Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  48

  “How’s that fever tonight, Mr. Watford?” Dr. Ramsay breezed across the room, the tails of his surgical gown flaring slightly behind him. He picked up the clipboard at the foot of the bed and briefly scanned it. A nurse stood just behind him.

  “Forty degrees centigrade. We’re still high.” He slipped two fingers over Watford’s inside wrist and took his pulse. “How’s the headache?”

  “Awful.”

  “Pulse is fast too. Enjoying your stay so far?” With a sweeping motion, he drew the privacy curtain round the bed to screen them from the patient in the adjoining bed. While the doctor probed and palpated, Watford launched into a series of complaints and indignities he’d suffered during the course of the day. “I can’t say I find the staff here very responsive.” Ramsay took the stethoscope down from his ears and clipped them round his neck. “How so?”

  “My needs,” Watford fretted. “My needs, Doctor, I am not accustomed …”

  “By your needs,” Ramsay resumed his tapping and palpating, “I take it you mean the nurses get a bit sticky when you call the dispensary, impersonate me, and order Demerol for yourself.”

  That took a bit of the wind out of Watford’s sails. He slumped back breathless, and sullen, while the doctor’s fingers probed up under his armpits. “That hurt?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Tender, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Chastened now, Watford’s voice was unnaturally low. He watched Ramsay warily.

  “How long have you been addicted to Demerol?” Watford was about to protest, but the physician was far too acute for him. “You have a hypodermic concealed around here. I suggest you turn it over to the nurse right now.”

  Watford felt his face redden.

  “I noticed the needle mark on your inner thigh last night,” Ramsay went on. “I know your game, Watford. What did you inject yourself with? Spoiled food? Feces?”

  “Hey—wait a minute …”

  “What you’re doing is dumb. Very dumb. How much Ex-Lax did you have to punch down to get your fever up so high?”

  Watford squirmed quietly beneath the sheets. “Your blood samples were loaded with phenolphthalein.” Ramsay’s fierce beady eyes were merciless. “Who do you think you’re kidding? How long have you been going on like this?”

  For reply, Watford turned his head to the wall and remained silent.

  But Ramsay was not yet finished. “Now listen to me, my friend. If it’s Demerol you want, I’ll get it for you. But in reasonable quantities. Without your having to commit fraud and impersonate a physician. Both of which, incidentally, are felony crimes, punishable by imprisonment. Before I do that, however, you’ll have to agree to get yourself onto a good detoxification program. I can arrange that for you too. We have a very good outpatient drug-rehab clinic right here.”

  Watford turned and stared pitifully up at him. “But I don’t …”

  “Let me finish, please. Before you start to deny all this, I think you should first hear what I have to tell you. I’m sure you’ll find it to be of considerable importance.”

  As he spoke he lay his cool, hard palm across the back of Watford’s hand. “In the first place, I have no intention of reporting this matter to the police.”

  Watford’s eyes narrowed and he could feel his body stiffen as the doctor spoke.

  “In the second place, I can assure you that, just as I suspected, there is not the slightest trace of filarial infection in either your urine or blood samples. Quite honestly,” Ramsay went on rather less harshly, “I wish there were.”

  Watford watched the doctor blankly, incomprehension in his eyes.

  Ramsay went on, seeming to feel his way through something unpleasant. “You see, filariasis I can treat. A regimen of Banocide or Hetrazan—and I can pretty well knock it out in a week.” The doctor’s awl-bit eyes suddenly skewered his patient. “Your blood smears came back today with a leukocyte count of 42,000/mm3, and I’m afraid that far from having anything remotely to do with filariasis, a white blood cell count of that magnitude, along with the enlarged lymphatic glands I feel in your armpits and scrotum, and the pronounced splenomegaly I picked up in your stomach yesterday, is all quite consistent with …”

  “Leukemia,” Watford murmured and closed his eyes. When he opened them once more, he was smiling.

  Ramsay found the smile disconcerting. “You knew that?”

  “No. But as you spoke it became increasingly apparent.”

  Ramsay sighed and leaned back in his chair. It occurred to him that the man whom he’d examined so meticulously over the past two days, the man whose serology he was now so intimately familiar with, he knew nothing about. It was the opacity of that smile that ultimately chilled him. “Watford. You do understand what I’m saying? You’re not confused, are you?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Doctor.”

  “With a leukocytic count elevated to the range of yours, life expectancy is not long.”

  “How long?”

  “Three to six months, if untreated.”

  The smile never faltered and that’s when it occurred to Ramsay that the man was quite out of touch.

  “And if treated?” Watford inquired. He showed no sign of fright. His voice was gentle, as if he wished to spare the doctor any unpleasantness.

  “With new drugs, chemotherapy, I’ve seen remissions that last …”

  “A year or two,” Watford completed the doctor’s sentence for him.

  If moments before Ramsay had assumed that Watford was out of touch, he now had the distinct impression that the fellow was now disconcertingly right on target.

  “Sometimes longer,” he said. “But 42,000/mm3 is quite advanced and you must get on therapy immediately.”

  “I have no money, I have no insurance. I have no prospects.” It was a sad litany, recited straight out with neither rancor nor self-pity. It was one of those rare moments of candor in the life of a pathological liar.

  “Don’t worry about any of that.” Ramsay rose stiffly to his feet. “There’s all kinds of federal money available for this sort of thing. I’ll get you on a program. But the Demerol and the funny stuff with syringes has got to stop. Also the phone calls to the dispensary. Every nurse on the floor has been alerted now, as well as the dispensary personnel. If you get so strung out that you must have Demerol, I’ll see to it that you get it. We’re going to put you on tetracycline now for the bacteremia and I’ve ordered bone marrow scans for tomorrow—” Momentarily out of breath, Ramsay paused and regarded the man oddly. “You’re sure you understand all of this, Watford? You seem so goddamned remote.”

  Shortly after the doctor left, a nurse came in with an enormous shot of tetracycline. Before she left she gave him sedatives and a glass of milk with cookies.

  “Now, Mr. Watford,” she said with her breezy, bustling efficiency. “We understand each other perfectly, don’t we? There’ll be no further problems, will there?” She pushed the tousled forelock off his brow and laughed warmly. It made him feel good, this gentle chastisement.

  The man in the bed beside him had fallen asleep. A thin Plasticine hose dangling from his nose gurgled softly into the shadows. Watford lay listening to the bubbling sound and the familiar hospital noises from the corridor outside, and contemplated his future.

  The doctor had told him that the odds were that he would die within six months. The doctor had described him as remote. To him it seemed more like indifferent with a most curious twist. The news that treatment for acute chronic myelogenous leukemia was lengthy, complicated and involved long periods of hospitalization, with only a bare hope of cure, filled him with an odd glow of pleasure. His future, however brief, for the time being was at least secure. He knew where he would be. His bed at the hospital was guaranteed. He had finally caught up with a fate he had so doggedly pursued for all these many years.

  49

  He thought that it was going to be traumatic. He thought that after he’d tendered his resignation
he would have to go out and get drunk. He looked grimly toward weeks of despondency followed by the numb listlessness of after-shock.

  Nothing of the sort occurred. It had all been so simple. No bitterness. No regrets. Not even a fleeting melancholy for the more than forty years of service. What he felt instead was a sense of relief, along with a startling sense of affection for his former colleagues.

  That third and final night Mooney hovered aloft for five hours above the rooftops. He no longer had any real expectation of success. Even the gnawing, relentless need for vindication was gone. Setting down near midnight on terra firma, and knowing he’d never have to go aloft in that hellish instrument again, was satisfaction enough.

  Then coming back to the precinct house, the cursory interrogation of a handful of human plankton, litter scooped from rooftops and hustled unceremoniously into a lineup, he knew the game was up.

  Dismissing them all, he went directly to his office, closed the door behind him and proceeded to draft his resignation.

  “Dear Captain Mulvaney,” he began, but in the next instant changed it to “Dear Larry.”

  I have had my fling. Forty years on the job is enough for any man. Particularly a tired, overweight detective whose last hunches have all fizzled.

  So far as strict police procedure goes, I realize that I have been known over the years as one to cut corners. For that I’m sorry, too. I have always had a sort of arrogance, God help me, and so far as my work goes, no one could convince me that I couldn’t tell right from wrong. I’m willing to concede that on this particular score I may have been wrong.

  So far as the Bombardier goes, I do not concede a thing. I know his method now and I thought I knew his timing. I guess I was wrong on that score. Whether or not my surveillance of rooftops from the air over the past three nights was successful is not the point. The point to remember is that the Bombardier strikes only one night a year and so far this year, he has yet to be heard from. I would be particularly vigilant over the next two weeks.

  As per my agreement with the commissioner, may this note serve as my resignation and request for retirement. In view of the kind of feelings I inspire down at Manhattan South among my brethren, I can’t say I’m sorry to be going.

  Will you kindly send me all necessary forms to file for retirement and pension?

  A copy of this letter goes to the commissioner and to the president of the PBA. Many thanks for all past favors.

  Francis (Frank) Mooney

  When he’d completed the letter, he licked the envelope flap, sealed it and took it out to Corelli, the desk sergeant.

  “Would you give that to Mulvaney in the morning?”

  Corelli took it gingerly, a look of embarrassment on his face. He knew very well what it contained.

  Mooney did not go home that evening. Instead, he called Fritzi at the Balloon and told her he would meet her at the apartment in fifteen minutes.

  She greeted him at the door with a kiss and a glass of champagne. Smiling, full of chatter, as if he’d come fresh from victory rather than defeat, she led him to the big leather chesterfield, took his shoes off and had him put his feet up. She had her own plans, she said, and proceeded to lay out a timetable for the next five years. It involved travel, a good deal of time at the track and a place out on the South Shore. It also involved Mooney, but at no time did she ever mention marriage.

  Tomorrow, they would celebrate the start of his new freedom with a drive up to Saratoga for the annual yearling auctions. There was a glint in her eye. “Yes,” she said with a charming air of fomenting mischief, that was another surprise she’d been planning. She wanted to get into breeding and racing her own horses.

  He closed his eyes and lay his head back against the soft tufted leather of the backrest. He was no longer thinking about Dowd, Mulvaney or the Manhattan South. Nor, for that matter, did he think about the shadowy figure who made his way once each year to the rooftops above the teeming city, toting with him forty pounds of lethal cinder block.

  Fritzi noted how well he looked. Fully fifty pounds lighter. More youthful, and yes, attractive. Even attractive.

  She made him a light snack and, as a treat, offered him a second glass of champagne which he characterized as “putrid.” He drank it, then asked for a cold beer which she reluctantly gave him.

  When they went to bed that evening, it occurred to him that for the first time, for as long as he could recall, for that matter, he was content. He slept like an infant.

  They were on the road by 8:00 A.M. the next day, breezing up the thru way at a brisk clip. By eight o’clock they had turned onto the Taconic Parkway at Hawthorne, and several hours later, they were nosing west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, heading for the Northway.

  All the way up Fritzi kept talking about what a shrewd investment a horse was—a hedge against inflation, a hefty tax shelter, security for the future and a pure ego trip.

  Some four hours after they’d set out, they hit the track at Saratoga and drove directly into a beer tent. Having each wolfed down a frankfurter and a diet soda, they proceeded at once to the auction hall. The auditorium was small, but what it lacked in size it more than made up for in tone. Several hundred conspicuously wealthy people all pursuing tax shelters sat about in red-plush fanned seats, encircling a raised platform covered in green astro-turf, roped off with a thick velvet cord. Atop the platform two auctioneers sat behind a semicircular desk, gaveling bids while some of the most extraordinary horseflesh Mooney had ever seen was paraded on and off the platform.

  Mooney resisted the inclination to be impressed. Instead, he affected his old standby, scorn. With her typically shrewd amusement, Fritzi noted that most of the time he was at the edge of his seat. Even she was cowed a bit by the big numbers and the august surroundings.

  Two hundred and thirty-three yearlings were to be auctioned off that day, averaging $111,159 per head, bringing in a total of $25.9 million dollars. Fritzi and Mooney watched twenty-one horses go by before they even dared to stir. The twenty-second horse to come out was a small, well-proportioned roan yearling, Capricorn out of Courtesan. Born in Kentucky at Saybrook Farms, his catalogue number 76 shot up on the big electric tote board at the rear of the auditorium.

  Fritzi leaned over and whispered, “What do you think?”

  “What are you gonna do with him?”

  “Race him, what d’ya think?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  The auctioneer opened the bid at $15,000. The tote board flashed the figure immediately, only to bounce up to $20,000 at the next bid.

  “Look at those swell legs and his head, Mooney. Come on—What do you think?”

  Fritzi’s whisper grew slightly more shrill. The attendant led the animal smartly round the little roped-off ring.

  “Twenty-five thousand,” the auctioneer remarked almost inaudibly and the board lights flashed at the rear.

  “It’s your money,” Mooney mumbled.

  “I know whose money it is, for Chrissake. What d’ya think of him?”

  “You must be nuts,” Mooney whispered, but he was sweating heavily.

  “Thirty thousand,” the auctioneer announced.

  “Come on, Mooney,” Fritzi shot him an exasperated glance. “What do you make of this animal?”

  Mooney’s mind was whirling. His eyes swarmed over the horse’s major points—feet, ears, legs, tail, head, chest. He was slightly smaller than average on height, Mooney noted, but exceedingly graceful and marked by a reserve that was unusual in yearlings. He liked the way the ears stood erect, and the attitude of the tail. He liked also the manageability of the animal, the way it turned within the confinement of that narrow space. It was not docility or lack of spirit either, but rather an instinctive comprehension of what was expected of him.

  “What about the chest?” Fritzi whispered.

  “Narrow.”

  “I think so, too.”

  Thirty-five thousand was the figure now flashing on the board.

  “C
ome on, Mooney,” Fritzi fairly hissed. “This is costing me money. What d’ya say?”

  “What d’ya need it for? It’s a lot of work.”

  “Don’t worry about the work. Do you like the horse?”

  “Forty thousand,” the auctioneer murmured softly.

  “It’s a lot of money,” Mooney whispered.

  “Forget about the money. What about the horse?”

  He cast one last rueful gaze at the animal. “Okay,” he said finally and closed his eyes. “I’ll take half the action.”

  “Forty-five thousand,” Fritzi bounded up instantly, then winced at the volume of her voice. There was an interminable pause while they looked about waiting for someone to top their bid.

  Then came the dull clap of a gavel. “Sold to the lady. Third row, aisle three. Forty-five thousand.” Fritzi appeared a bit awed by the magnitude of what she’d just committed. It all seemed so rash now, and irrevocable.

  “You didn’t mean what you said?” she asked, as they moved toward the rear to fill out papers and proffer checks.

  “About what?”

  “About half the action.”

  “I certainly did. I want fifty percent of that animal.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mooney. Where are you going to get twenty-two thousand, five hundred bucks?”

  “I’m retired now, don’t forget. I can take a loan out on my pension.”

  “That’s dumb. I won’t let you.”

  “Who the hell are you to tell me?”

  She glanced sharply into his eyes, gauging the depth of his determination. “In that case, you’re in for ten percent.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Okay, fifteen. Not a penny more. Don’t argue. Come on.” She took his arm. “The officials are waiting for us.” Suddenly she was overcome with excitement. “We’ll have to arrange transportation. He’ll need a groom and stable. A trainer. Oh, Mooney, did you see that little guy prancing around up there? He’s ours. Isn’t he nifty?”

  “Nifty,” Mooney muttered, already overcome with misgivings. Her face was flushed, he noted, and her eyes fairly beaming.