Night-Bloom (38 page)

He sat up quickly, nearly dislodging a tumbler of juice, then lunged for the phone beside the bed. Dialing, his brain spun and his fingers trembled over the digit holes. Then suddenly he put the receiver back on the hook and replaced the phone on the table beside him. He took a deep breath.

“My God.” His heart thumped. I must be mad. As it is he already suspects me of the Cardinal Pharmacy. And then there’s Myrtle and the bank robbery in Kansas City. Now all I need is this. If I tell this Mooney about Quintius, or Boyd, or whatever, he’ll think I’m mad. Possibly even an accomplice of some kind to the son. Of course. That’s it. They suspect me of being involved with the son in the burglary and—Oh, but that’s mad.

His voice trailed off as he caught the note of wild irrationality in it. Beside his bed on the night table was a pill and a tepid glass of milk. Cramming the pill into his mouth, he gulped it down, then fell back heavily onto the pillows and clamped his eyes shut.

Soon, he knew, the pain would start. That thin wire noose of constriction banding his head from temple to temple, gradually radiating outward to the ears, rising upward round the parietal and occipital areas, reaching down finally like steel fingers and seizing him by the scruff of the neck. He cringed in anticipation of it. The nurse going past in the hall heard the infantile pathetic whimper.

Having restored Mooney to full captaincy, Chief Mulvaney felt certain that the mystery of the phantom Bombardier was now safely out of his hair. It was Mooney’s problem now and let him take the heat for it. The Bombardier was still at large, the furor went on unabated, and Chief Mulvaney could not resist a twinge of spiteful delight. Mooney had failed before and he would fail again. Mooney was a sham. He knew no more about the phantom Bombardier than anyone else. How he had managed to euchre the commissioner and the whole force into believing that he had the inside track on the case, and had himself anointed God’s foremost expert in the matter was all part of the man’s colossal malarkey.

Mulvaney was right, of course. After five years of special investigations, tens of thousands of dollars in overtime and special requisitions, the department was no closer to an arrest now than they were the night the first cinder block dropped from the sky.

In terms of hard, objective data, Mooney had little to show. A pseudonym, a canceled insurance policy with a dummy address, a two-year-old hospital record, and now incomprehensibly, a link between the pseudonymous A. Boyd and a large, ungainly cactus that cast off huge fragrant blooms one night a year.

It was early June in New York City. For Fritzi there was now the lively, spirited yearling Gumshoe, who occupied her waking thoughts and lured her almost daily to the track to watch the morning workouts, talk with the trainer, consult with the vet.

There were supplies to order, expenditures and decisions to make. Increasingly, she sought Mooney’s guidance in these matters. On the one hand, he loved every bit of it. But, increasingly, he found the demands of the investigation on his time greater than he could fulfill. More disturbing, he sensed the department’s mocking cynicism and that made him crave vindication as never before.

The truth was Mooney was stalemated. Of course, he could not admit that to anyone, least of all himself. The investigation, after much hoopla, had ground to a sputtering halt. Now Mooney and his team of special investigators were reduced to the indignity of backtracking and treading water. Hours were spent scouring through years of dusty police files. There were the computers, too, and the FBI master file in Washington, D.C., with its list of over a million offenders.

Instinctively, Mooney knew all this to be futile— the hum and buzz of expensive new technology to mask the fact that, in the absence of any truly significant new evidence, the investigation was bankrupt.

Up on the rooftop overlooking 161 Street, sipping at a beer he had sneaked, Mooney gazed across at the molten glow of floodlights in the sky above the stadium where the Yankees were playing Baltimore. From over the Grand Concourse the steady roar of traffic wafted upward from below and occasionally he could hear the sharp crack of a bat impacting on a ball and the roar of a weekend crowd like a cataract of rushing water.

Leo, Virgo, Cepheus and the Lynx wheeled overhead. Bootes, like a bright kite, scudded low above the rooftops. Even the stars failed to console him. They filled him, instead, with a sense of desolation and reminded him that he was sixty-two. Implausibly, too, they reminded him of Fritzi and the rancorous thought that it had taken him a long time to find her and, having found her, she was almost too much too late. It was just another one of those wildly promising but heartbreakingly unplayable hands that life had always delighted in dealing him.

About to leave, he turned sharply, his foot colliding with something on the rooftop. He reached down, groping along the tar until his fingers found a smallish plank of 2” by 4”, undoubtedly left there by workmen repairing the roof.

He stood for a time hefting it in his hand. The wood was light, wide-grained, probably pine. He appeared to be pondering something. In the next moment, slowly, almost dreamily, he walked back over to the edge, then inexplicably flung the plank far out into the inky void. A second or two later a sharp clatter wafted up from below, followed at once by a long muted roar from the stadium.

He hovered there a moment at the ledge, perplexed, peering hard down into the blackened alleyway below. He had the look of a man trying to recover something he had lost.

Ultimately, his thoughts returned to the Bombardier, a shadowy figure of diabolic patience who knew how to wait, a man who knew how to hang back and let his trail cool. The stars looked down on that man now, whoever he was, surely as they looked down on Mooney. Even as Mooney pondered that, his eye fastened on the bright glow of Arcturus in the tail of Bootes, and in his mind’s eye, he triangulated the points between himself, the great star, and the Bombardier, thus mystically linking all three together.

“As of yet, the commissioner is harnessed to an exceedingly hot seat. Between the mayor’s office and the cries of public outrage, the department finds itself, as never before, beleaguered by proliferating crime and meaningless violence, the most recent example of which is perhaps the most heinous. Mr. Willie Krauss and his young bride of several days, honeymooning here from …”

“Quintius,” Watford murmured and thrust his newspaper aside. Surely it couldn’t be the same man, he thought. Not that quiet fellow in the bed beside me at the hospital. Surely the police are wrong. I just can’t believe … And why in heaven’s name … So cruel, so stupid.

For several days now, the name had racketed about in his head …

“Quintius.” He rolled the word around in his mouth as if he were tasting it. He thought next of the detective, the big, rugged Irish face, the eyes regarding him shrewdly. “Maybe I should … This way, if I don’t, I’m an accessory. Concealing evidence, I mean. No. I mean—I just can’t afford to get involved now. What if the hospital or Ramsay got wind that the police were talking to me? What then? I’d be out on the street before I could bat an eye.”

He didn’t want to leave the hospital, he thought. “Not ever again. No sir— Not ever …”

“Hello, Charles.”

Watford looked up into the gaunt, tired smile of Dr. Ramsay, who slipped down into the chair beside Watford’s bed. “You getting enough exercise? Walking round the esplanade outside, like I told you?”

“Sometimes,” Watford replied evasively.

“I can see that you don’t. Just from the way your eyes are avoiding mine. You should, you know, Charles.”

Lately the doctor had taken to calling him Charles, or sometimes in less guarded moments, Charley. Watford disapproved of that sort of informality, particularly since he’d never invited the doctor to call him by his first name.

“What you need is exercise, Charles. And fresh air.” The physician’s gaze lingered on him for a strangely protracted moment. The eyes were probing, yet uncertain, as if he weighted the wisdom of pursuing their talk on any deeper level. “Don’t you have any family?” he asked suddenly.

“My mother and father are dead.”

“Any sisters or brothers? You never seem to have visitors.”

“I have a sister and a brother-in-law and a niece in Pittsburgh.”

“Do they know about you?”

Watford appeared troubled. “Me?”

“Your health, I mean. Your condition. The fact that you’ve been hospitalized.”

“I wrote my sister several weeks ago and told her.”

“Have you heard from her yet?”

“The other day. She called.”

“And she’s coming up to see you, I s’pose?” Watford’s eyes focused on some distant part of the city skyline. “She’s very busy now. Her husband runs a big plumbing supply business. This time of the year, the spring and all, happens to be the height of the construction season.” He broke off suddenly.

“I see,” Ramsay replied softly. “Well, that’s all right. It doesn’t really matter. I just wondered …”

“I know you did.” Watford’s gaze wandered to that point on the skyline. There, tiny antlike dots of men inched up and down a gigantic crane surmounting a building under construction.

“… if a friend might be …”

“Friends? I have a lot of friends, plenty of friends,” Watford broke in belligerently. “I just don’t care to see them. That’s all.”

The physician tapped nervously at his knee. “I’ve got your new blood workups from the lab.”

“How are they?”

There was a pause as Ramsay regarded him keenly. “Not as encouraging as I would have hoped.” His voice grew brusque and professional.

Watford took a deep breath. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re not responding to the radiation or the chemotherapy.”

“The drugs make me sick. They make me vomit. I hate them.”

“Nobody expects you to love them, Charles. I’m perfectly aware of the side effects. But I’ll take unpleasant side effects any day if I can reduce the leukocyte count.”

“Have they reduced mine?”

Ramsay’s mouth opened, then closed as though he were about to speak but changed his mind. “No,” he said after another moment. “As a matter of fact, your white blood count appears to have increased.” He watched Watford warily as though he expected some sign of panic. There was none. Watford’s face remained blank and impassive, his eyes still transfixed on the huge crane.

“What’s more, your spleen is quite enlarged, the lymph nodes appear to be involved, and I see indications now of liver involvement.” He addressed him in a strangely harsh whisper. “You understand? You know what I’m saying?”

Watford nodded.

“You must forgive me for being sharp, Charles, but I don’t think you do.”

“You’re saying that I’m dying,” Watford replied flatly, without emotion.

“I’m saying that you’re not responding to treatment.”

“That’s not my fault, is it?”

“No, of course not,” Ramsay was quick to clarify. The question, direct as it was, struck him as pitiful.

As if Watford had perceived his inability to respond to the best that medicine had to offer as just one more failure in his long, unbroken string of failures.

“Of course it’s not your fault,” the physician went on apologetically. “It’s more my fault. I haven’t been able to come up with the right combination of drugs—the right balance between your radiation and chemotherapy. It’s not your fault at all. I’ll try harder. There are some new compounds just out on the market. Purely a hunch, mind you, but the literature on them is encouraging. Certainly worth a try. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to call your sister? I could, you know. No problem at all.”

Watford pondered that a moment. “I don’t think so. They’re really very busy now and I’d prefer not to bother them.”

After Ramsay left he sat there for some time, thinking. He had understood perfectly the physician’s meaning but, in some perfectly natural and self-protective stance, he couldn’t really believe that the deadly prognosis just described pertained in any way to him. It was someone else the doctor had been discussing, as if they were two old friends chatting about an unfortunate acquaintance they both hadn’t seen in years.