Dead poeple can be unpredictable.
It sounds weird, I know.
By definition, dead people are the most predictable people on the planet. They're done moving around, and they've got nothing to talk about. They're not going to show up in church wearing a fantastically indecent mini-skirt and they sure as hell are no longer going to say anything shocking over Thanksgiving dinner. They're never going to drunk-dial you at 3am on a Tuesday and they'll never appear at your work and ask to borrow money. Perhaps that's why when dead people do something unexpected- they're so damn creepy. It's just not normal. In the natural order of things, they should be done with surprises and ought to just lie there and decompose while the rest of us dish out all the appalling behavior and "in-poor-taste" remarks (which I specialize in.)
I'm a big fan of the new James Bond franchise. Daniel Craig is the man. Sure, his ears stick out, and he kind of has the face of those little plastic treasure-trolls that middle aged women like to put on their desks at the office. These unforunate aesthetics aside, I still think that the new James Bond movies are baked slices of awesome, drizzled with sugary sweet awesome sauce. Therefore, I am delighted to have the opportunity to quote the movie "Casino Royale":
As said by the character, Mathis, after he successfully frames a bad guy for murder by stowing an otherwise inconvenient corpse in the trunk of the bad guy's car:
"Just because one is dead does not mean one cannot still be useful."
Well, I must tweak this quote to my own purposes and instead say:
"Just because one is dead does not mean one cannot still be dangerous."
Let me 'splain.
Dispatch told me I had a dead body in the woods, a report that initially filled me with dread.
A young, female, dead body in the woods just screams "homicide". The scenarios one can imagine for how she ended up there are never... comforting. However, THIS young female body had a relatively benign story. A man had been walking his dog and found her laying in the weeds in a "nature preserve" area just beyond a big bank of apartments.
"I walk this way with my dog everyday," the bug-eyed, traumatized suburbanite had gasped as I spoke with him. "She wasn't there yesterday..."
A brief investigation of the scene had revealed the nature of the whole event. She had apparently walked out to that location, popped her head-phones on and swallowed 3 whole bottles of prescription medication, washing them down with the diet coke she had stowed in her back-pack which lay nearby. The head-phones were still in place and one of the empty bottles was still sitting in her lap. We dismissed the guy who found her to go home and pour himself a tall, stiff one, while the two cops and I processed the scene and the body.
I noticed, as I looked her over, that she wasn't actually holding her cell-phone/music player. Her cell phone was in the pocket of her coat and she was clutching a mysterious, square, pink item in her hand.
"What is that, that... thing... in her hand?" I asked the police officers. They shrugged.
"Okay, lady..." I grunted to the corpse as I leaned over her an pulled her rigored fingers loose from the object, "Hand it over..." (Yes, I talk to the dead... no, I don't think they answer me)
I pulled the object loose and held it up for inspection. It was roughly the size and shape of an old 110 film camera. The thing was bright pink, and tucked into a little pink leather case that was cut away to reveal a switch on the side of the box and a strap that was attached to a metal pin that plugged into one end. I had a flash of recognition.
"Oh, my gosh! I know what this is!" I announced proudly to the officers, whose disgusted expressions indicated that the two of them likely believed the object's pink color meant it was some kind of feminine hygiene product. They weren't altogether wrong.
"This is a personal alarm! My uncle gave me one of these a while back. You pull this little pin on the end like a grenade and it makes some unGODly loud noise. It's supposed to scare off attackers."
My uncle DID give me one of those little personal alarms once, but I never used it. Quite frankly, our discovery surprised me in as much as I didn't think that anyone made those personal alarms anymore. I was even more surprised to imagine anyone actually used them. In my opinion the effectiveness of such a device depended completely on the assumption that one would never be accosted by anything more threatening than a nervous cat. I gave mine to my mom and took Hapkido classes instead.
The cops looked doubtful.
"I'm serious you guys... watch, I'll show you." I grabbed the little strap attached to the pin and pulled.
Nothing happened.
"Huh... that's weird..." I mumbled as I turned the device over in my hands, plugging the pin back in. I noted the switch on the side, along with a little raised button. I flipped the switch and tried pulling the pin again.
Again... nothing happened.
"Man, what am I doing wrong here?" I ran my fingers along the side and, feeling the little button on the side, I pushed....
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
The end of the device erupted into a shower of icy blue lightning as the tell-tale clapping-crack of a tazer shattered the serene peacefulness of the quiet, wooded scene around us. My hand had been covering the business end of the tazer, and through some stroke of luck, my palm had NOT actually been in contact with the prongs when the weapon went off.... all the same...
"HOLY-FUCKING-SHIT!" I shieked as leapt at least 2 feet in the air and flung the tazer down at the officers' feet. The two of them scrambled back as though I had just launched an angry pit-viper their direction and their hands slapped to their hips where their side-arms were secured in holsters.
We all stood there is silence for a moment. The ambient noise of the woods had come to an abrupt halt, and you could imagine the local fauna turning to one another in confusion and saying: what the fuck was THAT?
The silence was broken by the two officers bursting into uncontrollable laughter.
"Oh my GOD, you should have SEEN the expression on your FACE" the younger officer howled at me as he slapped his thigh and rebuttoned the safety strap on his holster.
"Well," the older one chuckled, "THAT will get your attention."
"Okay, sure.. yeah, you guys think THAT'S funny..." I said as I retrieved the little pink tazer and brandished it at the two of them, letting the lightning bark at them as I pressed the button.
"Watch it now. I've got one of those too..." The older officer warned me as he reached to his belt and pulled his giant, black, police-issue tazer gun.... the kind that fires pronged wires into your flesh and issues about 10,000 more volts that the little civilian model I was holding.
(Here, I feel I should note that, way back when, during my time on the ambulance, I had a cop once tell me that before an officer can carry a tazer- they have to actually BE tazed... The cop choked up and fell silent when I asked him to describe the experience. He looked me dead in the eye and said he'd rather be shot than tazed.)
"Now, now... there's no need for THAT kind of talk..." the younger officer said to the older officer as he pulled his own tazer and levelled it at the older man's thigh.
"Man, that just would not look good, would it?" The older officer said as he observed the Mexican tazer stand-off in which we now found ourselves.
"What?" I asked, observing that my girly little tazer looked a lot less threatening than the industrial strength monsters I was up against.
"That poor guy, walking his dog tomorrow morning- and finding the dead body still here, surrounded by two cops and one medical examiner, stuck full of prongs and tazed into unconsciousness."
At autopsy, we confirmed that the woman had died of the drug overdose and wasn't fending off an attacker with her tazer when she "passed on". It seems kind of... counter-intuitive to me. I mean, I understand not actually wanting to be attacked, but what's with the self-defensive grandstanding when you're already going to kill yourself? What, exactly, are you afraid of? A murderer? But, then again, I suppose I can't begrudge her not wanting to die painfully... as she doubtlessly would have if a murderer had gotten to her before she could do the deed herself. And who am I to say that her tactics weren't successful? She sure scared the hell out of me.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The Things You Notice
After a while, you stop noticing the dead body.
I mean, obviously, there's a dead body at your scene, otherwise it wouldn't be your scene... in fact, without a dead body you wouldn't even have an excuse to be there... which would make it really awkward if you were there anyway.... because then you'd have to make one... that is either an excuse... or a dead body... take your pick.
Anyway..
When you walk into your 50th or 100th or 1000th death scene, the dead body is no longer the most interesting thing in the room. When I walk into a scene, the body is actually the LAST thing I look at. I'll stand back and note the overall condition of the environment. I just kind of look around. I'll get a feel for the place, wherever it is. Then I look at the body and ask myself "Does it make sense for this person to be in this room, in this position, under these circumstances?"
You'd be surprised the kinds of things you start to notice. You'd be surprised the kinds of thing you find- I'm a professional snoop. After all, snooping is how I discovered that my first fiance' was cheating on me. As a result, I'm a big proponent of snooping. After a broken engagement, the forfeiture of $5000+ in catering/flower/dress deposits and roughly a year of therapy, I've pretty much decided that snooping is only "wrong" if you DON'T find anything. As it is, I can honestly say that snooping saved my life, my sanity and my future- and now I do it for a living.
(As for the guy- it's okay, he was just a practice fiance anyway.)
For those of you who don't have a lot of experience in rooting through other people's stuff, let me give you a few pointers:
I have made it a habit to find the most frequently occupied spaces in a person's residence, then I check for anything within reach of my right hand. Statistically speaking, the majority of the population is right handed and their most important and incriminating items will be within this radius I saw Val Kilmer do it in the movie "The Saint". He was searching Elizabeth Shue's apartment and took the time to sit in her obviously favorite chair and look around at whatever was within arm's reach.
It's true, I learned my investigative technique from Val Kilmer... or whoever wrote the script for "The Saint".
This little mechanism has found me drugs, firearms, suicide notes... all kinds of telling shit. Even more importantly- I like to look in the top drawer of any dead person's bed-side table.... or under their mattress at roughly shoulder height. You learn a lot about people by what they want to keep within arm's reach when they're sleeping.
But I'm getting off track.
You notice things, like the fingerprints on doors, exactly where people grab the door when they don't use the knob You notice toenail polish, you notice crumbs in corners and what magazines people keep vs the ones they throw out. You notice if there is ice in the glasses on the kitchen table. You notice how sticky a countertop is. You notice movie collections and wether someone has an x-box or a PS3.
Most importantly you notice smells... which is unfortunate in this line of work, but it can't really be avoided. I notice when a house smells like burned toast, I notice if the family is wearing yesterday's clothes.
I have a great sense of smell.
As a paramedic, this "bonus feature" in my list of talents served me well. For example, when a diabetic's blood glucose is WAY too high, their breath has a very particular smell, and not everyobody can detect it. I was VERY good at walking into a house and just knowing how sick a diabetic was. I could smell liquor on people and I could pin-point weed from whole city-blacks away. During the final days of my underwhelming career as a paramedic, I identified and named a particularly squirrly aroma. This scent defied description, dodged captivity- and I could only dub it "homeless man smell". Some dapper gentleman could be sitting in the fanciest restaurant it the city, and I would be able to walk up, take a whiff- and then directly ask him out of which dumpster he got his clothing and whose pocket he picked in order to purchase that martini. There's no fooling my nose.
A less fortunate aspect of my remarkable sense of smell- is the fact that now, I can pick up the scent of death absolutely anywhere. Therefore, I can impart this truly unnerving reality: death is all around us... constantly... and only after you've been exposed to death can you really begin to appreciate how MUCH death is around you. After witnessing my first autopsy, I, in a rather horrified fashion, came to realize that my local 24-hour fitness.... reeked of death. Every alley in the city was awash in death. My refigerator shelves were packed with row upon row of saran-wrapped death. And my bathroom couldn't be made tolerable with 2 cans of fabreeze and enough incense to keep an entire army of fortune tellers in fine, mythical form for months.
Once I start moving and examining a dead body, I have to kind of detatch from my olfactory senses. I would be completely debilitated by nausea if I really allowed my self to experience the full bouquet of a dead body- especially an older one... (not "older" as in 90 years old... "older" as in this person's been dead for no less than 10 hours in a room without air-conditioning... in July) When a dead body is moved, all of the decaying gasses begin to release, and they're let loose to roam around the room like restless cats. So, while a dead body might not be particularly unplesanrt at first... it can turn into a real stinker once you fiddle with it, kind of like a hibernating bear.
When I went to my last scene it was reekingly clear that the decedent, a 50 year old woman who hadn't been seen walking and talking for almost 16 hours, was undoubtedly past her expiration date. I allowed myself to experience her ripeness for a few seconds before pointedly putting it out of my head. My mental distance from the odor was aided by the fact that I had a lot to think about. Looking around the house, it became evident that the scene we were dealing with was one of profound dysfunction and familial chaos.
I had been called there and responded to find my favorite Chaplain and a a police officer I'd never met before already knee deep in crazy. They were attempting to gather all the pertinent information from a frantic, big-breasted girl in her 20's who couldn't stop clutching at her bangs like she was trying to pull her eyebrows back around her ears. Furthermore, she began every statement with the words, "I mean". Meanwhile there were 3 crazed boys running around the house, the oldest of which was 13. Apparently, he was about to be removed from the home by protective services because he was such a hellion that he was singlehandedly turning the entire household into the OK Corral on a regular basis.
(This information was volunteered by the decedent's daughter, and mother of the boy, who yanked at her hair and said:
"I mean... he's being removed from the home because we just can't deal with him"
As she relayed this information I, wondered how a voluntary statement that wasn't intended to clarify an earlier statement, could begin with the words "I mean". All this while, I was staring at the young woman's utterly phenomenal cleavage and wondering if her breasts were real.... Like I said, you notice things)
I continued to ask more questions about the mother's medical history.
Yank... jiggle jiggle... "I mean... she was in a coma last year."
With every question the girl became more verbose and the children became more crazed, and I wondered more and more where and how her particular style of speech came about.
I was informed that the entire family was on a host of psychiatric meds and that the daughter had locked up all of her meds because she suspected her mother, the decedent, was stealing them. This act had caused the decedent to lock up HER meds. From the sound of it, everybody was always suspecting everyone of taking everyone else's meds (including the kids' Adderal) and everyone was constantly loosing the keys to the lock-boxes that held their OWN meds.
We went up to the decedent's room and found her lying in bed, her body cold to the touch and rigor already having come and gone. Next to her bed, in the majic spot that Val Kilmer taught me to look for, was the lock box which, when opened, revealed the decedent had consumed roughly 116 Vicodan tablets in the last 24 hours.
After that, the investigation followed the typical script. That is to say that I continued to look for other possible causes of death despite the fact that I was more or less certain that this particular parade was going to disband at the corner of Narcotic and Overdose. Only a few things happened that were significantly out of the ordinary:
1) I noticed that the decedent's room smelled like "Victorian Rose"- a discontinued lotion that was sold by Victoria's Secret back when I was in high-school. I am now 35... how old was her bottle of "Victorian Rose" and could I have it? (Don't worry, I didn't ask)
2) Judging by the predominant contents of her bedroom shelves, the decedent had a marked affection for turtles and filter-less pall-malls.
3) What I did NOT notice was that after I plunged a massive syringe into the decedent's femoral artery and procured a blood sample to test for drug levels, the cap on the blood-filled vial was not completely secure. SO, when I placed that vial in a plastic bag to secure it for the long journey to the lab, the vial burst open and my bare hand was abruptly covered with the slimy, lukewarm sludge of 16-hour-old dead blood...
... which I suddenly remembered was positive for Hepatitis C...
This turn of events meant that I was swearing a blue streak when I turned and noticed the chaplain had come back in the room and had just heard me mother-fucking our personal lord and savior.
He looked sad.
4) The final unusual event ocurred while we were rolling the decedent's body over in order to view her back, thus making sure there was nothing suspicious, like a stab wound, in or on it. As we rolled her over, I didn't exactly plug my nose, but I simply decided to stop paying attention to it. Furthermore, the olfactory sense is the fastest to adapt and I had already been wrestling with the body a bit. (Quick note: this adaptation means that if you ever find yourself in a truly rancid environment... like a Rancid concert, for example... never fear, your nerves will quite simply stop registering the sensory input in a very short time.) The police officer who was helping me roll the body, had not been in the room for very long. So as we rolled her, I didn't register anything unusual, but the officer wrinkled her nose and whispered,
"She smells like steak"
"What?" I said
"Well, not like a cooked one or anything... but she does smell like raw meat..."
I bent forward slightly and unsheathed my sense of smell, cautiously taking a sniff of our girl.
"Oh my God, you're right..."
The dead lady smelled like a raw steak... not like a piece of meat that's been rotting.... THAT would have at least made sense. The decedent actually smelled like raw steak- like that smell when you unwrap a thawed steak to cook it. Our decedent smelled like top sirloin.
"That is SO weird."
It didn't exactly conjure up an appetite, but it didn't exactly put me off steak for life either. More than anything, I was just astonished that I didn't notice such a bizarre occurrence earlier. We weren't grossed out. Across the board, I think everyone in the room... myself, the Chaplain and the cop... we were just really really confused. AND of course I was also hopeful that this unexpected revelation might make the chaplain forget that I had just expressed my belief that Jesus Christ's middle name was "Cock-sucking".
We loaded up our decedent when the funeral home arrived and I informed the daughter that we would NOT be leaving the decedent's medications behind-
(Yank... jiggle jiggle... "I mean... that's kind of a disappointment."
Yes, she actually said that... to me... out loud... in front of a cop.)
And as we were all leaving, I couldn't help but turn to the police officer, congratulate her on her keen observation... and ask her if she had ever seen the movie "The Saint."
I mean, obviously, there's a dead body at your scene, otherwise it wouldn't be your scene... in fact, without a dead body you wouldn't even have an excuse to be there... which would make it really awkward if you were there anyway.... because then you'd have to make one... that is either an excuse... or a dead body... take your pick.
Anyway..
When you walk into your 50th or 100th or 1000th death scene, the dead body is no longer the most interesting thing in the room. When I walk into a scene, the body is actually the LAST thing I look at. I'll stand back and note the overall condition of the environment. I just kind of look around. I'll get a feel for the place, wherever it is. Then I look at the body and ask myself "Does it make sense for this person to be in this room, in this position, under these circumstances?"
You'd be surprised the kinds of things you start to notice. You'd be surprised the kinds of thing you find- I'm a professional snoop. After all, snooping is how I discovered that my first fiance' was cheating on me. As a result, I'm a big proponent of snooping. After a broken engagement, the forfeiture of $5000+ in catering/flower/dress deposits and roughly a year of therapy, I've pretty much decided that snooping is only "wrong" if you DON'T find anything. As it is, I can honestly say that snooping saved my life, my sanity and my future- and now I do it for a living.
(As for the guy- it's okay, he was just a practice fiance anyway.)
For those of you who don't have a lot of experience in rooting through other people's stuff, let me give you a few pointers:
I have made it a habit to find the most frequently occupied spaces in a person's residence, then I check for anything within reach of my right hand. Statistically speaking, the majority of the population is right handed and their most important and incriminating items will be within this radius I saw Val Kilmer do it in the movie "The Saint". He was searching Elizabeth Shue's apartment and took the time to sit in her obviously favorite chair and look around at whatever was within arm's reach.
It's true, I learned my investigative technique from Val Kilmer... or whoever wrote the script for "The Saint".
This little mechanism has found me drugs, firearms, suicide notes... all kinds of telling shit. Even more importantly- I like to look in the top drawer of any dead person's bed-side table.... or under their mattress at roughly shoulder height. You learn a lot about people by what they want to keep within arm's reach when they're sleeping.
But I'm getting off track.
You notice things, like the fingerprints on doors, exactly where people grab the door when they don't use the knob You notice toenail polish, you notice crumbs in corners and what magazines people keep vs the ones they throw out. You notice if there is ice in the glasses on the kitchen table. You notice how sticky a countertop is. You notice movie collections and wether someone has an x-box or a PS3.
Most importantly you notice smells... which is unfortunate in this line of work, but it can't really be avoided. I notice when a house smells like burned toast, I notice if the family is wearing yesterday's clothes.
I have a great sense of smell.
As a paramedic, this "bonus feature" in my list of talents served me well. For example, when a diabetic's blood glucose is WAY too high, their breath has a very particular smell, and not everyobody can detect it. I was VERY good at walking into a house and just knowing how sick a diabetic was. I could smell liquor on people and I could pin-point weed from whole city-blacks away. During the final days of my underwhelming career as a paramedic, I identified and named a particularly squirrly aroma. This scent defied description, dodged captivity- and I could only dub it "homeless man smell". Some dapper gentleman could be sitting in the fanciest restaurant it the city, and I would be able to walk up, take a whiff- and then directly ask him out of which dumpster he got his clothing and whose pocket he picked in order to purchase that martini. There's no fooling my nose.
A less fortunate aspect of my remarkable sense of smell- is the fact that now, I can pick up the scent of death absolutely anywhere. Therefore, I can impart this truly unnerving reality: death is all around us... constantly... and only after you've been exposed to death can you really begin to appreciate how MUCH death is around you. After witnessing my first autopsy, I, in a rather horrified fashion, came to realize that my local 24-hour fitness.... reeked of death. Every alley in the city was awash in death. My refigerator shelves were packed with row upon row of saran-wrapped death. And my bathroom couldn't be made tolerable with 2 cans of fabreeze and enough incense to keep an entire army of fortune tellers in fine, mythical form for months.
Once I start moving and examining a dead body, I have to kind of detatch from my olfactory senses. I would be completely debilitated by nausea if I really allowed my self to experience the full bouquet of a dead body- especially an older one... (not "older" as in 90 years old... "older" as in this person's been dead for no less than 10 hours in a room without air-conditioning... in July) When a dead body is moved, all of the decaying gasses begin to release, and they're let loose to roam around the room like restless cats. So, while a dead body might not be particularly unplesanrt at first... it can turn into a real stinker once you fiddle with it, kind of like a hibernating bear.
When I went to my last scene it was reekingly clear that the decedent, a 50 year old woman who hadn't been seen walking and talking for almost 16 hours, was undoubtedly past her expiration date. I allowed myself to experience her ripeness for a few seconds before pointedly putting it out of my head. My mental distance from the odor was aided by the fact that I had a lot to think about. Looking around the house, it became evident that the scene we were dealing with was one of profound dysfunction and familial chaos.
I had been called there and responded to find my favorite Chaplain and a a police officer I'd never met before already knee deep in crazy. They were attempting to gather all the pertinent information from a frantic, big-breasted girl in her 20's who couldn't stop clutching at her bangs like she was trying to pull her eyebrows back around her ears. Furthermore, she began every statement with the words, "I mean". Meanwhile there were 3 crazed boys running around the house, the oldest of which was 13. Apparently, he was about to be removed from the home by protective services because he was such a hellion that he was singlehandedly turning the entire household into the OK Corral on a regular basis.
(This information was volunteered by the decedent's daughter, and mother of the boy, who yanked at her hair and said:
"I mean... he's being removed from the home because we just can't deal with him"
As she relayed this information I, wondered how a voluntary statement that wasn't intended to clarify an earlier statement, could begin with the words "I mean". All this while, I was staring at the young woman's utterly phenomenal cleavage and wondering if her breasts were real.... Like I said, you notice things)
I continued to ask more questions about the mother's medical history.
Yank... jiggle jiggle... "I mean... she was in a coma last year."
With every question the girl became more verbose and the children became more crazed, and I wondered more and more where and how her particular style of speech came about.
I was informed that the entire family was on a host of psychiatric meds and that the daughter had locked up all of her meds because she suspected her mother, the decedent, was stealing them. This act had caused the decedent to lock up HER meds. From the sound of it, everybody was always suspecting everyone of taking everyone else's meds (including the kids' Adderal) and everyone was constantly loosing the keys to the lock-boxes that held their OWN meds.
We went up to the decedent's room and found her lying in bed, her body cold to the touch and rigor already having come and gone. Next to her bed, in the majic spot that Val Kilmer taught me to look for, was the lock box which, when opened, revealed the decedent had consumed roughly 116 Vicodan tablets in the last 24 hours.
After that, the investigation followed the typical script. That is to say that I continued to look for other possible causes of death despite the fact that I was more or less certain that this particular parade was going to disband at the corner of Narcotic and Overdose. Only a few things happened that were significantly out of the ordinary:
1) I noticed that the decedent's room smelled like "Victorian Rose"- a discontinued lotion that was sold by Victoria's Secret back when I was in high-school. I am now 35... how old was her bottle of "Victorian Rose" and could I have it? (Don't worry, I didn't ask)
2) Judging by the predominant contents of her bedroom shelves, the decedent had a marked affection for turtles and filter-less pall-malls.
3) What I did NOT notice was that after I plunged a massive syringe into the decedent's femoral artery and procured a blood sample to test for drug levels, the cap on the blood-filled vial was not completely secure. SO, when I placed that vial in a plastic bag to secure it for the long journey to the lab, the vial burst open and my bare hand was abruptly covered with the slimy, lukewarm sludge of 16-hour-old dead blood...
... which I suddenly remembered was positive for Hepatitis C...
This turn of events meant that I was swearing a blue streak when I turned and noticed the chaplain had come back in the room and had just heard me mother-fucking our personal lord and savior.
He looked sad.
4) The final unusual event ocurred while we were rolling the decedent's body over in order to view her back, thus making sure there was nothing suspicious, like a stab wound, in or on it. As we rolled her over, I didn't exactly plug my nose, but I simply decided to stop paying attention to it. Furthermore, the olfactory sense is the fastest to adapt and I had already been wrestling with the body a bit. (Quick note: this adaptation means that if you ever find yourself in a truly rancid environment... like a Rancid concert, for example... never fear, your nerves will quite simply stop registering the sensory input in a very short time.) The police officer who was helping me roll the body, had not been in the room for very long. So as we rolled her, I didn't register anything unusual, but the officer wrinkled her nose and whispered,
"She smells like steak"
"What?" I said
"Well, not like a cooked one or anything... but she does smell like raw meat..."
I bent forward slightly and unsheathed my sense of smell, cautiously taking a sniff of our girl.
"Oh my God, you're right..."
The dead lady smelled like a raw steak... not like a piece of meat that's been rotting.... THAT would have at least made sense. The decedent actually smelled like raw steak- like that smell when you unwrap a thawed steak to cook it. Our decedent smelled like top sirloin.
"That is SO weird."
It didn't exactly conjure up an appetite, but it didn't exactly put me off steak for life either. More than anything, I was just astonished that I didn't notice such a bizarre occurrence earlier. We weren't grossed out. Across the board, I think everyone in the room... myself, the Chaplain and the cop... we were just really really confused. AND of course I was also hopeful that this unexpected revelation might make the chaplain forget that I had just expressed my belief that Jesus Christ's middle name was "Cock-sucking".
We loaded up our decedent when the funeral home arrived and I informed the daughter that we would NOT be leaving the decedent's medications behind-
(Yank... jiggle jiggle... "I mean... that's kind of a disappointment."
Yes, she actually said that... to me... out loud... in front of a cop.)
And as we were all leaving, I couldn't help but turn to the police officer, congratulate her on her keen observation... and ask her if she had ever seen the movie "The Saint."
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