Destinations Unknown Read online

  I picked up the clipboard and read the address to him.

  “You sure that’s right?”

  I offered the board to him; he stopped at a red light, took the board, and read it for himself. “Huh. That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  “When Doc said East Main, I just kinda assumed it was the Taft Hotel. A lot of old folks and welfare cases wind up croaking there.”

  I was familiar with the Taft; hell, anyone who’s lived here for more than a year knows about it. Once the most popular and expensive hotel in the city (named after William Howard Taft, who’d frequently stayed there), the last fifty years have seen it slide not-so-slowly into disrepair and decay, becoming nothing more than a glorified flop-house where those who’ve reached the end of their rope can crawl into poverty’s shadow and just give up. I’d assumed, as well, that the Taft was our destination, but it turned out we were headed for The Maples, an apartment building located two miles farther down East Main Street. The Maples’ residents were exclusively those elderly who still had their wits and retirement funds very much about them, and who were capable of living unsupervised. The Maples had good security, two doctors who lived on-site, an exercise room, a small chapel for Sunday services (some residents could not drive to church, so church came to them), and touted itself as the place to go for “…those seniors who can still do it on their own.” My grandmother had lived there until her death three years ago. Though I hadn’t set foot in its lobby since then, I had no reason to think that The Maples had suffered a fate similar to that of the Taft.

  “Well,” said Dobbs, tossing down the clipboard as the light turned green, “I think we can rule out having to wear the spacesuits today.”

  “Another thrill my life will have to do without.”

  “I can feel your heartbreak all the way over here.”

  I picked up the clipboard and looked at the sheet again. Under Caller’s Name, the space was blank.

  “Aren’t they supposed to take the name of whoever calls it in?” I asked.

  “Supposed to. The city’s supposed to have fixed all the potholes in the road, I’m supposed to weigh thirty-five pounds less than I do, and you’re supposed to be doing something else besides helping me. For that matter, this whole to-do was supposed to be handled by the book, but there ain’t been nothing about this has gone like it’s supposed to.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning that the doc was ordered by the mayor to examine the body hisownself. Doc doesn’t do that unless it’s a murder scene. Some old lady croaks in her apartment or a hotel room or at a nursing home, he sends one of his flunkies to look over the body and make the call to whatever funeral home is gonna be handling it.” He shook his head. “Not this time, no sir—this time the doc is ordered to do it personally. Mayor called him at home around five this morning, made the man get out of bed and go to it pronto. Doc was awfully tight-lipped about everything when he called me about the paperwork. Can’t say I’m too happy about being kept out of the loop.”

  I remembered the call; it had come into the office just as I arrived for work. Dobbs had seemed confused as he looked at the forms left on his desk by the coroner—his end of the conversation consisted of, “Yessir”, and “But why—?”, and “We’ll get on it right now.” It seemed like an awfully short exchange, considering what we were being sent out to do.

  “So,” I said, “you’re supposed to be given more information than this?”

  Dobbs nodded. “Yeah, but like I said, supposed to don’t always cut it. My guess is that one of the neighbors found her, told the building manager, and the manager called the police, cha-cha-cha—though why in hell the mayor got involved in this is beyond me. We can always ask whatever poor doofus the department left on the scene.”

  “There’s gonna be a cop there?”

  He nodded. “There’s always a cop there until we show up. Once foul play has been ruled out—and that’s already been done—what you’re left with is a body that’s just laying there stinking up the place and making everyone else nervous as hell. The law doesn’t require that an officer remain with the body until it’s picked up, but it ain’t exactly like Cedar Hill is Miami. They can spare an officer to corpse-sit for an hour or so.”

  “I’ll bet that puts them in a cheery frame of mind.”

  “Well, we’re gonna be finding out here in a minute or three.”

  He drove the wagon into the Maples’ underground parking garage, expertly backing up so that the rear doors faced the freight elevator. We got out, unloaded and unfolded the collapsible gurney, grabbed the clipboard, Latex gloves for each of us, some scissors in case there was carpet work to be done, a couple of filter masks, and then, finally, the body bag.

  Dobbs pressed the button, stood waiting for a moment, then shook his head and said, “Shit, I forgot, come on.” He started walking toward one of the parking garage doors that led into the lobby. “We have to get the elevator key from whoever’s manning the front desk.”

  A set of glass doors opened into a warmly-lighted hallway with gold carpeting. On the walls hung bulletin boards with announcements and fliers tacked on them—Bingo Night, a pot-luck dinner at a local church, a lecture on living wills to be given at the library next week—as well as tastefully-framed prints of bowls of fruit, glamorous cityscapes, and myriad pastoral scenes. The furniture was clean and over-stuffed, the sofa pillows fluffy, the doilies and afghans perfectly folded and arranged; the whole setting designed to make you feel Right At Home. Smells of soup, cornbread, and meatloaf wafted from the cafeteria (The Maples Dining Room, as it was called by the sign), and the murmuring of the voices coming from the dining area suggested that it was filled with people who’d known each other for decades and could easily fall into the kind of familiar, friendly conversation that, between lifelong friends, becomes a kind of art unto itself.

  Despite my increasing anxiety over what Fred and I were about to do, I slowed down, chancing a glance into the dining room, then stopped in my tracks entirely when I saw how everyone was dressed; the women wore either dresses or attractive suit outfits, while all the men were in slacks, jackets, and ties. I looked around, trying to see if there were anything posted about a dress code, and then just as quickly realized there wouldn’t be. This dining room was filled with people who remembered what it was like to treat mealtime as an event, every day. You dressed for meals not only out of respect for yourself, but for those with whom you would share the meal. Looking at the diners at that moment, I found myself wondering when, how, and why we’d come to view what was meant to be a sociable event of the day as just another excuse to grab some chow. Me, I frequently ate alone while wearing only my underwear, and the last time I’d had a dinner date, I’d worn khakis and a polo shirt, while my date arrived resplendent in her jeans, sandals, and OSU sweatshirt. Maybe we think it’s too old-fashioned or outright corny to dress like this for meals every day, but I’d’ve bet a week’s salary that every person in there had spent a lot of time deciding what to wear, then just as much time getting ready, and were probably enjoying their meal more than we of the jeans-and-T-shirted pizza nights could or would ever understand.

  Somebody has to come up with these commonplace profundities. Might as well be me.

  I smiled at an old woman who looked up and saw me looming in the doorway, then double-timed it to catch up with Dobbs, who was speaking to the receptionist at the front desk.

  “…moved in about seven months ago,” the woman was saying, “and in all that time I don’t remember her ever having a single visitor.”

  Dobbs gave his head a slow, sad shake. “That’s terrible,” he said, sounding like he meant it.

  “One of the things we try to do here at The Maples is make sure that none of our residents feel isolated—it’s a terrible thing to be getting on in years and feel alone and lonely. We encourage everyone to interact with their neighbors—you know, sort of keep an eye on each other’s well-being so that no one feels ignored or for
gotten…but Miss Driscoll never really allowed herself to become part of The Maples’ community. Oh, she’d be pleasant enough at meals and come to the weekly residents’ meetings, but aside from those times, she rarely left her room.”

  Fred put on his stroke-face again, considering this. “And she never had any visitors?”

  The woman behind the desk shook her head. “Not unless you count delivery people. And the thing is, she has—had—one of our bigger apartments. People who can afford anything on 7 or above are, well…comfortable, you know? They’ve been careful with their money. And—oh, God, this is going to sound so mean—our older residents who have a little money, they tend to get visitors. You know—family and friends who want to be left a little something in the will. Not to imply that they don’t love their grandma or grandpa or great aunt or whoever, but…oh, my; I’m really putting my foot in it here, aren’t I?”

  “Not particularly,” said Dobbs.

  The woman shook her head. “But not Miss Driscoll. Never a visitor, just the deliveries. I’ll bet she had two, three packages a week delivered to her. And some of those packages were fairly sizeable. On days when she had deliveries, she never came down for meals, just called the desk and said she wasn’t feeling well and could she have her meals sent to her room. We do that here, send meals to a resident’s room if they’re not feeling good enough to come down.”

  “So she’d sometimes miss, what—three meals a week?”

  “More, if it was a big delivery day.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder why Dobbs was asking all these questions, unless it had something to do with what he’d told me about treating the dead with respect; maybe asking questions gave him some sense of what kind of person they had been while alive, and helped him decide how best to treat their remains.

  And maybe he was just a good, old-fashioned, first-class nib-shit.

  The woman behind the desk gave the freight elevator key to Dobbs. “Your gurney doesn’t squeak, does it?”

  “No, ma’am, it certainly does not.”

  She nodded her head. “That’s good. I wouldn’t want the other residents to be disturbed by this—at least, not any more than they already have been.”

  Dobbs thanked her for the key, turned to leave, then looked back. “You don’t by chance know who called this in, do you?”

  “I know it wasn’t me, I just came on-duty a couple of hours ago, but…wait a second, please, I’ll check the phone log.” She called up something on her computer. “We have to keep records of who makes this kind of call, and when, all that good stuff.” She found was she was looking for, scrolled up, then down, then said, “Huh.”

  “Something wrong?” asked Dobbs.

  “There’s nothing here. If the call had been made from this desk or the manager’s office, it would be entered in the phone records. But…there’s nothing.”

  “So maybe it was one of her neighbors?”

  “Let me check.” She called up another file, then another, then one more. “Okay, this is odd.”

  Dobbs gave me a quick look, then went back to the desk. “You’re not gonna actually make me ask, are you?”

  The woman looked at him, then back at the computer screen as if she expected the information she’d been searching for to have suddenly appeared during the interim. “We have certain rules that all our residents abide by, and one of those rules is that in a situation like this, if they make the call to the police, they are to immediately inform us so that we can enter it into the records. When a resident passes away on the premises, it’s vital that we record every bit of information—not just for the family’s peace of mind, but to protect ourselves should any legal questions arise.” She looked back at Dobbs. “There’s nothing here about Miss Driscoll’s dying—and I mean nothing.” Her eyes narrowed. “This is lazy and thoughtless and inexcusable. We could get into a lot of trouble for this.”

  “I won’t say anything,” said Dobbs. “But it looks like maybe this’d be a good time for you to enter some information, huh?”

  “I…I don’t know any of the specifics, I wouldn’t know where—”

  Dobbs handed her a photocopy of the forms given to him by the Coroner’s Office. “Most everything’s there; when we got the call, when the doc arrived here, the estimated time of death, the doc’s official conclusion, all of it.”

  She took the forms from him. “Do you always carry extra copies of this stuff?”

  “All the time. You’d be surprised how many people forget to write this stuff down when someone dies.”

  She pressed the forms against her chest and sighed with relief. “You’re a life-saver, you know that?”

  “All part of my famous curmudgeonly charm.” And with a wave, he left, gesturing me to follow.

  “Why all the questions?” I asked him as we re-entered the parking garage.

  “You mean about Miss Driscoll?” He shrugged. “I dunno, it’s just something I do on jobs like this. Seems like, since I’m gonna be the last human contact their bodies will ever know outside of a funeral home, I ought to know a little something about them. It’s a terrible thing, to have your last human contact be with a total stranger. Just seems right somehow, knowing a few things.” Another shrug. “Or maybe I’m just a nib-shit.”

  I laughed, but not too loudly.

  Dobbs inserted and turned the key, pressed the button, and the freight elevator doors opened. We maneuvered the gurney into the too-wide, too-deep, too brightly-lit compartment and Dobbs pressed 7. The doors closed with a thump! that seemed so loud I actually started.

  “Easy there, Rambo,” said Dobbs. “This ain’t the time to get a case of the willies. You just follow my lead once we’re up there, okay? Let me do the talking with the officer, and once we get inside, don’t do a thing unless I say so, okay?”

  “Okay.” I sounded just as anxious as I felt.

  “Hey, look at me. The first time I had to go along on one of these, I was so scared I thought I was either gonna piss my pants or throw up. I surprised myself by doing both.”

  “If that was meant to make me feel better, it needs a little work.”

  “I’m just saying that it’s okay to be nervous. Do yourself a favor and don’t fight it. Fighting it’s what makes it worse. If it’ll help, just pretend that you’re moving a piece of antique furniture. I know that sounds cold-hearted as all get-out, but if you can put yourself into that frame of mind—that you’re moving a thing, not a person—it’ll go easier. Besides, when you get right down to it, that is all we’re doing, moving a thing. It’s not really a person; it’s just something they once walked around in.”

  “Then why bother asking all those questions like you did?”

  “We’re not talking about me, Einstein, we’re talking about how you can handle this. I’ve been doing this a helluva lot longer, and asking questions is how I deal with it so I can get to sleep at night and not feel so soul-sick and sad when I wake up the next morning that I can’t get out of bed.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you, Fred.”

  “I know. And I apologize if my tone was a bit harsh. But that’s my advice for you; if worse comes to worst, just think of them as being a piece of furniture, got it?”

  I swallowed—a bit too loudly for my nerves—and nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Look, on an average month the Coroner’s office only gets maybe one or two calls like this. Mostly what you and me will be doing is hauling bodies from the morgue to whatever funeral home they’re going to. We might have to maybe drive a body over to another county, or go to another county to bring a body back here, but mostly what we do is fill out paperwork and sit around waiting for Doc to call us with a job.”

  “Filling out paperwork sounds delightful right about now.”

  Dobbs reached across and patted my arm. “You’ll be fine. Just do me a favor—you feel anything coming up or your bladder starting to do the Watusi, you make a beeline for the toilet. Oh, I forgot to mention—the first two things you locate onc
e we’re inside are, 1) the body, and, 2) the toilet. Long as you know where both of them are at all times, you should be okay.”

  The elevator came to a groaning stop and the doors opened. We rolled everything out into a concrete corridor, following the signs past custodian closets and storage rooms until we came to a set of heavy swinging metal doors that led into another warmly-lighted hallway with gold carpeting. Its design and decor was an almost exact replica of the lobby.

  According to the wall-mounted signs, 716 (Miss Driscoll’s room) was to our left. We rounded the corner (making almost no noise whatsoever; Dobbs was right, this gurney was quiet) and the police officer sitting watch outside the room rose from her chair and gave us a nod.

  “Been waiting long?” asked Dobbs when we got there.

  “About forty-five minutes,” said the officer, whose nametag identified her as Carol Seiler. She pushed some blonde hair back from her almost-cherubic face (the only thing marring the “cherubic” image being the heat she was packing) and said, “I guess I have to earn my salary now and ask you if you’ve got some official-type paperwork to show me.”

  Dobbs handed her the forms. She looked them over, nodded, initialed the bottom of each, took her copies, then gave back everything else.

  “You’ve got quite the show waiting for you in there,” she said.

  Dobbs looked at me with an expression that was, for him, wide-eyed: Maybe we’re gonna need the sci-fi gear, after all?

  “Is it bad?” he asked.

  “The body is fine, but the rest of it is…well, a little strange.”

  “‘A little strange’?” said Dobbs. “I don’t like starting my Mondays with ‘strange’. Doc didn’t say anything to me about ‘strange.’ But then, he didn’t say much of anything to me. Don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on this ‘strange’?”

  Officer Seiler shook her head. “And ruin the surprise?”

  By now, I was getting a serious case of the jitters; maybe these two dealt with stuff like this frequently enough that they could afford to be flippant, but my composure was just about at the breaking point.