“Nothing, except that he’s been seen in this neighborhood, both before and after the bodies were found in the house.”
I wondered how my dear neighbor Bill would feel if he were to wake up one morning and find his wife dead. My musings were interrupted by the radio, which had being going pretty continuously, starting to sound urgent. It occurred to me that my friends had been out of touch for a while, and it was always possible that someone would call or drive by to check on them, if they hadn’t done so already.
Robert Duvall was still looking at me, waiting. He would continue to do so for some time, unless he was told to do something different.
“Now listen to me,” I said.
“Yes.”
“There must be something wrong with the exhaust system in this car.”
“Yes.”
“You have had the engine running, and you both fell asleep.”
“Yes.”
“In a moment, you will spill your coffee on your lap, and that will wake you up.”
“Yes.”
“You will know at once that you have passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning, and you will roll down the window, turn the car off, and wake up your partner.”
“Yes.”
“First you will roll up the window, and you will forget doing so, and you will forget this conversation entirely, then you will spill your coffee.”
“Yes.”
“Do so now.”
He rolled up his window and I got out of there.
I returned to the house, came up to my typing room, and dug through the sheaf of papers that my friend from the newspaper had given me, and it was all there, between the lines; hints of a love triangle, hints of a gruesome death, if you were looking for them. The whole thing was there. The trouble was, I’d been looking for the gruesome death part, rather than trying to spot a murder that made so much noise Kellem would know it couldn’t be hushed up.
Yes, indeed, the fool had fallen for the mayor’s son, and, when his fiancee had refused to back out quietly, Kellem had gone off her head and killed her. Idiot. And, on top of it all, Kellem wouldn’t leave. Why? I suppose because she was in love with him. Double idiot.
Hmmm. Of course, if Kellem is in love, that might explain why I
Never mind. My own feelings require no explanation. Nor do my actions.
But it all makes sense, I think. I now know the situation, and how I’ve been put into the middle of it. The police are watching the house, they will probably search it again, and eventually some fine morning someone will notice something funny about the bookcase or the dimensions of the basement, and then they will either locate the catch or simply bash down the wall, and then they will find me, and then-
And I’m stuck here, because that stupid bitch Kellem won’t let me leave.
Now, at any rate, I know the cure for that. I must take it soon.
FOURTEEN
i-de-al n. 1. A conception of something in its absolute perfection. 2. One regarded as a standard or model of perfection. 3. An ultimate object of endeavor; a goal. 4. An honorable or worthy principle or aim. 5. That which exists only in the mind.
Maybe I will make a good detective after all; I seem to have developed the knack of finding what I want through sheer, boring drudgework, which, as I understand it, is most of what detectives do. In this case, I called every hospital in the area asking to speak with Brian Baldwin. The first one I tried was University Hospital on Jefferson, where Jill was staying, because that would have made things sweet and easy, but I had no such luck. In any case, it wouldn’t have mattered, because I learned that she had been discharged that morning. So I got a telephone directory and started making calls. Eighteen times I asked to speak with Brian Baldwin; eighteen times I was asked if he was an inpatient; eighteen times I said yes; eighteen times I was told, very apologetically, that he didn’t seem to be listed and was I certain of the spelling of his name; the nineteenth I was told that it was too late to ring the patient rooms.
The hospital is called Saint Matthew’s, and it is located outside of town in one of the high-class suburbs. Now, I must tackle the problem of gaining entry. I don’t-yes, in fact, I do know how to go about it. More later.
Some time ago I dated an Emergency Room nurse, and I learned about some of the odder things that happen in hospital emergency rooms.
For example, once a patient had, somehow, gotten a lightbulb stuck in his, um, rectal passage, without breaking it, and to remove it the crew found a lamp, screwed the lamp into the lightbulb, and pulled it out. In another case, someone managed to get himself stuck in a stairwell, drunk, and wearing almost nothing. Since this was in a warm climate, no one thought of hypothermia, so when CPR failed he was pronounced dead, and the intern was breaking the news to the family when his heart started beating again. There was another case where a man had gotten a four-inch-thick piece of steel tubing driven through his chest-a piece that was too long to fit into the elevator, so they had to walk him up the stairway to surgery. He lived.
And here’s another example, from right here in Lakota, that happened just a few hours ago.
A man was found lying flat on his back outside of the Emergency Room entrance. A quick check indicated no pulse and no respiration. He was brought in and CPR was administered, as well as adrenaline injections (they will never know how much he enjoyed that), but, after twenty minutes, there was no response. They disconnected him, covered him over, and wheeled him out into the hall. Eventually, when those who come for bodies came for him he was gone. While they were trying to track him down, they found an ER admissions nurse who said that he had walked by her, winked, and disappeared down the hall toward the administrative section.
Some time later, an ob-gyn nurse was found, dazed and pale, slumped against her desk. Maybe someone thought to ask her if she’d seen the fellow, and maybe she looked puzzled, nodded, and passed out. More likely, the incidents were never connected. And maybe someone gave his description to the police and then identified him from a sketch. More likely, they just shrugged the whole thing off and never bothered reporting it to anyone for fear of getting into trouble. That’s what things are like in your favorite hospital.
The place smelled of disinfectant, the walls were white, the corridors wide, the doctors and nurses very intent on what they were doing. Brian Baldwin was in a private room on the third floor, sleeping. Someone had brought roses. Laura was always fond of roses, though I never knew if it was the flower or the thorns that appealed to her. Baldwin, even sleeping, had a strong and not unattractive face, with the exception of his hair, which was entirely missing. His breathing was deep but not terribly so. I hid myself and waited.
After a while, when nothing happened, I slipped outside the door and read his chart. He was, it seems, twenty-five years old and a graduate student at St. Bartholomew’s College. The chart contained such gems of information as: “Weak, rapid, thready pulse.” What in the world is a thready pulse? It also mentioned, among the little bit I could understand, dehydration, increased heart rate, severe anemia with several question marks after it, “HIV neg” followed by three dates, the first being last September, the most recent being last month. It also contained the notes “questionably compliant,” and “2–3 day cycle.”
I wondered what “questionably compliant” meant. It sounded like blaming the victim for the failure of the treatment, but I don’t know hospital jargon.
The most interesting one, however, was from late last September, where it said several things about “chemo,” followed by indecipherable codes, and ending with, “Leukemia negative, discontinuing chemo.”
