Nébulosité croissante en fin de journée
Jacques Côté
(Excerpt from chapter 4, p. 92-98)
The Chevy rolled down Saint-Sacrement Hill. Duval had always been amazed by the weird journey leading to 1600 Semple Street, the coroner's and forensic medicine offices. Having to take a street named "holy sacrament" to go to the morgue seemed a little odd. In the mirror, he could see the two bell towers of the Gothic-inspired church. The car crossed Charest Boulevard and Duval and turned left in Semple Street. The morgue was in an industrial park, in a row of warehouses and sheds. Several trucking companies had their headquarters there, as though they were mandated to take you to paradise or hell. But what amused Duval and Harel were the numerous food companies there, Canadian Salt, Provincial Food Brokers, Nutribec, so close to the morgue. Something to worry people with paranoid tendencies. By chance, rather ironically, Semple Street went nowhere to the west. A "dead end."
The smell of formaldehyde and the sweet miasmas of death perfumed the long white corridor. Cold walls lined with gleaming tiles took you to the autopsy and X-ray rooms.
Louis popped a menthol candy before entering the first autopsy room.
Villemure, the chief medical officer of the Quebec Morgue, was a stocky man in his fifties. He had white hair, light and wavy. Staring at death had not darken the vividly shining blue eyes behind his bifocals, which hung on a string. He was also a pathologist for the Laval University Hospital Centre and was associated with the Faculty of Medicine. Without making a bad pun, you could say he was a workaholic who was working himself to death. He walked the morgue's corridors like a running back on a football field. Twice a week, he taught a class to students, with verve. Laurence had told Daniel that his anatomy lessons were spellbinding. A great teacher, he had his own way of talking to students. "Here you have the Fallopian tubes. Who is Fallopio? No, sir, it's not a constellation. No idea?" His gaze raked the audience in the room. "Fallopio was a Renaissance physician, an assistant to the great Vesalius, whom he succeeded in the chair of medicine at the University of Padua. They didn't tell about you Vesalius, physician to Emperor Charles V? But what do they teach you these days in university? And me almost retired!"
All the detectives liked to work with François Villemure, since he provided leads that saved precious time. Sometimes, examining undigested food in a stomach was enough for him to put the investigators on the right track. "Junk food! Question McDonald's or Harvey's employees close to where she was found. She was raped just after eating this swill."
At the beginning of his career, Duval had worn a mask in the autopsy room, but he'd come to tolerate the smell of decomposition, except for the rare cases when there were maggots wriggling across the tables.
In front of the physician lay the naked corpse of a woman in her fifties, stiff as a board, lividity on her back and side. She'd been found dead behind the Maizeret estate, about fifteen hours earlier. Dionne, the coroner, had asked for an autopsy.
Villemure looked up from the body and welcomed the two detectives.
"Good day, gentlemen. Do you want a dog? The lady was out walking her doggie. It's been turned over to the SPCA."
He plunged his hands in the belly cavity where yellowish intestines bulged like so many inextricable tubes.
"I'll be with you in a jiffy. We're swamped. A heat wave is the deadliest psychopath."
Standing at the swinging door, Harel didn't feel too confident: he'd stuffed his face with spare ribs and egg rolls.
Villemure put the right lung in the tray of the scale, jotted down the weight in his report. Then he cut it into thin slices. After scraping the tissues with a blade, he found out that the lady suffered from oedema, which he also wrote down, as well as the presence of blackish deposits, a result of urban pollution.
Duval was amazed that the white smock of the forensic examiner was never splattered with blood or other bodily fluids, and Villemure's job fascinated him. He'd always been interested in a science that allowed to decipher signs on a corpse and to establish irrefutable facts. Villemure, the sphinx of the scalpel, was never wrong, but he would have to explain why no bullet had been found in Bernier's body.
Duval was very anxious to have the results of Bernier's autopsy, but Villemure was not a man you could hurry.
The doctor looked up and with the bloody tip of his index finger he invited Louis to come and have a closer look. Harel, who was biting his nails, hesitantly stepped toward Villemure, with a disgusted expression on his face.
"See, Louis, the black deposits, that's anthracosis. That's what you've got in your lungs. By the way, I'm still waiting for my bottle."
"Give it a rest, damn it, not again!"
Louis defiantly took out a pack of Export A's, lit one up and took a long, satisfied drag.
Villemure responded with ringing laughter, and Garant, his assistant, and Duval chimed in.
Louis had bet a bottle of port with Villemure that he would stop smoking before the previous year's end, but the physician was still waiting. François was a bon vivant and he sometimes had a drink with Daniel at the Clarendon. They had become friends after arresting a young father. The public prosecutor accused the man of shaking his baby, while the man's lawyer argued the baby had fallen from his crib. Their deposition had resulted in the father's imprisonment. Then Villemure had joined Daniel's jogging club, but he lacked persistence.
The technician, Garant, put on his safety goggles and switched on his rotary saw. It loudly bit into the skull, which he lifted off like a lid after Villemure had cut the scalp from ear to ear. Harel kept his distance. The scalp Garant had just taken off made the woman look like a corpse in a horror movie. It was turned inside out like a limp flesh hood.
Garant always had good jokes to tell about his job, and not always clean ones. Louis retold them at headquarters. Garant's index finger once more called Louis to the table.
"What do you want?"
"Come closer, Louis."
Garant lifted the skull, which had been emptied of its grey matter, and put a cotton ball in the back of the head, where the cerebellum usually was. He pointed at the cavity.
"You see, Louis, now that's a woman's brain!"
The big man guffawed.
Villemure, used to forensic humour, barely curled his lips. Daniel thought the atmosphere in the autopsy room more pleasant than the one in the provincial police offices.
The physician dropped let the right lung in the biomedical waste container; what was left of the big sack slowly slid over the pile of gleaming organs then stopped moving.
"You came just at the right time. I have the X-rays."
François took a packet out of his pocket and threw it to Daniel.
"Good work, guys. Just a bit more and the mortician was going to give a fused bullet to the widow. That's the cause of death. The thoracic fractures and the burns are peri-mortem or post-mortem. The spinal fracture was due to the impact against the wall. The tissues show traces of alcohol. On a body burned that badly, a bullet wound is impossible to find. At least with the naked eye. Besides, nothing indicated to my intern that he was supposed to look for a bullet on the X-rays. It's the last thing you think about when you get a road accident victim. In a case of suspicious death resulting from arson, that's different, but in this case..."
Duval had never known Villemure to justify himself this way.
The technician took the mobile shower head and sprayed the eviscerated corpse with water and disinfectant. Harel looked into the body as it was gradually emptied of its organs. Along the ribs, the tissues had the orangey tint of the roof of the Olympic stadium. Harel wondered how the mortician would be able to reconstruct the body for the funeral home.
Villemure picked up the heart and examined it. He noticed cholesterol deposits. One coronary artery was 92% blocked. He nodded: he'd just found out the cause of death.
"Come see, Louis. You too, Daniel. Look at these yellowish deposits in the coronary arteries. That's cholesterol accumulated on the artery walls, blocking them. Which would explain her death."
Duval asked the question, to force Louis to think about it.
"What does that?"
"Eating meat, saturated and hydrogenated fats. It's genetic too, in some cases."
"Anyway," Louis retorted, "you can always be killed by a mad man who's traded shooting clay pigeons for shooting drivers. This morning, in the papers, they were saying that in the States a doctor has been accused of murdering ten babies."
Villemure took off his gloves and washed his hands under the faucet. He turned to Garant.
"Go get the guy who killed himself in the motorcycle accident. Follow me, gentlemen."
The detectives' shoes clapped on the white tiles. Duval and Louis were constantly saying hello to old colleagues. Two years earlier, the morgue had been in the basement of provincial police headquarters. Villemure said he missed his old Victorian morgue on Saint-Cyrille Boulevard.
At the end of the hall there was the room where unclaimed bodies were stored; they went for government burial after six months. On the right, a freezer could take around fifty corpses on slabs, and about fifty others on the floor.
Villemure opened the hermetically sealed door.
The compressors of the refrigerated compartments switched on and the lighting in the morgue flickered.
Villemure pulled on the handle of Bernier's fridge compartment. He raised the white sheet under which lay the charred, unrecognizable remains. Harel's eyes narrowed, and Daniel bit his lip thinking of what Laurence had told him at the restaurant. It was hard to tell what animal species the body belonged to. Harel couldn't believe that man had screwed the woman he'd seen the morning before. Villemure closed the drawer.
"I'll show you the X-rays."
The physician hanged the films behind the illuminated screen.
"The bullet went in through the right pectoralis major. As it went through, it hit the lung and severed the pulmonary vein, causing fatal bleeding before coming to a stop against a thoracic vertebra. The bullet entered at an angle of 37 to 40 degrees."
He wrote in his report "killed by bullet," switched the light off and put away the X-rays.
"Thanks, François," Duval said. "When will you come back to the club?"
"I'm running around enough these days. I've got interns, thanatologists, and especially way too many bodies. But let's arrange a little outing by phone. What do you think?"
"Okay by me!"
"Mimi is doing well?"
Villemure's daughter, Raphaëlle, was also studying at the Ursuline school.
"Apart from regular verbs, algebra and the damned pleated skirt she doesn't want to wear anymore, she's doing fine."
"My girl has a boyfriend. Seventeen and a half years old. As soon as he is of age, I'll have him prosecuted for statutory rape. You should see that zombie! We send our girls to the best institutions and they bring home the riff-raff from the public schools."
The automatic garage door opened. A hearse from J.A. Bouchard & Sons backed up to the unloading bay. Two sinister-looking employees slid the stretchers out. One big corpse, one small.
"Here you go, Doctor. He blew his brains out after offing his wife."
Villemure's reddened, discouraged eyes looked morosely at the big red bags. He looked up to Daniel.
"The dead are after me!"
"You're lucky, for us it's a zombie named Pouliot," Louis chuckled.
They laughed and Villemure said:
"Well, bye, guys. Good luck with the investigation. Dan, you call me. As for you, Loulou, I'm waiting for my bottle..."
© 2000 Éditions Alire & Jacques Côté
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