Deadhouse: Life in a Coronerâ??s Office

THREE: THE CRYING ROOM

68 THREE THE CRYING ROOM The investigative office is packed with people; Tracy has to squeeze in. Mary Ann, the photographer, and all three day-shift deputy coroners are hanging around, no calls right now. Tracy met everybody when she started the shift at 7:00 a.m. No sooner had Tracy sat down than the coroner’s office receptionist pokes her head into the investigative office and says that the family of a deceased person just came in, the mother and four other people. They’re in the hallway. The receptionist says the family’s name and the name of the dead man. Jimmy, the senior deputy on day-shift duty today, shrugs.“Who’s that?” Another deputy says,“That’s the name of the homicide.” Jimmy looks pained and flustered. Deputy coroners hate this part of the job—when families come into the office, often uninvited and distraught and demanding to see their children, parents, spouses. But it happens often. “Do we have a photo?” Jimmy asks. “I don’t know,” another deputy says.“I need to read the case story.” Jimmy says he’s already printing it out. Mary Ann says that they just finished the homicide autopsy—the victim is bagged and already back in the cooler. Jimmy grabs a clipboard out of a filing cabinet and clips the printout of the case story to it. Another deputy reads it. The dead man’s aunt recognized him at the scene, so they already have a positive ID. “Since he’s already been identified, why are they here?” one deputy frets. “Well . . . they’re here,” Jimmy says with finality. Everybody knows exactly why the mother is here. She’s here for the same reason mothers always come to the coroner’s office. They don’t quite believe their sons are dead, and they hope that coming here will help them fathom what happened. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll find out that someone made a glorious mistake, that in the dim light of the housing project courtyard last night,her son’s aunt thought the dead man was her nephew,but she was wrong, he was a stranger, a total stranger. The receptionist goes back to the family in the entrance hall. Tracy peeks out there. Two men and three women follow the receptionist into a hallway behind the reception desk. Mary Ann and another deputy go to the cooler, where they pull out the homicide’s gurney and halfway unzip the body bag. Blood is visible where the dead man’s skull was sliced open, so Mary Ann covers the top of his head with plastic. She stands on a chair above the gurney and shoots two Polaroids. The other deputy zips the body bag back up, then takes off her latex gloves and looks at the Polaroids. They’re gray and cloudy, still developing. Impatiently , she fans them in the air, trying to hurry the development, knowing the family is waiting. The image gradually surfaces and brightens, revealing the upper body of the very dead-looking man, swaddled in a body bag on the gurney, his eyes slightly open. But there’s one problem. The tops of the Y cut on the man’s upper chest are showing. The deputy covers the damage with two strips of tape, goes back to the investigative office and gives the photo to Jimmy, who clips it onto the clipboard along with the case story. Then he heads into the hallway behind the reception desk to talk to the family. For decades, bodies have been identified in this part of the coroner’s office. When the building was first built almost a century ago, a marble-walled chapel towered over the space where the hallway now runs. The dead lay on cool marble slabs in a majestic room with sixty-foot arching walls, washed by THE CRYING ROOM 69 the tinted light coming through thirteen massive stained-glass windows. Back then, the Allegheny County Mortuary, as the coroner’s office building was known, was open to the public twenty-four hours a day. Fewer people carried identification in those days, and the office lacked the technology to identify them, so many unidentified, embalmed bodies lay in the chapel until someone claimed them or the county cremated them after weeks or months had passed. Often...