Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Page 10

  I saw more of Robert than I cared to, after this. Though I never fell for it, he perpetually asked people for money to satiate his gambling habit and his penchant for women. The physicians in the office were easy marks. I’d hear his sleepy voice say, “Let me hol twenty dollars, Doc.” Imagine a loud mumbler—that’s him.

  For those of us who worked as investigators, our time spent with Robert was especially interesting. In the evening he would answer the phone at the morgue. We would see the phone go on hold for what seemed like an eternity, then the loudspeaker embedded in the ceiling would crackle to life and our own in-house Pickwickian would say, “Polees on line fawty-fawty hunred. Day wants to repout a deff.”

  Many times the phone would ring for what seemed like ages before he would pick it up. Sometimes he just didn’t. One of us would go downstairs to see what was up and, as predicted, he would be seated in a chair sound asleep.

  Our chief medical examiner, Dr. Zaki, was from Egypt and had been trained in Britain. This meant that there were proper ways of going about everything. He even insisted that the investigators wear dress slacks, Oxford shirts, and ties. Nothing like dragging your silk Pierre Cardin tie through black and green decomp fluid to really set a day’s mood.

  Zaki had a flash temper and would go off on anybody in his field of fire. One day while at a county commission meeting, one of the black counsel members took issue with the fact that there were no African Americans in positions of authority at the medical examiner’s office. At once Zaki stood up, pointed his finger at them, and stated in a very loud, resolute voice, “I am more of an African American than you will ever be.” Touché. As you can imagine this comment went over about as well as a turd in a punch bowl, but that was Zaki.

  Now, combine Robert and Zaki, and laughter soon follows. One story involves the two while Zaki was performing a particularly difficult autopsy on a body with multiple gunshot wounds. Zaki being Zaki was very thorough. Hours went by, and Robert was his assistant. Imagine if you will the hulking form of Robert in his slacks, wifebeater, white plastic apron, and cobalt-blue gloves, all spattered with blood, working alongside precise, pristine Dr. Zaki. There appeared to be no end to Zaki’s laborious external examination, and eventually Robert said, “Doctur Zaki, I gots ta go to the resroom.”

  “Go ahead but come back immediately,” Zaki said. Knowing Robert’s nature, he probably didn’t want to take any chances.

  Zaki continued with the exam, meticulously going over every inch of the body. After approximately forty-five minutes, Zaki realized that Robert had not returned.

  “Where is Robert?” he asked everyone. No one knew. Zaki cursed under his breath.

  Eventually, in the break area, Zaki heard snoring. He opened the restroom door and found Robert sawing logs on the toilet seat, still clad in his bloody outfit but with his slacks down around his ankles.

  My mother and father on their wedding day, July 3, 1963. Pictured: Howard H. Morgan, Jr. and Louise Edwards. My mother had planned on going to Juilliard but opted to marry my father at seventeen.

  My grandmother Pearl and I in 1969. She told me the best way to deal with death and the screams of grieving families was to “just pretend it’s not happening.” After a couple of thousand deaths there’s just so much pretending I could do.

  This image was taken around the same time my father threatened to kill the family. My grandmother hid me beneath her bed in the adjacent bedroom. Seated left to right: Pearl Killian Morgan, myself and Howard H. Morgan, Sr. (grandfather).

  Pictured are my mother Louise Edwards Smith and my Granny Pearl. Separated by only seventeen years, Pearl was a parent to both my mother and me; loving us, feeding us and giving us a place to live in the absence of my father.

  Pictured 1969 with my Granny Pearl and her sister Aunt Juanita “Skeet” Osterland. In the background is the Monroe Louisiana Civic Center where I first saw “The Killer” Jerry Lee perform.

  Northerners call them “mobile homes,” Southerners call them “trailer houses,” one of several my mother and I occupied in our trajectory toward a “better” life with my stepfather. I was doing my best rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues.” Daddy sent me the album Live From Folsom Prison while stationed in Southeast Asia.

  Mother and son. An image of my father Howard Morgan, Jr. and my Granny Pearl.

  Death had required a high price of me. By the end of my career, my children were witness to a quivering, terrified father who saw death awaiting at every turn. Pictured left to right: Abigail, Lexie and Noah.

  Better times, my son Noah and I, teaching college and free from staring death in the face day after day.

  My first exposure to Southern Evangelisms. I first heard the question “Are you prepared to die without Jesus?”

  As a death investigator you bear witness to the height of human frailty and many times an equal measure of stupidity.

  I have come to believe that in the end most of us meet Death alone. Many believe that the time is of our own choosing, but Death isn’t interested in anyone’s view of free will; he simply waits and claims us.

  Just trying to survive. Prostitutes are always easy targets: used, abused, destroyed and thrown My colleagues and I were the only ones left to care. By the end of my career caring was pointless.

  Alone and wrapped in the blankets he died in. His fellow heroin addicts dumped him in the road rather than be found with the body.

  There was no one to hear her screams from the soft carpet of pine needles.

  An end to life under government care, disabled and left to decay.

  Assailant was stopped by the police while cleaning up and just before he began to dismember the body.

  In my experience, Death rarely visits in crowds, at parties or ball games. For most, it is a solitary affair, arriving unexpectedly. Some await it.

  One final knot.

  To experience life in someone else’s skin is an adage that most use as a punch line. One of the techniques often utilized to get a good fingerprint is to slip the skin of the dead over your own gloved hand and “roll” a print for those that no longer can.

  As the Bard related, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” No apologies.

  Up close and in living color. Inside of a solid waste bin note feces surrounding the body as the head rests on a dead rat. How do you extricate these experiences from your mind and being? Alcohol, therapy, Jesus or a hollow-point projectile?

  Opening a body in 1988. I worked as an autopsy assistant during the day and as an investigator at night. This was probably the best classroom I was ever in, but it came with a price.

  Those trappings upon which my identity had hung for twenty years...in the end emblematic not of my pursuit for answers but Death’s pursuit of me.

  In the cadaver lab at North Georgia. Now I teach Death Investigation to undergrads and occasionally warn them about “flying too close to the flame” of death.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Zaki used his most authoritative British-tinged accent, but it took several more shouts and a bout of hard shakes to roust Robert.

  After a number of years working there, I came to expect this kind of behavior from Robert; however, nothing topped what happened in 1998. One of my colleagues and I had returned from the scene of an overnight multiple homicide, and we still had much work to do. One of the victims had been a beautiful light-skinned black woman who had been found nude on the scene. She had long, flowing black hair and a very curvy figure. In an attempt to leave her in as pristine a position as possible, she had been transported to the morgue face down. The body was moved directly to an autopsy table without going into the cooler because we were continuing to take body temperature readings, trying to determine how long she had been dead.

  Robert walked in while we were taking temps and he came to a dead stop at the feet of the woman’s body. He stood there transfixed. While focusing on the deceased’s rather ample backside, Robert said aloud and to no one in particular, “Who she is?”

  No
t looking up from my clipboard, I replied, “She’s unidentified.”

  “She sho do look familiar,” Robert said.

  “Oh yeah?” I added absently. “Do you think you know her?”

  Without hesitating, and never removing his gaze from her buttocks, Robert said, “I don’t know, but she sho do look familiar.”

  At this point Robert slowly moved closer to the corpse. Never once did he go to her head and look at her face. Robert once again repeated his mantra. Then I caught him slowly raising his hand to his crotch to rub himself.

  That’s when I told him he needed to leave. He tramped off toward the bathroom, glancing back over his shoulder. Call me stuffy or call me a wet blanket, but even for the most libertine there are limits to what should be abided. All I could think at that time was, I sure hope Zaki doesn’t need him anytime soon.

  There is no doubt in my mind that people wonder about those of us in the field of death investigation. Do we ever sneak a peek? Do we ever cop a feel when no one is looking? Or maybe they consider us ghoulish and perverse, regardless. I have never encountered a genuine necrophiliac, beyond this vague hint from Robert—at least none that I know of. As with any profession that possesses its own mythos, there are bound to be stories that float about and elicit a salacious “You gotta be shittin’ me!”

  One such story revolves around an alleged event that occurred at the Orleans Parish morgue. I’ll tell it to you just as it was told to me.

  For those of you who saw the movie JFK, the exterior shots of the building housing the district attorney’s office in that film are the Orleans Parish Courthouse, and its basement is home to the Orleans Parish Morgue. In the summertime the smell of putrefied bodies often wafts up into the courtrooms, sometimes so intensely that sitting judges are forced to take indefinite recesses until the smell clears out.

  The Orleans Parish coroner utilized prisoners to help in the morgue (felons around sharp instruments?) and sometimes to drive the coroner’s van to a death scene to pick up the bodies (prisoners collecting evidence?). It was to this same morgue that a forensic pathologist and a police officer showed up one morning for an autopsy on a homicide victim. What they saw upon their entry was something that could scar a person forever; I know just hearing about it soured my stomach.

  At the topmost row of stainless-steel compartments that housed the bodies, one of the doors was open and its tray was pulled out. The tray contained not just an elderly lady but also that of a sprightly young male prison trustee. The difference between the two, of course, was that the poor woman was dead and the parasite on top of her was not. The blue-haired granny’s rigor mortis-laden legs were splayed and stuck in the air and the trustee was attempting to, shall we say, commune with the dead.

  LITTLE GODS

  AND CHOCOLATE

  MILKSHAKES

  WHEN HE BALLED UP HIS FISTS, they were the size of tomato cans and as hard as pig iron. Deep lines were carved into them from years of pulling cable and setting power poles for the electric company. Seeing him was like staring at a steam locomotive—large, self-reliant, powerful, and set upon his own tracks.

  My grandfather was a big man for his day, over six feet tall, with thick jet-black hair swept back under a dose of Vitalis. His face was as dark as a Plains Indian chief and deeply rutted. His eyes were dark like chocolate drops and always bore some sadness, the origins of which I never knew. I always imagined he had lost something somewhere along the line that could never be found again, but what it was I never understood. He was there when electricity first arrived to those who had sat in the dim glow of their oil lamps for years. He was a man born out of time, performing an occupational task that seemed out of step with the man he was. He was my Papaw and my John Wayne, the measure of all things masculine.

  Howard Morgan Sr. was born in 1911 to an alcoholic father who worked as a grocery clerk and was never around. When his father was around, he beat the shit out of Howard and Howard’s mother, who was half-Choctaw, the daughter of a Confederate veteran, and mean and contrary as hell. Howard was one of five boys, and life was hard for them in the woods of southeast Arkansas.

  Pearl K. Morgan and Howard H. Morgan, Sr. at Forsyth Park, 1952, one year after Joseph Killian’s murder. Whether good times or bad they rode it out. Papaw died of brain cancer in 1983. Pearl died in 2006 of cardiac failure.

  When Howard was maybe eight years old, he and his siblings went south, riding horses along the Mississippi to Baton Rouge, where along with their grandfather they purchased horses arriving off ships that had sailed from South America and beyond, then drove them back up to Arkansas to sell. They made this trip many times throughout my papaw’s youth, so he spent plenty of time on the trail and learning the horse trade. He and his brothers rarely, if ever, attended school; they, along with everyone else they knew, just tried to survive.

  By contrast, the men that I would end up emulating as an adult were nowhere near the measure of the man my grandfather was. Early on in my work life, I fell into the trap of confusing their academic and intellectual arrogance with the common-sense understanding of the world my Papaw had possessed. These men were out of their element in the workaday world. They prided themselves on their ability to preach to others less educated. And they rarely broke a sweat. The forensic pathologists I held in such high esteem in the beginning expected all the world to both defer to their intellect and admire the fact that they could deal with whatever death left behind.

  As an old man, Papaw kept his horses in an ancient barn in back of his ramshackle house. It was the aging horseman’s sanctuary. He spent hours brushing and currycombing his horses, cleaning their hoofs, then riding them in his pasture. He wore Texas-style spurs over his weathered Tony Lamas, and just like in the movies, he jingled when he walked. He would slip up into the saddle with his ever-present straw Stetson on his head and pause to survey where he would go, though the path led only in one direction, to the pasture.

  When he urged a horse to move, his voice didn’t resonate with the commonly held horseman’s vernacular. He yelped with the voice of an old drover and spoke to the animal by name. He would gallop off, but it was more like a sprint. I remember the first time I saw him on the back of his horse galloping full tilt. The raw power of the horse under his control scared me.

  With no horses to drive northward or brothers to ride with, he would simply ride in big circles around his field. Looking back now, I wonder if he ever searched for a hole in the fence to jump through, back to an earlier time, before the Louisiana Power and Light Company took ownership of his life.

  I watched my grandfather talk to his horses and mules as if they were men. I always wondered what he was saying. I always tried to listen; for the animal, listening was mandatory. When one of his animals disobeyed, particularly the mules, he would grab their lower lip with his left hand and land a sharp jab with his right between its eyes. My grandfather believed in brevity and economy when it came to communicating with animals as well as most people.

  The days at the power company were long for Papaw. He rose every morning at 4:30 a.m. The smell of chicory-laced Community coffee filled the air because my grandmother had risen five minutes earlier. Papaw demanded there always be at least two types of meat on the table at every meal but particularly at breakfast. His two favorites were fried country ham, from which my grandmother would make her red-eye gravy, and hog brains. He had an affinity for squirrel brains too, which he and my grandmother both said tasted sweet. Me, I stuck to the ham, never brave enough to eat something that might have once been thinking of me.

  Granny Pearl worked steadily in the kitchen as Papaw dressed himself in a khaki shirt and pants then rolled up his sleeves, revealing his ham-hock-sized forearms. It was always the same routine—he would enter the kitchen and pause before moving to the table, looking toward my grandmother. Being a man of very few words, he would just say, “Ready?” She always was.

  There were two things that were never done at Papaw’s table: speaking kin
dly of Republicans, particularly Abraham Lincoln, and sitting in his chair. His mahogany chair was beautiful and adorned with a carved rose at the apex of its back. It was his space. From here he surveyed the food he had provided and the many people who came to his home to eat it. I always sat to his right, a favored position for a young boy who thought the sun rose and set at his Papaw’s discretion.

  As he sat there at the head of the table, Papaw would drink his cup of coffee. I believe that for her own amusement my grandmother would serve it in her delicate china cups with matching saucers. To see this big man, from his rough upbringing, drinking from something so dainty was extraordinary. The coffee always smelled good, but one sip and I knew it could have stripped paint. Whenever I tried to prove how grownup I was by taking a sip from his saucer, my grandfather would give up a toothless laugh.

  It was also in this same chair that he would receive from my grandmother the good or bad news about their finances and news of any deaths or births among his relations. At night he would sit, hand-rolling his cigarettes for the next day. At Thanksgiving and Christmas he would sit down to feast on the ducks and deer he had killed or the bullfrogs he had gigged. And it was in that chair that he held me for the first time as an infant, his first grandbaby.

  So as custom dictated, when the cancer was done with this seemingly indestructible man, my grandmother leaned his chair forward against the table; it would never be occupied again. It remained a quiet reminder for our family, particularly my grandmother, of the powerful weight it had upheld through all the preceding years. When I would visit Granny later in life, once I’d grown into a man, I always tried not to look at it. The loss was still too dearly felt.