I didn’t know whether she was making a joke or not. I said, “All I’m trying to find out is why John Pighee’s sister isn’t allowed to visit him in the hospital.”
“Because the doctor says she isn’t,” said Seafield sharply.
“He’s been very severely injured,” Dr. Merom said.
“And visitors might hurt him,” said Seafield.
“We are worried about infection,” Dr. Merom said. “His condition is stabilized, but even some small development could tip the balance unfavorably.”
“Besides,” Seafield said scornfully, “who wants to visit somebody who’s in a coma?”
“John Pighee is in a coma?” I said.
“Yes,” Dr. Merom said. “He’s been unconscious ever since he was admitted.”
“Seven months?” I asked.
“He hasn’t regained consciousness since the accident. Didn’t you know?”
“My client didn’t tell me that,” I conceded.
“If it were a matter of visitors keeping his morale up,” Dundree said ingratiatingly, “helping his will to live, then the case might be different. Isn’t that right, Marcia?”
I said, “What about the morale of his relatives?”
“The patient comes first,” said Dr. Merom.
“The patient must come first,” Dundree echoed.
Seafield stood nodding.
“What would you say Pighee’s chances of recovery are?” I asked.
“That’s hard to say,” Dr. Merom said.
“We’ll do our best,” said Dundree.
“Is that all?” Dr. Merom asked. “Can I go back upstairs?”
“Anything else, Mr. Samson?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t want to delay the progress of medical science,” I said.
“Hell, come on, Marcia,” Seafield said, and left. She followed him.
Dundree sat down at his desk. “I hope we’ve been of some help.”
I said, “I’ll report back to Pighee’s sister and see what she has to say.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “That’s good!” He sounded pleased with himself.
Chapter Four
From Loftus Pharmaceuticals I went back to my office. In case there was a long line of discount-seeking clients stretching down the stairs and onto the street.
Or maybe one.
But there wasn’t, and a call to my answering service revealed that my phone had taken the morning off while I was out working.
“I’m sorry I called to ask,” I said.
“I wish someone had called, Mr. Samson,” Dorrie, the service voice, said. “I really do.”
I appreciated her concern. It added to mine. I could stretch the case of my comatose salesman to last a day, maybe, but I was close to what looked to me to be a reasonable place to end it already.
I ate a can of baked beans and counted my money.
On the way out I found a letter in the basket. Special delivery. I knew who it was from. My daughter is the only person I know who can afford special delivery.
It said she was coming to visit in a week. “My God,” I said to the stairwell. “My God.”
I went out the door and hesitated. The question was whether I wanted to get shouted at or not. I didn’t, so I went where it was quiet, the library.
I wanted the medical shelves, and found them without belying my profession’s job description. A fuzzy-haired girl in a maxi-skirt and a mini-blouse stood plumb in the middle of the section and appeared to be sorting out the entire world of medicine.
“Do you think you could help me?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, turning her face to me. The rest was not far behind, though it took a while for it to settle into its new compass bearing.
“I need some information on treatments for victims of violent accident.”
“Violent accident? You mean like car crashes?”
“Yeah, explosions.”
“Mmm,” she said. “I don’t know. Mmm.” She turned back to the shelves in stages. “There are some books with bits on various kinds of physical trauma, but it sounds like you want something pretty specialized. They don’t have a whole lot here. You might try some of the recent journals. There’s been work recently on that kind of thing in hospitals in North Ireland. All those soldiers and civilians getting blown up! They’ve had so many cases that they’ve been able to work out some new treatments. That’s all I can think of.”
“That’s interesting. Thanks.”
“They can probably get you some journals. If you can find one of the librarians, they’ll help you.”
“Aren’t you a librarian?”
“Me? Heck, no,” she said, and smiled. “I’m still in high school.”
And reading medical books in the summer vacation, at that.
“Going to be a doctor?”
“Well . . . maybe. I don’t know. Couple of years ago I came in here to see if I could find any books that could help me with my hair. And I kind of got interested.” She fluffed her hair up, though it hardly needed encouragement. “Isn’t this just the awfullest-looking mop you’ve ever seen?”
“Good gracious, no,” I said quickly. “I’ve seen much worse.” On the end of long wooden handles. “Besides, it’s fashionable these days, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Lucky old me,” she said.
I left her, but didn’t go looking for librarians. I didn’t feel I had the time to root through medical magazines; I’d gambled a visit against some book having it all laid out for me. I knew in laymen’s terms that Pighee was in a bad way, but I wanted more detail and authority than I could provide myself. So I went from the library to see my doctor. And get shouted at. He has a bad temper.
His wife let me slip in between patients. I explained what I wanted quickly.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” he said. And I hadn’t even asked what it was a picture of. “The guy’s been out cold for seven months and you want me to reconstruct his entire case history!”
“Not entire,” I said. “Just whatever you can.”
“The guy’s 99 percent likely to be a dead man. Mentally, not physically. You’d have to have some positive sign to lower those odds.”
“But he might wake up?”
“It’s just conceivable. In general. The specific case obviously I don’t know. Presumably his medical people could tell you.”
“If they would. Look, is it usual to keep a guy like that in isolation?”
“Isolation?” he asked.
“Could visitors sitting by the bed watching him not wake up hurt him?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of disgust. “How the hell do I know?” he said. Then, “I wouldn’t have thought so, if there weren’t other complications.”
“But—” I began.
“I just don’t have time now, Al,” he said exasperatedly. “I’d like to help you. God knows you need help. But I’ve got a waiting room out there full of bunions. Come back tomorrow morning, if you must. I can’t really do anything for you until then.”
I couldn’t press him. A guy who’d kept for seven months would keep a day. My sense of urgency was because I didn’t know whether I would still be working on him in a day.
So. I sat in my van, then decided to have another shot at the medical facts. The girl in the library had mentioned soldiers being blown up in Ireland. It occurred to me a military doctor might have more explosion medicine at his fingertips than a civilian doctor. So I drove northeast to Fort Benjamin Harrison.
Not that the place exactly has a wooden stockade around it. Turning of Aultman Avenue onto Greene Road, I thought it looked more like a college campus than a military outpost and the Army’s finance center. What with the old brick buildings and the sycamores.
Alongside a cemetery I hailed a soldier jogging in sweat pants and asked him where I could find some medical personnel. He sent me to Hawley Army Hospital. “That’s named after Major General Hawley, Commander of Hospitals in Europe during World War Two,” he said. I
was fascinated.
At the admissions desk they sent me to the adjutant, who got me together with “the Doc.”
He was a sizable man whose ragged hair and unshined shoes drew even my attention. And showed how fast a visitor can get used to Army norms. The Doc wasn’t tall, but his size projected forward between the flaps of his unbuttoned white coat. . . .
“Captain Oaks says you want a little information,” he said.
I told him about John Pighee.
“You understand that we don’t deal much with that sort of case here,” he said, and looked rather stem.
“Sure,” I said, “but I assumed that if I could find a career medical officer, he’d be more likely to have had special training in physical injuries.”
“That would make sense,” he said, nodding. “Wouldn’t know how true it was, but it would make sense.” He scratched his chin. “Your man’s been unconscious for seven months, you say.”
“That’s right.”
He shook his head, raised his eyebrows, and pursed his lips.
“What I’m wondering about is whether there is likely to be a good reason to keep people from visiting him or whether it’s just an administrative convenience. Is such a patient more likely than most to be vulnerable to infections brought in from the outside?”
“Resistance to infection,” the Doc said, “depends on the body’s production of leukocytes, a kind of white blood cell. Is there any reason to believe that your man’s capability to produce leukocytes has been reduced or inhibited?”
“Well. What would it take?”
“There are some drugs that do it. And radiation treatments often do.”
“I don’t know the details of how he’s being treated.”
“Well, I can’t think of any standard treatment that would involve use of any such materials.”
“He is in an experimental ward.”
He frowned. “Who knows what some of these people get up to? But I must say, it doesn’t sound very kosher to me. Are you sure that it is the patient getting infected that they’re worried about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it was a drug company lab, you say. Maybe they’re worried that he’s infectious, that he’s going to infect the visitors.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well.” He shrugged meaningfully. “From what you say, it’s worth thinking about.”
Chapter Five
I thought about it as I drove away. Didn’t even stop to watch the baseball game on the field next to the hospital. And the more I thought about it the less I liked it.
I stopped at a drugstore for coffee and brought my notes up to date. Then I extracted a dime and a name and went to the phone in the back. The name was Walter Weston, John Pighee’s lawyer. His secretary seemed disinclined to commit him to seeing me if I came right over. But I gathered he was in and before I hung up I mentioned John Pighee’s name. According to Mrs. Thomas, they’d been buddies from college and I hoped that might carry some weight.
For whatever reason, I got to see Weston as soon as I walked into his firm’s premises, in a relatively fashionable part of the unfashionable near eastside. It was about a quarter to four.
“A private investigator,” he said when I identified myself “So?”
He was a very short and slight man, with straight black hair hanging in a shock over his forehead and almost into his eyes.
“I’ve been asked by Mrs. Dorothea Thomas to find out why—”
He interrupted, “Why she can’t visit her brother John. She’s still at that, is she?” He threw his head sideways to get the hair out of his eyes. It didn’t work.
“You make me feel a bit foolish,” I said. “As if it’s not a real problem. It’s serious enough for Mrs. Thomas.”
“She collared me about it once in the spring. She caught up with me as I was leaving Mrs. Pighee and she wouldn’t let me go. It started to rain, but she was very insistent.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know what the hell she’s bothered about. Poor John is in a coma; there’s nothing she could do for him.”
“She’s entitled to be interested,” I said. “I went to the Loftus Clinic this morning myself, and the reception I got was hardly reassuring.”
“Really?”
“A no-help receptionist and a resident bouncer. Why can’t they say, ‘Sorry, doctor’s orders’ and smile sympathetically as a consolation prize?”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“All right,” I said. “You were a friend of John Pighee’s?”
“I still am.”
“What exactly happened to him?”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Pighee was—is—a salesman. What was he doing in a research building, getting blown up?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” he said carefully, but not as if it concerned him.
“You were—are—his lawyer?”
“And his wife’s lawyer. And his milkman’s lawyer. Yes.”
“And though he’s in a violent accident, you don’t know exactly what happened to him?”
Weston took a deep breath and said, “You don’t know John.”
I couldn’t argue.
“John was”—he smiled, correcting himself—“is a man with a great deal of drive. Personal ambition. He studied chemistry in college. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“He had been at Loftus for five years. He took the job in the sales department because he couldn’t get a job on the science side and because he was more interested in getting on in life than in science.”
“But you handled the legal side of what happened?”
He hesitated, choosing careful words. “I certainly handled Mrs. Pighee’s side of the compensation arrangement.”
“Compensation? All done before you know whether the guy is going to live or die?”
“Compensation for injury, with a variety of contingency clauses.”
“But you negotiated for the Pighees with the insurance company?”
“No. I am very close to the limit of what I feel I can tell you without Mrs. Pighee’s expressed wish that I go farther, but I said that I ‘handled Mrs. Pighee’s side of the compensation arrangement.’No insurance company was involved.”
“No insurance? I don’t understand. There must have been some kind of insurance connection.”
“How Loftus deals, ultimately, with its liabilities is not my problem.”
“But that will mean that there was no insurance investigation.”
“As I say . . .”
“But you never saw the result of any insurance investigation?”
“Mr. Samson. The terms offered, the financial details on all contingencies have been accepted. They are certainly adequate. All things considered. But it is hardly up to me to take you through the relevant considerations. These matters are certainly none of your business.”
He cooled me a little bit. I said, “O.K., but can you tell me in words of two syllables or less why his sister can’t get a closer look at John Pighee if that’s her pleasure?”
“Because the right of access is completely in the hands of the Loftus Pharmaceutical Company, and because, presumably, their medical people think it’s better for John not to have visitors. In any case, Mrs. Pighee has agreed to leave all medical questions in their hands. So you must leave it to them. It’s not a legal question.” He made it clear that he was at the end of his willingness to talk to me.
“Only one more question,” I said. “You say you don’t know what John Pighee was doing when the accident happened. Is it possible that he became infected in the incident—presumably with something they were working on in the lab—and that he is still infectious and that is the reason he is not being allowed visitors?”
For the first time, Weston seemed to have to think slightly about something. “It’s conceivable,” he said coolly.
“But you’re not concerned?”
/> “You’ve had your one question,” he said. “But if it were so, it would be a pretty good reason not to allow visitors, wouldn’t it?”
Chapter Six
“A week!” my mother said. “What kind of warning is a week?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
“I’m asking you.” Then she nodded knowingly. “You must have told them, spelled it out for them, that short notice was all right.
You did that, didn’t you?”
Mom runs a luncheonette called Bud’s Dugout, on Virginia Avenue. Southeast Indianapolis, not too far out of the way on the trip from Walter Weston to Beech Grove and my client. It seemed only sonly to let her know that Marianne, my daughter, was due to arrive. Not her only grandchild, but the one least seen.
“How long is she coming for?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She didn’t say.”
“Can’t be for very long,” Mom mused. “She must have to start school in September.”
“How do we know when they start school in Switzerland? All I know is that this year they’re spending the summer in some fishing village on the Connecticut coast. And that she’s coming in a week.”
“A fishing village,” said Mom. “A child in a fishing village! Oh, dear.”
“I’ll give you the address and you can write them direct. For some reason they’re going to let me see her, and I’m not going to put her off just because she doesn’t give me a lot of notice.”
Mom nodded. “You’re a good son, Albert,” she said, meaning to say good father. How true either was . . . But I gave her the benefit of the doubt
“Will you stay for dinner?”
“I’ve got to go to Beech Grove. I’m working.”
She was quiet for a moment “I saw your ad in the paper.”
“Yeah?”
“Humiliating,” she said.
I let it pass.
“But at least you’re in work now,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s the main thing.”
I didn’t tell her that I was odds on to be out of work before I returned home. Mothers need to be protected from that sort of thing.
It was about 5:30 when I parked in front of the Pighees’ house in Beech Grove. I got out and took one step toward the driveway and Mrs. Thomas’s immobile home. But I stopped. Then turned, for the hell of it, toward the house.
The Silent Salesman Page 3