Silent Treatment (29 page)

“Maura, are you drinking?” he asked.

The ensuing pause was answer enough.

“Not enough to matter,” she said flatly.

“Maura, please,” he said, battling to keep both his fear for her and his anger in check. “Please stop. Stop now. I need you. Evie’s killer thinks I paid to have someone follow us last night. He thinks I’m responsible for the death of his man. To pay me back, a few hours ago he killed one of my patients—a thirty-three-year-old guy. He just waltzed into his room and killed him. Then he called here to boast about
it. He … “ Harry had to stop speaking to compose himself. Maura said nothing. “Listen,” he finally managed. “You’re … you’re the only friend I have right now. I don’t even know what to do. The bastard said he wasn’t going to stop hurting me or my patients until I … until I kill myself.”

For another ten seconds the line was quiet.

“Harry, why don’t you come on home,” she said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, for starters, I’m going to take a shower.”

Harry gave a silent prayer of thanks.

“Heavy on the cold,” he said.

Harry had dealt with enough actively drinking alcoholics to know that no promise—especially the one not to drink anymore—meant much. He took a cab across town expecting the worst. As far as he was concerned, Maura had to bear some responsibility for starting up again. But he also believed that she had been discharged prematurely following her operation at MMC—not necessarily prematurely for her surgery, or even for the DTs, but certainly for her alcoholism. She needed more time in the hospital—someone to develop a workable treatment plan. She would have benefited from social services intervention, some psychotherapy, perhaps a visit or two from people from AA, and quite possibly an inpatient stay at an alcoholism unit as well. Once upon a time, that was the way it had been done. But now, even if her physician knew this approach would give her the best shot at recovery, her insurance carrier dictated otherwise.

There were codes in the company’s database for each
and every disease, injury, and condition that anyone might be likely to have, everything from leprosy to blackwater fever. There were codes that set limits for hospital stays, procedures, and allowable payments. But there was no code that took into account the complexity of any individual or his or her reaction to illness—no code named “Maura Hughes,” or “Harry Corbett.”
Brave new medical world
.

Harry paid off the cabby, thought about picking up another box of candy—she might crave the sugar—then simply shrugged and crossed the street to his building. He felt beaten and sore. What fight remained within him was fueled by rage and frustration. Andy Barlow hadn’t wanted to die. In the time he had left, he had wanted to design buildings and go to concerts and be with his friends. If Maura Hughes wanted to self-destruct, to drink until her liver or her stomach or her brain gave out, there really wasn’t a damn thing Harry Corbett—or anyone else, for that matter—could do about it.
No candy
.

Maura was waiting just inside the door to the apartment. There was an overnight bag at her feet.

“I’ve decided to go home,” she said.

Harry felt a spark of anger.

“Why?” he asked. “Because you drank? Or because you want to drink some more?”

“Both, probably. Harry, let’s not debate it, okay? I’m just not any good to either of us, and I don’t see where a few more drinks is going to make a bit of difference.”

“Well, it will.”

Harry wanted to shout at her. To remind her in the harshest terms that she had control of things Andy Barlow did not. Instead, he took a calming breath and held her by the arms. Her eyes were still clear and focused. She had almost certainly not had any more to drink since they spoke on the phone. There was still a slim chance to stop it right there.

“Let’s go in and talk,” he said. “Just for a while.”

“Harry, please. I’m not playing any head games with you, I’m not wallowing in self-pity, and I’m not trying to get you to beg me not to drink.”

“I didn’t think you were. Listen, we’re just having a lousy time of it—both of us. I know you feel bad about not remembering what that bastard looked like. I wish you could remember, too. But if you can’t, you can’t. It really isn’t that important. What is important is that you’re the only one who absolutely knows the truth about me and Evie. I’m counting on you to help keep me from coming unglued. And I think I can do the same for you. Now please, just come on back inside.”

For a few silent seconds, she stared up at him.

“Anybody ever tell you that you look like Gene Hackman?” she said finally.

Harry was shaken. Then he noticed the mischief in her eyes.

“Well,” he said, “now that you mention it …”

They sat on the sofa in the den, drinking coffee and trying to make sense of the events that were battering their lives. They had made very little when, an hour later, Harry’s pager summoned him to call his answering service. Maura had agreed that she was not handling her alcoholism very effectively, but did not agree that she needed a couple of weeks or more as an inpatient at a rehab—especially not with Harry footing the bill, as he had offered to do.

“Anything else,” she said. “Anything but the lockup.”

Harry suggested she might speak with Murphy Oates, the piano player in the house band at C.C.’s Cellar. Oates, once a serious drunk and heroin addict, had been clean and sober for over a decade, though he rarely spoke about it.

“I’ll be happy to speak with your friend,” Maura bargained. “And whatever he tells me to do, I’ll do … except get put away in some nut ward.”

“He’s probably at the club,” Harry said.

“Now?”

“It doesn’t open for another couple of hours, but there’ll be some musicians there, playing or just hanging out. This is actually the time I like it there the most. It’s dark and quiet and … well, sort of like a womb. You
know, I just remembered that Andy Barlow once came in there to hear me play.…”

Harry’s thoughts again entered the darkened hospital room on Alexander 5 and locked on the thin face staring lifelessly at the ceiling. From the moment he had heard Maura’s thick speech on the phone, he had been holding on by the thinnest of threads. Now, he felt that thread snap, and himself begin to slide down a sheer glass wall.

“… The lunatic admitted it, Maura,” he said, pacing across the room and back. “He just called up and admitted killing Andy like … like he was admitting he stole the morning paper off my front stoop. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Not one goddamn thing. What am I supposed to do? I’m like a toy for him. Jump, Harry. Roll over. Play dead. How am I ever going to stop this? Who’s next?”

“Harry, let’s go,” Maura said suddenly, taking his hand. “Let’s get out of here right now. The club might do you some good, too.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Listen, let me find out what this page is all about. Then we can decide what we want to do.”

Harry dialed his answering service. He wasn’t on for his coverage group, so the call had to be something they couldn’t deal with. The answering service operator, usually chatty and ebullient, sounded formal and cool. Apparently, she had joined the ranks of those certain that Harry was guilty of murdering his wife. It seemed as if word about him was spreading like a toxic fog.

“Dr. Corbett, you got a call from a Mr. Walter Concepcion,” she said, making no effort to pronounce the name the Spanish way. “He said that he’s a patient of yours, but that this isn’t a medical problem. He said that no one else but you can help.”

Harry scratched down the number, checked that it was the same as the one Mary had given him at the office, and dialed. A woman answered on the fifth ring.

“¿Diga?”

“Buenas tardes,” Harry said, “¿Está Walter Concepcion, por favor?”

Over his two decades of medical practice on the fringe of Spanish Harlem, he had evolved about a second grader’s fluency in the language, although his accent was closer to preschool.

“Un momento.”

He heard her set the phone down and envisioned a woman in a print house dress walking to the foot of a flight of well-worn oak stairs.

“¡Oye, Walter!
“ she called out as if on cue. “¡
Walter Concepcion! ¡Teléfono!
“ Harry’s image this time was of his gaunt, twitchy new patient, slipping his feet into a pair of threadbare slippers, opening one of several doors on the second floor of the dingy boarding house, and padding down the stairs.

“Hola,”
he said, at almost the moment Harry expected him to.

“Mr. Concepcion, it’s Dr. Corbett.”

“Oh, hey, thanks for calling back so quickly, Doc,” he said. “Your office gal told me about what happened after that call came in. I’m sorry you’re having so much trouble. I … I was calling to see if there might be a time for me to speak with you about it.”

“Actually, I was going to call you.”

He glanced over at Maura and motioned that he wouldn’t be long. He wanted to get to know Walter Concepcion better before turning his phone number over to Albert Dickinson. He also wanted to prepare the man for the sort of degrading grilling he could expect from the detective. But another thought had occurred to him as well. Concepcion spoke proudly of having kicked a drug and alcohol habit. On external appearances alone he wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for abstinence. But he was intelligent in a streetwise sort of way, and did seem to take his recovery seriously. If Murphy Oates wasn’t at the club, Concepcion might be another voice of hope for Maura.

“Would you be free in, say, an hour?” Harry asked,
guessing that the one-time detective would probably be free almost any hour.

“Just say where, Doc, and I’ll get there.”

Harry hesitated a moment and then gave him the address of the club.

C.C’s Cellar was a 120-seat hole-in-the-wall on Fifty-sixth Street west of Ninth Avenue. The scarred brick walls were covered with signed, black-framed photos of jazz greats, many of whom had spent their entire lives in obscurity, enmeshed in a vicious cycle of poverty, addiction, and pain. C.C., Carl Cataldo, had died years before, and had left the club to his niece, Jackie. As far as Harry could tell, except for a few more photos on the walls and a state-of-the-art speaker system, not much had changed in the place since Carl opened it decades ago.

There were four people in the dimly lit main room when he and Maura arrived. Jackie, expansive in a stained white apron, was getting ready behind the bar. A gnarled old janitor who had been with the place since day one was sweeping out the small private-party room. Two musicians, both guitarists, were trading licks on the stage. One of them called to Harry.

“Hey, Doc, how about comin’ up an’ knockin’ out a little bass line for us.”

“Later, maybe, Billy.”

“Hey, whenever, my man.”

“Any idea where Murphy is?”

The man shook his head and then ran off several incredibly melodic bars of “I Remember You.” Except for expressing grief about Harry’s loss, no one at the club had even hinted by word or manner that they were upset by the publicity surrounding him. They trusted his music, they trusted him. It was that simple. And in a city of eight million or so, this was the only spot where he felt truly safe and accepted.

“Go ahead and play if you want to,” Maura said, sipping soda water. “I’ll be fine.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I thought I might want to when we left the apartment, but right now I just want to sit with you and … Maura, he simply walked past everyone on Alexander Five, into Andy’s room, and then out again. How could he have done that without a single person noticing? Not one.”

“How did he just walk into our room the night he killed Evie? He knows how to move around hospitals. That’s all there is to it. If you were evil enough and set your mind to it, you could do it just as well. There’s so much stress and tension in hospitals that I’ll bet most people who work there are totally focused on not making mistakes. There are probably times when you could march an elephant through the halls and no one would notice. The guy just knows how to do it.”

“I guess.”

“Harry, I wish I could say something to help. I really do.”

“You can, dammit. You can say you won’t pick up a drink again.”

Her eyes sparked at his curtness. It was the first time he had spoken to her that sharply.

“I’ll try my best,” she said. “How’s that?”

“It’ll do for now.”

She stared into her glass.

“So,” she said, brightly, “tell me about this guy who’s meeting us here. You said he’s a private detective?”

“Was. He got into trouble with booze and cocaine. I don’t know what he did to lose his license, but now he’s trying to get it back.”

“Well, I think that may be him over there.”

Walter Concepcion was getting a soda water from Jackie, who nodded toward where they were sitting. He was wearing a lightweight plaid sports jacket and looked more businesslike than he had in Harry’s office. Harry studied him as he approached the table, wondering what sort of impression he might make on Albert Dickinson. He moved well enough, and carried himself like someone who had once had some athletic ability. But even dressed up, he still
looked wasted and chronically ill. Dickinson would never believe his claim that he had been off crack for years. Harry introduced him to Maura.

“Three soda waters on the perfect pitcher-of-beer day,” Concepcion said, motioning to their three drinks. “Could it be that I’m not the only one on the wagon?”

Harry was impressed.

“I didn’t say a thing,” he said to Maura. “You heard the whole conversation.”

“Harry’s just patronizing us,” she explained. “I’m the lush.”

“In that case, here’s to us lushes.”

“I like this guy,” Maura said, joining in the toast.

After five minutes of conversation, Harry knew that his office assessment of the man had been way off. Despite his sallow complexion and the persistent tic at the corner of his mouth, Concepcion was engaging and intelligent. He was borri and raised in New York, but had traveled extensively in the service, and then on his own.