The Skeleton's Knee (2 page)

She smiled, already dialing the hospital. “We used to, years ago, but when I told them we were throwing the list out, also as a matter of routine, they quit sending them.”

She turned back to the phone, and I retreated, suitably abashed. Harriet was a grandmother and the leader of an enormous familial clan. That she could run both her family and our office with good humor and no side effects proved she had little tolerance for wasteful habits, and no bashfulness about correcting them.

She buzzed me on the intercom moments later. “You’re in luck. He’s got a free hour right now. Nine Belmont Avenue, second floor.”

· · ·

Nine Belmont was a remarkably plain red-brick barracks building, attached to the side of the hospital by a narrow corridor like a near-severed limb. A professional building designed to house a variety of medical offices, it had always struck me as the ideal place to receive bad news about a terminal illness: low-slung, cheap-looking, and generally unpromising. I pushed open the glass and aluminum front door, crossed the worn, water-stained foyer carpet, and made for the stairs to the second floor.

Halfway down the dark corridor, I came to a door marked
MICHAEL BROOK, M.D.–ORTHOPEDICS
. I knocked and walked in.

Brook was standing in his own empty waiting room, leaning on the counter in front of the nurse/receptionist, picking a piece of candy out of a jar to the side of the sliding glass window. He looked up and stuck his free hand out as I approached. “Hi, Joe. I’m test-marketing my reception room. Got to see if I’m invoking the proper element of dread. Want a candy?”

I accepted a blue cellophane-wrapped offering and followed him through the far door into a hallway lined with suitably soothing calendar art. He led the way to an office at the end, stumping from side to side like a land-bound sailor. As ironies would have it, Brook was an orthopedist with one artificial leg, the original having been lost to disease as a teenager. He motioned me into one of two guest chairs, settling into the other one himself.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, unwrapping his candy and popping it in his mouth.

He was a big man, in all dimensions, and had always reminded me of a sheepdog: all bushy gray hair, bearded and uncombed, surrounding two soft brown eyes that hovered above a pair of half glasses like children looking over a fence. I’d met him more than twenty years earlier, when my wife had consulted him for a pain in her shoulder. That hadn’t turned out to be his particular expertise—the pain had been cancer, and Ellen had died within a few months—but Michael Brook had kept by both of us, smoothing the introductions to the many doctors we quickly acquired and translating their incantations into the kind of English we could grasp and digest. While I’d never had to use him professionally since, and our paths rarely crossed socially, his compassion back then had forged a friendship I’d never questioned.

“Mike, I just got a call from Beverly Hillstrom about Abraham Fuller.”

Brook’s face lit up with interest. “Right. What the hell was that, anyway? We were all stunned when he died; didn’t make any sense.”

“She called it a traumatic aortic aneurysm, caused by the creasing of a bullet years ago.”

His mouth fell open and he pulled his glasses off his face. “Damn. That scar he had. He said he got it falling against a tree branch when he was a kid.”

“Apparently, there was an entrance wound near his belly button—a small one. Hillstrom guesstimates a .32 caliber at most.”

He shook his head in wonder. “Christ. It never even crossed my mind. Did this guy have a record, too?”

I smiled at the imaginative leap. “Not everyone with a bullet scar is a crook, Michael. Although, for all I know so far, you may be right. I’m just starting to look into his past. I thought I’d start with you.”

Brook waggled his shaggy eyebrows at me and pushed himself forward in his chair. “You’re not going to get too far. He wasn’t a great historian.” He twisted his phone console around to face him and pushed one of its many buttons. “Bernice? Could you pull everything we have on Abraham Fuller and bring it in? Thanks.”

He settled back in his seat with a small grunt. “I was called in by the Emergency Department a few days ago. Rescue, Inc. had transported a middle-aged male with back pain resulting in paraplegia. The X-rays revealed vertebral osteomyelitis, complicated by an abscess, all stemming, I thought, from the patient’s decades-old encounter with a tree branch…”

“Did he pinpoint the time of the injury?”

Mike shook his head. “No. That’s what I meant when I said he was a poor historian. He just said it happened when he was a kid. I asked him the usual background questions, so I could rule out any underlying congenital or genetic causes for his problem, but every time I wanted specifics, he got vague. Maybe that’s why I thought he was a crook just now.”

There was a knock on the door and a nurse handed Brook a slim folder before retiring. Brook leafed through it cursorily and handed it over to me. “No date of birth, no place of birth, no names of parents, no address, no phone number, no Social Security number, no family physician, no prior records at the hospital. No nothin’, when you get down to it.”

I glanced over the admission sheets at the front, not bothering with the treatment pages, which were indecipherable scrawls, in any case. They were virtually blank. “Hillstrom told me he stayed several days.”

“That’s right. I wanted to do a biopsy on the abscess, and I was planning surgery regardless.” He paused. “If that damned aneurysm had held on a little longer, we might have caught it in surgery and saved his life.”

“Why did it blow, after all this time?”

He shrugged, much as I’d guessed Hillstrom had earlier to the same question. “That kind of aneurysm acts like a stretched-out water balloon. If either the pressure inside increases too much or the outer envelope weakens, it goes pow.” He retrieved the file from my lap and flipped it open. “His blood pressure was on the high side, probably due to the pain and anxiety. That alone might have been enough to do the trick.”

I let my eyes wander across the walls before me, registering but not reading the various diplomas and citations. A secretive man, admitting to no past, is forced by medical necessity to come out of his hole and then dies. I shook my head. This was turning out darker than I’d feared… and more intriguing.

“How did the Accounting Office deal with him? I notice he didn’t list any insurance.”

Brook chuckled. “Normally, I wouldn’t know, since it ain’t my department, as they say, but this guy really made history on that one. The whole hospital heard about it—unofficially, of course. He paid cash, and I mean real cash: greenbacks. At some point, after I’d started talking surgery, someone in Accounting got nervous—Fuller didn’t even have a Medicaid number, after all—and they went up to talk to him. He asked them how much they needed, told them to leave the room for a minute, and then handed them five thousand bucks. He told them to regard it either as a down payment or an amount to draw on, depending on the final amount due. They didn’t argue, and from what I heard, they didn’t ask for explanations.”

“Where was he keeping it? Did he have a bag or something?”

“Yeah, one of those small backpacks. I think the hospital still has it, along with his clothing and whatever else he left behind, unless somebody’s claimed them by now.”

My mind was humming with possibilities, most of them far from innocent, but I wanted to play out at least one straightforward angle before assuming the worst. “Maybe he was a hermit. Did you see him clothed, or did the ER staff have him stripped already?”

Michael paused before answering, thinking back. “He was still partly dressed. They were work clothes—standard JCPenney-type stuff. His hands were rough; he had the typical workingman’s suntan—forearms as black as walnut, the rest of him lilywhite. I don’t know… I guess initially I took him for what he looked like. Not a backwoods type, though. His speech didn’t fit that at all. He was pretty well educated, beyond high school. When I described what I’d found out about his back, he had no trouble following it, even asked some fairly sophisticated questions…”

“As if he’d had medical training?”

“No, nothing that fancy, but definitely a college background. He was also a health nut. A lot of construction workers and whatnot are tough as nails, but their eating habits are lousy. It usually shows up in their waistlines. This guy was as thin and hard as cable wire. Described himself as a lacto-vegetarian: no eggs, no meat, no fish, and no poultry. He gave strict instructions to the dietitian.”

“You think he took care of himself because he knew he had a touchy back?”

Brook shook his head. “I don’t know. He denied it to me—said he’d never had any trouble with it except when he’d fallen on the tree branch years ago, but who’s to know? The guy was obviously not too intimate with the truth.”

I thanked him and moments later passed through the umbilical-like corridor between the hospital and the office building, in search of the head of Accounting. I found her beyond a moderately crowded waiting room in a small, windowless, but cheery cubbyhole decorated with framed Georgia O’Keeffe posters and unusually healthy green plants.

She was an angular, white-haired woman with a flame-red dress and an animated face. The nameplate on her tidy desk read
KATHY PARKER
. She half rose from her chair as I entered and shook hands. “The receptionist said you’re from the police?”

I smiled and placed my credentials before her. “Yes. Lieutenant Joe Gunther.” She looked at me carefully then. “Oh, I’ve heard of you. My goodness, weren’t you almost killed a couple of months ago?” I smiled at the reference to a recent headline-grabbing case. “A dubious claim to fame. Yes, that was me.”

She returned my badge and gestured to me to sit. “Well, it’s an honor.” Her face acquired a carefully neutral cast. “I take it you’re here in a professional capacity?”

“Yes. I want to know about a small backpack belonging to a patient who died here a couple of days ago, an Abraham Fuller.” Kathy Parker’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh yes. I inventoried that myself. Would you like it?”

“I’d like to take a look at it.”

She turned toward a small floor safe behind her, opened its door, and retrieved an old red canvas bag, laying it on her desk. “I’m not surprised you’re here, actually. I mean, we’re obviously delighted when a patient pays for his treatment on the barrel, but using a bagful of cash did stir up a few comments.”

I picked up the knapsack and rested it in my lap for the moment. “Did anyone know him, or about him?”

“Mr. Fuller? Not that I heard. That’s what made it even more mysterious; paying cash is the kind of thing you see drug-runners do on TV.” She smiled at the soiled, much-used bag between my hands. “Of course, on TV they usually carry it around in a fancy briefcase. I guess that’s the Vermont touch.”

I smiled and fingered the material. “I know you didn’t mean it literally, but was there anything indicating he was into drugs?”

She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, this was all just gossip; you know how it is, especially in a small place like this. People were also asking if Fuller was a pseudonym for an Italian name, as in Mafia. I never even saw the man.” She nodded toward the pack. “I didn’t get that until after he’d been shipped off to Burlington for autopsy. It was just… Well, open it and see for yourself. It is a little weird.”

I undid the knot at the throat of the bag and drew it open, taking a look before I reached in. There were some odds and ends: a toothbrush and paste, a comb, a paperback edition of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, a balled-up pair of socks, some underwear, and a single change of clothes. But the attention grabbers were the banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

I gingerly pulled one out, holding it by the edges. “Did you count it all?”

“Yes. There’re five of them, a thousand dollars each.”

“And he’d already paid five thousand for his treatment, is that right?”

She nodded. “We deposited part of what he gave us, for services rendered. The difference is still in escrow, pending retrieval by next of kin.”

I looked at the bundle in my hand. The inner bills were new and crisp; the outer ones were unwrinkled but grimy, and the edges of all of them were faintly soiled. They also had an odd feel to them—almost slippery. I held it up to my nose and smelled.

“Mildew,” Kathy Parker suggested.

“Yeah. I think you’re right.” I lifted the knapsack to my nose and detected the same pungent odor. I looked at the face side of one of the cover bills and let out a small grunt, flipping through the others for confirmation.

“What?” Parker asked, presumably keen for more gossip.

I hesitated, then dropped the money back into the bag. “Nothing; I was just wondering about the mildew. If you could draw up a receipt, I think I’ll take this down to the Municipal Building and lock it in our evidence room.”

She did as I requested, half-curious and half-relieved to be rid of a potential headache. By proxy, I was allowing her to jerk her thumb down the line at us, should anyone later ask about the cash.

Not that I was paying much attention to her quandaries, in any case. As I thanked her, took a copy of the receipt and the bag, and worked my way back to my car, I was mulling over what I’d discovered in glancing at those bills. Not all the bundles were of mint notes—in fact, only two of them were—but those two were utterly pristine, with their serial numbers in perfect chronological sequence. The kicker was, new or old, none of them had been printed more recently than 1969, nearly twenty-five years ago.

SINCE THE RESCUE, INC.
ambulance service had delivered Fuller to the hospital, I made them my next stop after depositing the money at police headquarters.

Located off Interstate 91’s Exit 1, Rescue, Inc.’s broad, squat building sat on a small knoll overlooking where Canal Street petered out as a low-rent, commercialized, somewhat seedy urban drag, to be renamed Chicken Coop Hill on the far side of the underpass—a narrow, rural ribbon of tarmac heading toward Guilford and the southern Vermont hinterlands. The abrupt contrast was typical Brattleboro: an aging, turn-of-the-century industrial town, in spots old enough, worn enough, and frail enough to appear threatened by the encroaching countryside. It wasn’t true, of course. Brattleboro was expanding, if timidly. It just had the New England sensibility to be subtle about it.