CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (3 page)

F
IVE

Y
ou’re late.” Dayton scowled as I went to clock back in.

“I’m sorry. I ran into trouble.”

“I don’t want—” He broke off, staring. “What happened?”

I give him the Reader’s Digest version.

He shook his head. “This isn’t good, Smith. The Home doesn’t need enemies in this community. Especially Cobras.”

“Right,” I said. “I should have left him there.”

He didn’t answer that. Instead, he asked, “Does Mr. Moran know you’re armed?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not the usual thing here.”

“It is for me.”

“Smith—” He didn’t finish that thought either. “Go downstairs and see the doctor.”

“I’m all right.”

“And you’re on my crew.” Dayton picked up the desk phone, punched in two digits, asked for the doctor’s office. A wait; then a brief discussion about whether the doctor was in. He was and would be available shortly, it seemed. Dayton hung up. “Dr. Madsen’s office is on the north end of the hall. Come back here when you’re finished. I’m going to call Mr. Moran. He may want to pull you.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but Dayton was right. If the Cobras decided I was worth targeting, I’d be a magnet for trouble, not a shield from it.

I crossed to the stairs past three elderly ladies, one with a walker, waiting for the elevator. Two were arguing crossly; the third, in a blank, deliberate way, picked invisible lint from a shawl she carried. None of them looked at me.

Finding the doctor’s office wasn’t hard. The basement was all offices, storage rooms, and maintenance areas. On the east side, where the Home nestled against the garden, the rooms had light wells and windows high in the wall; on the west, Dr. Madsen’s side, the windows were large and barred and looked out over the parking lot.

Madsen’s nurse was a middle-aged Hispanic woman with smiling crimson lips. She told me the doctor would be right with me and in fact he was; I hadn’t sat down before the door to the inner office opened and a bony man, about my age, with active eyes and thinning hair, ushered a bent old man out past the nurse’s desk and to the door of the suite. “You’ll be fine until tomorrow, Mr. Domenico. I’ll see you then.” His words came out fast. The old man didn’t look convinced but the doctor shut the door behind him.

The doctor shook his head, mumbled something I didn’t catch; then he spun around and looked me up and down. “Who’re you?” His face was lined, his complexion sallow, like a man who worries and doesn’t get out in the sun.

“Smith,” I said. “Mr. Dayton sent me down. I had some trouble on the street; he wants you to look me over.”

“Trouble on the street,” he repeated after a short pause. His words were still fast, as though to make up for the pause. “All right. Come on.” He turned on his heel and walked through the inner door. I followed him past a cramped-looking office into an examining room.

“What happened?”

I told him briefly.

“Strip to the waist. Sit there.” He pointed at the exam table; I stripped and sat. The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and iodine.

Madsen had nothing to say when I unstrapped the gun, but when I took my shirt off he grinned. “Christ!”

“What?”

He gestured at my left arm with the surgical cotton in his hand. “Hippie or Navy?”

I glanced down involuntarily, saw the blue snake that wraps my arm from the elbow to the shoulder. “Navy.”

“Do the Cobras know about this?”

“No.”

He snickered. “They’d kill you from jealousy. They pay a lot for their tacks, but they can’t match this. Where’d you get it?”

“Singapore. I was eighteen, in the Navy, on a three-day pass. We started to drink the minute we hit shore and I don’t remember anything else about it.” He gave me a sardonic smile. I asked, “Have you seen a lot of Cobra tattoos?”

“Some. You will too. You can’t help it around here. Anybody bite you?”

“What?”

“The Cobras. In the fight. Did any of them bite you?”

“No. Do they do that?”

He shrugged. “Guys do that in fights all the time. You can get some nasty diseases that way. Hepatitis, bacterial infections. Some of those punks would do that on purpose.”

He looked at my eye, at the back of my head where I’d hit the pavement, at my chest. His hands were gentle for such an abrupt man, almost as though they operated independently of him.

“Headache?” he asked, moving the cold stethoscope around on my back. “Blurred vision? Nausea? Dizziness?”

“Yes, no, no, no.”

He pulled the stethoscope down around his neck. “Get dressed. You’re all right. Take a few days off, rest. I’ll tell Dayton.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Why? You love your work so much?”

“I’m new here. If I’m out now they’ll replace me.”

“Could be your lucky day, being out of a job in this shithole.
All right. Take something for the headache. Aspirin? Advil? You want something stronger?”

“No, aspirin.” As I put my shirt back on I said, “This doesn’t seem like such a bad place to me.”

“Really? Good for you.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I persisted.

“Oh, it’s a great place. Half these people don’t know which way is up and the rest don’t even know there is an up.” He pulled a physician’s sample card with two aspirin on it out of a drawer, tossed it to me. There were paper cups by the sink. As I swallowed the pills he said, “In a decent world they’d all have died years ago. But not in this world. You know why?”

“No. Why?”

He smiled the same sardonic smile. “They’re a growth industry. Look at all the people making a living here. You, me, a hundred other people. All the people who supply the crap we buy, all the bureaucrats who process the paperwork we do, and all the inspectors who come to inspect. State, city, federal. Medicare, Medicaid, Building Department, Social Services, Health Department. Now
there
are the people who love this place. Why not? It’s clean and well-run and it’s indoor work.” He ripped the paper off the table where I’d been sitting, smashed it into the trash can. “You think anybody gives two shits about these people? Sits with them or listens to their stories? Ha. We just can’t afford to do without them. This—” he spread his arms—“this isn’t for them, it’s for us.”

He turned, washed his hands. I finished dressing in silence.

As I was leaving he had a thought. “Who did you say the other guy was?”

“Martin Carter. He’s in Maintenance.”

“Ha. That explains why he hasn’t been in to see me.”

“Why?”

“You work for Al Dayton. He’s a nice guy. Carter works for Pete Portelli. He’s a shit. Carter’s black, Pete must be already looking for a reason to fire him.” He shook his head. “But I guess I’d better get him in here.”

I zipped the Moran Security jacket over the .38.

“Are all you security guys armed?” he asked me.

“I don’t know.”

He fixed his intense eyes on me, then turned and opened the
outer office door. “Good-bye. Elena, call Pete Portelli. Find out where Martin Carter is. I want to see him.”

He spun around, was back in his office before she said, “Yes, Doctor.”

S
IX

M
r. Moran doesn’t want to pull you, but he doesn’t want you showing yourself on the street, either,” Dayton told me when I came back upstairs. “I’ll get your lunch for you today when I go out. From tomorrow, bring it with you. What did the doctor say?”

“I’m fine.”

“Mr. Moran is prepared to send someone else to finish the day.”

“No, thanks. I’ll stay.”

Dayton nodded. “Smith, I’m sorry if I was harsh with you. You saved Martin Carter from a lot of pain.”

“I just can’t resist a good fight.”

He said sharply, “I hope that isn’t true.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll try to control myself.”

“See that you do. I have a hundred fifty old folks here, scared to death by what happened to Mike. You’re here to reassure them as well as protect them. They’re in need of both.”

I looked at him, at his deep eyes and guarded expression. “You like working here, don’t you, Dayton?”

“This is my job.”

“I mean beyond that. Here rather than somewhere else. You like these people, don’t you?”

He looked at me unwaveringly for an extra beat. “Yes, I do.”

I was glad to hear that.

* * *

As the morning wore on and the sun warmed the day, the residents of the Home began to appear on the wide porch, wrapped in shawls and blankets. They were brought out and settled by small, solid-looking Latina women, whose white uniforms glowed against the red tile floor and the yellow limestone of the building front. One of these women, with a long nose and a wide, laughing mouth, greeted me in English as I came up the stairs. Then, fastening the sweater of an unresponding old man, she gave a giggling Spanish commentary to the women nearby about my height, my bruise, and my general level of appeal. I suppressed the urge to answer her in Spanish, just walked on with a wink and a grin.

The residents wore blank looks or trembling smiles, mostly, though here and there small groups of two or three leaned together in conversation, as though on a park bench or at a bus stop, back in the world. Others sat alone, angular and motionless as lizards.

I went in and out, doing my job, wondering how Mike had organized the route, wondering how the garden smelled at night, what sounds there were at four
A.M.
, what sounds there had been on the night he died.

Coming up the stairs on one of my circuits I heard music, muffled by a half-closed door. It was the Chopin Ballade in F, played with great feeling on a piano not worthy of the music, or the pianist. I crossed the thick carpet, stood in the doorway. In a high-ceilinged room with carpets and curtains a man in a wheelchair smiled softly while Ida Goldstein played Chopin.

I watched her move with the music against the brightness of the windows; and suddenly I was gripped by a memory unexpected but so sharp and complete that it displaced the scene before me.

Another old woman sat at another piano in a curtained, carpeted room, smaller than this but with the same autumn brightness. A nine-year-old boy stood in the doorway, unable to speak, unable to say the good-bye he had come to say. The music then was Chopin, too, a nocturne, and the old woman was lost in it, her back straight, her small hands low over the keys. The boy’s hands were already bigger than hers, and she marveled at them when he played, as though he had done something clever, to grow such big hands.

The boy felt his eyes sting, his throat begin to ache. He stood
and listened for the last time, his hands curling and uncurling, as the black walnut tree in the yard scattered leaf shadows across the window and music filled the room in the old, familiar house.

“Well, come in and sit down. You make me nervous, standing there like that. And what on earth happened to your eye?”

My heart jumped; for a second I was disoriented. Then I realized Ida Goldstein had finished playing and was speaking to me.

The bluntness of her tone was welcome, helped to bring what was in front of me into focus again. I swallowed to ease my throat, walked farther into the room. “I had an accident.”

“That’s not very reassuring in a security guard.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You play, don’t you?”

For the second time that day a question from her threw me off balance. “How did you know that?”

“The way you were watching me. There’s a look you only see in musicians hearing music. I used to see it sometimes in a student. The one in a hundred with real talent.”

“You taught piano?”

“For forty-five years. Who taught you?”

“My grandmother started me.” The notes of the Chopin nocturne still echoed in my mind. “After I was nine we moved around a lot. I didn’t play much again until I was out of college.”

“You didn’t have a piano?”

“Most of that time, no.”

She seemed to be waiting, as though she knew there was more. There was: the piano my increasingly desperate mother bought for me in Amsterdam when I was fourteen, trying to give me something that would keep me out of the kind of trouble I went looking for, wherever we were. My father sold that piano without a word while I was in a Brooklyn hospital at fifteen. From the hospital I moved straight in with my uncle Dave; not a lot of cops had pianos. Then the Navy, college, my brief, fiery marriage, and it wasn’t until I was divorced and living above Shorty’s at twenty-five that I touched a piano again.

Lost, lost years.

Ida Goldstein must have gotten tired of waiting for a story I
didn’t seem about to tell. She swiveled on the piano bench to face the old man in his wheelchair. “Eddie, this is Mr. Smith. He’s here because of Mike. Mr. Smith, this is Eddie Shawn.”

“Bill,” I said. I offered the old man my hand. “Pleased to meet you.” He inclined his head, smiled, said nothing. His thick glasses made his watery brown eyes look enormous. The hand he offered me, his left, was all bone, trembled as we shook.

“Eddie’s had a stroke,” Ida Goldstein told me, looking at Eddie. “He doesn’t speak anymore.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, nor to whom. Eddie Shawn made it easier by winking at me, as if his not speaking was a problem for no one, except possibly Ida Goldstein.

“Eddie,” said Ida suddenly, “why aren’t you wearing a sweater?” She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time that day. “For heaven’s sake, you’d think those women would know better, with you right out of the hospital.” Eddie Shawn shook his head, dismissing her annoyance, while she rearranged the crocheted blanket around his knees. “Not that he belonged in the hospital, either,” she went on, to me. “That doctor’s an idiot.”

“Dr. Madsen?”

Her blue eyes gave me a sharp look. “No, of course not. He’s just bad-tempered and unpleasant. That’s probably why they threw him out of Wisconsin.”

“They did what?”

“He can’t practice medicine there anymore. That’s why he came here.”

“How do you known that?”

Her tone became casual. “Oh, he was complaining about corn-fed self-righteous hypocrites to a nurse one day in the common room. He must not have seen me over on the sofa.”

Eddie Shawn snorted in disgust.

“I was not eavesdropping,” Ida protested. “Besides, it’s their own fault for thinking we’re all deaf and stupid. Anyway, that’s all I heard, so that’s all I know.”

She looked at me defensively, daring me to say anything more on the subject.

I didn’t take her up on it. “What doctor did you mean was an idiot?” I asked.

“Dr. Reynolds,” she said. “The other one. He’s sweet and patient
and he smiles and sends you to the hospital for a hangnail. He’s sent Eddie three times this year already. I hide when I see him in the hall.” Eddie Shawn, in his wheelchair, pulled away from her fussing hands. She sighed, straightened up stiffly. “I used to look after him, until they moved my room. Now he’s never put together right.”

“Why did they move your room?”

“Because I complained about the noise in the middle of the night. Now, they didn’t believe me, because I’m never right. When you get old, you see, you automatically get stupid. But they gave me a room on the garden side to shut me up.”

I looked at her with a grin. “I’ll bet it didn’t work.”

Eddie Shawn in his wheelchair started to shake, to emit wordless noises. I was alarmed until I realized he was laughing.

Ida Goldstein tilted her chin up, the way she had when we’d met that morning. “Aren’t you afraid of offending me? I’m an old lady—excuse me, a senior citizen. You’re not supposed to joke with me. I might not get it. You’re supposed to talk to me the way you would to a three-year-old.”

“I’m not supposed to talk to you at all. I’m supposed to be out patrolling.”

“Well, here.” She slipped her hand into the pocket of her dress, pulled out something folded small. “Here’s ten dollars. That’s almost three weeks’ worth, but don’t bring it all at once, because I can’t hide so much.”

I waited for enlightenment, but it didn’t come. “Sorry?” I finally said.

“The cat food,” she said to me patiently, the way you would to a three-year-old.

“I don’t—” I began, but I didn’t have to finish.

“Ida,” a voice interrupted, a silky voice with ice in it, “what are you doing?”

We all three jumped, Eddie Shawn in his chair, Ida and I standing beside him. I turned toward the voice, which came from the doorway, where a tall woman made taller by the blond coils piled on top of her head approached us, walking as deliberately as an army on the march.

“Oh, Mrs. Wyckoff,” sighed Ida, in the voice of a teacher dealing with a particularly tiresome parent. “Bill, this is Mrs. Wyckoff. Mrs. Wyckoff, this is Mr. Smith. He’s the new security man—”

“Yes, I can see that.” Mrs. Wyckoff, with an air of distaste, looked me up and down.

“Mrs. Wyckoff,” Ida Goldstein told me, “runs the organization that runs us.”

“I’m the Executive Director of Helping Hands,” the tall blond woman informed me. “And I would appreciate it, Mr. Smith, if you wouldn’t socialize with the residents. I’m sure Dr. Reynolds would agree. You’re large and uniformed and you could easily frighten these people.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Ida.

“Ida, please.” The blond woman smiled a closed-lipped smile. She wasn’t an unhandsome woman, but she somehow made me wish I were in Florida.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought the opposite. I was trying to put them at ease.”

“I suggest you stick to guard patrols and let us look after the residents.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But before you go about your business I’d like you to give back the money you took from Ida.”

“He didn’t take it. I gave it to him.”

“And why would you do that, Ida?” Mrs. Wyckoff asked.

Ida’s eyes caught mine for a second, then flicked back to Mrs. Wyckoff. “He’s helping me out,” she said blandly. “He’s buying a present for one of my great-nephews. The one who flies planes.”

“Don’t be foolish, Ida. A man you’ve barely met? If you need that sort of help, one of the social workers will be glad to provide it. That’s what we have them for.”

Mrs. Wyckoff turned to inspect me. Behind her back, Ida Goldstein twisted her face into a mask of demented idiocy, including a tight-lipped smile, then was instantly demure and attentive as Mrs. Wyckoff looked back to her. I bit the inside of my lip to keep from cracking up.

Mrs. Wyckoff surveyed us all. “No, I think something else is going on here.” The tight smile grew by a millimeter or so. I wondered if her lips cramped up by the end of the day.

“I think we should tell the truth, Mrs. Goldstein,” I said. Ida started to say something. I addressed Mrs. Wyckoff over her words. “It was my fault. When I met Mrs. Goldstein this morning, we made
a bet. She lost; she insisted I collect. I’m sorry. I should have known better.” I pressed the folded bill into Ida’s tiny hand, closed her fingers around it.

“Is that so?” Mrs. Wyckoff tipped her head, looked from me to Ida. “What was this bet about, if I may ask?”

“But now I’m not so sure I lost,” Ida said. “Except on a technicality.”

“And what was the bet about?” Mrs. Wyckoff repeated.

“I bet him,” Ida told her, “that he’d be in trouble with you before lunch.”

Mrs. Wyckoff’s eyes flared, and she flushed a color which was not becoming with her shade of hair. She threw a poisonous glance at me; then she turned on her heel and stalked away.

In his chair, Eddie Shawn was jiggling and squeezing his knee in wordless laughter.