The Octopus on My Head (20 page)

“I forget. In the event, I don't often have them at all.”

“Looking up into the spray, the story just clicked. It wasn't an hour later that Ivy Pruitt called. After that
….
” Garcia snapped a fingernail at the palmtop. “
Roberto su tío.
”

Once pressed, the morphine button takes a long time to come back up. You have to wait for it to come back up before you can press it again.

Garcia smiled. “They saved your eyes.”

I blinked gratefully.

“The bad news is you can't afford to stay here. No insurance. Tsk.”

The button came back up. I pressed it. “So Torvald did his own taxidermy.”

“It was a near thing, though. By the time we got there, that oxygen tank was empty. Good thing the curare had almost worn off. Which reminds me. I'm supposed to tell you that you'll probably notice residual effects of the curare and of oxygen deprivation for a long time. Maybe a year.”

“What sort of effects?”

Garcia read from the palmtop. “Erratic motor control. Apnea. Memory loss. Tinnitus. Trembling of the extremities.”

“Why isn't a doctor explaining this?”

“He's too busy. Certain drugs will ameliorate your symptoms.” He bit his lip. “But they're expensive.”

“Hey, man,” I told him, “you're good at this.” The button had rebounded. I squeezed it again. The morphine machine, about the size of a taxi meter on a wheeled stand next to the bed, clicked reassuringly.

“I'm going to send in a friend of mine. She's a social worker.” Garcia tapped his stylus. “You're probably eligible for vocational redirection. Computers, data-entry, automobile mechanics—”

“I could fix my car,” I said weakly.

“She'll find a way to help you get back into the job force.”

“I've got a few bucks.” A little bell went off in my head, and I glanced toward the drawer in the bedside table. Was it six hundred dollars? Seven?

Garcia tapped his kneecap with the palmtop. “I smoothed that over with the D.A. He wanted to impound it. I pointed out that since you and your friends were indirectly responsible for stopping Torvald, who killed a lot more people than his own wife, his next door neighbor, and three of his tenants, the D.A. should cut you some slack. Think of the publicity.”

“Lavinia and Ivy and I get a finder's fee?”

Garcia caught the laugh before it got away from him. “Torvald's suicide saved the state hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“He killed himself? In jail?”

“You don't know?”

“I don't remember. Should I?” Like a water moccasin just beneath the muddied surface of a stock pond, pain rippled beneath the thickness of morphine when I shook my head. It occurred to me that there are more people than not who think that a stock pond is some kind of office pool.

“Why, it's the only reason you and Ms. Hahn are still alive. Torvald killed himself right next to you, right there in his living room. It could just as easily have been you, or Ms. Hahn, or me, even. By that time he had gone random. He swallowed a cyanide tablet. We found another one mixed in with his breath mints. He was playing Russian roulette with them.”

I found myself wondering, if he had taken the tablet beforehand, whether Torvald's poisoned tongue in my ear could have killed me, like Hamlet's father, whose name I could no longer remember. My mind seemed to be misfiring. Of all the questions I might have asked, appropriate or otherwise, I feebly inquired, “Where the hell did he get cyanide?”

“The internet, according to his journal. I believe him. You can get anything on the internet. Including,” Garcia grimaced, “a full-length documentary of Torvald's career.”

All I could think to say to this was, “Really?”

Garcia grimly shook his head. “Once something gets on the web, it never goes away. You can't get rid of it. It's out there forever.”

“What was his … career, exactly?” The word sounded inadequate.

Garcia stared at his knee. “He kidnapped, tortured, and killed some seventeen people.”

I had nothing to say. Two people, a man and a woman, came down the hall and passed the closed door to my room, in heated but indecipherable conversation. When their voices had faded, Garcia continued. “It hit the television news last night. The first call the D.A. got this morning was from the parents of the girl who disappeared from Torvald's rental unit three years ago.”

“They've seen this movie?”

“No. Some
pendejo
left the URL on their answering machine.” Garcia sighed raggedly. “The D.A.'s next call was to me, and we checked it out. It made me sick. Physically sick. Everybody who watched it puked.”

I covered my eyes with the arm that wasn't attached to the IV tree.

After a moment Garcia continued quietly, “The provider will take the page down, but it won't do any good. If I'd known what that iBook was doing
….
We just stood there like a bunch of idiots while it uploaded that filth.” He stood and began to pace. “This guy Torvald was full of gimmicks. Apparently he would offer mints to anybody, indiscriminately, to himself, too, whenever the mood came upon him, blind. It's a miracle nobody else died. So far as we know, anyway. It's like a curse, sometimes, with these types of guys. The fix is in. No matter how they tempt fate, they don't go down until it's their time to go down. The tablets were about the same size as his mints, but the mints were white and the cyanide a pale blue. In the dark, or in choosing by touch, one might easily be mistaken for the other.” Garcia shook his head. “We only caught the bastard because he was ready to be caught. With that cat blood he might as well have put a big neon arrow over his house. But first,” he added morosely, “I had to take a goddamn shower.”

He thumbed a key on his palmtop. “Our cyberexpert found a meticulous journal in Torvald's computer. It was encrypted but he'd left the file open, so our man was able to extract the text. Torvald was tired. He was bored and scared and defiant, too. He wanted to get it over with; he couldn't do it just like that. He needed to spice things up as much as possible. He bought a gallon jar of mints, wholesale at CostCo, and added four or five cyanide tablets to it. Even he wasn't sure how many. Then he scooped out his daily supply by the tinful, without looking at them. The medical examiner says even one of the cyanide tablets constitutes a massive overdose. As it happened, the tin Torvald left behind had one other tablet in it, so there were two cyanide tablets in it the day he kidnapped you and Ms Hahn.”

“So somebody's number was up, and for once it happened to be Torvald's.”

“It's damned hard to look at it another way. The dose barely gave him time to start uploading the movie virus. He had five to ten minutes of consciousness, maybe twenty minutes after that of vital signs. We missed him by many hours. By the time we got there, his mouth was full of blue foam and he was colder than a dry martini. That's if you don't count that damn iBook sitting there, uploading that movie to site after site, carrying on his evil work for him.” Garcia sat down again. “It would have been nice to watch him die.”

The hospital morphine pump enables the patient to self-medicate up to a level preset by the attending physician. The dose for a broken cheekbone, a broken rib, a cracked vertebra, and a sutured skull is pretty high.

“I want to tell you something, Mr. Curly Watkins.” Garcia squinted. “Are you awake?”

“Sure,” I answered, if unconvincingly. My eyelids were on the way down.

“If you hadn't switched that video source, we might not have found Miss Hahn until it was way too late.”

I didn't understand. “I thought you said he … he set it up that way.”

“Angelica Stepnowski was supposed to have been his last victim. But when he first laid eyes on Miss Hahn, Torvald was smitten. Purely by chance, she got away. But then he figured out a way to get her to come back. You weren't supposed to be with her.”

My eyes had sunk below half-mast.

“Are you awake?”

“I'm here. I just
….
Resting
….
”

Garcia cleared his throat and pressed on. “The stairs to his torture studio were accessed by a hatch under the refrigerator. It took us the rest of the night to find it. We would have looked eventually but if not for you we might have waited until daylight to initiate the search. You know, let the lab boys have the run of the place first. The procedure is to let them lift every print and hair before we tear apart the crime scene. Heck, by then Ms Hahn would have been looking at dehydration, kidney failure, internal bleeding
….
Insanity, even. Death, very possibly.”

“Dredth.” I exhaled a long sigh.

“It was just a punch, a slap almost. We saw it. We all did. It was eerie. The doctor says he can't understand how you managed to overcome the paralysis sufficiently to do it, and the shock is going to cost you. But
….
” Garcia paused. “You don't even remember doing that, do you?”

I lost consciousness.

I awoke to whispering shadows in a darkened room. The staff were removing the corpse from the adjacent bed. Whether I found this comforting or not, I fell asleep again. I awoke a second time to the sounds of a pillow being plumped. Comforting or not
….
When I awoke a third time, two orderlies, supervised by a nurse, were transferring a groaning personage from a wheelchair to the empty bed. There was a lot of scuffling. I drifted off again. The next time I opened my eyes, it was night. Red numeric LEDs on the morphine machine blinked beside my bed. The room was illuminated by the flickering of a single silent television beaming its version of reality at my new roommate, who was snoring. The sound was off. Between our beds stood an empty wheelchair.

An orderly at the nurse's station in front of the eighth floor elevators didn't pay much attention to the specks of fresh blood inside the elbow of my nightie. He helpfully pointed my way, and I wheeled inexpertly down the hall.

I had the door pushed half open, using the wheelchair's footrests, when a woman, not much taller than me sitting down, pulled it wide. One look at me and she said, “This is the wrong room.”

“Excuse me.” I double-checked the numbered plaque. “Lavinia Hahn?”

“Who wants to know?”

The woman wore half-lens reading glasses from which dangled a rhinestone lanyard. The hand that held the door also held a copy of
Reader's Digest
, one finger keeping place. Her hair had been cropped and tinted into a concept of eggplant severity that went with her rose fingernails and maroon pant-suit and fuchsia blouse and American flag brooch. Whether paste or real its tiny colored stones and their gold setting twinkled on the slope of her bosom like the distant lights of a mountain resort.

“Curly Watkins. I'm a friend.”

“My daughter has no friends in San Francisco.”

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Hahn. I'm pleased to meet you. I'm—”

“Threllgood. Hahn is her father's name. Not that it's any of your business, Mr. Watson.”

“Watkins. Call me Curly.”

She glowered at my discolored face and the two or three weeks' worth of cranial stubble that surrounded a shaved patch crosshatched by sutures that looked like a crop circle and she didn't call me anything. But I had been away from my warm bed and warmer morphine for half an hour already and was no more in the mood for false accommodation than she was.

“When my hair grows out, I'll look just like a stockbroker,” I assured her.

Mrs. Threllgood expelled a snort of frank incredulity.

Beyond her I could see a small form curled in the hospital bed. Atop the standard issue bedclothes lay a mostly maroon patchwork quilt, sufficient to cover a child but too small to cover a supine adult. No doubt Lavinia herself had drawn the covers over her head to forestall confronting her indomitable mother. Ranked along a shelf over the headboard were a stuffed tiger, a Pooh bear, and a black-spotted purple dinosaur. All were threadbare. A pink, slightly deflated heart-shaped mylar balloon about eighteen inches across and bearing the word LOVE in letters of silver glitter drifted above the bed, tethered to the side rail of the bedstead by a spangled blue ribbon. A mild draft from an overhead heat vent caused the balloon to search one way and another, like an aquarium carp oscillating listlessly from one glass wall of its narrow tank to the next. Mrs. Threllgood backed me into the hall and let the door close behind her. A cart clattered past, reeking of steamed food, pushed by a tired woman wearing green scrubs and white latex gloves. A speaker embedded in the hall ceiling paged a doctor. The hospital was beginning to wake up.

“How is Lavinia?” I asked the woman.

Having relocated her daughter's undesirable visitor into the neutral hallway, Mrs. Threllgood felt comfortable enough to say, “Recovering, no thanks to this place.”

“I'm glad to hear it.”

“A few weeks at a nice clinic will put her to rights.” She sounded confident, but more likely she was resigned to being determinedly hopeful. Repetition of the mantra might make it come true. A word like “clinic” with respect to someone like Lavinia means sanatorium, that is to say, a detoxification facility. I wasn't certain as to how much her mother was admitting to herself about her daughter's addiction, but I was sure she saw no reason to be forthcoming with the likes of me. “Ah, yes,” I said, as if wistfully. “A few weeks in the mountains. Fresh air, three square meals a day, badminton, a lap pool, massage, acupuncture and a fentanyl patch, far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife—” I stopped myself before I reminded her that the last phrase was plucked, long ago, from Gray's poem of the country churchyard. It seemed to portend a negative arc.