We finished our drinks and left, then walked back to where we had started, the taffy stand just outside the subway station. Ruby said, “So the day shouldn’t be a complete waste, Hock, why don’t you spring for some cotton candy? I haven’t had cotton candy since I was a kid in plaits and mama-jama dresses.”
I gave a couple of dollars to the curly-headed young woman running the stand, and she obliged with a fat wad of feathery pink cotton candy. I said she should keep the change and she said, “God bless.”
Then Ruby and I rode the F train back to Manhattan.
I suggested lunch at Angelo’s Ebb Tide, which Ruby thought was a good idea since she could then study another of Picasso’s paintings. And then after a good long lunch, we made plans for a night downtown at Ruby’s place. But first we would stop by my apartment because Ruby had some telephone calls to make and I wanted to collect my toothbrush and read my mail.
Good plans are sometimes unkept, even by the most well intentioned. In our case, this was because of the mail.
Specifically because of a plain white business-size envelope addressed to me, with a city postmark. It was the cheap kind of envelope that comes a hundred to the box at any Lamston’s store. There was a flag stamp on the envelope, upside down.
And inside, a Polaroid photograph.
It was the picture of a painting hung on a bare wall. The artist had rendered the figure of a man with a frizz of black hair. The man lay on his belly on a rooftop garden, with a knife plunged into his back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I telephoned Logue, who of course had called it a day. Then I rang Neglio, who of course had done the same. And then I made the mistake of dialing Bellevue.
“Admissions, may I help you?”
“I want to speak to Dr. Ronald Reiser.”
“Dr. Pfizer retired. Last year or maybe the year before.”
“No, Reiser. Not Pfizer, Reiser.”
“You don’t want Dr. Pfizer?”
“No, I want Reiser.”
“This Dr. Kaiser, he’s with Bellevue Hospital?”
“I don’t want Kaiser, I want Reiser.”
“Young man, is this some kind of game?”
“What?”
“You guys in the barrooms, you think you’re pretty funny, hey?”
“Look, lady. I’m a cop and I want to talk to Dr. Ronald Reiser.”
“Well I don’t have any way of knowing who I’m talking to, and besides I don’t know anybody here named Rice.”
“What the hell is your name, lady?”
“That is certainly none of your business!”
I counted to ten fast and said, “Let’s start all over. My name is Detective Hockaday …”
“Oh, and a detective yet.”
“Please, I would like to speak to Dr. Ronald Reiser. That’s spelled R-E-I-S-E-R.”
“You think I don’t know how to spell?”
“I think you don’t know how to answer a telephone.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job!”
“Transfer this call to the Zoo for Christ’s sake!”
“So we’re familiar with the name Zoo? I thought as much.”
“Transfer the freaking call!”
I waited. The line clicked. A woman with at least a double load of chewing gum came on.
“Psych services.”
“Dr. Ronald Reiser please.”
“Usually he’s gone out of here by this time. He supposed to be on tonight?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Got no time for games, man.”
“Me neither. So I’m going to say this once: My name is Neil Hockaday, I’m a detective with the New York City Police Department, and I want to talk to Dr. Ronald Reiser, if that’s all right with you.”
“Whoa, man!”
She connected me to a line that rang a dozen times, then she cut back in. “Told you. He’s gone.” She giggled.
“But he’s not always in his private office. He might be walking around the ward. You want to page him, darling?”
“Whoa, man!” The pace of her chewing quickened. Then she covered the telephone speaker and I heard her muffled call to someone, “Hey, Freddy, check out Doc Reiser, see if he ain’t gone home yet.”
The phone slammed down on a desk, which I took as my cue to stand by while Freddy searched the Zoo floor. I waited. I listened to gum popping, patients mumbling and shuffling along in felt slippers, the occasional scream. Meanwhile, Ruby sat across from me on the couch under the window and examined the Polaroid of the grisly painting and declared, “No doubt about it, this is Charlie Furman’s style.” Then I heard Freddy (presumably) say, “Well I went and looked pretty much everyplace. I guess he’s gone checked out.”
And then, “Hey man, you still there?”
I put on my shoulder holster and a tweed jacket. Ruby put on a pout.
“What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”
“Don’t be like that, Ruby.”
“How sweet. Our first argument.”
“Come off it. The inmates are running the asylum. You know I have to go.”
“Sure, go. And leave me here again.”
In two and a half turns of her head, Ruby took a disapproving inventory of my sorry little apartment: lumpy couch, green fringed chair next to table with an old wooden radio and a rotary telephone, non-working fireplace, books crammed onto a wall of shelves, the kitchen alcove blighted with a sink full of dishes and a crusted chili pot on the stove, door to the untidy bath, unmade bed through the archway to the other room, the sideboard with Johnnie Walker in the cupboard and a black-and-white Philco on top.
“You could watch television.”
“Oh, swell suggestion, Hock.”
“It passes the time.”
“Yes, and it’s so educational. The minute somebody turns on television, I go and read a book.”
“That’s my girl,” I laughed. “I hate to say it, but don’t wait up.”
Ruby did not laugh. “I hate to hear it. But I suppose I’ll have to get used to it.”
“Do you?”
She got up from the couch and came to me. She ran her almond fingers over my coat buttons and smoothed the sleeves and folded her arms around my waist, grazing me with her hips. She slipped one of her knees between mine. If I ever got out the door and downstairs to the street, I thought, I would possess the strength of ten men.
Her voice was low, like a lady disc jockey’s on an overnight jazz show. “Got your guns now, Detective Hockaday?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your badge, and that nasty picture?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my boy.”
And then I had to leave, ready or not.
I walked over toward the Midtown North Precinct, which is luckily only a block from my apartment. Lucky because I was wobbly in the knees, exactly the way I had been one fateful May evening when the world was young and I had to pin a gardenia onto a spaghetti strap of Judy McKelvey’s prom dress. I wound up married to Judy McKelvey, but it was not a heaven-made match and we divorced. After all that, I was now merely a big wobbly cop suddenly hit by the warm fact that somebody was waiting for me at home again, and right in the middle of a case of murder, too. As a regular person, at least, I was making progress.
The desk sergeant obliged my request for a driver by assigning me an auxiliary cop named Liz. Liz was like lots of other female auxiliary cops I have seen: hair done up in a ruthless bun, breasts weirdly flattened by her uniform, plenty of makeup, eager to the point of twitching. It could have been worse; the desk sergeant could have found me a Chuck.
“Oh, Detective Hockaday!” Liz chirped. “I’ve heard about you.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, I have. I’ve heard all about you!” She stared at me like I was some jock come to life off a baseball card. “Where’re we going tonight? Should I wear a vest?”
“I guess vests are okay, so far as they go,” I sa
id. “But nowadays, you know, the bad guys are mostly shooting headers at cops.”
Eagerness faded from Liz’s lips. “I never actually realized that.”
“Not too many people do. And there’s practically no way of protecting yourself against headers, especially now with the bad guys just shoving their semiautomatics right in your face and squeezing off a clip. You never know. But we might be safe for tonight. I only want a lift across town, all right?”
“Oh. Right. I’ll bring a car around.”
“That would be nice.”
Liz did not care to chat with me anymore, which was the idea. So I enjoyed a nice conversation-free ride in her auxiliary patrol car over to the East Side. I used the quiet time to contemplate how somebody would have to conduct himself to elude Bellevue’s crack security staff if he got it into his head to kill his psychiatrist. Which, unless Ronald Reiser was at home in shorts watching television or something—in my haste and dread, I had not bothered to check out—was maybe what recently happened.
But wait. The last time Picasso showed his face at Bellevue, he assaulted Reiser and they tossed the net over him. Why return now? Because he painted a murderscape? Because he sent me a Polaroid picture of this handiwork in the mail? Did I really expect I would, ipso facto, find death imitating art? Was this line of thinking nuts, or what?
Or what. I had Liz drop me off three blocks from the Bellevue gate so I could walk in unannounced as a cop. Along the way, I bought a big spray of daisies from a florist shop.
In the lobby of the psychiatric ward were a few of the same zoned-out patients in wheelchairs I had seen the other day. But instead of a duty nurse, there was a badly undernourished clerk manning an access control desk. He had one pair of horn-rimmed spectacles propped up on top of his bony head and he used another, smaller pair to pore over a crossword puzzle magazine.
“Say is that the newest issue?” I asked him.
He jumped and his top pair of glasses slid off. “Huh? Yup, bought it this morning.”
“I do all the crosswords myself,” I said, which was partly a lie since I only do the puzzles in the Times and the Daily News but never on Sundays.
“Y’do?”
“Sure, sure. What’s Q-U-O-C-N-G-U, brother?”
He slapped the thin blue-white skin of his forehead and said, “Wait a minute now … I know that one. Ah—quocngu … the Vietnamese alphabet!”
I stuck out a hand. “Put her there, pal. You’re a real tack.”
We shook. I tried not to pull off his arm. He waited for me to state my business. And waited. I have found by long experience in the police business that, if I keep my mouth shut when all about me the world is noisy and overly talkative, people I am dealing with become nervous and awkward, and that when they are in such a state it is not so difficult for me to persuade them to do what I want done. Lying also helps.
“Ah, you’re here to what, visit somebody or something?” he finally asked. “Visiting hours don’t start’til after they finish the feeding time, you know.”
I paused, looked at my flowers and grinned at him. “Oh, you mean these.”
“Yeah. You taking them up to a patient?”
I grinned.
“Please, mister, you got to tell me what you want.”
I grinned some more, stalling for time to improvise a response. “Oh, I’m not here to see a patient. Well, not exactly.”
“What then?”
“Didn’t they tell you about me?”
“Who?”
“Say now, you weren’t so wrapped up doing those crossword puzzles you didn’t get the word, were you?”
His face flushed deep red. He stammered, “Hell, I been doing my job here like I’m supposed to.”
“Say no more, brother. I understand how it gets down here. A man’s got to do something to relax. You got the public to deal with, you got doctors to deal with. Us doctors, we’re the worst. Am I right?”
“Well, yeah …”
“God bless you. What’s your name?”
“Stanley.” He was suddenly worried. “Hey, you ain’t going to say I been cooping!”
“You got no problem with me, so don’t worry. I’m Dr. Neil, from up in White Plains. Anybody asks me, I’ll tell them you knew that. Have you got a cigarette, Stanley?”
He fumbled in his pants pockets and one hand came up with a pack of Kools. “You can’t smoke except for in the special lounges.”
“Hey, I know that. We got the same rules up in White Plains. It’s for later.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry, Dr. Neil.”
“You like these flowers?”
“They’re okay.”
“You think my wife’s going to like them?”
“Yup.”
“Good. It’s our anniversary and she’s waiting for me up there in Westchester and here I am stuck in the city on a consultation up in the Zoo. You think they’ve got a vase and water up in the Zoo, Stanley?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Gosh, I sure hope so. I want to keep these fresh for the missus. You know.”
“Yup.”
I grinned at Stanley for a second or two. And he waited for me to say something. And waited. “I’d better get up there now, don’t you think, Stanley? What do I need from you, a pass or something?”
“Oh—a’course.”
Stanley could not move fast enough to tage me with a badge that said VISITING PHYSICIAN. I said, “Thanks a lot, Stanley—from one blinkard to another, right?”
His face brightened, and as I started moving toward the elevator restricted for doctors only I heard him saying, “Blinkard—one with bad eyes, a stupid or obtuse person, someone who ignores or avoids something.”
Up on the Zoo floor, I followed my ears to the sound of gum-chewing at the receptionist’s station and beheld the woman I had spoken to earlier on the telephone. This one was plump and cross-eyed and her name tag said she was Desiree. I stood there with my flowers looking at her.
Desiree read my VISITING PHYSICIAN badge and stared at my flowers and waited. I finally said, “Dr. Neil, to see Dr. Ronald Reiser.”
“Well, um, he’s gone.”
“That’s odd. He’s expecting me.”
“We just been looking for him ourselves.’Bout a half hour ago, maybe forty-five minutes. We couldn’t find him nowhere.”
I gave her the flowers. “He said you liked daisies.”
“What you talking’bout Doc Reiser say I like daisies?”
I shrugged.
“What time you supposed to see Doc Reiser anyhow?”
I looked at my wristwatch. “Oh, I’m a little early.”
“Oh, so he must be coming in tonight.”
“That must be it. I guess he didn’t tell you? Us doctors, we’d forget everything if it wasn’t for the staff, am I right?”
“That’s the truth.” She found a vase in a cabinet under the reception desk and started arranging the daisies in it. “You want to take a seat?”
“Well, actually, Dr. Reiser told me he might be a little late and that I should ask for Freddy to show me right on into his office.”
“Okay. I’ll get him.”
She hollered for Freddy and in about five minutes I found myself inside Reiser’s private office, thanks to the accommodating Freddy and his special keys to the double electromagnetic locks on the psychiatrists’ office doors.
“You want any coffee, or a sandwich with it? Or anything?” Freddy asked.
I took a look around Reiser’s cluttered little office, with the picture of Freud on the wall and the you-toucha-my-cup, I-breaka-you-face mug on his desk. It was a quick look, but long enough so I could see that nothing violent had happened in there. The mug could have used a rinsing. I grinned at Freddy standing in the doorway, waiting for me to say something. Freddy grinned back.
I pulled Stanley’s cigarette out from my shirt pocket. “I wouldn’t want to stink up Ron’s office.”
“Naw, I wouldn’t neither. People
’re pretty snorty about that these days.” Freddy jangled the impressive batch of keys clamped to his belt. “You gotta come with me and I’ll take you down t’the staff smokers’ lounge.”
As we walked down a corridor, I asked, “You keep the smoking lounge locked up, too?”
“Hell, yes, Doc. We’re tighter’n a drum around here. Gotta be. In case you ain’t noticed, this floor’s crawlin’ with loons who’d kill you if they got half the chance.”
“Nothing gets by you security guys, right, Freddy?”
“Very little, my friend.”
I stopped when I spotted the sign that read TO ROOF. And I said to Freddy, “It’s such a nice night, maybe I should go up there to have my smoke.”
“Sure, go on. That door’s open.”
“It is?”
Freddy sighed. “Yeah, Doc Reiser, he’s forever goin’ up there to his tomatoes and he can’t never remember to use the right key, so one day when he’s usin’ the wrong one he goes and breaks it off in the slot and t’make a long story short we hadda bust off the whole damn lock to make the door open up and shut normal and we ain’t fixed the situation yet.”
“How long has the lock been broken on this door?”
“I guess a month, thereabouts.”
“A month and you can’t get a locksmith up here?”
“Hey, Doc, this is New York. You get a maintenance man inside of a year, it’s a rush job.”
“I see what you mean.” I put my hand on the broken lock, “Earlier tonight, I hear you were looking for Dr. Reiser. Did you look up on the roof?”
Freddy’s face was quizzical, like he was an infant on the verge of soiling his diaper. “No, man. I didn’t think of that.”
“Let’s go take a look now, Freddy.”
Sure, I told her plenty of times. Plenty! Damn straight I did.
I even told her what it says right there in the Holy goddamn Bible, black on white, where it says, “I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgement, and in loving kindness, and in mercies.”
Women—haw! Oh, they really got their hooks into every goddamn thing there is, don’t they? Ain’t I telling the truth?
Did you know there’s more women than anything else on Earth, except insects?
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