Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  Mooney scribbled. “If you saw the guy in a lineup or a photograph, you think you could identify him?”

  “Sure,” Watford nodded excitedly. “Sure I could.”

  “You told me before that the guy said he’d had some kind of accident. An open manhole or something?”

  “That’s right. He’d been walking in the street, he said, and the utility people had quit work for the night and gone off and left the manhole cover off. I told the guy I would have sued for a million.”

  “And the guy fell through the hole, you say?” Mooney pressed harder. “Did you ever think the guy was lying? That maybe he got injured some other way?”

  Watford stared blankly back at him. “Nope.”

  “Where was his injury? Do you recall?”

  “I think I told you the first time you came to see me. It was his leg. Took thirty-two stitches to close him up.”

  His string of questions run out, Mooney experienced a small rush of desperation. “Was he discharged before or after you?”

  Watford had a ghastly recollection of himself in physician’s gown, lunging down a corridor, the thud of footsteps in pursuit, hoarse angry shouts bellowing from behind. The last question had reignited his terrifying suspicion. Suddenly he was antagonistic. “How come you need to know all this?”

  Mooney reared back slightly, a light whistling noise issuing from his nose. “I’d just like to know if anyone came while you were there. Did he have visitors?”

  “No. There were no visitors.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Of course I’m certain. I was there, wasn’t I?”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t go getting all hot and bothered. I’m just trying to get some additional facts.”

  “I’m sick,” Watford whined at the detective as if he were responsible for the condition. But in the next instant, he was apologetic and a little frightened. “I’m sick, you see. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve got filariasis. Bancroftian filariasis. Picked it up in the army. In ‘Nam.”

  Mooney’s head tilted sideways. “I thought you said you had leukemia.”

  “That’s what they tell me. But I don’t believe them. They’re all liars. I’m sure this is a relapse of my filariasis.”

  Something in the man’s eyes at that moment caused the detective to set his pencil down. “Why would they lie to you?”

  “They do that in hospitals,” Watford confided in a whisper. “They’re trained to lie. Particularly if you’re a veteran. The government doesn’t want to pay the benefits, you see.”

  “Yeah, I see.” Mooney’s spirit sagged. He was just about ready to rip out all the pages of Watford’s deposition and tear them in shreds. They were the ramblings of a madman. “Well, I guess that’s all the questions I’ve got. In case your memory sparks, you know where to find me.”

  “You gave me your number the last time we spoke.”

  Mooney scribbled his office and home numbers onto the pad, then tore out the page. He lay it down on the night table beside Watford. “Just in case something comes to mind.”

  “Sure,” Watford cried eagerly. “Sure. I’ll call. I’d love to see you get this guy. He sure didn’t look like any killer to me.”

  Mooney had a final impression of the man lying in bed in his gown. With his wide, staring, childlike face, he seemed pathetic and unbearably alone. “I hope you feel better soon.” He took the cool, smooth palm in his hand.

  For a terrible moment Watford clung to the hand and wouldn’t let it go. “Listen,” he said, “I didn’t do anything wrong. Honest.”

  55

  The light in the room was bright but Watford’s vision was dim and hazy. He’d had his eggs and toast and juice and the nurses, following Dr. Ramsay’s directions, had given him his morning allotment of Demerol.

  Now, as was always the case after taking the drug, he was drowsy and wanted to sleep. Several nurses moved about the room on gummed soles that squeaked over the vinyl tile floors. They were straightening up, changing sheets on the bed beside Watford’s, where a man just operated on for bleeding ulcers lay with a plastic hose inserted into his vein. From time to time a bubble of glucose slid audibly down the tube into his arm.

  Knowing that Watford liked to drift off watching TV, the nurse had put the set on softly so he might watch the morning talk shows without disturbing his neighbor.

  Through drowsy, heavy-lidded eyes, Watford watched the blue-green cathode phantoms floating eerily above him, their voices coming at him over long, cold distances. On the screen he watched an ambulance and police cars and then several men lugging a heavy canvas bag between them to a waiting van.

  The television reporter, a pert, all-American girl, stood in the foreground with morning breezes lashing wisps of hair about her face. In breathy, portentous whispers, she explained what had occurred there. It appeared that someone had broken into an art gallery somewhere uptown. Burglar alarms had gone off. Thieves or a single thief, she couldn’t be certain (Watford’s eyes were nearly closed now and he listened with only one ear), had been interrupted by the police during the act. When asked to surrender, they, or he (they couldn’t say if there were more than one), refused, trying instead to escape. One was subsequently killed.

  “Quintius,” the pert young thing murmured breathlessly. “Mr. Peter Quintius … owner of … father of … internationally renowned collector … dealer. When notified at his Long Island estate last night …”

  Watford turned drowsily on his pillow and gazed blankly at the screen. Between the moist cage of his lashes he saw for a moment a face. It was strikingly handsome in a haggard way. Full of some ageless dignifying sorrow.

  The face hovered unsteadily on the screen before Watford’s woozy vision. A voice, hoarse, broken with grief, replied numbly to questions. Then, like some troubled wraith, was gone.

  Watford’s eyes had opened fully by then, still focused upon an afterimage that persisted, even as the bright, perky mask of the reporter had reoccupied the screen, signing herself off and transferring the show back to the studio.

  Watford had a slightly baffled feeling, like a man jarred rudely out of deep sleep. He had no idea why he continued to watch the screen expectantly. In the next moment he shrugged, rolled over and fell soundly asleep.

  Late the next afternoon one of the nurses brought him a newspaper. It was her own copy of the Daily News which she delivered to him unfailingly each day. Watford loved the Daily News. It embodied for him some vestige of his childhood when, as a small boy, he looked forward each Sunday to the comic strips—Dick Tracy, Popeye, Gasoline Alley—although most of the old strips were gone now and what remained lacked the color and engaging good spirits of the old favorites.

  He read slowly from one page to the next, his mouth lipping words as he read, stories about small, unheroic wars in distant places, labor strife, sordid little page 4 stories reeking of treachery and deceit—a paternity suit involving a cinema star; the body of a numbers runner found pulped and bloody in the trunk of a car in Staten Island; a Long Island heiress who drove an ice pick into the heart of her philandering husband. Watford devoured everything on the page. As always he experienced a sharp twinge of affinity for the victims and losers. Next was a story about a young man shot to death attempting to break into a prominent uptown gallery. “… the victim identified as 26-year-old William Quintius, paradoxically the son of the …”

  “Peter Quintius,” Watford uttered the name aloud without reaction. Inset was a photograph of Mr. Quintius himself at the crime site being questioned by the police.

  “Peter Quintius.” He murmured the words once more under his breath, then vaguely, he recalled the television news early that morning, the pretty young reporter standing before the gallery, interviewing the tall, dignified gentleman, caught that moment full-face by the camera. A stricken, disheveled figure beleaguered by reporters.

  “Peter Quintius,” he said once more, and in his mind’s eye he saw a face. It lay propped on a pillow
in three-quarter view surmounted by a crown of thick, white hair, partially eclipsed in shadow.

  “What’s your name?” he heard himself ask. The face turned laboriously toward him on the pillow. The large eyes fluttered open.

  “Boyd,” came the hoarse reply. “My name is Anthony Boyd.” Not Quintius. It was Boyd. Just as the police had said. “My name is Anthony Boyd.” Unable to believe, yet unable to discount, he repeated the name over and over, like a man trying to shake something sticky and unpleasant from his hand.

  My God. How strange. Watford reread the story, pity welling up within him for the man he’d known only briefly in a hospital room two years before. The son killed like that, breaking into his own father’s place of business. And the father having to come down. Making the identification and all that. Imagine the shame. The pity of it. His own son. My God. It’s him, all right. That’s him. A. Boyd. A. Boyd. Not P. Quintius. A. Boyd.

  He laughed to himself, then suddenly broke off, recalling the detective who had come to him. Just two days ago. How strange. How come I couldn’t recall then? It was the face. Seeing the face like that. How strange. My God. I’ve got to call. I’ve got to get in touch with that policeman, what’s his name? He snatched at the strip of paper. His eyes swam over the letters. “Mooney.” That’s it. Captain Mooney. My God, I’ve got to call.

  He sat up quickly, nearly dislodging a tumbler of juice, then lunged for the phone beside the bed. Dialing, his brain spun and his fingers trembled over the digit holes. Then suddenly he put the receiver back on the hook and replaced the phone on the table beside him. He took a deep breath.

  “My God.” His heart thumped. I must be mad. As it is he already suspects me of the Cardinal Pharmacy. And then there’s Myrtle and the bank robbery in Kansas City. Now all I need is this. If I tell this Mooney about Quintius, or Boyd, or whatever, he’ll think I’m mad. Possibly even an accomplice of some kind to the son. Of course. That’s it. They suspect me of being involved with the son in the burglary and—Oh, but that’s mad.

  His voice trailed off as he caught the note of wild irrationality in it. Beside his bed on the night table was a pill and a tepid glass of milk. Cramming the pill into his mouth, he gulped it down, then fell back heavily onto the pillows and clamped his eyes shut.

  Soon, he knew, the pain would start. That thin wire noose of constriction banding his head from temple to temple, gradually radiating outward to the ears, rising upward round the parietal and occipital areas, reaching down finally like steel fingers and seizing him by the scruff of the neck. He cringed in anticipation of it. The nurse going past in the hall heard the infantile pathetic whimper.

  56

  Having restored Mooney to full captaincy, Chief Mulvaney felt certain that the mystery of the phantom Bombardier was now safely out of his hair. It was Mooney’s problem now and let him take the heat for it. The Bombardier was still at large, the furor went on unabated, and Chief Mulvaney could not resist a twinge of spiteful delight. Mooney had failed before and he would fail again. Mooney was a sham. He knew no more about the phantom Bombardier than anyone else. How he had managed to euchre the commissioner and the whole force into believing that he had the inside track on the case, and had himself anointed God’s foremost expert in the matter was all part of the man’s colossal malarkey.

  Mulvaney was right, of course. After five years of special investigations, tens of thousands of dollars in overtime and special requisitions, the department was no closer to an arrest now than they were the night the first cinder block dropped from the sky.

  In terms of hard, objective data, Mooney had little to show. A pseudonym, a canceled insurance policy with a dummy address, a two-year-old hospital record, and now incomprehensibly, a link between the pseudonymous A. Boyd and a large, ungainly cactus that cast off huge fragrant blooms one night a year.

  It was early June in New York City. For Fritzi there was now the lively, spirited yearling Gumshoe, who occupied her waking thoughts and lured her almost daily to the track to watch the morning workouts, talk with the trainer, consult with the vet.

  There were supplies to order, expenditures and decisions to make. Increasingly, she sought Mooney’s guidance in these matters. On the one hand, he loved every bit of it. But, increasingly, he found the demands of the investigation on his time greater than he could fulfill. More disturbing, he sensed the department’s mocking cynicism and that made him crave vindication as never before.

  The truth was Mooney was stalemated. Of course, he could not admit that to anyone, least of all himself. The investigation, after much hoopla, had ground to a sputtering halt. Now Mooney and his team of special investigators were reduced to the indignity of backtracking and treading water. Hours were spent scouring through years of dusty police files. There were the computers, too, and the FBI master file in Washington, D.C., with its list of over a million offenders.

  Instinctively, Mooney knew all this to be futile— the hum and buzz of expensive new technology to mask the fact that, in the absence of any truly significant new evidence, the investigation was bankrupt.

  Up on the rooftop overlooking 161 Street, sipping at a beer he had sneaked, Mooney gazed across at the molten glow of floodlights in the sky above the stadium where the Yankees were playing Baltimore. From over the Grand Concourse the steady roar of traffic wafted upward from below and occasionally he could hear the sharp crack of a bat impacting on a ball and the roar of a weekend crowd like a cataract of rushing water.

  Leo, Virgo, Cepheus and the Lynx wheeled overhead. Bootes, like a bright kite, scudded low above the rooftops. Even the stars failed to console him. They filled him, instead, with a sense of desolation and reminded him that he was sixty-two. Implausibly, too, they reminded him of Fritzi and the rancorous thought that it had taken him a long time to find her and, having found her, she was almost too much too late. It was just another one of those wildly promising but heartbreakingly unplayable hands that life had always delighted in dealing him.

  About to leave, he turned sharply, his foot colliding with something on the rooftop. He reached down, groping along the tar until his fingers found a smallish plank of 2” by 4”, undoubtedly left there by workmen repairing the roof.

  He stood for a time hefting it in his hand. The wood was light, wide-grained, probably pine. He appeared to be pondering something. In the next moment, slowly, almost dreamily, he walked back over to the edge, then inexplicably flung the plank far out into the inky void. A second or two later a sharp clatter wafted up from below, followed at once by a long muted roar from the stadium.

  He hovered there a moment at the ledge, perplexed, peering hard down into the blackened alleyway below. He had the look of a man trying to recover something he had lost.

  Ultimately, his thoughts returned to the Bombardier, a shadowy figure of diabolic patience who knew how to wait, a man who knew how to hang back and let his trail cool. The stars looked down on that man now, whoever he was, surely as they looked down on Mooney. Even as Mooney pondered that, his eye fastened on the bright glow of Arcturus in the tail of Bootes, and in his mind’s eye, he triangulated the points between himself, the great star, and the Bombardier, thus mystically linking all three together.

  57

  “As of yet, the commissioner is harnessed to an exceedingly hot seat. Between the mayor’s office and the cries of public outrage, the department finds itself, as never before, beleaguered by proliferating crime and meaningless violence, the most recent example of which is perhaps the most heinous. Mr. Willie Krauss and his young bride of several days, honeymooning here from …”

  “Quintius,” Watford murmured and thrust his newspaper aside. Surely it couldn’t be the same man, he thought. Not that quiet fellow in the bed beside me at the hospital. Surely the police are wrong. I just can’t believe … And why in heaven’s name … So cruel, so stupid.

  For several days now, the name had racketed about in his head …

  “Quintius.” He rolled the word around in his m
outh as if he were tasting it. He thought next of the detective, the big, rugged Irish face, the eyes regarding him shrewdly. “Maybe I should … This way, if I don’t, I’m an accessory. Concealing evidence, I mean. No. I mean—I just can’t afford to get involved now. What if the hospital or Ramsay got wind that the police were talking to me? What then? I’d be out on the street before I could bat an eye.”

  He didn’t want to leave the hospital, he thought. “Not ever again. No sir— Not ever …”

  “Hello, Charles.”

  Watford looked up into the gaunt, tired smile of Dr. Ramsay, who slipped down into the chair beside Watford’s bed. “You getting enough exercise? Walking round the esplanade outside, like I told you?”

  “Sometimes,” Watford replied evasively.

  “I can see that you don’t. Just from the way your eyes are avoiding mine. You should, you know, Charles.”

  Lately the doctor had taken to calling him Charles, or sometimes in less guarded moments, Charley. Watford disapproved of that sort of informality, particularly since he’d never invited the doctor to call him by his first name.

  “What you need is exercise, Charles. And fresh air.” The physician’s gaze lingered on him for a strangely protracted moment. The eyes were probing, yet uncertain, as if he weighted the wisdom of pursuing their talk on any deeper level. “Don’t you have any family?” he asked suddenly.

  “My mother and father are dead.”

  “Any sisters or brothers? You never seem to have visitors.”

  “I have a sister and a brother-in-law and a niece in Pittsburgh.”

  “Do they know about you?”

  Watford appeared troubled. “Me?”

  “Your health, I mean. Your condition. The fact that you’ve been hospitalized.”

  “I wrote my sister several weeks ago and told her.”