Night Secrets

by Thomas H. Cook

  Frank nodded.

  “And when was that, do you remember?”

  “Early morning.”

  Tannenbaum smiled. “Like always, right?”

  “Like always,” Frank said.

  Tannenbaum closed his notebook, then shrugged. “Well, we get a lot of this kind of thing these days,” he said, “but mostly in the winter. Freezing, that’s usually what does it.” He glanced up toward the EMS ambulance. A bright mid-morning sun was shining silver on its chrome bumpers. “You expect them to make it through the spring.”

  Frank nodded slowly.

  “But sometimes, they don’t,” Tannenbaum added casually. He looked up toward the ambulance. They were shoving the old woman’s body into the back of it. “My guess is, it was her heart. Sometimes they just pop, like a balloon that’s been stretched too far.” He shook his head as he looked back at Frank. “She looks like she’d been stretched pretty far, doesn’t she?”

  Frank said nothing.

  Tannenbaum looked at him pointedly. “I heard you were the one who found out about that Gypsy, the one who escaped last night.”

  Frank nodded.

  “Funny, you being there and all,” Tannenbaum said. “As a matter of fact, why were you there?”

  “I had a few things to tell her.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Things about the murder.”

  Tannenbaum’s voice took on a tone of warning. “You wouldn’t hold anything back on your old friend Tannenbaum, would you, Frank?”

  Frank shook his head.

  Tannenbaum’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “There’s a felony warrant out on her now,” he said, “so any way you look at it, she’s in deep, deep shit.”

  “I know.”

  “With only one way out, Frank,” Tannenbaum added. “To get her ass right back over to the Women’s Center.” He shook his head. “There’s no way she’s not going to do a hell of a lot of time, but if she turns herself in, it might go a little easier on her, you know?”

  Frank said nothing.

  Tannenbaum continued to stare at him intently. “I’m going to ask you straight out, Frank, and I hope you have sense enough to tell me the truth, because if you don’t, I’ll pull your PI license so fast you won’t even see it pop out of your pocket.”

  Frank anticipated the question. “I don’t know where she is, Leo,” he answered.

  For a moment, Tannenbaum seemed to doubt him, then suddenly the doubt dissolved from his face, and his eyes drew back down to the littered area where the old woman’s body had just been picked up. ‘‘Well, it’s over for her now,” he said. He closed his notebook and headed up the stairs. When he got to the top of them, he looked back toward Frank. “You know, it’s like they say, Frank,” he told him. “Life has a way of making you want revenge.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. And once in a while, he thought, someone ought to get it.

  A few minutes later, the ambulance pulled away and Frank found himself entirely alone outside his office. For a while, he thought about walking back in, lying down on the sofa, and simply trying to sleep for at least a few minutes, enough to ease himself back into his steadily ebbing strength. But even as he thought about it, he dismissed the idea, and headed up the stairs instead. He knew that Farouk had been trailing Mrs. Phillips for several hours by then, all during the long morning while he’d waited for the old woman to be picked up, and the interrogations after that. For all that time, Farouk had been working on the day case, and now it was his turn to work on it too.

  The offices of Pentatex Laboratories were on East Twenty-eighth Street, and as he walked toward them, shifting incessantly through the crowded midtown traffic, he went over the nightmare jumble of facts he’d collected on the day case, old theories lingering persistently, as if he were afraid to dismiss them from his mind.

  He traced her movements again day by day, from the meeting at the Pierre Hotel, to Powers’s house in the Village, then on to the next day, the Dakota, the long stroll across Central Park, the small black purse she’d left at the Alice in Wonderland statue.

  He shook his head and continued walking, meticulously going over all the details of the case once again. He thought of Devine, then of Business Associates, the small, unlisted business that Mrs. Phillips had called immediately after returning from Connecticut. Why had she called Devine? Was he expecting a drop, or was she supposed to pick one up? He remembered that she’d looked strangely distressed after leaving the telephone booth on Madison Avenue.

  He thought of Burroughs again, of the limousine that had picked Mrs. Phillips up, then taken her to Trump Tower. He wondered if Burroughs owned an apartment in the Tower, or if he and Mrs. Phillips simply met in the one owned by Devine.

  Last, he thought of Mrs. Phillips again, the coldness which had overtaken her, the blank sheet of her past, the changed will she’d been told of, the jewelry she’d pawned, the purse she’d dropped, the meetings at Trump Tower, the ones she never noted in her appointment book.

  His mind was still studying the odd logistics of Trump Tower when he finally reached 338 East Twenty-eighth Street. He walked into the building, checked its lighted directory, then took the elevator up to the seventh floor, where Pentatex Laboratories were located.

  The outer office looked very clean, and as he entered the glass double doors which led from the corridor into its neat, tiled vestibule, he felt strangely seedy and unkempt, as if his body crawled with millions of small, struggling parasites which the people at Pentatex knew well and worked laboriously to identify.

  A woman in a white lab coat sat behind a small white desk, her fingers dancing over the keys of a large phone bank.

  “Good morning,” she said brightly.

  Frank felt as if he should blow the dust off his identification before he gave it to her.

  “Private investigator?” the woman asked as she glanced back up at him.

  “That’s right.”

  She handed him back the identification. “How can we help you?”

  “I’m not sure you can,” Frank admitted. “But I’d like to ask somebody a few questions.”

  “About any particular area?”

  “No, just in general.”

  The woman thought a moment. “Well, I suppose Dr. Kelsey might help you,” she said. “He usually handles all our public relations.” She smiled cheerfully. “Hold on a minute, and I’ll check if he’s available.”

  She called Kelsey’s office, explained the situation, then hung up the phone.

  “Yes, he can see you now,” she said as she stood up. “This way, please.”

  She led him down a short corridor, then into a large office. “Dr. Kelsey,” she said, “this is Mr. Clemons.”

  The man behind the desk stood up immediately and offered his hand. He was very tall and very slender, with a face that looked as if it had been constructed from parts that didn’t quite fit, the nose too large, the eyes too small, a mouth that looked as if it had once belonged to a woman.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Frank said as he shook Kelsey’s hand.

  “Please, sit down,” Dr. Kelsey said. He sat down himself, and raked back his thinning brown hair. “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “I’ve been working on something,” Frank told him as he took his seat. “It’s the usual kind of thing we do. Routine. But Pentatex came up, and my client needs to know a little about it, so I …”

  “Who is your client?” Kelsey asked quickly, before Frank could continue.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Frank said as passively as he could. “He wants everything to be very discreet.”

  “I see.”

  “But I do have a few questions,” Frank continued, “more or less for background.”

  “Background on what?”

  “On Pentatex Labs,” Frank told him.

  Dr. Kelsey looked mildly distressed. “I’m surprised that the laboratory has come up in any kind of investigation.” He offered a smile. “The things
we do here are very common.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m interested in,” Frank said.

  Kelsey looked puzzled.

  “The work you do,” Frank explained. “It’s mostly for physicians?”

  “Almost all our work is done for physicians,” Kelsey said cautiously. “And our records are meticulous.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Frank assured him. “I’m just interested in what you do for one particular physician.”

  Kelsey’s face seemed to tighten. “One particular physician?”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Kelsey looked at Frank hesitantly. “Well, at this point, I’d have to have a name.”

  “Kevin A. Powers,” Frank said.

  Kelsey immediately recognized the name. “Dr. Powers is a very valuable customer of ours,” he said stiffly. “I hope he’s not in any kind of trouble.”

  Frank said nothing.

  Kelsey settled back in his chair. “You have to understand our position, here,” he said. “As I said, Dr. Powers is a very good customer. We wouldn’t want to do anything that might damage that relationship.”

  “I understand.”

  “And mere are rules in the medical community, of course,” Kelsey added. “I mean, about confidentiality.”

  “I’m only interested in one patient.”

  Kelsey looked surprised. “We do a great deal of work for Dr. Powers. He has a very active practice.”

  Frank took out his notebook. “What sort of work?” he asked.

  Kelsey looked at the notebook suspiciously.

  “I don’t remember things very well,” Frank explained. He shrugged casually. “This work that the lab does for Dr. Powers,” he went on gently, “what is it, exactly?”

  Kelsey hesitated for a moment, then allowed himself to answer. “Well, it’s the same that we do for other doctors,” he said. “Just the routine laboratory tests that any private medical practice would require.”

  “What kind of tests?”

  “You know, the usual blood and urine tests. Biopsies, things like that.”

  Frank smiled amiably. “What do you do for Powers?”

  “Dr. Powers?” Kelsey repeated. “Well, I suppose you know that he’s a gynecologist.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that means that in addition to the usual blood work, we do things like pregnancy tests, Pap smears, maybe a few more biopsies than you’d find in other practices.”

  “So, you’d be doing a lot of things for him?” Frank asked.

  “Of course.”

  Frank wrote it down quickly, then glanced back up. “Where does the work come from?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever he sends you. Whatever it is. Where does it come from?”

  “Well, from Dr. Powers’s office, of course.”

  “And he has only one office?”

  “One? No, I think he has two.”

  “There’s only one in the telephone book,” Frank said. He flipped back through his notebook. “Here it is, at 485 Fifth Avenue. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “But you thought there were two?”

  Kelsey shrugged. “For some reason I thought he had a second office.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because some of his lab work comes from somewhere else,” Kelsey said. “Not a lot. Very little, as I recall. Perhaps just one or two tests a week.”

  “Do you remember the address?” Frank asked.

  “No.”

  “Could you look it up?”

  “I suppose so,” Dr. Kelsey said. He stood up and walked out of the office for a moment, then returned with a large manilla folder. He opened it quickly and began to sort through a large number of papers. “We pick up at doctors’ offices once a day, so if there’s a change in the route, it goes through our traffic department.” He flipped through a few more papers, then stopped and pulled one out. “Here’s what I mean,” he said as he handed it to Frank.

  Frank took the paper and studied it quickly, reading quietly, almost to himself.

  “As you can see,” Kelsey said, “for every pickup they record the time, date and location.”

  Frank nodded silently, his eyes continuing to scan the small yellow invoice. It recorded a pickup on April 17, the Monday Mrs. Phillips had gone to Powers’s house. “This wasn’t picked up at Powers’s office,” he said.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Kelsey said. “Some place in the Village.”

  Frank read the address. “One-twenty-four West Twelfth Street.” He glanced at the time: 1:22 P.M. He flipped back through his notebook and found the time he’d jotted down as Mrs. Phillips left the office: 1:07 P.M.

  “That address,” Kelsey said, “is that another office?”

  “No,” Frank said. He recorded the information on the invoice into his notebook, then handed it back to Kelsey. “What did he send to you that day?” he asked.

  Kelsey stared at him hesitantly. “Now, when we get into that sort of information, we have to …”

  Frank leaned forward, lowering his voice somewhat, as if confiding something important to Kelsey. “We may be dealing with criminal activity,” he said darkly.

  Kelsey looked alarmed. “Criminal activity?”

  “It’s possible,” Frank said.

  “Well, Pentatex couldn’t be involved in anything like that.”

  “Involvement is a funny word,” Frank said. “It’s not always too clear the way people think about it.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Kelsey said, a little nervously. “We wouldn’t want Pentatex’s name to come up at all. I mean, in any context, criminal or not.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Frank said.

  “Could you help us with that?” Kelsey said. “I mean, if we were exposed.”

  “Maybe.”

  Kelsey glanced back at the invoice, then up at Frank. “And whatever I tell you is …”

  “Strictly confidential,” Frank assured him.

  “All right,” Kelsey said, after taking in a deep, but shaky breath. “What do you need to know?”

  “What did he send you?”

  Kelsey glanced at the invoice. “It was a blood sample,” he said.

  “Was there a name?”

  “Yes,” Kelsey said. He looked at the invoice again. “Driscoll. Virginia Driscoll.”

  “And the tests?”

  “Well, according to this,” Kelsey said, “Dr. Powers only ordered one test on this blood sample.” He looked up. “An HIV analysis.”

  Frank’s pen remained motionless on the page. “What’s the test for?”

  Kelsey closed the folder and let it drop softly onto his desk. “It’s only given to determine one thing.” His eyes brightened somewhat. “And in this case, it came up negative, so the woman, whoever she is, she doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

  “What’s the test for?” Frank asked again.

  Kelsey’s face grew faintly sorrowful. “AIDS,” he said quietly, as if it were a word which should only be whispered.

  The pen in Frank’s hand leaned slowly backward as he released his grip.

  “It’s the test for AIDS,” Kelsey repeated softly. He shook his head despairingly. “Here at Pentatex, we call it the Death Warrant Analysis.”

  Frank left the offices of Pentatex only a few minutes later. Once outside, he drew in a deep breath, then glanced at his watch. It was still almost four hours before he was scheduled to meet Powers, and so he headed back across town to Forty-ninth Street.

  From the top of the cement stairs that led to his office, he could see the few scattered chicken bones that were now the only remaining evidence that the old woman had once lived and died at the bottom of the stairs. For a few seconds, he stood in place, his eyes fixed on the thin dark bones. They seemed to press themselves toward him, warning him away, and so he turned back toward the street and headed west, moving silently along the bright sunlit street until he reached the little park on
Tenth Avenue where he and Farouk often met in the early evening.

  It was almost three in the afternoon, and the park was filled with neighborhood children. They played noisily in the iron swings and rushed back and forth across the cement basketball courts.

  Several yards away, he could see a young girl as she skipped rope by herself in the only part of the park which was more or less deserted. As he watched her, the pace of the swinging rope steadily increased, until, after a time, it seemed to be whirling madly over her, cutting through the air so swiftly that he could hear the hard whirr of its flight as it slashed the air around her.

  He leaned forward slightly and rubbed his aching eyes, trying to remove the blur which too often overcame them now, turning his vision into a soft, nearly featureless haze. The slap of the rope drummed relentlessly against the cement floor of the park, and its driving, incessant beat seemed to pierce him sharply. He turned away from it and closed his eyes, rubbing them again, gently at first, then more roughly, his thumbs pressing in against their soft white flesh.

  When he opened them again, the rope was no longer whirring loudly, and he could see the little girl as she walked toward him slowly, the red wooden handles of the rope scraping softly over the cement as she drew them along behind her. She had a strange, ghostly look, and he thought of Sarah, his daughter, again, her lost, forsaken eyes, the way she had seemed to dissolve into her death, grow bodiless and void, as if her flesh were peeling from her, leaving nothing but a homeless soul.

  Reflexively, he glanced away from the girl, then, just as reflexively, returned to her. She was much closer to him now, and she smiled tentatively as she passed by. He nodded to her gently, his eyes still following her as she made her way out of the park, then began skipping playfully along the sidewalk. For a time, Frank continued to watch her as she sped through the thin pedestrian traffic, gliding past a large woman whose small boy walked beside her, then an old priest who moved shakily along, his hand gripping fiercely at his cane. Toward the end of the block, she darted abruptly to the left as if to avoid someone, and Frank instantly saw the old Gypsy woman who’d told Farouk’s fortune the night before.

  He stood up, then moved behind a thin stand of trees which rose at the other end of the park. The early spring foliage was quite sparse, and through it, he could watch the old woman as she hurried up Tenth Avenue. She was dressed in a long, flowing skirt which dragged behind her heavily, its hem nearly touching the cement walkway, and her hair was bound up in a bright-red scarf. She walked very determinedly, as if under orders, her eyes staring straight ahead until she reached the liquor store, which stood almost directly across from the park. She went in quickly, and from his position across the avenue, Frank could see her step up to the clerk. She said something to him, and he nodded once, then disappeared into the back of the store.