Again, I feel compelled to gratify elements of enquiry I’m usually loath to accommodate. Can’t say I’m sure as to why… perhaps it’s my age. Pushing into another decade on this earth—one that twenty years ago I’d honestly perceived my funeral would be in the works—and it could be I’m entering a phase of second childhood: I want to be noticed. I’m eager to please. Oh, well…
* * *
A former colleague who’s now moved on to bigger—though I doubt better—things related this to me years ago. She was summoned to a scene that involved an elderly recluse, an old lady. The fact that the woman was decomposed was no big deal. Ninety per cent of the time if we go out to pick up anyone over seventy years old, it’s either because they took a trip down a stairway or got in a car wreck, committed suicide (happens more with old folks than you’d like to think,) or some total shitbag—usually a family member– has killed them. These incidents still only make up about ten per cent of our “senior” clientele. Most medico-legal investigations concerning old people are performed in an atmosphere that’s best described as pungent. (If at any time while reading this you feel an urge to call Nana or Pop-pop, don’t hem and haw. Fucking do it.)
She told me when she got the call, the cop sounded weird. Nobody hates a decomp more than law enforcement. More than one of America’s Finest has told me the only thing they like less is the possibility of getting shot at. Near every cop I know said they would rather respond to a domestic scrap than stand over someone who’d have to be scraped off a floor. But this was different, she told me. She said the Officer was audibly shaken but would not elaborate. She pressed him, but he wouldn’t budge, just politely insisted she get there as soon as she could.
When she arrived, she was surprised to see a firetruck parked with the squad cars. The FD never hangs around for a corpse. Not in the city we operate in, anyhow. Their presence was explained when she approached a ‘30’s era, three story apartment building. Smoke evacuation fans had been placed in the doorways at the front and back of the building. (This might seem a good idea, but is not. I’ve also been in a building where this was done. It doesn’t work for shit. You can’t “waft away” that kind of stink. For one thing, it binds to everything. Another thing is, by the time anybody smells it in your average apartment building, the source of the stink has saturated and soaked into whatever the corpse is lying or sitting on. It’s not going away. The only rival for that kind of stench is cat piss. All running those fans does is flood the whole building with an odor most folks find disagreeable.)
The cops—well, one of them—led her upstairs to the second floor. To her surprise, one of the firemen went up with them. Curiouser and curiouser… Which apartment contained the dead woman was obvious. There was a third fan in the doorway. The cop stopped in the hallway, well short of the roaring machine. He told her the reason of her visit was in bedroom, wedged between the bed and the outer wall. He explained the person who’d been contacted regarding a foul odor was covering for the real manager, who was on vacation. She only made it as far as unlocking and opening the main door of the apartment. The stink really hit her then, and she bolted. The officers didn’t try to stop her. They went to the bedroom door and found it was locked as well. He motioned to the fireman. “We called them,” the policeman told her, “because they’re better at getting in a locked place than we are.” He spoke to her over the roar of the fan, which the firemen had decided to set up of their own accord. The “foul odor” was now present throughout the building, insuring that anyone who’d not experienced the initial cause of all this ruckus wouldn’t feel they’d missed out.
The cop continued: The Fire Department arrived and forced the bedroom door, probably causing no less damage to it had the police just gone ahead and kicked it in. The fireman, wearing his respirator, had been nodding at every word. The cop paused a moment. This was the set-up. He was about to get to the weird part.
“When the door popped open, we all got the shit scared out of us.” She said the cop’s face became a mask. She said he swallowed, shook his head, then said, “Cats.”
She told me he didn’t say any more, just stared at her as if it was all that was needed in matter of explanation. She said the man just maintained his blank look. The fireman stepped up.
Lifting his respirator, he clarified. “There were three of ‘em.”
She must have made it clear that a little elaboration was needed, because the fireman went on to tell her that once the door was open they had the bejeesus startled out of them when “a blur” flew at them, out the door, through the living room and into the hallway. “Took us a second to even realize what it was.” The fireman was shaking his head now, instead of nodding. “Couldn’t even be sure of how many there were, at that moment. One of my guys was putting the fan in the front entry. He told us how many they were. Startled the hell out of him, too. He said they went right over the fan, down the sidewalk and were gone.”
Here’s the upshot: The decedent was an older woman who’d lived in the building for over twenty years, yet there wasn’t a single person in that building who could tell you diddly-squat about her. Nobody knew of any medical issues, whether she had any living family, what her favorite color was. She was, for all practical purposes, non-existent, invisible. This is an old story, sad and pathetic as it may be. The story, as related to me, was that there was nothing in the apartment outside of her bedroom that indicated there was anybody or anything in her life that had anything to do with what went on in the world past her front door. There were no letters, cards, photos that hinted she had a relationship of any kind with anyone. Sad, yes? Once her mailbox was accessed, several days after her body was removed and our Office was laboring to find someone willing to bury her, there was nothing but bills and junk mail. (The earliest postal date was five days before she rotted to the point she could no longer be ignored.) This was provided by the building manager, refreshed from a lovely vay-cay and not shy about sharing his relief over not having to deal with her demise. It was related to me that he was, however, no less pissy about having to contend with the remaining mess. It seemed all she had for companionship, interaction and nurturing were her three cats. The cats with whom she slept . . . behind a locked bedroom door.
What the cop and the firemen chose not to elaborate on—and left my colleague to discover on her own– beyond the trio of felines desperate dash for the streets, was that those kitties had spent at least five days with no access to their kibble. The cats—obviously—did not share their lonely owner’s fate. They did not pass into the Great Beyond, and were arguably just as fit and full of mischief as they were before retiring to sleep on that fateful night. They did what any creature would do when self-preservation was the issue: They made do with what limited means fate had left them.
My colleague related that when she entered the bedroom the deceased woman was right where the policeman and the fireman said she’d be. They had chosen to remain in the hallway. No effort was made to move her into a more accessible location. One reason was that she was decomposing. Neither cop nor fireman will touch a decomp without prompting, though I’ve yet to meet one that has refused such a prompt. That’s our job, to be sure. What may have exacerbated any normal hesitation they had at moving a putrefying corpse was clear at her first glance. It was what the trapped kitties had done to spare themselves a fate similar to their owner’s.
The old woman was in a kneeling position, head wedged in the corner, hips up. By the looks of things, my colleague related, the cats didn’t suffer their hunger pangs for long. The old lady’s hamstrings were gone. So was the lower third of her buttocks. Picked to the bones. Her femurs, hip joints and a fair portion of her pelvis were exposed to open air. Fleshless. Picked clean. The missing flesh had left the apartment in a blur, into the hallway, out the front door, down the sidewalk and gone.
Is there a lesson in this? Dunno.
You tell me.
* * *
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