“My God,” Rogers said.
“That is a perfectly good baby,” I told him. “They all look like this when they’re born. The bald ones look worse. I think she’s a darling, myself.”
“My God,” Rogers said again.
“And,” I went on, “you should keep this in mind: this is undoubtedly the wealthiest baby born in the world today. Just by being born, she becomes the major owner of a giant corporation. A birthday gift from her father.”
“Yeah,” Rogers said, “but what I still want to know is—”
I never found out what he still wanted to know. There was a noise from the end of the corridor, something halfway between a scream and a roar. I turned, and saw that the noise was coming from Mrs. Alma Letron. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see her. She was kind enough to repeat her yell over and over, so we could make out the words.
“She won’t get away with it! She won’t get away with it!”
She started running down the corridor at us, waving her right arm over her head. She had something in her hand; when she ran under one of the lighting fixtures, I could see it was a great big claw hammer.
Let the cops handle this, I thought, just before she put a move on Rogers and ran around him like he was a fire hydrant. The Giants should have a halfback with moves like that.
Harry, I told myself, it is up to you. Of all people. How about that.
By now, she wasn’t even looking at me. For her, two things existed in the world—that sheet of glass, and her hammer. No, three. The baby behind that sheet of glass. The ironic thing was that the nurse had already taken off with Faith’s baby still in her arms. God knew what Alma intended, but I didn’t think it would be especially healthy for the five or six other people’s kids behind that window.
I got way over to the left side of the corridor to cut off her room to maneuver. Then, when she tried to go around me to my right, I dived at her, wrapped my arms around her waist, and brought her down with a tackle that would have made my old coach proud.
Then she started hitting me with the hammer. I guess she figured she’d carried the goddam thing this far, she was damn well going to use it.
I could feel things crunching in my body under the blows, but I didn’t feel any pain. Yet. Next time I did this, I would make it a point to pin her arms.
It seemed to be taking forever for Rogers to come to my aid. I looked up to see where he was, and the hammer came down on my nose, and that was the end of Sunday as far as I was concerned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I WOKE UP AND said, “Stupid.”
I wondered why I said it, but only for a second. Bewilderment was rapidly replaced by concern over my vision—the world I could see was a narrow, rough-edged rectangle surrounded by blackness, like a sloppy CinemaScope screen.
“You are not stupid,” a woman with a Jamaican accent said. “You are a ’ero. And you are making medical ’istory.”
My voice cracked. “Medical history? What’s the matter with me?” I turned to look at the owner of the voice, a plump happy black woman in a nurse’s uniform. It was a mistake. I no longer saw a rectangle, I saw stars.
“Take it easy, mon,” she said. “You’ll ’eal, in time. You got a broken nose and some cracked ribs.”
That explained the vision problems—I was looking through mounds of swollen eye-socket flesh surrounded by bandages. It was a wonder I could see anything at all. Gently, I raised a hand and confirmed the rest. “Where does the medical history come in?”
She laughed. “You are the first mon ever to ’ave ’is nose looked after by an obstetrician. She was sitting by you all night. She got a big plastic surgeon to get out of bed, and ’e came and fixed you up all pretty.”
“Is she still here?”
She laughed again and nodded. “I go tell ’er you are awake.”
Ten seconds later, Barbara came in, and we shared Our First Kiss, a little peck on the square millimeter of my lip the bandages left exposed.
“How are you?” she said.
“I feel as if someone has shoved a flat rock up under my upper lip into my forehead.”
“That’ll happen,” she assured me.
“It certainly will,” I agreed. “Thanks for getting your friend up here for me.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said. “Protecting my investment.”
“What have I missed? What day is it?”
“It’s only Monday.” She looked at her watch. “About two o’clock in the afternoon. Your rescue of the window and the babies was the high point of the action,” she assured me. “Do you have Blue Cross?”
I tried to nod, decided that was a bad idea, said yes instead. Then she gave me the wrap-up.
There was a regular little convention at the hospital. I was here. A couple of doors down was the policeman Alma had belted in the head to gain access to the maternity ward in the first place. Faith and Paula were still in the maternity ward, safe and sound, and under twice as much protection, even though they were completely safe now.
I wondered how I knew that.
Alma was under restraint in the psycho ward. Peter, who had turned up at a police station about 2 A.M., saying he had despaired of finding his mother, and that he was afraid she was going to do something terrible, was haunting the waiting room up there. Lucille was with him. If I remembered the financial deals correctly, with Paul’s estate being distributed with the birth of his daughter, Lucille would get all the money she and Robert had before the baby was born, a fortune to me, but chicken feed compared to the money Faith now controlled on behalf of her daughter. The big surprise winner were Alma Letron and her surviving son, who would split the money Paul had put aside for the four of them. This had not been chicken feed when it had been a four-way split; now it would be fairly monumental.
Now I thought I knew why I’d said “stupid” when I woke up. The whole thing had been so pointless. Only a perverted, maniacal family pride could have found a purpose to kill Faith or the baby in the first place. And the attempts themselves had been so inefficient. Pushing her down in the street, trying to run her over with a car. Trying to run a car with her in it off the road, if that little incident in Westchester had been in fact one of the attempts. So chancy. So likely to fail. Hell, they did fail.
I may have wanted to kill people in the past (old girlfriends, editors at The Grayness), but I never felt that way strongly enough or long enough to actually get around to planning it. But even such a gentle soul as myself could see that if you really wanted somebody dead, you should either get him (or her) alone and shoot, stab or strangle them, or spend the money on a professional to get it done right.
I mean, let’s face it. When I can save somebody from a murder attempt, she must not have been in much danger in the first place. You’d almost think…
Why almost? What if you went ahead and just thought it?
“Not stupid,” I said.
Barbara said, “What?”
“It wasn’t stupid,” I told her. “It was crazy, and bizarre, and more than a little nasty, but it wasn’t stupid. It all makes sense. Not perfect sense, mind you, but sense nonetheless.”
She bent to kiss me again, this time on the forehead.
“No,” I told her, “I am not delirious. I’ve got to talk to Rogers.”
“Why?” she demanded. “It’s over, Harry. Get well, will you? I’m not going to get involved with a man who won’t let go of trouble, even when it’s over.”
“When it’s over,” I told her solemnly, “I’ll let go.”
“Oh,” she said. She was no longer bantering. “It’s like that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like that. Get Rogers here as soon as he can make it, okay?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
BY FOUR O’CLOCK THAT afternoon, I was sitting in a wheelchair, en route to the psycho ward of Narwood Hospital. I was just visiting, not being committed. If anyone deserved to become a student at the Happy Academy, it was Detective Lieutenant Craig Rogers
, N.Y.P.D.
As usual, he was full of surprises. When I told him everything I had in mind, he’d stroked his chin and said, “Sure, I thought of that last night, as soon as I heard about the fire.”
“You did, huh? Have you done anything about it yet?”
“Don’t get so snotty, Ross—with a broken nose, you can’t afford it.”
Barbara told him not to be disgusting.
Rogers ignored her. “I’m a police officer, Ross. An officer of the law. I took an oath to uphold the law, and I’m stuck with it. I can be—and have been—sure enough to stake my mother’s life that somebody’s guilty, but if I don’t come up with enough evidence to convince a jury, he hasn’t done anything.”
“There’s got to be some evidence,” I said. The rock under my face was starting to throb.
“Where do you think I’ve been all day, on no sleep? I’ve been kicking ass all over town trying to find some evidence. So far, not a goddam bit.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Keep looking until the brass makes me quit. Then I quit.”
“And the killer walks.”
“You’ve got a mad on about this particular killer, don’t you?”
“What do you think?”
“I think this is something beyond, shall we say, an abstract love of justice. Something personal.”
“That was my mother and my sister in the car with me and Faith, Rogers. And my sister and me just outside when the bomb went off. Accident or not, we were around.”
“I don’t believe any of this,” Barbara said.
“Doctor,” he said, “believe it. The question is whether Ross here would do something about it, if he had the chance.”
“You know I would.”
Rogers smiled. “I’m glad you said that,” he told me.
So here I was, not a cop, not even a crime reporter. Not even a goddam process server, for God’s sake. Here I was, with every bit of my no-experience dealing with dangerous, cornered psychopaths behind me, going to try to pull a magic trick on a murderer. No. Trying to get the murderer to pull a reflexive magic trick, and have the evidence appear by the killer’s own act.
Not that it was a bad plan. It was a good plan, and I knew all the reasons Rogers couldn’t do it himself. He was a cop, and everybody knew he was a cop. People would be on guard around him. I was just Harry Ross, someone the killer had played by the numbers, like an Emenee organ. When I lit off a firework, people would jump.
That was the theory.
We found Lucille and Peter sitting around outside the guarded entrance to the psychiatric care wing. They were doing a pretty good impression of Rogers and me, but they came to life when I spoke to them. They were all concern and apologies. Peter assured me that I need have no worries about medical expenses. Faith had already made the same promise; the plastic surgeon was charging me practically nothing as a professional courtesy to Barbara; and I had insurance. All my problems should be as well taken care of as my bill at Narwood Hospital.
“How’s Faith?” Lucille asked. I told her she was fine. Then I looked at her and waited. “And the baby?” she said at last. Barbara said in her experience, she had never seen a better baby. Lucille’s nose wrinkled for a split second. I didn’t know exactly what her hang-up was, but I wanted to get out of the wheelchair, grab Lucille by the hair, and drag her down to look at little Paula and the rest of them, and defy her to tell me the difference between a “natural” child and the “experiment.”
“Have you been talking to Lieutenant Rogers?” Peter asked. “Do you think he’ll go along if we have Mother privately committed?”
That was beautiful—I couldn’t have asked for a better straight line. “I don’t know. I guess it would depend on the medical consensus. What do you think, Barbara?”
She picked right up on it. “I don’t know. Mental health isn’t really my field, but it was my patient she was after, so I’m sure my opinion would be asked…”
“Yes?” Peter asked. “What would you say?” Lucille wanted to know.
Barbara bit her lip, pondering it. “I don’t really… Listen, I’ve got to do something inside, come with me and we’ll still talk.”
Lucille was puzzled. “Inside the psychiatric ward? I thought mental health wasn’t your field.”
“It’s not, Mrs. Letron. But disturbed women get pregnant, and pregnant women get disturbed.”
So we went inside. Barbara kept talking without actually saying anything until we reached the nurses’ section. Then she said, “Excuse me,” went behind the desk, and started looking at charts. She held the clipboard in her left hand; only I noticed what she was doing with her right.
I raised my hand and indicated my bandages. “Too bad you weren’t around in time to save me from this,” I said to Peter.
He looked at me for a second, decided it was a joke and that an injured man could be forgiven a lapse of taste, and laughed.
“Of course,” I went on, “it must be harder to figure out how long after you’ve primed her your mother is going to go off than it is a bomb.”
“What are you talking about?” Lucille demanded.
“Look at him, Lucille,” I said, keeping my eyes on Peter. “He knows what I’m talking about. He knows he killed his brothers. Louis, with the bomb, your husband wi—”
“Robert had a heart attack!” she protested. Peter’s smile said, “Answer that one.”
“He had an angina attack. People live for years with angina. How many weeks went by without your husband having them? And more importantly, how much did they hamper his having a normal life?”
“He… it… didn’t hamper him. As long as he kept taking his medicine—”
“Remember you said that, Lucille.” I turned to her brother-in-law. “I know you did it, Peter. I’m pretty sure how, and I bet I even know why.”
“I saved your life, Ross,” the young man reminded me.
“Yeah. I appreciate that less now that I know you were the one who put it in danger in the first place. What did you do? Did you tell him it was glass animals? You gave Louis the package and sent him on his merry way, right? Then you followed him, to make sure the bomb went off, or to intercept the package if for some reason it didn’t.
“But your timing got messed up by the light traffic. You couldn’t have foreseen it, but suddenly it was imperative to keep that bomb away from me. Especially away from Faith. So you had to show yourself. It worked out pretty well for you; Louis was gone, and you were a hero to Faith and her friends. You couldn’t be the one trying to kill her; didn’t you save her life?”
“It still sounds good to me,” he said.
“You’re crazy,” Lucille said.
“Let him call me crazy.” I didn’t take my eyes off Peter. He didn’t stop smiling.
“Go on,” he said.
“Oh, you weren’t about to stop me.”
“You still have to explain why I saved Faith’s life if I was trying to kill her.”
“That’s the whole point, Peter. That was the whole brilliance and sickness of your plan. You weren’t.”
“He wasn’t?” Lucille demanded. “He wasn’t what?”
“Trying to kill Faith.”
I was beginning to think it was a mistake to have Lucille for an audience while I tried to do this. She was coming up with all the histrionic reactions I’d been hoping to get from Peter. All he had to do was stand there and smile, while Lucille got wilder and wilder.
She was practically screaming by now. “Then who was trying to kill her?”
“Nobody,” I explained. “I mean, Peter made the attacks, didn’t you, Peter? Look at how he keeps smiling, Lucille. Haven’t I said enough to piss him off yet? You’re practically hysterical, and I haven’t accused you of a damn thing.”
“You’ve had a blow on the head,” Peter said calmly. “I’m making allowances. Or I’m giving you enough rope to hang yourself. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Well,” I said, “I�
��ll just keep talking until you do. Barbara, how are you coming with that?”
“Just fine,” she said.
“Good, good, then we’ll be able to wind this up soon. Lucille, Peter didn’t have any great regard for Faith’s well-being, or the baby’s either. But he didn’t want to kill her. He couldn’t kill her, not and go through with his plan. Because if he killed her, the investigation would come down on your family like the proverbial ton of bricks. The motive screamed out. Faith went around screaming it out, and so did your mother-in-law. It might have been your mother-in-law’s ravings about the family fortune and all that, that gave him the idea.”
I waited for somebody to say “What idea?” but nobody did. I went on unprompted. “What Peter wanted to do,” I said, “and what he has damn near succeeded in doing, was to use Faith as a smokescreen, allowing him to kill his brothers and frame his mother for the crime.
“You will notice,” I said, “that he didn’t really do anything lethal until he sent that bomb. That was after Faith came to me. What difference did I make? I had used the resources of The Greatest Newspaper In The World to look into the situation. I knew how much of Faith’s story was true. When the shit started to go down, I gave Faith a credibility with the cops she never had when she went to them on her own.
“So now that Louis was dead, it looked like he was the one behind the threats on Faith’s life, Peter was a hero. Why didn’t he stop? Why didn’t you stop, Peter?”
“Why don’t you stop, Ross? This is getting tiresome.”
I ignored him. “You didn’t stop because you still had Robert to take care of. Killing Robert was even simpler and nastier than killing Louis had been. You have access to poisonous chemicals; you work with glass. It would be a simple matter for you to, say, empty one of Robert’s ampoules, replace the medicine with what? Cyanide? Nitrobenzene? Something deadly that worked fast and evaporated. Then seal it up again. They’re going to look for it during the autopsy, now. They probably wouldn’t have before.”
Peter shrank. Not a lot, and not for long, but the news about the autopsy stung him.
Keep the Baby, Faith Page 17