Mr. X (48 page)

June Cook’s eyes flicked at me, then back at Hatch. “You can spend ten minutes with my patient. But if he makes an identification in his present state, I will have something to say about it in court.”

Hatch smiled.

I asked her what had happened to Clyde Prentiss.

“Mr. Prentiss suffered fatal knife wounds,” she said. “Nobody saw anything. Mr. Hatch’s friends on the police force seem to be as baffled as we are.”

“Imagine, a thing like that in this well-run hospital,” Hatch said.

June Cook went through the curtain. Treuhaft obeyed a silent command from Mullan and stayed outside when she returned to wave us in.

The old man in the bed glared at our invasion through glittering eyes surrounded by an interlocking network of bruises. A cone-shaped structure had been taped over his nose, and his mouth described a downturned U. He glanced back and forth as Mullan and I went up one side of the bed, Hatch and Rowley the other. I wondered how many people he saw.

“Nice of you to drop by, Mr. Hatch.”

Hatch tried to pat his hand.

Sawyer pulled his hand away. “I talked to your doctor a couple hours ago. He wants me to go to Lawndale, but the only place I’m going is home. You know how much it costs to rent space in an ICU?”

“Earl, your costs are taken care of,” Hatch said. “Don’t worry about anything. We’ll work something out.”

“I got no health insurance and no pension plan,” Sawyer said. “You want to talk about working something out, let’s work it out now, in front of witnesses. How do I know I’ll ever see you again?”

“Earl, this is not the time to discuss business.” Hatch grinned at the two cops. “We’d like you to look at the man in the blue shirt on the other side of the bed and tell us if you recognize him.”

“You used the word ‘business,’ ” Sawyer said. “Considering I got injured on the job, what are we talking about? You agreed to cover the medical expenses. Health insurance would have been a better deal, but I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m grateful.”

“Thank you,” Hatch said. “Can we get down to the present business, Earl?”

“Present business is what I’m talking about. I put in fifteen years with you, and some guy comes along and pounds the bejesus out of me. I’m sixty-five years old. You know what would be right? A lifetime pension at seventy-five percent of my salary.”

“Earl, we can’t—”

“Here’s another option. A one-time settlement of twenty-five thousand dollars. You’d probably come out ahead that way.”

Hatch stared up at the dim ceiling of the ICU. “Well, Earl, I hadn’t really expected to get into a negotiation here.” He sighed. Mullan and Rowley were both eyeing him. “If you think a settlement like that would suit you, you got it. It’s the least I can do to express my gratitude for your years of service.”

Sawyer nodded at him. “I’m glad we’re in agreement, Mr. Hatch. You’ll cover my medical bills, and the check for twenty-five grand will be waiting for me at your front desk by … what day is this? Sunday? By Wednesday morning.”

Hatch raised his arms in defeat. “Earl, I could use you on my team. All right, Wednesday morning.”

“You had me on your team, Mr. Hatch. That’s what you’re paying for. Who am I supposed to identify? Him?”

Hatch moved away from the bedside, shaking his head. Mullan said, “You’ve already had an opportunity to take a look at him, Earl, but I want you to look again and tell us if he resembles the man who assaulted you in the Cobden Building.”

Earl Sawyer squinted at me. “Come closer.”

In their nests of bruises, the old man’s eyes were shiny with malice. “Bend down.”

I leaned toward him.

“Didn’t I talk to you a couple of days ago? When I was letting myself in?”

“Friday evening,” I said.

“You heard Mr. Hatch agree to my deal, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“You got the wrong guy,” Earl said. “You have to remember, I hardly saw the guy. But this isn’t him.”

“Are you seeing double?” Rowley asked.

“So I see two of the wrong guy. I see two of you, but I still know you’re a son of a bitch named Rowley.”

“This is a travesty,” Hatch said. “Earl can’t see straight. He had us come in here to work out a pension deal.”

“He can see well enough to clear Mr. Dunstan,” Mullan said.

“Send the nurse in here, will you? Mr. Hatch, I want you to sign a written agreement.”

Outside the cubicle, June Cook gave me a small, triumphant smile and said, “I heard the patient’s request.” She leaned over the counter for a sheet of paper and drew a pen from the pocket of her green tunic.

While Hatch signed away $25,000, the four of us drifted toward the top of the unit. I looked again at the bloody floor inside Prentiss’s sealed cubicle. It reminded me of something I had heard in the past few days, but could not quite remember. Mullan was looking at the bloodstains, too, and I asked him how soon
his men would be done with their work. “In there?” he said. “Rowley, we’re finished with this scene, aren’t we?”

“I’ll send a man over,” Rowley grumbled.

“Clothhead Spelvin,” I said. “I knew this reminded me of something.”

Captain Mullan slowly turned his head to regard me in ill-concealed amazement.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rowley asked.

“An oldie but goodie,” Mullan said, still marveling at me. “That’s very interesting. Would you care to say more?”

“Wasn’t Spelvin knifed to death in a cell? Whoever killed him got past the guards and the other prisoners without being seen.”

“Pretty good trick, wasn’t it?” Mullan said.

“Funny thing, nobody ever sees squat when jungle justice goes down. You close it as a suicide, right?”

“That’s how it was closed,” Mullan said, still looking at me.

Stewart Hatch thrust the curtain aside and stamped out. His face was tight with anger. No one spoke during the wait for the elevator, and the arctic silence continued as we descended, elbow to elbow with strangers, to the ground floor.

Instead of ramming his way through the people before him, Hatch let them depart and nodded at me to get off. I thought he was going to go back to the ICU and rip up the agreement he had signed, but when the elevator had emptied, he moved out into the corridor. For a moment, he pressed his hands to his face and held them there, as if concealing his anger or reining it in.

Hatch lowered his hands. He took a deep breath. “I didn’t know the old bastard had it in him.” His face split into a grin, and he chuckled. The chuckles built into outright laughter. I would not have been more surprised if he had started passing out hundred-dollar bills. All of us started laughing. Treuhaft boomed out huge bass cannonballs, and Rowley contributed a toneless noise that sounded like a child’s first assault on a violin.

“Old Earl,” Hatch said through gasps of laughter. “He
snookered
me. He flat
bushwhacked
me.” He tilted back his head and roared.

I confess, this performance disarmed me. In spite of everything I knew or thought I knew about Stewart Hatch, at that moment I could not help liking him. His ability to laugh at himself put him in a different category from self-important toads like Grenville Milton.

He wiped his eyes with the back of a hand, still chuckling. “All right. Live and learn. I can take Mr. Dunstan home. You guys have things to do, and it’s on my way.”

When we had all spun through the revolving door, Mullan questioned me with a look, and I said, “Sure, why not?”

Stewart Hatch opened the passenger door of his Mercedes and beckoned me in with a flourish.

66

We drove out of the hospital grounds like a couple of old friends. Hatch was smiling, and his eyes were filled with a comfortable, humorous light. Top down, the car flowed up the street with the weighty ease I remembered. “You liked this little sweetheart, didn’t you?” Hatch asked me. “I keep forgetting how much I enjoy driving it.”

“If you’re going to Ferryman’s Road, I’ll get out there. There’s no reason for you to take me back to my place.”

“Let’s drive around a while. It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other. Wouldn’t you agree we should talk?”

“If you think so.” I braced myself.

“Oh, I do, definitely.” He smiled at me again, his eyes dancing. “There’s something I’d like to show you. We can get there in about twenty minutes.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Can you spare the time?”

“As long as you’re not going to march me into a field and show me a gun.”

Five green lights and a nearly empty road had appeared before us. Hatch twinkled at me. “Watch this.” He touched the accelerator, and the car concentrated upon itself for a tenth of a second before rocketing ahead. I watched the speedometer glide past sixty before we sped through the first light. It kept climbing as we blasted toward the second. The breeze whipping past our heads shifted the line of Hatch’s hair about an eighth of an inch
backward. He kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the fourth light, and brought it smoothly down to thirty only in time to make it past the fifth and swerve right onto Commercial Avenue. His hair sprang perfectly back into place. “You can get this baby up to a hundred and ten before you actually feel like you’re speeding.”

“Now that we’re together like this, Stewart,” I said, “can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Anything.”

“Between you and me, is Rowley your inside guy at Police Headquarters?”

“Lieutenant Rowley works for the city of Edgerton. The man is a dedicated public servant. His passion for justice may sometimes get the better of him, but that comes with the job.”

“And you didn’t tell him to order me out of town.”

“Of course not.”

“And you realize I had nothing to do with what happened at your building.”

“I’m relieved, as a matter of fact. Now I don’t have to figure out how you broke in. We have the most sophisticated security system you can imagine. Nobody not on the inside could get around the pressure sensors and the electronic beams and disarm the contact points, so it must have been an employee of the security company. We’ll get him, but that still leaves me with the computer damage.” Hatch gave me an inquiring look. “Aren’t you an expert in that area?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.

“Would you like to make ten thousand dollars a week? It looks like about half the files are missing from our hard disks, and I need to recover them. All I’d ask is that you sign a confidentiality agreement. The work might not even take as long as a week. You get me set up and running in a day or two, the money’s the same. Sound interesting?”

“It sounds great,” I said, “but the answer is no.”

“Can I ask why?”

“No offense intended, but I’d rather not be on the Hatch payroll.”

“Too bad. It was a long shot, but too bad.”

We cut through the southern end of the business district, turned west, and drove into a part of town I had never seen before. Uptilting blocks lined with peeling frame houses dropped away
toward an overgrown baseball diamond and rotting bleachers. Beyond the next rise, a few women trudged along dusty paths in a trailer park. A bare-chested kid aimed a BB gun at us from beneath a limp Confederate flag.

“You liked this car, didn’t you?” Hatch asked.

“It handles beautifully.”

“And what about my wife?” He grinned. This time, the light in his eyes was still humorous, but not at all comfortable. “Would you say she handles beautifully? Accelerates smoothly? Did you find her well engineered?”

“Forget it, Stewart,” I said. “Your marriage has nothing to do with me.”

“You would admit, wouldn’t you, that my wife is an extremely good-looking woman? Even a beautiful woman? What you might call an attractive bit of horseflesh?”

“She’s attractive, yes,” I said. “But if you’re having someone follow her around with a camera, I feel sorry for you.”

“Bear with me,” he said. “I bet you wondered why a woman like that would marry me. After all, I’m rich, but not superrich, I’m twelve years older than she is, and I live in a nowhere Midwestern town. Am I right?”

“I wondered about some of that,” I said.

“Sure you did. If you hadn’t, she would have done it for you. Now, between us, she isn’t so great in bed, is she? When it comes to performance, this car is a lot more satisfying. My wife is too selfish to be a good lay.”