Koko

Robbie’s death. He had not told Judy that he was doing this, because Judy had insisted that they give away or destroy everything their son had owned. The trunk was an awkward relic from the days when Michael’s parents had taken cruises, and Michael and Judy had filled it with books and clothes when they had moved to Westerholm. Michael knelt down before the open trunk. Here was a baseball, a short-sleeve shirt with a pattern of horses, a worn green Dimetrodon and a whole set of smaller plastic dinosaurs. At the bottom of these things were two books, Babar and Babar the King. Poole took out the books and closed the trunk.

1

An hour and a half later, driving as if on automatic pilot toward Manhattan, Michael finally noticed the worn old Riverside Edition of Wuthering Heights on the other seat and realized that he had held it in his hand during the whole of his visit to the hospital. Like glasses their owner searches for while wearing, the book had become transparent and weightless. Now, as if to make up for its earlier tact, the novel seemed denser than a brick, nearly heavy enough to tilt the car on its springs. At first he felt like pitching the book out the window, then like pulling up at a gas station and calling Murphy to tell him that he could not make the line-up. Beevers and Linklater could identify Victor Spitalny, Maggie would say that he was the man who had tried to kill her, and that would be that.

His next thought was that he needed something to fill up his day with reality, and driving to New York to attend a line-up was as good as anything else.

*  *  *

He put the car in a garage on University Place and walked to the precinct house. The weather had brightened in the past few days, and though the temperature was still under forty, warmth had begun to awaken within the air. On both sides of the narrow Greenwich Village streets, people of the generation just younger than Poole’s walked coatless, smiling, looking as if they had been released from prison.

His idea of police stations had been formed by movies, and the flat modern facade surprised him when he came upon it. Lieutenant Murphy’s precinct building looked like a grade school. Only the steel letters on the pale facade and the police cars drawn up before it declared the identity of the building.

The interior was another surprise. Instead of a tall desk and a bald veteran frowning down, Poole first saw an American flag beside a case of awards, then a uniformed young man, leaning toward him from the other side of an open window.

“I’m supposed to meet Lieutenant Murphy for a line-up at eleven,” he said.

The young man disappeared from the window; a buzzer went off. Poole opened the door beside the window, and the young man looked up from a clipboard. “The others are on the second floor. I’ll get someone to take you up.” Behind him plainclothes officers glanced at Poole, then away. There was an impression of busyness, conversation, male company. It reminded Poole of the doctors’ lounge at St. Bart’s.

Another, even younger, policeman in uniform led Poole down a corridor hung with bulletin boards. The second policeman was breathing loudly through his mouth. He had a lazy, fleshy, unintelligent face, olive skin, and a fat neck. He would not meet Poole’s eyes. “Up da stairs,” he said when they arrived at a staircase. Then he labored up beside Poole and slouched off through another school corridor. Soon he stopped at a door marked B.

Poole opened the door, and Beevers said, “My man.” He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, talking to a small round-faced Chinese woman. Poole greeted Beevers and said hello to Maggie, whom he had met two or three times at Saigon. A little ironic breeze seemed to blow about her, separating her from Harry Beevers. She shook his hand with a surprisingly firm, competent grip. One side of her face dimpled in a lopsided smile. She was extraordinarily pretty—the impression of her intelligence had momentarily filtered out her good looks.

“It’s nice of you to come in all the way from Westchester County,” she said in a flat accentless voice that sounded almost English in the precision of its consonants.

“He had to join all us plebs in the dirty city,” Beevers said.

Poole thanked Maggie, ignored Beevers, and sat down at a board room table beside Conor. Conor said, “Hey.” The resemblance to a grade school persisted. Room B was like a classroom without a teacher’s desk. Directly before Michael and Conor, on the other side of the room, was a long green blackboard. Beevers went on saying something about film rights.

“Are you okay, Mikey?” Conor asked. “You look kinda down.”

Poole saw the copy of Wuthering Heights on the passenger seat of his car.

Beevers glared down at them. “Use the brains God gave you, man! Of course the man is down. He had to leave a beautiful town where the air is clean and they don’t even have sidewalks, they have hedges, and spend hours on a stinking highway. Where he came from, Conor, they have partridges and pheasants instead of pigeons. They have Airedales and deer instead of rats. Wouldn’t you be down? Give the man some understanding.”

“Hey, I’m from South Norwalk,” Conor said. “We don’t have pigeons either. We got seagulls.”

“Garbage birds,” Beevers said.

“Calm down, Harry,” Poole said.

“We can still come out of this okay,” Beevers said. “We just don’t say any more than we have to.”

“So what happened?” Conor whispered to Michael.

“A patient died this morning.”

“A kid?”

Michael nodded. “A little girl.” He felt impelled to speak her name. “Named Stacy Talbot.” The act of putting his loss into these specific words had an unexpected and nearly physical effect on him. His grief did not shrink, but became more concrete: Stacy’s death took physical form as a leaden casketlike form located deep in his chest. He, Michael Poole, was intact and whole around this dense, leaden weight within him. He realized that Conor was the first person to whom he had spoken of her death.

Stacy had been feverish and exhausted when he had last seen her. The lights had hurt her eyes; her usual gallantry was at low ebb. But she had seemed interested in his little fund of stories, and had held his hand and told him that she loved the beginning of Jane Eyre, especially the first sentence.

Poole opened the book to read the sentence. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

Stacy was grinning at him.

This morning one of the nurses had tried to head him off as he walked past their station, but he had barely noticed her. He had been intent on some words Sam Stein had spoken to him in the first-floor corridor. Stein, who had evaded responsibility for a surgical error with a combination of cowardice and superiority Michael found repulsive, had said that he was sorry his medical group had not made more progress with Michael’s “boys”—the other doctors of his own group practice. Stein was assuming that Michael would be familiar with the background of this remark, but Michael could fill it in with informed guesswork. Stein’s own “boys” were building a new medical center in Westerholm, and wanted to make it the most important in the county. To do that they needed a good pediatric practice. Michael himself was the stumbling block to the effective union of their practices, and in his grumpy, conceited way Stein had been asking him to spare him the trouble and implied insult of having to go after a second-rung pediatric group. A brand new facility like the one Stein was planning would draw about fifty percent of all the new people in Westerholm, and maybe a quarter of the houses in Westerholm changed hands every year. Michael’s partners had been talking things over with Stein while he had been gone.

Michael had sailed past the gesturing nurse, the germ of a brilliant idea beginning to form in his mind, and opened the door to Stacy’s room.

He strode into a room where a bald middle-aged man with a grey moustache and a double chin lay asleep with an IV in his arm and the Wall Street Journal open on his chest. The man did not awaken and wink at him like an actor in a farce, he slept on noiselessly, but Michael felt a change in his inner weather like the sudden hot airlessness that precedes a tornado. He ducked outside and checked the number of the room. Of course it was the right room. He ducked back again and looked at the drugged tycoon. This time he even