The Book of the Dead (16 page)

Gamadge admired the surgery, and then followed Mrs. Lubic upstairs and on a long tour of both houses; they were connected on every floor by double doorways cut through the walls. He saw a good many closed doors, several large and well-equipped empty bedrooms, one or two smaller ones, and a very small one with a skylight, on the top floor, which the supervisor said Mrs. Mullins could have reasonably cheap. It was very hot, had no bath, and was not what Gamadge considered cheap at all.

“You do get prices here,” he murmured in a tone of admiration.

“Why shouldn't we? Jeremiah H. Wood Homes don't grow on every bush.”

“I'm afraid this wouldn't quite do for poor Mrs. Mullins, aside from the cost.”

“It comes in useful sometimes,” said Mrs. Lubic carelessly.

They were halfway down the parlor flight of stairs when Gamadge, a step or so behind his guide, asked casually: “How is Dr. Billig's patient getting along?”

M
RS. LUBIC PAUSED
a moment, strong fingers on the stair rail; then she resumed her ponderous descent to the lower hall. “We never discuss patients,” she said.

“Perhaps Hamish will be able to tell me.”

Mrs. Lubic reached the bottom of the stairs, turned, and looked at Gamadge; he was leaning easily against the newel post. She said: “Patients have privileges.”

“And so do doctors. Isn't it staggering, sometimes, Mrs. Lubic,” asked Gamadge with a smile, “to think what privileges they have, and what an amount of faith we must put in them?”

Mrs. Lubic said rather roughly: “We have to.”

“And if a doctor
should
be a bad one—it does happen—what couldn't he get away with? But you must realize that, even more fully than a layman can.”

Not once, during their entire tour of inspection, had Gamadge heard a sound or a human voice; but Mrs. Lubic glanced about her. Then she asked, staring at Gamadge:

“What are you talking about?”

“I couldn't do more than give you a hypothesis.”

“Well, don't give it to me here. Come inside.”

She walked into the office, waited for Gamadge, closed the big walnut door, and faced him. “Now what is this?”

“Let's sit down.”

She sat on the edge of the nearest chair, without removing her eyes from his. He resumed his earlier seat. “Imagine this, Mrs. Lubic,” he said. “A patient with no friends, or none available. He's in a strange apartment, sick. He calls in a strange doctor. The doctor tells him he's dying—let's say of leukemia. Gives him a drug—a sulfa drug, say—and gets him into the state a leukemia patient might be in. Tells him at last that he must go to a hospital, and drives away with him in a cab.

“But he doesn't take him to a regular hospital. He takes him to a nursing home—like this one.”

A dark flush had begun to rise in Mrs. Lubic's sallow face. She remained silent.

“Where there are no resident physicians,” continued Gamadge, “and where they take a doctor on trust; where they're a little hardboiled about these drug addicts. For of course by this time there is a narcotic drug in use—of course; and the patient is quietly drugged out of existence. Who gives the death certificate—collapse from drug addiction? Why, the doctor, of course.

“That day another patient, who really has acute leukemia, is taken to a regular hospital by our doctor, in another cab. He's entered there under the first fellow's name, of course; dies under the other fellow's name, and is buried under it in the other fellow's graveyard. The only catch is that a friend does turn up, and sees the body at the undertaker's. Well, this is only a hypothesis; did the friend see what the friend expected to see? Would the game ever have been played if there hadn't been a leukemia patient who looked like the other man?”

Mrs. Lubic said in her gruff voice: “Don't ask me questions. I'll ask you one. Why?”

“Well, that's not such an easy one. The financial motive doesn't emerge, unless it's connected with the victim's will. He'd made a will, it involved a hundred and fifty thousand dollars at least. If he died before he had a chance to change it—”

Mrs. Lubic said dangerously: “You couldn't talk to everybody like this, Mr. Gamadge; you might be sued for libel.”

“Slander. I'm not talking to everybody, Mrs. Lubic,” said Gamadge. “I'm talking to you, and you impress me as being one of the most intelligent women I ever met in my life.”

Mrs. Lubic sat back in her chair, and looked at Gamadge in a fury of concentration. She said at last: “You're a detective. There is no Mrs. Mullins.”

“Here's her file.”

She made no move to take it. “I might call Dr. Hamish.”

“But you won't.”

Her fingers tapped the arms of her chair. “You're counting on the effect of any kind of an investigation on a place like this. Any talk—not scandal, just talk—and the patients run for it; and their doctors won't send 'em back. You're banking on that. Well, let's settle it. If you think one of our patients is somebody else, come right up and meet the party.” She shoved herself to her feet. “I'd rather lose Dr. Billig's custom than the whole business.” As Gamadge rose, she went on: “Now how will we fix it so you can be sure you're being taken to the right room?”

“Mrs. Lubic, I trust you implicitly.”

“You do, do you?”

“If you hadn't a clear conscience I should never have got upstairs at all without a warrant.”

Mrs. Lubic laughed hoarsely. “You're dead right. When my husband died he left me poor, and I had to do police work before I got my nurse's training. I used to be sent to look at joints before they raided them, and when the joint was wrong I never got any further than the front door. The trouble is I can't send for the nurse, because we don't leave the patient alone.”

She tramped ahead of Gamadge, out of the office and up three flights of stairs. When they had again reached the top floor she halted.

“You wait here a minute till I get rid of the nurse,” she said. “I don't want any gossip in the house. I'll send her out on an errand; they're always glad to go. Makes a change for them.”

“The patient
can
be left, then?”

“It won't be half a minute.”

She went through into the next house, and returned almost immediately. “O.K. You're an electrician.”

“In name only, I hope?”

“Inspector.”

They entered the hall that Gamadge had visited before, and Mrs. Lubic opened a door at the end of it. He walked past her into a pleasant room that overlooked the yard; green outside shutters were partly closed, mitigating the glare, and it was only after a moment that Gamadge made out the strong bars in the windows. An open door gave him a glimpse of the white tiles of a neat bathroom.

A woman of fifty or more sat between the windows, shuffling a pack of cards. Her hair was dyed a harsh shade of red, and her face—a large-boned, well-modeled face—was reddened as if by a permanent skin-affection and deeply lined. It looked slightly out of focus; all the features seemed blurred.

She was perfectly groomed; her long hands were white, her nails polished, her feet shod in crocodile shoes that had cost money. Her dress was not new—it was of pure silk, which dated it—but it was a long-sleeved summer dress that looked like an importation. On one arm she carried a red handbag.

“Man about the lights, Mrs. Dodson,” said Mrs. Lubic. “Just a minute. He won't bother you.”

Mrs. Dodson looked up, and her clouded eyes rested on Gamadge calmly. Then she put down her cards, rose to her feet, and supported herself by placing her hands flat on the table. She said in a muffled voice: “Get me out of here. Take me home.”

Gamadge knew it well—the race, the type, the unmistakable clan to which Mrs. Dodson belonged; never, while she lived, could she lose its characteristics—that dominant, privileged, confident pose, that easy way with strangers, that driving will. He knew her background as if it lay unfolded before him—the ocean liners, the blue trains, the galas in European opera houses, the bridge dinners and benefit plays and concerts here in New York. But she had been out of her world a long time; that flaming hair was not her own taste.

Mrs. Lubic said in a practical, rather bantering voice: “Now, Mrs. Dodson.”

Mrs. Dodson paid no attention to her. She kept her eyes on Gamadge, clasped her red handbag to her side, and repeated: “Take me home. I want to go home.”

Mrs. Lubic shook her head at the patient. “You know that's no way to talk.”

Gamadge, in spite of Hamish's warning, was unable to keep the old question out of his head:
Which is the real ticket man, the real policeman?

He asked gently: “Where is it, Mrs. Dodson?”

“Where is it?” Her faded eyes searched his.

“Home, you know.”

Mrs. Lubic asked in her hateful, bantering tone: “Yes, where is it? Go ahead and tell him, Mrs. Dodson. Go ahead.”

Mrs. Dodson muttered something, glanced from side to side, stood irresolute, and at last gave way to discouragement. She sat down slowly, picked up her cards, and began to lay them out with the manner of one to whom cards have always been an important part of life.

Mrs. Lubic addressed Gamadge from a corner of her mouth: “Had enough?”

Gamadge nodded.

“Then wait for me downstairs. I can't go till the nurse gets back.”

Gamadge went down, took a chair in the office, and sat smoking until Mrs. Lubic joined him.

He said: “I don't know whether I ought to be smoking.”

She replied to this by taking a crumpled package of cigarettes out of the desk drawer, shaking her head at Gamadge's lighter, and scraping a match on its box. When her own cigarette was going, she asked “Well?” in a tone of grim amusement.

“I never was so depressed in my life.”

“Glad of it. Serves you right for scaring the daylights out of me. That wasn't your party, I suppose?”

“No.”

“She doesn't need any dope. She's dying on her feet of several things.”

“Who on earth is she?”

“Just a drunk with a delusion. We don't know any more than that, it's none of our business. Old patient of Dr. Billig's. Some cheap hotel sent him an SOS last spring, and he paid the bill and got her here. She won't be with us long.

“I'll say this for her: she keeps herself up. Any other woman I ever saw would be in bed; but she's right in there pitching. Dyes her own hair, or tries to; goes through all the motions. Well brought up,” said Mrs. Lubic, and took her cigarette out of her mouth to smile.

“Suicidal?”

“Just part of the mental collapse. She isn't depressed. Perhaps,” and Mrs. Lubic, not smiling now, looked at her cigarette, “she thinks it might be a short cut home.”

“No money?”

“A little annuity or something; it's enough to keep her here. Dr. Billig looks after it.”

“Why does she hang on to her handbag like that?”

Mrs. Lubic glanced at him. “You don't miss much.” She squinted through smoke. “There isn't a thing in it but junk, we looked when she first came. She might have had something lethal in it. Just junk, and change for a dollar. I suppose she remembers the time when she had a roll of bills with her all the time, and an extra diamond bracelet. She hangs on to the bag day and night, and sleeps with it under her pillow.”

“Can she still endorse her checks?”

“What checks?”

“Her annuity checks.”

“I don't know. Dr. Billig attends to that. Perhaps he has some authority, and guarantees she's alive. I don't know a thing.”

Gamadge smoked in silence.

“Anyhow,” said Mrs. Lubic, “you can forget that about the cab and the leukemia patient and—the undertaker's. Can't you?”

“Oh; yes.”

“Just made it up to make me show you the patient? Dr. Billig will be pleased; of course I have to tell him.”

“Of course.”

“Is Dr. Hamish really in this?”

”Certainly not. Mrs. Mullins is his patient, that's all.” Gamadge rose. “I'm greatly obliged to you, and I only hope you return my feelings of regard, Mrs. Lubic.”

“I'm not as mad as I ought to be, if that's going to be a comfort to you.” She eyed him with a curious look. “You're a funny one.”

“Am I?”

“Are you a lawyer or something?”

“Not a lawyer. Something.” Gamadge shook hands with Mrs. Lubic, whose grasp was flaccid; she sat sunken in her chair, gazing up as if for spiritual consolation at the portrait of the rather tragic J. H. Wood.

Gamadge went out into the baking street, and stood for a moment looking up at the grim frontage of the Home. He understood better now why such a paying proposition should be allowed to give a dingy first impression;
here
, it seemed to say,
you won't find front page news. Nobody of any importance to you comes here. We are beneath your notice
. Gamadge was quite certain that at least one inmate of the Jeremiah H. Wood Home would rate the front page; the inmate known as Mrs. Dodson.

He got into the first cab, and had himself driven to Dr. Billig's Lexington Avenue corner. Making sure that the doctor was not in sight, he walked quickly to the rooming house opposite the doctor's flat, and up a short flight of steps to the unswept vestibule. A card bearing the name
Toomey
was stuck in a frame beside a bell. He rang, the door clicked, and he plunged into an atmosphere of dusk and eld. He went up steep and narrow stairs, sagging and uncarpeted stairs whose treads were hollowed and whose banister shook under his hand, to confront Mr. Indus in the upper hall.

“I got you a nice place, Indus.” Gamadge blinked upwards into darkness. “A cheerful, unusual place. Oldworld atmosphere and lots of privacy.”