Murder Ward

by Warren Murphy

  “Well, she’d better be sick or your ass is going to be in real trouble,” hissed the manager, who had adopted this manner of speaking to the young Puerto Rican maid after the girl had committed the unpardonable sin of refusing to spend an afternoon with him in one of the motel’s empty rooms and, even worse, threatened to tell his wife if he should persist in asking.

  The manager swallowed once. Invading women’s bedrooms was not the kind of thing managers did happily. “You keep your twiff right here,” he whispered to the girl, making sure that he had a witness to his entry. He brushed past the girl brusquely and walked around the edge of the bed.

  He began to call Mrs. Wilberforce’s name to the form hidden under the covers. There was still no response. He gently grabbed a section of blanket that he thought concealed an arm. He shook slightly.

  “Mrs. Wilberforce.”

  There was a faint groan from under the blanket. Carefully, the manager pulled the cover down from the face of the person under the blanket. He paused, looking at the face, then recoiled sharply.

  “This isn’t Mrs. Wilberforce,” he said excitedly.

  “It isn’t?” said the girl, moving into the room.

  “No. Come look,” he said, waving the girl forward. She walked nearer, at first hesitantly, then boldly. She came around to the side of the manager and looked down at the face of the figure in the bed. Involuntarily, she let out a gasp.

  The face that lay there was as ugly as sin, as old as time. The skin was dried and brown with the deep cracked-mud wrinkles of extreme age. The hair was gray and there were occasional long hairs jutting out from the cheeks, the chin-long white wiry hairs, the kind grown by witches.

  “Mrs. Wilberforce is a much younger woman,” the manager said. “I checked her in yesterday myself. This isn’t her.”

  The head on the pillow moved slightly. Muscles in the eyelids seemed to flicker and then slowly, as if waiting for death to come and grant her reprieve, the rheumy eyes opened and looked blankly at the man and woman by the bed.

  The lips moved slightly, but there was no sound. They moved again, the muscles at the corners of the mouth twitching spasmodically, and then the mouth opened and a tired scratch leaked out:

  “I am Mrs. Wilberforce.”

  · · ·

  Chiun was watching television and Remo was lying on the couch practicing meditation when the telephone next to the green velvet sofa rang.

  “This is Smith,” said the voice, all lemons and bitternesses. “I have just learned that Mrs. Wilberforce…I believe you met her…has been taken to Robler Clinic.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know. She was found sick in her motel room outside the city about an hour ago. You understand the connection, of course?”

  “First her son, then her. Why, I don’t know.”

  “Try to find out.”

  “Anything new elsewhere? Anything come up with the IRS investigations?”

  “Nothing that we know of. Whatever Wilberforce may have been working on was largely in his head. We’ll probably never know. Keep in touch. By the way, this line is secure. We’ve had our own men check it.”

  Remo slowly returned the receiver to the telephone, then hopped off the couch. He looked at Chiun’s back, who appeared to be in a trance, fixated by the images on the television screen. No need to bother him, particularly since there was no chance of bothering him. Chiun would not move from the set until his shows were over. The room could be bombed, flooded or set afire. When the smoke had cleared, the water subsided and the debris settled, Chiun would still be there in full lotus watching Dr. Lance Ravenel solving the problems of the world with wisdom and kindness.

  Remo wore a tan tee-shirt, brown double-knit slacks and gumsoled glove-leather slipons that were handmade in Italy.

  “Well, I’m going now, Chiun,” he said loudly.

  There was no answer.

  “I may never return. This is my most dangerous mission,” Remo said.

  Silence.

  “Yet it is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done,” Remo said.

  “Almost anything is,” Chiun spat back, and then was silent again, leaving only the television’s voice in the room.

  “Chiun, you’re a shit,” Remo yelled.

  But there was no answer again, and Remo slipped on the dark glasses, which he did not really like to wear, and the wearing of which infuriated Chiun.

  Remo had bought them while wandering the streets of San Francisco late one afternoon with Chiun. San Francisco was one of their favorite cities, because its cosmopolitan polyglot nature found nothing unusual about an eighty-year-old Oriental in ceremonial robes walking along the street with a hard-faced lean-looking American, and just as long as Remo kept Chiun away from Chinatown, they had never been hassled in San Francisco.

  This day, they wandered into Union Square and Chiun insisted upon going into a large department store there.

  Remo had gone to look at golf clubs. When he came back, he found Chiun in a corner of the store’s ground floor, watching an optometrist fit a woman with eyeglasses.

  Chiun was clucking loudly. The eye doctor and the woman kept turning to glare at him, and Chiun glared back.

  “What are you doing, Little Father?” Remo had asked.

  “Watching this man ruin that woman’s eyes.”

  “Shhhh,” said Remo. “Somebody will hear you.”

  “Good,” Chiun said. “Think how many eyes I can save if all will but listen.”

  “Chiun. Some people need glasses.”

  “Wrong. No one needs the glasses for seeing.”

  “Sure they do. You’ve seen those funny little eye charts that all start with E. Some people can’t read the letters.”

  “Ahah, but they do not spell words,” said Chiun triumphantly. “Who would want to read the letters?”

  “That’s not the point. Some people just can’t even see what the letters are.”

  “That is because their eye muscles do not work correctly. The muscles are untrained. Yet, instead of training the muscles to work properly, what do people do? They go to a so-called doctor who puts these pieces of glass in front of their eyes. This makes sure that the person will never have a chance to train the eye muscles to work correctly. It is a terrible thing this man is doing.”

  “Some people can’t control their eye muscles,” Remo said in mild protest.

  “That is true,” Chiun agreed. “Most of them are Americans. This country is a cesspool of laziness. We have been many places, but only in this place do you find almost everyone wearing eyeglasses. Do you need any further proof of laziness?”

  “That’s not true, Chiun. One of the reasons many people in this country have eye trouble is from watching television.”

  Chiun’s mouth dropped open in amazement. “You lie,” he said.

  “No, it’s true. Too much television hurts the eyes.”

  “Oh,” moaned Chiun. “Oh, the infamy. Do you tell me that those beautiful dramas could harm my eyes?”

  “Well, maybe not yours. But most people’s.”

  “Oh, the infamy. To say such a thing, and only to hurt my feelings.” He looked at Remo questioningly.

  Remo shook his head. “Truth, Little Father.”

  Chiun was silent momentarily, considering the terribleness of it all, then smiled craftily and raised a long-nailed index finger into the air. “Ahhh,” he said, “even suppose what you say is true. Think of how much good these beautiful dramas do for the soul and the heart.”

  Remo sighed. “That’s true enough, Little Father. They’re beautiful. They enrich everyone’s life, blind or sighted. I’d rather have the whole country go blind than to have the wonderfulness of those shows reduced by even so much as one minute.”

  “There is hope for you yet, Remo,” said Chiun. “But not for him,” he said, pointing to the eye doctor. “He should tell these people to exercise their eye muscles, not to wrap them up in a glass bandage that prev
ents them from ever using their eyes correctly.”

  “What is all this noise?” came a woman’s voice. It came from a young blonde with a Scandinavian accent, who had come out of the back room of the optical department.

  To quiet her down, Remo had bought a pair of almost black sunglasses, even though he did not like wearing them. Chiun was, of course, right. Left alone, the trained eye muscle was more than able to screen out light, to let in light, to focus, to see. Sunglasses were just another crutch for a muscular cripple.

  As he tried on different frames, Chiun had demanded of the woman that she try to find him a pair of spectacles that did not use glass but had wooden lenses. “Since he insists upon ruining his vision, we should at least protect him from flying glass.”

  Remo had settled for the darkest pair of lenses he could find. He stuck the glasses in his pocket and had not worn them until entering the Robler Clinic, when they became part of his billionaire’s disguise.

  Remo heard the organ music come up and over signifying a commercial and Chiun turned to see Remo in his dark glasses.

  “That is very good,” said Chiun. “You come to this hospital looking for something and the first thing you do is cover over your eyes so you cannot see. A truly American approach to a problem.” He turned back to the television, consigning Remo to a lower rung on the ladder of his interest than a horse-faced lady plumber selling soap.

  Remo thumbed his nose at Chiun’s back and stepped out into the hall.

  The walls and floors were a creamy-tan marble and looked cold, but Remo touched a wall and found it warm. The latest innovation in heating. Warmed walls. Obviously, Robler Clinic did not worry about where its next buck was coming from.

  Three doors down from his room, he saw a closet and slipped inside. On a top shelf he found what he wanted; when he exited a few moments later, he was wearing a full-length white medical gown.

  With his sunglasses and gown, he looked like a hungover playboy which, Remo decided, characterized most of the doctors he had ever known.

  He went down to the fourth floor by the stairs and rudely interrupted a nurse talking on a telephone at a desk. “Where is the emergency room?”

  “First floor, doctor,” she answered. “That elevator over there.”

  “Your collar’s getting a little frayed, nurse,” said Remo. “Better watch that.”

  “Yes sir, doctor,” she said, and, puzzled, watched as he walked away. She wondered who he was.

  Remo decided to walk to the emergency room and was astonished as he made his way through the hospital corridors to the action center of the hospital. No one stopped him; no one questioned who he was. He could have accepted that if it were obvious that people thought he was a doctor and asked him to do doctorly things. But no one did. He stuck his head into different examining rooms, looking for Mrs. Wilberforce, but no one asked his advice or help.

  He had physical acceptance in that his presence was tolerated, but he did not have professional acceptance, as no one had asked him for help. He did not know if this were good or bad, but he decided it was insulting and caused by his lack of a stethoscope. As he passed a doctor in the hall, he filched the stethoscope from around the man’s neck, snaking it off his collar with a finger. The doctor kept walking ahead, unmindful of his loss, and Remo put the stethoscope around his own neck.

  The stethoscope worked wonders. Before he had gone fifty feet more, Remo was asked for advice on three separate cases.

  He stuck his head in one room, stethoscope dangling from his ears, and was asked his opinion about a patient suffering a broken leg. He prescribed aspirin and plenty of bed rest. He called another patient a faker, using up hospital space that was needed by really sick people. In the third room, he had his first chance to use the stethoscope. He was amazed that one could really hear things through it.

  A fat woman lay on an examining table, being examined by a young man in white gown, obviously an intern. He looked up hopefully as Remo came in.

  Remo placed the stethoscope on the woman’s stomach and broke out laughing. “Listen to that rumbling,” he said. “Wow, what a racket. It sounds like pea soup cooking.”

  “What do you think, doctor?” asked the intern.

  “I’d say two tablespoons of Pepto Bismol every three hours ought to do the trick. And you, lady, you better knock off the beer.”

  The intern moved closer to Remo and whispered in his ear: “But it’s the headaches she’s complaining of.”

  Remo nodded officiously. “Right,” he said. “That comes from the beer. It’s the yeast in the beer. It blows up inside the body and the gas causes pressure in the skull cavity. I remember hearing Brother Theodore explain that at the last medical lecture I went to. Watch that yeast. And you, lady, knock off the beer.”

  “Well, I never…” the woman said to Remo’s back.

  He paused at the door, turned, smiled and said, “Don’t worry about the bill either. Just send it to me.”

  Then he was out in the hallway, moving along, hoping for someone else to try his stethoscope on.

  At the end of the corridor were a heavy pair of metal swinging doors with large wired glass panels in them. Remo glanced through the panels then pushed open a door. He was, he realized, in the emergency room complex.

  There were four rooms; all but one were empty. In that one, he found Mrs. Wilberforce. Going in the door, he found a face mask in the pocket of his gown and put it on.

  There was a figure on the emergency table, partially covered by sparkling white sheets, and around her hovered a team of men and women, doctors and nurses, all busy. Two nurses massaged the patient’s legs and feet. A doctor and nurse were leaning on the chest area, rhythmically, in a kind of team artificial-respiration effort.

  Remo’s eyes were drawn to another doctor who was standing alongside the patient drawing a fluid into a syringe, possibly for injection into the heart, which would make it adrenaline.

  That doctor did not look happy, Remo thought. He watched the man’s hands holding the syringe and the small adrenaline ampule, saw them shake, and realized what was wrong—the doctor had been drinking.

  Remo moved into the room, whistling softly, the whistle turning into a hiss of air through his mask.

  A few heads turned toward him.

  “Hi, folks,” he said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. If I spot anything wrong, I’ll let you know.”

  He lifted his stethoscope in reassurance. Faces turned back toward the patient.

  Casually, Remo walked up to the side of the patient. It was a woman, but an aged woman, as Remo could see in glimpses of her face when a young nurse sporadically removed the oxygen mask from her nose and mouth. Remo thought back to the visit to Mrs. Wilberforce in Scranton, the big, buxom battleaxe he had slapped on the rump. Then he looked down on the shriveled old woman, lying in the bed.

  Dammit, he thought. Where is Mrs. Wilberforce?

  He turned to go, but as he did, his eyes caught sight of a magic-markered name tag on the head of the bed. “Wilberforce,” it read.

  He looked again at the face of the woman. How could it be? But the eyes…the hooked nose…it might be…it could be. He looked again, hard. It was. But how? A few days ago, she had looked like a member of the Praetorian Guard, but now she was small and weak, frail and old.

  How could it be?

  He looked again at the doctor who, still shakily, had finished filling the syringe. Behind the patient, an electrocardiogram screen was jumping erratically. The artificial respiration continued; the extremity massage went on.

  Another person came into the room. Like the doctor with the syringe, she did not wear a hospital robe. She was wearing a tight yellow sweater and a short white skirt that showed off long, full legs.

  She entered the room imperiously, as if she owned the hospital. A nurse caught sight of the movement at the door and looked up as if to reprimand the visitor, but when she saw who it was, she turned back to her massage of the right leg.

&n
bsp; The reddish-haired beauty walked up and stood alongside the man with the syringe.

  “How is it going, Dr. Demmet?” she said.

  “Serious case, Ms. Hahl,” he answered. His voice was wavering, cracky.

  “Oh?”

  “General breakdown of body functions. Advanced senility.”

  “Can you save her?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor said.

  “Try to,” the woman said. Her eyes met the doctor’s. “Try to,” she said again. It was almost like a challenge, Remo thought.

  “I’m going to,” the doctor said.

  “You do that. You do that.”

  The doctor leaned forward, inserted the syringe between the woman’s ribs and injected the jolt of adrenaline directly into her heart.

  The woman in the yellow sweater watched detachedly for a moment, then looked around the room. Her eyes stopped on Remo, standing behind the crowd of doctors and nurses. He realized how out of place he must look with his black sunglasses.

  The woman came to his side.

  “Who might you be?” she asked.

  Remo decided he would be eccentric.

  “Williams my name, sickness my game.”

  “Williams? Are you the Mr. Williams?”

  Remo nodded. He could see the woman was impressed. Her fine, intelligent eyes lit up as if illuminated from within.

  “But why are you here?” she asked.

  “I like hospitals. I always wanted to be a doctor. I play golf every Wednesday. I own my own stethoscope. I wanted to be here. I wouldn’t have missed it.”

  Kathy Hahl nodded. “I’m Kathy Hahl, the assistant administrator. I’ve been meaning to check with you to see if there was anything you needed.”

  Remo shook his head. “Nope. Having a great time right here, watching these fine people work on that poor old lady. Funny thing. I hear she’s not as old as she looks.”

  “So I’m told,” Kathy Hahl said.

  “Unusual case,” Remo said.

  Kathy Hahl nodded.

  “Kind of instant aging,” Remo said. “Never heard of anything like that before.”

  “I understand it happens sometimes. A shock to the nervous system can do it. I understand this woman recently lost a son she was very close to.”