Deathbed

by William Kienzle

  “What do you expect? You were the new guy on the block. Having you sit in killed their normal conversation.”

  “No, I expected that. It was something more. And if I’m right, it wasn’t directed at me; it was aimed at the nun.”

  “So? Deference to a superior.”

  “You’re not getting the drift, Joe. Please hear me out.”

  “Okay.” Cox pulled the quilt up. This would have to be a pretty interesting story or he would soon be asleep.

  “There was an air of hostility toward the nun. It was palpable. It was coming from several people. I don’t know what they’ve got against her, but I’m going to find out.”

  “You’re serious. You really think there’s something going on?”

  “Yeah. It’s a physical thing. Like someone is out to get her.”

  “Get her? You mean harm her?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay. But if something like that should happen, it’s open season on this story.”

  “I know.”

  “You know Nelson Kane—you should, you worked for him long enough. You know how he salivates when somebody comes up with a crying statue or the figure of Christ in a burning chicken coop. He is just not the type of city editor to overlook a hospital nun under attack.”

  “Nelson Ka—you didn’t tell Nellie about the contraceptive angle of this story!”

  “Of course I didn’t. He’d have my ass in a sling if he knew about our nonaggression pact. Matter of fact, I think he kind of suspects. But if he knew for sure . . . wow!”

  “Well, anyway, at the moment, it’s just a feeling. I’ll have to check it out. There may be nothing there.”

  “Backing away, are you? Just remember: If you come up with an injured or dead nun . . .”

  “Heaven forbid.”

  “Okay, heaven forbid. But if you do, then it’s open warfare, no holds barred.”

  “Joe, you wild and crazy guy, you never get it straight, do you?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s not when making war, it’s when making love that there’s no holds barred.”

  “I lie corrected.”

  Lennon smiled, turned off the lights, and slid beneath the quilt and Cox.

  8

  “You did what!”

  “Easy!” the First Man cautioned. “You’ll attract the guard.”

  “You did what?” the Third Man repeated, more quietly but just as furiously.

  “We all heard him,” the Fourth Man said. “He said he made a mistake. What kind of mistake, Bruce?”

  “An honest mistake,” Whitaker replied.

  “What mistake?” the Third Man said through clenched teeth. “What the hell did you do, you idiot?”

  “Now, now, there’s no need to drop lugs on poor Bruce,” the Fourth Man tempered. He turned to Whitaker. “Tell us what you did, Bruce.”

  “Well, I made a mistake . . .uh . . . instead of altering IUDs, it turns out I mutilated several boxes of curtain hooks.”

  “You what!” all three exclaimed simultaneously.

  “Hey, what’s goin’ on here, anyway?” A burly guard rapped his knuckles on their table. “You wanna hold it down, or what? You get loud like that again and this visit’s over. You’ll get outta here, Whitaker. And the three of you’ll go down with a recommend that y’ll be put in the box and forgot. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  “Perfectly clear, Captain,” the Fourth Man said.

  “Okay, then.” The guard walked away and resumed his post against the wall not far from their table.

  “Bruce,” the Fourth Man said, “do I understand you to say that you mistook curtain hooks for IUDs? How in God’s name did you do that?” His knuckles were white from gripping the table’s edge.

  “It was an honest mistake—”

  “It was a stupid mistake.”

  “Honest.”

  “Stupid!” the Third Man insisted. “Incredibly, supremely, unforgivably stupid! IUDs look nothing like curtain hooks!”

  “How was Į to know? I’ve never seen an IUD. Besides, I’ll bet these curtain hooks look like an IUD. They were S-shaped and made of strong metal.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference. They were curtain hooks! Goddam curtain hooks!”

  “Watch your language,” the First Man cautioned.

  “And,” Whitaker continued, “they were in the drawer reserved for IUDs.”

  “That’s different,” the Fourth Man said. “That provides a logical explanation for why you might have confused them. Why didn’t you tell us this in the beginning?”

  “You didn’t give me a chance. You jumped all over me when I told you I made an honest mistake. Now do you see how honest that mistake really was?”

  “All right,” the Fourth Man said in a conciliatory tone. “Tell us what happened so we’ll be better able to plan for the future.”

  Whitaker began recounting the events of the night on which he successfully attacked the curtain hooks. He reached the point where he was almost detected by the guard.

  “You mean you were seen! You could be identified?” the First Man challenged.

  “Well, no, not really. At that point something else happened.”

  “What?”

  Whitaker’s face broke into a beatific smile. “A miracle.”

  ‘A miracle!”

  “A miracle. Remember that nurse’s aide I told you about? Well, she helped me. She happened to be in the hospital at the same time. She saw me sort of sneaking down the main floor corridor and she noticed the guard was about to intercept me . . . and she . . . uh . . . . intervened.”

  “Intervened?”

  “She said she . . . distracted him.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. However she did it, she saved me from being discovered. That’s the important part. Not how she did it.”

  “I don’t like it,” the Third Man said.

  “Why not? Did you want me to get caught?”

  “Frankly, I’m beginning to care less and less whether you get caught. Probably the worst that could happen is that you’d be thrown back in here, or DeHoCo, or Jacktown. I’m worried about us. We’ve only got a bit left. I don’t want ‘all day’ time added to what we’ve got. Or to have to go back to Jacktown.”

  “What does Ethel have to do with all this?” Whitaker was getting defensive.

  “Oh, it’s Ethel, is it?” the Third Man said. “All right then, Ethel. I don’t like the fact that she just ‘happened’ to be at the same place at the same time as you were when you were carrying out our mission. Or trying to carry it out. And I don’t like that she knew you were sneaking around at night. And I don’t like that she got involved. Just how much does she know about you? About us?”

  “Okay, she doesn’t know anything at all about you, about us. And she knows next to nothing about me. We’ve just eaten together a few times and went on a date. But she doesn’t know anything about us or our mission.”

  “Are you sure?” the Fourth Man asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “So you went on a date,” the First Man said.

  “You as much as told me to. You told me to get acquainted with her. And I did. And I have.”

  “All right,” the Fourth Man said. “But be careful. It’s vitally important that she doesn’t find out about us or our mission.”

  Everyone nodded agreement.

  The Fourth Man continued. “How about the rest of the people at the hospital? Do they know about the curtain hooks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have they associated them with you?”

  “No. They think it was a manufacturer’s error.”

  “All right, then,” the Fourth Man said. “What happened after your friend . . . uh . . . distracted the guard?”

  “Then the way was clear to the clinic—wait ... no; I almost forgot the old nun.”

  “The old nun?”

  “Sister Rosamunda. She was sneaking along the hal
lway ahead of me.”

  “What is this, a Mack Sennett comedy?”

  “No. She went into the clinic ahead of me. Then I went in and was able to see what she was doing. But she never saw me. Do you know what she did?”

  He had their attention.

  “She took some bottles out of a cabinet after she unlocked it.”

  “She stole!” the First Man exclaimed. “An old nun stole! Is nothing sacred? What was it? Did you get a chance to check it out—Lourdes Water or something like that?”

  “It was Terpin Hydrate Elixir . . . whatever that is.”

  “Whatever that is!” the Third Man exclaimed. “What did you do with your time in here anyway? They call that GI Gin. It’s potent. Got lots of codeine in it. And alcohol. A few slugs of that and you’re out. Either that nun has got one hell of a cold or she’s bending the old elbow.”

  “You mean she’s an alcoholic! An alcoholic old nun! Nothing is sacred,” said the First Man.

  “She has to be,” the Third Man affirmed. “She’s not picking up GI Gin with a prescription. She’s stealing it. She’s a lush. Just an old religious lush.”

  “Very interesting,” the Fourth Man observed. “We’ll have to keep that in mind. It may help us somehow. You never can tell. All right, then, after the nun, you made your . . . honest mistake. And that was all there was to it? There was no further incident?”

  “None.”

  “All right, then. What we have is a failure . . . albeit an honest mistake. But no other harm done. We can go on from here.”

  “What about that newspaperwoman?” the First Man asked. “The one you said came to do the story on St. Vincent’s?”

  “I can’t figure that out at all. I went out of my way to personally make sure she saw the clinic. And she did see it. And she saw the evil things that are going on there. And I know that she knew they shouldn’t be going on in a Catholic hospital. And because it’s such a little hospital and rumors get around pretty quickly, I know that she had a couple of meetings with Sister Eileen. But nothing came of it.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. Well, not so far, anyway. It’s probably too soon to tell for sure . . . but she was back the next day having lunch with the staff as if nothing had happened. I don’t know why, but it looks to me as if she isn’t going to do an investigative story on the clinic after all. Maybe Sister Eileen talked her out of it . . . although that seems hard to believe. But whatever the reason, it just doesn’t seem that she’s going to follow up on that situation.”

  “Unless we force the issue,” the Fourth Man said pensively. “I’ve been spending some time in the library. They’ve got a good collection of old newspapers from around the country. I’ve been looking through them for hospital stories. You don’t have to look far. The papers are running stories all the time about things going wrong in hospitals. If you put all these stories together, why, hospitals are simply filled with accidents.”

  “Something like ourselves,” the First Man admitted.

  “Speak for yourself, Rumdum,” the Third Man said.

  “Now, now,” the Fourth Man cautioned, “let’s not have any falling out. We’ve got to be united to be effective.”

  “Yes, you’re right. It’s like what I saw in the emergency room the other day. A man was brought in unconscious. They almost sent him up for X-rays. But at the last second, one doctor decided to give him some test. Then they gave him some medicine and he recovered. Like almost immediately. It was like a miracle. And if they’d sent him up for the X-rays, he would have died. Is that your idea?”

  “Yes. The idea is that newspapers—and magazines, for that matter—feature prominently the mistakes, blunders, and accidents that happen in hospitals. They happen all the time. But even though there are many, many accidents, there are never too many, it seems, for the media to overlook.”

  “I think I understand,” the First Man said. “Sometimes so many instances of a normally noteworthy occurrence take place that the news media tend to overlook the latest happening. Like there are so many murders in a city like Detroit or New York or Chicago, that not all of them get big headlines or are even reported. Whereas, when a murder occurs in someplace like Kalamazoo, that gets a lot of notoriety there.”

  “That’s it,” the Fourth Man chimed in. “But somehow, for some reason, when major blunders happen in hospitals, they always seem to get well publicized. I guess it’s because on the one hand, you come to expect a certain level of violence in a big city. But hospitals are supposed to be places where, even if cures can’t be worked all the time, at least you expect good care to be taken of the patients. So when the wrong fluid is injected in a spinal column or the wrong kind of anesthetic is used and the patient ends up as a vegetable, crippled, or dead, that’s big news as far as the media are concerned.”

  “Sort of like when a dog bites a man as opposed to when a man bites a dog,” Whitaker added. “But what has this to do with where we are now in our project?”

  “Only to put it in perspective,” the Fourth Man said. “We had a good plan and we still have a good plan. All right, so we suffered a minor setback when somebody put the wrong thing in the right drawer. And so the lady reporter at St. Vincent’s, for whatever her reason, seems to be avoiding a story that’s right there in front of her. It’s still a good plan. If we can make something happen at that hospital that is newsworthy, somebody in the media is going to pick it up and use it. And all we need to do is get one segment of the media to use it prominently and all the rest of the media will jump on board.

  “Once we do that, the spotlight of investigation and publicity will be on St. Vincent’s and the evil that’s going on there will be exposed. Then the archdiocese will be forced to act. And then we will have achieved our mission.

  “Now, what do you say? Let’s get back in this and see what we can do. Any suggestions?”

  “Well, yes, “ Whitaker said. “I have a few ideas. I’ve been reading up on this. But mostly I’ve been trying to overhear some of the doctors when they are talking over some of their problems. And from all this, I have a few ideas, one of which I’d like to try next. Want to hear it?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” The Fourth Man was enthusiastic. Among other goals, he hoped to infuse his colleagues with a new sense of confidence.

  “Would anyone like something to eat?” the First Man inquired.

  “What!” the Third Man exclaimed. “You didn’t do it again! Tell me you didn’t do it again!”

  “It’s just a slice of baloney.” The First Man removed his right hand from his trouser pocket. Clutched in his fist was what at one time had been a thick slice of baloney. It now resembled modeling clay squeezed into the shape of inverted brass knuckles. Also, it was beginning to lose much of its savory piquancy and take on the stench of sweaty prison clothing.

  “God! How can you do that to food?” the Third Man demanded.

  “Where did you get that?” the Fourth Man asked.

  “The chow cart. There’s never enough to keep from getting hungry between meals.”

  “You idiot!” the Third Man exclaimed. “We’ve got to get rid of that somehow. You try eating that and the guard will be on you in a minute. And the way it’s beginning to smell, we’re not going to keep it a secret much longer. You stupid bastard! This is just like the goddam cheese!”“Cheese?” Whitaker asked. “You mean the cheese you hid in the heat duct last time?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What happened? I thought you hid that good enough.”

  “Not quite,” the First Man explained. “At first, they thought they were looking for a dead animal. Then they found the cheese. I guess they knew it didn’t get in the heat duct all by itself. So they looked some more.”

  “And it wasn’t all that difficult an investigation,” the Third Man continued. “Dumdum here couldn’t get the odor out of his armpit.”

  “So,” the First Man said, “they knew we had been sitting together in here. So they took go
od time away from all three of us.”

  “And now,” the Third Man said, “this idiot comes in with a putrid piece of baloney. So what the hell are we going to do?”

  “I’ll take it,” Whitaker volunteered. “I’ll be leaving in a few minutes. They won’t check me on the way out. I’ll get it out of here.”

  “I hate to say this,” the Third Man said, “but I guess we owe you one.”

  Keeping an eye on the guard, who had wandered slightly further away, and assisted by Whitaker, the First Man pried the baloney out of his fist. Whitaker then plunged the gook into his pocket without being discovered.

  “Now, then, what is it you have in mind?” the Fourth Man asked.

  “Okay.” He was eager to explain his plan. “Get close.”

  The four huddled. Noting this, the guard returned to his vantage near their table.

  After several minutes, the Third Man fairly shouted, “You’re going to do what? That’s insane!”

  His outburst activated the guard, who strode to their table. “Okay, okay, okay, that’s it. I told you no commotion, no commotion! Now break it up! Break it up! Let’s go! This visit’s over! Move it! Move it! Move it!”

  They had no alternative. The three, still muttering, were herded to their cells while Bruce Whitaker and his contraband baloney returned to the streets, confident of his plan despite the incredulity of his colleagues.

  * * *

  Father Koesler studied his patient chart. It was run off each day and contained such information as the patient’s name, room number, nature of illness, religion, and doctor’s name. Other information was added as needed.

  He noted that several patients had requested the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Odd. From his limited experience, as well as the briefing he’d received from the now-vacationing Father Thompson, he knew confession was rarely requested in this hospital. This was due partly to the fact that Catholics did not go to confession nearly as frequently as they once had, and partly to the fact that there just were not very many Catholic patients in St. Vincent’s.

  One of the confession requests had been penned in by a nurse’s aide. The patient was on one of Sister Rosamunda’s floors. Another oddity. Sister of course was not empowered to hear confessions. So when one of her patients asked for the sacrament, Sister routinely would communicate the request to the priest-chaplain. In this case, she had not.