Sleazy bars, dirty rooming houses, movie extras, drunken servicemen

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

“I didn’t like going to the morgue,” Willis says. “It was an awful place.” For ages there had been threats to shut the morgue down—plans for condemning or moving the facilities. Time and again they got out of it with improvement schemes, but nothing was done. “There were other changes going on in the city, but a lot of things were staying the way they’d been—pockets were being filled and the dead weren’t going to kick.” Rooms opened off halls that were filled with deputy coroners drinking coffee, joking, and talking, while in some rooms the bodies were stacked two and three deep— “stacked up like cord wood,” Willis says. “I once had a judge order a check on a particular decedent in a case, and a deputy took me into one room and dumped one body off the other like you’d roll logs to get to the one on the bottom. I never found the right corpse. When we left the place he didn’t bother to stack them back up again, but left them where he’d turned them over looking for the one I needed. Guys at funeral parlors griped that bodies were sent over half the time without being sewn up or put back in shape. Sometimes body parts were put in wax paper—especially with traffic fatalities— or put into boxes for the independent undertakers. I remember one incident where the face was still folded back over the top of the head, which they’d sawed through, and the body was sent out like that, with the wife and relatives waiting for it at the other end.”