Anonymous Rex by Eric Garcia Page B

after Ernie died and stayed split until well after I was thrown out of New York.
    “No … but he’s very busy.”
    “As are we all. Please, tell him that a private detective would like a few moments of his time, nothing more.” I’m trying to be as polite as possible, and the effort is making my teeth itch.
    The assistant mulls it over for a while, then wordlessly turns and disappears into a door behind the counter. I’d like to snoop around, open a few file cabinets, but the door swings open once again, as the coroner—bloodstained smock, formaldehyde scent mixing with what must be a natural odor of polished pine and chili paste—steps into the lobby.
    “I got a suicide pact back there, three kids up at City College whodecided to off themselves by sucking down a couple gallons of JD. It ain’t pretty, and it’s a rush job.”
    “I’ll speak to the point, then. My name’s Vincent Rubio—”
    “I know who you are. You’re the guy who roughed up Wally last January.” Wally looks on from across the room, cringing when his name is mentioned. “Sometimes the kid needs a pop in the head, but I like to be the one doing the popping, you understand?”
    “Understood,” I answer. “And I’ve apologized for that. What I’m looking for now are the reports on Raymond McBride and Ernie Watson, both deceased approximately nine months ago. I understand you performed both autopsies—”
    “I thought the case was closed.”
    “It was.”
    “It
was
?”
    “It is. This is unrelated.”
    The coroner takes a glance at Wally, at the ceiling, at the floor. Decision time. Finally, he motions for me to follow him. We head through the cadaver room and back to his office, a utilitarian space sporting only a small desk, a chair, and three large file cabinets. I stand at the doorway as he unlocks one of the cabinets, blocking its contents from my view. “Close the door, would ya?” he asks, and I dutifully do so. “Don’t want the kid to listen in. Like a son to me, but a mammal’s still a mammal, if you get my drift.”
    Two file folders sit on the desk, and the coroner—Dr. Kevin Nadel, from the nameplate on the door—flips through them rapidly. “McBride. Right, it’s the same thing I gave everyone else. I counted twenty-eight gunshot wounds to the body, in a number of different places.” Small blue spots mark the surface of a smooth human outline, random polka dots spread across the head, the torso, the legs, seemingly without pattern.
    I point to a series of numbers scribbled on the autopsy report. “What do those marks mean?”
    “Ammunition caliber. Four of the shots were approximately twenty-two-caliber-sized, eight were from a forty-five, three buckshot wounds from a shotgun, two were from a nine-millimeter, and eleven are similar to wounds consistent with an automatic machine gun of some sort.”
    “Wait a second,” I say. “You mean to tell me that McBride wasshot twenty-eight different times with five different weapons? That’s insane.”
    “What’s insane is not my business. They bring me dead guys, I open ’em up and take a peek and tell ’em what I find.” He removes a photograph from the folder and hands it over.
    It’s McBride, all right, but much less alive than he usually seems in the tabloids. There he is, lying on the floor of his office, splayed out in a spread eagle, and though it’s a black-and-white picture, I can make out the individual bloodstains on the floor, on the seat, on the walls. Wounds dot McBride’s body, and much like Nadel is saying, they are of varying shapes and sizes, though all look to be projectile-based. A gunshot wound is a gunshot wound, and despite the different ammo sizes, they tend to look alike in these types of pics. I’ve seen more than my share of similar ones, believe me.
    I hand the photo back. “Go on.”
    “As for your second body … I don’t recall the case personally, but my notes here say I came to a conclusion that Mr. Watson’s