
“But he made you executor?”
“Go figure. I didn’t know about that till Dunny was here two days in the ICU. Got a call from his lawyer, tells me not only I’m the executor if Dunny dies, but meanwhile I have power of attorney to handle his affairs and make medical decisions on his behalf.”
“Must’ve still been something special there between you.”
Ethan shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Must’ve been something,” Vin Toledano insisted. “Childhood friendships, they’re deeper than you know. You don’t see each other forever, then you meet, and it’s like no time passed.”
“Wasn’t that way with us.” But Ethan knew that the something special between him and Dunny had been Hannah and their love for her. To change the subject, he said, “So how does your friend come to be pushed out of a car doing ninety?”
“He was a great guy, but he always thought more with his little head than his big one.”
“That’s not an exclusive club.”
“He’s in a bar, sees three hotties, no guys with them, so he moves in. All three come on to him, say let’s go back to our place, and he figures he’s so Brad Pitt they want to three-on-one him.”
“But it’s a robbery setup,” Ethan guessed.
“Worse. He leaves his car, rides in theirs. Two girls get him hot in the backseat, half undress him—then push him out for fun.”
“So the hotties were hopped on something.”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” said Toledano. “Turns out they’d done it twice before. This time they got caught.”
Ethan said, “I came across this old movie on TV the other night. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello. One of those beach-party flicks. Women sure were different back then.”
“So was everybody. Nobody’s got better or nicer since the mid-sixties. Wish I’d been born thirty years sooner. So how’d yours die?”
“Four guys thought he’d cheated them out of some money, so they thumped him a little, taped his wrists behind his back, and submerged his head in a toilet long enough to cause brain damage.”
“Man, that’s ugly.”
“It’s not Agatha Christie,” Ethan agreed.
“But you’re dealing with all this, it proves there must’ve been something left between you and your buddy. Nobody has to be executor of an estate, they don’t want to be.”
Two meat haulers from the medical examiner’s office pushed open the double doors and entered the garden-room reception area.
The first guy was tall, in his fifties, and obviously proud about having kept all his hair. He wore it in a pompadour elaborate enough that it should have been finished with bows.
Ethan knew Pomp’s partner. Jose Ramirez was a stocky Mexican-American with myopic eyes and with the sweet dreamy smile of a koala bear.
Jose lived for his wife and four children. While Pomp dealt with the paperwork supplied by the attendant, Ethan asked Jose to see the latest wallet photographs of Maria and the kids.
Once formalities were completed, Toledano led them through an inner door, into the garden room. Instead of a vinyl-tile floor as in the reception area, this chamber featured white ceramic tile with only sixteenth-inch grout joints: an easy surface to sterilize in the event that it became contaminated with bodily fluids.
Although continually cycled through sophisticated filters, the cold air carried a faint but unpleasant scent. Most people didn’t die smelling of shampoo, soap, and cologne.
Four standard stainless-steel morgue drawers might have held bodies, but two cadavers on gurneys made an immediate impression. Both were draped with sheets.
A third gurney stood empty, trailing a tangled shroud, and to this one Toledano proceeded with a stupefied expression. “This was him. Right here.”
Frowning with confusion, Toledano peeled the sheets back from the heads of the other two cadavers. Neither was Dunny Whistler.
One at a time, he pulled open the four stainless-steel drawers. They were empty.
Because the hospital sent the vast majority of its patients home rather than to funeral services, this garden room was small by the standards of the city morgue. All possible hiding places had already been explored.
IN THIS WINDOWLESS CHAMBER THREE stories underground, the four living and the two dead were for a moment so silent that Ethan imagined he could hear rain falling in the streets far above.
Then the meat hauler with the pompadour said, “You mean you released Whistler to the wrong people?”
The attendant, Toledano, shook his head adamantly. “No way. Never did in fourteen years, not startin’ today.”
A wide door allowed bodies on gurneys to be conveyed directly from the garden room into the ambulance garage. Two deadbolts should have secured it. Both were disengaged.
“I left them locked,” Toledano insisted. “They’re always locked, always,’ cept when I’m overseeing a dispatch, and then I’m always here, right here, watching.”
“Who’d want to steal a stiff?” Pomp asked.
“Even some perv wanted to steal one, he couldn’t,” Vin Toledano said, pulling open the door to the garage to reveal that it lacked keyholes on the outside. “Two blind locks. No keys ever made for it. Can’t unlock this door unless you’re already here in this room, then you use the thumb-turns.”
The attendant’s voice had been quickly worn thin by worry. Ethan figured that Toledano saw his job going down the drain as surely as blood was drawn by gravity down the gutters of an inclined autopsy table.
Jose Ramirez said, “Maybe he wasn’t dead, you know, so he walked out himself.”
“He’s deader than dead,” Toledano said. “Total damn dead.”
With a slump-shouldered shrug and a koala smile, Jose said, “Mistakes happen.”
“Not in this hospital, they don’t,” the attendant insisted. “Not since once fifteen years ago, when this old lady was in cold holding almost an hour, certified dead, and then she sits up and screams.”
