Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Page 6

  This gruesome work quickly wore on me and eroded my ability to work with others. By the end of the whole process, I was sick of the bodies. Not just because they were disgusting—that is easily overcome. But what grated on me most was being placed into circumstances again and again that any human—no matter how resilient he or she may be—is simply not equipped to deal with. This held true for me many times throughout my long career. I have heard people who’ve taken hallucinogens describe their trips in this manner. They are fully aware that they are tripping yet they cannot alter the perceived reality of the moment. The only difference is that my reality was inherently unalterable.

  What amazes me still is that I, of my own free will, had become a medicolegal death investigator whose job entailed exactly this, every day of my life. No matter how many cautionary tales I now offer up to younger generations who express interest, they still, like lemmings heading for the sea, push their way into this field.

  I think back on my work life a great deal now and I realize that we—myself along with my colleagues—were all steadily losing bits of our minds. Sometimes I can’t quite see myself. Was that really me doing those things? Did I stand in an autopsy room or in the back of a refrigerated truck with a forensic pathologist who had just directed me to decapitate a body in order to achieve a more thorough examination? Intellectually I understood and complied with the pathologist’s directive, but then it would strike me. Holy shit! I just cut off this guy’s head! How does one process an act such as this for the first time, let alone that act compounded by multiple occurrences over the course of a career? I regularly pictured a case of rifles and a clock tower to climb into.

  And then, who do I share these experiences with? “Gee son, I remember my first decapitation as if it were only yesterday.” There are a very small number of people who can identify with those of us who have worked in the medicolegal field and that group consists solely of other medicolegal death investigators. Unfortunately, they tend to be just as affected by all of this as I was.

  A phenomenon followed me throughout my life as a death investigator. It had started only four or five months into my career, at a Christmas party. For me, there is no more beautiful place to spend yuletide than in the Big Easy—black wrought-iron rails and the columns of Creole mansions wrapped with garlands and twinkling lights, the sound of uniquely New Orleans Christmas music, and the few moments when mercifully the humid air cools for the first time all year.

  This party was at one of the Creole-style shotgun houses right off St. Charles Avenue. For those who are not fortunate enough to call the South home, a shotgun house is long, narrow, straight, and typically occupied by the poor. The idea is that you can stand at the front door with a shotgun in hand and fire a blast that will never strike a wall, but will exit the dwelling through the back door, since that back door is perfectly in line with the front door. I’ve worked many cases in shotguns. But in the uptown areas of New Orleans, shotguns were the former town homes of the gentry and had recently been refurbished by new money. Consequently, there they were viewed as status symbols.

  This type of socializing was very exciting for me, a young man just starting out in his profession. I was part of something now, and I knew my work would be like none other. It was through my new profession that I believed I would receive recognition, acceptance, and maybe even a little adulation.

  The party scenario went something like this: The party was filled with those practicing the usual occupations—insurance, education, sales—along with a few unemployed, alcoholic rich boys who would never make a laudable mark on anything other than the C-section scar they’d left on their mother’s abdomen.

  Word leaked out, probably by someone who only knew me peripherally, and the partygoers slowly approached like hungry dogs not sure if they should take part in spilled garbage.

  “So, I hear you’re a coroner.”

  I politely responded, “No, I am a medicolegal death investigator.”

  That hooked them. “What is that?”

  After the obligatory explanations, one of these bored partiers asked The Question. Are you ready? Here it comes. Hold on . . .

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Knowing that they are not capable of emotionally or intellectually absorbing the worst I could throw at them, I attempted to gratify their morbid curiosities with some story about a guy blowing his brains out with a hunting rifle and not being found for six weeks. If they only knew . . . The worst thing I would ever see was later that night when I got home all alone and caught my reflection in the blank TV screen. I had my hand around an ice-cold bottle of Stoli and was weeping. Recognition is often hollow, at best.

  When I was a child I would go to the annual county fair. I’d walk along the midway with its toothless ex-cons operating rides that they wouldn’t even put their ex-con buddies on. Inevitably I would wander up to the large-bellied, bearded man who was calling out to passersby, attempting to lure them into stepping inside for a peek.

  The fat lady fascinated me. How did she get that big? What would drive her to simply lie prone before a crowd of eyes, scantily clad, with her Buddha-like girth fully exposed? She would even roll up a section of a newspaper, light it on fire, and then extinguish it on the skin of her abdomen. Why wasn’t it enough to just be bare before the world? I took my eager looks at her along with the rest of the crowd then traveled on to the next booth or ride, but she remained there, never escaping the sordid inspection by her fellow humans.

  To the uptown Christmas partygoers, I was the fat lady. I was a trivial preoccupation, never understood by those who didn’t really care anyway. After my report of titillating horrors, they took with them a moment of visceral excitement and perhaps a punch line for their next party, while I was left with nothing more than what I began with, and perhaps a fraction less.

  If only those people I had stupidly tried to impress could have seen me slipping and sliding through decomp juices on the floor of that refrigerated truck. What a price for glory.

  After all jaws had been removed, salvageable fingers cut off, and the last drop of foul fluid had been washed from the truck’s floor, there remained the smell, the abiding essence of death that never quite evaporates. It screams long after the creator of the scent has been patted in the face with a shovelful of dirt. That sweetly sick aroma hangs in the air and permeates everything within its grasp. As absurd as it might seem, I have thought that the odor is some type of separate entity with a will of its own. It lingers in order to tell the living that our time is coming.

  My scrub suits and my comfortable Nike autopsy shoes had to be trashed. No amount of hot water and Borax was going to save them. Always having been somewhat of a shower freak, I went home to thoroughly scour my own remains. I groomed my hirsute frame to a glowing sheen, giving special attention to my beautiful mustache.

  As the days passed after that barge accident, I could not get beyond my experiences in the refrigerated truck. This is when the dreams began for me, not only the one that stayed with me for years, but other similar ones too. Me, naked, falling in a pool of decomp fluid in a dark room surrounded by floating remains. All around me were the corpses of the sixteen men, absent their jaws and reaching for me with fingerless hands. But when I came out of the water, blowflies would settle all over my exposed, sticky body. I would wake up thrashing and swatting at the invisible attackers. The dream continued night after night unabated. It was infinitely troubling to a man who could supposedly withstand the most disgusting of onslaughts.

  And the smell lingered.

  Several days later, I was in my office when one of my colleagues asked, “Did you work a decomp?”

  I responded that even though it was summertime in New Orleans, I had not worked a decomp since the barge accident. It is at this point that my colleague took what is considered a professional courtesy between death investigators, much like apes picking fleas from each other’s fur.

  He walked closer, asked me to d
ip my head forward, then deeply inhaled. “No, you stink.” He then asked other colleagues over to perform the same ritual. They complied and concurred.

  I had on a clean shirt and pants. My Nikes had been burned. I had taken a bath that morning and two the previous day. My friend pronounced me permanently foul.

  Then I smelled the smell myself. Maybe it’s a form of plausible deniability, so that you can just move on. Like death itself, you become numb to it until some event or some person draws it back into your focus.

  That evening, as I stared at myself in the mirror with French Market shears in hand, my emblem of maturity and manhood floated down into the sink. It all went—the hair on my head and chest too, along with my beautiful mustache. A mound of hair before me, looking now more like a cancer patient, I was no longer hirsute. I was bare and bald, before the world.

  RED BEANS

  THE GREATEST PLEASURE IN THE WORLD, while I was living in New Orleans, was the food. No other city in the United States—including the Big Apple—can boast as many five-star restaurants. If you have the means and the time, a culinary tour of the Big Easy is well worth a visitor’s effort. But don’t just stick to the usual fare. Get off the beaten path and go to a few of the hole-in-the-wall places for a truly Crescent City experience.

  One such place for me is Ye Olde College Inn. It’s located directly across from Notre Dame Seminary on South Carrollton Avenue. You can sit and watch the streetcars go by and drink in a true Creole ambiance. I don’t mean Creole the way the Food Channel tries to explain it or the way the Travel Channel tries to sell it. I mean Creole in the sense of true Southern hospitality as defined by New Orleans’ French descendants.

  You can sample any variety of soul, Cajun, or Creole down-home cooking, everything from fried chicken to shrimp étouffée. However, the College Inn is known around New Orleans as the place to get both the best bread pudding with rum sauce and their crowning achievement, red beans and rice. You can choose to have your red beans served with either a grilled pork chop or grilled pork sausage, but the staff at the College Inn wouldn’t hear of cooking their sausage in the beans; they include only a ham hock for seasoning, along with a generous helping of other secret ingredients.

  For those unfamiliar with New Orleans cuisine and tradition, Mondays are considered red-beans-and-rice day. It may seem unbelievable that a city of formerly a million-plus individuals would devote a day of the week to one particular dish, but the Big Easy has done so for years. You certainly won’t be arrested if you violate this unwritten precept, but if you don’t partake, you miss out on one of the rituals that makes us New Orleanians who we are. There are many possible explanations for this tradition, but the one that seems to me to fit best is that, after a long weekend of partying, few have the money to buy anything special to eat. So the alternative is to prepare a cheap pot of Creole-seasoned kidney beans.

  Now, you can get red beans at Chez Paul’s in the French Quarter or at the Court of Two Sisters. You can make the drive to a nouveau restaurant at the lakefront or take a trip down Carrollton to the College Inn. But there is no place better than, as the locals say, “my mama and Nem’s house.”

  On Sunday night, rinse your beans to assure the removal of “stones,” then cover them in water and leave them to sit overnight in your mama’s favorite pot. I prefer to also add a dash of dry red wine. By the next morning, the beans will be soft, their skins cracked. They are now ready for cooking.

  Cooking beans is a joyous event. As seasoning is added and the stew of beans and flavors thickens, the smell permeates your home and may just cause your neighbor to stick his head out his window with a smile and say, “Hey Brah, you mind if I pass by later so we’s can talk?”

  Then comes the meat. Some like pork chops. Some will use smoked sausage. Me, I prefer andouille, a traditional Cajun pork sausage with just enough sweetness and a bite of cayenne. You can grill it or fry it in a pan—either way, you’re headed for a culinary perfection few others have experienced.

  Next comes the rice. It can’t be sticky. And somebody had better pass by a bakery on the way home to pick up a fresh loaf of French bread. My preference has always been Randazzo’s Bakery. Prepare the bread by spreading slices with butter and garlic and heating them up just enough to make the toppings soft and the bread pliable for dipping in the bean mixture.

  Finally, you need wine. In the words of Louisiana’s famous Cajun chef, Justin Wilson, “Your favorite, not theirs. You drink the kind you want.” This is poor folks’ cuisine at its best and New Orleans’ pride and joy.

  It was on one such red-beans-and-rice Monday when the New Orleans homicide squad and I were summoned to an apartment. After receiving complaints of a lower-floor ceiling leak (and after two months had gone by with no rent payments being made), the landlord had stopped in on an upstairs apartment with his passkey. What the old man found had him still shaken by the time we arrived.

  I have to admit, what I saw disturbed me somewhat too. There was a bathtub filled with . . . well, let’s say water, and some of it was slowly dripping out and flooding the vinyl floor. The “water” was green and brown and had a foamy residue, a product of decomposing human fat floating on the surface. All that was visible of the man’s corpse lying in that tub were his arms, shoulders, and head. His extended arms reached out to me, probably due to their swollen, rotting appearance.

  I began my initial examination, noting that the floor around the tub was very spongy and unstable. The thought crossed my mind that at any moment the tub, the nasty fluid, and the dead guy might take me on a trip downstairs. Speed became essential.

  I checked for trauma, making notes while the sheriff’s office technician snapped photos. I warned the removal team to take care as they shifted the body since he was tensely bloated and very slippery. As we hefted this guy out of the tub, something happened that I’d never encountered before. The decedent partially tore in half. We struggled with this new development while the putrid, stagnant water sloshed out, further soaking an already saturated floor, but eventually we were able to get him into a bag and on his way to the morgue.

  A significant number of people are found dead in their bathrooms. Most often they are found on the toilet, but it is not unusual to find someone in a bathtub, dead from a cardiac event, which we determined had occurred in this case. Many people go to the toilet in order to get relief from what they think is a need for a bowel movement but turns out to be a major heart attack. Likewise, people try to receive comfort from a warm bath.

  As I was leaving I noticed a police detective questioning the young woman who lived directly below and who had originally reported the leak. She was an attractive woman and younger than her haggard appearance let on. I could tell she was a New Orleans native. The brown doe eyes, slightly olive complexion, and Yat accent gave her away. She was a single mother of two; her children sat transfixed in front of a television in another part of the room. She was telling the detectives that she had been experiencing the leak for about three or four days.

  Her back was to her small kitchen. The detective reached into his wallet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and with all of the graveyard sincerity he could muster, he grabbed her hand and placed the twenty in it.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “get your kids. Take them to Ground Pat’i or McDonald’s. Tonight’s meal is on the sheriff. Just get your kids and leave. I will secure your apartment.” I could tell the woman wanted to argue, but her weary expression seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the effort.

  She hustled her kids past us and down the breezeway to where her car was parked, and I turned back to the detective.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked.

  He calmly pointed past me to the kitchen. “Look at the stove.”

  There on one unlit burner was a big pot of red beans soaking, just about ready to be turned into a New Orleans culinary masterpiece. But an unexpected ingredient was being added. Right above the pot, on the ceiling, was a wide, wet spot pouring a
thin but steady stream of fluid into the mix from the upstairs bathroom. We grabbed that pot together and dropped the whole thing into a dumpster in the parking lot. And that detective went out and bought the woman a brand new pot, just to be certain.

  HEY, HAVEN’T

  WE MET BEFORE?

  RIDING A MOTORCYCLE is a great American pastime. Our culture is an unrepentant road-trip culture, but add the feeling of air rushing over your skin and whipping the ends of your hair, and it becomes an unmatchable sense of freedom. Whatever your taste, there is a bike to match it—whether you want a fat, comfortable hog, a Gold Wing to cruise the countryside, a missile-shaped “crotch rocket” that liquefies your surroundings as you blow past the rest of the world, or a knobby, hard-working dirt bike for rougher terrain. Motorcycles are popular in every area of the country, rural or mega-metropolis, but the type of bike you observe in any location generally seems to fit its environment.

  I have been fascinated with motorcycles since I was a young boy. I believe this captivation stems from when my Daddy was home on leave from one of his tours in Vietnam. Like many children of the ‘60s, I grew up going to drive-in movies. My father, not being one for most child-friendly cinema (he would not have been caught dead watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), took us to the drive-in showing of a film that influenced my view of motorcycles forever, Nam’s Angels.