It’s quarter to one on a Saturday morning, and although I’m in a room with more than 200 other people, I’m the only one in shoes. Everyone else is wearing green toe tags on their naked feet. Everyone else, if you haven’t guessed by now, is dead.
“Be sure to breathe through your mouth,” Lee instructed me as he placed the cart by the inside wall and turned back toward the cooler door.
A few minutes go by, and as I’m making a note about the no-smoking sign in the cooler, I carelessly let a strong whiff of corpse in through my nose. It’s time to leave. I can come back later.
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Out in the admitting room, I gladly inhale the usually repugnant smell of cigarette smoke. Bill Lee has a Benson & Hedges dangling from his lips and a stack of body tags in his hand. Lee, 63, is a chain-smoker with a raspy, wheezing voice that spouts truncated sentences in a distant southern accent. Except for the lime green lab coat he is required to wear, he looks and sounds a lot like a blues singer from the Mississippi delta.
“Sometimes I wear them, but usually I don’t bother,” he says.
“Comin’ down hard?” asks Lee as he lights up another cigarette.
At 2:15 AM I go wandering. The viewing room down the hall is where next of kin are taken to identify bodies via closed-circuit television. It’s one of the stylish features of this five-year old, $18-million facility, which lies at the center of the newly developed Chicago Technological Park on the west side. And Room 113, the investigators’ room, looks like an IBM office. Cream-colored cubicles and carpeting brighten a space filled with police maps, computers, and bulletin boards. Pop music is on the radio and a half eaten pizza on the counter. Here, across the way from the admitting room, is where the bureaucracy of death functions–even at night.
