The Face (31 page)

He added a quart-size Hefty OneZip plastic bag in which to store the peels after he ate the fruit. Left in the open air, peels would give off an intense banana scent as they darkened. According to the movies, every serial killer had a sense of smell keener than that of a wolf. Banana peels might be the death of Fric if he didn’t stow them in an airtight container.

A roll of paper towels. Several foil-wrapped moist towelettes. Even in hiding, he would want to be neat.

From a cupboard filled with Rubbermaid containers, he chose a pair of one-quart, soft-plastic jars with screw-on lids. They would serve in place of the library palm tree.

Mr. Hachette, being a deeply unstable person, had stocked the kitchen with ten times more cutlery than would ever be needed even if the entire staff developed knife-throwing acts and ran off to work in carnival sideshows. Three wall racks and four drawers offered enough blades to arm the entire coconut-rich nation of Tuvalu.

Fric selected a butcher knife. Proportionate to his size, the blade was as large as a machete—scary to look at, but unwieldy.

Instead, he chose a smaller but formidable knife with a six-inch blade, a wickedly pointed tip, and an edge sharp enough to split a human hair. The thought of cutting a person with it made him queasy.

He put the knife on the lower shelf of the cart and covered it with a dishtowel.

For the time being, he could think of nothing additional that he needed from the kitchen. Mr. Hachette—busy shopping and no doubt also shedding his skin for a new set of scales—wasn’t due to slither back to Palazzo Rospo for hours yet, but Fric remained eager to get out of the chef’s domain.

Using the service elevator would be too dangerous because it was in the west wing, not far from Mr. Truman’s apartment. He hoped to avoid the security chief. The public elevator, toward the east end of the north hall, would be safer.

In sudden guilty haste, he pushed the cart through the swinging door into the hallway, turned right, and nearly collided with Mr. Truman.

“You’re up early this morning, Fric.”

“Ummm, things to do, things, you know, ummm,” Fric muttered, silently cursing himself for sounding devious, guilty, and more than a little like an absentminded Hobbit.

“What’s all this?” Mr. Truman asked, indicating the stuff piled on the cart.

“Yeah. For my room, things I need, you know, stuff for my room.” Fric shamed himself; he was pathetic, transparent, stupid. “Just some soda and snacks and stuff,” he added, and he wanted to smack himself upside the head.

“You’re going to put one of the maids out of work.”

“Gee, no, that’s not what I want.”
Shut up, shut up, shut up!
he warned himself, yet he couldn’t resist adding, “I like the maids.”

“Are you all right, Fric?”

“Sure. I’m all right. Are you all right?”

Frowning at the items on the cart, Mr. Truman said, “I’d like to talk to you a little more about those calls.”

Glad that he had covered the knife with a dishtowel, Fric said, “What calls?”

“From the heavy breather.”

“Oh. Yeah. The breather.”

“Are you sure he didn’t say anything to you?”

“Breathed. He just, you know, breathed.”

“The odd thing is—none of the calls you told me about are on the computerized telephone log.”

Well, of course, now that Fric understood these calls were being made by a supernatural, mirror-walking being who referred to himself as a guardian angel and who only used the
idea
of a telephone, he was not surprised that they weren’t recorded as entries in the log. He also wasn’t any longer puzzled about why Mr. Truman hadn’t picked up on the call the previous night, even though it had rung just about forever: Mysterious Caller always knew where Fric was—train room, wine cellar, library—and using his uncanny powers and only the
idea
of a phone, he made Fric’s line ring not throughout the house but only in the room where Fric could hear it.

Fric longed to explain this crazy situation to Mr. Truman and to reveal all the weird events of the previous evening. Even as he worked up the courage to spill his guts, however, he thought of the six psychiatrists who would be eager to earn hundreds of thousands of bucks by keeping him on a couch, talking about the stress of being the only child of the biggest movie star in the world, until he either exploded into bloody pieces or escaped to Goose Crotch.

“Don’t get me wrong, Fric. I’m not saying you invented those calls. In fact, I’m sure you didn’t.”

Clenched tightly around the cart handle, Fric’s hands had grown damp. He blotted them on his pants—and realized that he should not have done so. Every crummy, sleazy criminal in the world probably got sweaty palms in the presence of a cop.

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Mr. Truman continued, “because last night someone rang me up on one of my private lines, and it didn’t show on the log, either.”

Surprised by this news, Fric stopped blotting his hands and said, “You heard from the breather?”

“Not the breather, no. Someone else.”

“Who?”

“Probably a wrong number.”

Fric looked at the security chief’s hands. He couldn’t tell whether or not they were sweaty.

“Evidently,” Mr. Truman continued, “something’s wrong with the telephone-log software.”

“Unless he’s like a ghost or something,” Fric blurted.

The expression that crossed Mr. Truman’s face was hard to read. He said, “Ghost? What makes you say that?”

On the trembling edge of divulging all, Fric remembered that his mother had once been in a booby hatch. She had stayed there only ten days, and she hadn’t been chop-’em-up-with-an-ax crazy or anything as bad as that.

Nevertheless, if Fric started babbling about recent freaky events, Mr. Truman would surely recall that Freddie Nielander had spent some time in a clinic for the temporarily wacko. He would think,
Like mother, like son
.

For sure, he would immediately contact the biggest movie star in the world on location in Florida. Then Ghost Dad would send in a powerful SWAT team of psychiatrists.

“Fric,” Mr. Truman pressed, “what did you mean—ghost?”

Shoveling manure over the seed of truth that he’d spoken, hoping to grow a half-convincing lie from it, Fric said, “Well, you know, my dad keeps a special phone for messages from ghosts. I just meant like maybe one of them called the wrong line.”

Mr. Truman stared at him as though trying to decide whether he could be as stupid as he was pretending to be.

Not as great an actor as his father, Fric knew he couldn’t long stand up to interrogation by an ex-cop. He was so nervous that in a minute he’d need to take a leak in one of the Rubbermaid jars.

“Ummm, well, gotta go, things to do, things up in my room, you know,” he muttered, once more sounding like a cousin from the feeble-minded branch of the Hobbit clan.

He swung the cart around Mr. Truman and pushed it east along the main hall. He didn’t look back.

CHAPTER 50

T
HE DOME LIGHT ATOP OUR LADY OF ANGELS Hospital was a golden beacon. High above the dome, at the top of the radio mast, the red aircraft-warning lamp winked in the gray mist, as if the storm were a living beast and this were its malevolent Cyclopean eye.

In the elevator, on the way from the garage to the fifth floor, Ethan listened to a lushly orchestrated version of a classic Elvis Costello number tricked up with violins and fulsome French horns. This cable-hung cubicle, ascending and descending twenty-four hours a day, was a little outpost of Hell in perpetual motion.

The physicians’ lounge on the fifth floor, to which he’d been given directions by phone, was nothing more than a dreary windowless vending-machine room with a pair of Formica-topped tables in the center. The orange plastic items that surrounded the tables qualified as chairs no more than the room deserved the grand name on its door.

Having arrived five minutes early, Ethan fed coins to one of the machines and selected black coffee. When he sipped the stuff, he knew what death must taste like, but he drank it anyway because he’d slept only four or five hours and needed the kick.

Dr. Kevin O’Brien arrived precisely on time. About forty-five, handsome, he had the vaguely haunted look and the well-suppressed but still-apparent nervous edge of one who had spent two-thirds of his life in arduous scholarship, only to find that the hammers wielded by HMOs, government bureaucracy, and greedy trial attorneys were daily degrading his profession and destroying the medical system to which he’d dedicated his life. His eyes were pinched at the corners. He frequently licked his lips. Stress lent a gray tint to his pallor. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he seemed to be a bright man who would not much longer be able to delude himself into believing that the quicksand under his feet was actually solid ground.

Although he was not Duncan Whistler’s personal internist, Dr. O’Brien had been the physician on duty when Dunny had gone flatline. He had overseen resuscitation procedures and had made the final call to cease heroic efforts. The death certificate carried his signature.

Dr. O’Brien brought with him the complete patient file in three thickly packed folders. During their discussion, he gradually spread the entire contents across one of the tables.

They sat side by side in the orange pseudochairs, the better to review the documents together.

Dunny’s coma resulted from cerebral hypoxia, a lack of adequate oxygen to the brain for an extended period of time. Results revealed on EEG scrolls and by brain-imaging tests—angiography, CT scanning, MRI—led inescapably to the conclusion that if he had ever regained consciousness, he would have been profoundly handicapped.

“Even among patients in the deepest comas,” O’Brien explained, “where there’s little or no apparent activity in the cerebrum, there is usually enough function in the brain stem to allow them to exhibit some automatic responses. They continue to breathe unaided. Once in a while they might cough, blink their eyes, even yawn.”

Throughout most of his hospitalization, Dunny had breathed on his own. Three days ago, his declining automatic responses required that he be connected to a ventilator. He’d no longer been able to breathe without mechanical assistance.

In his early weeks at the hospital, although deeply comatose, he had at times coughed, sneezed, yawned, blinked. Occasionally he had even exhibited roving eye movements.

Gradually, those automatic responses declined in frequency until they ceased to be observed at all. This suggested a steady loss of function in the lower brain stem.

The previous morning, Dunny’s heart had stopped. Defibrillation and injections of epinephrine restarted the heart, but only briefly.

“The automatic function of the circulatory system is maintained by the lower brain stem,” Dr. O’Brien said. “It was clear his heart had failed because brain-stem function failed. There’s no coming back from irreparable damage to the brain stem. Death inevitably follows.”

In a case like this, the patient would not be connected to a heart-lung machine, providing artificial circulation and respiration, unless his family insisted. The family would need to have the means to pay because insurance companies would disallow such expenditures on the grounds that the patient could never regain consciousness.

“As regards Mr. Whistler,” O’Brien said, “you held a power of attorney in matters of health care.”

“Yes.”

“And you signed a release quite some time ago, specifying that heroic efforts, other than a ventilator, were not to be employed to keep him alive.”

“That’s right,” Ethan said. “And I’ve no intention of suing.”

This sincere assurance caused no visible relief on O’Brien’s part. Evidently he believed that even though the conscientious medical care given to Dunny was lawsuit-proof, a plague of lawyers would nonetheless rain down on him.

“Dr. O’Brien, whatever happened to Dunny once his body reached the hospital morgue is another matter altogether, unrelated to you.”

“But I’m not any less disturbed about it than you are. I’ve discussed it twice with the police. I’m…bewildered.”

“I just want you to know that I don’t hold the morgue employees at all responsible for his disappearance, either.”

“They’re good people,” O’Brien said.

“I’m sure they are. Whatever’s going on here isn’t the fault of the hospital. The explanation is…something extraordinary.”

The physician dared to let hope tweak a little color into his face. “Extraordinary? And what would that be?”

“I don’t know. But amazing things have happened to me in the past twenty-four hours, in some way all related to Dunny, I think. So why I wanted to speak to you this morning…”

“Yes?”

Searching for words, Ethan pushed back from the table. He got to his feet, his tongue stilled by a thirty-seven-year-long reliance on reason and rationality.

He wished for a window. Gazing out at the rain would have given him an excuse not to look at O’Brien while he asked what needed to be asked.

“Doctor, you weren’t Dunny’s primary physician…”

Talking while gazing moodily at a vending machine full of candy bars seemed eccentric.

“…but you were involved with his treatment.”

O’Brien said nothing, waited.

Having finished his coffee, Ethan scooped the paper cup off the table, crumpled it in his fist.

“And after what happened yesterday, I’d wager that you know his file better than anyone.”

“Backward and forward,” O’Brien confirmed.

Taking the paper cup to the waste can, Ethan said, “Is there anything in the file that you’d consider unusual?”

“I can’t find a single misstep in diagnosis, treatment, or in the death-certification protocols.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He tossed the crumpled cup in the can and paced, looking at the floor. “I’m sincere when I tell you that I’m convinced you and the hospital are utterly blameless. When I say ‘unusual,’ what I really mean is…strange, uncanny.”

“Uncanny?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how to put a finer point on it.”

Dr. O’Brien remained silent so long that Ethan stopped pacing and looked up from the floor.

The physician chewed on his lower lip, staring at the piles of documents.

“There
was
something,” Ethan guessed. He returned to the table, sat in the orange torture device. “Something uncanny, all right.”

“It’s here in the file. I didn’t bring it up. It’s meaningless.”

“What?”

“It could be misconstrued as evidence that he came out of the coma for a period, but he didn’t. Some attributed the problem to a machine malfunction. It wasn’t.”

“Malfunction? What machine?”

“The EEG.”

“The machine that records his brain waves.”

O’Brien chewed his lip.

“Doctor?”

The physician met Ethan’s eyes. He sighed. He pushed his chair away from the table and got up. “It’ll be better if you actually see it yourself.”