Shamrock Alley (15 page)

The butler continued to look at the business card, aware of the Secret Service emblem emblazoned above Kersh’s name, obviously chewing something over in his mind. Then he turned back to clearing off the coffee table.

Kersh leaned over the sofa, grabbed the book he’d taken from the shelf, and proceeded to slide it back into place.

“No, no, no,” the woman said, causing Morris the butler to glance over in their direction again. Mrs. Gethers plucked the book from Kersh’s hands, held it up to her face as if preparing to read the small print on the leather cover … then inhaled deeply, breathing in the musty scent of the book. Eyes partially closed, a soft smile swimming on her face, she gently handed the book back to Kersh. “Keep it,” she said. “It’s yours.”

“Oh, I can’t.” The older agent uttered an embarrassed laugh. “It’s very old. Must be worth—”

Evelyn Gethers merely waved her hand. “Nonsense,” she said. “How much crap can an old woman inherit? It’s just one other item for Morris to dust.”

To this, John expected the butler to grunt and shuffle quickly out of the room. But Morris remained, silent and watchful as ever.

“Really—” Kersh insisted.

“No,” she said, adamant, “I won’t hear of it. It’s yours now. Keep it. And good reading to you, Inspector Kersh.” She turned to her butler, her bony hands suddenly hugging her pointy hips. “See them out, Morris. I’m going to the windows for air.”

“Ma’am,” he said, and straightened up quickly, suddenly disinterested in the coffee cups.

She turned toward the agents, pirouetted with surprising agility, and bade them farewell.

“Gentlemen,” Morris said, opening the front door. There was something in his voice, in his demeanor, that caused John to look in the butler’s direction and study his face. If Kersh had heard it too, he showed no sign.

He wasn’t surprised when Morris followed them out into the hall.

“What’d he do?” were the first words out of Morris’s mouth. His breath was stale and awful-smelling. “That son of a bitch.”

Stunned, Kersh turned around. “I’m sorry?”

“Clifton,” Morris said. “Can you tell me what he did, why you’re looking for him?”

“Sir, we—” Kersh began, but John cut him off.

“You know him? What do you know?” he asked the butler. He could almost read the man’s thoughts straight from his head, could see them glowing like neon across his bald pate. “Tell us.”

“Clifton’s no good and not deserving of anything Mrs. Gethers gives him. I see what goes on here, see what he does. He’s a hooligan, and I’m not surprised he’s in trouble with the authorities.”

“How’d this guy get mixed up with her?”

“How does
anything
happen?” Morris spoke in a near-whisper now, his face very close to John’s, his breath oppressive. “He used to deliver groceries up to the loft. Mrs. Gethers is elderly, lonely, a little out of it—and she’s got a lot of money. This Clifton fellow took advantage of that. He sometimes comes and goes and she gives him money, pays for company, that sort of thing.”

“How old is he?” John asked.

“About your age. He’s at Bellevue,” Morris spat, quick enough to trip over his words. “Bellevue Hospital. I sometimes …” Then he caught himself, considered changing his mind, then must have figured
what the hell
. “I sometimes listen in on her calls.” He looked embarrassed and a bit peeved at the whole situation. “Her husband was a good man—a good employer and a good friend. I worry about her. This Clifton fellow—he’s no good. I knew that from the beginning, but what can I do? She doesn’t listen to reason. Plus, he made her happy. I guess it’s not terribly bad if she’s happy. I don’t know. Is he going to jail?” There was some hope in his voice. And although John was positive Morris had some designs of his own, he knew the man
did
care about Evelyn Gethers and
did
want to see Douglas Clifton behind bars. Probably more the latter than the former.

“We just need to speak with him,” John told the butler. “I appreciate this.”

“I don’t know what to do if—”

“Just give us a call if you see or hear from him, all right?”

“Yes,” Morris said, glancing down at Kersh’s business card. After a moment, he tucked the card into the breast pocket of his shirt, nodded once in a perfunctory manner, then slipped back inside the apartment. John heard him bolt the door on the other side.

“Looks like we’re going to Bellevue Hospital,” John said once they were riding the elevator to the lobby. “That was some goddamn place, huh? Imagine living like that.”

“Amazing,” Kersh said. He was flipping through the old book Evelyn Gethers had given him, examining pages the way an archeologist might examine prehistoric tools unearthed from a desert landscape. He paused, his finger on the title page of the book. A small, ironic chuckle lurched from his throat, and John turned in his direction.

“What?”

“Check it out.”

Kersh extended the book, his finger pointing to a line of text on the bottom of the title page. The book itself was called
Riders of the Black Storm
, probably an old western. John glanced down at the line of text Kersh had his finger pressed to. It read,
Printed by C.C. Gethers Publishing, Inc
.

“Son of a bitch,” John mused.

Kersh smiled and looked up. He watched the numbers on the elevator’s panel tick down until they reached the lobby.

Thirty minutes later and they were clopping down a tangle of corridors at Bellevue Hospital Center, searching for Douglas Clifton’s room. John’s head hurt, and his joints felt tired. And he would have been surprised and a bit ashamed that Bill Kersh had him so easily figured out—that the steely glances Kersh had given him in the car on the way to Evelyn Gethers’s were all the older agent needed to confirm his concern about young and abrupt John Mavio. On occasion, he’d caught himself absently trying to imagine Bill Kersh as a child. But that was an impossibility. People like Bill Kersh had never
been
children; somehow, they simply
appeared
one day, dressed slovenly in a wrinkled, cigarette-burned shirt, a stained and crooked tie, and slacks with worn knees. People like Bill Kersh had nothing in common with most ordinary people of the world.

After some confusion and misdirection, John and Kersh found Douglas Clifton’s room. Kersh knocked twice lightly, not sure what to expect. The scene at Evelyn Gethers’s apartment had left them in a state of suspended amusement, and now they were prepared for anything.

The door quickly opened, startling both men, and a tall, dark-skinned doctor in a white coat stepped out into the hallway. His features were sharp and birdlike, and a dark crop of stiff, curly hair sprouted from his head.

“Can I do something for you gentlemen?”

“Is this Douglas Clifton’s room?” John asked.

“Are you relatives of Mr. Clifton?”

John flashed his badge. “We’re Secret Service. We want to have a few words with Clifton—”

“Mr. Clifton’s in no condition to talk with anyone.”

John sized the doctor up, looked for a name plate on his coat. There was none. “Who are you?”

“Dr. Kuhmari, Mr. Clifton’s doctor. I’m going to have to insist Mr. Clifton remain undisturbed—”

“Look, I respect what you do. Now respect what I do.” There was a small window beside the door—thin and narrow, like windows in a castle tower—but the blinds were drawn and John couldn’t see inside. “What’s wrong with him? When’d he come in?”

Intimidated by John’s forwardness and inability to be swayed by doctoral politics, Dr. Kuhmari delivered a resigned sigh and began massaging his forehead with his brown fingers. “Came in yesterday,” the doctor said. “Stumbled into the ER bleeding profusely, hardly even conscious when—”

“Bleeding?” Kersh said. He’d loosened his tie on the drive over, and now a red, raw-looking patch of neck peeked out over his shirt collar. “What the hell happened?”

“Mr. Clifton’s right hand had been severed completely. It was bad, and he’d lost a lot of blood.”

“Did he say what happened?” Kersh pressed.

“He just said it was an accident, didn’t go into detail, but it was severed pretty roughly. Not a clean cut. We had to amputate some more just to clean the area, make it workable. It’s not our business to investigate the cause of a patient’s accident. I’m a doctor; I just fix the problem.”

John resisted the urge to slug the prick. “You gonna be around for a while, if we have questions to ask you?”

Kuhmari glanced at his clipboard, at his beeper. “I’m pretty busy today. You can have me paged.”

Kersh thanked him, and the doctor nodded and hurried away.

“Prick,” John mumbled under his breath.

“Doctor
Prick,” Kersh corrected, reaching out and pushing open the hospital room door.

The first thing that struck them was the smell—of clotting blood and ammonia and large doses of human sweat. The smell went straight for the stomach.

It was an unusually large hospital room with a single occupied bed alongside an enormous bank of windows. The windowpanes themselves were tinted, making it appear gloomier outside than it really was. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the lack of light in the room. Meanwhile, the shape in the bed shifted almost in agitation. John let the door swing closed, blackening the room even more. Across the room, the figure beneath the bed sheets continued to shift restlessly. A soft, pathetic moan escaped the patient’s mouth as both he and Kersh stepped farther into the room.

Indeed, the man in the bed was missing his right hand. The arm itself tapered off into a bandaged stump and was propped up in a mechanical sling bolted to a rack above the bed. A network of tubes ran from the wound and were collected in a confusing machine beside the man’s bed. The section of gauze bandage at the wrist—the section covering the stump, the actual wound—was blotted with drying blood, so dark it looked nearly black in the poor lighting. The stink of blood in the air was impossibly thick, like the reek of a brutal crime scene.

The man himself looked close to eighty years old, though John knew he was perhaps a little older than himself. Morphine had played a cruel trick on his youth. He was bearded, though not heavily, and he watched both agents approach with muddy, drooping eyes. A crest of dark hair was cropped close to his scalp. Beneath the starched white bedsheets, the man’s legs kicked with little strength.

“Douglas Clifton?” Kersh said, his voice low as he moved around the side of the man’s bed. “Hello-hello-hello.” Clifton’s expression suggested his mental status was currently that of a fevered child, and Kersh was quick to catch on.

“He even conscious?” John practically whispered.

“Uh …”
The figure in the bed began turning at the shoulders, his head turning impatiently from side to side. From the foot of the bed, John examined the man’s abbreviated right arm. He could see the muscles and tendons working up the terrain of Clifton’s arm where the bandage concluded and skin began.
Phantom fingers
, he thought, wondering if Clifton could still feel his absent right hand.

“Mr. Clifton,” Kersh said again, moving a foot closer to the bed. “William Kersh, Secret Service.” Kersh paused beside the bed, seeming to consider, then moved in front of the tinted windows and placed his hands on his ample hips. His shadow fell across Clifton’s face. Yet Clifton would confess no emotion; his medication had rendered him incapable.

“Do you … hear somethin’ ringing?” Clifton managed, his voice groggy and inept. The man shifted his gaze from John to Kersh, John to Kersh, his eyes void of cognizance and dulled like that of someone just recently dead. “You hear it?” Those sloppy eyes continued to move wetly in their sockets. Finally, just when it seemed Douglas Clifton was powerless to stimulate that portion of his brain that worked with reality as a medium, Clifton managed a languid, “Who’re you?”

John and Kersh shared another glance. Casually, John moved around the other side of Clifton’s bed, opposite Kersh. Their dual presence above him and on either side might have intimidated a person not hopped up on meds, but it did nothing to Douglas Clifton.

“What happened to you, Doug?” Kersh said in a serene voice.

Clifton just stared at Kersh. John moved a step closer, but the man did not alter the position of his head on the pillow. This close, John could make out indents in the shape of teeth along Clifton’s lower lip, flecked with dried blood.

“Doug?” Kersh held up two fingers, waved them in front of Clifton’s face. “What happened to your hand?”

“An accident,” Clifton intoned.

“What happened?” Kersh continued, wanting the man to elaborate. He was like a deep sea fisherman, slowly reeling in his catch. “Tell me about the accident.”

“I …” The man’s eyes folded up into his head, as if searching for the information in the deepest recesses of his mind. Then he blinked, turned, and looked John up and down, his eyes cut to slits and eerily sober. “Who sent you here?” he demanded.

“Douglas,” John began, “what—”

“Who
sent
you?”

“Nobody sent us. We’re cops.”

Eyes boring through John, lower lip quivering, Clifton said, “You ain’t no cop.” Clifton now turned to look at Kersh. “This guy here a cop? He with you? You both … the both of you’s cops?”