Baughman nodded. “Let’s see what this other boy has to say.”
Corpsman Robert Harrison, another impossibly young kid, dark-haired, skinny, said, “Tell you the truth, I was supposed to check on him every five minutes, but he got irritated with that. So I cut it to fifteen.”
Baughman was again doing the interrogating while one of another trio of plainclothes agents stationed in this room took the notes. “You came on at midnight?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And he was still awake?”
“Yeah, well-at one-thirty, he was asleep, or seemed to be. When I looked in on him at one forty-five, he was up, sitting at his desk, writing … not writing exactly, copying something from a book.”
I wondered what that was about. The only two books in the room I knew of were that Catholic tome by Monsignor Sheen and the poetry anthology I’d given him.
The kid was saying, “I told him if he was having trouble sleeping, maybe he should have a sleeping pill … sodium amytal is what we use.”
The corpsman apparently wanted to let us know he knew his stuff, even if the psychiatric patient he’d been charged to watch had jumped out the window.
“But Mr. Forrestal refused the pill,” the boy said. “I went down to check with the floor nurse about it, but she was away from her desk. So I woke Dr. Deen up, right here in this room, and he wasn’t happy with me. Told me if Mr. Forrestal didn’t want the sleeping tablet, he didn’t have to take it.”
“When did you check on Mr. Forrestal again?”
“I didn’t wait any fifteen minutes, that’s for sure! I stepped it back up to five … it was one-fifty. And Mr. Forrestal’s bed was empty. I woke Dr. Deen up, and we looked for him, and we saw the screen in the pantry was took out, and looked out the window and … well, he was down there, but they’d already found him. We were kinda shook up, me and the doc-just sat down at the table there, in the pantry. Figured, you know, it was obvious who he was. But I guess the patient got messed up pretty bad in the fall, and some nurse came up to do a bed check and we told her it was Forrestal who fell … or jumped.”
“… Thank you, Robert.” Baughman turned to the other agents. “Anyone have anything else?”
Baughman may not have been including me in that question, but I asked, “Robert, what was Mr. Forrestal copying?”
“I don’t know. Just something out of some big red book.”
My book of poetry. Was this the “substitute” for a suicide note Baughman mentioned to Dr. Bernstein?
“We found what he wrote,” Baughman said to me. “Let you have a look, later.” He turned to the note-taking agent. “Show Robert out, would you? And bring Dr. Deen in?”
The slender, handsome young doctor who had slept through Forrestal’s journey out the pantry window did not look like he’d be getting any more sleep tonight. Anguish was etched in his pasty-white face, the blueness of his night-duty beard giving him an unwashed look; his dark hair was uncombed and his eyes were wide and haunted. A sleeve of his white jacket hung loose, torn away from the shoulder.
“How did that happen, Doctor?” Baughman asked his seated interview subject, nodding at the sleeve.
“I tore it loose.”
“How?”
“Yanked on it myself.”
“Why?”
Deen swallowed. “When I saw that corpsman, Prise, step out of the elevator … he was coming up to see what happened, you know, in the brief bedlam after the body was discovered.” He shook his head. “The look the kid gave me … accusing look …” He lowered his head and covered his face with a hand.
“That’s okay, Doctor …”
He raised his head; his face was slick with tears. “Nothing’s okay. Why did I tear off my sleeve, when I saw that kid who’d tried to warn me, looking at me? Because I couldn’t reach my heart.”
Baughman asked him the pertinent questions, and the story the doctor told mirrored and corroborated those of the two corpsmen.
“I don’t think I was negligent,” he said, wearily, “not really-not when both Dr. Raines and Dr. Bernstein told me the patient was close to full recovery. But that won’t make this any easier to live with.”
A while later in the hallway, Baughman said, “Getting the picture, Mr. Heller? It’s not a murder, it’s a suicide.”
“If you say so.”
Baughman smiled at my misgivings, saying, “I tell you what-let’s take a look at the crime scene. I believe you’ll quickly concur with our findings.”
He led me into the tiny diet kitchen, where a plainclothes photographer-apparently just finishing up-was loading up his gear, and a white-jacketed technician was also closing up his kit, which sat on the porcelain tabletop where, not so long ago, Forrestal and I had sat, in friendly conversation.
The screen had been removed from the window and rested against the wall, at the left of the radiator under the window yawning open onto, and letting in, the cool night.
“No usable fingerprints on the sill or the screen,” the white-jacketed technician told Baughman; he was a bald, bespectacled guy of maybe thirty, with a flatly expressionless voice. “Smudges only. Same for the radiator, and the wall. But that would be expected, considering.”
“How about the sill outside?” Baughman asked.
“Sorry. Nothing. But did you see the scuff marks, on the concrete?”
“No.” Baughman moved to the window and I tagged along. He leaned way out, studying the concrete below the window. Pulling back in, he nodded toward the window, inviting me to have a look. I did. Scuff marks and scratches on the concrete indicated Forrestal, in the process of trying to hang himself, may have changed his mind and tried to climb back in, to safety, to no avail. The view out this window-unlike the pleasant, bustling one of the hospital’s driveway from room 1618-was bleak: a small, dark utility building and weedy overgrown vacant lots.
“Did you dust out there?” Baughman was asking the technician.
“As best I could. But if the guy was flailing out there, slappin’ and clawin’, it’s unlikely he left a clear print of any kind. I suppose we could put a ladder up, from that roof below, and see what we come up with.”
Baughman thought about that, then said, “Thanks, Frank. Maybe we’ll do that, in the daylight…. You’re done here, then?”
The photographer had already slipped out.
“That’s your call, Chief,” the fingerprint man said. “Other than the ladder routine, I’m fresh out of ideas.”
Baughman nodded, and the technician left.
We were alone.
I said, “Close the door, Chief, would you? I don’t want us to be overheard.”
He did. We sat at the table; I was where Forrestal had been seated that afternoon, Baughman in my chair.
“Don’t you find some of this troubling?” I asked.
Baughman grunted. “Whole thing’s troubling.”
“A nurse who steps away from her desk at just the right moment? A doctor who’d rather sleep than attend a patient? A suicidal patient, at that, kept on the sixteenth floor? Whose windows, overlooking the front of the hospital, have security locks in his own room, but who has access to a pantry, overlooking nothing, with a window screen you just have to look at hard to open?”
“Mr. Heller …”
“For Christ’s sake, call me Nate.”
“Nate.” Baughman dug a pack of Camels out of his breast pocket, offered me one, which I declined, while he found a lighter in his suitcoat pocket, firing one up, saying, “My friends call me ‘Hughie,’ and this is a suicide. Open and shut.”
“The only thing open and shut about this case is that fucking window. You’ve got a floor nurse, a corpsman and a doctor simultaneously out of action, either away from their posts or sleeping like a baby. Maybe that was arranged so somebody could drop by Forrestal’s room after visiting hours, and find him alone, unprotected. How do you know somebody-either a hospital employee, or somebody from the outside, hospitals have notoriously poor
