The Book of the Dead (15 page)

“The subject,” he began, “finished with his evening batch of patients at a quarter to ten P.M.”

“Were they in the humbler walks of life?”

Toomey raised his eyes.

“As Indus would say,” explained Gamadge.

“They was. When the last one left, the doc got into his car, which he keeps parked outside the flat, and drove to Park. It's a westbound street, so that's where he had to go first. But he drove right back again to Lexington, and down town. I had a cab waiting from nine-thirty on.”

“That's right.”

“We drove down to the sixties, parked at a corner, and stood around a minute. Then the subject walked up the block to a private house occupied by a Mr. Henry Gamadge.”

“No!”

Toomey, gratified at the effect that he had made, went on: “He stopped, looked up at the front—which was all dark—”

“I was in the library reading. Can't say my flesh crept or anything.”

“He crossed the street and stood looking. A cop came along, and subject went down into an area. Cop didn't see him—”

“Good.”

“But saw me at the corner and gave me an ugly look. Wouldn't you know? Always get the innocent bystander, don't they?”

“Often,” said Gamadge, who did not think that the lantern-jawed Mr. Toomey looked particularly innocent.

“Subject came out of the area, stood around some more, and then came back and got in his car and drove to Third. We went down Third, then east to an address in the upper Fifties. I'll give it to you. He got out of his car, went up the steps, rang, and was let in. I went up and had a look; two old brick houses joined together, one of 'em walled up to the second story. Evidently some kind of an institution. Afterwards I got Information on the telephone; it's called The Jeremiah H. Wood Home. I looked it up in the Red Book. It's a home for mental cases, alcoholics and drug addicts.”

“Perhaps Dr. Billig has a patient there.”

“If so he gives good service; he stayed an hour and seven minutes. He came out at 11:33, drove home, and put out his milk bottle. I thought we were through for the night, but there I sat in my window. An hour later he sneaked out again. He'd garaged the car, so he took a Third Avenue car; I nearly lost it. We came back here.”

“You don't say!”

“And went through the same performance all over again, except that there wasn't any cop. We came home on a Lexington Avenue bus, and the performance was over for the night by thirty-four minutes past one. Perhaps you need a bodyguard.”

“Not with you and Indus on the job.”

Gamadge dismissed Toomey with praise, and called Dr. Hamish. “Red,” he began, “there's some sort of a private hospital or nursing home called the Jeremiah H. Wood.”

“Probably. I never heard of it.”

“It's down in the East Fifties.”

“There are some still in town; most of them have moved out now to the suburbs.”

“It's for mental cases, alcoholics and drug addicts. Red, I've got to get in there.”

“Easiest thing you know,” began Hamish with some enthusiasm, but Gamadge cut him short:

“Billig has a patient there, I think. I've got to find out.”

There was a pause. Then Hamish said: “Not so easy without giving yourself away. You don't want to?”

“Certainly I don't.”

Another pause. Then Hamish said: “Perhaps we can work it. Be down at the hospital in half an hour?”

“Coming now.”

Gamadge took a cab to the Vandiemen Hospital, a speckless and glassy building, only to be distinguished from an apartment house by the sign on its awning. Here Dr. Ethelred Hamish performed miracles of surgery, and here, in his private office, Gamadge found him; dressed in white for operating, with a sort of white turban on his head and a sheaf of typed papers in his hand. Near him stood a super-nurse, handsome as everyone in Hamish's entourage was always handsome.

Gamadge nodded to the super-nurse, and said: “Good morning, Miss Walkley.”

“Good morning, Mr. Gamadge.”

“And blessings,” continued Gamadge, turning to Hamish, “on the old dead pan. A heart beats under that snowy stuffing, I always said so.”

“But not for you, light-weight, not for you.” He addressed the super-nurse without turning his head. “This all on Mrs. Mullins, Miss Walkley?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“All right.”

She went away, with a backward smile for Gamadge which he returned with interest.

“Lovely creature,” he said in a sentimental voice.

“Very good nurse. The Jeremiah H. Wood, they tell me, is a private foundation, started in the 'eighties by one J. H. Wood, a merchant, who left his whole fortune to it. Began with a resident physician, is now run by a supervising nurse. There are resident nurses, and doctors send patients there, usually as a temporary measure—when they don't know what the devil else to do with them, you know. I needn't say that snoopers are not welcome; patients and their friends wouldn't like it.

“Now here's my suggestion: you remember Mrs. Mullins?”

Gamadge thought a minute. “The Hamish cook!”

“You ought to remember her; many's the wedge of cake she slipped us.”

“And not a word out of her when she found we'd helped ourselves to something.”

“Well, she's retired, and we thought she was comfortably settled with her married son and his family. But she's getting senile, and the daughter-in-law complains that she breaks dishes and annoys the children; obvious that they don't want her, and she can't be happy. I'm looking for some other place, not too expensive. I'd fork out the difference. Now of course this Jeremiah H. Wood place wouldn't do for her—”

“But I could go there and say I was looking around in behalf of Mrs. Mullins.”

“That's right. And the best of it is that you could use my name; unless you mean to bust the place up?”

“Not at all.”

“You may hear some manic-depressive complaining, and think something's wrong.”

“I'll give the Jeremiah H. Wood the benefit of the doubt.”

“I don't want to get mixed up in a mare's nest.”

“Some day I must come up and give you a short frank talk on the use of the metaphor; but meanwhile I may be able to do you a favor you'll better appreciate. I know of a place that may really suit Mrs. Mullins.”

“You
do
?”

“Upstate; nice old lady and her daughter, nice little farm. They've just buried their paying guest, and they wrote me for another to pay taxes with. They're used to taking care of old people. They have airtight stoves, they don't open too many windows on the aged, and they tell me they have a whole shed of firewood. Mrs. Mullins need never see her daughter-in-law or her brats of grandchildren again.”

Hamish said eagerly: “I hope you'll write and get details for me. Fix the thing up. These cases are the hardest in the world to deal with—old age is so damned incurable.” He handed the typed pages to Gamadge. “Here's Mrs. Mullins' file. And if you think anything is wrong at the J. H. Wood, or they won't let you in, I'll drop down myself.”

“You're as good as you are beautiful.”

Gamadge hastily departed, to take a bus down Lexington Avenue. When he had left it, and walked east, he found himself in a district with which as a pedestrian he was not familiar; he found it odd and gray. Streets were suddenly transformed into the ramp which carries passenger traffic to and from the Queensborough Bridge; that traffic being westbound only between the hours of five and eleven A.M.

Certain blocks to the east and south of this neighborhood, built up in a transition period, have the bleak look of decayed gentility. Not one dwelling is unconverted, and many of the flats have frankly turned into tenements; there are some of those oldfashioned apartment houses where dressmakers used to fit their customers in an occupational atmosphere of must, there are small shops in the basements, children scream and play in the empty streets.

The Jeremiah H. Wood, of brick with a brownstone trim, was unutterably dingy. Half of it had retained its high stoop and vestibule, the other half had had its basement windows sealed with brick; its blinds were all pulled down against the morning sun, it might have been closed up and deserted. Gamadge mounted the flaking steps and rang the bell.

A leaf of the front door was almost instantly flung open, and a little woman in an oldfashioned silk dress stood smiling brightly up at him. He said: “May I speak to the supervisor?”

“I am the supervisor. Come right in.”

A very tall, big woman in crumpled linen came striding down the hall. She possessed herself of the doorknob, saying: “All right, Miss Gentry.”

Miss Gentry turned and scuttled away into a room on the right. The big woman turned her sallow face and murky eyes on Gamadge. She asked: “What is it?”

“I wanted to see the supervisor.”

“I am the supervisor.”

Gamadge felt a little as he had felt as a boy at the waxworks. Which was the real ticket-taker, the real policeman, the real lady-tourist in the Alpine hat and eyeglasses? Which gloved hand would return his handshake if he dared one? He could still dream of those questionable shapes.

“The other lady is a patient?” he asked, coming into the hall.

“That Miss Gentry!” The supervisor shut the door. “We're short-handed, of course, and she pops out the minute the doorbell rings.”

“No danger that she'll—er—pop off? Run away?”

“Oh, no. She never goes out. She's afraid of the streets. What can I do for you?”

“I was talking to Dr. Hamish at the Vandiemen Hospital about placing an old lady in a Home. My name's Gamadge. I thought you might be able to tell me whether the Jeremiah H. Wood—”

“Dr. Ethelred Hamish sent you here?”

“Oh, no; I was talking to him about the patient—she's all right, just getting a little weak in the head—and I had a list. It would be convenient here for her, but there's the question of expense.”

“Don't get it in your head that we're cheap.” She led the way into what seemed to be her office, a large room, once a library, with Jeremiah H. Wood himself, fully labelled and whiskered, over the mantelpiece. “I'm Mrs. Lubic,” she said. “Have a chair.”

She sat in a chair behind a desk, and Gamadge took another. The light that came through the brown shades was sickly; he could barely make out her strongly defined features, graying hair, heavy chin. She was looking at him curiously.

“It would be temporary,” said Gamadge. “I'm more or less responsible—have assumed the responsibility for her comfort. We thought you might show me what you have vacant just now.”

“Glad to.”

Gamadge looked around him. “Interesting old place. Why did Jeremiah H. Wood found it, do you know?”

“He lived in this house we're in, and his son lived in the other. The son went under; drugs, alcohol, I don't know which. The family doctor said he could cure him at home, and did; so J. H. Wood made a will leaving both houses to be converted into a Home, and giving the doctor life-tenancy of the job. Out of gratitude, you know. When the doctor died there was a trust set up. We have only visiting doctors now; they visit their own patients. This patient you want to send here would have to engage one of our nurses to look out for her if she needs care; and if we have a nurse,” added Mrs. Lubic, with a sardonic look.

“It sounds a little expensive. Did Jeremiah H. Wood's son approve of this disposal of his father's property? Rather a grim reminder for him, I should say.”

“Oh; by that time he didn't care; he died.”

“Died?”

Mrs. Lubic's eyes glinted with a cynical kind of amusement. “Killed himself. I suppose after he was cured he didn't think life was worth living.”

“It must be very bad to have a thing get its teeth into you like that.”

Mrs. Lubic raised a heavy eyebrow. “We're so used to them here that we get a little hardboiled about them. And so do the relatives, believe
me
! We don't get many straight mental cases like Miss Gentry nowadays; they're sent out of the city. She's here because there isn't much of anybody left to move her; and she wouldn't like to go. She likes it. Has the run of the place. Well, shall we take a look?”

They went first downstairs to the basement of the other house, which ran straight from the bricked-up front windows to a shadeless yard. The adjoining yard was a drying ground.

“This is supposed to be a game room,” said Mrs. Lubic, casting an uninterested glance at a decrepit ping-pong table, “but only the nurses use it nowadays. The trouble is,” she went on, tramping out to the yard with Gamadge behind, “the least noise we make, somebody sends a policeman. The neighbors can play radios all night, and their children can scream and yell in the street under our windows, but just one yip out of us and there's a complaint.”

“It must be pretty difficult, running a sanitarium in town.”

“Well, most of our patients are in their rooms, in bed. When they're able to get up,” said Mrs. Lubic in her hoarse voice, “they go elsewhere or they go home. The reason they come to us now is that there's no publicity. Nobody knows a thing. They get over whatever it is, and go home, and then after a while they come back. We
don't
tell!”

“Come back?”

“What do you think? Of course there are exceptions. Let's go upstairs before we get a sunstroke.”

Gamadge saw a large dining-room on the first floor, which Mrs. Lubic said was never patronized by the patients; naturally not, since to be a patient at the Jeremiah H. Wood was to require privacy. The nurses had their meals there.

“Good for board-meetings, too, I suppose,” offered Gamadge, but Mrs. Lubic shook her head:

“We don't have them any more. All that is done in some office downtown, thank goodness. Across here is our little surgery. Nice, isn't it?”