Mile High

by Richard Condon

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “They found her unconscious on the floor of the Hammetschwand lift at 6:38 the next morning. The helicopter spotted her on its first morning patrol because the elevator car had stalled somehow, halfway up the transparent, illuminated shaft, and the pilot had alerted the police command post to investigate. Four men went up the mountain trail in two motorcycle trucks, bringing a maintenance technician who activated the life machinery and brought the car to the base of the shaft. Mayra was sprawled across the floor of the car. The police sent for a stretcher and Dr. Garrison, and she was carried down the mountain, still unconscious.” Willie spoke slowly and with great seriousness. Mr. West listened intently. Walt simply wasn’t able to comprehend what Willie was saying.

  “But why? What does it mean?” he asked.

  Dr. Garrison spoke next. “I have taken the liberty of calling psychiatric colleagues at Johns Hopkins in your absence, Mr. West,” he said, speaking directly to Edward West, “and I hope, under the circumstances, that meets with your approval. They are flying from Baltimore now.”

  “Indeed, it does meet with my approval, Dr. Garrison. And we thank you.”

  “Dr. Garrison,” Walt began, “will you please—”

  “I have asked these distinguished men to come to confirm my own diagnosis because this has evolved into a serious matter.”

  “Evolved? Evolved from where? You had never set eyes on my wife when I left here three days ago.”

  “I think Mr. Tobin might begin with the first symptoms of the evolution of the patient’s illness.” Dr. Garrison said stiffly.

  Willie cleared his throat delicately. “Uh—you see, Walt—on Wednesday afternoon—the day you left with your father for Chicago—Mayra took her paint box and gear to the top of the Tritten Alp. I was engaged in meetings with Mr. Zachary, our chief mechanic. At about six o’clock, maybe a little before that, Mayra sent word through the desk that she wanted to see me. When I arrived at her apartment she seemed to be in tip-top form, entirely healthy in every way, then she told me that your father had assaulted her verbally on the mountain top and to escape him she had had to flee down the valley trail.”

  “But how could she—”

  “Yes. Precisely. I told her that what she had experienced was illusory, because Mr. West was, of course, in Chicago. She refused to discuss that condition of fact but instead said she would telephone you in Chicago, which, I assume, she did.”

  “She did. Yes. But she was entirely normal. She said nothing to me about any delusion, I mean about Father being in Bürgenstock when he was in Chicago.”

  “She didn’t mention it at all?” Dr. Garrison asked.

  “No. She asked if Father was in Chicago. Yes. She did cross examine me in a fairly pointed way about when I had seen Father last and when I expected to see him again that day. But that was all.”

  “Didn’t you think it was odd or strange that she asked so many detailed questions about your father?”

  “I did for a moment, yes. I commented on it to her. But she said she was just making conversation to keep talking to me because she was lonesome. But the hell with this. I knew this. I want to know why you have sent for Johns Hopkins psychiatrists to see my wife.”

  “Take it easy, boy,” Mr. West said.

  “The next morning, that would be Thursday morning, Mayra was violently ill—sick to her stomach and so forth. And when she saw it wasn’t going to stop she called Gubitz and asked him to send a doctor,” Willie explained, “and Gubitz immediately told me. I arrived at the apartment with Dr. Garrison.”

  “As you know,” Dr. Garrison continued, “it was my first examination of Mrs. West. I found her to be suffering a perfectly normal manifestation for an expectant mother—it’s called morning sickness—and I prescribed for it even though there was a possibility that it could have been food poisoning, although she had eaten nothing more than tea and cinnamon toast the day before. Mr. Tobin then asked me—or rather he told me about Mrs. West’s delusion of the previous day—then he asked me if I felt that the delusion could all be a part of a reaction from the pregnancy. I said that this was possible.”

  “She was very ill the next day, Walt. Worse than the first day, the poor dear,” Willie said. “Then in the afternoon, after she had agreed to stay in bed and follow Dr. Garrison’s orders, she turned on the radio at just about the same moment that I hung up on your father, both of us hearing the news about the same time that your plane was missing.”

  “I want to have an investigation and find out who the son of a bitch was who gave out that ridiculous goddam story,” Walt said.

  “Then, after that news, at some time during the night, after she’d heard the news, she wandered out of this hotel and up the mountain trail to the Hammetschwand.”

  “But why didn’t you tell her that the story was false? Surely someone told you the story was false.”

  “Your father told me the moment he knew,” Willie said. “But Dr. Garrison had sedated Mayra rather heavily, and it would have been the wrong thing, I felt, to try to awaken her to tell her. I was eager to tell her that everything was all right the first thing this morning.”

  “All right. All that happened. But why did that mean you had to fly in psychiatrists, for Christ’s sake? Gynecologists, yes. Obstetricians, certainly. Why psychiatrists?”

  “Because of my fears, which in my opinion were confirmed last night and early this morning when your wife was found,” Dr. Garrison said.

  “Fears of what?”

  “Fears that in her present condition your wife might be intent upon harming herself—or even destroying herself.”

  Walt shook his head slowly and compulsively in a caricature of patience. “That just isn’t possible, doctor,” he said. “You just don’t know Mayra. It’s simply impossible.”

  “Well,” Dr. Garrison replied, “very shortly you will be able to have the prognosis of two of the best psychiatric men in this country.”

  “When can I see my wife?”

  “She’s in a sedated sleep right now. She should awaken in about two hours, when the doctors should be here. Their examination may take an hour or an hour and a half, but you will certainly be able to see her as soon as they have talked to her, and then you’ll be able to see her when you’ve been armed with their very special response to her condition.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Your wife’s condition is wholly classical,” Dr. Palmer said, evenly and sympathetically. “It is called Doctorow’s Syndrome in our work. It is potentially very dangerous because of two things. First of these, of course, is the destruction the patient wishes to turn upon herself. Second is the patient’s total unawareness that she is ill, her denial of any delusions of self-destructive ambitions. If she can be watched at all times, the prognosis is simple. Watch her, wait until the baby is born, then know that all danger has passed. If the patient cannot be watched—and we believe these patients must be watched, not by members of the family, whom such patients can convince that they are rational, but by strong, impersonal psychiatric nurses—then we would urge that the foetus be aborted to save the patient from harm.”

  The three doctors faced Walt seated in an arc. They were grave, mature, obviously intelligent men of considerable experience. Flanking Walt were his father on his right hand and Willie on his left. It was a terribly effective, terribly convincing scene. Walt began to weep. He put his face in his hands and he sobbed as though he were alone. Willie patted him softly on the back. “I’ve got to see my wife,” Walt said. He stood up, averted his face and walked out of the library to the elevator in the main hall. He ascended to the top floor. He let himself into the apartment with his key. Mayra was fully dressed and was arranging flowers in a crystal vase. She turned and grinned as he came into the room, dropped the flowers and flew across the room into his arms. She kissed him again and again and tasted his tears.

  “Please, baby. Don’t get yourself sick with this. I see they convinced you. Well, that had to be. T
hat’s the way it was set up for you. What the hell. But pay it no mind, because not only is this whole thing a fantasy, but I am going to prove it is a fantasy.”

  Pillows were piled upon the two telephones in the room. The door to the bedroom was shut.

  Mr. West was seated at the monitoring equipment, fiddling with the gain dial. “Something has gone wrong with the transmitters in that room,” he said to Willie. “I’m not getting anything. I can’t hear one word they’re saying.” He took off the earphones and wheeled in the swivel chair to face Willie. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he asked.

  “I’m sick of this,” Willie said. “I think this has gone far enough.”

  “What has gone far enough?”

  “Ed. Please.”

  “I ask you again, what has gone far enough?”

  “What you are doing to this girl.”

  “What I am doing? Are you mad? Do you mean flying doctors in here to help her or putting up with a half-crazed woman pregnant with a half-caste baby?”

  “Those men aren’t doctors.”

  “Dr. Garrison isn’t a doctor? Is that what you’re saying? You hired Doctor Garrison out of a half-dozen alleged doctors two years ago, and all this time you led me to believe he was a doctor.”

  “Garrison is a doctor. He’s a crook or you have something on him, but he’s a doctor.”

  “He’s a crook?”

  “I mean those two actors who were supposed to have come here from Johns Hopkins. I can’t prove anything else, Ed, but I can prove they aren’t doctors.”

  “How?”

  “Do what I did. Call Johns Hopkins. They don’t have doctors named Palmer or Youngstein in any department, and in the psychiatric department no one has ever heard of Doctorow’s Syndrome.”

  “I don’t understand this. Garrison arranged to bring them here. He handled everything.”

  “The way he handled putting the stuff in her food to make her sick was more efficient, Ed. Or knocking her out so you could have the security men ride her up the mountain and dump her in that lift.”

  “Willie, there’s been something wrong with you for a long time now. I haven’t trusted your judgment for a long time now, and this is proof that I was right. You’ve gone rotten on me, Willie. Your mind isn’t the same. You’re older than I am and I think you’re senile.”

  “Okay. But nothing is going to be done to that girl any more, and you’re going to tell those two young people that you are too tired to stay on through the winter up here on this mountain and that you’re going to leave in the morning for Palm Springs and you’ll send them back to New York.”

  “I am, am I?”

  Willie stared at him, not answering.

  “Willie, did you know that I’ve had you stacked to take the fall for Goff—just in case something like this came up? I have the gun. I have your prints on the gun. Doc Yankel is still alive. He runs a chicken farm in southern Illinois with his grandson, and he’s there to tell how you broke into the apartment, holding a gun on him to make him get you in, and that you then shot and killed Goff because of a woman. Jesus, what a scandal that would make.”

  Willie couldn’t speak. He sat down weakly.

  “For the past few years you’ve had the idea that because you’ve got me isolated up here you are the real boss, because you think you control the boss. Isn’t that so? Well, that hasn’t bothered me. You worked hard and you’re entitled to kid yourself if you want to. What the hell. But you never tried telling me what I was to do. You bossed flunkies and felt real good, but you never made mistakes like this before—over this nigger girl who doesn’t mean a damn to you, except you like the taste of being boss, and you thought I’d gone soft and old, and you thought you’d make a test run to see if you could move me as you wanted to. Well, I haven’t gone soft, and I’d break your back just as quick as I broke Goff’s back or Capone’s back or Warren Harding’s.” He stared at Willie with distant contempt, colder than hatred, as though he were unable to justify how Willie had ever somehow gotten into his life. Willie’s eyes filled with tears. He turned away from West as he sat in the chair and hid his face in his left hand. West said, “You’ve always been worth about what a full spittoon is worth, Willie, and we both of us know it.”

  “I’m trying to kill myself, right?”

  “That’s what the three doctors said.”

  “Okay. Now I’ll lay it out straight. And I’ll even have exhibits like they do in court. Like you’ll have to eat my breakfast in the morning just to sort of bear out what I’m going to tell you. Then—but we mustn’t talk while we’re doing it—I’m going to show you how your daddy has this place bugged and how he’s either been listening in or recording everything we’ve said since we’ve been in this room. I got a lock on it now, so we can say what we want—but I can see you’re looking all wary like what I’m saying is proving that I’m crazy. I better start at the beginning.”

  “Honey, let’s just get out of here. Let’s just pack up and go home.”

  “I don’t think we can.”

  “You don’t think we can?”

  “No.”

  “My father is holding us as sort of prisoners?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him levelly. “Did your father say we could leave Monday?”

  “No. As a matter of fact he—well, because of what’s happened to you—anyway, he said he’d prefer it if I set up an architectural office here, in the tennis house, and bring draftsmen and Derek and so on up here so he could be in the closest touch with the job from the very beginning.”

  “I see.”

  “I said okay, but now I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Baby, listen. Please. Let me talk. You’re the one who has to stay loose, because as long as you’re convinced I’m sick, you can move in and out of here. He was on that mountain at about twenty to five Wednesday afternoon. You saw him last at twelve-thirty or so in Chicago, and there was plenty of time for his Learstar to take him back here and back to Chicago. But I’ll let that one go by. It can all be proved from the outside, and maybe that’s why you’ve got to stay loose. Tell him we’re leaving, and he’s got to put a lock on you. Tomorrow morning I’m going to ask you to eat my breakfast because—”

  “It takes two and a half hours to fly to Chicago. I didn’t see him for six and a half hours,” Walt said dazedly.

  “Oh, sure. No doubt about it.”

  “But what did he say to you?”

  “He said I was a sex-crazy nigger and that I had to be punished for marrying you. I had to be beaten until I bled from every orifice, then thrown off the mountain down the cliff beside the elevator shaft—’cast down,’ he called it—so I could be punished through eternity.”

  “But why would he say such things, Mayra?”

  “You ever see me have morning sickness?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think anybody in my family ever had it. That’s for true. But tomorrow you’re going to have it.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re going to have it right after you eat my breakfast, then I’ll give you the antidote and you won’t have it any more unless you eat my breakfast the day after that. You know about the dogs here?”

  “Yes.” He felt sad. He could never be found by his father now. His eyes had turned inward upon his grief, but his grief was being suffocated by his rage. Mayra was pulling at his lapels. “They got nine killer shepherds. All bigger than wolves. All trained to tear anything that moves into dead, bloody pieces. They’re loose all night. But I walked from this hotel to that Hammetschwand elevator and nothing bit me. And there was deep snow, but my slippers weren’t wet and my feet weren’t cold. How come?”

  “How?”

  “Because they doped me to make it look like I’m in psychiatric shock because your plane was missing and me being in a very delicate condition as any doctor will shortly prove, then they rode me up the trail and put me in that elevator car and stopped the car halfway up the shaft.”

&nbs
p; “Why? Why?”

  “I told you why. Because he’s crazy. And because he wants you to think I’m crazy so when they find me dead at the bottom of the mountain everybody can say poor girl, too bad.” She closed her eyes and began to sway. He held her tightly by the shoulders. “But why would all these people conspire with him to kill you?”

  “Not all these people. Just Willie Tobin. Willie fixes up my morning breakfast before it comes in here. Willie brainwashes that dimwitted Dr. Garrison. Willie took me up the mountain to make sure I’d know the way if I wanted to paint up there. He’s done it all before. Your father has murdered Italian-speaking niggers before.”

  “Mayra!”

  “Mama’s scrapbook will be in the mail Monday morning. When I can show you that I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “What’s in the scrapbook?”

  “I can’t say it until you see it under your own eyes. Nobody could believe what I have to tell you unless they can look right at this scrapbook.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “First, you have to believe him or me. One of us is crazy.”

  “I believe you. I believe in us.”

  “Then everything has to be okay. He can’t kill me if you believe he’s trying to kill me. Next, you’ve got to believe that he can keep us here as long as he wants us here. He controls all the transportation. All the cops. And he controls the telephones, so we just aren’t about to call out to your brother Dan to send in an air force and some troops.”

  Walt looked ill. “But I can get out,” he said. “If you can stand to take the chance to stay up here alone with him, then I can get out and get all this finished.”

  “How?”

  “Business. I’ll tell him I’ve got to meet Derek in New York to line up a drafting crew. I won’t even tell him. I’ll keep it casual and just ask Willie to arrange to have the plane take me into the city.”

  “Then what will you do in New York? What can you do? I mean, if you bring Dan back here with you, then he’ll just be one more prisoner.”