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word myein , meaning to be closed (of eyes). In a disciplined hour, the coroners and technicians at the morgue, the observers like me and my dippy cohort, Doug Forster, would open our eyes to see, in the knowledge that someone has to, and in the knowledge that we could.
    Doug’s sneakers gave off a loud sneeek in the entry room, piercing through the piped-in Muzak. While I wrote my name on the register, three women clerks behind in the office were talking about a Kevin Costner movie, one saying she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, he looked like a geek to her. Another clerk moved papers while she had a phone handset clamped on her shoulder, a Mexican girl in a pink suit who just got her A.A. degree in business. “Yo, Smokey,” she said, and looked at Doug with a half smile. “I’m on hold.”
    â€œIs the canyon Jane up yet? The bum from yesterday?”
    â€œWe had an officer-involved case, so it got delayed.”
    â€œGood. So are we. Delayed.” I looked back at Doug. “You two know each other?”
    â€œHi, Doug,” Janetta said, all cheeriness. “How you doing?”
    I left them smiling at each other and went in the other door and down the hallway, passing by the office of a deputy coroner, his high forehead gleaming as he hunched over the phone.
    Thirty-eight people, including clerical help, cover the twenty-four hours here. Even so, only about eight autopsies are performed a day compared to L.A.’s daily twenty-four, and the techs don’t have to forklift bodies three to a shelf the way they do there.
    The odor of formalin and alcohol filled the air, and I patted my pocket to see if I still had my Mentholatum stick. Most corpses we see do not have that much of an odor because the amine-type chemicals responsible for decomposition—cadaverine and putrescine—haven’t yet begun their work.
    It’s the smell of the formalin that slugs me. In its usual state as a preservative, it’s a solution of formaldehyde and water but it’s also used in powder form, sprinkled in the cavities of bodies so violently disrupted by autopsy. Early household deodorizers contained formalin, not so much to hide the odor as to numb the ability to smell. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work all that well. Not so much in the autopsy room, but in the refrigeration room where the treated corpses wait until removal to a funeral home, I have to use something for my nostrils, sissy or not.
    Dr. Schaffer-White was working on a male in the first station. Schaffer-White’s a strong sister and very feminine. Always she has pearls or diamonds around her neck. Tall, slender, and blonde, she works fewer hours than the rest of the staff because she has a two- and a four-year-old at home. The only chink in her armor is that she doesn’t work on child cases.
    Dr. Watanabe was at the second station, with his two favorite assistants, both women. The air vent beneath the basin by his legs had filter papers with blood smears on them drying against the louvers. Later, the filters would be plucked off and stored in the freezer. On Watanabe’s table was a young man with distinct ligature marks around his neck and what I could recognize as electrical burns on his ankles even from where I stood. A torture victim. The doctor was showing the techs how the electrical cord that still bound the victim’s left ankle had been shaved back on the ends, the better to apply power.
    A doctor who looked to be East Indian and who I didn’t know, was sitting in a chair at the next station, watching a young man who looked like a college halfback use rose cutters to sever the ribs of a heavy woman.
    On the table next to her, a tech was preparing to remove the tongue of a suspected cocaine courier. I shifted positions so I wouldn’t see. Removing the tongue is the one step in the autopsy procedure I avoid. It’s done to check for injury to the larynx. But when they