Night-Bloom (30 page)

He laid the blame for it on Mooney, whose visit, it seemed, had scared the wits out of him. It hadn’t been bad, he recalled, while Mooney and the other man were there. As a matter of fact, he’d started to enjoy being the focal point of their attention. It was only when they’d left that the doubts and misgivings began.

“Who do they think they’re kidding?” he fumed, “They must take me for some kind of sap. All of that hokum about a man in the bed next to me in the hospital two years ago. Just a pretense to come in here, nose and poke around looking for bottles and pills. I’m a suspect. They’re on to me.”

It started like that, gradually. But then he began to work it up into a mild frenzy. Winding the clocks for the evening, his agitation escalated into a huge, inflicted panic. “It’s me that big cop was looking for. Not anybody in the hospital. They’ve got something on me. Either I left fingerprints at the pharmacy, or I dropped something.”

Struggling to reconstruct his every move at the Cardinal Pharmacy, he started to make his way through the clock collection, winding and resetting them distractedly. Forcing windup keys into clocks, at one point he nearly upended a rare French Napoleonic clock of doré and marble. All the time he kept muttering, working himself into a frenzy about the big cop and who the devil was he to come into someone’s home like that, snooping around on a cheap pretense about some man in a hospital bed next to him? So obvious a lie it was, unless … unless it wasn’t the Cardinal Pharmacy at all. It was Myrtle. That was it. She’d notified the New York police, who’d finally tracked him down. My God. Oh, my God, it’s Myrtle.

It was just about then that he’d had the first intimations of a rapidly onrushing migraine. He’d not wanted to take the Demerol. Some deep vestige of self-preservation had cautioned him over the past several months to curtail his intake. He had actually made some conscientious effort to cut back. But if Myrtle had the New York police track him here … this was clearly not the time to start denying himself.

“But maybe it’s not that at all,” he reasoned. “Maybe it’s the prescription yesterday. All those fake prescriptions. My God, and that doctor, the gastroenterologist I impersonated. Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”

A thousand chimeras whirled through his head. Phantoms of past crimes, actual and imagined. Forgeries. Impersonations. Thefts, petty and grand. Breaking and entering. In his mind he recalled dozens more. The Cardinal Pharmacy was but one of a string of many. Vividly, with almost preternatural acuity, he relived the crime over and over again. The shattered glass. The high, persistent shriek of the alarm. Lurching up and down the aisles of canisters and phials.

It was then that he’d bolted down the second Demerol, forgetting completely that he’d taken one only minutes before. A cold sweat erupted on his forehead, and though it was close to eighty degrees outside, he started to shiver. He climbed into bed that night fully expecting never to awaken. A dull throb had commenced at the back of his neck. Lying there anticipating the arrival of pain was more ghastly than the pain itself. That slow, insidious creep upward from the back of the skull into the right ear, radiating spokes of agony outward into the right hemisphere of the head as far as the right eye.

Outside in the harsh, fast dusk, he could hear the squeal of children playing stoopball in the street below. Lying spread-eagled atop the cover, he continued to wrack his brain for some hint of past guilt. What stupid blunder had he made? How had they found him? Where did they get his name?

Still awake at 2:00
A.M.
, lathered in a sweat of irrational dread, he got out of bed, intending to call his sister Renee in Pittsburgh. He meant to dash out t here immediately and seek refuge until the whole affair blew over. But no sooner had he started to dial than he had an image of his brother-in-law, Edgar, remorseless and unforgiving, followed by a humiliating picture of himself begging sanctuary of Edgar.

He could see the brow lowering, the eyes glinting with scorn.

Slowly he replaced the phone and slumped into a chair. He would have bolted right then, but he was convinced that the police were just outside the door, waiting in a darkened, unmarked car for precisely such an action. In their eyes, flight at that moment would seal his guilt forever.

“Who was that man in the bed next to me?” He ransacked his memory for a name. It seemed to him that if he could come up with one his salvation was assured. “It certainly wasn’t Boyd. That wasn’t the name he told me. Or was it? He did give me a name. And there was something else—something strange he told me.”

He could recall the face, as if he were seeing it just then—haggard, pale, drowsy with sedation. Generally he had a good memory for faces. But this impression was somewhat less vivid because he had only seen the man on his back, recumbent beneath sheets and with plastic tubes dangling from his nose.

“What is it?” He stood suddenly, peering into the upper reaches of the house. “What is it?” he called once more. “Filariasis,” he murmured as if answering himself. “Chronic lymphadenopathy. Retrograde lymph … Epidemiology Coastal borders Asia, Queensland.” He recited the words, the symptoms over and over again with the hypnotic force of incantation, invoking the old gods he knew had the power to deliver him.

In his tatty robe and floppy slippers he walked round and round the damp, unlit regions of the house. The dull throb in his head had intensified to sharp, ripping detonations. Waves of sickening pain that came and went. In the bathroom, concealed behind a radiator cover, he found the precious jeroboam of meperidine. Forgetting the dosage he had taken before, he took two additional pills. When he awoke the next day it was 1:00 p.m. and he was lying on the bathroom floor. He had no memory of anything other than a fleeting impression of a bad dream, like a foul taste in one’s mouth.

The room came gradually into sharper focus. Staring into the mirror above the sink, he noted a drawn, scruffy visage staring disdainfully back at him. Something in those bland, familiar features was different, however. Something askew. But he couldn’t tell exactly what. Then, on the sink top he spied his shaving kit—a mug of shaving lather, a beaver brush still wet with dried soap caked to the bristles as if recently used, and a single-edged barber’s razor his father had given him at age sixteen. He had no recollection of having either taken them out or shaved. But suddenly he knew why his features had taken on that slightly crooked, off-kilter cast. The brow above his right eye had been completely shaved off.

“Without even knowing it the guy did you a tremendous favor.”

“Like what? Telling me I hadn’t a friend in the world?”

“I’m your friend.”

“Or sweet things like telling me I’m a thorn in the ass of the department. And quite frankly, the son of a bitch says, the department can’t wait for my retirement.”

Fritzi set a plate of cold sliced cucumbers and tomatoes in front of Mooney. “You got your helicopter, didn’t you? You got your ten men.”

“I asked for fifteen.”

“And your snooperscopes.”

“Sniperscopes.”

“Whatever. You got all that, didn’t you? And will you kindly remove that article from your person. At my dinner table we do not wear guns.”

She came round behind him, encircled his chest with her arms and deftly unbuckled the pistol harness. Obediently, almost childlike, he raised his arms and submitted as she unstrapped him.

“Pissed me off how quickly he agreed. Pissed me plenty. They must want me out real bad.”

“Their loss.” Fritzi sat down at the small kitchen table opposite him and proceeded to slice their steak. “He did you the biggest favor of your life. Thank him tomorrow for me. Medium or rare?”

Mooney fumed and clapped a cucumber between his great jaws. “Pink. Not purple like the other night. Jesus, can’t we ever get a potato here? Or a slice of bread? What I’d give for a slice of …”

“You’re down fifty pounds. What’re you complaining about? You look almost human. I can actually see the bones in your face, and it’s no longer that sick beet-red. Why blow it all now with bread and potatoes?”

Mooney frowned and held his plate up while she carefully placed an austere portion of lean steak there.

“And you know something else,” Fritzi went on breathlessly in her gay, chirpy fashion, “personally, I hope the whole thing is a bust so you do have to retire.”

“Thanks a lot.” He gulped a small gobbet of steak. “I needed that.”

“Well, it’s the truth. I’m sorry. They don’t deserve you—the lousy way they’ve treated you all these years. You know what Rudy Baumholz used to say?”

“No,” Mooney grumbled. “Tell me.”

“He used to say, ‘Fritzi. Any man who gives his whole life working for some organization deserves everything he gets. In the end, they screw you.’ That’s what Rudy used to say.”

“Three cheers for Rudy. How about another slice of steak?”

“Stop wolfing your food. Take small bites. Chew.” He held his plate out, a martyred expression on his face.

“And you know what else is going to happen when you retire from this dumb, thankless job?”

“Is there any coffee?”

“You’re going to go to work.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mooney gulped water with his eyes raised to the ceiling. “Not on a bet. Once I’m done, I’m done.” He went on chewing his steak irritably, as if it were a task.

“How does manager of Fritzi’s Balloon strike you?”

The chewing ceased momentarily and he looked up. “A headwaiter?”

She could see the contempt in his eyes. “Maître d’. Major domo.”

“A bouncer?”

“No bouncer. Manager, I told you.”

“A mortician in a tuxedo. A freak in a starched dickey.”

“No dickeys. No tuxedos. All smart stuff. Sports jackets. Brooks and Paul Stuart.”

Mooney made an unpleasant sound. “You don’t by any chance happen to have some pie?”

“And you know what else?” Fritzi chattered on irrepressibly. “All the free time you want. Whenever you want to go to the track, bang, you got it. No permission required. And maybe if you want to knock off for a couple of months and go, like maybe, to Spain, bang, we go.”

“On what?” Mooney smoldered. “My miserable pension plus my miserable Social Security?” A short, bitter laugh rippled from his throat.

“On your wages from the Balloon.” Fritzi spooned out heaping portions of fresh raspberries. “Fritzi pays good wages. Fritzi pays top dollar to the right guy.”

She had meant to cheer him, but instead, what she saw was regret sinking into despair. Second thoughts on the wisdom of his brash wager with the commissioner stood out all over his face.

She leaned across the table and with her large, rough palm covered the back of his hand. “You’ve always been a good handicapper, Mooney. Careful. Shrewd. You called these odds. Now live with them.”

“More likely die with them.”

“Now let’s have none of that.” She’d grown curt and testy. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself. You know what Rudy would say?”

“No. And don’t tell me.”

“You’re a smart fellow. I don’t think you’re impulsive. The odds had to be there for you to make this bet with the commissioner.”

“They are. In spades.”

She thought he looked like some incorrigible child, pleading innocence, seeking vindication. Her eyes suddenly sparked. “What odds do you pay he makes a drop in the next five days?”

“Make it a week and I’ll give you three to one.”

“You got it. What about quinellas?”

“Pick any two consecutive nights between now and next Thursday.”

“What odds?”

“Eight to one if you hit the night. Three to one if you hit on a date either side of the drop night.”

“I got a hundred that says it’s this Friday.”

“The twenty-ninth,” Mooney said, his spirits noticeably rising. “I hate to take your money, Fritz, but you’re on.”

She poured coffee. “When’s the first surveillance?”

“Tomorrow night. We go out from the heliport on South Street.”

They rose and carried their coffee into the little sitting room that looked out over Seventy-third Street toward the East River. “Now,” she said, sitting down beside him, “tell me all about this funny little guy you met today.”

Mooney was momentarily baffled. “What funny little guy?”

“The guy you saw this morning. The one out in Queens.”

“Oh, Watford.” He leaned back and put his feet up on the hassock. “Strange fellow. Nervous. Jumpy. He kept acting like he was expecting us to beat the hell out of him any minute.”

“It’s not every day that two of New York’s Finest pay you a house call.”

“I’d ask him one thing and he’d look at me kind of funny, and answer some other question. Go off completely on another tangent. Middle of the day, and he’s still there in his pajamas. The place was an unholy mess. Stunk from cats, although I didn’t see any around. Just clocks. All these clocks …”

Dusk had fallen over Seventy-third Street, and they had drawn close in the comfort of the gathering shadows, the odor of fresh coffee lingering on the quiet air. Like figures in a frieze, they appeared as if they’d been sitting just that way, chatting and sipping coffee, for the past thousand years, and would probably do so for the next.