CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (25 page)

F
ORTY
-T
HREE

T
he next day was different. I ate Jell-O. I drank coffee. I had all my remaining tubes and wires disconnected, and I got out of bed.

The tiny, tan nurse, whose name turned out to be Amy Isham, bustled into my room after breakfast and said, “Let’s go.”

“Anywhere,” I told her.

She helped me maneuver onto my feet. My legs were strong as rubber bands. The room took up spinning again.

“Lean on me,” Mary Isham ordered.

She couldn’t have weighed half of what I did. “I don’t think—”

“I used to work at Bellevue, stuffing psychotics into straitjackets.” She lifted my arm onto her shoulder.

I leaned. Her bones were so sharp through her uniform I thought they were going to cut my hand.

“Let’s go,” she said again.

We went down the hall, a full twenty yards. At the end of this
accomplishment we stood at the window, gathering strength for the hike back.

Outside, a huge dewatering apparatus sprawled in the center of a deep excavation. Gray sludge rushed away through a wide-mouthed pipe. For the most part, everything was blurry to me, but there seemed to be moments when, briefly, my vision was clear.

“Is that going to be part of the hospital?” I asked. A whole sentence without a pause for breath, and after strenuous exercise, too. Must be the Chinese herbs. Or the Jell-O.

“No,” Mary Isham said. “It’s part of the Bronx Renaissance.”

Back in bed, I was listening to the Chopin Preludes again and trying to see if there was a way to breathe without moving my chest when a large bouquet of chrysanthemums floated through the door, followed by Arthur Chaiken.

“Hi,” Chaiken said tentatively. “Are you up to visitors?”

“Sure,” I answered. “Figuratively.”

“That’s good enough.” He let the door close, then opened the cabinet by the bed. “Ah! Just what I need. Let me take care of these.” He took the flowers to the bathroom, came out with them spreading from a plastic vase. He put it on the windowsill, where the yellow and white blossoms glowed fiercely in the morning light like junior suns.

“From your garden?” I asked.

“Yes.” He beamed back at the chrysanthemums, then came around the bed. “I tried to come yesterday morning, but they told me only family. I didn’t know you were married, by the way. Congratulations.”

“No, that’s my partner. She lied so she could keep an eye on me.”

“Oh.” He must have decided that whatever that meant wasn’t his business; he went on, “How are you? Are you all right? Is there anything you need?”

“No, thanks. Just time. Unless you have a cigarette?”

He shook his head. “I gave it up. Smith, what happened? Who did this? What was the point?”

“The point was to kill me. I don’t know who and I don’t know why.”

“I feel responsible.”

“Did you order it?”

His mouth fell open. “Good God, no. You’re not serious?”

“Then why would you be responsible? No, I don’t think I was serious.”

Chaiken shifted in his chair. “Still. You were carrying out an investigation at one of our facilities. I should have been able to offer you some kind of protection. It didn’t—” A muffled boom stopped him, as it had stopped me the day before. “What was that?”

“The Bronx Renaissance. I don’t know what that means, but that’s what it is.”

He smiled. “The Bronx Renaissance? It’s sympathetic magic.”

“Sorry?”

“You know. You want the courage of a lion, eat a lion’s heart. You want the stealth of a panther, wear a panther’s pelt. You want to stimulate the economy of the Bronx, seed its neighborhoods with publicly financed development.”

“Money attracts money?”

“That’s the dogma.”

“You don’t sound like a believer.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Each time the City does this, or talks the State into it, real estate booms in the immediate area and service establishments expand. I suppose it could work. But there’s no commitment.” He looked toward the window, where his flowers filled a small patch of sky. “No staying power. It’s like planting a garden and not watering it. The politicians want instant success, and when they don’t get it they wander off looking for something else.”

“What would work?”

“Oh, any idea will work if you stick with it long enough. The Bronx Renaissance is as good as any. But they’ll give it up as soon as the Mayor and the Borough President get tired of each other.” He stopped abruptly, looked at me. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. I’m sorry, Smith. It happens it’s one of my hobbyhorses, political fickleness. I’m sure you don’t need a public-policy lecture right at the moment.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I just need distraction. Or a cigarette.”

The phone rang.

“Shall I?” Chaiken asked.

“Thanks.”

Chaiken answered the phone, told it to hold on a minute,
moved it to where I could reach it. “It’s your partner,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”

I thanked him again, took the receiver out of his hand.

“Hi,” Lydia said, after I’d grunted at her. “How are you feeling?”

“Lousy.”

“Good. That’s much better than yesterday. Can I go through with the divorce?”

“See if I care. I was hanging all over a cute little nurse this morning. She picked me up.”

“Literally, I’ll bet. I’ll be up soon. Is there anything you want?”

“Cigarettes.”

“Hah. Bill, who was that who answered the phone?”

“Arthur Chaiken. He brought me flowers.”

“Oh.” Her voice was worried. “Bill, be careful. Someone tried to kill you. It could be anyone.”

“I thought of that. But if I tell them no visitors I’ll die of boredom. Besides, whoever wanted me dead the other night could’ve just shot me, if he was going to do it himself. It’s surer and easier.” “Surer” was tough to pronounce. I reprimanded myself for getting cocky. “But I get the feeling this was hired out. I don’t think whoever’s behind it is going to stroll in here and try it himself.”

As it turned out, only half of that was right.

Chaiken came back a few minutes after I’d hung up the phone. “Do you want more distraction?” he asked. “Or do you want to rest?”

“Either one.”

“Spoken like a man who wants to rest. Listen, Smith, I’ve thought of something I can do for you, and I’d like you to let me.”

I raised my eyebrows, but it was the facial equivalent of saying “surer.” “What would that be?”

“This.” He nodded at the room. “It gets expensive. I—”

He stopped, because I was shaking my head.

“Wait,” he grinned. “I wasn’t offering you money. I assume you’re insured.”

“That’s right.”

“What I’m offering you is expertise. By training and long practice, I’ve become, if I say so myself, one of the great form-filler-outers.”

I must have looked bewildered, if my expressions were readable.

“It matters.” Chaiken was still grinning. “You have no idea. If the forms are correctly filled out you’re much less likely to have your claims questioned. Sometimes I think they don’t even care if the claim is completely bogus, as long as the paperwork is correct. You’re bound to find yourself drowning under paperwork, with a thing like this. Call me if you need help with it. Let me check it before it goes in.”

“Well,” I said doubtfully, “if I need to.”

“I’m telling you, it’s all that matters,” Chaiken said. “How good your paperwork looks.”

It was much too bright, but not warm enough. A snake slithered up my right arm, scraped me like a rope burn. “It has to be correct.” The tight-lipped woman waved a SIG Sauer at the blindingly white piles of paper that towered above the walls of my roofless cabin. “Or they’ll know.” The door clicked behind her. I looked up where the roof had been, aching to see the glowing autumn hillside sloping up from the cabin; but the trees were gone, the hills bare and sandy. I heard the ocean, breakers pounding, felt the sudden hammering of my heart. I’d never have time to finish before the sea crashed over the walls, sucking the snake, the papers, me, into a whirlpool the depths of which I was afraid to even imagine.

“Bill? Bill, what is it?” Lydia’s voice. “It’s all right. You’re dreaming. Come on, wake up. That’s right. That’s better.”

It was still too bright. I lifted my hand to ward off the light. “Oh,” I heard Lydia say. “Wait.” Footsteps; a swishing noise; the brightness was gone.

I looked around the room. Lydia was resettling the vase of chrysanthemums on the windowsill, where the slatted blind was now closed. The full midday sun bled in around the edges. Lydia turned and smiled.

“You were having a nightmare. What was it about?”

“Paperwork,” I muttered. Slowly, carefully, I reached for the cup by the bed, sucked lukewarm water through a straw. The Bronx Renaissance boomed outside. “Paperwork.”

“The flowers are lovely.” She went back to her bag, fished out
the thermos. “Here. This is different from yesterday. Stronger. For a different stage of healing—”

“Paperwork.”

She stopped. “What?”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “It has to look right. That’s all that matters.”

Lydia put down the thermos, came over to the bed. “Bill? Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly confused. “I may be wrong.”

“When did that stop you?” There was amusement in Lydia’s tone, but seriousness too.

“Chaiken,” I said. “He said … it has to look right …”

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

I took a breath, told her what I was thinking and why I was thinking it. “I might be wrong,” I said again. “And if I’m right it still might not explain everything.”

“It would be another piece. A big one. Shall I call Lieutenant Robinson?”

“No. No, I want to check it out ourselves first.”

“Why?”

“Leverage.”

She knew what I meant.

I drank the new soup, this one richer than the other, more pungent, with bits of greens floating in it. Lydia made two phone calls: one to Emigrant, to confirm what we were thinking, and then one to get the ball rolling.

“Half an hour,” Lydia said, hanging up from the second call.

“Good. That should just about give me time to get to the bathroom and back into bed.”

“Want me to help?”

“I do not. I’m a big boy; I can do this by myself.”

That turned out to be almost not true. I leaned on every piece of furniture in the room on my way to the bathroom, grabbed every grab bar once I was there. I managed to stand at the sink long enough to catch a look in the mirror. I saw a Neanderthal blur, purple and dark red, shadowed where I hadn’t shaved, set off by white patches of bandage on forehead and nose.

Sometimes, a reluctant voice said inside my head, there are advantages to not seeing.

The hell with it. I went back to bed.

Lydia had settled in, a small brushstroke of loose green shirt and black pants against a cream-colored chair. I mountaineered into the bed as she chose a tape for the boom box. We were listening to an early Beethoven sonata when the door opened and Mrs. Wyckoff stalked in.

F
ORTY
-F
OUR

A
ctually, Mrs. Wyckoff only stalked in about a foot, then stopped. Even blurred as she was I could see her nose wrinkle with distaste.

“Come on in,” I said. “It’s not contagious.”

Reluctantly she let the door close behind her, stepping only as far into the room as she had to to get out of its way.

“I …” She swallowed. “I had no idea …”

“No?” I said. “This is how it looks just before you get to the Mike Downey-Henry Howe stage.”

She drew herself up. “How can you say a thing like that? You are the crudest man—”

“I know. And you’re a very subtle woman. That’s why it took me so long to catch on.”

Lydia pressed a button on the boom box, stopping Beethoven in his tracks.

“Mrs. Wyckoff, you know my partner, I think?”

“Your—” She spun to look at Lydia. Her pale skin flushed with anger to the roots of her piled blond hair. “It was you who called me? But you were at the Home. Ida said—Dr. Reynolds showed you—Why, how dare you!”

“Pleased to meet you,” Lydia murmured, smiling.

“You two deceitful—”

“Forget that part,” I said. “I don’t have time before my next shot. I want to ask you some questions. There’s no reason you should
answer them, except I might be more understanding than the cops. You may have to talk to them too; but this way you get to rehearse. Unless it was you who hired someone to beat the crap out of me. That makes me less understanding. Did you do that?”

“I?” she sputtered. “Certainly not! What are you talking about? Why on earth would I do a thing like that?”

“To protect your reputation,” I said. “To protect the paperwork.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded again.

“Helping Hands’ reputation. All-important, all-consuming, right? That’s what everyone told me about you, and I’m an idiot, so I believed it. Except in a way it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Mr. Smith, I really don’t—”

“Sure you do. I thought it was just your ego, but I was supposed to think that. Me and everyone else. Just don’t make the place look bad and you’ll stay out of trouble, Bobby told me. And it’s true. Helping Hands’ reputation really is of vital concern to you. Only it has nothing to do with ego. It has to do with money.”

“I have no idea—” she huffed.

“It was Mr. Chaiken,” I rode right over her, “who clued me in. He offered to help me with my paperwork. He said they don’t care if your claims are phony if your paperwork is right. That’s true, isn’t it? And, besides your paperwork being right, if you run a model facility, with everybody well taken care of and all your inspections passed, I’ll bet you can steal like a son of a bitch and nobody gives a damn.”

“Mr. Smith!” Mrs. Wyckoff gathered herself together. “I will not have you speak to me this way! I came here because this woman—” she looked daggers at Lydia—“called and said you had information for me concerning the murders at the Home. I certainly will not stay and subject myself—”

“Yes you will, for just another little while. I’m too worn out to put up with you for long. See,” I went on, “we knew about Reynolds after we found the Emigrant account, but we thought he was working alone.”

The color drained from Mrs. Wyckoff’s face as if someone had pulled a plug in her big toe.

“What account?” she asked, in a voice not as convincing as before.

I started to speak, but Lydia rattled off the account number, adding, “Medical Services, Inc.”

“I don’t—”

“Oh, knock it off,” I said. “Lydia, you take it. I need a drink.”

I reached for the plastic cup and straw. Lydia said, “Actually, Dr. Reynolds was sort of obvious. He tried to extort money from me to get my mother into the Home. And he was killed in Mr. Howe’s apartment, which probably means he was looking for something, which probably means he was being blackmailed.”

Lydia took the cup, which had turned out to be empty, and went to fill it in the bathroom. Mrs. Wyckoff’s eyes followed her warily, as if Lydia might suddenly turn and bite her.

“But we thought he was at the top of the food chain,” Lydia said, bringing me back the cup. “Actually, it was you.”

“Don’t start,” I said as Mrs. Wyckoff opened her mouth. “I don’t care. If we’re right it’ll be easy to prove, once the auditors and examiners start swarming. If we’re wrong I’ll apologize.”

“I should hope so!” she managed.

“Uh-huh. And you can explain why you didn’t fire Portelli and shut down his operation, why you even moved Ida Goldstein’s room to protect Portelli’s privacy. Howe blackmailed you into it, right?”

She stared at me. I closed my eyes, realized my head ached and my chest was sore.

“God, I wish you weren’t here,” I said. “So let’s finish, okay?” I looked again, tried to focus on her, but I really didn’t need to. Her pale, tight face and rigid posture spoke volumes.

“The Home is a model institution,” I said. “I’ll bet they all are, all Helping Hands’ places. They have to be. Complaints would mean investigations. You never made the mistake almost all crooks make: you never got greedy. You probably never stole from the client-care budget, or the maintenance budget. Just double-billing. A little extortion, like Reynolds tried on Lydia. The kickbacks from Samaritan we know about already—” Mrs. Wyckoff’s face hardened when I said that—“and I’ll bet there are bills for consultants who never existed for services to patients they never saw. And all kinds of other scams I never even thought of. But all very low-key and high-class. It went on for years, and you made enough to buy a nice condo near a golf course. Do you play golf?”

“I—?” She squeaked. Her mouth opened and closed; she seemed startled that I’d called on her to speak. “Play golf?”

“I don’t,” I said. “No excitement. No risk. Of course, that’s probably why it attracts someone like you. Excitement can draw interest,
and interest can be risky, especially the kind of interest a place gets where people get killed.” I sipped some more water. I could afford the time out; I had her attention, now.

“Mike’s death was bad enough. Howe’s was a disaster. But me, I was a catastrophe. An investigator poking around—God knows what I might find. You couldn’t let that go on.”

She frowned. “You can’t mean you think that I hired someone to do this to you in order to get rid of you?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “That would have been very stupid. Another murder at the Home? No, on the contrary, I’ll bet you were upset when you heard about this. Thanks for your concern. No, what you did was smarter. Mrs. Wyckoff, who do you think murdered Mike Downey and Henry Howe?”

“Those boys,” she said stiffly. “That gang. I don’t see why that isn’t obvious to everyone. I don’t see what the big mystery is.”

“Even though you pay them a thousand dollars a month to leave the Home alone?”

A pause; then, unruffled, “The Home’s monthly extortion payment is fifteen hundred dollars, and I don’t see any reason to expect, when dealing with people like that, that one will actually get what one pays for.”

“And do you think the ones who did it will ever get caught?”

“I understand the police have arrested one of them for Mr. Howe’s murder.”

“Martin Carter,” I said. “He used to work for you.”

“Yes. He came out of our halfway-house program. It’s one of Helping Hands’ services to the community, giving our ex-felons their first job out of prison.”

“Oh.” I sank a little into the pillows. Everything would be so much easier without the weight on my chest. “So that’s how you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Enough about him to choose him as your sucker.”

“I—Mr. Smith!”

“If you really believe the Cobras are your killers and that they’ll never get caught, then this makes sense. Get an arrest, at least the police go away. Probably I’ll go away too, especially if the sucker pleads guilty. In fact, I might have, if you hadn’t happened to choose a friend of mine. Tough break, Mrs. Wyckoff.”

“What can you possibly mean?” Mrs. Wyckoff wondered. “
I
had that man arrested? I suppose I just called up the police and suggested—”

“You called up your old friend Andy Hill. You suggested to him it might be a good thing if people stopped poking around the Home. You sold him a nice line of concerned bull involving your donors, bad publicity impacting negatively on your future ability to effectively intervene—” I broke off, turned to Lydia. “I’ll bet you didn’t know I could talk like that.”

“I had no idea,” she grinned.

“And you thought Hill bought it.” I was back to Mrs. Wyckoff. “Actually, I think he may have his own reasons for wanting to avoid people like me and Lydia sniffing around Helping Hands. But anyway, he agreed with you. He liked your idea about framing Martin Carter—I mean, the guy is a killer, isn’t he? He probably deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, whether he actually did these killings or not—”

“You’re absolutely right!” Mrs. Wyckoff couldn’t hold it in any longer. “He
is
a killer! Filth like that, walking the streets, draining our resources—why should I spare a thought for him? The publicity was affecting our ability to operate, and whatever you think of me, Mr. Smith, Helping Hands is caring for people who otherwise—”

“Jesus!” I blew up too, within the limits of my ribs. “Spare me. I’ve heard that same crap from more people than you could imagine, these last few days. Everyone has one hand in the till and the other feeding the hungry. Mrs. Wyckoff, I’m going to call the
Daily News
and tell them all about you unless Martin Carter calls me by five this afternoon to say the charges against him have been dropped.”

“You are—what? How do you expect me to—”

“The same way you had him arrested. You and Andy Hill worked out this crap about his threatening you. You were the complaining witness.” Her beet-red face and her silence told me I was right. “So work out something else. Andy Hill’s always eager to oblige, especially if you’re a friend of Arthur’s. Now get the hell out of here. If I hear from Carter, I’ll keep my mouth shut and let the police dig up what Lydia and I have dug up already. That may give you time to get out of town with a little hot cash—like what you cleaned out of Emigrant yesterday—instead of just the shirt on your back. That’s my best offer. Now beat it.”

Either I hadn’t made myself clear, or desperation makes people
deaf. “Mr. Smith,” Mrs. Wyckoff began in a clenched-teeth tone that might have been intended to be conciliatory, “I can’t just pick up and leave like that. The people in my care—people like Ida Goldstein—depend upon me and my staff to look after them. I—”

“Mrs. Wyckoff,” I said, “yesterday Snake LeMoyne stood right where you are and told me the same thing. How people depend on him to take care of them. I threw him out too.”

Talking about Snake reminded me that when he was here I’d closed my eyes, hoping he’d go away. I tried that again.

The room began moving, swaying in syncopated rhythm with the pounding in my head. I kept my eyes closed, calmed the room down, calmed myself down. I heard Lydia’s voice, and I heard the door click, and then another woman’s voice, maybe Amy Isham’s. She said something to me and I said something to her. An insect stung me on the arm. The darkness settled into a velvety deep sea, and I settled into the darkness.