The Todd Dossier

by Robert Bloch

  Continued Excerpt From the Diary of Natalie Everett

  Under Dateline October 16

  Last night when Charlie came home I had dinner all ready for him—roast beef from that place in Farmer’s Market, baked potatoes, asparagus tips, all the things he likes. On the way home from shopping I had my hair done at Marlene’s and I wore my dress from Saks.

  “What’s all this about?” he said when he came in. I told him it was a celebration, a family reunion. I brought out the bottle of champagne from the refrigerator and asked him to open it while I served. Not now, he said.

  I’d been so excited I guess I hadn’t really taken a good look at him but when I did I thought, oh-oh Natalie, you blew it again. Something was wrong, I could see that. The thing is, I wasn’t going to let him shut me out now or we’d be right back in the same old routine. So over dinner I got it out of him.

  Apparently he’d been chasing all over town in the rain trying to check up on the accident. First he thought he’d found something, then it turned out he hadn’t. No sense going into details because it doesn’t matter now. That’s what I said to him.

  “What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” Charlie said. “Geiger blew the whistle on me. He as much as told me if I didn’t stop playing cops-and-robbers he’d fire me right out of the hospital.” That’s what really bothered him. I know how much he thinks of Dr. Geiger.

  I asked him what he was going to do. He said, “You tell me.” I couldn’t believe my ears. Charlie’s never asked my advice before, not about something that’s really important to him. But I could see he meant it.

  So I told him what I thought. You can’t win them all, and in this case it sounded as though Geiger was right. The thing to do now was relax, get some decent rest and forget about it.

  “Okay, you’re the doctor,” Charlie said. I told him no, he was the doctor, and from now on that’s the way it was going to be. He was the doctor and I was a housewife, and just to prove it I was going to show him how good I was at opening that bottle of champagne.

  We drank the whole bottle. I saw to it that he had most of it and gradually he started to unwind. We sat in the living room talking about what I’d do now that I’d quit the job. I told him the apartment would keep me busy and if not I’d find some kind of occupational therapy like looking for a house. I told him what had happened with Dorshka didn’t bother me anymore and I hoped it didn’t bother him either. That’s when I knew Charlie was really relaxed because he made a funny. “I’ve got nothing against lesbians myself,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want one to marry my sister.”

  Then he finished the last glass and stood up and put his arms around me. “No more windmills then,” Charlie said. “Come on, let’s go to bed.” I don’t know what he meant about the windmills but the rest sounded good to me.

  It was good. You know something, Natalie? I think you won’t have to be keeping this diary anymore. I think you’ve got your husband back.

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Eva Veillier

  . . . I was at the hospital all day, most days. Of course I could not talk to him at first, but I could see through the window, and I could sit at the nurses’ desk and watch him on the closed-circuit television. The nurses were very kind. They would let me sit there and do my needlepoint and read my books and when they had coffee they would share it with me, very open, very kind. The nurses liked Hollis. Women always liked Hollis. And they did not resent me having him because I was—I was older than most of them. That’s where I was, there at the nurses’ desk, the day you ask about. I was doing a square of needlepoint for a rug I wanted to put in a house Hollis had promised we would have, a house in Sardinia. Doing the rug was an act of faith that he would get better and we would have the house. It seems silly now. But I was doing the rug and watching Hollis on the television. Hollis was himself watching television—he had a remote control for a wall-set in his room—and suddenly when I looked up from the rug and saw what he was watching I was appalled. He was watching a news program which had been given over to a documentary tribute for—for the boy, for Tony Polanski. The boy was running, the boy was breaking through a tape, the boy was wearing an Olympics medal and waving at the crowd, the boy was being interviewed, the boy was smiling. The boy was alive. But now he was dead and Hollis had his heart and Hollis was lying there watching him. And then Crosby McCullen came up—he was not at the hospital much but he did come in at least once a day—and Crosby was angry. He wanted to know who had given Hollis the television set. And the nurse on duty was very cold. “Mr. Todd asked for it,” she said without looking up. “And Dr. Geiger said that he could have it. Which is good enough for me.” Women do not like Crosby, he is too nervous, too rude, too—I don’t know. And I did not speak to Crosby because I was watching Hollis. He had turned away from the television set and I could not see his face. I had the sense that he had turned away deliberately so that the closed-circuit could not show his face. I had the sense that we were intruding on some private grief. And then the nurse jumped up. She had been watching the instruments which recorded his heartbeat and his brain waves and so forth and the instruments said that something was going very wrong in Hollis’ body.

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Charles Everett, M.D.

  I was in the doctor’s lounge reading a magazine when I heard the loudspeaker page “Dr. Heartwell.” Every hospital has coded paging—“Dr. Firestone,” for example, is a fire alarm—and the heart team’s emergency code is “Dr. Heartwell.” I knew something was up with Mr. Todd and I got over to Cardiology immediately. Dr. Geiger was not in the hospital—he’d gone to a medical dinner in Beverly Hills. I told the nurse to get hold of him at once. Mr. McCullen was there and he asked where Dr. Geiger was. I told him I was in charge. He didn’t seem to like that one damn bit. I didn’t much care if he did or not. My concern was Mr. Todd. He was undergoing a serious rejection crisis. His liver was not producing enough prothrombin and other substances required for clotting and his blood was dangerously low in platelets.

  Q. Would you repeat that last, please?

  A. Platelets. The tiny cells that prevent hemorrhage.

  Q. Got it. Thank you.

  A. What Mr. Todd needed was both a transfusion of whole blood and a separate infusion of pure blood platelets. We had the platelets but not six pints of whole blood in AB-negative. The type is rare and it would have taken until next morning before we’d be able to call in six pints. I ordered six pints of O—that’s the so-called universal donor type. It was risky, but it was my judgment that the patient might not last until we got AB-negative. I knew Dr. Geiger would probably have waited, but as I was in charge, I felt it my responsibility to do what I considered best. There was a little—reluctance, I suppose you could call it, on the part of some members of the team, but when I told them, uh, who was in charge, they responded immediately. We administered both the platelets and the six pints of O. And then we waited.

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Walter Geiger, M.D.

  . . . After thirty-five years in medicine, I always know when I’m going to get called. I think every doctor has a built-in alarm signal. He can have the most critical case, but some instinct tells him he can go home and get a good night’s sleep and there won’t be a call. And he can have a minor case and this alarm signal keeps ringing somewhere in the back of his mind, telling him he’ll be summoned back to the hospital before he’s finished the second cup of coffee. That’s how it was that night. I left Mr. Todd resting comfortably. There were no indications of any complications. Yet I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t get all the way through my evening at the Hilton. The call came right after the soup course. I made the run back as quickly as I could through Saturday night traffic, but by the time I arrived at the hospital there was nothing left for me to do. I don’t think I would have taken Dr. Everett’s course of action—I would have waited for the AB-negative blood—but Mr. Todd was conscious and breathing normally. The crisis had passed. I told Todd I
didn’t appreciate being interrupted during dinner and not to do it again. As I have never known public officials to be equipped with a sense of humor, I should point out that what I said was meant facetiously.

  Q. Did you speak to Dr. Everett at all?

  A. Yes. In the corridor. I told him I might not have taken his course of action. I also told him that I might not have saved the patient.

  Q. Is that all?

  A. No. I also told him that he was a far better doctor than he was a detective.

  Continued Extract From the Statement of Charles Everett, M.D.

  Dr. Geiger was right. I never claimed to be a detective. I’d promised him I’d lay off, I’d promised my wife, and I did lay off. I won’t go so far as to say I forgot about it completely, but it gradually faded away into the background as time went on. After that one rejection crisis, Todd was over the hump. There was a tremendous vitality, by the end of November he’d progressed to the point where he was able to spend most of his waking hours in a wheelchair. Naturally he was still under close observation and round-the-clock care, but it was more of a precautionary routine. Neither Geiger nor I had any doubts about the prognosis if he continued to recuperate at this rate. Actually I didn’t see very much of him during his convalescence, he was Geiger’s patient, and by this time I was involved with other cases. Things were getting back to normal, more regular hours, a decent home life. On Thanksgiving, after dinner, Natalie and I drove up to look at a house just below Mulholland. I—the reason I’m telling you all this, going into detail, is because I want to make one point very clear. I was not disturbed. I was not obsessed. I’m willing to swear an oath that I hadn’t even thought about Tony Polanski for weeks. Not until the afternoon at the hospital when I ran into Tallac.

  Q. Tallac?

  A. Joe Tallac. He’s one of the assistants on duty at the morgue.

  Extract From the Statement of Joseph D. Tallac

  . . . I stepped out into the hall for a smoke and I saw Everett passing by. Funny thing, I was just about to call upstairs when I finished my cigarette, and there he was, you know? So I said, hey Doc, you got a minute? And he said sure, what is it, and I took him into the office and showed him the envelope laying there on the desk. That’s what I’d put it in, this big manila envelope, you know?

  Q. Put what in?

  A. I’m getting to that. When a customer—a body, that is—comes in, we generally put all their personal effects in a locker until the family comes to claim it. Things like clothing, jewelry, papers, you know? There’s a list we keep and we check off the items before they’re released. Everett knows that so I don’t have to explain. I told him, I’d just been cleaning up the empties—empty storage lockers, you know?—with a disinfectant we use. And I come across this item in one of the lockers all by itself, nothing else with it. At first I couldn’t figure how it got there so I went to the files. The last party whose belongings were stored in that particular locker was Anton Polanski. Tony Polanski, the Olympics champion, you know? Well, the minute I saw the name it all came back to me, what happened. The family picked up his stuff six weeks ago, his old lady signed the forms. All the items on his list were checked off except this one. This scarf.

  Q. Anton Polanski’s scarf?

  A. No. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, you know? It wasn’t his scarf. That don’t belong to Tony, his mother said. He never wore a scarf. I told her it had come in with him but she said no, there was a mistake, he didn’t even own one. So I dunno what happened—we must of got busy, somebody using the examination room or something—anyway, I just stuck the scarf back in the locker, to get it out of the way, you know? And then one thing after another, and I forgot about it being there.

  Q. Did you explain all this to Dr. Everett?

  A. Sure. I said I’d run across it today and put it in this envelope, figuring to call and send it upstairs. Whoever’d been on the case, let them worry about it. If they said throw it away, okay. But don’t blame me, you know?

  Q. What did Dr. Everett say?

  A. Well, first he took the scarf out of the envelope and looked at it. A silk scarf, on the small side, blue with little red designs all over. Like bugs. What d’they call it—Presley, pastry—?

  Q. Paisley?

  A. That’s it. Could be a woman’s scarf, Everett said. And was I positive it belonged with Tony Polanski’s effects. Couldn’t it have gotten mixed up with somebody else’s stuff? I told him not as long as it was on Polanski’s list it couldn’t. We itemize everything the minute it comes in. And there was no such thing missing from anybody else’s list around that time. Nobody said anything about missing a scarf when they came in to pick up other bodies, you know? So it was Polanski’s all right. Maybe somebody gave it to him before the accident. Maybe he got it from a girl friend. Everett kind of looked at me funny and then he said, yeah, maybe he did.

  Q. What happened then?

  A. Everett put the scarf back in the envelope. He asked if he’d have to sign for it if he took it away. I said sure, that was S.O.P., just put down his name and the date opposite the item on the list. I gave him the list and he signed. I asked him what was he going to do with the scarf, keep it for a souvenir—just kidding, you know? He said maybe he’d do just that. One hell of a souvenir, if you ask me.

  Continued Excerpt From the Diary of Natalie Everett

  Under Dateline December 3

  I was lying in bed, already half-asleep, wondering what was taking Charlie so long in the bathroom, and then I heard this sound. This horrible retching sound. My God, he’s sick, I thought. I was out of bed and into the bathroom in about five seconds flat.

  Charlie was standing at the wash basin in front of the mirror. He had his pajama pants on but not the jacket. There was a scarf wrapped around his neck, a woman’s silk scarf, and he was pulling on the ends with both hands, choking himself. That’s the sound I heard—he’d pulled so hard he was gagging, and his face was almost purple.

  I grabbed his wrist and he let go of one end of the scarf. I yanked it away from him. “For God’s sake, Charlie,” I said, “what are you trying to do?”

  Instead of answering, he looked at himself in the mirror. There was a red mark on his neck and he ran his fingers along it. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly that way.”

  Then he told me about the scarf, how it was in Tony Polanski’s effects only it didn’t belong to him. And how Polanski’s friend Vacek had seen him talking to a woman just before the accident, before his wheelchair rolled down the hill. “Only it didn’t roll,” Charlie said. “She shoved it down. She wrapped her own scarf around his neck, this scarf, and choked him. And then she shoved.” He was all wound up again. “I had it figured that way but Geiger talked me out of it—maybe Polanski got his scarf caught in the wheel of his chair he said. Well, I’m not buying that anymore. Polanski didn’t own a scarf, didn’t wear one, so it doesn’t fit. What fits is Vacek’s story. The abrasions on my throat, matching the ones I found when I examined Polanski. Don’t you see?”

  I started to cry, I was so angry. “No, I don’t see,” I told him. “Maybe it happened that way, maybe it didn’t. But finding a scarf isn’t proof. You want to prove anything, ask yourself why it was him, why Tony Polanski?”

  “Why Tony Polanski?” Charlie said. And then he looked at me and I could almost see the wheels turning. “Yes,” he said. “Right. Why Tony Polanski?”

  Extract From the Statement of Charlayne Lawson

  My name is Charlayne Lawson. I’m the executive director—directress—of the California Institute of Hematology.

  Q. I gather this is a blood bank?

  A. You gather wrong. A blood bank stores blood. Every hospital has its own bank, a branch bank as it were, and every municipality has its own central bank. Perhaps you could call it a federal reserve—that is if you continue the banking analogy.

  Q. I’m sorry. What is the function of your institution?

  A. The Hematology Institute is engaged in research into the geog
raphical availability of types and subtypes of blood and tissue.

  Q. Availability?

  A. Yes, the prevalence of these types. By computerizing our data we determine the incidence of a given blood type, the theoretical prevalence of that type in a given sampling of the population—one hundred thousand people, say—and the number of committed prospective donors. Our service is available to public health agencies, medical schools and institutions, clinics, hospitals and individual physicians.

  Q. Do you know Dr. Charles Everett?

  A. I knew him only by reputation. And then one day, early last month, he appeared at my office and insisted on seeing me.

  Q. You say insisted.

  A. He seemed quite agitated. He told me he wanted some information on A-negative, subgroup B. I informed him that this information was always available to Los Angeles General—there is a service fee for our information—but he insisted on my giving him the information immediately. Our usual procedure is to fulfill such requests on a basis of priority. This generally means within a day or so, but he emphasized an urgent need.

  Q. And you complied?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Mrs. Lawson—

  A. Miss Lawson.

  Q. Excuse me. Miss Lawson, could you tell us the nature of the information that you gave to Dr. Everett?

  A. Certainly. The computers were programmed with the pertinent data. I have here a copy of our findings. He first requested an estimate on the theoretical number of AB-negative blood types in Los Angeles County. The computer answer is eight-tenths of 1 percent. Roughly, twenty-two thousand people. Then Dr. Everett added another factor—the number of AB-negatives with delta-type tissue.

  Q. What was the answer?

  A. This requirement brought the probability in the county down to roughly one thousand people.

  Q. One thousand, yes.

  A. Dr. Everett then asked for a further refinement. He wanted a probability estimate for this grouping based on the elimination of all persons over the age of fifty, all those under eighteen—also the sick and infirm, the transient. Arriving at such a determination was a considerably complicated procedure.