Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Essentially, what you’ve got here is a man in tremendous psychological distress.”

  “I knew he was lying to me most of the time,” Mooney said. “I can’t say I got the feeling of psychological distress. You don’t think he’s dangerous?” Mooney asked.

  “He could be. There’s a great deal of anger in poor Watford. But since he’s not the sort to externalize it, be turns it inward against himself. That manifests itself in all these crippling migraines he suffers and in self-punishment, such as infecting his own bloodstream with dirty needles, and inducing sickness. In medicine we call that Munchausen’s Syndrome.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Munchausen,” Ramsay smiled in spite of himself. “After Baron Munchausen, the infamous eighteenth-century liar. Watford’s a classic study of Munchausen’s Syndrome.”

  “You say these people pretend to be sick?”

  “Not pretend. They are sick. They induce real symptoms in themselves.”

  “Just to get into a hospital.”

  “More or less.”

  Mooney smiled oddly. “Ain’t that a kick? A hospital? Why, in God’s name?”

  “Simply because they feel more secure being cared for on the inside than having to cope on the outside. Hospitals are great surrogate mothers for some.” Ramsay’s pencil scratched randomly on the pad beside him. “I got very interested in Watford’s odyssey. Once he told me all about his wartime experiences, so I got hold of his VA records.”

  “He was in the service?”

  “He was, but it was not the way he tells it.” Ramsay grinned at the detective’s growing bewilderment. “To hear him tell it, he was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Actually, he never left the States. The truth is he was in the Coast Guard. Served as a medic on an isolated lighthouse off the coast of Washington. Pity, because there’s a fellow who’d have probably been happier in a theater of war. In the lighthouse he was just bored and depressed. Then one day, to escape the tedium, he faked an attack of acute appendicitis. Just got up one morning and started to complain of sharp pains in the side and feelings of nausea. As a medic he had access to the drug locker. He started taking ipecac to induce vomiting. Then, with a stolen hypodermic, he injected small amounts of saliva subcutaneously in the popliteal area.”

  “Come again?” Mooney cocked an ear toward the doctor.

  “Popliteal—the area behind the knee. Wonderful spot for the spread of infection. Within a day he developed an abscess and became febrile. Also, his white blood cell count shot up. A local physician was called in and Watford was savvy enough to be able to fake rebound tenderness in the correct anatomical location. The physician put him right into the hospital for an appendectomy.”

  Ramsay took a certain pleasure in recounting the tale. “When he was telling me all this, he roared with delight, particularly at the part where the surgeon, postoperatively, described to him his ‘badly inflamed appendix.’ He thought that was a hoot.” Just then the phone rang. Ramsay signaled the detective to stay put while he murmured dosage directions into the phone. When he’d finished he looked up. “Where was I?”

  “At an inflamed appendix.”

  “Right. Well, that was all fine for Watford. While he was hospitalized he had a grand time. He loves being fussed over. But the moment he got better the Coast Guard sent him right back out to the lighthouse. Once again he was in the middle of Puget Sound, stuck there with the long hours and the boredom and depression. That’s where he learned to fight depression with Demerol. There again, his access to the medicine locker served him in good stead. Eventually, the CO of the lighthouse noticed that larger and larger reorders of Demerol were being requisitioned. He also noticed that they were being used up at a disturbing rate. The source of the reorders and their disappearance were eventually traced to Watford and he was discharged.”

  “For misappropriation of drugs?” Mooney asked. “No. It was actually for enuresis. Bed-wetting. The drug thefts they could handle,” Ramsay rattled on. “It was the bed-wetting that actually sprang him.”

  Mooney looked away, surprised at his own embarrassment.

  “The Armed Services have plenty of experience with guys looking for medical discharges. For reasons that should be obvious, bed-wetters, once they’re spotted, are quickly mustered out.”

  “And Watford was that?”

  “Possibly. But knowing as much about him now as I do, I doubt it. Actually, I think he was just clever enough to know how to fake a good case of it. He wanted to get off that rock in Puget Sound so he kept pissing in his bed until, after eight months, they just got tired and let him go with a medical discharge.

  “After the Coast Guard he must have thought that living in civilian life was going to be a piece of cake. It didn’t turn out that way. He got a few jobs with airlines but he couldn’t hack that. The regimentation, the regular hours, the performance reports. Before he knew it, he was stealing flight tickets and travel documents issued only to top executives. And he got caught there, too. He was fired by Pan Am but they never pressed charges. They just let him go. But, with something like that on his employment record, another airline wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t get any work at all. That’s when it occurred to him that prison might be his salvation. Almost as good as the hospital.”

  “That’s one helluva salvation.”

  Ramsay’s brow shot up. “Better, isn’t it, then the hassle of life on the outside. The daily scrounge for shelter and fodder. So he contrived to get himself arrested.”

  Mooney sighed and pushed the brim of his hat back on his head. By that time he’d given up being amazed.

  “He started passing bad checks. Seven thousand dollars’ worth. It’s all in the VA report. For that he was rewarded with two years on Rikers Island.”

  “This is all in the VA record?” Mooney asked. “Pretty much. The rest is easy enough to put together.”

  “Pathetic.”

  “Pathetic,” Ramsay nodded in agreement, then continued. “And he enjoyed prison. Lots of leisure time and no responsibilities. He spent most of his days studying medical and law books in the prison library. Merck Manual. Torts and civil law. That sort of thing. Eventually, he became adept in the terminology of both fields. But for a clever, enterprising fellow like our Charles, this was simply not enough. He was very shortly bored out of his mind and started looking for new kinds of trouble to get into. So one day he swallowed a spoon in order to escape to the soft environment of the prison hospital.”

  “Good Christ. A spoon? How the hell—”

  “Don’t ask me. The prison doctor couldn’t figure it out either. Anyway, they got it out, but he was right back there the next week. This time he’d incised the skin of the abdominal wall with a sharp tool. Claimed he’d accidentally become impaled on it while in the prison workshop. Just to give zest to the diagnostic picture, he pulled the old saliva-behind-the-knee stunt again. Fever and leukocytosis induced by the unnoticed abscess and his expertly feigned signs of peritoneal inflammation got him a laparotomy which revealed no disease but resulted in the secondary gain of a secure hospital environment for several weeks. There he was able to get all the Demerol he wanted. He learned to counterfeit hematuria by introducing a few drops of blood into his urine sample. This was always good for a few days in the infirmary. After that you couldn’t stop him.” Ramsay was beaming with wicked delight. “You have to give it to the man. He has imagination and flair, our Charles.”

  Mooney shook his head in wonderment. “Beats me how he could con everyone like that.”

  “Doctors can be incredibly gullible. His VA records show admission to hospitals all over the country—Chicago, San Diego, Denver, Madison, Wilkes-Barre, Kansas City, New York. You name it. He’s been there. The VA estimates he’s been hospitalized a total of nearly four hundred times over the past dozen years. But the strangest, most ironic t wist of the story is the marriage.”

  Mooney sat back in his chair. “I didn’t realize he was
married.”

  “Well, he’s not any longer. But he was at the ripe old age of seventeen. He entered a common-law marriage with a woman of twenty-five. He told me he didn’t love her at all. Actually, she revolted him, but he married her just to rescue her from a dismal home situation. Within a few months after their marriage, while pregnant, she died of acute leukemia.”

  Mooney made a slight startled sound. “Which he claims to have now.”

  “And he does,” Ramsay said emphatically. “There’s no faking that, although in his mind he’s faking this just like all the other times. But this time it’s for real. I don’t think he quite grasps it yet, but he is truly dying.”

  Ramsay, his head tilted to one side, caught the detective’s dismay. “May I ask why you wanted to see him, Captain?”

  “He gave me some information the other day.”

  “About what?”

  “About a man he shared a hospital room with two years ago—a man who may just be the key to several murders in the city.”

  “And, now, of course, you’re concerned about the reliability of his information?”

  Mooney turned his frank, questioning gaze on the doctor. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  Ramsay shrugged and rose to indicate the conclusion of their talk. “Probably. It’s like the little boy crying wolf, isn’t it? Who knows? Maybe this time the wolfs really there.”

  62

  It was several days before Mooney thought again of the Watford lead. Ironically, while the detective now believed none of Watford’s revelations, he was strangely unable to put them aside. And then too, Peter Quintius was disturbingly, uncannily close to the profile Baum, the police psychiatrist, had given him months back.

  Four days later Mooney was in an unmarked police car, driving out over the Queensboro Bridge. The Manhattan skyline dropped away behind him; the dark, grim jungle gym of elevated IND tracks loomed up ahead, raining down the thunderous clatter of subway cars, racketing their way through the cobbled, motley landscape of Queens. Once more he was on his way to Kew Gardens. He took no driver with him. Nor had he asked Defasio to come along. His skepticism was such that he was unwilling to risk the possibility of having any of the special task force see him make a jackass of himself.

  Then, at last, Watford was there standing at the door of the brick row house on the quiet, tree-lined street with the leaves falling noiselessly all about in the first chill of autumn. This time he was not in his bathrobe and pajamas, but in overalls and wearing gloves, a look of momentary startlement upon his face, followed by something amused, and half-shrewd, as if he’d known all along the detective would be back.

  “Been working out in the garden,” Watford apologized for his appearance and led him back into the musty little sitting room where all the clocks ticked with their sharp implacable assertion of the preeminence of time.

  Would he pare to go into town with him? the detective asked. Now, right then and there. To the gallery. Up to Sixty-seventh Street to see this Quintius fellow for himself. He had not intended it, but it had come out in the form of a challenge.

  “Sure,” Watford replied with disconcerting calm. Mooney would have preferred a response somewhat more guarded.

  In a matter of moments Watford had changed and they were back in the car, tooling west down Queens Boulevard and back over the bridge. All the way there Watford chatted easily about his plans for the future. My God, Mooney thought, the fool is dying and at the same time keeps making plans for the future.

  Slightly past noon they stood outside the gallery in precisely the same spot Mooney had stood a week before. This time the gallery appeared to be empty except for a tall, stocky man in plaids who sat behind a desk.

  Mooney had simply taken it for granted that Mr. Quintius would, of course, be there, walking freely about, on display as it were, for their special convenience. They would simply stand outside the window and Watford would either confirm or rescind his identification.

  They waited twenty minutes but nothing of the sort occurred. The gentleman in the plaids continued to sit at the desk in the rear, riffling through papers, pausing from time to time to study some more attentively than others.

  Watford grew restless. “When is he going to come?”

  “Any minute. Just wait.”

  They waited another ten minutes. The man at the desk appeared to be blithely unaware of the fact that two men had been standing outside the window, peering in, for at least a half hour.

  “I don’t think he’s here,” Watford frowned.

  “He’s here all right. Just hold your horses.”

  “Why can’t we just go in and ask for him?”

  The idea, direct, uncomplicated, would never have occurred to Mooney. He stood there ransacking his mind for reasons why it would be imprudent to take Watford’s suggestion. Unorthodox police procedure, to say the least. But then again, wasn’t the whole situation unorthodox? “Okay,” he conceded finally, “why not? If you’re game, I am. All they can do is throw us out and charge me with harassment. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get fired.”

  Walking in, Watford trailing at his heel, Mooney felt slightly foolish. He fairly glided across the parqueted floors. The cushioned prosthetic shoes he wore felt spongy going over the thick pile Kirman area carpets. The air about him smelled faintly of turpentine, pipe smoke and the moist, fecund smell unique to large commercial greenhouses.

  “May I help you, gentlemen?” The man at the desk rose as they approached him. Mooney took command at once.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Quintius.”

  “Which Mr. Quintius? There are two.”

  Mooney noted the cautious skepticism in the man’s eyes as he sized them up.

  “Mr. Peter Quintius,” Mooney replied.

  “Ah.” There was a pause while the gentleman seated at the desk continued to take their measure. “I’m Frederick Quintius, his son. Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Captain Mooney,” the detective replied and opened his shield for identification. He didn’t bother to introduce Watford. The younger Quintius merely assumed he was another policeman.

  “Is this in connection with my late brother?” Mooney noted the man’s eyes shifting and the mind behind them whirling quickly. “In a manner of speaking. Is Mr. Quintius here?”

  “In the back. One moment, please. I’ll see if he’s available.”

  They waited out front beside the desk, shifting awkwardly on their feet. Mooney could hear muted voices conversing through the open door. A few moments later Frederick Quintius reappeared. He was followed by the towering presence Mooney recognized at once as Peter Quintius.

  At this point Mooney had already strayed dangerously far from standard police procedure. Even as the two men approached, it occurred to him that he had absolutely no idea where to start. His heart leaped, his mind went blank and he experienced panic.

  Providentially, however, Watford did not. The moment he saw Quintius his face lit up with boyish warmth. Before Mooney could stop him, he moved forward, smiling, his hand outstretched to meet Quintius.

  “Hello, Mr. Quintius. Remember me? Charles Watford. We shared a hospital room two years ago.”

  There was a pause and evident confusion. Mooney saw the man frown and take an involuntary step backward as Watford grasped his hand and pumped it enthusiastically. Fully a whole head taller than Watford, Quintius gazed down speechless at the affectionate puppy tugging at his hand. “I beg your pardon.”

  Watford beamed. He appeared breathless and overjoyed, as though he were waiting to be embraced. “It’s me, Charles Watford. You remember. Beth Israel. In the bed beside you. You’d injured your leg. Fell through an open manhole or something.”

  Something flashed in Quintius’s eye. Mooney couldn’t call it fear. It was more a flash of sudden guardedness; the woodchuck scurrying into its hole. In the next instant it was gone and another mask had replaced it.

  “I saw you on television the other night,” Watford rattled on cheerfully. “I w
as sorry to hear about your son. It was horrible. Tragic.”

  Quintius’s brow lowered, his face darkened. Watford appeared not to notice. He went on, offering condolences and paying his respects. Quintius’s withering stare impeded him not in the least. At that moment Watford took on, in Mooney’s jaded eyes, a new, and unexpected stature.

  “There’s some mistake,” Quintius said.

  “There’s no mistake at all,” Watford cordially persisted.

  Quintius stiffened. “I don’t know you.”

  “Of course you do. It’s Charles Watford. Charley. I used to sit by your bed and chat with you. You were having a lot of pain and …”

  Clearly agitated, Quintius’s voice rose. “I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Look here,” Frederick Quintius blustered for ward. “You said you were here to talk about my brother.”

  “I don’t recall saying any such thing,” Mooney replied.

  Not the sort to take control of a situation gracefully, the younger Quintius stiffened and grew red. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

  Mooney turned from him. He hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Instead his eyes were riveted on Quintius.

  Watford continued to badger the man with smiles. His irrepressible goodwill put Mr. Quintius off-balance, but still he did not appear guilty. This was not the face of a murderer tracked to his lair, Mooney thought. This was not cinder blocks dropped from rooftops into the midst of unsuspecting crowds. This was not sleazy or craven or loutish or malicious. This was the face of civilization at its summit—refined, sensitive, urbane, the apex of the evolutionary process.

  “Look for gray flannel,” Dr. Baum had said. “You’ll have to go now,” Frederick Quintius persisted, “or I’ll have to call the police.”

  With his bulky frame he started to crowd them toward the door. Watford was nearly trampled underfoot, but Mooney, who had yielded several feet, suddenly stiffened and thrust the young man back at arm’s length.