3 Quarters (16 page)

The guard then pointed Bobby to a parking area, and soon he was walking past the tablets of the dead, glancing at the graves of political-machine bosses, celebrated mobsters, and robber barons of Brooklyn's notorious past. All safe from the law at last. There wasn't a more appropriate place in all of Brooklyn to fake a murder, Bobby thought.

He followed an arrow marked CREMATORIUM and soon saw a small house of worship, a glass-and-marble columbarium where the remains urns were stored for eternity in polished-brass wall niches, and then the actual cremation building. The warm wind rustled the surrounding trees, and Bobby could hear soft, smothered sobs. Thin, white smoke rose from the hooded chimney as a group of grieving mourners gathered outside the house of worship near an urn garden, waiting for the remains of a loved one.

A young priest stood among the mourners, looking as if he were groping for words of comfort for his elders. Bobby studied the faces of the bereaved, a white clan in black clothes, most of them in their sixties or seventies, each probably wondering when his or her turn in the fire would come. Bobby imagined them wondering where their souls would go. For a long time only the Protestants that Bobby knew got cremated. Then in Vatican II the Catholic Church, while steadfastly opposing birth control and abortion, gave in to the problem of the population explosion by okaying cremation. Now even devout Catholics could pass through earthly fire on the way to the cool celestial plain.

Bobby watched the wispy smoke rise into the diehard sun, saw birds fly through the white puffs of human soot, and wondered if he was wrong. Maybe all that was left of his Dorothea was ash and acrid gas scattered in the dirty city wind.

He walked around the back of the crematorium to the carport, where the hearses delivered the bodies. This was where the cops had found him parked and unconscious, covered in someone's blood. In the sunlight, the place looked a whole lot better than it had that rainy dawn.

Two caskets, one a gray-colored, pressed-wood box and another an expensive mahogany coffin, sat on biers on the loading platform. Bobby saw a tired-looking worker, a Hispanic man in overalls and work boots, sitting on the fender of a pickup, eating an apple. Bobby nodded and the man nodded back. From inside the stone building Bobby heard the low, hungry rumble of an intense fire and the whining of other machines, a gurgling water-filtration system and something that sounded like a sanding machine. All around them were the sounds of life. The cemetery was an urban bird sanctuary, a daily songfest of magpies, crows, geese, mockingbirds, sparrows, quail, seagulls, robins, cardinals, owls, and even parrots. Rabbits, raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, field mice, scurried in the thick bush, the wind fanning over the hillocks and eternal meadows of the magnificently cared for necropolis.

“Carlos?” Bobby asked. “Carlos Orosco?”

The Hispanic man seemed surprised, took the next bite of the crisp apple slowly. “Who's asking?”

“Someone said you might be able to help me,” Bobby said. “You're the head burner, right?”

“Called retort director,” Carlos said. “Someone's dead, you gotta go to administration.”

“Someone might not be dead,” Bobby said quickly.

“Maybe you need a priest,” Carlos said, chewing the apple, the juice rolling over his lip. “Or a head doctor . . .”

“Tom Larkin, he's a cop, he sent me,” Bobby said.

“Yeah?” Carlos said, wary. “How you know him?”

“He's a friend,” Bobby said.

Carlos stood and said, “Old Tom is a nice guy. Good Christmas tipper when I tended his wife's grave. I'm glad he finally found a girl. You be surprised how many people find companions in a cemetery. Widows and widowers, a regular Love Connection.”

“He told me you're the one who found Dorothea Dubrow's remains,” Bobby said.

“You're Bobby Emmet, right? Tom called and said you might come by,” Carlos said.

Bobby knew from years as an investigator that the one thing people loved to talk about almost as much as their kids was their jobs. It was because it was always the one topic on which they were experts.

“What you wanna know?” Carlos asked, looking past Bobby at the empty path. “Ask fast. I can get in trouble from my boss for talking to you out here. Come inside where no one can see us.”

Bobby followed Carlos into the hot crematorium building, where the rumbling sound of intense heat grew louder. Carlos walked directly to one of five ovens built into a brick wall.

“I found her remains right in here that morning,” he said, pulling open the metal hatch cover, pointing inside the cremation chamber, where the rumbling sound now became a roar. “You were in the car outside. I called security. They called the cops.”

The mouth of the oven was three feet wide and ten feet deep, and when Bobby peered inside, he was transfixed by the raging flames of thousands of gas jets eating away a pressed-board box. The giant glowing ember inside resembled a human log. Head and shoulders. Arms and legs. Protruding feet. All one blinding white-hot image. There was no odor as the smoke was quickly sucked up in a roaring draft through a water-filtered chimney.

“How long does it take a body to burn?” Bobby asked.

“With a casket, at sixteen hundred degrees, takes about two hours to burn a human being, maybe a little longer, depending on the body weight,” Carlos said. “Fat guy, he can take three hours. Then it's supposed to cool for another two hours, to let the rest of the smoke go up. You know, it smolders, like a wet mattress. When the smoke cools, it falls as dust. Since eighty-seven percent of the human body is water, most of it goes back into the atmosphere as steam.”

“Afterlife is a puff of steam?” Bobby asked.

“Well, the soul doesn't burn, unless you go to hell,” said Carlos with a laugh. “Like teeth.”

“Teeth don't burn?”

“Teeth and bone, they scorch,” he said. “See, the big misunderstanding about cremation is that you wind up with a pile of ashes. Not true. What you wind up with is really bone dust. A lot of the bones, especially the skull, knee and elbow joints, don't burn so good. Come on the other side, and I'll show you.”

He closed the oven hatch, and Bobby followed Carlos around to the far side of the ovens.

They passed the same open hearse port where the undertakers delivered the dead. From there, Carlos explained, the caskets were placed on biers, rolled to the mouth of the cremation chamber, and sent into the center of the oven on steel rollers. “Then I just light the fire,” he said.

When Bobby and Carlos reached the other side of the ovens, only one was burning. Another body lay in oven number two, cooling.

Carlos opened a trapdoor beneath the oven, where dust from the cooled corpse had fallen the same way ash falls through a fireplace grate. He took a long backhoe and scraped the grainy beige dust into a metal pan. If they were flour, these human remains would have been about enough to make a loaf of bread. Carlos carried the dustpan, lumpy with knuckles, joints, and teeth and some odd-looking metallic objects, into an anteroom, where a machine not dissimilar to a meat grinder sat bolted to a worktable. Along a second wall were various kinds of urns and plain, plastic-lined cardboard boxes marked with the brand name Aftalife.

“You take this here dust, and you sift it to get rid of all the nonorganic material,” Carlos said as he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and sifted the remains through a screen into another pan. This process left behind bones and teeth and what looked like melted and deformed metal screws on the screen.

“Tooth fillings, metal pins and bolts that hold people together after injuries,” Carlos said. “Mostly in older people. These days they use flammable plastic joints.”

Bobby thought Carlos looked like a prospector panning for gold in the dust of the dead. Carlos lifted the gnarled metallic nuggets from the screen and dropped them into a large white plastic container that was half full with other melted and twisted metal objects. “And you dump what's left into this here hole in the top of the remains pulverizer,” Carlos said as he poured the dust and bones through a funnel into the grinding machine. “The knuckles, elbows, knee joints, skull fragments, and the teeth go down to the pulverizer. Then I grind them down to a dust so fine that you could sprinkle her remains from a salt shaker.”

“Salt of the earth,” Bobby said.

“Yeah,” Carlos said as the machine crunched and vibrated and ground the last vestiges of the dead stranger. “But that thing with you? I knew something was wrong when I saw it.”

“What was wrong?”

“Well, to begin with, I scraped up the remains of the woman in the chamber that morning,” he said. “But I never pulverized that dead woman's teeth. I came in and the body was already cremated. I scooped out the dust like the cops asked, but I didn't pulverize the teeth because I knew they would probably need them for an ID.”

“Teeth?” Bobby said, growing excited. “What the hell happened to them? What happened to the teeth?”

“I put them aside in a plastic bag,” Carlos said. “Then a guy from the medical examiner's office, he came, and I gave them to him. His name was Franz. He put them in an evidence bag, and he took them away.”

“This is the first I ever heard of dental remains in my case,” Bobby said.

“I followed the trial on Court TV,” Carlos said, pointing to a TV mounted on a high shelf on the wall near the window. “You have some downtime while the body is burning or cooling. When I watched your trial, I figured someone would have called me. Prosecution. Defense. Nobody did. And no one ever mentioned her teeth. They just said she had no dental records anywhere.”

Bobby remembered that there was no way to match the teeth of the corpse to Dorothea's dental records because there were no records. His excitement ebbed. That's why neither side introduced the teeth as evidence, he thought. You can't match something to nothing. Still, the actual teeth might tell him something. He would go see this Franz guy anyway.

“Thanks,” Bobby said and reached out to shake Carlos's hand. But Carlos's hand was covered with a plastic glove and human dust. They smiled and did not shake. Bobby patted his shoulder.

“So maybe that's why they never used the teeth,” Carlos said, walking Bobby toward the door to the anteroom. “But they never called me about the pacemaker either. So, who knows?”

Bobby stopped before he reached the door, looked at Carlos oddly.

“What do you mean, ‘pacemaker'?”

Carlos pointed into the white plastic pail where the metal objects were gathered. “You get your bolts from people's backs, your pins from their broken bones, your tooth fillings, a lot of bullets, even a spoon or two, and rings that people swallow. Be surprised the shit you find in people's bodies that won't burn. Religious medals, coins, hearing aids, metal rosary beads. People get metal plates in their head, they go in the pail . . . .”

“You found a pacemaker in the body that was supposed to be Dorothea's?” Bobby asked excitedly.

“Of course,” said Carlos. “She had a bad heart, a pacemaker, your girlfriend, no?”

Bobby's eyes widened, and he dried his palms on his jeans, “Did you throw that pacemaker into the pail?”

“No,” Carlos said. “I thought it might be important, because it was a crime, so I put it aside.”

“You gave this to the ME, this Franz guy, too?”

“No,” Carlos said. “I gave that to the lady from the DA's office. The one who hung you . . . face like a tomahawk . . .”

Carlos snapped his fingers several times, trying to pop the name into his head.

“Tuzio?” Bobby asked.

“That's her,” Carlos said. “So how come no one ever mentioned the teeth or the pacemaker in the trial?”

“That's a very good question,” Bobby said.

One thing Bobby knew for sure: In order to have a pacemaker installed, Dorothea would have required surgery. Bobby knew every inch of Dorothea's flawless body. Even the smallest scar would have stood out. Especially around her heart. And he certainly would have felt the battery and small mechanism of a pacemaker above her lovely breast.

“You gotta do me a favor,” Carlos said. “You can't tell my boss you was here or I get fired. Funny, huh, cremation director
fired?”

“Hilarious,” Bobby said.

“I'm thinking of doing a cookbook,” Carlos said, laughing.

“I might have to subpoena you,” Bobby said. “My lawyer will want to do a deposition.”

“That's covered by the union,” Carlos said. “Bringing you in here ain't.”

Bobby was about to leave when he stopped to ask one last question. “I know you found the body in the morning,” Bobby said.

“The remains,” Carlos corrected. “It was already burned.”

“How do you think they got the body in here the night before?” Bobby asked.

Carlos waved his hand and laughed. “That's easy, man,” he said. “People think we have guard dogs and armed guards with shotguns. That's bullshit. We got the laziest rent-a-cops you ever saw. Mostly retired cops. All they ever do is sleep. Half dead. They fit right in around here.”

“What's the name of the security firm?” Bobby asked.

“Gibraltar Security.”

A
t ten to seven Bobby returned to The Winning Ticket to meet Sandy Fraser. Although feeling the first wave of fatigue, he was fidgety with excitement over what he'd learned from Carlos. Dorothea was alive, he was certain. Now he needed to get some answers from Sandy.

The Winning Ticket was packed, two deep at the horseshoe-shaped bar, the maître d' occasionally walking in and paging diners with reservations, leading them past the smoked-glass divider into the crowded dining room that was a buzz of conversations, rattling silverware, occasional bursts of laughter.

At the end of the bar, John Shine seemed surprised to see Bobby back so soon.