The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum Read Free Book Online Page A

. justice [would be] flaunted and innocent people bear the brunt due to a system which fosters ignorance, prejudice and graft.”
     
     
    IT HELPED that Charles Norris, however high-minded he could sound, also possessed a lively sense of the ridiculous. “We call this the Country Club,” he would tell visitors gravely, gesturing them into his departmental offices, furnished with items from the motley collection left him by Patrick Riordan.
    Norris had saved, with some enjoyment, the old coroner’s original inventory, which had listed, in bitterly meticulous detail: three (dented, according to Riordan’s notes) brass cuspidors, one curio closet (glass front intact), one safe (large), two telephone booths, four rugs, thirty-one chairs (two broken, one destroyed), eleven rolltop desks (one in bad shape), three wooden file cabinets, two clocks, one fan, one costumer (or coat rack), and four wooden wardrobes (one in several pieces). The rugs (filthy), they’d thrown away. One slightly blood-spattered carpet from a murder investigation was eventually salvaged to cover the floor of the Country Club lounge.
    Norris at least had a new home for his department’s offices and laboratories: in Bellevue’s recently completed pathology building. Standing a stately six stories, solid with granite, dressed up by long arched windows, the building had been designed with the intention of coordinating the city’s forensic services. Here the city morgue was located, as well as the laboratories and autopsy rooms used by pathologists to study the dead. There was plenty of room for the medical examiner’s offices and, to Norris’s delight, some spare space on the third floor for a forensic chemistry laboratory, something which he was determined to establish.
    As he wrote to Mayor Hylan, the location benefited them all. Riordan may have handed over all his battered furnishings, but he had left behind not a scrap of laboratory equipment. It made sense that “the place for the laboratory force of the medical examiner’s office should be where its seat of greatest activity resided.” Further, as Norris reminded the mayor, Bellevue offered the doctors working for him free access to the glassware, instruments, and chemicals of the pathology department.
    The resentful mayor had cut the medical examiner’s budget by some $65,000 from what he had offered Riordan. Norris responded by constantly needling the mayor for more money—and by paying for needed supplies himself. He’d inherited a comfortable income, and throughout his tenure he used it to make sure his department was adequately equipped. His first purchase, out of personal funds, was laboratory equipment needed to test for bacterial infections.
    He’d assembled a capable staff in his Manhattan office, which would handle major lab work for all the boroughs. He kept a couple of physicians on and brought in some new pathologists, notably a fiercely intelligent Harlem doctor named Thomas Gonzales. He worried, though, about the staff he’d inherited in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The doctors there seemed lazy to him. Norris warned the mayor that he might have to replace a certain amount of “useless timber.” But first he’d see how they responded to new standards. It surprised no one who knew Charles Norris that he had plans, lots of them. He would develop new rules for handling bodies. He would hire someone to run the chemistry lab, clerks to answer the phones, and stenographers to take and type notes on all bodies processed by the laboratory. He would create files on each case and insist that medical examiner employees, when testifying in court, refer to the recorded information rather than “memory,” as in the past.
    “This work, which I may term ‘organization,’ ” has apparently not been tried before, Norris wrote to Hylan, displaying his contempt for the previous system. The relaxed environment of the old coroner’s office, he promised the mayor, was now a thing of