The Sandman (18 page)

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t home. But where could he be? Out with another woman? No … don’t start that. She hung up and started out of the booth. The Travolta clone was moving toward her. The Bee Gee’s were still playing, and the idiot was even strutting like he was in the damned movie.

“Hey,” he said, “like, don’t I know you?”

“Buzz off,” Debby said. “I don’t dig guys.”

He moved away, holding his hands up, and she walked by him, tossing her head and pretending to chew gum. It relieved her tension, putting him down—it felt good.

Outside on the street, she looked up at the moon, cursed softly, and hurried down the block. All the way back to her apartment house, she could feel the huge yellow eye staring down at her, the bright rays lancing her back.

“Harry’s disappeared,” Beauregard said, not for the first time. He paced up and down in front of the big double bed, rubbing his hand over his muscular chest. Propped up on a pillow, Heather watched him, enjoyed his catlike pacings back and forth across the room. She noticed the way his back curved, how flat his stomach still was … how trim his hips. She wondered how she could have ever stopped noticing before she had left for Paris.

“It’s unbelievable,” Beauregard said. “They just let him go. I gave Lombardi hell. He should have at least kept him there on some pretext. Christ knows where he is.”

He reached down to the blue quilt and picked up his black silk pajama top and put it on. Then he looked down at Heather, who was smiling at him.

“I don’t know,” she said, putting her copy of The Magus down. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If he had committed the murders, he would never have gone down to talk with you and Lombardi without a lawyer.”

“Yeah,” Beauregard said, “unless he was supremely confident he could pull it off.”

“Right,” Heather said. “Did he seem supremely confident?”

“No.”

“And on top of that, trying to run out … that doesn’t make much more sense either. It only makes him look worse. He must know they are going to catch him.”

Beauregard nodded and leaned back so that his shoulders and head rested on Heather’s legs.

“I know,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. Nothing does.”

Suddenly, he tensed up and pounded his fist into his palm.

“Beau,” Heather said, “it’s not your fault those patients died.”

“It’s not acceptable,” Beauregard said. “Unnecessary deaths are unacceptable, and this … I’ve worked my ass off to make that place the best … so many of us have. And it’s all being undone by some goddamned crazy force. It’s enough to make me sick.”

She looked at him with alarm. She had seen him like this only twice before … When two patients had died in spite of all he had tried to do.

There had been that girl, Kathy, who had leukemia … just a teen-ager, and Beau had been a resident. She had been so very sick, so very, very sick, and Beau had become friends with her … lost his distance from the case. He hadn’t slept for months, worrying about her … the long talks about the unfairness of it, the absurdity of his job. In the end she had died, and Beau had been crushed, but finally he had seemed relieved.

Then there had been the old man, Mr. Robinson. He had so many things wrong with him that he had become the subject of black humor among the staff—they called him a walking plague—but Beau had not found it funny. He had talked to him, learned of his life in the Bronx, his candy store, his children, his courage in the war, and she remembered Beau going through agonizing sleepless nights, staring out the windows at the gas lamp, going over the old man’s life again and again. And finally Robinson had died too, right on the operating table, and Beau had been frantic, upset, and even visited his grave. Since those days, though, he had become a complete professional, keeping his distance from the patients. Until this—this thing had gotten to him.

“Is there anything else, Beau?” Heather asked.

“Oh yeah … there’s quite a few things. Like Peter Cross. I saw him today at the hospital. I started to say something to him and he looked startled, like I was going to jump down his throat. And when I mentioned Harry to him, he got very nervous and then he put his hand up to this scratch on his cheek. I asked him about that and he said he cut himself shaving. That was very strange. Then I saw Debby … and she seemed uptight too. Very antsy … couldn’t talk to me at all.”

“Oh,” said Heather, “that’s odd—I was just wondering about Debby. Wondering if she took my advice. She called the other day—said she and Peter hadn’t been getting along. He seemed mad at her.”

“So they’ve had a fight? I wonder if she gave him the scratch?”

Heather ran her long fingers through Beauregard’s black hair.

“That’s entirely possible,” she said. “I remember some of our early battles. They do tend to be pretty rough.”

“Yes,” Beauregard said, “especially when one of the parties is a little weird … when he lives in his head to the exclusion of everything else.”

“Peter?” Heather said. “Aren’t you being a little unfair.”

“Maybe,” Beauregard said. “I was just thinking out loud. Peter has changed toward us … and Harry is missing … does any of that add up?”

Now Heather sat straight up in bed.

“Beau?” she said. “I’m surprised at you. This, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, darling, sounds like the true old conservative Beauregard of yesteryear.”

Beauregard laughed nervously and sipped his wine.

“Even if I told you that Harry Gardner thinks Peter framed him?”

She gasped.

“You didn’t tell me,” she said.

“I’m not allowed to tell anybody. But that’s what was said down at the police station.”

Suddenly the phone rang, and both of them jumped as though they had been pierced by a needle.

Beauregard picked it up.

“Lombardi,” he said. “What gives me the honor?”

“Be kind,” the nasal voice said. “I’ve had a rough day. They were going to make me technical advisor on a new cop series called Stark, but the networks axed it. It was a very severe blow to my self-esteem.”

“Are you calling for grief counseling?” Beauregard said.

“No,” Lombardi said, “but that’s a good line. I might work that into my new script. You really ought to read it. It’s about a series of murders at a large New York hospital. The police think they have the killer, but he jumps. They comb the city for him, break down doors, and look under the subway. Then we switch to a close-up of the pier around Twelfth Street. We find a body drifting up, his head all bashed in, maybe from where he fell, but more likely from a blunt object.”

“Gardner?” Beauregard said. “You found Harry?”

“That’s not all,” Lombardi said. “Whoever did this was pretty good with a needle. He’s been shot with something. I think we got to talk to some of your people—starting with Dr. Cross.”

“Talk to Peter?” Beauregard said.

“You got any better ideas?” Lombardi said. “If so, turn them over. The boys at the studio are licking their chops. This could be big, real big.”

“Where are you now?” Beauregard said.

“Not Twenty-One,” Lombardi said. He read Beau the number.

“Stay there,” Beauregard said.

He hung up the phone.

Two doctors and an attendant waited for the ambulance as it entered the emergency gate. The siren screamed across the roofs of Eastern, and the red light whirled frantically as the driver pulled to a screeching halt. The attendants wasted no time getting the doors open and pulled out the stretcher bearing the young woman. She looked at them, frightened, her eyes wide open in fear, and when one of them went to hold her hand, she grabbed his so powerfully that he could not get away from her.

“It’s going to be all right, miss,” he said. “It’s going to be just fine. Don’t worry … everything is going to be just fine.”

She began to cry, her tears running down her face, spoiling her makeup, wetting the roots of her red hair.

“Jesus,” she said, “I feel so damned afraid. I’m sorry. I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

The attendant, a tall boy named Gerald who looked more like a basketball player than a med student, tried a smile. But he looked so unconvincing that she began to panic and started to cry louder.

Quickly they got her through the doors and began wheeling her down the hall. As they did, she sobbed loudly and then groaned.

Peter Cross came out of the canteen, where he was sitting, drinking some grapefruit juice. He saw her go by, saw her pale red face, the pain in her eyes.

He spied one of the attendants.

“Hey, Garrison, who’s the girl?”

“Good-looking,” Garrison said. He smiled a bit and shuffled his feet, which pointed in opposite directions. He was a dull boy from Arkansas and liked nothing better than racing home after he got off and playing his entire collection of Patsy Cline albums.

“Yeah,” Cross said. “Very attractive.”

“She’s a dancer, named Martha Boston,” Garrison said. “Modern dancer … with the Joffrey. Or to be technically correct, I should say, ‘was’ a dancer. She’s had some kind of stroke and her entire left side is paralyzed. They’re going to have to operate on her in the morning.”

“Is that right?” Cross said.

In his stomach he heard a rumbling so loud that he was surprised the farm boy couldn’t hear it as well.

He moved slowly down the dark hallway, feeling as though at last he had arrived somewhere, that he had been dreaming all his life and knew it, but now, at long last, he had managed to part the curtain and walk through the other side … no longer was he a dreamer but the dream itself. This was all his, the white walls, the patients, the nurses looking like nuns. They were all his, to do with as he would. He came upon her lying with her eyes closed.

“Hello,” he said softly, ever so softly, for he felt at that moment so compassionate, so in touch with her, that no words needed to be spoken at all.

“Hello,” she said waking and smiling at him.

The red hair, the fullness of her breasts, the absurdity of it. He wanted to laugh out loud … not at her, but at the common stupidity of it all. If there was a God, he would spit in his eye.

He moved to the end of her bed and picked up her chart, pretended to check her blood pressure and the other details. Again he wanted to laugh, simply tell her there was no reason to worry, none at all, for everything that really mattered had already been decided. The chart with its “vital signs,” the hospital with its oxygen tents, its laser beams, its sophisticated gases, its knives, its smug golf-playing suburban doctors … all of that was history now.

“How do you feel?” he said. “How are you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Then a tear came down her cheek, and she put her hand up to her face.

“They say I may be paralyzed for life,” she said. “I’m a dancer … I can’t afford that.”

He moved around to her side of the bed.

“No,” he said, sitting down on the chair next to her. “No, of course you can’t. You dance … Tell me how do you feel … dancing?”

“It’s wonderful,” she said, moving her head toward him, the tears still coming.

“Your body feels wonderful?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes when you are really there … it’s almost as if …”

He put his finger over her lips.

“It’s almost as if you don’t have a body.”

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

“I know about those kinds of things,” he said. “It’s my business to know. I’m a doctor.”

“Yes,” she said. “But now. Oh, God, I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

He sat down on the chair next to her bed. He took a deep breath and smelled her perfume. He felt lightheaded, as though he could float away.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, offering her a handkerchief. “It’s going to be all right. Where are you from?”

“Philadelphia,” she said. “I’d been in this town for a year. I couldn’t get any work. Then I got this part in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and I got to sign on with the Joffrey. It was going to be my big moment. Oh, shit …”

He looked at her with total compassion. The tricks the body could play. If people had any real sense they would never feel safe. Never.

“You shouldn’t be upset,” he said. “It’s going to be fine … There’s an operation that is almost 100 percent sure. I’ll make sure I’m your anesthesiologist. I’m on tomorrow. Trust in me, and the other doctors, and try to sleep. That’s just what you need. A nice, long sleep.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know it. Oh, God. I’m so scared.”

She reached out and grabbed his hand, and he took hers and felt her soul pass from her own body to his. He wanted to bare his teeth, to howl, but he merely smiled.

“I’ll check in with you before the operation,” he said to her. “Sleep … just sleep.”

Beefy Sloan sat in his battered pale blue Pinto beneath a dying elm in front of Sig’s Bar and Grill. In his huge hands were a pair of binoculars, which had been splattered with red paint by his five-year-old son who had been trying to help him redecorate their old house in Queens. Beefy was looking at the Doc’s house, waiting for some movement, but all that ever happened was an occasional shadow on the lime green curtains. Beefy didn’t understand what the point of it was anyway … they already had the other guy, the muscleman. He’d like to see that jerk’s corpse after the lab boys got done with it. So what was Lombardi doing putting him down on this case … watching this other guy. It was chilly out … and worse, it was boring. Beefy longed to be slouched in a booth at the Sage Diner, hoisting a few with Ding Dong Delbert and the others … maybe watching the Knicks on TV. Though the Knicks wasn’t as good as they used to be on account of the whole team was made up of Jiggs.

He picked up the glasses again and waited. Goddamn, it was boring here. He looked over at Sig’s. Through the open window he could see two guys jawing and drinking down Miller’s. Jesus! It was obvious nothing was going to happen. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred on stakeout you came up with nothing. Fuck it! He put down the glasses and got out of the car.

He walked through his living room, looked up at his Hopper painting, “Rooms by the Sea.” He had always liked that painting, always cherished it … a room opening into blue water, no steps … just like stepping into the wakefulness of a dream. Which is how he felt when he killed them. As though he had completed a picture of his own, the outline of which was traced faintly in his mind the night before. It was like a performance that any great artist could understand. Certainly, a great musician, or even an athlete. He had read accounts of athletes imagining themselves running the 440 in record time, and then going out the next day and doing it, and when it was done, they said they felt they had simply acted out their dream. The problem was, of course, they dreamed so pathetically small. They understood nothing of the alleviation of human misery, of the higher calling of the spirit. They were tied irrevocably to the petty, the banal, the whole boatload of stupid, trivial earthly cares.