Night-Bloom (9 page)

Watford gazed across at his roommate who lay, eyes open, staring blankly at the ceiling. “There were witnesses to the accident, weren’t there?”

“Yes, witnesses,” the man replied in a manner that could have suggested affirmation or indifference. His eyes appeared to be transfixed on some indeterminate point across the room.

“You took their names, of course?” Watford persisted.

“Whose names?”

“The witnesses. The people on the site. You did get their names?”

The man shook his head dazedly.

A look of puzzlement crossed Watford’s face and he shrugged.

“Well, I’m sure glad you made it here on time. The nurse told me they had you on the table for three and a half hours, sewing up your leg. Too bad about the witnesses though. You could’ve taken the city for a bundle. Say, aren’t you going to eat your breakfast? With all that blood you lost, you need to get your strength back.”

The man closed his eyes and merely nodded. Watford, however, was far from discouraged. He was feeling very fit that morning and the good spring weather had contributed mightily to a sense that he had licked the dark memories of the recent past. The sad indignity of banishment from his sister’s home in Pittsburgh. The bleak embattled days of Inez. There was even a certain guarded optimism he felt about his prospects for the future. For the nonce, however, he was happy to be alive, secure and cozy in the hospital.

Watford grew curious about the sort of work the gentleman at his side might be engaged in. He was not so forward, however, as to ask the question directly.

“Say, what was your name again? ‘Fraid I didn’t quite catch it the first time.”

“Boyd,” the man murmured through lips taut with pain.

“What was that?”

“Boyd—Anthony Boyd.”

“Boyd?” Watford pondered. “Don’t think I know any Boyds. Has your family been notified? Your wife?”

“Abroad. Visiting relatives.”

“Don’t you think she should know?”

“No. No need. Only worry her.”

“Is there anyone else? Any family to be notified?”

“No. No one else.”

“What about your job? Shouldn’t someone be told there?”

“Not necessary. Not necessary.”

There was an awkward silence. Then Watford resumed. “Can’t wait to get out of here and get back to work,” he enthused brightly. “Been sick on and off for the past year or so. Airline work is my field, you know. Been a purser on most of your major lines. Pan Am, TWA, United, you name it. Been all over the world, too—Europe, the Far East, Russia. Love travel. Have ever since I was a kid. Joined up with the Air Force during Vietnam. Helicopter pilot, you know.”

Watford waxed nostalgic. He appeared just then, with his wry boyish grin, to be a man fully enjoying his reveries. “Got myself shot down behind enemy lines,” he continued. “Had to make my way back on foot through the jungle. Three days I walked, with a couple of 50mm slugs in my leg.” He held his leg up for his roommate to see. “Still walk with a limp but they gave me a Purple Heart and a DFC.” Watford smiled and glimpsed across at his neighbor. “That’s how I got into airline work. Seemed the natural way to go. They wouldn’t let me fly anymore because of my disability. So they made me a purser instead. I don’t mind, though. I love it. The travel, the people, new experiences. Always something new. You see, with me it’s always been a case of … Beg pardon?”

Watford had been chattering on so freely that he was unaware that the man had been muttering something to himself.

“Sorry,” Watford leaned across the narrow space between the beds. “What was it you were saying?”

The man’s head rolled sideward on his pillow. His eyes blazed open, fixing Watford angrily, then in the next moment closed.

“Are you all right?” Watford inquired uneasily.

Just at that moment, voices and a flurry of motion streamed through the doorway. A tall, brisk man in a white flowing coat breezed into the room. A flustered, somewhat breathless nurse tripped along behind at his heel.

“Good morning, Mr. Watford. I’m Dr. Rashower. Dr. Shavers’s associate. How are you feeling this morning?”

Watford looked up into a pair of shrewd, assessing eyes. He had not been expecting this so soon and had to get himself into a proper frame of mind for what he was certain was to follow. Momentarily stunned, he had sufficient presence of mind to stall in order to suggest infirmity.

“I think I’m all right, Doctor.” He spoke haltingly. The chirpy note of several moments before had become a kind of frail bleat.

The doctor glanced up and down his chart. “Still having pain, are you?”

“Yes. Across the lower back. Particularly at night. The pain is terrible at night.”

“I see. Roll over, please. We’ll have a look.” Dutifully, Watford rolled over on his stomach while the doctor untied the back of his smock and with strong, coolish fingers, palpated the area around his kidneys. Next he sounded the area with a stethoscope. Lastly, he slipped on a rubber glove, dipped one finger liberally in Vaseline, inserted it in Watford’s rectum and routed about in there for a while.

“Okay. You can roll back over now,” the doctor said, removing the glove and disposing of it neatly in a nearby wastebasket. “This is all a bit perplexing. You say that Dr. Shavers has been treating you for recurrent renal colic? But I find no sign of renal colic. There’s nothing in your blood or your radiology to suggest renal colic. We have found some blood in your urine, but not in sufficient quantities to be alarming. The blood may simply be a sign of infection, but you’re running no fever, nor do you have an elevated white blood cell count. I just checked your prostate and found it normal in size, possibly a trifle boggy. Nothing very significant. Frankly, I’m puzzled. Something else puzzles me, too.”

Something in the man’s voice and expression sent a red flag up for Watford’s keen antennae.

“I’ve looked high and low through Dr. Shavers’s records for your file and can find no trace of his ever having treated you.”

“I can assure you he has,” Watford retorted sharply. He could produce a fairly impressive moral indignation when the need was upon him, and the need was now definitely upon him. “Dr. Shavers has been my personal urologist for the past thirteen years. His records may be untidy. Go back and check them. I’m certain you’ll find me there.”

“And another thing, Mr. Watford,” the imperturbable Rashower disregarded Watford’s commands and instead bore down coolly, “the dispensary here has asked me to sign out three separate prescriptions for Demerol. I’m told I prescribed them for you.”

“You prescribed them?”

“So I’m told, yet I have no recollection of phoning any such prescriptions into the dispensary. Have you received any Demerol here?”

“Why, yes. Of course.”

“I never prescribed any Demerol for you. But apparently someone did, because you got it. Do you have any idea who might have called in the prescriptions?”

“Of course.” Watford’s heart thumped in his chest, but he was now determined to brazen it out. “Dr. Shavers called them in. He called here to ask how I felt. I told him I was in a good deal of pain and unable to get any medication stronger than aspirin. He wasn’t about to let me suffer night after night in terrible pain, so he said he would call in a prescription at once. That idiot nurse would only give me aspirin.”

Dr. Rashower stiffened and his voice grew clipped. “Let’s understand each other, Mr. Watford—” With a snap of his head he indicated the nurse in question hovering behind him. “I will not tolerate disparagement of the nursing staff here. These people are tired and badly overworked. Mrs. Price in denying you medication was carrying out strict hospital policy. No medication until the attending physician has had an opportunity to examine the patient and prescribe medication and dosage himself. That’s for your own protection. And number two—it is highly unlikely that Dr. Shavers called in any such prescription—”

“You’re not suggesting that I’m lying?”

“I’m suggesting no such thing. All I’m suggesting is that I have no record that you are, in fact, a patient of Dr. Shavers. And in the absence of any records, I’m not going to treat you or prescribe anything. Not even aspirin.”

“I see. Then you’re prepared to let me lie here and suffer. Is that it?”

“Frankly, Mr. Watford, I can’t find a blessed thing wrong with you. Except for a bit of blood in your urine you appear to be a perfectly hardy specimen. I’ve got a call into Shavers right now and I ought to be able to clear this whole matter up within the hour. In the meantime, please stay put right here in the room.”

The doctor nodded to the nurse, still cowering off to the side. He then turned abruptly on his heel.

“You haven’t heard the last of this.” Watford’s voice grew shrill. “Shavers will have your head for this. You’ve got one hell of a malpractice suit on your hands now.”

It must have taken Watford all of five minutes to dress and throw his few shaving and toilet articles into a paper bag. He was no longer even barely aware of the white-haired gentleman with whom he’d been chatting so pleasantly only a few minutes before. Still lying flat on his back, eyes closed as though in sleep, the man appeared completely oblivious to the recent flurry of excitement. The steady respiratory rise and fall of the blanket across his chest was deep and tranquil. It occurred to Watford that the man was trying to tell him something. Anxious though he was to get away, he stepped across to the bed and stooped over, the better to hear the man. He appeared half-conscious and was mumbling to himself. “Killed a man—last night—dropped a block on his head. Killed him—killed him.”

“What—what’s that?” Watford gaped, then heard voices and footsteps approaching and forgetting the man, started up at once. Poking his head out the door of the room, the first thing he saw was a stern, hatchet-faced chief nurse glaring back at him from behind a reception counter at the center of the floor. She raised a cautionary finger as he started out. “Mr. Watford—”

He didn’t stay around to hear the rest. He was off in a trice down the corridor with the chief nurse shouting his name, and a number of robed, shuffling inpatients turning to gaze after him in astonishment.

With the sound of a heavy tread bearing down fast, he had no intention of waiting round for an elevator. Instead, he ducked at once through a door with a red bulb glowing directly above it. It led to an emergency stairway down which he plunged, three steps at a time. At the top of the stair he could hear the nurse’s voice booming into the empty stairwell, “Mr. Watford. Come back here. Mr. Watford—”

She started down the stairs. Then, instead, ran back to the desk and phoned for guards and husky orderlies to head Watford off at the exits.

By then Watford was three floors below, striding purposefully up a crowded corridor in the pediatric wing. No stranger to expedient departure, Watford was certain that a complete description of himself and his mode of attire had already been flashed to every guard in the building. Prudence strongly suggested that he remove himself temporarily from the scene.

Passing down a corridor of small individual offices, the partially open door of one, apparently vacant, seemed a welcome invitation. He ducked in and closed the door behind him.

It was a smart, compact space, lined floor to ceiling with books. A Danish teak desk sat in the center of the room on a small Oriental carpet, a large leather swivel chair behind it, and a pair of canvas slingback chairs before it. On the desk itself was a copy of the
PDR
(the
Physician’s Desk Reference),
a manila file folder with a name typed across it, and a large meerschaum recently smoked and still warm, lying on its side in an ashtray. Beside that lay a tobacco pouch and matches.

From a walnut antique coat rack in the corner of the room, a long white physician’s coat hung with a stethoscope poking out the side pocket. Watford, barely pausing to reflect, had donned it.

There was a light knock, and before Watford could respond the door swung open. Instantly, he snatched up the pipe, clapped it between his teeth and proceeded to scan the file before him. Looking up, he saw standing there, apparently as startled by Watford as he was by them, a somewhat apprehensive young couple. “Dr. Atwell?” inquired the husband.

Watford required no further prompting. “Yes. I’m Dr. Atwell.”

“We’re the Greeleys. We had an appointment.”

A quick glance down at the folder he held quickly verified the name. Just outside and beyond the narrow shoulders of the husband, Watford saw two burley orderlies barrel past the open doorway. “Greeley. Oh, yes. Please come right in. Have a seat, won’t you?”

Watford walked to the door, gently closed it behind them and returned to the desk with the air of a man who had occupied the space all of his life. He settled back in the chair, opposite the young couple, making a great show of bustling with the files on the desk top.

“You’re here about—”

“Our baby, Alice. We were recommended to you by our pediatrician, Dr. Blaustein.”

“Oh, yes, Blaustein. Excellent man.” Watford tapped the ashes of the meerschaum into the tray, refilled it and with the most elaborate calm, relit the pipe. By that time he had fallen quite nicely into the role of the harried, much-in-demand Olympian, but nonetheless kindly, medical luminary. Despite all of the danger awaiting him just outside the door, he was rather relishing it. Not so much, however, that he’d lost all sense of self-preservation. He was keenly aware that the real Dr. Atwell, obviously on the premises, here precisely for this appointment, could, and probably would, reappear at any moment.

Like a parched desert wanderer coming upon water, Watford opened the Greeley file and drank in information from the reports and EKG spools lying there. He began to read aloud, quickly under his breath, mouthing all the technical verbiage perfectly as if he were completely familiar with the details and merely just refreshing his mind. “Aortal insufficiency. Valvular defect. Congenital, of course. Poor little tyke.” In a swirl of pipe smoke, he glanced up at Mr. and Mrs. Greeley, who were gazing at him, both fear and adulation raging in their eyes.