“Won’t you have something to eat?” I asked.
“I’ll try later,” she said.
Sam and I watched her go to the bedroom.
“I don’t understand you, Daddy,” Sam said as soon as Linn had closed the bedroom door.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She doesn’t want to go out. Anybody can see that.”
“But she wants to know about her husband. People often have wants which conflict with each other. It’s up to her to choose.”
“I understand that,” Sam said sharply. “I’m not stupid. But what I don’t understand is you pushing so hard for her to go. You are the one who’s pushing her into decisions.”
I started to defend myself. But stopped. She had a point. I shrugged.
“Why does she have to go today? Why not tomorrow?”
Not that she’d be more likely to want to go out tomorrow, either. But I said, “I feel it’s the right time.”
Sam still didn’t understand.
“I feel it, Sam. I feel there’s a momentum and a correctness to the timing. I don’t want to lose it”
“The feeling?”
“And the concentration. I hate to let something I’ve worked on go. I’ve built up an understanding of what I don’t understand. Another day and I might confuse myself. I don’t like to toss away the pieces easily.”
She was quiet for a while.
It gave me a moment to reassure myself that if Linn really didn’t want to go out, I wasn’t threatening to tie her up and roll her down the stairs. If her problem was mostly mental, concentrating on clearing a small obstacle might help build confidence for clearing larger ones.
Sam said, “You and Mummy must have had a lot of trouble when you lived together.”
“What?”
“You must have had some feeling for her once. You wouldn’t have wanted to throw all that away easily.”
“I didn’t,” I said, after a moment’s catching up with the long gone. “And it wasn’t exactly me that threw it away.”
“Mummy says it was.”
“You talk about me?”
“Of course!” She burst with it. “You’re my father. She’s my mother. Of course I want to know about you. I’ve got curiosity, too, you know.”
And I finally understood why an active kid could cut a few weeks out of a summer to hang around Indianapolis with an old man she’d hardly ever met. It was because it was her old man, and, thrust into other people’s lives, she had little enough that was hers, all hers.
“We . . . your mother and I . . . we sort of met each other when we were both thinking about being things that we weren’t, that we aren’t.”
“She thinks you’re stupid to waste your time being a detective.”
For all the years, it hurt.
“And I think she’s stupid contenting herself with being a rich man’s wife. She did all that while she was still just her rich father’s daughter. She had a lot going for her, underneath all the silk.”
“It still hurts?”
I didn’t want to admit to her what I’d already admitted to myself.
“Once stung,” I said. Trying to be ambiguous. I didn’t fool her a bit.
“I thought it might,” she said. Then, for no logical reason, “You wrote me super letters when I was young.”
“That’s ‘cause we were pen playmates. You’ve outgrown me now.”
“Daddy, why are you a private detective?”
“It just seemed like a good idea at the time. And now—well, I know a lot more than I did about how to do it, and it seems a shame to throw all that good knowledge away. And I like those odd times, every year or two, when someone tells me something interesting.”
“But why without really trying at it? Why without working hard at it?”
“There’s no reward for working hard except more money and less time to enjoy it.”
“But . . .”
“And I don’t like to waste my concern, my feeling, on things that aren’t really interesting. I’d rather save them for situations like this one, so I can pull out my best, even if it isn’t good enough.”
It seemed to satisfy her. Even if it didn’t satisfy me.
At least she didn’t ask another question. I said, “So I don’t want to make Linn go out this afternoon. But if she will, then I’ll encourage her.”
Quietly, Sam accepted the return to work. “Isn’t there something else you could do?”
“Any suggestions?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know all that much about it, do I?”
I spent the rest of the morning going through my notes on the case with her.
When it was ten minutes past the time I thought Linn should be up, I said, “Is Linn awake?”
“No,” Sam said. “If she is, she hasn’t made any noise.”
“I’ll go look.”
I went to the bedroom and opened the door very quietly. Linn Pighee was still and facing the wall so I couldn’t see her face.
“I said, “Linn?”
She didn’t move.
I said her name again.
She turned over. Her eyes were still closed, but she clawed at the space next to her. She made sounds, breathing at first and then some crying. She slurred the word “John,” said it again. Turned back to the wall and became still again.
I left her, wondering how much stress she could take. And decided to make some coffee before waking her up for real.
But as I was pouring it into three cups, the bedroom door opened and Linn walked out smiling. “I’m getting used to your mother’s smock, Mr. Albert,” she said. “Do you think she’d let me buy it from her?”
“I doubt it. But she’d give it to you. Want some coffee?”
“Lovely,” she said, and took it. “When do we leave?”
“A little less than an hour.”
“You know,” she said, “I don’t have anything suitable to wear.”
She decided to dress from Sam’s wardrobe, rather than mine, and when we descended the stairs at 3:40 they looked more like sisters than I would have thought possible. Out for a walk with Pop. Linn remained cheerful. Only at the outside door did she shudder and ask, “How far is the car?”
“It’s a panel truck and it’s around the corner.”
“Couldn’t you go bring it up to the curb, Daddy?”
I did.
Sam sat in the back on the cushions I keep there. “I don’t often have two passengers at the same time,” I said.
“You should go out and get my car,” Linn said. “I’d bevery happy for you to use it. It ought to be used.”
We were quiet for a while as I made progress toward the hospital. Then Linn said, “I’ll bet Dougie is worried about me. He’s very responsible that way, you know.”
“Who’s Dougie?” Sam asked.
“He’s a boy who used to bring me medicine, when I was in Beech Grove.”
“That was nice of him,” Sam said.
“I’m sure Mrs. Thomas is aware by now that you’renot at home,” I said. “If he asks, she’ll tell him that.”
“I suppose so,” Linn said.
I saw Sam’s face wrinkling in the rear-view mirror. She said, “He’ll probably stop by in a few days, and you’ll be able to tell him yourself.”
Linn didn’t say anything.
Neither did I.
“You’re bound to be feeling better by then,” Sam said.
“I’m not going back to that house,” Linn said. “Not now I’m out. Not ever.”
Chapter Twenty Two
Walter Weston was sitting in the Loftus Clinic waiting area. He didn’t see us when we walked in; he seemed to be brooding.
“Hello, Walter,” Linn said when we arrived in front of him.
He literally jumped up. “Linn! Hello.”
“Hello, Walter,” she said again.
“You don’t look very well. Sit down.”
She did.
He
acknowledged me and then looked at Sam. “Who is the young lady?”
“My daughter,” I said. “But she’s also a trainee detective. It’s a family business.”
Weston didn’t say anything, but he brushed at the hair that hung over his forehead.
Sam asked Linn if she felt all right. She said she did, but her voice lacked conviction, even to me.
“Let’s get going,” Weston said. “If we must go through with this bizarre episode.”
“We’re not all here yet,” I said.
“No?”
“A friend of mine from the police department is supposed to meet us here at four.”
“Police?” he said. But didn’t press it, because the envelope of used hundreds had been bothering him, too.
I looked at my watch. It was five past four. I said, “We might as well go ahead with preliminaries.” I walked to the reception desk and said, “We are a party with Mrs. Linn Pighee. We want to see her husband, John Pighee.”
The nurse was the same one I’d dealt with four days before. She didn’t say anything to me but turned to the room behind her and called, “Evan!”
The bouncer. I thought she was calling him out to dribble with me again. But he came to the door and walked away from us through the swinging doors to the Clinic proper.
I went back to my party. It was seven past four. “Things are rolling,” I said. Linn looked seasick.
“Exactly what is this friend of yours in the police department?” Weston asked.
“A detective lieutenant,” I said. But I was more interested in where he was. He hadn’t promised he’d come. “He said he would try to make it,” I said.
Behind me doors swung and I turned to face Evan and Jay Dundree.
“I didn’t expect so many people,” Dundree said. He was frowning and making no effort to put on a braver face. “Henry Rush said Mrs. Pighee would be here.”
“This is Mrs. Pighee,” I said, and introduced Linn. Then Weston and Sam.
Dundree said, “Dr. Merom is ready. Shall we go in?”
Linn said, “I’d like to sit here for a while.”
Dundree looked at me; I looked at Linn.
Sam interceded. “I’ll stay here with her, Daddy. You and Mr. Weston go ahead. He knows Mr. Pighee, doesn’t he?”
Evan accompanied us through the swinging doors into the Clinic. At the second door on the left, Dundree knocked once and then led us into a comfortable medical office where Marcia Merom was waiting. Dundree said, “I’ve asked Dr. Merom to describe Mr. Pighee’s condition and history and to summarize the treatment he’s received to date. Then we will go to see him.”
“O.K.,” I said.
“The patient,” she began, “arrived at the Clinic with severe head injuries on the night of January 27th.” She described the injuries in some detail, but I found my mind wandering to the $22,000 that Pighee had apparently left for her. I looked at Weston and realized that he had picked up her name in the introductions. I was urgently curious what Pighee’s involvement with her was. With hair rolled tight and eyes bright with precise recounting of the medical history, she certainly didn’t do anything for me.
“In our opinion,” she continued, “had the patient come to any other emergency clinic within four hundred miles, he would have died that night. Fortunately for him, and his family, the company had recently begun a research project related to the development and testing of possible chemotherapeutic aids to treatment of severe physical trauma. The initial problem in such cases, as you may know, is the very short time available to stabilize the patient’s critical body functions. Without these, the body’s natural repair mechanisms have no time to operate, because the patient is already dead.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Do you want me to go into more detail?”
“We want to see the patient.”
“So I understand,” she said. She got up from her chair.
We were led to another room, where we were dressed: masks, hairnets, and gowns. Part of making a convincing performance, if nothing else.
Merom led us into Pighee’s room.
At first I couldn’t see him. There was a committee of machines surrounding what turned out to be his bed. His body was encased up to the neck in a plastic bag. Electrical and physical connectrodes grew off him like hair. There was a machine positioned over his chest.
His head down to his nose was covered in a brown material, like a bandage impregnated with some chemicals. His eyes and the rest of the left side of his face were covered.
“My God!” Weston said. It was not a pretty sight.
“I will ask you all not to move too close,” Dr. Merom said. Dundree nodded slowly behind her. “I won’t go into detail about the apparatus you see before you. Just a few of the more obvious things.”
Which included the monitors of his heart, breathing, kidney function, nutrient input, waste production, temperature, salt balance, various blood factors, liver function.
“Are you satisfied?” Dundree asked us.
“Yes,” Weston said sharply.
“No,” I said. Then to Weston, “Get a good look at him.”
“What’s to look at?”
“Is he John Pighee?”
“How could anyone tell?”
Dundree frowned. “Are you suggesting that he might not be John Pighee?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Ridiculous.”
We talked about it more in the dressing room. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” I said. “When you people won’t let anybody near him, how are we supposed to know?”
“Your imagination must be running away with you, or you’re ill. That is most certainly John Pighee.”
“I’d like a set of his fingerprints,” I said. Just to take my popularity ratings to a new Olympic and world record.
Merom was impassive, but Dundree was furious. “Who do you think you are!” he shouted. “What kind of madman?”
“I think I’m the authorized representative of Mrs. Linn Pighee, and I have a right to ask for positive identification.”
Dundree turned to Weston. “You’re the lawyer. Do you concur in this . . . this insulting request?”
Weston looked very uncomfortable. But he came down on the side of the angels. “If it can be done without undue risk, I don’t see why you should object.”
They got the patient’s fingerprints on a sterile glass, and ten minutes later Weston and I were on our way out.
But before I left Dr. Merom, I said, “I hope you won’t take this all personally. I am trying to act in the best interests of my client as you, presumably, are acting in the best interests of your patient as you see them.”
She didn’t seem very charmable.
“What is Pighee’s prognosis?” I continued.
“That is impossible to say.”
“So he might just die, after all this?”
“It’s certainly possible, although his condition has been stable for some time now.”
“What about brain damage?” It was the one organ she hadn’t made a point of drawing our attention to.
“We monitor his cerebral activity, of course,” she said. “It’s about all we can do. We would be more hopeful if he were conscious, but he may yet be.”
“Well, there will be at least one good side, if he should die,” I said with artificial jauntiness.
“What’s that?” asked Dr. Merom.
“I’ll be able to open an envelope I’ve got in my office. John Pighee left it. It’s only to be opened in case of his death.”
Merom and Dundree exchanged glances that were momentarily worried, shocked, puzzled. Then Dr. Merom said, “Well, I certainly hope that it won’t come to that.”
They hadn’t given me much joy, but at least they’d given me a reaction. We came to the swinging doors, and Weston and I were back in the Clinic waiting area.
Sam and Linn weren’t there.
The nurse behind the desk pre-empted my question. She said,
“The older woman became ill while she was waiting. The young lady took her to the emergency ward for examination.”
“Not here!” I said, without thinking.
The nurse got my meaning all too quickly. “This is an experimental clinic,” she said. “We don’t take just anybody.”
Weston said to me, “This hasn’t been a very successful venture, Mr. Samson.”
I cradled the fingerprint glass uneasily. I knew in my core that the fingerprints were Pighee’s, that Linn was not well.
We found Sam in the emergency ward waiting area. She was sitting with her head on her hands. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders.
“She’s been admitted,” Sam said. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do. She was very sad, Daddy.”
So were we all.
Chapter Twenty Three
Weston didn’t have much to say to me before he went on his way. He was sympathetic with my suspicions, but he was glad that he hadn’t been responsible for this particular effort at elucidation. I could understand his point. I didn’t feel very elucidated.
Sam and I didn’t talk much all the way home.
Sam and I didn’t talk much during the rest of the evening.
I woke up in the middle of the night and talked to myself. I asked me what I’d thought I was doing. Forcing my way into a desperately ill man’s sickroom. Insisting that his unwell wife go out when she didn’t want to.
More deeply I asked what reason I had for thinking I was a private detective when I couldn’t keep myself together, when my enthusiasm for suspicion could outweigh my better judgment.
I asked what I was doing sleeping in the bed Linn should have been sleeping in.
At twenty past ten Sam woke me up. “Daddy. Daddy! There’s a lady to see you.”
There are worse reasons to wake up. I stretched, scratched, covered up, and walked through to my office.
Where I found Mrs. Thomas. “It would be nice if we could all sleep past seven-thirty,” she said. I got the feeling that she was not all that pleased with me. But she’d have to take her place at the back of the line.
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Thomas?”
“You can explain this,” she said, and handed me a piece of paper.
The Silent Salesman Page 13