Leader of the Pack (Andy Carpenter) Read Online Free PDF

will Andy Carpenter get off his ass’ pool.”
    I laugh. “You’ve got a pretty good shot.”
    “Good to hear. So if you’re not working, this is a strange place for you to show up.”
    “Doesn’t everybody show up someplace like here eventually?” I ask.
    “Now you’re waxing philosophical? What’s up?”
    “Has Nicky Fats come through yet?”
    She looks puzzled for a moment, and then says, “Is that Nicholas Desimone?”
    “You never heard of Nicky Fats?”
    “No, but after looking at him, the derivation of the name is fairly easy to understand. I’m just getting to him now.”
    “Can I watch?”
    “You mean listen?”
    “Yes. Listen.”
    Janet knows the drill, since I’ve sat in on other autopsies with her before. I do so with my back turned to the body and table; I even walk into the room backward so as not to see the unfortunate ex-soul that’s about to be cut up.
    She shrugs. “Sure. I always like live company.”
    We go into the autopsy room. As we approach, I do a neat little pirouette and take the last ten or so steps backward, ignoring Janet’s chuckling at my antics. As always, I’m struck by how cold it is in the room.
    As Janet is getting ready, she asks why I’m interested in this particular autopsy.
    “I saw him just a short while before he died. Just an hour or so, if the news reports are right.”
    “Was he a client?”
    “No, I represented his nephew, Joey.”
    “The guy who shot those people?”
    “Innocent as charged.”
    “Wasn’t there a jury involved in there somewhere?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. She starts talking into a recording microphone, describing what she is doing to the body, and what she is discovering.
    I don’t understand much of it, since there are a lot of medical terms. Also, since I can’t see what she’s looking at, and because she examines every part of the body, it’s hard to know when what she is saying has any significance.
    When she mentions “vertebral fracture” I perk up. “Broken back?” I ask.
    “Broken neck; it was reported that he fell down in the bathroom. It’s going to be the cause of death.”
    “So no chance of suicide?”
    “Are you asking if he intentionally broke his own neck?”
    “Withdraw the question. Could he have had help?”
    “Let’s see,” she says, and then doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. Finally, “It’s not going to be definitive, Andy.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “There are contusions on the left side of the neck, probably premortem. Slight ones on the right side as well, but much less pronounced. Possible that they were sustained in the fall, maybe if he fell against a sink or something.”
    “So it could have been a murder?”
    “Possibly, but I’m not going to have enough to call it that. Unless you have something enlightening to add.”
    “He was an enforcer and hit man. Those kind of people make a lot of enemies.”
    “He lived a long life,” she points out.
    “True.” I thank her and leave, walking straight out the door, since that leaves me with my back to Nicky Fats.
    I’m not really sure what I wanted her to say, but what I got was the worst of all worlds. Had she said definitively that Nicky died of natural causes, I would have known that it had no connection to what he said to me, and I could have dropped it.
    Had she said for sure that he was murdered, I would have been close to positive that there was something for me to find, and I could have plunged into it, for Joey’s sake.
    This was somewhere in the middle, enough to draw me in, and probably enough to waste my time.

 
    “I heard it from a guard,” Joey said. “He thought it was pretty funny.”
    “He thought what was funny?” I ask.
    “The idea of Nicky falling out of the shower onto the floor. He said he must have looked like a beached whale.” He shrugs. “That’s what passes for humor around here.”
    Among the things I’d come back to the prison for was to tell Joey about