The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) (5 page)

It was only after she was gone that he realized that she was going to analyze the names he’d picked according to that crazy system of hers. It made him laugh.

The encounter had done more for him than his whole bar-as-window system ever had before. He felt strong, fresh, masculine—like a man, not the terrified boy he felt like most of the time, the boy who was the truth he struggled so hard to conceal.

It wasn’t working either. Someone else knew, and she was trying hard to help him, but he hated it that she knew, that he was so transparent. He felt as if Di didn’t see him that way.

Damn! He didn’t know her last name. How could he see her again?

Forget it, Sonny, he told himself. No way you’re going to see her again. You’re just drunk. Go home.

* * *

“Hi, Missy.”

She looked like every girl in Georgia. Blond. So many of them here were dark, like everyone in New York and Pennsylvania. This one had almost certainly been head cheerleader in high school, and probably homecoming queen, had gone on to pledge some good sorority at LSU and now probably worked as a teacher or maybe a clothing-store clerk. Just something until she got married.

A piece of fluff—slender, blue-eyed, perfect WASP features. If there had been one single thing about her that was different, that set her apart from a million other young women, she could have been a TV star; probably she wouldn’t make it in movies, you had to have talent for that. But even for TV she needed a beauty mark or something.

She said, “I’m going through something really hard right now. I’m trying to let go. Well, not let go, exactly, just loosen my grip, sort of.

“I’m trying not to be too smothering, not to hang on too hard.”

Her voice was like a flower petal, her perfect face marred by her earnestness. “I’m trying to recognize the fact that not everyone needs as much attention as I do, and that maybe I don’t really need it myself. But I’m not really there yet. I’m still fighting it. I’ve been with the same man for a year.…”

Damn!

He hoped no one had heard his sudden intake of breath. It wasn’t fair—the good ones were always taken; he’d been watching her for weeks.

Oh, get a grip, Abe.

He looked around to see if any of the other men looked similarly disappointed and saw that they didn’t. They looked as earnest as Missy, their sympathetic brows creased with concern.

I should have known. She’s always with that guy
.

Well, she wasn’t tonight. “I know that my boyfriend needs time to himself, and that it isn’t personal when he doesn’t want to be with me every day, all day. I mean, we both work, but when we’re not working, we don’t have to be together all the time. I know that, I really do.”

She was too young anyway, and a shade too perfect—perfection was blandness. He’d be sick of her in five minutes.

“I’m doing okay with that. It’s just that lately he’s seemed really distant sometimes. I keep wondering if something’s bothering him and telling myself that it’s not my problem. He and I are two different people. If he’s having a problem, it’s something he has to work out for himself, it’s nothing I can help him with.”

Suddenly he saw through her as clearly as if she were made of Lucite:
She thinks she’s the problem. She’s afraid he’s going to dump her.

Adrenaline suited through him. She’d be vulnerable now; it was a perfect time to move in.

She gave a self-deprecating little laugh. “I’m a social worker. I spend all day every day trying to solve people’s problems. I think I should be able to solve his and everybody else’s as well. Sick, isn’t it?”

No one answered. It was forbidden.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, not to meddle; not to try to help when I know I could. He has to go through this thing alone, whatever it is. I think it’s something like a mid-life crisis. Except he’s only twenty-six.”

Before Abe could stop himself, he snickered. You weren’t supposed to do that, but it didn’t matter—a few others chuckled indulgently, laughing with, not at, because that was the way it was done here. She threw back her head, tossing the blond hair out of her face, and laughed with the others. She was flushed, maybe embarrassed.

“My mother died when I was twelve; there were three kids in my family younger than me, and I was all the mom they had till my dad remarried a few years ago. I’ve been a mother all my life. How am I supposed to stop now?”

The inevitable tear or two spilled.

“But I know I have to, because it’s inappropriate to act as the parent to another adult. He doesn’t need that and he doesn’t want that. And neither do I.”

She paused to blow her nose.

“Except I do.” Laughter again. “Well, that’s what I’m fighting. I guess that’s all I have to say.”

The leader said it was time to stop. This was the part Abe hated. The group stood and joined hands. Someone volunteered to lead the prayer. Then there was the ritual wagging of joined hands that accompanied the chant.

At first he hadn’t said the chant, but it got easier every time; he said it now as heartily as anyone else, his gorge rising hardly at all.

SONNY WATCHED HER as she slept, pale hair falling away from her face. He was hectored by guilt over his adventure of the night before. He hadn’t intended to see her, in fact had told her he couldn’t, but his encounter with the gypsy-like Di had left him too restless to sleep alone. He’d phoned Missy and told her he was lonely.

That she would see him hadn’t been in doubt. Missy was Missy—always ready to help no matter how shabbily she was treated. She was such a lovely person, a truly good person—a near-perfect person, to Sonny’s way of thinking, and he wanted to treat her like a princess. She was the perfect woman to marry, and when he’d asked her, she’d accepted as if she couldn’t believe her good fortune. But he knew he was getting the better part of the deal. And even so, sometimes he couldn’t imagine himself married.

Sleepily she stirred and reached for his penis. It came alive in her hand and he felt guilty about even that. He didn’t want to make love to her. But he caressed her as if she were the greatest treasure of some forgotten empire, till her cheeks were flushed and she writhed like a lure on the end of a line, and then he entered her as gently as if she’d break. Her body shuddered and she seized his buttocks, eyes open, fiery with passion. He could at least give her this much.

He closed his own eyes, rocking her, and the woman under him was Di, lush tendrils like corkscrews round her olive face. He felt his cheeks go hot with his shame, opened his eyes, and said Missy’s name. She smiled and said she loved him. He said it back to her and hated himself.

When it was over, she said, “I don’t think you know how beautiful you are.”

“Men aren’t supposed to be beautiful.” He disliked compliments.

“You’re the sort of person who deserves a wife who’ll make love to him three times a day for the rest of his life.”

“How about one who cooks?”

“Cooks too.”

“Cooks what?”

“Oh, maybe Oysters Rockefeller for breakfast. How would that be? Exotic, unexpected things. I’m going to work twenty-four hours a day at making you happy.”

“Stop. I’m getting embarrassed.”

“I know.”

Blue eyes looked into blue eyes. “You know?”

“You don’t think you deserve it, do you? A woman who’ll love you and take care of you?”

He shook his head. “No.” It came out a whisper.

“Oh, Sonny, you do, you do. You’re a wonderful person, do you know that?”

He sat up, turning away from her. “Oh, Missy!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll shut up.” She touched her lips to each of his vertebrae in turn, opened her legs, wound them around his body, and simply sat that way, arms around his chest, kissing his neck.

The breasts against his shoulder blades were small and round, as firm as only the breasts of women under twenty-five are firm. Diamara’s would be much larger, not round at all anymore, as soft as down pillows.

He shook his head to clear it, forgetting Missy at his neck.

“Ow.”

“What?”

“Bit my tongue.”

“I’m sorry, Missy. God, I’m such a fuck-up!”

“You are not, Sonny Gerard! Don’t even think that. You’re the pride of your goddamn stuck-up family, and you’ve earned it, precious. Do you realize how hard you work? It’s not normal. It’s not natural. You’re going to keel over one day.”

“Do me a favor, Missy. Don’t call me precious, okay?”

“Why not?”

“It’s a name for a little kid.”

“But you are precious.”

He headed for the shower, feeling slightly depressed, hoping against hope for a good day. Yesterday had been one Room Four after another, sometimes two at a time.

At least for once he’d had a full night’s sleep.

Though you could tell it only from the roof, Charity was actually a giant, nineteen-floor H. From the street it merely looked like some out-of-control antique, urban sprawl in microcosm, the hospital that ate New Orleans. But Charity wasn’t about to devour anything. Nurses hated working there, and many wouldn’t. It was still a good teaching hospital with one of the best trauma units in the country, but it was perennially short-staffed and underfunded.

The building itself was so outdated you could hardly believe it had elevators, much less elevators with robot voices (which it did). Above the fourteenth floor, there was no hospital, only the now-empty call rooms where residents had once resided, and a couple of ancient operating theaters. Sonny had explored every inch of the place, knew which of the call rooms had keys above the doors and could be entered for a catnap, when you could make speeches to imaginary audiences in the operating theaters. (Now and then meetings were held in them.)

The first time he’d seen the waiting room, where, despite emergencies and imagined ones, many waited the better part of a day, he’d thought:
Calcutta.
The place looked caught in time, a scene from a Thirties movie that should have been hung with cobwebs. People moaned on gurneys or in their chairs, held broken arms against their bodies, drooped in misery and boredom.

Sonny could feel himself absorbing their pain. He’d had a dream once, of being a flasher—he’d opened his trenchcoat and his skin came open as well, exposing his heart, liver, intestines, everything that needed protection. Being in the room was like that, like the dream come true. He was open, vulnerable, couldn’t separate himself from the misery in the air, couldn’t get his skin zipped up.

Half an hour later, behind the closed doors of the trauma room, where he’d watched as a team stabilized a man found beaten up in the street, where he’d seen a nasty cut stitched, where the hospital bustle mixed reassuringly with the misery, making inroads, he was fine.

It was a pretty normal reaction so far as he could tell. Even Missy had had it. The touted medical armor didn’t take months to develop, it came on you almost immediately. You couldn’t go around with your skin open, you had to close up.

But this rotation was still the worst for him—the worst by far, the only thing he’d ever gotten into that made him doubt himself.

His uncle had come over once to find his parents fighting, arguing before a party. “Robson Gerard,” he’d intoned, “you are a physician!”

When his dad left his guests and came to tuck him in, Sonny asked, “Why did Uncle Bick say that?”

“Because doctors are supposed to do better than other people—didn’t you know that?”

“No. Why?”

“They just are, Sonny boy. That’s why you have to be such a good boy—because you’re going to be one someday.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.” He had drawn a finger down Sonny’s nose and left him then.

In medical school they taught you by example not to show reaction—anger was okay, but nothing else, never anything else. Even in your own family you didn’t show weakness, didn’t say you felt for a patient, you hurt for him, a little of you died when he did.

Was it really that way, or just the way he perceived it? Maybe no one else was weak, or felt for the patients, ever—maybe it wasn’t all just a front. Maybe he really was different. And if he was. he couldn’t be a doctor.

And even if he wasn’t, but didn’t conquer it, he still couldn’t be a doctor. And if he couldn’t be a doctor, he couldn’t be Sonny Gerard. Sonny Gerard was born and bred to be a doctor. Both his grandfathers had been doctors, and so had all their sons and so would all
their
sons be (except for Sonny’s brother Robbie, who had never fit in). With that one exception, it was what Gerards did. All they did, and Robbie had paid by becoming a family outcast. Not that he seemed to give a damn, but he had chosen not to follow the family path, hadn’t flunked out, as it appeared Sonny was about to do.

He’d started getting squeamish in the neonatal intensive-care unit, doing heel sticks on those unbelievably tiny babies—all night stabbing babies, night after night. He hadn’t been ready for that, but he’d steeled himself, prayed about it. He got through it. Got through it easily—it was just one of the things you had to do if you were a doctor. He even heard other people talk about it. This was normal, that baby-stabbing would get to you. The other thing wasn’t.

It had started with the woman who came in with nausea and vomiting about six months ago—not the first person he’d seen die, not by a long shot. But he’d felt the mass in her stomach and gotten the resident to order the CAT scan. She loved him—all the old ladies loved him—black or white, he treated them all the same, spoke quietly, calmly, didn’t try to kid around and call them beautiful. She asked to see him every day he was there—he couldn’t run away from it—and in a week she was dead.

Here in this rotation, in the emergency room, they lost about three a week. Usually, he was fine. It was as the folklore had it—adrenaline kicked in and the patient became only a medical problem. Nothing else. But frequently they had the medical students do the chest compressions. At first he could dissociate when he was doing that, could do it so well he could even see himself as the charge resident, orchestrating the thing. Now he was beginning to lose it a little. It was starting to get to him.