The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh

was what he was experiencing more than a mid-life crisis?
    Then he saw his face in the reflection of the window glass. In the opaque reflection he had eyes like The Gooned-out Vice Cop. Eyes like bullet holes. He was starting to feel inexplicably scared when Chip Muirfield, with a grin as wide as a surfboard, said, “Don’t you want to watch her being posted?”
    “No, you go ahead and enjoy yourself,” Mario Villalobos said, “but don’t get too close.”
    The L. A. county coroner had recently been the object of disciplinary action and was criticized for a backlog of bodies. As a result, the pathologists were doing maximum autopsies these days. The last postmortem that Mario Villalobos attended had been on a victim who was head shot. Formerly, a cop could hang around the length of time it took to smoke a few cigarettes, waiting until the pathologist popped the slug from the corpse’s skull. Now the cops had to stand around for two hours. The pathologists, not wanting any more criticism and complaints, were going at it swashbuckler style. They were flashing more steel than the Three Musketeers, everyone said. Even for a head shot they’d open up that stiff from head to toe. Every corpse became a kayak these days, which didn’t displease the shoulder holster kids.
    This was only the third autopsy that Chip Muirfield had ever witnessed. He enjoyed each one more than the last. Mario Villalobos thought that if Chip started liking them any better, the kid might start moonlighting at Forest Lawn. The pathologist and technician were trying like hell to get this one zipped in time to watch Days of Our Lives.
    The former Western Avenue prostitute, who had delighted Chip Muirfield by dying not in Hollywood Division where she worked but in Rampart Division where she lived, was not broken up too badly by the fall from the roof, at least not her face. Mario Villalobos thought of the early mug shot of this face now peeled inside-out like a grapefruit. A natural blonde, fair and slight; he wondered if she drove them wild when she got that tattoo of the man-in-the-moon. It was on the inside of her left thigh, high enough to have been a very painful job. In death she looked thirty-five years old. Her identification showed her to be twenty-two.
    Mario Villalobos was one of those homicide dicks who somehow revert to uncoplike sentimentality during mid-life crisis. That is, Mario Villalobos, like his old partner Maxie Steiner, gradually came to resent needless mutilation of corpses by cutlass kids who, quite naturally, are extremely unsentimental about carcasses in which detectives have a proprietary interest.
    What Mario Villalobos didn’t see while he was roaming the autopsy room, thinking of how dangerous it is to go to The House of Misery every single night, was Chip Muirfield’s interest in the man-in-the-moon tattoo high up on Missy Moonbeam’s torn and fractured femur, close to the inn-of-happiness which the bored pathologist figured was really what was interesting the morbid young cop.
    It was a professional tattoo. The man-in-the-moon had winked one eye at Chip Muirfield and with the other glanced up at the blond pubis of Missy Moonbeam. It was a very cute idea, Chip Muirfield thought, but the leg was so destroyed by the fall that the upper thigh was ripped open and hanging loose.
    “I wonder if the photographer thought to shoot a picture of that tattoo?” he mused aloud to the pathologist, who shrugged and said, “What for?”
    “Identification,” Chip Muirfield said without conviction.
    “I thought you already knew who she was,” the pathologist said.
    “We’re not certain,” Chip Muirfield lied. “I wish it weren’t so damaged around that tattoo. It’s all ragged and bloody and it’s hard to see. Snip it off there and I’ll have the photographer come and shoot a close-up of it that we can use.”
    The pathologist shrugged again and sliced away the flap of tattooed flesh and placed it on the steel table. Chip