Read Online Morgue by Dr. Vincent DiMaio - Free Book Online Page B

ever return, even for reunions.
    But the first of us to become famous—infamous, really—was Stephen H. Kessler. A brilliant but troubled guy, he’d graduated from Harvard and entered medical school at Downstate with me. Before long, he started behaving erratically. One day he was caught tossing scalpels like darts at the cadavers in the anatomy lab. The dean forced him to take a leave of absence after his first year, and he checked into a mental hospital.
    Kessler eventually returned to medical school but was kicked out again when he was caught giving LSD to patients.
    Rumors circulated that Kessler was due to return for a third try when startling news broke in April 1966: Kessler had viciously slashed his fifty-seven-year-old mother-in-law to death in her Brooklyn apartment. (Coincidentally, my father did her autopsy and counted 105 separate wounds.) Kessler claimed he’d been tripping on LSD at the time, so the media dubbed him the “LSD Killer.” It turned out he was high on lab alcohol and pills and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, so he was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity. He disappeared into the asylum at Bellevue and was never heard from again.
    During those frantic med-school days, I often visited my father in the Brooklyn morgue. I’d seen dead bodies before, but these weren’t the slides in my father’s closet, or pictures in a medical textbook, or even the cleaned-up cadavers we poked and prodded in anatomy class. These were freshly dead, real people, pale or blue, with real bullet wounds, knife gashes, or no visible injuries at all.
    I was fascinated mostly by the mobsters who seemed to come through my father’s morgue doors with regularity in the late 1960s. The New York mob wars came and went, but the hits never stopped. The Mafia dead were always well-dressed, with alligator shoes, silk underwear, manicured hands. I’d never seen a man wearing clear fingernail polish until I examined those dead wiseguys on my father’s slab.
    As the end of medical school approached, I had to choose my specialty. What were the choices? There was an adage to consider: “Internists know everything but do nothing; surgeons know nothing but do everything; psychiatrists know nothing and do nothing; and pathologists know everything and do everything, but it is too late.”
    There was more. I had learned in medical school that (like my father) I had no bedside manner and that I couldn’t master the complex knots a surgeon must know. I realized I’d be better with patients who didn’t require reassurance and operations that didn’t require lifesaving knots. Pathology was perfect. Pathologists were doctors’ doctors.
    After my one-year pathology internship at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina—where I finally decided to pursue forensic pathology—I started my three-year residency at the Kings County Medical Center in Brooklyn. During that time, I started performing autopsies for the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Brooklyn under my father’s watchful eye. By the time I finished my residency, I had already done more than a hundred autopsies before I worked a single day as a certified forensic pathologist.
    My residency changed my life in another, more significant way when one of my supervisors introduced me to her secretary, Theresa Richberg, who at the moment was bent over her typewriter, her long blond hair obscuring her face. When she looked up, I was thunderstruck. She was beautiful. I guessed her to be in her mid-twenties, and when she spoke, I heard an articulate woman who seemed to be as smart as she was pretty. And among the first things she told me in that confident voice, scented with just a tantalizing whiff of Brooklyn, was that she was engaged to be married. She flashed a diamond ring to prove it.
    I was deflated but not defeated. Over the next few days, I made a point of speaking to Theresa