The Sleepless Read online

  But the ferocious internal politics within the coroner’s office had denied him promotion again and again; and twelve years ago, angry and frustrated, he had accepted an offer from Brigham & Women’s to move to their pathology department; and when Boston Central had opened, he had taken over as Head of Pathology. He had become wealthy, respected, thoroughly disliked, and twenty times louder than ever.

  ‘Michael!’ he boomed. ‘This is a wonderful surprise! It must be all of five years!’

  ‘Near enough,’ said Michael. He shook Dr Moorpath’s enormous hand and, just as they always had before, those banana-sized fingers made him feel like a small boy.

  ‘I heard that you quit,’ Dr Moorpath queried, as if quitting were as distasteful as urinating in public.

  ‘Well, yes, I did, kind of,’ said Michael, glancing around the room. ‘I had a little nervous trouble.’

  ‘I heard that, yes. I guess there are some psyches that can take the strain and others that can’t. Death isn’t attractive at the best of times, is it? I’m doing some interesting work on gangrene at the moment – especially gangrene caused by crushing or burning. Fascinating ... but, no, not attractive.’

  ‘Quite an office you’ve got here,’ Michael remarked.

  ‘Hmph, thank you. I like to think that it lends some dignity to a profession that’s notoriously lacking in dignity. The proportions are slightly different, lower ceiling, but apart from that it’s almost an exact replica of the main drawing-room at Foxley Hall, in Huntingdonshire, in England. Except, of course, for the hi-tech equipment.’

  He approached a fine Jacobean-style dresser, and opened it up to form a desk. Inside were three telephones, an Apple desktop computer, and a fax.

  ‘And look at this,’ he laughed. He swung open a narrow oak cabinet next to it, to reveal a CDI. ‘I like the interactive golf ... means I can practise in between cases.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Michael.

  Dr Moorpath closed the doors, and said, ‘Drink? I have some very good dry sherry. Or there’s Scotch; or beer if you want it. Have you tried Singha Beer, from Thailand? It’s very good. Six bottles of that and you can understand Thai, no tedious learning necessary. “Do not be infatuated with honour”, that’s a good old Thai proverb.’

  ‘I’m trying to keep a clear head,’ said Michael.

  ‘Well ... you’re probably wise,’ said Dr Moorpath. All the same, he poured himself a large tumbler of Glenmorangie and held it to his nose for a moment, as if it were an oxygen mask, breathing in whisky fumes. Then he said, ‘Ahh ... there’s nothing like it.’

  ‘You’re probably wondering why I wanted to see you,’ said Michael.

  ‘My secretary said something about reviewing some of my old cases. You’re writing your memoirs? Or reliving your nightmares? Which particular cases did you have in mind?’

  ‘None of them, I’m afraid. I wasn’t being one hundred per cent truthful.’

  Dr Moorpath parked his large bottom on the arm of his sofa. ‘We worked on some good ones, though, didn’t we? What was that last one? That powerboat accident off Spectacle Island, wasn’t it? The lovely Mrs Deerhart III, rich enough to buy anything and everything, except her own amputated feet.’

  Michael smiled wryly, and nodded. ‘She got $7.19 million, which almost made up for them. And she can dance pretty well these days.’

  ‘Well, good for her,’ said Dr Moorpath. ‘That’s more than I can. My wife says that I dance like Godzilla. That’s my fourth wife. You haven’t met Jane, have you? We were married last April in Santa Cruz Huatullo. Beautiful girl – bright, young, brilliant hostess. She was shortlisted for Playmate of the Month.’ He thought for a moment, then noisily cleared his throat. ‘I wouldn’t have minded her doing it, Playmate of the Month, don’t get me wrong, but I’m glad she didn’t.’

  Michael said, ‘The real reason I’m here is, Plymouth have retained me to investigate the John O’Brien accident.’

  Dr Moorpath covered his eyes with his right hand. He remained masked like this for almost a minute, saying nothing, but when he did take his hand away, he stared at Michael with deep revulsion and mistrust, as if Michael had just reported him to the welfare department for abusing his daughters.

  Taking a shallow breath, Michael said, ‘I’d like to ask you one or two questions, if I could.’

  Dr Moorpath’s tone was already hostile. ‘I’ve already spoken to somebody from Plymouth. What was his name? Ballpen, something like that.’

  ‘Rolbein,’ said Michael. ‘And, fine, yes. Rolbein reported that you were very co-operative, as far as you were prepared to go. The trouble was, you weren’t prepared to go very far. You’ve held back a whole lot of very critical information. Like, a preliminary post-mortem report. Like, copies of death certificates. Like, how many individuals died in this wreck, and whether there was any discrepancy between the number of individuals who were found in this wreck, and how many individuals boarded the helicopter at Mr O’Brien’s home. I mean, we’re talking a very substantial insurance claim here, Raymond, a real ball-breaker, and we need that information.’

  ‘Why do you think the commissioner asked me to conduct the post-mortem?’ said Dr Moorpath. ‘And I mean he asked me personally.’ He lifted his hand to his ear, thumb and little finger extended, miming a telephone-call.

  ‘I expect he asked you for the sake of discretion,’ Michael replied. ‘If they’d taken those bodies to the city morgue, the Globe would have front page pictures of them by morning, lying on their respective slabs. “O’Brien Family United In Death”, or whatever.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dr Moorpath. ‘He sent those remains to me because the bodies of John O’Brien’s family are not just carrion, not just street-meat. John O’Brien was a Supreme Court Justice, and John O’Brien’s father was a friend of my father; and this whole tragic business calls for privacy, and dignity, and restraint, and the suppression of wild and idle speculation.’

  ‘Some people are going to say that the only time that people insist on privacy is when they’ve got something to hide.’

  Dr Moorpath thought about that, and made a growling, humming noise in his larynx. Michael could tell that he was deeply irritated. But it was very difficult to resist the temptation to irritate him even more. Dr Moorpath had never welcomed fools or dissidents; and he had always been driven into a rage by anyone who questioned his clinical judgement. But Michael had quickly realized that the angrier he became, the less certain of his ground he really was; and that an outburst of fury was the sign not to back off but to prod, and prod, and keep on prodding.

  ‘Have you completed your preliminary examination?’ he asked.

  ‘When I have, it will go through the proper channels.’

  ‘So you haven’t completed it yet?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘So you have completed it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, either.’

  ‘Raymond ... for God’s sake. You have a job to do and I have a job to do. The man’s dead; his family’s dead. Who are you going to harm?’

  Dr Moorpath gave him one of his famous glittering looks. ‘You really wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me, Raymond. My employers are facing the prospect of paying out millions and millions and millions of dollars, which means that my employers will have substantially less money to invest in the interests of other clients, and substantially less money to buy themselves Maseratis and marble-tiled Jacuzzis. They’ll be seriously pissed. And so will I, because they won’t be seriously pissed with you, they’ll be seriously pissed with me.’

  Dr Moorpath swallowed whisky, and shivered slightly, as if somebody had walked past his burial plot and paused and smiled at it. ‘You haven’t changed, have you?’ he said, with a humourless smile.

  ‘Let me see the report,’ said Michael. He didn’t want to see the report. He kept thinking of burned, shrunken bodies. Masklike grins, flame-exposed teeth.

  Dr Moorpath shook his head. ‘You really would
n’t understand, Michael. When a man like John O’Brien is suddenly killed ... well, it has repercussions. Political, legal, financial ... it’s not like some homegoing suburban family rolling over their station wagon on the VFW Parkway, or some wino dying in an alley. It’s a sensitive issue. It has to be dealt with on many different levels.’

  ‘I understand that,’ said Michael. ‘But Plymouth have as much interest in John O’Brien as anybody else. If not more.’

  Dr Moorpath shrugged. He was behaving as if he were marginally drunk, and it was plain that he didn’t feel helpful. Michael sat and looked at him and thought, how are the dedicated fallen. There isn’t anybody more bitter and stubborn and self-absorbed than an idealist who has abandoned his ideals.

  Minutes went past. Outside the window, smoke kept piling into the summer sky. It looked like heaps of filthy cauliflower. Dr Moorpath finished his Glenmorangie and didn’t even bother to talk. Michael sat watching him, knowing that he wasn’t going to make any progress, yet strangely reluctant to leave. As if Dr Moorpath would suddenly relent, and tell him everything. Or some extraordinary sign would manifest itself, like a shimmering dove from heaven.

  ‘You have a boy, don’t you?’ asked Dr Moorpath, unexpectedly conversational.

  ‘Jason, yes. He’s fine. He’s thirteen now. He’s had some reading problems, but – ‘

  ‘I have children,’ said Dr Moorpath. ‘Juniper – that’s my oldest, she’s twenty-seven now, older than Jane. I think, on the whole, that she hates me. Well, she’s a feminist. It’s strange how feminists hate men. I would have thought that the first job of a feminist would be to make friends with men ... make them her allies, rather than her enemies.’

  ‘Are you going to let me see that file?’ asked Michael.

  Dr Moorpath looked up and raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Mmh?’ and it was then that Michael realized he wasn’t particularly drunk, he was making a point. He was telling Michael in not so many words that the subject of John O’Brien was way off limits, and that he wasn’t going to discuss it under any circumstances whatsoever, and he didn’t even want to be asked.

  Michael said, ‘I think I’ll try that Thai beer after all.’ His throat suddenly felt like thistles. He sensed danger – danger from an unexpected direction, as if he were a swimmer, and something very big and dark and amorphous were rising up beneath him, like a huge black octopus rising through the sea.

  Dr Moorpath opened up an icebox that looked, on the outside, like a Victorian walnut davenport, a little desk for ‘young ladies of learning.’ He took out a frosted bottle of beer and opened it. ‘Looks like Armageddon, doesn’t it?’ he remarked, nodding downtown toward the rising smoke. ‘What was it they used to say? “Armageddon, Armageddon, and Armageddon oudda here.” ‘

  ‘We’re having real problems making any headway with this O’Brien investigation,’ said Michael, watching carefully as Dr Moorpath poured out his beer.

  ‘Well ... under the circumstances, that’s only to be expected.’

  ‘I’m not even sure what the circumstances are.’

  ‘The circumstances are that John O’Brien’s appointment was finally going to tip the balance against the right-wing justices that Richard Nixon first installed. And much more than that. John O’Brien’s appointment was going to change America for ever.’

  ‘Did you support him?’ asked Michael.

  The true expression on Dr Moorpath’s face was disguised by light and shadow. ‘I’m a pathologist,’ he replied. ‘I deal in meat; not political ideals.’

  Michael was about to pursue Dr Moorpath further when there was a quick, token knock at the door, and a swarthy, bearded, harassed-looking doctor hurried into the office. ‘Dr Moorpath, I’m sorry to interrupt you. But they just brought in some victims from the street-fighting; and the police commissioner and the deputy district attorney are very anxious that you should look at them. Apparently there’s some –’ He saw Michael and stopped in mid-sentence, but Michael could guess what he had been just about to say. Apparently there’s some question about who killed them, and how. The cops in the Combat Zone were almost as trigger-happy as the yummies.

  ‘Very well,’ said Dr Moorpath, and stood up. He turned around to Michael, and asked, with consummate dismissiveness, ‘Yes, Michael? Was there anything else?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ Michael told him. ‘I wanted to ask you about times and procedures, and what you did when the bodies arrived here, and who handled them.’

  ‘Can’t that wait till tomorrow?’ asked Dr Moorpath, impatiently, tugging on his white coat.

  ‘I could buy you lunch,’ said Michael.

  ‘Thank you, Michael, but all my lunches are booked.’

  ‘Jasper’s?’

  ‘Thank you. I’m tempted, but sorry.’

  ‘Okay ... ‘ said Michael, standing up. ‘I’m not sure how old man Bedford’s going to take it, but – what? You still play golf together, don’t you, you two?’

  Dr Moorpath checked his glittering Jaeger-le-Coultre wristwatch. ‘Listen, Michael ... I won’t be long. Give me twenty minutes. Read some magazines. Janice will bring you some coffee.’

  Michael sat down again. ‘Raymond ... Edgar’s going to appreciate this.’

  But Dr Moorpath had already swept like a low-pressure storm-front out of the door, leaving Michael alone in his eighth-floor country house, with nothing but silence and air-conditioned coldness and a view of Boston burning.

  He circled the room, picking up a china shepherdess and reading the label on the base. ‘Oliver Sutton Antiques, London. Staffordshire, ca 1815. Guaranteed genuine.’ He carefully replaced it. He didn’t like antiques very much. He didn’t like to think that the people who had fashioned them, and the people who had first bought them, were long since dead and forgotten, their names unrecorded, their lives blown away like dust.

  He went to the window and watched the smoke rising and the traffic sparkling. Eight floors below, in the hospital parking lot, he saw two miniature doctors walk up to each other and hold an ant-like conversation. He saw both of their heads turn as a nurse walked briskly past.

  He was still staring out of the window when the door opened behind him.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry ... ‘ said a girl’s voice. ‘I was looking for Dr Moorpath.’

  He turned around. A tall brunette girl in a grey pin-stripe suit was standing in the doorway, holding three manila folders.

  Michael said, ‘It’s okay ... Dr Moorpath was called down to emergency.’

  ‘I have these photographs, that’s all. He wanted them urgently.’

  ‘You can leave them here. He’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’

  The girl held the envelopes protectively close to her chest. ‘I’m not so sure ... I was told to give them to Dr Moorpath personally.’

  ‘Well ... you can wait, if you want to. He won’t be long.’

  The girl anxiously glanced at her watch; then stepped into the office; and waited, fidgeting from one foot to the other. Michael thought she was very attractive: rather like Linda Carter when she used to play Wonder Woman. In spite of the severity of her suit, she had a very full figure, and her eyes were brilliantly hyacinth-blue.

  ‘I have a lunch appointment at twelve,’ she said, with a quickly-evaporating smile.

  ‘Dr Moorpath shouldn’t be too long,’ Michael reassured her.

  ‘These are blow-ups, you see,’ the girl explained. ‘Dr Moorpath wanted computer-enhanced blow-ups.’

  Michael nodded. He wasn’t really interested. ‘Quite a war going on out there,’ he remarked, inclining his head toward the rising smoke and the circling helicopters.

  The girl smiled, and fidgeted, and checked her watch a second time. Eventually, she said, ‘Listen ... I’m really tight for time. If I leave these here, could you make sure that Dr Moorpath gets them? I mean, right in his hands? They’re real important.’

  ‘For sure,’ said Michael. ‘Just leave them on the desk. I’ll make sure that he gets them.�
�

  ‘Thanks,’ flustered the girl. ‘You saved my life.’ And with that, she laid the envelopes on Dr Moorpath’s leather-topped desk, blew Michael a kiss, and left. Michael sipped his beer and smiled to himself. Before he was married, he would have asked her out by now. Or at least asked her what her star sign was. Sagittarius, he guessed. A beautiful, flustered ditherer.

  Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Still Dr Moorpath didn’t return. Michael heard sirens down below, and saw three more ambulances arriving, their red lights flashing. Doors opened, miniature paramedics rushed around miniature casualties. He didn’t want to look. He had a sudden sense of vertigo, of falling down to the concrete apron two hundred feet below him. He had a sudden memory of broken bodies and trees that grew human hands.

  He prowled around Dr Moorpath’s office some more, staying away from the window. Eventually, maybe inevitably, he arrived at Dr Moorpath’s desk, where the envelopes lay. The top envelope was labelled ROOSA, followed by a long serial number. Michael knew all about Democratic state senator George Roosa. He had been discovered hanging from a roller towel in a gas station men’s room in New Brighton, Watertown. Some said homicide, some said suicide, some said sexual peculiarity. Michael decided that he didn’t want to look at blown-up photographs of George Roosa, dead or alive.

  He lifted up the ROOSA envelope and underneath was one labelled ZERBEY. Michael had never heard of anybody called Zerbey, and he reckoned that he could probably live quite comfortably for the rest of his life without finding out who Zerbey was – particularly if he or she had suffered a horrifying death.

  He heard distant ambulances wailing. Then he lifted up the third envelope and it was labelled O’BRIEN.

  For a long time, he held the envelope in his hand and his hand was trembling as if he had been carrying a heavy suitcase from one end of Park Street subway station to the other.

  O’BRIEN, 343/244D/678E/01X. He even knew what the numbers meant. They were file numbers from the coroner’s office, and the ‘01X’ suffix meant that the contents of this envelope and everything connected with the O’Brien case were strictly confidential, and only for the eyes of authorized personnel. ‘01X’ meant ‘you talk to about this to anybody – even your wife – you’re going to end up jobless and poverty-stricken and maybe worse.’