Double Whammy

"It didn't work out. Now I need a new guy."

Dennis Gault looked uncomfortable. "Distracted" was the word for it. He set down his drink and reached inside the desk. Out came a fake-lizardskin checkbook. Or maybe it was real.

"Twenty-five up front," Gault said, reaching for a pen.

R. J. Decker thought of the alternative and shrugged. "Make it thirty," he said.

To Dr. Michael Pembroke fell the task of dissecting the body of Robert Clinch.

The weight of this doleful assignment was almost unbearable because Dr. Pembroke by training was not a coroner, but a clinical pathologist. He addressed warts, cysts, tumors, and polyps with ease and certitude, but corpses terrified him, as did forensics in general.

Most Florida counties employ a full-time medical examiner, or coroner, to handle the flow of human dead. Rural Harney County could not justify such a luxury to its taxpayers, so each year the county commission voted to retain the part-time services of a pathologist to serve as coroner when needed. For the grand sum of five thousand dollars Dr. Michael Pembroke was taking his turn. The job was not unduly time-consuming, as there were only four thousand citizens in the county and they did not die often. Most who did die had the courtesy to do so at the hospital, or under routine circumstances that required neither an autopsy nor an investigation. The few Harney Countians who expired unnaturally could usually be classified as victims of (a) domestic turmoil, (b) automobile accidents, (c) hunting accidents, (d) boating accidents, or (e) lightning. Harney County had more fatal lightning strikes than any other place in Florida, though no one knew why. The local fundamentalist church had a field day with this statistic.

When news of Robert Clinch's death arrived at the laboratory, Dr. Pembroke was staring at a common wart (verruca vulgaris)that had come from the thumb of a watermelon farmer. The scaly brown lump was not a pleasant sight, but it was infinitely preferable to the swollen visage of a dead bass fisherman. The doctor tried to stall and pretend he was deeply occupied at the microscope, but the sheriffs deputy waited patiently, leafing through some dermatology pamphlets. Dr. Pembroke finally gave up and got in the back of the squad car for the short ride to the morgue.

"Can you tell me what happened?" Dr. Pembroke asked, leaning forward.

"It's Bobby Clinch," the deputy said over his shoulder. "Musta flipped his boat in the lake."

Dr. Pembroke was relieved. Now he had a theory; soon he'd have a cause-of-death. In no time he could return to the wart. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.

The police car pulled up to a low red-brick building that served as the county morgue. The building had once been leased out as a Burger King restaurant, and had not been refurbished since the county bought it. While the Burger King sign had been removed (and sold to a college fraternity house), the counters, booths, and drive-up window remained exactly as they had been in the days of the Whopper. Dr. Pembroke once wrote a letter to the county commission suggesting that a fast-food joint was hardly the proper site for a morgue, but the commissioners tersely pointed out that it was the only place in Harney with a walk-in freezer.

Peering through the plate-glass window, Dr. Pembroke saw a pudgy man with a ruddy, squashed-looking face. It was Culver Rundell, whose shoulders (the doctor remembered) had been covered with brown junctional moles. These had been expertly biopsied and found to be nonmalignant.

"Hey, doc!" Culver Rundell said as Dr. Pembroke came through the door.

"Hello," the pathologist said. "How are those moles?" Pathologists seldom have to deal with whole patients so they are notoriously weak at making small talk.

"The moles are coming back," Culver Rundell reported, "by the hundreds. My wife takes a Flair pen and plays connect-the-dots from my neck to my butthole."

"Why don't you come by the office and I'll take a look."

"Naw, doc, you done your best. I'm used to the damn things, and so's Jeannie. We make the best of the situation, if you know what I mean."

Culver Rundell ran a fish camp on Lake Jesup. He was not much of a fisherman but he loved the live-bait business, worms and wild shiners mainly. He also served as official weighmaster for some of America's most prestigious bass tournaments, and this honor Culver Rundell owed to his lifelong friendship with Dickie Lockhart, champion basser.

"Are you the one who found the deceased?" Dr. Pembroke asked.

"Nope, that was the Davidson boys."

"Which ones?" Dr. Pembroke asked. There were three sets of Davidson boys in Harney County.

"Daniel and Desi. They found Bobby floating at the bog and hauled him back to the fish camp. The boys wanted to go back out so I told 'em I'd take care of the body. We didn't have no hearse so I used my four-by-four."

Dr. Pembroke climbed over the counter into what once had been the kitchen area of the Burger King. With some effort, Culver Rundell followed.