Silent Treatment

by Michael Palmer

  “No!” Harry cried, his voice only a harsh, impotent whisper. “No, don’t!”

  He struggled to push himself up, but the behemoth standing beside him drove him back down with a foot between his shoulder blades.

  Suddenly, the man on top of Maura grunted, pitched forward and to one side, then toppled like a stuffed toy down the hill toward the reservoir. At virtually the same instant, the taller man cried out in pain and spun to the ground clutching his right arm. Instinctively, he rolled over twice and scrambled for cover behind a large oak. Harry’s head was clearing rapidly, but he still could not figure out what was going on. Then he saw the man’s gun lying six feet away. He crawled unsteadily toward it, expecting the giant to beat him there. Instead, the man, still holding his arm, lurched to his feet and stumbled off through the brush.

  Harry snatched up the revolver and then crawled to where Maura lay. She was facedown and very still, but she was breathing. He turned her over gently and cradled her head in his free hand.

  “Maura, it’s okay,” he whispered into her ear. “It’s Harry. You’re all right.”

  His senses keyed, his finger tight on the trigger of the revolver, he peered into the darkness, straining to see movement or a silhouette. The noise of his assailant’s escape faded, replaced by a silence as dense as the darkness in the grove.

  Harry checked the carotid pulses on both sides of Maura’s neck. They were bounding and sharp. His own pulse was bludgeoning the inside of his head. Maura’s eyes were open now, and she was sobbing softly. Harry continued scanning the woods. He set the gun on his leg and caressed the side of her face.

  “He was strangling me,” she said, trying to clear the hoarseness from her throat. “I couldn’t breathe.”

  “I know. Easy does it. You’re okay now.”

  “Wh-what happened?”

  “I’m not sure. I think both men were shot, but I didn’t hear any gunfire. Are you all right?”

  “As soon as I stop shaking I will be. It happened so fast.”

  “They work for that doctor you saw. I think they wanted to kill you and leave me alive, trying to convince the police that I didn’t do it.”

  He helped her sit up, but continued to support her with an arm around her shoulder.

  “Is someone out there?” she whispered, gesturing toward the darkness.

  Again they listened. Again there was only silence. Holding the revolver loosely, he helped her to her feet. The throbbing in his head persisted, along with some dizziness. A mild concussion, he decided. Nothing more. He touched the bruise behind his ear and winced from the pain. But there was virtually no swelling—no support for his story that they had been mugged. The two thugs knew what they were doing. Professionals. But someone out there had beaten them both.

  He and Maura helped one another down the steep slope. The path, dark but still somewhat lighter than the woods, was empty. Harry again rested his finger on the trigger of the revolver as they searched slowly along the treeline.

  “I was certain the bastard fell this way,” Harry said.

  “Maybe he was just wounded, like the other one.”

  “He didn’t roll that way, but maybe.”

  “I’m not sure I like it here in the park anymore,” she said.

  “I think leaving may not be such a bad idea myself.”

  At that moment, she pointed at the base of a tree several feet up the slope. An arm protruded from behind it, the limp hand dangling palm up. They swung a wide arc and then approached the tree from above. The man who had so nearly strangled Maura to death was wedged against the trunk. He wore dark jeans and a black turtleneck. The side of his face was pressed into the damp soil. His visible eye was wide open, staring sightlessly up the hill.

  “Here,” Harry said, pointing to a spot in the upper middle of the man’s back. “Look.”

  Maura bent down and could just discern the dime-sized hole and expanding disc of blood.

  “What should we do?” she asked.

  Harry felt the man’s jeans for a wallet, but knew there would be none.

  “I didn’t hear any gunshot,” he said again. “Did you?”

  “No, but I was busy listening to the pearly gates creaking open.”

  “I think whoever shot these guys had a silencer.”

  “So?”

  “Professional killers use silencers. Maura, I think we should get the hell out of here.”

  Maura rubbed at her neck.

  “I’m with you,” she said.

  CHAPTER 19

  The discovery of a man shot to death in Central Park made the late-night news and the morning papers. Police located the body at ten p.m. following an anonymous phone tip from a male caller. The victim carried no wallet and as yet had not been identified. Preliminary impression was robbery, but police were not ruling out the possibility that the shooting was an execution.

  Harry entered the hospital for morning rounds, his thoughts in their now-usual state of disarray. The mystery surrounding Evie’s death remained as murky as ever. And now other unanswered questions had darkened the picture even more. Who had been down there on the path in Central Park, silenced revolver in hand, ready and quite able to kill? Could the arrival of their savior have possibly been a coincidence? Was he some anticrime vigilante? No explanation made much sense.

  A few things, very few, seemed apparent. Harry remained convinced that his life was not in jeopardy—he was being kept around to deflect responsibility for Evie’s murder. Maura’s continued survival was not nearly so assured, though. Maybe Albert Dickinson gave her eyewitness account no credence whatsoever, but clearly the murderer did.

  Throughout the night she had said little of her ordeal. But Harry shuddered at the thought of what it must have been like for her, a killer’s hands tightening around her throat, her spine bowed near the breaking point.

  After leaving the park, the two of them had gone to Harry’s apartment. Maura’s place, they decided, was simply too vulnerable. And although Rocky, the night doorman, was hardly the sort of protection that would put one’s mind at ease, he was better than nothing. Maura was certain that by filing a formal report supporting her story, her brother had already put his future in the department in jeopardy. This time around she insisted that he not be involved—at least not in any official capacity. Harry did not completely agree, but with all she had endured, there was no way he was going to try and change her mind. He reported the Central Park body to 911 from a pay phone. For the time being, Tom Hughes would be left out of it.

  Once in the apartment they settled onto the sofa in the small, oak-paneled den and turned on the television. Maura, physically drained, said little. She sipped herbal tea, nibbled some shortbread cookies, and stared at the screen. In just over an hour, the first news report appeared on Channel 2, announcing the homicide near the reservoir in Central Park.

  “Okay, Harry,” she said when the brief report was complete, “I think I’m ready. Could you please tell me what’s going on?”

  “I wish I knew,” he responded.

  He told her about the bewildering, depressing discoveries he had made in Evie’s Greenwich Village apartment. He told her what he remembered of the doctor with the cultured accent, and of the two men with him who had then assaulted them in the park. Maura listened without interruption.

  “So, it’s all about sex,” she said when he had finished.

  “In a way, I guess you could say that, yes. Somewhere in her—what would you call it? research?—Evie apparently crossed the wrong person. Whoever it was murdered her—or more likely had her murdered—in a way that should not have aroused any suspicion whatsoever. Aneurysms like hers rupture all the time. I’m certain there wasn’t supposed to be any flap about it or any autopsy. But Caspar Sidonis’s claim that I had reason to kill her changed all that. Now, whoever really did it is committed to proving Sidonis is right.”

  “And to eliminating the only eyewitness as well,” Maura added. “Harry … Evie sounds like such a sa
d, mixed-up soul.”

  “Believe me when I tell you she didn’t come across that way.”

  “What about children? Didn’t you want them when you got married?”

  “Oh, very much.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  “She used to say she did, but—not really. Look, I know it sounds like I should have gotten out of the marriage years ago, or never gotten into it in the first place. But believe it or not, taken on a day-to-day basis, it really wasn’t that bad. We were like a lot of couples. We got up, went to work, had a reasonable amount of money, had friends, went on an occasional vacation, bought some nice things, made love—at least in the beginning. I took care of my patients, played my music, did my workouts, jogged through the park. I guess I just didn’t look at it all too closely.”

  “I understand. I think everyone who’s in a bad marriage is guilty of wearing, blinders—sometimes for a long while.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “There’s still plenty of time, Harry.”

  “For what?”

  She yawned and stretched. “For whatever …”

  Hours later, damp with sweat, Harry awoke from a dream he had experienced many times before. It was a Nha-trang dream, viewed along the barrel of Harry’s gun. Beyond the end of the barrel, a young Vietcong soldier is raising his weapon. His face and expression are indelible in Harry’s mind. Eyes widening in fear, he tries to level his semiautomatic. Harry’s gun discharges. The youth’s chest bursts open like a ripe melon. He is hurled backward into oblivion. Moments later another soldier, even younger than the first, steps into view at the end of the barrel. He spots Harry and the wounded man on the ground beside him. He raises his weapon. Harry’s gun discharges once again.…

  The television flickered across the darkened room, its volume barely audible. Maura Hughes, covered with a woolen throw, lay sleeping beside him, her head resting on his lap. Harry clicked off the set and sat in the near blackness, gently stroking her face and her downlike new hair. Not once during the entire evening had she made excuses for herself or her life, or tried to rationalize her drinking. Not once had she whined about the deadly situation into which she had been thrust. She might not have medals as proof, but in her own way, Maura Hughes was pretty damn heroic. And Harry felt drawn to her in a most powerful way. He shifted his legs. She moaned softly, then rolled onto her back and looked up at him.

  “Mmmm. Am I keeping you up?” she asked dreamily.

  “No. Lately I’ve spent more nights on this sofa than in bed. Why don’t you go on into the guest room and get some real sleep?”

  “Is staying out here like this an alternative?”

  “If you want.”

  Heavy-lidded, she smiled up at him, then rolled back onto her side.

  “I want,” she murmured.…

  Harry had three patients in the hospital. The first, a four-year-old girl with asthma, was ready for discharge. Harry wrote out detailed instructions for the mother, who was scarcely more than a child herself. But no amount of information or reassurance seemed to be enough to calm her. Finally, Harry took a business card from his wallet.

  “Here, Naomi,” he said, writing on the back of the card. “This is my home phone number. If there’s any problem with Keesha, you don’t even have to call the answering service unless I’m not home. But she’s going to do fine.”

  The teen slipped the card into the pocket of her jeans, then finally accepted the discharge and Harry’s efforts by giving him a hug.

  The second patient, an elderly man, had been transferred back to Harry from a cardiologist following an uneventful three-day stay in the CCU. He was a toothless old gent who had been pleasantly confused for as long as Harry had been his doctor, now fifteen or so years. With social services and the visiting nurses teaming up on his case, there was a good chance he’d be back in his own place within the week. He patted Harry on the back, called him Dr. Carson, and told him to keep trying and he would be a very good doctor some day.

  Harry smiled sadly at the thought of how typical, how: utterly humdrum normal, rounds like today’s once were. Now, as he moved through the hospital, he was aware of the stares, and the pointed fingers, and the whispers.

  That’s the man. The doctor who killed his wife. I can’t believe they let him just walk around the hospital like this.…

  He took the elevator to the fifth floor of the Alexander Building. The car was the very same one in which he had ridden down with Mel Wetstone. That time, Evie’s killer had been one of the crowd packed in with them. This time, he was alone.

  The final patient he had to see was in Alexander 505—a thirty-three-year-old architect named Andy Barlow. Barlow had been HIV-positive for two years and was now battling Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, the first indication that he had developed full-blown AIDS. During those two symptom-free years, Barlow had continued work at his job with a midtown firm, volunteered countless hours at a hospice for the homeless and disenfranchised, and led the campaign for expanded needle exchange and improved local services for AIDS patients.

  Another legitimate hero, Harry thought as he entered the room.

  Andy Barlow, oxygen prongs in place, did not look as good as Harry would have wished. His color was sallow and somewhat dusky, his lips more purplish than they should have been. He sat propped up at an eighty-degree angle, quietly working to get air into his lungs. Still, he managed a smile.

  “Hey, Doc,” he said, the words punctuated with coughs.

  “Hi, yourself.”

  Harry pulled up a chair and sat, flipping through the pages in Barlow’s chart. The reports—blood count, oxygen levels, chemistries, chest film—actually looked better than the patient did. They were reason to be at least a little encouraged.

  “What’s the news?” Barlow asked.

  “Well, the returns from these key upstate precincts say we’re winning,” Harry said.

  “Tell that to my lungs.”

  “That bad?”

  “Actually not,” Andy said, and paused for breath. “My breathing’s a bit easier and I’m not coughing nearly as much.” He coughed again several times and then laughed at himself. “As usual, the man speaketh too soon.”

  Harry examined his throat, chest, heart, and abdomen.

  “Not bad,” he said, now genuinely encouraged. “How’s your head?”

  Andy shrugged. “I think being HIV-positive for a couple of years has helped a bit in getting ready for this, but I’m still pissed and … and a little frightened.”

  “Me, too,” Harry said.

  “I know. And I appreciate your saying it.”

  Andy Barlow wasn’t the first patient with AIDS Harry had cared for, or even the tenth. Healthy habits, exercise, preventive medications, and aggressive treatment of infections had made a significant contribution to the quality and quantity of each of their lives. But a number of them had already died. This lung infection marked Barlow’s first step on a new road. The questions of whether and when he would develop the full-blown disease had been answered. Now, physician and patient had to reorder their priorities and their expectations. Harry feigned another chest exam until he was fairly certain his own emotions were under control.

  “You know,” Andy said, “don’t take this personally, but I don’t think I fear dying as much as I fear being sick all the time. I’ve spent so much time in hospitals with my friends, I just dread becoming one of them.”

  “I understand. Well, I promise you I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of here pronto and to keep you out. And as far as getting sick over and over goes, I know nothing I say can take away that worry. Just try to focus on the truth that today is what you have—it’s all that any of us have. The only thing you can do is try to live it to the fullest.”

  “Keep reminding me.”

  “I will if you want me to. Now listen. I really do think the IV Bactrim has turned the tide. Your film’s a little better, and so’s your blood count.”

  “Good, because I’m one of the pri
nciple designers of the renovations on the Claridge Performing Arts Center, and I want to be at the opening production on the twenty-first.”

  “Ten days? Hey, no problem, mon. With my stethoscope tied behind my back, even.”

  “Guaranteed?”

  “You have my word.”

  Andy, an IV in his right hand, reached out and grasped Harry’s right hand with his left.

  Harry squeezed his hand, then turned quickly and left the room. This was a situation he would never get used to or inured to. And in truth, he never wanted to be.

  He returned to the nurse’s station and wrote some orders for intensified respiratory therapy on Andy Barlow. Nearby, two nurses were chatting with the unit secretary. He had known each of them cordially for some time, in one case many years. Now, none of the three broke from their conversation to acknowledge him. He flagged the new orders and set the three-ring notebook chart on the secretary’s desk.

  “Just a few new orders,” he said.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the woman replied without looking over. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Harry gave momentary thought to forcing a confrontation with the group—a plea against being judged prematurely. He decided against it. Constitutional guarantees notwithstanding, he knew that in many minds he was guilty until proven otherwise. As long as his situation remained unresolved, there would be coolness and distance and silence. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  He trotted down to the first floor and out of the hospital. The morning was cloudless and warm, and with twenty minutes before his first office patient he could actually walk slowly enough to appreciate it. He wondered how Maura was doing. By the time he had left for work, the reality of her situation had begun to sink in for her. She seemed irritable—deflated and distracted. And although she didn’t say so, Harry sensed she was thinking about how much easier everything would be with a drink. They had decided that she would return to her apartment with a friend of hers, pack some things, and move into Harry’s place for a few days. Meanwhile, she could decide about calling her brother. When she did move back to her own place, Harry offered to hire a security guard.