“We’re going to have her put away before she does anything,” Peter explained. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“But it’s going to take time,” Robert said. “She can be very plausible when she wants to be. And we’d like to do it with as little publicity as possible. We owe her that much.”
“I’m certainly not going to try to talk you out of it,” I said. “I’m just wondering what you came to me for. Do you want me to testify at a hearing or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” Robert was horrified by the idea. “God forbid that it come to a hearing. We’ll keep you informed of what happens, and how long it’s likely to take.”
“Okay, sure, but you still haven’t told me why you need me for any of this.”
“Well, we’ll try to keep an eye on her, but she might still get some kind of nasty message out. Tell us immediately if she does, will you?”
“Of course.”
“And warn Faith. I mean, tell her. What we’re doing.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, and I told them why, told them that the woman who was scheduled to deliver Faith’s baby wouldn’t even learn the patient’s whereabouts until the last minute. I promised to tell Rogers and try to get him to deliver the message.
Then I changed the subject. “Let me ask you a brutal question.”
Robert smiled. “I like an honest man.”
“Is part of the reason you’re doing this that you think your mother gave Louis that package to deliver?”
Peter was almost indignant. “No!” he said. Robert started to shake his head, then he clenched up tight, as though he’d been handed a live wire. He clutched at his chest and reached for his pocket. I ran to help him; Barbara, having spotted it before it happened, was at his side already.
Robert looked more irritated than in pain, like a man at the end of a long race, puffing and wheezing and holding a stitch in his side, angry at himself for not being in better shape. He waved Barbara off. “It’s all right,” he groaned. “It’s nothing.”
He was already reaching into his pocket for his medicine. He seemed to be in much better shape than last time, when the policeman had had to break the ampoule for him. This time, he did it deftly, one-handed. I heard the little crunch as the glass tube broke, and the sniff as he took a deep breath. Barbara was nodding in approval. I thought I saw a hint of relief in her expression.
As it had last time, Robert’s head shot back as the fumes reached up into his head. After that, everything was different.
His head didn’t come forward again—it thrashed against the back of the chair. Briefly, less than a second. Then Robert’s whole body pitched forward, and he lay in a semi-fetal position on my nice blue rug, twitched a few times, then lay still.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
PETER STOOD BY THE window, screaming. You’d think his brother’s condition was coming to him just now as a big surprise. I told him to shut up, but he kept on screaming. I screamed back. He shut up, then stared at me, disappointed in me for losing my head in a crisis.
I didn’t care what he thought of me at the moment—whatever it was it couldn’t have been anything worse than what I was thinking of myself. What the hell did I think I was doing? What had I thought I was doing when I got into this? All right, Faith was a friend of the family, but her problems were none of my business.
But I had been lonely, and bored doing my little TV listings, so I got involved. And I got my sister involved, and my mother involved, and nearly gotten them (and myself) killed. I had tried to deal with kinds of people I had no experience in nor aptitude for dealing with. I had watched a man get blown to bits, and I still wasn’t sure why. I had (indirectly) cost a young cop a fractured skull. I had gone to bed with another man’s wife.
I wondered how much that last incident had had to do with Robert Letron’s collapse, how much it had contributed to his lying still on my carpet at that moment. I still wonder.
I told Peter to call 911 and get an ambulance. I had to repeat it before he gave the first clue he knew what I was talking about. He walked two steps toward the phone.
“We’re wasting time,” Barbara said. The professional tiger was back on the case. She had Robert stretched out flat on the floor, and had straddled his body about level with his navel. Her skirt had ridden well up, showing most of her legs, and I became almost absently aware that I had been wanting to see most (or all) of her legs since I’d first met her.
Not now, though, and not like this. “CPR?” I asked.
She nodded. “You know how?” I said I did, but she hardly listened to me. She looked back over her shoulder to see Peter still standing around with his hands stretching his face into a rough approximation of a basset hound.
“Get on the phone, damn you!” she hollered. Peter picked up the phone, hit buttons with a weak finger.
We got to work. Barbara began pressing down with all her weight on Robert’s sternum. Sets of five. She gave a soft little grunt of effort with each compression—“uh uh uh uh uh”—pause. Over and over. That sort of noise was something else I realized I had wanted to experience with her.
This, I decided, was my punishment for taking Lucille to bed, this mockery of eroticism with a woman I truly cared about, performed over the body of Lucille’s husband.
And now I had to kiss him.
I tilted Robert’s head back to straighten his windpipe. I reached into his mouth to pull his tongue out of the way, then pinched his nose, and pressed my mouth over his and breathed softly into him. I took my mouth away and listened. Nothing. There was a chemical smell around him from the popper he’d used, but it soon evaporated. It was hard to get a good seal, with Robert’s moustache and beard against my lips, but I pressed hard, and kept trying.
Peter had summoned an ambulance. He hung up the phone, and began hovering around us as we worked on his brother, bending, kneeling, making noises in his throat. He was like a neurotic art teacher, critical of what we were doing, but awed by the spectacle of it.
Finally, Barbara left off grunting long enough to tell him to get out of the way, to go sit down somewhere. He complied, and I was delighted. If he had knelt beside me and whimpered in my ear one more time, I would have completed a clean sweep of the Letron brothers.
In CPR training, one point they press home is to stay at it—don’t stop until the ambulance comes. It took several eternities (or sixteen minutes by the official New York City log) for the ambulance to get there. About halfway through the waiting time, I started to feel dizzy and sick. I started to panic. How could I breathe for Robert when I had no breath for myself?
I was not going to get hysterical. Not while Robert’s life (possibly) depended on it. And not in front of Barbara. I suggested we switch positions, a maneuver we accomplished without missing a beat. I took deep breaths as I pressed on Robert’s chest, and I soon felt better. A little. There was no visible improvement in Robert
The ambulance men finally came. Peter had enough presence of mind to let them in. They pushed Barbara and me out of the way. I was glad to go. Barbara, an M.D., and therefore the ranking medical person on the scene, stayed close by and supervised.
She didn’t have to say much—the paramedics did all the right things. They replaced secondhand air from a human lung with fresh air pumped from a black-rubber squeeze bag. They injected something into Robert’s chest. They smeared two metal disks with white paste, and jolted his body with electricity. His body jumped with the shock. They did it five times.
Then they gave up.
I said a rude word. Barbara made a face and a sad shrug. Again, very professional, though I doubted she was too used to losing patients. At least I hoped she wasn’t. Peter sat in his chair, looking deader than his brother.
Well, not really. Robert’s skin was tinged with blue, and his arms and legs were in positions that were too uncomfortable for natural sleep. But at least there was an expression on his face, pained and hopeless as it may have been. Peter’s face loo
ked as though it belonged to something the shamus had already removed from the premises and brought to the undertaker, and the undertaker had used all his skill on it, it shouldn’t frighten the children. It occurred to me that Robert was lying on the rug exactly where I stretched out sometimes to watch TV. I wondered if I could afford a new rug.
We had to have the medical examiner in on this, it seemed. If Barbara had been Robert’s regular doctor (unlikely, for an obstetrician), she could have signed a death certificate, and that would have been it. Since she wasn’t, there was going to be an autopsy. The ambulance men used the phone to call it in.
And since there was going to be an autopsy, there had to be cops, to stand guard over my living room and see that I didn’t mess around with the evidence.
I had known there were going to be cops, regardless of what New York State law had to say about death and dead bodies. Anybody involved in a mess like this was going to be the subject of rigorous examination if he suddenly keeled over and died. I could have waited for things to go through channels, but I thought, why waste time?
As soon as the ambulance man was done, I asked for the phone.
“Going to call your lawyer?” he asked.
“Why?” I asked. “Do you know somebody?”
“I meet a lot of people,” he said.
“Makes more sense to have a spy on the ambulance than it does to chase them in person, I suppose,” I told him. He was offended and stopped talking to me. Barbara gave out with a giggle that was the first indication of nervousness I’d ever seen from her.
I called police headquarters and told them to put me in touch with Craig Rogers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IT COULD HAVE BEEN heredity, or it could have been environment. All I know is that for the first time in my life, I found myself wanting to do something I had been making fun of my mother about for years—clean the house in a time of stress.
It was maddening that I couldn’t really do it. For one thing, I had done a pretty good job on the place before I left for Scarsdale (that had been a pretty stressful time, too, come to think of it), and for another, the cop wouldn’t let me do a proper job.
I did the obvious stuff first—gathered up newspapers, things like that. Then I went looking around for more to do. The place could stand to be dusted, I thought, but that was too elaborate a chore to start with company present.
Then I saw something on the floor I could pick up, one small, white object about three feet away from the body. I bent over and got my fingers around it.
“Don’t touch that,” the cop said. He was a mustachioed young Hispanic with a charming smile. “It might be evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” Barbara demanded. “The man had a heart condition. We saw him collapse.”
“I am sorry, ma’am.” He sounded like he meant it. This guy was going to be chief of patrol some day, maybe commissioner, and it wouldn’t do to offend too many citizens. “I’m sure you’re right,” he went on. “But they told me to wait here until Lieutenant Rogers arrives. I understand you folks have met him. I haven’t, but I’ve heard of him, and I think it’d be best if we let him make the decisions on what’s evidence and what’s not.”
He had a point. I let go of the thing. Gladly, now that the feel of dry gauze over broken glass had told me what it was—the ampoule that had failed to save Robert’s life.
Rogers arrived a few minutes later. He was not announced over the intercom. He was not alone, though he wasn’t accompanied by the invasion force that had descended on my mother’s house the other day. He waved his arms like a third-base coach, and men (and one woman) got busy taking pictures and making a body outline. They did it with white tape, rather than with chalk. I appreciated their concern for the welfare of my carpet, but I would just as soon they used liquid enamel and ruined the thing completely. The way it was, the decision on keeping the carpet or getting rid of it resided solely between me and my stomach.
Rogers looked around, making sure everyone was doing the right thing. Only then did he speak. First to Peter. “Mr. Letron, let me express my deepest sympathies. I know this must be a nightmare for you. Still, I will be asking some questions—I hope you understand.” Peter nodded. At least his head went up and down a half inch or so. The expression on his face still might have been an oil painting.
Rogers turned to Barbara. “Dr. Metzenbaum,” he said respectfully. “Lieutenant,” she replied. As long as Faith’s whereabouts remained a mystery, she was giving away nothing.
Then he turned to me. “Ross,” he said. “Nothing personal, but I have never been as sick of the face of another human being as I am of yours.”
I was too tired to be offended. “Quite all right, Lieutenant,” I told him. “I’m not carrying your picture in my locket, either.”
He laughed at that. I wasn’t recovered to the point of jollity or anything, but they had just zipped up the green rubber bag, and they were getting Robert’s body the hell out of my apartment! and I was starting to breathe a little better.
He started asking me questions. Barbara and Peter were taken off to different rooms by subordinates. I assume we were asked the same questions: Did I know Robert was going to be here? Do I know of any reason someone would want to kill him? Do you have any reason to suspect it wasn’t a heart attack? Was there someone here who left before the ambulance arrived? What had we been talking about? Did Robert seem afraid? And so on.
I further assume that we gave more or less the same answers. No (Peter would say yes, he knew Robert was coming here); no, except possibly Faith Letron, assuming she had gone nuts. But they had her in protective custody, didn’t they? No; no; getting Alma Letron committed; and no, not afraid, just agitated.
Rogers looked pretty agitated himself. “Why did you call the homicide squad, then?”
“Lieutenant,” I said, “I don’t mind your jerking me around, but try to give me credit for a teeny amount of brains, okay? Here was this guy—here were two guys, no, four people involved in a whole bunch of attempted murders and a bomb blast—three, if you don’t want to count Barbara…”
“Barbara,” he said.
“Dr. Metzenbaum. Get your eyebrow down. Anyway, the four of us are sitting around talking about a fifth, one of us keels over and dies, and I’m supposed to believe you wouldn’t be interested? Let’s not be foolish.”
“All right. So use some of the brains you want me to give you credit for. Are you trying to get the old lady locked up because she’s the one that gave Louis the bomb?”
“How would a nice old lady like that know how to make a bomb?”
“Are you kidding?” Rogers demanded. “For thirty years this whole gang has had free and complete access to a cosmetics factory. Three of them: one in the States, one in Canada, and one in France. I’ve been checking into this. Do you know what kinds of chemicals they use in cosmetics?” He answered his own question. “All kinds, from whale puke to high explosive. Nitrobenzene. Nitroglycerine. Arsenic. God knows what all. I looked into this after Louis staged his little fireworks show—I haven’t used my goddam after-shave lotion since. Poisons, caustics, they use everything, either as an ingredient or in processing. Or if they don’t use it anymore, they did once. Believe me, making a bomb is the least of their worries.”
I asked him if he still wanted an answer to his question. He nodded. “In that case, I don’t know.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“However,” I went on, “if Louis was going to carry a bomb for anybody, I guess his mother would be the most likely one, right? I mean, don’t you do things for your mother you wouldn’t do for anyone else in the world?”
“I wouldn’t blow anybody up.”
“We are not talking about a normal family here.”
“Mr. Understatement. But if I was Louis, and I agreed to carry a bomb for Mom, I would check the timer first.”
“Timer? I thought it was supposed to go off when you opened it, and that Louis had shaken it the wrong way s
omehow.”
“Nope,” Rogers said. “It was a time bomb, all right. Found pieces of the dial. It was practically a miracle Louis even made it to your apartment. If the traffic hadn’t been so light that day, Louis would have been blown up in a taxicab, somewhere, we estimate, around Fifth Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street. I mean, he allowed himself, or somebody allowed him, ten minutes to get from a midtown hotel to the Upper East Side in the middle of the afternoon. I ask you.”
“I would say it showed that the bomb had been set by somebody who wasn’t used to getting around in New York—”
“That would be Robert,” the lieutenant pointed out.
I made a face. “It would, but Robert was used to getting around in Paris.”
“So?”
“So the traffic in Paris is worse. They park on sidewalks. They drive on sidewalks, and if they run you over on the sidewalk, it’s your fault. They park at the corners of the curbs. The Métro is so good in Paris because travel on the roads is damn near impossible.”
“Still,” Rogers said. “Robert had spent the time before the bomb went off out in the country. The rest of them had been in the city—they’d know what the traffic was like.”
“So that closes the case? Robert sneaked into the city from way the hell up in Litchfield County, Connecticut, built the bomb, slipped it to his brother after miscalculating the time setting, then went home in time for the Connecticut cops to find him. How’d he get back there, a rocketship? I suppose he could make fuel from some of the chemicals they make cosmetics out of. Then, of course, he drops dead here tonight in a fit of remorse.”
Rogers looked at me for a few seconds. “You done?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Good. I hate to see a man make an ass of himself. Your brains should tell you I have to go through the implications of everything, whether it makes you feel guilty for sleeping with a dead man’s wife or not.”
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