Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Please, Ms. Solomon.” He made one final impassioned appeal. The look in her eye was one of tired disgust.

  “Okay.” She flung her coat down. “You got just one question. Make it fast.”

  “The room Mr. Boyd was in that night—was it a private or a double?”

  She looked at him, then past him as if she’d already forgotten the question. In the next moment she laughed despairingly to herself, a look of icy resignation on her face. Eyes fixed straight ahead, she limped past the two detectives into the small cubicle office where she kept her records.

  They waited uneasily while she riffled through a long horizontal ledger bound in bogus black leather. The year 1979 was gold-stamped across the face of it. Neither man spoke. They barely breathed and never looked at one another for fear of distracting her or invoking her wrath.

  At last they heard the pages stop flipping, followed by Sophie Solomon mumbling to herself. “Okay,” she yelled at them through the open door. “I think I got what you want. Mr. Boyd was in room 382 that night. That happens to be a double.”

  “Wonderful.” Mooney beamed gratefully. “That’s wonderful, Ms. Solomon—Now don’t—don’t close that book yet.” He rushed toward her even as she reared back, slightly alarmed. “May I see that page, please?”

  For reply she whisked the ledger up and pressed it to her chest. “Private records. I don’t reveal these. Even to the police. Not without a court order.”

  A wave of fatigue overtook him—almost despair. “You’re perfectly right, Ms. Solomon.” The s’s buzzed hard in his teeth. “I do need a court order to see your records. It’ll take me seven to ten days to secure one. I’m trying very hard now to locate a man who may possibly kill someone within the very near future.”

  There was a look of contempt in her eyes. “You don’t expect me to swallow that one, do you?”

  “No,” he replied, looking at her hopelessly. “But it happens to be the truth. I have a theory that this Mr. A. Boyd has already killed five people and crippled another for life. I’m trying to avert another tragedy. I have one last question …”

  “Ah-ha.” She glowed triumphantly and clacked her dentures. “Now already you got two questions.”

  “But this one is definitely the last. And I’m willing to lay seven to ten the answer is right there on that page you’re already open to.”

  She watched him distrustfully through pinkish tinted glasses, her head nodding with a gentle palsy. “Didn’t I say my niece was due at the airport? I should be there now.”

  “I appreciate that, Ms. Solomon.”

  “For one man you do a lot of appreciating.” She folded her arms across the ledger and glared defiantly at the two detectives. “Okay—this is the last one. Definitely. Let’s have it.”

  Mooney inhaled and held his breath a moment. “Was anyone sharing the room with Boyd?”

  Ms. Solomon’s smile was edged with venom. “I knew you were going to ask me something smart like that.”

  “The answer’s not on that page you’re open to?” Sophie Solomon started to laugh, a cheerless, bitter laugh, full of the painful wisdom of years. “No, it’s not on that page.” Her small, frail figure shook with laughter. “In the first place, we can’t even be sure that anyone shared the room with Mr. Boyd. But in order to verify that I have to check the room numbers of every patient in residence at the hospital that night.” Her smile deepened, became almost beatific. “Have you any idea just how many people we have hospitalized in Beth Israel on any given night?”

  Mooney stared expectantly at her. “Nope. Tell me.”

  “What about you, young man?” she cooed at Defasio with all the cordiality of an ice pick.

  “Two hundred,” Defasio blustered, then gazed sheepishly at Mooney.

  Ms. Solomon made a funny quacking sound, then turned back to Mooney. “How would you feel about four hundred?”

  “I’d say it’s a helluva lot of names to go through.”

  “You’d be right.” Sophie Solomon’s smile turned suddenly to a glare. “But as it turns out, it’s closer to six hundred inpatients on a given night. Now you’re asking me to check roughly six hundred names to see what other person might have shared room 382 with Mr. Boyd.”

  “I agree it seems unreasonable on the face of it.”

  “On the face of it?” Ms. Solomon’s eyes narrowed to small gashes. Suddenly her mirthless cheer turned to frost. “I’m leaving now.”

  “Sophie …” Mooney started toward her.

  Glaring at him above her glasses, she appeared to swell. “Forget it, my friend. There is no way that I’m going to spend the next four hours here, going through every name on the patient manifest for the evening of April 30, 1979. Call me tomorrow, then maybe we’ll talk.”

  She hobbled to the coat rack and once again struggled into her tan raincoat. By that time her glasses were slightly askew. Then suddenly looking at the overweight, clearly exhausted detective, she hesitated. “However, since I don’t particularly care to have the guilt of unnecessary bloodshed on my head, I’m gonna walk out of here now and just forget to put my books away. If you should happen to look at them while I’m out, I can’t help that. I’m off to meet my niece now.” She turned and hobbled to the door. “Don’t forget to turn the lights out when you leave.” Sophie Solomon had said that the job of checking six hundred names of patients against their room numbers would take four hours. As it worked out she was within ten minutes of her projected time.

  The names were listed in the huge ledger in alphabetical order. The patient roll was made up each day, giving date, time of entry, a description of illness, room number and discharge date.

  For the day of April 30, 1979, the hospital had logged 553 patients. Defasio groaned as they started with the A’s and worked on through, checking each name and date against a room number. It was 10:35 p.m. when Mooney looked up bleary-eyed from the ledger and said, “Charles Watford, 724 Hauser Street, Kew Gardens, New York.”

  39

  It was somewhere near 3:00 A.M. when he woke. His mouth was dry and something like a pulse throbbed inside his head. It wasn’t the pain that woke him, however, but the hyperventilation—the gulping for air and getting nowhere near enough. The fear of suffocation caused him to sit bolt upright. When he did, his head swam and he nearly toppled over.

  The Demerol bottle beside the bed was empty, and the pain was of an order that transcended mere mortal pain. It was so great and all-engulfing that it had the effect of transporting him into some other state. Woozy, half-conscious, hallucinatory, the sense of slipping one’s moorings.

  Then came those wracking paroxysms, the gasping for air, the awful terror that he might die (not the fear of death itself, but the idea of dying alone), his body undiscovered for weeks—mortification, decomposition, stench, all maggoty and obscene, discovered weeks later by strangers—some shapeless, reeking thing. The indignity, like fouling oneself in public.

  When he threw a leg over the edge of the bed, his head shrieked and he sagged to the floor. The floor was uncarpeted and cold. He lay with his face flat down upon it, rolling his flamed cheeks against the cool wood as if to soothe himself.

  He lay there for some time, vision unfocused and scintilla rocketing like comets across his visual field. Aware of a sound muffled and distant, like a moaning or whimpering that rose from the basement, he didn’t realize that it was himself. He knew he had to get up off the floor, dress and seek medication. On the other hand, motion of any sort produced pain in him of an order that was transfiguring.

  Assuming that he could move, where could he go at that hour? All pharmacies were closed and he had long ago worn out his welcome at every hospital in the immediate area. He was known at every emergency room in the borough of Queens.

  He would never recall how he managed to dress that night; how he pulled shoes and pants on over pajamas, and threw a raincoat on top of that. Every time he moved he had the distinct impression that his skull would blow apart, shatter int
o smithereens. Going down the steps to the front door, his legs felt waxen and he thought he would faint. Spark showers continued to rocket madly inside his head.

  Outside, the streets were damp and deserted. There had been recent rain. Misty halations encircled the streetlamps at every corner. Suddenly, he was striding purposefully out toward Austin Street, the heels of his shoes ringing on the damp cobbles.

  On 74th Road he rounded the corner, walked beneath the black dripping trestle of the LIRR and emerged onto the ghostly vacancy of the boulevard before dawn. There was something phantasmagoric about it—the traffic lights, the dimly illuminated shop windows, shimmering in the rain-slicked streets. Out on the boulevard a solitary taxi bound for some unknown destination hurtled onward into the night. Within that mottled, woozy landscape, Watford knew exactly where he was going. Some internal gyroscope had guided him, and when at last he stood in the pale neon illumination of the Cardinal Pharmacy window with its phials and apothecary jars, its alarm clocks, heating pads, vitamins and trusses, it was to him as if everything had always been precisely that way—him standing there before the glass windows, looking in, knowing the end of it before the action had scarcely begun.

  Leading round the back of the pharmacy into a cul-de-sac backing onto a synagogue was a small alleyway strewn with crates and boxes from an adjoining greengrocer. The brick wall behind was lined with aluminum trash cans exhaling into that narrow, huddled area, the sweetish breath of ripe spoilage.

  Watford’s throbbing head felt large and empty. Some mysterious defensive mechanism of the body had enabled him to transcend the normal thresholds of pain. It was not that pain was no longer present. It was, but it had become externalized. He was now merely witness to rather than victim of its decimating effects.

  Threading his way now through the maze of litter, he experienced a peculiar sensation of buoyancy. Light-headed, light-footed, his feet seemed to skim airily above the alley concrete. The wood crate he upended below the frosted rear window of the Cardinal Pharmacy was stamped with an arc of vivid runny purple letters that read, MUSACHIO RUTABAGAS—SACRAMENTO—CAL.

  He went about his work directly. There was not a trace of stealth to his movements. Nor did he take any special pains to cover his actions with silence. Hefting a chunky stone he’d found at the rear of the alleyway, he took several noisy swipes at the frosted glass before it shattered. Instantly, the alarm tripped, ringing into the dark, mist-hung morning.

  Unmindful of the racket, he reached through the gaping, punched-out glass and unlocked the window latch. Lifting the sash, he clambered over the frame with its jagged shards thrusting daggers up at him, then tumbled through into the drugstore.

  Pitched into darkness, he groped his way along a wall, finding at last with his bleeding fingers a light switch. In the next moment he was bathed in the blue luminescence of overhead fluorescent lights. He was standing in the rear of the pharmacy amid shelves and racks of prescription drugs.

  Despite the shrill, unceasing ring of the alarm he worked coolly, moving systematically up one aisle, then down the next until he found the big forty-six ounce jar brimming chockful with the pretty, pink-gray, candylike spansules of hundred-milligram meperidine.

  As carelessly and conspicuously as he’d entered, so he departed. There was neither haste nor disarray.

  More disturbing, too, he was scarcely aware of having committed any crime. He merely walked out of the alley, raincoat open and flapping behind him, his striped pajama top clearly visible underneath, and the huge jar of Demerol carried under his arm as if it were a loaf of bread.

  The alarm trilled insistently behind him, but the thought that he might be in danger from the imminently expected arrival of the police never entered his mind. As it happened, the police arrived six minutes later. By that time Watford was back home, just closing the door behind him.

  40

  “Is this 724 Hauser Street?”

  “Huh?”

  “I say, is this 724 Hauser Street?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re …”

  Watford’s eyes wouldn’t focus properly. He was looking directly into the sun and squinting. What he saw before him was more shadow than substance— more a blockage of light rather than any definable shape or form.

  “Charles Watford?”

  “Yes?”

  Boring through his numbed senses a voice came, gruff and slightly impatient, followed by the grating noise of heels scuffing on the front step. His head pounded, though the Demerol he had taken during the night had at least muffled some of the jagged thrusting of the pain.

  “Lieutenant Mooney, New York police. My partner, Detective Sergeant Defasio.”

  The shadow appeared to poke something at him momentarily, then withdraw it. Slowly the two blurred images came sharply together. All at once, he remembered and then something like a fist closed over his heart.

  Mooney gazed critically at the rumpled, unshaven man in the tattered robe. “Got a few questions we’d like to ask you. May we come in?”

  “Oh, God,” Watford muttered.

  “We’ll just be a few minutes.”

  Watford’s drugged mind whirled. Desperately he tried to recall where he’d left the stolen jeroboam of meperidine. He was already scrambling in his head for alibis.

  “Sure.” Watford stepped aside and hovered there in panicky confusion as the two men brushed past into the hallway.

  “Looks like we woke you,” Mooney remarked and stared at him with that vaguely disapproving look. At the same time he noted the gash of dried blood on the back of Watford’s hand.

  Staring blankly at them in the hallway, it suddenly occurred to Watford they were waiting to be led in. “Oh—sure. This way, please.” He felt his body .slowly waking and some of the fog in his head beginning to lift. Instantly, he began constructing an alibi for the night before.

  “Afraid I’m a bit hung over.”

  “Party?” Mooney smiled frostily.

  “No. Actually, I never met these folks before. Perfect strangers. Salesmen. From Cincinnati, I think. Met them in a bar. Nice fellows. They kept buying and I guess I just kept drinking.” He moaned and held his head.

  “Happens that way sometime,” said the big detective.

  “Sure does.” Watford forced another laugh. “Have a seat.” He’d noted that the other man—the swarthy younger fellow—had already settled into the little velvet puce settee his mother had so loved.

  Watford chuckled uneasily. “These guys from Cincinnati …”

  “Mr. Watford,” interjected the big detective. “This won’t take long. We’ve got just a few questions.”

  “Questions?” Watford feigned a look of surprise. All the while his mind sped. “Well, of course. What can I tell you?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Mooney replied.

  Watford caught the sharp, slightly bleary eyes fixed on the gash across the back of his hand. Slowly, and with a stiff nonchalance, he folded his arms, concealing the hand in an armpit.

  “You see I was out all last night.” Watford tried once more to emphasize the point. “I’m a bit hung over.”

  “We understand,” Mooney nodded. “Am I right in saying that you were hospitalized for a short period two years ago?”

  “What’s that?”

  “At Beth Israel. For a few days. End of April of seventy-nine, I believe. You were hospitalized. Is that right?”

  Watford was thrown completely off-balance. That was not what he’d been expecting. “Beth Israel? Oh, sure.” Then it suddenly all came rushing back to him. The forged prescription. Fleeing the hospital after impersonating the pediatric surgeon. The patrol car outside the house. Or was it possibly fleeing the Gramercy Park Pharmacy last week? Sure—that was it. Or was it a few days ago? No, it was yesterday. Or was it?

  “You were at Beth Israel then?”

  “That’s right. I was there.” Watford’s heart pounded. “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “
Who said you did?” There was a look of consternation on Mooney’s red round face. “It was the end of April of seventy-nine, though?”

  Watford was suddenly wary. He sat down on a small Victorian chair and rolled his head back against the lace antimacassar. “It may have been. I’m not sure.”

  “We are.” Defasio spoke from the corner of the room. “We checked it with the hospital records.”

  “Oh?”

  Mooney pulled up a chair next to Watford and sat. “Do you recall anything of your stay there?”

  “Nothing in particular. I was in for a bladder infection.”

  “A bladder infection?”

  “Right. You see, I’d been in the Air Force a couple of years before and I couldn’t …”

  Mooney rose and planted himself heavily before him. There was something immovable about the man. He appeared to swallow up all the light and air about him.

  “Mr. Watford,” the big detective went on. All the while Watford was aware of the other man staring around at all the clocks in the room. “While you were at Beth Israel you were in room 382.”

  “Was I? I don’t really remember.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. But you can take my word for it. While you were there you shared room 382 with another man.”

  “Another man?”

  “A man in the bed beside you.”

  Completely baffled, Watford’s eyes narrowed in an effort at recollection. He became even more guarded. “Well, there was a man …”

  “You recall anything about him?”

  The Demerol fog had almost completely lifted. Instead of the terrible gnawing anxiety he’d experienced moments before, there now came a rush of gratitude. They were not looking for him at all. It was the other man. The one in the bed beside him. He was suddenly eager to help.

  “Like how he looked,” Mooney rattled on. “What he was in for? His name? Anything?”

  “He’d had some kind of surgery. His leg, I think.” The two detectives exchanged glances.