Chump Change Read Online Free PDF Page A

pets.
    Where his head should have been, a zip-lock bag now rested. It had something inside, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I pointed. “May I?” I asked.
    “You can take that stuff with you,” she said. “He’s officially a John Doe.”
    I shook the bag out onto the table. It wasn’t much. Twenty-three cents, a ferry receipt dated the day before yesterday, and an old-fashioned skeleton key.
    Rebecca anticipated me. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s all he was carrying.”
    “This guy’s seen hard times,” I said, as much to myself as to her.
    Rebecca agreed, with a bit more vigor than was customary for her.
    She had something she wanted to tell me, so I shut up and waited for her to get around to it. She nodded at Ronald. “Help me turn him over,” she said.
    With practiced ease, they rolled the corpse over.
    I think I may have gasped. I could feel Rebecca’s eyes boring a hole in the top of my head, but couldn’t pull my gaze from the guy’s back. I’d never seen such a collection of scars in my life. Little scars, going this way and that. More of em than you could count, covering every square inch of him.
    Rebecca reached out and slid the zipper to the bottom of the rubber bag. The scars continued. His back, his buttocks, the back of his thighs. All of them covered with a maze of interconnected scar tissue. “Jesus” was all I could think to say.
    “Jesus indeed,” she said.
    Ronald made the sign of the cross.
    “Thank you, Ronald,” she said, pointing at the pile of Indian bones on the cart. “Box those up and store them in number four.”
    Ronald rolled the cart ahead of him, headed for the door.
    I waited until he was gone.
    “You got any idea how he might have . . .” I pointed again. “I mean how he got those and you know . . . like what that might be from?”
    “I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.”
    “Could they be burns?” I tried.
    She shook her head. “Not a chance.” She pointed at his back. “They’re overlaid,” she said. “This happened in stages.”
    I found myself at a loss for words.
    “If you had to guess . . .” I finally squeezed out.
    She made her “You must be kidding me” face. “For the record?”
    I showed a palm. “No. No. Just between us,” I said quickly.
    She wanted to refuse but couldn’t. Despite my many failings, I am, without question, real good at keeping my mouth shut, and Rebecca knew it.
    “Were I forced to hazard a guess . . . I’d say he’d been whipped.”
    “Whipped?”
    “Over an extended period of time, I’d say,” she added.
    “Whipped?”
    She used one of my own jokes on me. “Is there an echo in here?” she asked.
    “This is the twenty-first century. People don’t . . . they don’t . . .”
    Took me a coupla minutes to collect my thoughts and lower jaw. She walked me up to the lobby, where she had Margot rustle me up copies of the postmortem photos. When I turned back to thank her, she was gone.

     
    I was still trying to wrap my mind around the body in the morgue when I turned downhill onto Louisa Street, heading for the Eastlake Zoo. The Seward School loomed lithic on my right as I stood on the brakes and eased my way down the uneven surface.
    Sometimes, less is more. In old neighborhoods like this, when the city wanted you to slow down, all they did was not pave over the century-old cobblestones. Loosened by a hundred years of relentless rain, thrust skyward here and there by massive tree roots, the stones became an axle-shattering mogul course, where a speed of more than two mph virtually guaranteed you’d be utilizing your AAA membership.
    I slid the car to a stop along the curb on Eastlake Avenue and checked my teeth for loose fillings. The dashboard clock said it was nearly two P.M. Drunks are habitual people. They make the same mistakes over and over, because they’re hardwired that way. If they could do something else, they would, but they can’t, so they don’t.
    This