Nick's Trip (14 page)

By the time I had finished Marcel’s article, a somewhat severe middle-aged woman had emerged from a mysterious door and called my name. I followed her back into a hall, past a large scale and a wall-mounted Dictaphone, and into an office.

The office contained a table padded in maroon Leatherette that was half-covered with a strip of industrial paper. There was a folding chair next to the table, and several cabinets with thin drawers that I immediately knew contained all varieties of needles and clamps and other instruments that inflicted pain in the name of health care.

“Take your shirt off and have a seat on the end of the table, Mr. Stefanos,” the nurse said. “Dr. Burn will be in shortly.” She exited the room.

I undid the buttons on my shirt and made myself comfortable on the edge of the Leatherette table. The paper crinkled beneath me as I sat. As I waited, I mulled over how many children had been scared witless in anticipation of a visit with a man named Dr. Burn, and wondered why he, like my imaginative copywriter friend, didn’t change his name to something less ominous.

But it wasn’t long until the good doctor arrived, closing the door softly behind him. He was tall and lean, with the genetically regal gray temples of the profession and the glow of a man whose bronze hands were wrapped around a nine iron more often than they were around a stethoscope.

“Good morning,” he said, looking over my blank chart.

“Dr. Burn,” I said.

“What brings you in today?” he said.

“Just a blood test,” I said.

“Getting married, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Roll up your sleeve and make a fist,” he said. I made a tight fist for the second time that day.

Dr. Burn hadn’t looked me in the eye yet, and he didn’t now, as he crossed in front of me and opened one of the thin metal drawers. He pulled a syringe out of its wrapping and wet some cotton in alcohol, then stood in front of me and dabbed the alcohol at the vein that was visible at the base of my bicep.

I looked away and felt a sharp sting, then I felt nothing. I said, “You get it, Doc?”

“No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact,” he said tiredly. “Your vein’s a little tough. Do you drink very often, Mr. Stefanos?”

“Only on special occasions,” I said.

“Right,” he said; then I felt the sting again and turned to watch the burgundy black liquid fill the tube. Dr. Burn capped it off and handed me the plastic cylinder. I felt the sickening but reaffirming warmth of my blood through the plastic. “Hold this while I wash up.” He returned after washing and took the sample from my hand. “What’s the sample for?”

“I’m going to be a father,” I offered, in response to his coercive gaze. “The mother wanted me checked out before we went through with the process.”

“The process?”

“I’m a surrogate,” I said, the words clipped with clinical sterility.

“That’s very intelligent of her,” he said, and added, before I could take it the wrong way, “and noble of you.” He tapped his pencil on the clipboard. “But I’m curious. Why come to me for a simple blood test? Any of the in-and-out clinics would have done.”

“That’s true. In fact, I just came from a clinic where I could have had it done. But I wanted to speak to you. I was referred by William Goodrich.”

“I saw that on your chart,” he said. “Which is stranger still. William Goodrich isn’t a patient of mine. His wife April is.”

“I said I was referred by Billy Goodrich, Dr. Burn. I didn’t say it was a medical matter.” I buttoned my shirt and looked up at the doctor. “April Goodrich is missing. Her husband hired me to find her.”

I handed the doctor one of my cards. He cleared his throat as he looked it over, then handed the card back to me.

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss my patients with anyone without their consent. That is something that I think you can understand.”

“Of course. But I’m not here to ask you if you know her whereabouts. I wouldn’t ask you,” I lied, “to compromise your professional relationship with your patient.”

Dr. Burn had a seat on the folding chair and crossed one long leg over the other. He removed his reading glasses and placed them on the counter to his left. “Then what is this about? Is April in any danger?”

“I don’t know. She may have just walked away and made a clean break from her marriage. Even if that’s the case, I still intend to find her. It’s what I was hired for. But if something’s happened to her, it would help to know of any medical difficulties she may have. It could increase her chances.”

“You mean, if she’s been kidnapped.”

“That’s right.”

“I would need to check this out with the police first, before I spoke to you. I assume they know.”

“They have a record of her disappearance,” I said.

Dr. Burn said, “I’ll call you.”

*   *   *

THE PHONE RANG SHORTLY
after I arrived at my apartment.

“I spoke to the police,” Dr. Burn said.

“Well?”

“Your story checks out.”

“So? Is there anything I need to know on the medical end about April?”

“She’s a healthy young woman,” he said carefully, “as long as she watches herself.”

“What’s wrong with her, Doc?”

Dr. Burn chuckled without joy. “She’s got a very minor problem, one that you would benefit from greatly,” he said. “She’s allergic to booze.”

“No shit.”

“Precisely.”

“So April Goodrich can’t take a drink.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “April is both corn- and grape-sensitive. Most liquor is out, of course, and it goes without saying that wine is too. The majority of rum sold in this country is shipped in hogshead barrels, blended with grape brandy before bottling. So that’s out too. But rum bottled in Jamaica is a different story.”

“You lost me.”

“April can drink liquor that’s free of corn or grape, and drink it she does, Mr. Stefanos—to excess. She’s damn near what we used to call a Jamaican rummy.”

“And if she drinks something else?”

“She knows not to. She’d get violently ill.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing on the medical end, as you say. Nothing else particularly unusual.”

“What about on the personal end?”

“It’s none of my business, of course” he said. “But I’ll tell you this: on more than one examination, I noticed various…
markings about her wrists. Sometimes similar markings were around her ankles.”

“What kind of markings?”

“Burns of a sort. Hemp or wire.”

“You think she was tied up?”

“The markings would seem to indicate some sort of bondage, yes.”

“April ever mention it? Complain about it?”

“No.”

“Consenting adults, Doc. It’s not my thing, but it’s not illegal.”

“Maybe not. But I met her husband once on a consultation, when they were considering having a child. Let’s just say that I don’t think April left home involuntarily. He seems to have had a proclivity for sudden anger, an anger perhaps that could have manifested itself in violence. Does that paint any type of picture for you?”

“It’s vivid enough.”

“Good luck, then,” he said abruptly. “And good luck with fatherhood too. Your blood specimen was fine, by the way. Though you ought to take it easy on the sauce, as a general matter of health.”

“It’s under control,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Thanks for the advice, Doc, and thanks for the information. You’ve been a big help.”

T
HURSDAY’S
POST
WAS
light on news but heavy with inserts. I read it that morning as I sat on my convertible couch, a mug of coffee resting on the couch’s arm. My cat sat next to me, her thin body barely touching mine, licking her paws with deliberate, efficient zeal. Occasionally I reached over and scratched around the scarred socket that had once housed her right eye.

The headline of the Metro section screamed that the homicide numbers had exceeded the previous year’s, with three weeks to spare before New Year’s Day. Arsons and gay bashings were on the increase as well. Several related articles described the “faces behind the victims” of the street crimes that were now spreading “west of Rock Creek Park,” a D.C. code phrase for whites. This from a newspaper that routinely buried the violent deaths of its black readership in the back of the section.

After my second cup of coffee I laid Dream Syndicate’s
Medicine Show
on the turntable, cranked up the volume, and
cleared the rocker out from the center of my bedroom. I jumped rope for the duration of the album’s first side; for the B-side I did abs and several sets of push-ups. Then I showered, shaved, dressed, and had another cup of java and a cigarette. The cat slid out the door with me as I left the apartment. I tapped her head slightly before she scampered away into the depths of the backyard.

The platform of the Takoma Metro was empty at midmorning. I caught a Red Line car and grabbed an early copy of
City Paper
that had been left beneath my seat. By the time I had finished the weekly’s arts reviews, I was ready to transfer to the Orange Line at Metro Center. Six stops east I exited at Eastern Market and headed down Eighth to the Spot.

Darnell was standing by the door, waiting as I arrived, his hands deep in the pockets of his brown car coat. Next to Darnell was the tiny man-child Ramon, smiling his gold-toothed smile. Ramon had on a pair of Acme boots and wore a cheap cowboy hat with a red feather in the brim. Though there weren’t many Western types left in D.C. (the garb was still mildly popular with Latins), there had been a short craze of it in the gay community centered around the 1980 release of
Urban Cowboy
. At that time it was nearly impossible to walk around the P Street area without witnessing a sea of cowboy hats. My friend Johnny McGinnes, never accused of being too sensitive, had dubbed the headwear “homo helmets.”

“Gentlemen,” I said as I pulled the keys from my pockets and put the correct one to the lock.

“Same shit,” Darnell said. “Different day.”

THE LUNCH HOUR WAS
over, and pensive drinking had begun. A fiddle screeched, and Dwight Yoakam sang, “It won’t hurt when I fall from this barstool….” Happy stared straight ahead, his hand gripping a rocks glass filled with Mattingly and Moore. At the sports corner of the bar, Buddy and Bubba were splitting a
pitcher, while a pompadoured guy from Bladensburg named Richard blew smoke in Buddy’s tight-jawed face and loudly insisted, “I’ll bet you a goddamned C-note, goddamn it, that Tampa Bay did too make it to the fuckin’ play-offs!” Melvin Jeffers’s eyes were closed as he sat alone at the other end of the bar, mouthing the words along with Dwight Yoakam. I sipped a ginger ale and chewed ice from the glass.

Dan Boyle entered the Spot at three o’clock, had a seat at the bar, and exhaled slowly. His eyes, like a bashful old hound dog’s, slid up the call rack to the Jackie D. I put a mug of draught in front of him and poured two fingers of the mash into a shot glass, placing the glass on a damp Bushmill’s coaster. Boyle shut his eyes and drained the shot, then chased it with some beer.

“How’s it goin, Boyle?”

“Bad Day at Black Rock.”

“Ernest Borgnine,” I said. “And Lee Marvin.”

“I’m not kidding, man. Been over at Edgewood Terrace all day, in Northeast. Twelve-year-old kid got blown away over a pair of Nikes. Shotgun load to the chest. You could drive a truck through the fuckin’ hole. And the look on the kid’s face by the time we got to him—twelve years old. I seen a lot of death, man. I seen too much death.” Boyle rubbed his face with one large hand while I free-poured another shot. This one he sipped.

“You got a kid about twelve, don’t you, Boyle?”

“A girl,” he said. “It never gets any better, to see a kid get it, no matter who it is.”

“Even when it’s just a spade, right?”

Boyle had some more whiskey and some beer behind that, then focused his pale eyes on mine. “Don’t be so fuckin’ selfrighteous, hombre.” He was right, and I let him give it to me. I looked down at the bar until his voice softened. “Anything happening on the Henry deal?”

“Something will shake out.”

“You let me know when it does,” he said.

“Bet on it, Boyle. I will.”

*   *   *

AN HOUR LATER ONLY
Happy remained at the bar. A Chesterfield burned down in his right hand as he slept. For a while I watched it burn, then lost interest. Shirley Horn was smoothly pouring from the house speakers. Drinking music. I began to eyeball the Grand-Dad on the call rack and was contemplating a short one when the phone rang. I stubbed out my own smoke and picked up the receiver.

“The Spot.”

“Nicky, that you?”

“Billy?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s hard to make you out, man.”

“I’m on the car phone, on Two-ninety-five.”