Simon Said

by Sarah Shaber

  Simon once again consulted the 1926 city directory. He found what he was looking for right away. Temple Beth Or was at 612 Hillsborough Street—about three blocks from Anne Bloodworth's house and four from the Manhattan lunch counter. They would have met there after services on Saturdays. Weinstein probably didn't drive on the Sabbath, so wherever they met would have needed to be within walking distance. During the week, they would have seen each other on campus.

  And in the lower left-hand corner of the right page, among the other business ads, was a rectangle that read "The Weinstein Brothers: Everything in Junk." IT WAS NOISY outside on the sidewalk where Simon stood next to the public telephone and dialed Blanche Holland's number because he couldn't wait to get home and call.

  "About Mr. X," he began.

  "I've been thinking and thinking," she said, "and I just have no idea." "Could it have been Joseph Weinstein?" Simon asked.

  "Who? Oh, Joe Weinstein, the economics and history instructor. I remember him. He was so attractive, in an exotic sort of way, and younger than the other men on campus."

  "Could he have been Mr. X?"

  "Goodness. Goodness gracious."

  "Exactly."

  "My word. That would have created an uproar."

  "But could he have been Anne's beau?"

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, and for a minute, Simon was afraid they had been cut off.

  "Yes," she said. "Yes. I don't know why I didn't think of it. It answers so many questions."

  "Do you know anything about him? His family? What happened to him after Anne disappeared?"

  "No. Not really. We would not have encountered each other away from college. He was Jewish, you see. And his father and uncle were junk dealers." "I know," Simon said.

  "I do remember . .." she said.

  "What?"

  "I do remember that he wasn't at the college after Anne dis . . . died. I understood that he was teaching somewhere up north. New York City, I think. Do you think that he killed Anne?"

  "I have no idea," Simon said. "I just know now that Adam Bloodworth didn't." He explained what he had learned about the younger Bloodworth's alibi.

  "One can be so stupid," Mrs. Holland said, "about the weaknesses of human beings."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  SIMON GOT HOME AT TWO O'CLOCK, THIRSTY AND STARVING. HE had just enough time to eat something and get to the campus, where he needed to spend an hour figuring out what to say during his four o'clock lecture. Work was definitely interfering with his detecting. Or was it the other way around?

  Simon opened his refrigerator door and took out some leftover chicken and rolls and a half-liter bottle of Coke with a screw-off cap that he had been working on for a day or so. There were only a couple of inches left. He swigged about half of it straight from the bottle, then began to tear the chicken apart with his fingers. Maybelline stirred herself from a puddle of sunlight and jumped onto the table. He gave her some scraps of his chicken. If she was preggers, she probably needed the protein. He wondered if his friend Mark Mitchell would trade more potato salad for some leg-work on Joseph Weinstein at the New York Public Library. Probably not. Simon thought he could probably fly up between summer sessions and do the research himself. Maybe Julia could go, too. They could see some shows and he could spend some time with his family.

  Simon stood up and felt a dizziness come over him. He shook his head, but the dizziness remained. Nausea crept up his throat, and he had to swallow to contain it. Damn it, he thought, I don't have time to be sick right now. He sat down and put his head in his hands, while a chill started in his groin and worked its way up his back and into his shoulders. He looked at the chicken. He had cooked and eaten it last night with no problem. It couldn't have gone bad overnight. He put his head down onto the kitchen table and began to fall asleep, but Maybelline woke him when she rubbed up against his face.

  Simon took the cold Coke bottle and pressed it up against his face, which felt hot and flushed. I'm losing consciousness, he thought. I've got to do something. Call an ambulance. He carefully used his hands to push himself up from the table and then reached for his cordless phone. When he did, he saw his three prescription bottles lined up on the kitchen counter where he had left them. All three were empty.

  Thanks to the new enhanced system, the emergency dispatcher on the other end of the telephone knew Simon's address, even though he couldn't speak by the time she answered. Within just a few minutes, two paramedics and a policeman walked into his house and found Simon curled into a fetal position on his kitchen floor, deeply unconscious.

  "This guy looks familiar. Didn't we pull him out of a car a few days ago, just around the corner?" the first paramedic asked. "Yeah," the second said. "And this time, he left a note." He pulled the scrap of paper out of Simon's hand. But the note didn't say anything like "good-bye, cruel world," as the paramedic had expected. Instead, it read, "Pump my stomach."

  "He must like attention," the paramedic said, handing the note to the policeman, who had picked up Simon's three empty prescription bottles carefully with his handkerchief. "Establish an airway and start an IV and transport," he said. "We can alert the poisoncontrol team on the way to the hospital."

  Within just a few minutes, the contents of Simon's stomach, including an undetermined amount of Dalmane, Tylenol No. 3, and Prozac, was being pumped into a glass beaker that looked as if it came from the lab scene in Frankenstein.

  "Make sure and save that; it'll need to be tested," the emergency room intern said. He looked down at Simon. "He'll be okay. Take him upstairs to sleep it off." He stripped off his gloves and initialed his orders. "Make sure to send him to the psych ward," he said. "We don't want him finishing the job after he wakes up, like the last guy."

  When Simon woke up a few hours later, he was thrilled to find himself alive. Mentally, he inspected himself, starting with his feet and moving up to his head, which was splitting. He was very nauseated. When he moved his head or tried to focus, flashes of light moved across his brain. Very slowly, he turned his head to look around. He was definitely in a hospital bed in a hospital room. This was good. And David Morgan was sitting on a chair very close to Simon's bed, reading American Archaeological Review. This was very good.

  "Hi," Simon said.

  Morgan turned to him, putting his journal on top of the copy of Scientific American already sitting on the bedside table. "Hi," he said. "How do you feel?"

  "Lousy," Simon said. "Somebody tried to kill me."

  "You have no idea," Morgan said, "how glad I am to hear you say that." Morgan scooted his chair closer to Simon's bed and selfconsciously patted his arm. Simon slowly processed what Morgan had said. He tasted bile in his mouth, and he waited until the nausea passed to speak again. He didn't think Morgan had understood him.

  "Somebody tried to kill me," he said again. "I need to talk to the police." "I know," Morgan said. "I understand. I believe you. But the authority figures here think you tried to commit suicide."

  Simon turned his head farther, and then he saw the bars on the lower half of his window. "Oh, hell," Simon said.

  "Exactly."

  "He used my own pills. Put them in a Coke bottle. Whoever it was knew I'd drink it eventually." "I know."

  "Get me out of here."

  "You're in no condition to go anywhere right now. Just rest until we get it straightened out. Besides, it's going to be damn all getting you out. The hospital is really digging its heels in. Apparently, they had some guy in here last week who swore he accidentally OD'ed and wasn't suicidal. They put him in a regular room and he jumped out the window. His family is suing for zillions. It's all very exciting, really. Judy and Marcus are at the office, digging into your personnel file so that they can get your Uncle Morris's phone number before the hospital does, so he won't agree to commit you."

  "Oh God." "Your doctor had a knock-down-drag-out with the psych guy up here. You could hear them all the way down the hall. Your doc told the other do
c that he wasn't normal himself, so how could he tell normal? Then the other guy said your guy was an old country doctor who shouldn't prescribe anything other than penicillin. The nurses had to separate them. It was great."

  "Gates believes me, doesn't he?" "He sure acts like he does. For one thing, you've got a twenty-four-hour guard outside your door. And he and that woman you've got the hots for are at your house with a team of forensic guys. They're looking for evidence somebody else was messing in your house besides you."

  That was when Simon noticed that the door on the inside of his room had no handle on it. It didn't upset him the way the window bars had. It made him feel safe. "On second thought, I don't think I want to leave right now," Simon said. "Don't blame you, under the circumstances. What no one can figure out is why somebody would want to get rid of a stuffy, harmless history professor like yourself." "I don't have any idea."

  "Me neither."

  "I feel awful."

  "You're still full of drugs. Go back to sleep. When you wake up, I'll get you a milk shake. Maybe we'll know more then." When Simon woke up again, it was dark outside. Marcus Clegg had taken Morgan's place. He was sitting in the visitor's chair, reading Rolling Stone. He owned every issue printed since .

  "Am I still officially crazy?" Simon asked.

  "Hi there," Clegg said. "No, not at all. You're going to stay up here because it's secure. At least until you're ready to be discharged."

  "When is that going to be?"

  "Maybe tomorrow, if you feel like it. David left you a milk shake. It's in the freezer. Want it? They won't take those tubes out of your arm until you start eating and drinking." "Sure," Simon said. The texture of the chocolate shake was a little strange, since it had been frozen and then thawed in the microwave. It really didn't taste very good, but his nausea was gone and he knew he should drink it. He forced down about half of it.

  "Did you manage to fend off my relatives?" he asked.

  "Yes, but it wasn't easy. You should have heard Judy on the phone to your uncle. She was brilliant."

  "What about my aunt in Boone?"

  "They never found out about her. She's not listed in your personnel file. And I sure as hell wasn't going to tell them." "So what do we do now?"

  "Go to sleep."

  "You don't have to stay," Simon said. "There's a policeman here."

  "Don't be brave. It doesn't ring true. I've got dibs on the sofa in the waiting room. I brought my pillow and everything."

  "Thank you."

  Simon woke up only once during the night. He counted the drips from his IV bottle until he fell asleep again.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ALL OF SIMON'S ENERGIES WERE CONCENTRATED ON KEEPING down his bland breakfast. Sgt. Otis Gates wasn't making it any easier by sipping on a cup of vending machine coffee. It smelled of burnt cardboard. Simon could taste it in his bowels.

  Earlier in the morning, Dr. Ferrell had dropped in to tell Simon he could leave the hospital soon.

  "If you didn't have such good insurance, I wouldn't mess with you," he said. "You're time-consuming."

  "I understand that you and the psych resident had a falling-out over me," Simon said. "A minor professional disagreement," Ferrell said. "We've had them before. He's one of these guys who believes the whole world is one big dysfunctional family just waiting for him to organize into group therapy and talk into personal revelation and mental health. The next time he tells me that he understands a patient of mine he's seen for five minutes better than I do, I'm going to stuff him down the laundry chute."

  Ferrell told Simon he could go home that afternoon, after some test or another came back with the right reading.

  "Please take care of yourself," Ferrell said. "One-hundred- percent-covered patients are hard to come by." Simon hadn't wanted to talk to Sergeant Gates when he walked into the room a few minutes after Dr. Ferrell left. Simon was tired and a little anxious. He had almost died twice recently. But Gates sat down and began to drink his coffee, oblivious to the sensitivity of Simon's stomach.

  "How are you today?" asked Gates.

  "Tell me you have some idea what's going on," Simon said.

  "Let's dispense with the niceties and get right down to business, shall we?" Gates said.

  Gates took out his reading glasses and perched them on his nose. The glasses looked like doll accessories on his large face. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and began to flip through it.

  "Let's go over what I've got and you can tell me what you think," Gates said. This was not what Simon wanted to hear. He wanted Gates to tell him he had made an arrest and had a confession and it was someone Simon didn't know and that the police would lock the guy up permanently and Simon could go home and forget everything.

  "I don't have to remind you that this has happened once before, and that we chalked it up to vandalism," Gates said. "I think that we can discard that theory. It's hardly vandalism to walk into somebody's house and dump pills in an open soda bottle."

  "The two could be unconnected," Simon said.

  "That's possible, of course. But for safety's sake, we should assume the worst." "I can live with that."

  "First possibility: You are trying to commit suicide."

  "No."

  "Your doctor and your friends say you're fine. And it's pretty hard to fake mental health. Besides, we've found evidence of an intruder at your house."

  Simon was taken aback even though he had expected to hear this. Absurdly, he found himself worrying about his cat. "The doorknob on your back door and your prescription bottles were wiped clean of prints. Why would you do that? Also, we found a tire track in the parking space off your alley that doesn't match your car or anyone else's in the immediate vicinity. There was a partial footprint a few feet from your back porch that belongs to a foot about five sizes larger than yours."

  Tessa had wanted Simon to fill in that low spot in the yard for years. It was always damp. Now he was glad he hadn't ever gotten to it.

  "Also," Gates said, "you are a brilliant researcher who would need about half an hour in the library to figure out how to kill yourself successfully."

  "Fifteen minutes," Simon said. "Second possibility: You are not trying to kill yourself; you are only trying to get attention. This is a distinct possibility. You've been, or are, depressed. And again, you are smart enough to figure out how to attempt suicide without actually accomplishing it."

  "I've had enough attention to last a lifetime." "Thing is, the docs are undecided as to whether or not the amount of drugs you ingested would have killed you. Your size makes that hard to figure out. If you didn't want to die, seems to me you would have been more careful on the dosage side."

  "We're running out of possibilities." "Be patient. Third possibility: Someone was trying to make it look like you are suicidal. To make you seem psychologically unstable so that you lose your job. This is serious professional jealousy we're talking about here. This is a real possibility, because Alex Andrus, who hates your guts, accused you of being incompetent right before the first incident."

  "It can't be Alex. He's a basket case. And he had an alibi for the first time." "I wouldn't exclude him from being involved. Besides, you have plenty of other enemies to choose from. Seems you're the favorite to become chair of the department of history after Walker Jones retires."

  Simon was thunderstruck. "That's nonsense," he said. "If the college doesn't choose someone from outside the department, there are three other people on the history faculty senior to me."

  "Two of them are out of town for the summer, and the other one is Vera Thayer," Gates said, consulting his notes.

  "This is crazy," Simon said.

  "Maybe Professor Thayer figured if she took you out of consideration, she could have the job after all. Where does she live?" "Around the corner and down two on Benehan Street—about two blocks from me." Simon knew Vera was mean enough to do anything to get the chair, but he had a hard time visualizing her with her beehive and ultrasuede suits und
er his car, rigging a booby trap.

  "Your secretary told me you'd be shocked," Gates said. "She said you hate departmental politics and never know what's going on. I think the expression she used was 'babe in the woods.' "

  "I don't believe this." "According to her, you're a Pulitzer Prize winner, you generate great publicity for the college at regular intervals, you're a popular teacher, and you're fair and easy to get along with. Oh, and you're cute. In short, you're the history faculty's ideal compromise candidate. Nobody wants Professor Thayer, and you get everyone else's vote after themselves."

  "So your theory is that these two so-called suicide attempts of mine are somebody's way of taking me out of the running for chairman, or out of the college altogether? By making me look psychologically unstable and unfit for the job?"

  "It seems possible."

  "I can't deal with this."

  "You'd better deal with it. There's always the fourth possibility."

  "What's that?"

  "The perp doesn't just want you out of the way; he, or she, wants you dead."

  Chapter Thirty

  THE UNDERCOVER POLICEMAN WATCHING SIMON'S HOUSE MADE him nervous. No one in full position of his faculties could mistake this guy for a student on a bicycle. Every time he hit a cobblestone in the alley, he practically fell off. His blue jeans, T-shirt, and athletic shoes were brand-new and looked like he had bought them at Sears. His haircut came from the shop opposite the police station, which offered a special price to anyone in uniform. His sunglasses screamed "cool Clint Eastwood-type lawenforcement person." Plus, he kept stopping and fiddling with an earpiece that obviously wasn't connected to anything. He didn't have a backpack or books in his bicycle basket. Simon hoped he had a gun in it—a really big gun, like the bad guys had on television.

  Simon thought he should probably warn the cop's night relief about the neighbors' intruder alerts. They were mounted on garages all up and down the alley. If the guy cruised all night, the alley would look like a lit-up Christmas tree. Someone might call the police.