Night Walker (3 page)

“Nurse,” he whispered.

“Yes, Mr. Wilson.”

“Have you — got my things?”

The nurse put the card back with the flowers. “Why, yes, they’re right here,” she said. “Except your clothes; I’m afraid you’d better not plan on wearing that suit again, Mr. Wilson. But here are your keys and your watch and your wallet. Your money’s in the hospital safe downstairs; a hundred and fifty-six dollars and some change. That’s right, isn’t it?... Oh, you want to see the wallet?”

“Please,” he whispered.

She put it into his hands: Lawrence Wilson’s wallet, that he had been holding in his hands when Wilson struck him down. He wondered dully where his own had got to. The wallet might have been
attributed to him by mistake, but the thin, curved watch on the dresser did not belong to him, either; nor did the keys in their pigskin zipper case. And the nurse had indicated that he had been brought here wearing a suit of some kind instead of his uniform. It was clear that he had not become Lawrence Wilson by accident; the other man had apparently, after knocking him out, changed clothes with him before rolling him off the road in the car. Young tried to work out the possible motives for this in his head; but nothing came except a kind of weak resentment that he had been so easy to take.

He studied the wallet in his hands and opened it idly as he tried to force his thoughts into some kind of constructive pattern. The little book of plastic-protected identification cards inside fell open under his clumsy fingers at the snapshot of a girl on a boat; he remembered that. He stared at the small figure in a blank sort of way; this was Bunny, who had sent him flowers.
Who had sent Larry Wilson flowers,
he told himself;
let’s keep these identities straight.

He remembered that his original impression of the girl in the picture had been of a kind of tomboyish innocence; strangely, she now seemed to have assumed a tough and predatory appearance, a small, lean, and catlike figure in her scanty bathing suit. She was the girlfriend of the man who had tried to kill him; the one person, according to the story,
who had stuck by Wilson after he had been fired from his government job for unstated reasons that Young was now willing to accept as excellent.

Larry Wilson’s girlfriend seemed to stare at him out of the snapshot with a flat and cruel and triumphant look, as if gloating over the injuries her man had inflicted upon him. One eye gleamed a little, wickedly. Her expression fascinated Young; it seemed as if the inanimate paper had come alive beneath its plastic covering. Then the wallet tilted a little in his hands, and suddenly all life went out of the image, leaving it gray and neutral, just a poor representation of an unknown girl in a bathing suit.

Young frowned and regretted it; it hurt his face. He moved the wallet experimentally, and watched the gleam come back to Bunny’s left eye. He squinted along the paper and discovered the simple reason for the phenomenon: someone had written something on the back of the snapshot, causing little ridges in the photographic emulsion, one of which had caught the light in just the right way to give the picture its satanic look.

Glancing up, Young found that he was alone in the room; the nurse had left him briefly. He could hear her footsteps down the hall through the door she had left open. The photograph shared a plastic envelope with a card of membership in some yacht club. He slipped both out, and studied the snapshot, turning it
over. The back was quite blank. There was not even a sign of erasure.

The effort of concentration was fast using up the last remnants of his strength; he lay back on the pillow, closing his eyes, feeling perspiration wet on his face beneath the bandages. Still lying there with his eyes closed, resting, he ran his thumb across the face of the picture. It seemed to him that he could detect the tiny ridges that his eyes had seen; it seemed to him also that the paper was heavier and less flexible than was customary for an ordinary snapshot print. He opened his eyes and focused on the edge of the picture and found the faint mark of lamination where a second sheet had been neatly cemented to the back of the first, the edges later trimmed to leave no unevenness. By working a corner back and forth, he made the two papers separate; they had been sealed together with rubber cement. He parted them cautiously, leaving them still attached near the bottom, and read the penciled list of names that was revealed:

Shooting Star

Aloha

Marbeth

Chanteyman

Alice K.

Bosun Bird

Estrella

There was a cryptic notation opposite each name. His mind could make no sense of any of this. He was very near to passing out; and the nurse was coming back along the corridor. He pressed the two small rectangles of paper again — the rubber cement taking hold nicely — and returned the snapshot and its companion card to the plastic envelope, and the envelope to the wallet, and dropped back to the pillow dizzily as the nurse entered the room. She came to the bed, retrieved the wallet, and moved away.

“I’ll put it over here, Mr. Wilson,” she said.

There was something he had to say; something he had to do. After all, he was not Lawrence Wilson, and something had to be done about this. Without opening his eyes, he whispered, “I’d like to see the doctor.”

“Dr. Pitt’s already made his rounds,” the nurse said. “Why, what — There isn’t anything missing from your wallet is there, Mr. Wilson?” Her voice had sharpened. “I can assure you — I mean, the office always makes a list—”

“No,” he breathed, “no, it isn’t anything like that. Everything is fine. I’d just like to talk to him for a moment. The doctor.” The nurse wouldn’t do, he thought. She would think him delirious or crazy. Besides, if he told the nurse he would have to repeat the story to the doctor anyway, and he did not have that much strength. “Please!” he whispered.

“Well, he’s tied up right now.... Mr. Wilson, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Young breathed sarcastically. “I’m wonderful.
Please
will you—”

The room had started to go around him crazily. He closed his eyes more tightly, and the bed swung away with him; and he forced them open, and the motion stopped.

“Damn it,” he said clearly, “will you—”

“I’ll get him when he comes out of staff meeting,” the nurse said. The promise was quick and insincere. “The minute he’s free, I’ll certainly tell him, Mr. Wilson. Now you want to rest because we’ve got a nice surprise for you. Your wife’s coming in to see you this afternoon, just for a moment this first day, and you want to be all—”

“My wife?”

“Yes, she’s been here several times asking about you. She drove over and is staying in town, she told me. I guess you don’t live very far from here, do you? You must feel kind of silly, driving all the way down from New York to have an accident almost at your own doorstep.... Honest, I think your wife is the loveliest person, Mr. Wilson, and that’s funny because I don’t go for people with Southern accents as a rule.... No, that’s quite enough talking for now. We’ve got to save our strength for this afternoon, don’t we? Please, Mr. Wilson, if you insist on
exciting yourself, I’ll have to give you a sedative!”

The door closed behind her. Young sank back against the pillow and lay staring helplessly at the white ceiling, trying to think, but nothing came, and he fell asleep.

When he awoke, somebody was talking about him. He recognized the voice of Dr. Pitt. There had been some evidence of concussion, the doctor said, but the X-rays had shown no signs of skull fracture. Lacerations of face and scalp were healing normally and would probably leave no serious disfigurement; however, there might be a slight thickening of the bridge of the nose, as was usual in these cases. The patient had a badly bruised chest from being hurled against the steering wheel; but apparently no ribs had been broken. It was fortunate that the wheel had held up, the doctor said; he had seen instances of drivers impaled upon the steering column like insects on a pin.... Footsteps moved away from the bed. The low, professional murmur of voices continued for a while; then the door closed softly.

Young opened his eyes, found himself alone, and lay for a while wondering to whom the doctor had been speaking: apparently, from the tone and terminology used, another doctor. He rang the bell at the head of the bed.

“Oh, you decided to wake up at last, did you?” the nurse said playfully, coming into the room. She
adjusted the bed for him and raised the blinds to let sunlight through the windows. Then she went back to the door. “He’s awake now, Dr. Henshaw,” she said, and a large, balding, middle-aged man came in. He was wearing a brown suit, and even without the nurse’s identification there would have been no doubt of his profession. In a hospital you could always tell; the doctors were the only men who seemed to feel really at home. Dr. Henshaw approached the bed briskly.

“Well, Larry, what do you think you’ve been doing to yourself, anyway?” he demanded. He did not wait for a response, but went on: “I’ve been talking your case over with Dr. Pitt, and he thinks you’re well enough to come home and leave this room for somebody who’s really sick, haha... Nurse, will you have a stretcher brought up, please? And ask Mrs. Wilson to drive the station wagon around to the ambulance entrance....”

In his weakened, semi-drugged condition, it was difficult for Young to be sure of anything, but the voice stirred a sort of echo — of the Navy, of home... he wasn’t sure.

He was given little time to think or to protest, and he found himself gripped by a strange indecision. He found that he had no real desire to convince these people of the mistake they were making. A moment later he no longer had a choice. There was a certain
ruthlessness to which sick people were subjected when a decision had been made as to what should be done with them; in transit they were handled like a sort of perishable but inanimate freight: gently, even tenderly, but with efficiency and dispatch. In a moment, it seemed, he was being lifted into a large, shining station wagon from which all seats except the driver’s had been removed to make room for a low cot, on which he was placed. Someone got in beside him and said in a clear, Southern voice:

“All right, Dr. Henshaw.”

Then a girl’s face moved into Young’s field of vision, as the car started up beneath them.

“I reckon you must feel like you were being kidnaped, Mr. Young,” the girl said, smiling.

It took him a while to realize that she had addressed him by his rightful name.

He awoke gradually to the sound of a phone ringing somewhere in the house to which he had been brought. They had given him something when they put him to bed here and it had not quite worn off yet; he lay drowsily with his eyes closed, unready to move, but listening. Somebody came out of a room not far away and went downstairs to answer. The door to his room was apparently open; he could hear the quick, light footsteps receding down the stairs — the sound dulled by a carpet — and then the girl’s voice speaking with the soft Georgia accent he remembered. He could not make out what she was saying to the person who had called.

The window of his room was also open. He could feel the breeze from it against the minor portions of his face not covered by bandages; and he could hear the sound of the occasional cars on the highway some distance away, and the faint field and woods noises that came quite clearly into the room although he knew himself to be on the second floor of the house. There was the buzz of an outboard motor on a body
of water not too far away.
My wife... is staying at our place over on the Bay,
Lawrence Wilson had said. He had also said,
We haven’t been getting along lately.

Mrs. Wilson came back upstairs, entered Young’s room, went past the foot of the bed to the window, and raised the Venetian blind. He opened his eyes.

“That isn’t too bright, is it?”

He had the remote feeling of looking at someone on a distant stage; it took him a moment to realize that the girl was addressing a question to him.

“No,” he whispered, “no, it’s fine.”

He watched from behind the shelter of the bandages as she came to the foot of the bed to look at him. He saw a slender, quite graceful, dark-haired girl apparently somewhat younger than his own age of twenty-nine. This morning she was wearing a long gold satin negligee that gave her a regal air; the effect was faintly marred, however, by the fact that her face was shiny and that her dark hair — somewhat longer than they usually wore it these days — was loose and a little untidy about her shoulders. It was clear that the telephone had awakened her, too. The lack of lipstick gave her face an unsophisticated and defenseless look.

“I declare, you haven’t been lying here awake for hours?” she said quickly. “There’s a bell right beside you, if you need anything, hear?”

There were at least two people in the house beside
himself, he decided; she, in the room with him, and somebody below, apparently in the kitchen. The dark-haired girl, clearly feeling his attention wandering, tried again.

“How do you feel this morning, Mr. Young?”

“Swell,” Young said mechanically. “I feel fine.”

“Bob — Dr. Henshaw says you can eat anything you like. Shall I have Beverly fix you some breakfast?” She laughed quickly. “I forget you don’t know us. Beverly’s the cook. Dr. Henshaw — well, you met him yesterday. He’s the family doctor. I’m Elizabeth Wilson. We’re all real respectable folks, and this is our” — she hesitated, and tried a smile that did not succeed — “our first kidnaping.”

He was watching her hands, long and slender, gripping each other tightly as she faced him. The indirect sunlight from the window glinted on the rings — one displaying an impressive diamond — that would have reminded him, had he forgotten, who she was: the wife of a man who had tried to kill him; a girl who, knowing him not to be her husband, had nevertheless smuggled him out of the hospital and brought him here; a girl who knew his name. There was only one person from whom she could have learned it.

“Where is he?” Young whispered.