An Inconsequential Murder by Rodolfo Peña Page B

on a fresh, white shirt over his V neck T-shirt. He put his suit into a bag which he would drop at the cleaner’s on the way to the Department. His other suit was the same as the one he had taken off. They were interchangeable in style, in the worn look they had, in the same dark-gray color. No wonder people thought he always wore the same clothes.
     
    He called the Department’s garage. Yes, they had retrieved his car. Yes, they had changed the tire, the oil, filled the tank. OK, he’d take a taxi to the Department and pick it up.
     
    He called the Medical Examiner’s office. Was the doctor there? “Doc, have you got anything for me? OK, I am on my way.” He told the taxi driver to go by the cleaner’s on Garza Sada Avenue and then to take him to the Medical Examiner’s office.
     
    After he dropped off his suit at the cleaners, he sat back to wait for the taxi to thread its way through the usual morning rush hour traffic. He thought about his boss
and again wondered why people wanted this case to go away as quickly as possible. “There’s something wrong, something’s not right,” he said aloud.
     
    The taxi driver looked at him through the rear view mirror. “What’s that, sir?”
     
    “ I said that the dry cleaning is getting very expensive,” he said and laughed.
     
    “ Dry cleaning, sir?”
     
    “ Yeah, but never mind.”
     
    The taxi exited from Gonzalitos Avenue and turned into Madero Avenue. At the red light it turned into the University Hospital. He showed his badge to the guard so that the taxi could go into the reserved parking lot.
     
    “ Wait for me,” he said to the driver whose face stiffened thinking he was out of a fare. Lombardo said, “Keep the meter running. Don’t worry; you’re going to get paid.”
     
    He went into the stark white building whose only features were the glass entrance doors and a few small windows, which were curtained with white cloth. A sign above the entrance simply read, “Servicios Médicos Forenses” to announce the Forensic Medical Services.
     
    A girl in a white lab coat, sitting behind a beige counter asked, “Yes?”
     
    “ Dr. Figueroa, please.”
     
    “ Do you have an appointment?”
     
    “ He’s expecting me,” he said.
     
    The girl, without taking her eyes off of him picked up the phone, spoke into it, and then pressed the buzzer, which sounded unusually harsh and loud.
     
    “ You may go in,” she said. “Do you know where he has his office?”
     
    “ You’re new here, aren’t you?” he said to the girl and opened the buzzing door without waiting for her to reply.
     
    Dr. Figueroa was standing by the door to his office, with one foot out of it, and speaking to someone inside. He made a motion to Lombardo to stop, and said to the person inside that he would be right back.
     
    He made a motion for Lombardo to follow him and they walked quickly down a hall and into another office. A sign on the door said that this office belonged to a Dr. Pineda but Dr. Pineda was not there.
     
    Dr. Figueroa closed the door and without any preliminaries said, “The body you came to see is not here anymore.”
     
    Lombardo furrowed his brow but did not ask the question.
     
    Dr. Figueroa sighed. “The family had an order signed by a judge. It allowed them to take the body away without further, uh, abuse to it, as the father put it. We had to stop the autopsy, return the organs, and forget about including the lab reports in our write-up.”
     
    Lombardo nodded and was about to ask him something when the Doctor reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag, the kind reserved for evidence. There was a wet and crumpled piece of paper in the bag. “I found this deep in his trachea.”
     
     
    Chapter 12: The Governor Calls the Dean
     
    In the Dean’s office at the University, his new cell phone rang.
     
    “ Yes?” said the Dean tentatively.
     
    “ Ah, Dean Herrera. I see you have installed the cell phone I sent