The Dinosaur Chronicles

by Erhardt, Joseph

  Brill opened Drawer A. Her fingers whipped over the folders even as her mind registered colors and patient numbers. Drawer A slammed shut and Drawer B opened. The process was repeated. Once she broke a nail and muttered an oath. Twenty minutes later, still in Drawer S, the bell for shift change rang through the building and she knew she had to get back to her station. But she had seen enough.

  Except for the files in Drawer G, all gray folders fell within patient numbers from about 600 to 1000, and all of the oldest patients, except for the files in Drawer G, had yellow folders.

  Brill didn’t know what it all meant, but she was certain of one thing: During a time when the Institute was buying and using gray folders, Daniel Greavey’s records had been reworked.

  —

  As Nurse Supervisor, Brill’s shift overlapped, by an hour, that of the next shift supervisor. This was so she could pass on information of a critical nature, and so that the transition to second staff went smoothly. A similar overlap existed for third staff’s arrival.

  Most days Brill did not need to stay the full hour. Most days she was out the door at ten minutes past four. Today she made it a point to dawdle: she cleaned and dusted her desk, she filed her nails, and she indulged herself two cups of coffee that stayed hot because she wasn’t called off in the middle of a sip to address one problem or another.

  Brill’s behavior did not go unnoticed by the second staff supervisor.

  “Are you waiting for a taxi, or is it time for my annual review, and is Dame Schiffler having you check up on me?”

  Brill, coffee in hand, looked up at Ogust Dennever. Nursing was still a mainly feminine occupation, but Ogust had broken the gender barrier years ago. The staff liked him because he treated them fairly, and they liked him because he kept his hands to himself.

  Brill grinned. “Waiting for a telephone call, Ogee.”

  “It must be important. You look relaxed, but I’m surprised you haven’t filed your nails to a point.”

  Another reason Ogee was good at his job was his ability to read people. Normally Brill would tell him what was going on, but because she didn’t know herself what was going on, she demurred. “Tell me something, Ogee. You’ve been here a while. Why were the patient folders in Drawer G reworked?”

  Ogee Dennever sat on the edge of Brill’s desk. Blue eyes twinkled under a balding scalp. “I wasn’t aware they had been.”

  “I think it was some time ago, when the Institute was using the old gray folders for patient records.”

  “I’m old, but not that ancient. Must have been under Carfack’s regime.”

  Aloysius Carfack had been the Institute’s first director. It was he who had set the Institute’s monetary priorities: staff and patients first, everything else secondhand.

  Brill asked, “Do you know if he’s still alive?”

  “Last I heard, yes. He retired in town, you know, because retirees have cafeteria privileges. It saved him money.” Ogee scratched his head. “I don’t know if he’s been by recently, though.”

  “Is he in the phone book?”

  “Should be.”

  The phone on Brill’s desk rang, and Brill scooped it out of its cradle. “Brill here ... Okay, Dmitri. I’m on my way.”

  Brill grabbed her handbag and a brown paper sack and rose to leave. Ogee wore a puzzled frown on his face.

  “Dmitri is married, Gladys.”

  Brill laughed. “He’s also the guard at the 7 South station.”

  Before Ogee could say any more, Brill was skipping down the hall at a pace normally seen only in bus and train terminals. She took the stairs, not the elevator, and arrived at the visitor station eight steps ahead of Eleanor Greavey.

  By this time Brill had slowed her pace to an everyday stride. The arrangement she had made with the 7 South guard to warn her when Eleanor Greavey left had given Brill just enough time to intercept the woman.

  Because the visitor station was just inside the main entrance of the Institute, Brill’s presence could not be taken as unusual, though in practice she used a guarded, employees-only exit to the parking lot.

  Brill turned her head, apparently in a absent-minded gesture. “Oh! Ms. Greavey, how fortunate to see you again.”

  That was playing things thick, thought Brill, but here was a chance for Eleanor Greavey to pass a test.

  Eleanor Greavey’s smile this time was less perfect than the one she had worn for the meeting in the 7 South commons. “Nurse Brill. I see you’ve worked late. The hospital’s not short-handed these days, is it?”

  The fact that the Greavey woman knew Brill’s shift hours was not lost on the nurse. Also the fact that Eleanor Greavey was trying to steer the conversation into neutral waters. “Oh, no,” Brill said. “It’s just been a little busy today. Do you know, I wanted to come back to the commons to show you the picture of my niece? You remember I mentioned her to you?”

  As Eleanor Greavey’s brow furrowed, Brill pulled a portrait of a young girl, perhaps five or six years old, from the brown paper sack. It was set under glass in a stainless-steel frame with a tethered flap in back, the type of frame that could sit, unsupported, atop a desk. Brill handed the woman the portrait.

  Eleanor Greavey took the picture and said, slowly, “Gladys, she’s a beautiful child. I-I’m not sure I remember you saying much about her ...”

  Brill ignored the apology and launched into a brief soliloquy about the girl—her hobbies, how well she was doing in Kindergarten and how proud her parents were of her. Brill could see the Greavey woman tense up as she stoically tolerated Brill’s character sketch.

  When Brill finished, Eleanor Greavey handed back the picture. Greavey said, “Her parents aren’t the only ones proud of her; I can tell.”

  Brill allowed herself to blush. The stress of lying made blushing easy, and till now it had been hard to hold back the rush of blood. Brill put the picture back into the paper sack. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go on so.” Brill lowered her eyes. “Well—till next time, then.”

  “Yes,” Eleanor Greavey said slowly. “Till next time.”

  Chapter 2

  Gladys Brill had two things going for her: A large bookshelf filled with Masons, Marples and Maigrets, and a job that often obligated people to her.

  With regard to the bookshelf of mysteries, the ploy with the portrait of the niece had been totally bogus. The portrait belonged to a nurse currently on vacation, and the girl was the woman’s daughter. Eleanor Greavey’s admission that she didn’t recall Brill talking about her “niece” was absolutely correct, because Brill hadn’t. So the Greavey woman had passed part one of the test. Part two of the test she could not, of course, “pass,” no matter what she did.

  With regard to the fact that her job often obligated people to her, Brill now pulled her plum-colored Cavalier into a parking space in front of the Baxter building. The Baxter building housed various white-collar businesses, including architects, accountants and insurance companies. But to one side of the main entrance was a dull brown entranceway marked in small letters “Pengold Investigations.”

  The entrance led to an anteroom with another door. Brill pressed the doorbell and a moment later heard the dull thud of an electric latch. She turned the knob and stepped inside.

  In a 12-by-12 office lit by a ceiling fixture dotted with dead insects, Montgomery James Pengold sat on a swivel chair behind an old laminated desk. Papers cluttered the desktop so completely no wood at all was visible. At one corner of the desk a personal computer dangled cables; at the other corner a small gray monitor showed the contents of the anteroom in which Brill had just stood. She knew this from an earlier visit to Pengold’s office, from a time when Pengold had asked Brill for help.

  Pengold himself had aged poorly. In the ten years since she’d seen him, his white shock of hair had thinned to a spiderwebby swirl. His once-plump jowls had sunken, leaving flaps of skin that made the P.I.’s resemblance to a bulldog pathetically ironic.

  Still, the amiable grin rema
ined.

  “Gladys Brill! What’s it been? Eight years?” Pengold had a habit of silently drumming his fingers as he spoke, and the digits of his right hand crabbed through the clutter on his desk.

  “Ten years, Monty. But who counts?” Brill took a seat in the client’s chair that faced the large wooden desk. “How’ve you been?”

  Pengold shrugged. “After Delores died, I fell off the wagon and nearly killed myself. Been clean two years, eight months now.”

  Delores had been Pengold’s wife, and Brill had overseen her care at the Institute. Pengold had suspected abuse, and through Brill’s vigilance an orderly had been caught using excessive force on the woman. Brill asked, “AA?”

  Pengold nodded. “It’s remarkable how many former clients I run into at those meetings.”

  Brill lowered her eyes. “I need a favor.”

  “I told you if ever you needed the kind of help I could give you, I would. Delores would never have lasted as long as she did without your help.”

  Brill wondered whether, in the end, that had been a good thing. Each time Pengold had visited his wife, he too had died just a little. Aloud, Brill told him about the Eleanor Greavey mystery, about meeting the woman in the commons, and about her last encounter with the woman at the visitor station.

  “Are you sure the woman’s a fake?”

  Brill nodded. “The resemblance is there, but I’m sure she’s not the Eleanor Greavey of six months ago.”

  Pengold asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Do you have someone in Irving, Texas, who could check up on Dan Greavey’s background?”

  “No. But there’s a firm in Dallas that I work with, and that’s within a spit of Irving. What else?”

  Brill opened the paper bag she had brought. Carefully she pulled out the picture of her “niece.” Brill looked at Pengold and grinned. “Remember I told you Greavey passed the test of not remembering my niece?”

  Pengold’s eyes widened, and his voice showed a new respect. “Aha! You’ve got the false Ms. Greavey’s fingerprints on that picture!”

  “I polished the frame and the glass before handing it to her, but a few of my prints are there, too. You’ll need to take mine to eliminate them from hers.”

  “Not a problem,” Pengold said, getting up from his chair. “Step into the work room and we’ll take care of that right now.”

  After taking Brill’s prints, Pengold said, “I’d rather have a tech I know pull the prints off the picture. Can I keep it a couple of days?”

  Brill nodded. “The girl’s mother comes back to work next Monday.”

  Pengold said, “I’ll get it back to you. And I’ll try to have an answer on the prints by next week.”

  —

  Night had fallen by the time Gladys Brill pulled her car into the driveway of the old split-level rancher. The porch was unlit and the front yard overgrown. The only lighting came from the moon and from Brill’s headlights.

  Brill cut off her lights and stepped from the car.

  After leaving Pengold’s office, Brill had gone home, eaten and changed, and had gotten Aloysius Carfack’s number from the telephone book. The first time she called the phone had just rung; the second time an answering machine picked up the line. So Brill decided to drive out and see Carfack in person.

  Carfack lived on the outer bounds of the city. A dark, patched, two-lane road wound through developments-in-waiting and struggling family farms before Brill arrived at her destination.

  Her ring at the door went unanswered. So did her second and third rings, and several knocks. But the grey flickers of a large black-and-white television, thrown onto the drapes of what Brill assumed was the living room, showed the house was not deserted. She went back to her car, put on her lights and stood in their beams. Then she cut off her lights and knocked on the door once more.

  A voice filtered through the door. “What do you want?”

  Brill raised her voice. “Dr. Carfack, it’s Gladys Brill—”

  “Don’t know any Gladys Brill!”

  “I work at the Institute. First shift nurse supe.”

  “So?”

  “So I want to talk with you about Daniel Greavey.”

  The door opened so abruptly Brill jumped.

  “Confound it! D’you want the whole world to hear?” The bent, silhouetted figure that opened the screen door for her added, “C’mon in. Watch the cat on the rug. He doesn’t move for anyone.”

  Aloysius Carfack showed Brill past a curled, dark spot on the living room rug, to an overstuffed chair. The chair sat next to a vinyl-covered recliner clearly marked with Carfack’s own impression. Before seating himself, he turned down the volume on the television.

  “My wife used to sit in that chair and watch TV with me.”

  Brill thought for a moment. “Am I then Guest of Honor?”

  Carfack laughed. “A good, positive-neutral response. You’ve had some psychological training. So what about Greavey? Has he croaked?”

  No other light in the living room was on, but in the glow of the large black-and-white TV, Carfack’s eyes were two black voids set above a pointy nose and parchment-white cheeks. Brill said, “No, he’s doing fine. But I had occasion to look at his records today, and they’ve been reworked. I thought you might know why.”

  Carfack stared at Brill for several long seconds. “Astute of you to notice. No one at the Institute remembers the fire in Drawer G, do they?”

  Brill raised her eyebrows. “No. What happened?”

  “Someone apparently tossed a lit butt into a trash can. The papers in the can caught fire, and the flames lit the contents of Drawer G, which had been left open in the file cabinet.”

  Brill blinked. “I have a hard time picturing that.”

  “I did, too. But I had no evidence with which to raise a stink. So the records in G were re-created. Some from extinguisher-soaked originals, some from memory—from what the doctors and the nurses and the patients at the Institute could remember.”

  “And Greavey’s was one.”

  “And Greavey’s was one.” Carfack laughed again. “Course, I could have helped out—could have restored Greavey’s records entirely, but that would have meant admitting I had carried copies of confidential records home with me—away from the Institute.”

  For Brill, it took a moment for this disclosure to sink in. “You’ve got an original of Greavey’s file—here?” She leaned forward and said, “Can I see it?”

  “You don’t want to know why I had it copied?”

  Brill settled back in the chair. “All right. Why did you have it copied?”

  “You want a drink?”

  “I’m fine.”

  In a flare of the TV’s light, Brill saw the wrinkled amusement around Carfack’s eyes. “I’ll get us drinks, anyway, and Greavey’s file. It’s a bit of a story.”

  Ten minutes later, Carfack returned to the living room carrying a tray with two cups, two saucers and a thick manila envelope. He toed the switch of a floor lamp and set the tray on the coffee table between the chairs and the television.

  In the yellow lamplight, Brill for the first time got a good look at Carfack’s cat. An old, huge Tom—and by the marks on the furniture never declawed—the cat looked big enough and willing enough to take a chunk out of anyone invading its space.

  Carfack sat down again and picked up his tea. He left the envelope untouched. He sipped and said, “When Greavey came to the Institute, he got my attention because his type of amnesia was totally new to medicine. And it’s still new, ‘cause I haven’t heard about anything similar since. And I do keep up with what’s going on in the field.” Carfack pointed at a bookshelf crammed with journals and correspondence. “It keeps me alert and feeling useful. Retirement, you know, is the leading cause of death.”

  Brill bent forward to pick up her own tea. “So you wanted a copy of his records for your own personal research.”

  “Yes. And what a case! A boy shoots his old man in a hunting acc
ident and then not only forgets the incident, he forgets about the father utterly, as if the father had never existed!”

  “Did you think he was faking?”

  “Everybody thought he was faking. But in the envelope is a polygrapher’s report. After the death of Joshua Greavey, Daniel Greavey was interrogated by police. He denied ever knowing Joshua Greavey and denied the man had ever been his father. It was such an obvious bald-faced lie so vehemently maintained that the police called in a shrink, who after listening to the boy for several hours suggested a polygraph. And Greavey passed the lie-detector without so much as a single suspicious jiggle on the readout.”

  Brill said, “Some psychopaths can fool a polygraph. They simply don’t have a conscience that reacts to the concepts of right and wrong.”

  Carfack nodded. “But not Greavey. While hooked to the machine, the examiner asked him about pranks Greavey had pulled in school—information the police had gotten from Greavey’s mother and teachers—and Greavey’s traces on the polygraph showed the twinges of guilt that every normal kid exhibits.” Carfack sipped again and added, “What was most fascinating was the way Greavey’s mind would ‘fix up’ or ignore secondary references. For example, when asked whom his mother had married, Greavey answered ‘No one.’ And the thought of being a bastard child—then much a disgrace—seemed not to affect him. Indeed, Greavey was quite matter-of-fact about it. Other questions, however, showed the limits of his mind’s creativity. Greavey had once broken his leg, and his father had driven him to the doctor’s office. When asked how he’d gotten to the doctor’s office after breaking his leg, Greavey would just look at you with the biggest blank stare on his face. If you pressed him, he would eventually just say he didn’t remember.” Carfack set down his drink. “I think, for questions like that, his mind did realize something strange was going on, but it never made the connection to the sequestered memories. And I’m sure the memories are still there—it’s just a matter of sending the right trigger to release them. There’s no organic disease involved in Greavey’s amnesia.”