It didn’t make a laugh, so Benek smiled and Gibney smiled back.
Benek thought of all the frigid dead in their morgue drawers, waiting to be cremated or buried. “Did you start out wanting to be a coroner?” he asked.
Gibney chuckled. “Nobody does.” He scratched the back of his neck and sat back. “No, I began with surgery at a hospital. Thought I’d get my own practice. But I wasn’t good with patients, and wasn’t that fast with my fingers, so I washed out of surgery. Can’t make too many mistakes on corpses, and I’m quite good at finding out what made them corpses. I became a coroner after my wife died, fifteen years ago. What do you do for fun?”
Benek hesitated, then said, “I read the ancient historians, mostly.”
“No kidding?” Gibney said with surprise. “What am I missing?”
Benek decided it would take too long and sound too odd to explain the sense of orderly comfort he got from the ancients. Not much had changed with human beings, and what seemed about to be new might be worse. One might hope, and hope makes a man deathless, Melville had said.
“History,” Benek said.
“Oh, that,” Gibney said. “Our record of repetition and failure. Repetition that is never quite the same and failure that never seems to completely fail. There’s hope in that, son.”
“So what about the priest?” Benek asked.
“I haven’t done that autopsy yet.” Gibney sighed. “Tonight. What do you expect we’ll find?”
Benek sat back in his chair. “Any idea of what was on the floor?”
“Calves’ brains, maybe.”
“It makes no sense.”
Gibney nodded. “So the priest went up into the pulpit with a head full of sermon and keeled over when he saw the bloody garbage hit the floor.”
“That simple?” Benek took a deep breath and realized that Gibney was glad to be here with him.
“What did Captain Reddy say?” Gibney asked.
Benek said, “Wait for the autopsy.”
“What did you tell the parish?”
“A vandal threw something and the priest died.”
“Some dope will say it’s supernatural.”
“Sure gives a good imitation,” Benek said as the waiter handed them menus.
“I’m not very hungry,” Gibney said. “Bring me a scotch—neat.”
“A Coke for me, no ice,” Benek said. The waiter left. “It’s irritating. What was the motive?”
“Somebody doesn’t like churches. Somebody doesn’t like priests.”
“No one noticed anybody out of the ordinary,” Benek said. “It was a pretty respectable crowd, and most of the people in the church at the time attended regularly. You’d think they would have noticed a crazy.”
The coroner shrugged. “People see but do not observe.”
The drinks came. Gibney lifted his glass and put it away. “Wish you luck. This one’s on me.”
Benek took a sip and realized that he liked the man. And that made two people that he felt good about recently. Three if he counted his new neighbor Carla. His life was looking up.
Gibney smiled and said, “So tell me now about these ancient historians you like so much.”
“Share one lemon chicken?”
“This will do me enough,” Gibney said to his drink.
Benek laughed, then told him about Hadrian and Caligula and their stolen car, which, as it turned out, was found a couple of weeks later later by the complaining pair, abandoned only a few blocks away, with all its contents stolen. Hadrian lamented his lost luggage, Caligula his large jar of vitamin tablets.
7
Benek went to bed early that evening, wondering whether the coroner was an old closet queen or just wanted to be friends. The two strange cases they had discussed were as good an excuse as any. Human attractions were unpredictable.
Questioning the local butcher near the church had been useless. The man had guessed why Benek had come, and fearing for his business had vehemently denied that
Similar Books
