She took a picture of Zack Meadows from her pocketbook.
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"This one," she said.
"I don't recognize hún," the cop said. "But a lot of them don't look like much anymore. When'd he come in?"
Ruby shrugged. "Sometime in the last two weeks."
"Oh, jeez," the policeman said. "Can't you narrow it down any more than that?"
"No," Ruby said, "I can't. How many unidentified bodies you got coming in in the last two weeks anyway?"
"A couple of dozen, for Christ sake. This ain't Connecticut, you know. This is New York."
"Yeah, I know," said Ruby. "Let's look at them."
The bodies were kept in lockers with large stainless steel doors. They were put in head first. Each body was covered with a sheet and there were cardboard tags tied to the left big toe. With bodies that had been identified, the tags carried that information. Name, age, address. With unidentified bodies, the tags carried when and where the body was found and referred back to a police file number. Most of the unidentified dead were victims of gunshot wounds.
"Don't you send prints to Washington for identification?" Ruby asked the cop, as she shook her head "no" and he slid another corpse back into the freezer locker. The overhead lighting was bright, nonglare fluorescent. She was able to see the faces very clearly.
"Sure. When we get around to it. But we got a lot of things to do and we don't always get around to it in a hurry. This is New York, you know." *
"Yeah," Ruby said. "I know. It ain't Connecticut."
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"Right."
She found Zack Meadows in the sixth locker. There was no mistaking the bloated face. Looking down at him, covered only by a sheet, his hair matted around his head as if he had died stepping out of the shower, Ruby thought to herself that even in death, Zack Meadows looked stupid. She bit her lip. You shouldn't talk bad of the dead, her mother had always told her. God would punish you for that. She inspected the corpse carefully. The fingertips on both hands were destroyed. They looked as if they had been cut off.
"That's unusual, isn't it?" she said.
"What?" asked the cop.
Ruby pointed to Meadows' fingers. The cop shrugged.
"Who knows?" he said.
The tag on Meadows's toe said he had been taken out of Central Park's lake, with another body, two weeks before.
"Where's the other body?" she said.
"Let's see." The patrolman looked at the tag. "It ought to say on the tag but it don't. I don't know what the hell help is coming to when they can't do a simple thing like put the right information on a toe tag. The kind of people we get around here."
"Where might the other body be?" Ruby asked patiently.
"Around here somewhere," he said angrily. "You done with this one?"
"Yeah."
The cop slammed the rolling tray back into the freezer locker. It hit the back wall with a loud metal-
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lie clank. God help Zack Meadows, Ruby thought, at the hands of this cretin.
The cop began to pull out slabs quickly, just checking the toe information. On the fourth try, he found it.
"Here it is," he said. "Central Park lake. Same day. That's it. Want to see him?"
"Yes," Ruby said.
He pulled out the tray and pulled down the sheet from the face. It was a small man with thinning hair and a mousey meek face. Ruby checked his hands. His fintertips too had been cut off.
"Probably two guys got a load on and got into a swimming contest and both of them drownded," the cop said.
"In December?" Ruby said.
"Could be. Remember, this . . ."
"I know. It ain't Connecticut," Ruby said. "What do you make of their fingertips being mutilated?"
"I don't make nothing of it," the policeman said.
No wonder the city was like Fort Apache, Ruby thought. She gave the small corpse an encouraging slap on the bottom of its bare foot, then smiled at the cop.
"Thanks. You've been a big help," she said.
"All right," he said. "Maybe you can do something for me some day."
"Hope so," Ruby said. Like put a tag on your toe, she thought.
Out front, Ruby caught another cab and gave it the name of Remo's hotel. Inside the hotel, the desk clerk looked at her as if she were a hooker on her way to visit a John with a middle-of-the-night urge.
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She rode a squeaking elevator up to the twenty-third floor and stood outside Remo's door. She found a pen and paper in her purse and wrote a note.
Chiun heard the noise instantly. Something had been pushed under their door. He rose quietly from the grass mat on which he slept. Remo was asleep in the inside bedroom. Chiun saw the piece of paper on the floor. He opened the note and looked at it. The greeting read: "Dear Dodo." Chiun decided the note was not for him. He crumpled it onto the floor and went back to his mat to return to sleep. He hoped the squeaking of the elevator did not keep him awake all night.
Back in the lobby, the clerk again looked at Ruby with distaste. Once he could have gotten away with; twice was too much.
Ruby walked up to the desk and even though the clerk was standing directly in front of her, she slammed her hand down on the night service bell, sending a loud ring throughout the lobby.
"What was that for?" the clerk asked in his best surly manner.
"Just making sure you alive," Ruby said.
"And now that you're sure . . ."
"Who says I'm sure?" Ruby asked. "All I see is somebody staring down his long nose and making sounds."
The clerk took a breath. "What is it, Miss, that you want? We don't want people hanging around the lobby, if you get my drift."
Ruby dug her wallet from her purse and opened it to a New York City police identity card.
"That elevator over there ain't been inspected in the last six months like it's supposed to be," she said.
The clerk looked startled. He stammered. "Just an oversight, I'm sure."
"People get killed by oversights," Ruby said. "If I look at all the rest of them elevators, you think they'll have oversights too?"
"I ... er ... I don't know."
"Well, I'm going to take it easy on you. I won't be back till noon. Make sure those elevators are checked by then 'cause if they ain't, I'm going to close them all down and you can have your guests walk upstairs. You get my drift?"
"Yes, ma'am."
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137
CHAPXER TWELVE
Dr. Elena Gladstone had not been able to get back to sleep in her apartment above the Lifeline Laboratory.
She had felt relieved when Dr. Jesse Beers called her to let her know that he had "taken care" of Randall Lippincott before the man had a chance to talk.
"Better late than never," she had told him.
But what kept her awake was a telephone call she did not receive and as the clock moved on toward 4 A.M., she began to doubt if she was ever again going to hear from the two men she had sent after the Oriental and the American. They should have been back by now, but they had not returned and they had not called and inside she had the sinking feeling that perhaps the two government agents—what were their names, Remo and Cbiun?—just perhaps there was more to them than met the eye. They had managed to keep Randall Lippincott alive, when by all medical practice he should have been dead. How had they done it? It had caused no real danger. Jesse Beers had taken care of it, but still those two were a threat. For a brief moment, a chill passed through her body and she thought that perhaps she might be willing to get out of the whole business.
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She rejected that thought right away. She wasn't talking aboui wealth; she was thinking about riches. Not just millions, but hundreds of millions. She was thinking of yachts and villas and chauffeurs and the beautiful Ufe.
Nothing must get in the way of that dream.
Ruby saw the silent alarm wires in the back door of the laboratory, so she did not attempt to slip the door. She ro
oted around inside her pocketbook and found a long wire with two thin adhesive clips on the ends. She carefully pressed the clips into the top of the door, until she was able to bridge the two wires of the alarm.
Then she picked the lock with a small tool from a set she carried with her.
"CIA was good for something," she mumbled to herself.
She stood inside the closed door of the laboratory for long minutes, waiting, ready to flee if another alarm had sounded and alerted someone. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She saw the cages lining the wall, cages of rats and mice and monkeys. She examined them clinically. While most people might be afraid of rats and mice, in the neighborhood where Ruby had grown up, they were constant companions, and you didn't stay emotionally fearful of them for long. When Ruby was ten years old, a rat had climbed into her bed and bitten her. She had grabbed it behind the head, and beaten it to death with the spiked heel of her mother's shoe.
The animals quieted as Ruby stood in the room. She listened. Had Zack Meadows been here too? Had he come to find out what was going on, only to
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wind up dead in the Central Park lake? If that was what had happened, Ruby realized she had better be very careful.
There was no point in trying to sleep anymore so Elena Gladstone dressed casually in blue jeans and a plaid shirt and decided to go down to the laboratory to look in on her latest experiments. She had succeeded in conditioning a rat to be afraid of metal, to the point that the rat went berserk if placed in a metal cage. Even after hundreds of experiments, she never lost her sense of wonder that a learned response such as fear, trained into an animal, would produce a substance in the animal's brain that could be isolated, purified, and intensified so that it could be injected into the bloodstream of another animal and produce exactly the same fear.
She had gotten into the research a decade before when, just out of medical school, she had taken a job in a laboratory and been exposed to the famous flat-worm experiments, in which flatworms were trained to respond to light. Then the trained worms were cut up and fed to other flatworms who immediately developed the same response to the light stimulus.
The eccentric doctor for whom she worked had been inclined to dismiss the experiment as a curiosity but it became the pivot of Dr. Elena Gladstone's life. She never published any of her findings or original research. Somehow, in the back of her mind, there had always been a feeling that there was a profit to be turned through this research and this profit would be in direct proportion to how much she knew and how little others knew.
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She was dressed and, barefooted, started downstairs.
Ruby had seen the guard sitting just inside the front door of the building, and she had seen a small office ofl: to the side of the main laboratory room. She went into the office and struck a match, to satisfy herself that the room had a window through which she could escape if it became necessary.
She closed the door behind her, locked it, opened the window, and went over to the desk. The name-plate read "Dr. Gladstone."
Ruby switched on the desk lamp and turned her attention to the filing cabinet behind the desk.
It was locked but her lock picks quickly opened it. She whistled softly to herself as the top drawer opened. In the back of the drawer were patient folders and there were the Lippincotts. Elmer, Lem, Douglas, and Randall. She moved the desk lamp closer to the file cabinet, then spun around in the swivel chair so she could read the reports more eas-
iiy-
Elena Gladstone casually unlocked the door to the laboratory, stepped inside, then froze against the wall. At the end of the hallway, light was pouring from her office. Silently, she walked down the hall, pressed close to the wall. She peered in through a corner of the window in the door. There was a woman inside, a black woman with an Afro, sitting at the cabinet, reading her files. Behind the desk, the solitary window in the office was open, obviously for fast escape if it became necessary.
Who was she, Elena wondered. Perhaps she had
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some relationship to that private detective who had come snooping around a few weeks before.
Noiseless on her bare feet, Elena moved away from the door and went back out the front door of the laboratory. In a hallway closet, she found what she was looking for, secreted the small can inside her shirt and walked to the front of the building.
The guard looked up when she approached. As if stricken by guilt, he tried to hide his copy of Hustler Magazine under some papers on the desk.
"Hello, Doctor," he said. "What are you doing
up?"
"Just walking around, thinking," she said. "This is
what I want you to do."
She explained it very carefully, then had Herman repeat it. He did not understand his instructions but he nodded and said he would do just what she ordered.
Dr. Gladstone walked outside into the cold December air and as she stepped outside, behind her, Herman began counting softly to himself, "One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand
and ..."
When the count had reached sixty, Herman stood up. Whistling loudly, he walked toward the laboratory door in the rear of the building. Even though the door was unlocked, he fumbled with the knob for awhile, then reached inside and flipped on the laboratory light.
In Dr. Gladstone's office, Ruby had heard the whistling and turned off the desk lamp. In the dark, she had replaced the Lippincott folders in the rear of the file cabinet. She stood near the open window,
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waiting. She heard the fumbling with the doorknob in the outer office, and then her office was semi-lit as the lightswitch outside was turned on.
Ruby didn't wait to see the guard follow the last of his instructions, which were to turn around, go back to his desk, put on his coat and go home early.
Ruby stepped up on a book case to hoist herself through the window. Her body was halfway out when Elena Gladstone stepped out of the shadows alongside the building.
As Ruby looked up and saw her, Dr. Gladstone raised a can of Mace and sprayed it in Ruby's face. It hit the young black women like a punch, taking the wind out of her lungs. She could feel it tingling on her face and the burning sensation in her eyes, and then she could feel her body start to grow numb and her ringers slipped from the windowsill and Ruby fell back inside, on the office floor, unconscious.
Elena Gladstone, stepping carefully in her bare-feet, so she did not step on glass or sharp pebbles, came back around the front of the building. She checked to make sure that the guard had gone, locked the door behind her and walked into her office, to see just what she had captured.
Remo was up before the sun and when he stepped out into the living room of the hotel suite, he saw Chiun lying in a pink sleeping kimono on the grass mat, his hands folded steeple-like in front of him, staring at the ceiling.
"What's the matter, Chiun? Trouble sleeping?"
"Yes," said Chiun.
"Sorry," said Remo.
"
"You should be," said Chiun as he rose to a sitting position.
"I didn't have anything to do with it," Remo said. "I don't snore. And I keep the door to the bedroom closed so you won't complain about my breathing or the springs in the bed squeaking or anything like that. Find yourself another patsy."
"A lot you know," Chiun said. "Who was it who put us in a hotel where the elevator squeaks? And if people were not always coming to this floor to look for you, the elevator would not always be squeaking and keeping me awake."
"Looking for me? Who?" Remo asked.
"And if people were not always slipping messages for you under the door, I might just be able to get some rest," Chiun said.
Remo saw the crumpled note on the floor. He smoothed it out and read it aloud:
"Dear Dodo. What you're looking for is Lifeline Laboratory on East Eighty-first Street. Ruby."
He looked at Chiun. "When'd this come?"
"You're not going to ask me how
I knew it was for you?"
"No. When'd it come?"
"Who knows? Two hours ago. An hour ago."
"And you read it and didn't do anything? Ruby's probably gone to this place and she might be in trouble."
"One, I did not read it because it was not addressed to me. I am not 'Dear Dodo.' Two, if that Ruby woman wrote it and is going wherever that place is, she will not be in trouble because she can take care of herself, that one, which is why she would
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make a fine mother for someone's son, if someone had but the brains to see that, but one cannot expect too much of a stone."
Remo was on the telephone to Smith and when the light flashed, Smith's wife was downstairs preparing breakfast so Smith spoke from his bedroom.
"Yes, Remo. The Lifeline Laboratory. I told her to alert you before she went there. All right. Keep me advised."
When he hung up with Remo, Smith turned the receiver of the phone upside down to expose a panel of buttons. With practiced fingers, he pressed a 10-digit sequence. There was no buzzing ring of the phone. There was only silence for thirty seconds and then a voice said "Yes, Dr. Smith."
"On the Lippincott matter, our people are closing in," Smith said.
"Thank you," said the President of the United States as Smith hung up.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was a pain in the neck.
Ruby knew it was a pain in the neck and as she struggled toward consciousness, her mind asked what was a pain in the neck. Remo. Remo was a pain hi the neck. Working for the government was a pain in the neck. If she had had any sense, she never would have gotten involved with the CIA and then with CURE. She would have just kept running the Afro wig shop in Norfolk, Virginia, building her business, moving on to other things, and socking enough money away to retire by thirty.
Not her, though. She had to be smart and work for the government. That was the pain in the neck. And Remo, he was a pain in the neck. Chiun and Smith, pains in the neck. Her brother, Lucius. No, he wasn't a pain in the neck. He was a pain in the ass.
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