Angel of Mercy

by Andrew Neiderman

  “She says Frankie’s having a heart attack. Call the paramedics.”

  “Right,” Derek said. He rushed to the nearest phone.

  “What is that?” Rosina demanded when Faye returned to Frankie’s side.

  “Digitoxin. It’s a cardiovascular drug used for congestive heart failure, to regulate the heart rhythm.”

  She went to her knees and quickly prepared to inject Frankie.

  “Wait,” Rosina cried. Faye turned.

  “If we wait any longer, he’s sure to die,” Faye said. “Look at his lips and his pupils!”

  Rosina’s mind reeled. Where was the other sister? What had caused Frankie’s seizure? Is this woman a murderess or a nurse? she wondered. She, a policewoman, could be standing by and willingly watching someone kill another person; in effect, giving her permission to do so. On the other hand, Faye Sullivan might actually be saving Frankie Samuels’ life.

  “Well?” Faye waited, poised with the needle. “I’m losing him!” she screamed.

  “Do it.” Rosina lowered her pistol to her side, closed her eyes, and prayed.

  EPILOGUE

  With Stevie, Beth and Laurel at her side, Jennie held Frankie’s hand and watched the medicine in the IV bottle drip through the tube and into his arm. There was subdued noise and chatter around her in the CCU, but Jennie heard only the beep, beep, beep of Frankies heart monitor. His eyelids fluttered and slowly lifted. When he focused on Jennie’s face, he smiled. Then his gaze went to his son and his daughter and daughter-in-law.

  “Did I miss something?” he asked.

  The tears rolled down Jennie’s cheeks, but she didn’t make any effort to wipe them away.

  “You missed something,” she said with a tone of chastisement.

  He stared at her a moment.

  “I had the craziest dream,” he said, “that I had come out of the hospital, recuperated, gone to my retirement dinner, and then moved to Palm Springs.”

  “Very funny, Frankie.”

  “How are you doing, Dad?” Stevie asked moving closer to the bed to take Frankie’s other hand into his.

  “I’m all right as long as you guys leave me in here and don’t let her take me home, where she’s sure to beat me to death,” he replied.

  Beth laughed and then just started to cry. She turned away quickly.

  “Hey,” Frankie said. “I’ve got a new cause for you to picket and protest: the treatment of retired policemen, especially retired detectives.” Beth’s shoulders stopped shaking. She wiped her face and turned back to him.

  “Maybe I will,” she said. He took her hand and held it. Then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Guess I don’t look much like Dirty Harry anymore, huh?”

  “No,” she said sadly.

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry, that you’ll miss him.”

  “I won’t,” she said, smiling.

  He laughed and looked at Laurel. “You mad at me too?”

  “I’m with Jennie, if that’s what you’re trying to find out,” she said.

  “Figures you women would stick together,” he said, and then he took a deep breath and turned back to Jennie.

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  “What’s there to hear? You knew what you were doing and you went and did it anyway.” She softened. “Rosina says you’re being awarded some sort of citation for outstanding police work as soon as you’re able to leave the hospital and receive it.”

  “Check this, Dad,” Stevie said, and he held up the Desert Sun. The front page had Frankie’s picture on it and a story about his cracking the case they labeled “The Medical Murders.”

  “Well isn’t that nice,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah, it’s nice. I could have put it in a nice frame and looked at it whenever I returned from the cemetery,” Jennie quipped.

  “That’s a woman for you,” Frankie said to Stevie. “Always looking at the dark side.”

  “Rosina’s here.” Jennie smirked. “I’m sure you’re anxious to hear the details, even in this condition. There’s only a few minutes left to this visit. We’ll go out and let her come in. I’ll be back on the hour.”

  She leaned over to kiss him.

  “I’m sorry, Jen. I really didn’t think this sort of thing would happen.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You’re Charles Bronson,” she said. The children kissed him, too, and they all left. A few moments later, Rosina was at the side of the bed, shaking her head.

  “You know what I feel like now, don’t you—an accomplice to a capital crime.”

  “Come on, Flores.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you anything about the Ratner murder. I should have just closed all this myself.”

  “What, and get all the glory?” She laughed. “So, tell me all about it. What did I do? I’m still not sure what the hell I found in that apartment.”

  “You found someone with what the doctors call a multiple personality syndrome.”

  “Then there wasn’t a twin named Susie?” he asked.

  “Yes, there was, but she died when she was twelve. She was born with the handicap, just the way Faye played it. Apparently, from what I could gather up to now, her twin was a very disturbed young lady with many psychological problems exacerbated by the fact that she was handicapped and not as bright as her sister. Whenever comparisons were made, she always came out on the short end, and there was even evidence their father favored Faye and neglected Susie.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She took too many of her mother’s sleeping pills,” Rosina said. “To escape the turmoil and disappointment. And she was only twelve. Can you imagine?”

  “But that’s where the idea to do people with pills originated?”

  “It probably got planted there and developed when Faye became a nurse. Anyway, after Susie died, Faye’s mother went off the deep end and became obsessed with cleaning, organizing, regimenting her life to the point that there was no real living. She and her husband became estranged, whatever, and … here’s the other ugly part … he began to sexually abuse Faye.”

  “When?”

  “Not long after her sister’s death. It went on for some time, until Mrs. Sullivan had heart trouble and died. He began to suffer some guilt himself, went into a depression and eventually was thought to have committed suicide.”

  “Thought?”

  “The psychiatrist tells me he now believes—I should say, he’s now convinced—Faye, who was a nurse by this time, helped him off to the hereafter, and thus the so-called Medical Murders began.”

  “Is that when this multiple personality business began?”

  “The doctor believes so.”

  “Why did that happen?” Frankie asked. “Does he know?”

  “The psychiatrist feels Faye reinvented her twin sister to compensate. She had trouble living with the guilt, of course, but she had more trouble living with herself, living with whom she had become. Susie became her alter ego, encompassing all the qualities and beliefs she wished she had, such as believing in the magic of love and marriage, that relationships between men and women could be perfect and go on forever and ever, even after death.

  “Most importantly, Susie was that part of her that denied what had gone on between her and her father. Susie was the innocent.”

  “Innocent? She murdered people as Susie, didn’t she?” Frankie said.

  “Yes, but the doctor says those killings validated Faye’s killing of her father.”

  “Huh?”

  “Believing she was helping these loved ones reunite in a better world continually justified Faye’s killing of her father, sending him off to join their mother in a more perfect life. Death, killing, wasn’t so terrible then. In fact, it was in Susie’s and I suppose Faye’s mind, nothing more than the ticket, the means of transportation. When the doctor talks to the Susie part of her, Susie says she was just helping them leave, providing them with the means.”

  “The Susie side,” Fr
ankie said shaking his head.

  “There are definite, clear personalities in her mind, Frankie, and you’re alive because those two personalities are so sharply delineated. That’s what the doctors say.”

  “Come again?”

  “Don’t you know? No one told you?”

  “What?”

  “Faye Sullivan saved your life. She was a perfect nurse, giving you the right emergency treatment. As Faye, she couldn’t be a murderess. She had to become Susie to do anyone in.”

  “The killer saves the life of the policeman who’s coming to arrest her?”

  “You’ve got to understand … she wasn’t the killer. Not in the sense you mean.”

  “But what about this Ratner guy?”

  “We’re not sure if he came to blackmail them or what.”

  “Them?”

  Rosina laughed.

  “I can’t help it. Does that make me nuts, too? Anyway, Susie says she had to kill him in order for them to continue their good work. She reverted to a medical analogy, comparing him to a cancer. They merely had to cut him out and go on helping loved ones reunite.”

  “Lovely young women. I mean …”

  “Even the doctors have trouble thinking of Faye as only one person. They talk about Susie and Faye the way you would talk about two different people. It’s as if her brain split in two distinct parts and those two parts communicate with each other,” Rosina said.

  “Anyway, they’re calling you the instinctive detective. You should see Nolan talking to the press with his chest out, describing how unhappy he his that he is losing his best man, a man of age and wisdom who can smell out a crime. I feel like puking at his feet,” she said.

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “You know what he asked me this morning?” Frankie shook his head.

  “Can’t imagine.”

  “He wondered if your doctor would permit you to be something of a consultant for the department.”

  “No shit? Nolan said that?”

  She shrugged and leaned over.

  “Who knows, maybe he’s a multiple personality, too.”

  Frankie laughed and the nurse came over.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But time is up.”

  Frankie smiled.

  “You’d better listen to her, Rosina.” He lowered his voice to sound ominous. “She’s a nurse.”

  “All right,” Rosina said. “Get better.”

  “Get a life, Flores. Don’t end up like me. Say yes to that accountant from Palm Desert and raise a herd of niños and niñas,” Frankie advised.

  “I might. We’ve got a date tonight,” she said, and she flashed an impish smile at him before turning to go.

  Frankie lay back and closed his eyes. He was alive; he had survived. He would live to become a different sort of man. Maybe, in a sense, we’re all multiple personalities, he thought. There’s someone else living within us, just waiting for his or her time to emerge. There’s no sense fighting it, he thought. I’m too tired to resist. Come on, Frankie Samuels the Second, whoever you are. Come get me.

  He drifted off and dreamt about Jennie and him walking toward the famed Palm Springs Indian Canyons, just down from their house. In his dream there was a nearly cloudless sky with a turquoise tint. The sun had created pockets of shadow and strips of darkness along the brown San Jacinto Mountains. Here and there along the range, he could see a clump or two of bushes and palm trees, suggesting a mountain spring.

  As he walked with Jennie, the vista seemed to come alive. The shadows shifted, presenting the illusion of the mountains moving and turning. It was magical. The farther into the valley they walked, the younger Jennie and he became, until he turned to look at her and saw her as she was when they first met. It filled his heart with joy and made him feel they would be together … forever.

  Faye yawned. It seemed to her she had been sitting in this office for hours and hours, explaining it repeatedly to Dr. Clark, chief of the psychiatric staff. He sat there taking notes and nodding stupidly, occasionally asking what she considered the most obvious questions:

  “How did your sister know these people were waiting for their loved ones? How did she know the people she helped off wanted to go off? Tell me again why you thought she saw this as her private duty.”

  It amazed her, truly amazed her, how incompetent some doctors were, especially psychiatrists. When would the malpractice lawyers turn their money-hungry eyes to this segment of health care and haunt and pursue them with as much vigilance and tenacity as they did medical doctors?

  “You’ve been a great help, Faye,” the doctor said. “I’d like to talk to Susie now. Can you get her for me? Please.”

  Faye stared at him, shook her head and then rose from the chair. She walked down the corridor and turned to go down another corridor, stopping at Susie’s room. She knocked on the door and waited until she heard her say, “Come in.”

  “He wants to see you,” she said. Susie was sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap, twirling her fingers nervously. She looked up at Faye.

  “They’re all angry at me, aren’t they?”

  “They’re not angry. They’re just confused. You have to explain, make them understand. I tried, but it needs to come from you.”

  “You’re not going to leave me here, are you?”

  “I told you I wouldn’t, didn’t I?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I said I wouldn’t. Now, are you going to go to the doctor on your own or do I have to drag you down the corridor?”

  “I’m going,” Susie said and stood up. She smoothed down her dress. “How do I look?”

  “What possible difference does that make?”

  “I care about my appearance, even though you don’t care about yours.”

  “Will you stop that? Will you finally, once and for all, stop that?”

  “Stop what?”

  “Making comparisons. You’re who you are and I’m who I am. We just happen to look a lot alike.”

  “Of course we do. We’re twins.”

  “But we’re two different people, and when you finally accept that …”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be free, that’s what,” Faye said, a little harder than she had intended. Susie’s eyes revealed her pain, but she didn’t cry.

  “Okay,” she said in a tired voice. “I’ll try. I’ll try to be a separate person.”

  Faye stepped back to let her hobble by.

  Down the corridor she limped. Now that she had her back to Faye, she could permit a tear or two to escape and flow over her cheeks.

  It seemed to her that she sat with the doctor for hours and hours before he looked up from his notepad to ask his final questions of the day.

  “So how do you feel about this now?” he finally asked. “Considering what’s happening to you, where you are …”

  “I feel terrible. I’m locked up here, unable to help the countless others out there who are depending on me.”

  “If you were released, you would go back to Palm Springs and continue your work?” he asked.

  “No, not Palm Springs. Faye and I are ready to move on,” she said.

  “I see. Well now, next time I’d like to talk about your parents more. Is that all right with you?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “You look fidgety today.”

  “I happen to be hungry. It’s after twelve,” she said nodding toward the clock. Dr. Clark smiled.

  “So it is. All right. Why don’t you go to the cafeteria. We’ve had a good session today.”

  “Good for whom? It’s wasting precious time,” Susie said. “There are people in pain.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  She smirked and got up.

  “Let me ask you a question, Doctor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Are your parents alive?”

  “No. My mother died two years ago and my father died last year.”

  “See,” she said.
“He couldn’t live on much longer without her.”

  She spun on her heels before he could reply and left the office. She got her food quickly and sat at the same table she had been sitting at since she had first arrived. The gentleman across from her, Mr. Keach, stared ahead blankly and chewed mechanically. He had yet to say his first word to her. She looked behind her at the attendants chatting by the door and then turned to Mr. Keach, just as she had every single time before.

  “You miss your wife, don’t you? That’s why you won’t say anything to anyone. I know. I’m probably the only one here who knows.”

  He continued to chew and to stare.

  “I’m going to help you,” she said. “I figured it out last night. That’s why I’ve been sent here. That’s why all this has happened.”

  He turned slowly toward her. She was heartened. Her words were finally getting through. He was beginning to understand. She widened her smile.

  And then she looked across the cafeteria and brightened even more. All of her couples, including her parents, were seated at the various tables looking her way, holding hands and smiling gloriously.

  She had been given the gift of bringing them all together. What more could she ask for?

  About the Author

  Andrew Neiderman was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York’s scenic Catskill Mountains region. A graduate of the University at Albany, State University of New York, from which he also received his master’s in English, Neiderman taught at Fallsburg Junior-Senior High School for twenty-three years before pursuing a career as a novelist and screenwriter. He has written more than forty thriller novels under his own name, including The Devil’s Advocate, which was made into a major motion picture for Warner Bros., starring Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, and Charlize Theron, and is in development as a stage musical in London. Neiderman has also written seventy New York Times–bestselling novels for the V. C. Andrews franchise. He lives with his family in Palm Springs, California. Visit him on Facebook and at www.neiderman.com.

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