Blue Lonesome Read Free Page A

descended gradually into a void of utter passivity.
    The possibility worried him, yet he wasn’t frightened by it. Perhaps that too was symptomatic. If you think you might be on the edge of a breakdown, you ought to be terrified of the prospect—and if you’re not terrified, then isn’t that in itself a sign of something clinically wrong? Utter passivity: a synonym for despair. Like the kind of despair Ms. Lonesome had been suffering from?
    No. The difference was, he wasn’t suicidal. Sit in bathtub, cut her wrists with a razor blade. He simply wasn’t made that way. He could never commit an act of self-destruction.
    Maybe she hadn’t believed she could, either. Once.
    Why did she do it?
    What drove her into the depths?
    The Duke’s arrangement of “Blue Serge” was playing now, a piece even more reflective of plaintive resignation than “Perdido.” Messenger listened, let himself be folded into the music for a minute or so—and then popped out again, back into bleak awareness. He sipped some of the brandy. It tasted bitter: bitter heat. He set the snifter down. Outside, a motorcycle raced past with its engine cranked up, momentarily drowning out Ellington’s band. A sudden siren sliced the night, close by; white and then blood-red lights flashed across the curtains and were gone. The room, he realized, was chilly. He ought to get up and put on the furnace. But he didn’t do it. He did nothing except sit, thinking and trying not to think.
    After a while, when the record ended and quiet pressed down, he said aloud, “She shouldn’t have been alone. Nobody should have to die that much alone.”
    He sat there.
    “Lost, wasted life.”
    He sat there.
    “Ms. Lonesome,” he said to the darkness, “why did you use that goddamn razor blade?”
    IT WAS WARM in the coroner’s office on Bryant Street. Too warm: Messenger could feel the sweat moving on his face and neck. Another of life’s little illusions shattered. He’d always thought places like this would be dank and cold from top to bottom. And a bare, antiseptic white, presided over by sepulchral types in starched uniforms. Maybe it was that way down in the basement, where the morgue and autopsy room were, but up here was a straightforward business office paneled in wood; and the male clerk who waited on him was young and brisk and nattily dressed in a dark blue blazer and gray slacks.
    “Janet Mitchell,” the clerk said, and tapped out the name on his computer keyboard. He studied the file that came up on the screen. “Oh, right. The Jane Doe suicide last week.”
    “Jane Doe? Does that mean her name isn’t Janet Mitchell?”
    “Evidently not.”
    “Then her body hasn’t been claimed yet.”
    “Not yet. It’s still here, in storage.”
    “Storage,” Messenger said.
    “In cases like this cadavers are frozen immediately after autopsy. Do you think you might be able to identify the deceased? If so, I can arrange a viewing. …”
    “There’s no point in it. I knew her as Janet Mitchell.”
    “I see.”
    “How long will you keep her body here unclaimed?”
    “Thirty to sixty days, depending on space available.”
    “And then?”
    “We’ll make arrangements with the Public Administrator’s Office for cremation or burial. But in this case, at least, the city won’t have to assume the cost.”
    “Why is that?”
    “She left more than enough money to pay for it.”
    “How much money?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t give you that information.”
    “Can you at least tell me what’s being done to find out her real identity?”
    “No, you’ll have to discuss that with the officer in charge of her case.”
    “If you’ll give me his name …”
    “Inspector Del Carlo,” the clerk said. “Second floor, main building.”
    INSPECTOR GEORGE DEL Carlo was sixtyish, heavyset, with black-olive eyes that seldom blinked. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, but still he made Messenger feel uncomfortable, as if he thought his visitor was