The Madman's Tale (26 page)

Francis was correct. Cleo was roosted in the back of the dayroom, by the Ping-Pong table. She had arranged three other patients on the side opposite her, equipping each with a paddle, and showing them a designated area, where they were to respond if her shot landed there. She also demonstrated to each patient how they should crouch down, and grip the paddle, and shift their weight to the balls of their feet in anticipation of action. It was, Francis saw, a miniclinic in how to play the game. And, he guessed, destined for failure. They were all older men, with stringy gray hair and flaccid skin marked by brown age spots. He could see each of them unhappily trying to focus on what they were being told, and struggling with their responsibilities. These simple tasks were magnified in the moment before the game was to begin, and he could also see that the more urgent the need to reply to Cleo’s opening Ping-Pong salvo was, the less capable they were of meeting it, no matter how well she had instructed them.

Cleo said “Ready?” three times, looking each in the eyes, as she prepared to serve the ball.

Each of the opponents reluctantly nodded.

With a flick of the wrist, Cleo launched the ball vertically. Then her paddle came forward with snakelike speed, and knocked it across the table, where it landed once on her side of the table, clicking loudly, then jumping the net, striking the other side, spinning and passing directly between two of the opponents, neither of whom budged in the slightest.

Francis thought Cleo would explode. She reddened, and her upper lip seemed to curl back in anger. But then, just as swiftly the whirlwind of fury dissipated. One of the opponents retrieved the little white ball and tossed it
across the table to her. She set it down on the green surface, beneath her own paddle.

“Thanks for the game.” She sighed, replacing all the anger on her face with resignation. “We’ll work on our footwork a little more later.”

The three opponents all looked significantly relieved, and wandered off to distant corners of the room.

The dayroom was crowded as usual, with a bizarre mixture of activities. It was an open, well-lit room, with a bank of steel barred windows on one wall that let in the sunshine, and an occasional mild breeze. The glistening white painted walls seemed to reflect the light and energy in the space. Patients in various forms of dress, ranging from the ubiquitous loose-fitting robes and slippers to jeans and overcoats, milled about the room. There were cheap red and green leather couches and well-worn armchairs spread about the space, and these were occupied by men or women who sat quietly reading, despite the hum of noise that filled the room. At least, they appeared to be reading, but pages turned only infrequently. There were out-of-date magazines and tattered paperback novels on sturdy wooden coffee tables. In two of the corners there were television sets, which each had a passel of regulars gathered around, absorbing the soap operas. The pair of television sets were in dialogue conflict, tuned to different stations, as if the characters on each show were squaring off against the other network. This was a concession to the near daily fights that had sprung up between devotees of one show, versus those favoring a competing show.

Francis continued to look around and saw there were some patients playing board games, like Monopoly or Risk, a couple of chess and checkers games and some patients that played cards. Hearts was the dayroom favorite. Poker had been banned by Gulp-a-pill when cigarettes were used as chips a little too often, and some patients began hoarding them. These were the less crazy ones, or, Francis thought, the people who hadn’t checked all connections to the outside world at the door, when they were shipped off to the hospital. He would have put himself in the same category, a distinction all the voices he heard within him agreed with. And then, of course, there were the Catos, just wandering about the space, speaking to no one and everyone, all at once. Some danced. Some shuffled. Some walked briskly back and forth. But all had their own pace, driven by visions so distant that Francis could only guess what they contained. They made him sad, and they frightened him a little, because he feared becoming like them. Sometimes, he thought, on the balance beam of his own life he was closer to them than he was to normal. He considered them doomed.

A thin haze of blue cigarette smoke hovered over everyone. Francis hated the room, and tried as much as possible to avoid it.

It was a place where everyone’s out of control thoughts had free rein.

Cleo, of course, ruled the Ping-Pong table and its immediate surroundings.

Her blustery manner and fearsome appearance cowed most of the other patients, including, to some degree, Francis. But, at the same time, he believed she had a liveliness that most of the others lacked, which he enjoyed, and he knew she could be funny, and frequently managed to make others laugh, a valuable and rare quality in the hospital. She spotted him hovering on the edge of the area, and grinned wildly.

“C-Bird! Come to give me some competition?” she asked.

“Only if forced,” Francis said.

“Then I insist. Forcing you. Please …”

He walked over and picked up a paddle. “I need to speak with you about what you saw the other night.”

“The night of the murder? Did the woman prosecutor send you to ask me?”

He nodded.

“It has something to do with the traitor she is searching for?”

“Correct.”

Cleo seemed to think for a moment, then she held up the small white Ping-Pong ball, eyeing it closely. “Tell you what,” she said. “You can ask your questions while we play. As long as you keep returning the ball, I’ll keep answering your questions. We’ll make it into a game within a game.”

“I don’t know …,” Francis started, but Cleo dismissed his protest with a nonchalant wave.

“It will be a challenge,” she said.

With that, she flipped the ball into the air and served it toward him. Francis reached across the green table, and punched the ball back. Cleo returned it to him easily, and suddenly a rhythmic clicking filled the space, as the ball went back and forth.

“Have you thought about what you saw that night?” Francis asked, as he stretched forward for his shot.

“Of course,” Cleo replied, easily flicking the ball back toward him. “And the more I think about it, the more intrigued I get. There is much afoot here in Egypt. Rome, too, has its interests, no?”

“How so?” Francis said, grunting this time, but keeping the ball in play.

“What I saw only took a few seconds,” Cleo said, “but I think it said a lot.”

“Go on,” Francis said.

Cleo returned the next shot with a little more pace and a little more angle, so that he had to reach to his backhand to get it back, which he did, surprising himself. He saw Cleo grin as she gathered his return and parried it easily.
“Entering the room, and surveying it, after he’d done all that he’d done,” Cleo said, “indicated to me that he’s not really afraid of very much, is he?”

“I don’t follow,” Francis said.

“Sure you do,” Cleo replied, this time giving him an easy slow shot down the middle of the table. “We’re all afraid of something, here, aren’t we C-Bird? Either afraid of what’s inside us, or afraid of what’s inside each other, or afraid of what’s outside. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid of staying the same. We’re petrified by anything out of the ordinary, terrified of a change in the routine. Everyone wants to be different, but that’s the biggest threat of all. And so, what are we? We live in a world so dangerous that it defies us. Do you follow?”

Everything Cleo said, Francis thought was true. “What you’re saying is we’re all captives?”

“Prisoners. Absolutely,” Cleo said. “Confined by everything. Walls. Medications. Our own thoughts.” This time she hit the ball a little harder, but she kept it within his reach. “But the man I saw, well, he wasn’t was he? Or, if he was, then what he’s thinking isn’t at all like everyone else, is it?”

Francis knocked the ball into the net. It dribbled back toward him.

“My point,” Cleo said. “Serve it up.”

Francis plunked the ball across the table, and once again the clicking noise of the ball traveling back and forth filled the room. “He wasn’t afraid,” Francis said, “when he opened that door to your dormitory …”

Cleo caught the ball in midair, stopping the rally. She leaned across the table. “He has keys,” she said quietly. “He has keys that can unlock what? The doors in the Amherst Building? Or beyond? Keys that can unlock the other dormitories. Storage areas? How about the offices in the administration building? How about the staff housing, will his keys work on those doors? Can he unlock the front gate, Francis? Can he unlock the front gate and simply walk out of here whenever he wants?”

She put the ball back in play.

He thought for a moment, then said, “The keys are power, aren’t they?”

Click, click
went the ball against the table surface. “Access is always power,” Cleo said, with a sense of finality in her voice. “The keys say much,” she added. “I wonder how he obtained them.”

“Why did he come into your room, risking being seen?”

Cleo did not answer for several passes of the ball back and forth above the net, before she said, “Perhaps because he could.”

Again, Francis considered this, then he asked, “Are you sure you couldn’t recognize him if you saw him again? Have you thought about how tall he was, what his build was like. Anything that might distinguish him. Something to look for …”

Cleo shook her head, but then stopped. She took a deep breath, and seemed to concentrate on the game, picking up velocity with each stroke, making the ball fly back and forth across the table. Francis was a bit surprised that he was able to keep pace with her, returning her shots, moving right and left, forehand and backhand, meeting the ball solidly each time. Cleo was smiling, dancing from side to side, her own body moving with balletlike grace that contradicted her bulk. “But Francis, you and I, we don’t have to know his face, to recognize him,” she said after a moment. “We need only to see that attitude. It would be unique in here. In this place. In our home. No one else will have that look, will they, C-Bird? Because, once we spot that,” she said, “we’ll know precisely what it is we are looking at. True?”

Francis reached out and struck the ball just a little hard. It flew across the table, missing the back line by two inches. With a darting, quick motion, Cleo snatched the ball from the air, before it bounced across the room. “Just long,” she said. “But an ambitious shot to try, C-Bird.”

Francis thought:
In a place filled with fears, they were looking for the man who had none
. In a corner of the dayroom, several voices suddenly started shouting. He could hear rage, and he pivoted around. A loud sob, followed by an angry shriek, creased the room. He put the paddle down, and stepped back from the table.

“You’re improving, C-Bird,” Cleo cackled, her laugh superimposed on the sounds of the burgeoning fight. “We should play again.”

When Francis reached Lucy’s office, he’d had a little time to think about what he’d learned. He found her leaning up against a wall, behind a simple gray steel desk. Her arms were folded in front of her, and she was watching Peter. He was seated, and he had three large manila case files opened on the desktop surface in front of him. Spread about were eight-by-ten glossy color photographs, crime scene maps in stark black-and-white, with arrows and circles and notations, and written forms that were filled out with details. There were coroner’s office reports and aerial pictures of the locations. As Francis entered the room, Peter looked up with a look of exasperation.

“Hi, Francis,” he said. “Any success?”

“Maybe a little,” Francis replied. “I spoke with Cleo.”

“Could she provide any better description?”

Francis shook his head. He gestured at the piles of documents and pictures. “That seems like a lot,” he said. He’d never seen the volumes of paperwork customarily associated with a homicide investigation before, and it impressed him.

“Lots that says little,” Peter replied. Lucy nodded her head in agreement.

“But then again, says a lot, too,” Peter added. Lucy made a wry look with her face, as if this particular observation was painful or unsettling.

“I don’t understand,” Francis said.

“Well,” Peter began slowly, but picking up momentum, as he spoke, “what we have are three crimes, all committed in different police jurisdictions, probably, because bodies were moved postmortem, which means that no one precisely has charge of any case, which is always a bureaucratic mess, even when the State Police get involved. And we have victims discovered in various states of decomposition, whose bodies have been exposed to the elements, which makes forensics at best difficult and really well-nigh impossible. And we have crimes, which, as best as one can tell from the detectives’ reports, were randomly selected, at least the victims were, because there are few, if any similarities in the women who were killed, other than body type, hair type, and age. Short hair and slender physique. One was a waitress, one was a college student, and one was a secretary. They didn’t know each other. They didn’t live anywhere near each other. They didn’t have anything in particular that linked them together, other than the unfortunate fact that each traveled home alone on various forms of public transportation—you know, subways or buses—and that each had to walk several blocks through darkened streets to get to their apartments. Making them eminently vulnerable.”