The Silent Salesman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  After calming down, I went up the stairs to the balmy calm of an empty office. I sat in my swivel chair and tried to relax. Instead I fell asleep.

  Sam woke me up at about four. “Daddy!”

  It pulled me out of a world where I understood everything that was going on. “Hi,” I said.

  But before we could pursue the subject further, we both heard heavy steps on my stairs.

  Lieutenant Miller walked into the office to find us both looking directly at him. He growled threateningly. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know,” I told him.

  He shrugged. Then, indicating Sam, he said, “Can we talk alone?”

  “Feel free to talk in front of her, Lieutenant. She’s my new employee.”

  “Employee? You?” He looked at her again.

  “Show the officer your I.D., Sam.”

  She obliged. He studied it with a brief flicker of interest.

  “She’s apprenticed to me. Under bond for seven years to learn the detective business.”

  “Seven years,” Miller said. “That’s too pitiful to be funny.”

  “Come, come, Lieutenant,” I said.

  “Because at the rate you’re pushing your luck you’ll be lucky to be in business seven days.”

  “A poor joke,” I said. “But you didn’t come over here just to show me that you haven’t got any sense of Yuma.”

  “Any what?”

  “Just an Arizonan quip.”

  The mood grew serious.

  “You wanted information about the death of Simon Rackey in June ’73.”

  “True.”

  “Well, I’ve looked it up. But you’re going to misinterpret it, if I know you.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because the first patrolman on the scene—a rookie—thought that the circumstances were suspicious and he filed a report to that effect.”

  “Did he?” I said. Sam smiled.

  “But he was wrong,” Miller said. “He was overruled and it was wrapped up as accidental. Look, Al, you’d be amazed how many rookies come across suspicious cases in their first couple of weeks that no one comes across again except maybe once or twice in a lifetime.”

  “Tell me about it, will you?”

  “The rookie thought it was very unlikely that an educated man, a polio victim fully conscious of his need to maintain his balance, would have lost his cool so badly that he fell off the back porch. Even chasing a burglar.”

  “Was that all?”

  “Yeah. He just thought it was suspicious, and rated further investigation.”

  “Which it didn’t get?”

  “No.”

  “So we’ll never really know.”

  “They’re bound to have looked into it, Al. If they overruled it, then they had good reason. I don’t think you should follow this up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not easing off on the case,” Miller said explosively, “and you said you would.” He acted as if the worst thing about it was that I wasn’t playing fair.

  For all my sympathy with him and for him, I’d still cast my die. “I undertook not to jeopardize anybody,” I said sharply. “But if your captain thinks that he can give me orders, without even saying please, then he’s not in touch with reality.”

  Miller sighed and shook his head. “I’m going to have to go from here and tell Gartland. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “What you do with the information that I’m not spending my days watching TV soap operas is your business. I suggest you trust my good sense, but you can also tell your hifalutin friend that if he tries to strong-arm me out of circulation, a full account of everything I know and guess will go to four newspapers. And let him try to bottle them up.”

  “You’re going to have me pounding a beat, you know that,” he said despairingly.

  “If the worst comes to the worst,” I said, “I can always find a place for you here.”

  He left to see his doctor for some antidepressants on his way to Gartland.

  “Have you really written out what you know for the papers, Daddy?”

  “No,” I said. “They wouldn’t print it anyway. They might go after the local police for corruption, but around these parts they have strong feelings of support for the enforcement arms of the government.”

  “Are we going off now?”

  “I’d rather eat. Are you in some kind of hurry?”

  “I was going out with Ray tonight,” she said.

  “Well, that’s just as well,” I said. “I got some soap operas to catch up on.”

  Ray and Sam left at seven and I made some phone calls. I wanted to talk to one of Drs. Norman Kewanna or Fowler Boone, but I didn’t know which. Fowler Boone, I found, was on duty that night, but Kewanna was due home. His wife said I could come over. Rather than go again to the hospital, I plumped for Kewanna.

  His house was in west Indianapolis; a sizable frame building, with a screened porch and the yard full of odds and ends. Not just children’s toys, adult toys, too: old wheels, bits of building material, bags, a pile of logs. It was refreshingly ordinary, compared to the stereotype of the ambitious young doctor.

  A miniature Phyllis Diller answered the door. I asked if its father was home. It turned its back on me and shouted, “Mom!”

  Mom was a thin woman in new jeans and a very large man’s shirt. “Hi,” she said brightly, projecting an enthusiasm for life that I thought had been lost in the modern world. “What can I do for you?”

  I reminded her of my phone call and asked if her husband was home yet.

  “He was here,” she said, “but he’s just gone out for some beer. Should be back in a few minutes. You come on in and wait for him, hear?”

  She led me to the kitchen, where she was baking cookies. Three children of assorted sizes were making contributions to the project.

  “This here is Allison,” their mother said, “and this is Corinne, and the little’n’s Marina, but you already met her.”

  “How do you do,” I said to the girls. “My name is Albert”

  “Albert!” said Marina. “What a funny name. Isn’t that a funny name. Mommy?”

  “Hush, child,” she said. “You want a funny name, you try mine. I’m called Fayette.”

  “I know that,” Marina said.

  Corinne said, “I don’t think that’s a funny name, Mamma.”

  “That’s just you’re used to it,” she said. And then, to me, “I was born in Fayette County and my mother must have liked the sound of it.”

  “Lucky it wasn’t Tippecanoe County.”

  “I sure am,” she said. We both heard a car turn in the driveway and then stop on the gravel. “There’s Norm now.”

  Kewanna came in through the back door carrying a crate of beer. He was a big man but more wide than tall. He and his burden seemed to fill the doorway nicely. He paused as he saw me, then remembered. “The guy who wanted to see me,” he said. “Hang on a sec.” He set the crate next to the refrigerator and went back outside. In a moment there was a second crate on top of the first.

  He opened the refrigerator and began transferring bottles to empty shelves at the bottom. The last four in the bottom crate he took to the work-top next to the sink, where an opener was screwed into the wall. The four bottle tops bounced to the surface and Kewanna handed me a bottle. One for Fayette, one for himself, and the last one he held up. “This is for you girls to share,” he said. “I don’t want one of you hogging it, now.” To me, he said, “Shall we go out on the porch? Bit cooler there.”

  I followed. It was cooler there.

  “I hope I’m not wasting your time,” I said.

  “So do I. I don’t have much to spare.”

  “You were on duty in the emergency ward at Entropist Hospital last January 27th,” I said.

  He smiled slightly. “I was?”

  “So I am told. You and a Dr. Boone. It was a Thursday.”

  “If you say so.”

  �
�According to wherever records are kept of such things . . .”

  He shrugged.

  “Anyway, a case came in that night. If you dealt with it, you might remember it.”

  “Possible.”

  “It was a man who’d been seriously injured in an explosion, in a lab accident at Loftus Pharmaceuticals.”

  “Yeah?” He was trying to remember.

  “A man named John Pighee. Was working in a research lab when something happened.”

  “Head injuries,” he said slowly.

  “That’s it.” I nearly tipped forward out of my chair.

  “I remember a guy who was rushed to us with some administrator in the ambulance with him. I started to examine him, but the administrator insisted—that’s right, Loftus, because of the Clinic— this guy insisted that they take him straight up to the experimental section. He said they’d been alerted and were expecting them. And he wheeled him off himself. Yeah, I remember.”

  “So you didn’t examine him?”

  “Not thoroughly. But from what I could see, I told the guy it wasn’t worth the effort. He took him through anyway.”

  “Wasn’t worth the effort? Why not? Don’t they have fancier equipment in there and that sort of thing?”

  Kewanna pulled hard on his beer. “The guy was D.O.A.”

  “Dead?”

  “You’ve heard of the condition?” he said.

  “Look, don’t mess around. Are you sure he was dead?”

  “It’s one of the first things they teach us, how to tell when you’ve killed a patient. Or someone else has. No heartbeat, no breathing, smashed head. Dead.”

  “How would you react if I told you that John Pighee has been in the Loftus Clinic for seven months. Unconscious, but alive.”

  “Are you telling me?”

  “I am.”

  He was surprised.

  “How do you explain that?” I asked.

  “I don’t.”

  “Try.”

  “Well, I never got a chance to try and resuscitate him, and I don’t know how long his heart had been stopped for. Loftus Pharmaceuticals? That’s a few miles. Got to be ten, fifteen minutes at the very least between the time it happened and when I saw him.”

  “Or half an hour.”

  “Could easily have been half an hour,” he said. “I don’t know.

  They rushed him right past me; I only had a minute. But . . .” He shook his head. “The virgin birth and now this . . .”

  “You say this administrator said the Clinic was expecting them?”

  “He said they’d been alerted and were expecting them.”

  “Does that often happen?”

  “Only once to me,” he said.

  “You don’t remember the administrator’s name, do you?”

  “Didn’t have time to get his autograph,” he said. Then, somewhat apologetically, “I didn’t ask. He said he was head of something, though.”

  “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  Speculatively, “Chubby little fella. Bright weasel eyes. Nothing else.”

  It had to be Jay Dundree. “Do you know any of the medical staff in the experimental section?”

  “We don’t mix,” he said, “though I understand that it’s controlled by a woman called Merom. Don’t know anything about her, though. And I don’t know whether there are any others. Probably some on part time. Depends on what they’ve got cooking there.”

  “What would you say this man’s chances of surviving and coming out of the coma would be?”

  “Look, pal,” he said to me, “as far as my professional judgment goes, this guy was dead in January, and there aren’t many of us survive that.”

  Chapter Thirty One

  I called Merom’s apartment from a phone box, but there was no answer. Then I called the Loftus Clinic and, after waiting two minutes, was told Merom wasn’t there. I would have called Miller, but I didn’t have another dime.

  On the way to Loftus Pharmaceuticals, I realized I could have used the dime to call Miller, if I’d thought about it. Because Wednesday was Merom’s night at the lab, according to Fincastle’s list. But then I wouldn’t have known whether to call Miller at home or at the police department. I probably would have lost the dime anyway.

  Fincastle himself was on the job in the Security Building. I told him Dr. Merom was expecting me in Research Three. He just pushed the logbook toward me. It was a quarter past eight.

  I walked quickly to the building. There was only one light visible in it. The Storeroom lab. I didn’t bother to sign in at the table logbook next to the door in Research Three.

  Marcia Merom was singing to herself. I heard her at the top of the stairs and paused momentarily to listen. She had a clear and rather pretty voice and she sang with feeling enough to make me think she sang often. Only the words jarred with the surprising pleasantness of discovering her new talent. It was one of the rock dirges from the late fifties, unfulfilled love leading to violent and anticipated death. “Curly Shirley sure woke early on the day-ay she died.”

  I scuffled my feet as I walked down the hall toward the open door.

  Merom stopped singing. She listened. She said, “Lee?” She sounded cool and businesslike and expectant. “Lee?”

  I stepped into the doorway. “No,” I said. “Not Lee.”

  She whirled toward me, and her hands shook. She dropped a pen. “My God!” she said. She steadied herself “You gave me the most terrible fright. Don’t ever do that. Ever!” It was a formula of speech rather than a reaction to the actual situation.

  “Sorry,” I said. But I concentrated more on the lab. It was packed from floor to ceiling with machinery. There was virtually no surface space for miscellaneous work. The first things to catch my eye were several clock-face gauges, a stack of packing material in a rack underneath the window, and an open box containing little metal vials marked on top with the three-leaf-clover design used to identify radioactive materials.

  The dials seemed to cover several kinds of measurement; the packing material included both small unerected cardboard boxes and a pile of clear plastic bags; the box of vials had spaces for a couple of dozen containers but was only half full.

  Merom saw me looking around the room. She immediately marched forward. “You’re not allowed in here. Get out. Go on.”

  “I want a word,” I said.

  “Outside.”

  We went out into the corridor. She closed the door to the lab, but that left us standing in the dark. Uncertainly, she opened the lab door a crack, so we could at least see where the other was.

  “It’s been nearly a day and a half,” I said to her. “You were going to talk to your people. I left you my card with my phone number.”

  Her voice became sly. “Haven’t you seen the police since then, Mr. Samson?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Your people went to the police, and the police came to me, and now I’ve come back to you, because certain things still need explaining.”

  I’d taken the offensive. She had considered me to be a solved problem, and all of a sudden my solution was uncertain again.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Why, for instance, have you kept John Pighee’s heart beating for seven months since he died?”

  “What—? How—?”

  “And after you stutter through that one you can tell me how you come to be practicing medicine without a medical degree.” It was an attacking gamble. I’d seen the Ph.D. certificate on her wall. I was guessing that if she’d had an M.D. it would have been there, too.

  She opened her mouth, but didn’t speak.

  “Let’s have some answers. I’ll settle for them now.”

  “I’ll . . .” she said. Then decisively, “We can’t talk here.”

  I shook my head, but before I could find words exact and emphatic enough to show the end of my patience with these people who’d been playing with the cadaver of John Pighee for more than half a year, she said, “Lee is due here any minute
, and if he finds you here . . . We’ve got to go to my place. Give me a minute, just a minute to hold things together in there. Then we’ll talk.”

  She ducked into the Storeroom lab. I stood in the dark, but before I became anxious she was out again and locking the door. We made our way down the stairs and out of the building. At the Security Building she studied the log as we signed out. Seafield hadn’t signed in yet. She relaxed visibly. Our vehicles were in the same lot. I followed her to her apartment building and parked behind her.

  While she was opening her front door, she said, “Yesterday afternoon I had the glass put back in the kitchen door.”

  “Oh?”

  “But it worries me that there was only that pane of glass between me and the outside. I may have a new door fitted.” I wondered if I should recommend the work of Ray McGonigle.

  She led me in. I remembered she had been afraid of Seafield, not the outside world in general. The thought of Seafield didn’t, in itself, inspire me with fear. But she knew him better than I did.

  While she locked the door behind us, I sat down on her couch. She sat in a matching chair and said, “Please tell me what you know, Mr. Samson.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not the idea. The idea is for you to tell me what the hell you’ve been doing with John Pighee’s body.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “maybe I should have killed you yesterday while I had the chance.” It was said speculatively and without apparent malice. I ignored it. Then she said, “John was dead when he came into the Clinic. We hitched him up to some excellent machines and we’ve kept his heart pumping and his lungs breathing, all that sort of thing. But he was dead from a few minutes after his accident.”

  There it was. “But what I don’t understand is why.”

  “Because accidents on company premises which result in death or permanent injury are thoroughly investigated by the insurance company,” she said. “Whether there is a claim or not. This way, with no death or injury reported, they haven’t gone through their investigation procedure. Our situation—well, it would have been highly detrimental to have an insurance investigator asking questions. You’ve been bad enough. But those guys are good, and they’re given free run of the place.”