The voice was weak and raspy, and sounded more like someone gargling than speaking, and just barely recognizable.
“So, wha took you s’long to ask me queshions, Sher…lock?”
“You can talk? You’re awake?”
“Course can. Look, no tubes in, and, yay, no tubes out! Also no beeping, burbing, or drip…ping. Doc Pa…tel sez th’ortho…peed doc give me a walk’n cass next week.”
“That’s great.”
“Yes, v’been ly’ng here try to com…comu…talk you for long…Time not same in your head as out. N’all you do is read me dumb story about a dopey woman and cat.”
“How long have you…? Wait a minute, what’s up with all the grunting just now?”
“Gedding bak a you for playing accordion, Bus…ter.”
“I could kiss you.”
“Brush my teef firs’. Morning mouf for three weegs s’murder.”
“Can you hear yourself?”
“Wha?”
“You are in no position to leave, Sweetie.”
“M’ too…n’ gonna. Ged dressed.” Ruth held out her hand. “Hand up.”
Ike took it and eased her to a sitting position. She gasped.
“You just turned whiter than the linens on the bed. Take it easy there, Wonder Woman. You’ve been sliced and diced and non compos mentis for a long time.”
“Woof. Guess need rest minute.” She lay back again.
“More than a minute, I think. You don’t wake up from a three-week nap and major surgery and bounce out of bed like a gymnast.”
“I’m plenty compos menes…not bounzing…try get up ‘gain.”
“You can, and then what? Ride your Harley to work tomorrow?”
“I don’t have a Harvey. You c’n buy me one for birth…day?”
“You’re lucky you’re alive to have one—a birthday, I mean. And no, I will not buy you a motorcycle. How about something nice from the Scooter Store instead?”
“No. Check outta here now, Ike. Go the A-frame and you be…Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuz ‘n bring apple dum…lings.”
“Not going to happen, Ruth. Tell you what. I have an election in a week. Not the big deal it almost was since Jack Burns is now in the pokey and hopefully will stay there for something like five to fifteen years. So, it appears I’m running unopposed. Abe is happy as a clam. The mayor is reconsidering his position on campaign financing while taking in the sun and fun in Orlando with his kids, and I have got a lock on reelection. So, you behave, play nice with the folks from physical therapy, and when that’s done, and if Patel says so, we’ll go to the A-frame for a week or two. R and R for you, and post-election decompression for me, okay?”
“Don’ nee it.”
“You do. You’re going to need it because, after that, when you get back on the job, you will have an administration in chaos, the university’s reputation in the toilet, a new vice president to hire, not to mention the grief you will be taking from both your faculty and Board of Directors. Fiske getting himself shot was just the beginning of your problems, Kiddo, not an end.”
“Goin’ home.”
“Soon, babe. Not today.”
“M’ fine.”
“Really? Repeat after me. She sells sea shells by the seashore.”
“See zells she gels byda zee shhh…or.”
“My point, exactly.”
“Not important. Doctor gave me painkillers, s’all. Makes me wobbly.”
“Among other things, and that tells you what, exactly?”
“I’m fine. Need to go home.”
“You need time to recover, Ruth. You need to build your strength up. You need to be on the top of your game when you hit the streets again. You’ll be sprung from this joint just as soon as Doctor Patel says it’s okay. Maybe next week, two at the most.”
“But…Look, the doc gave me crutches.” She waved in the general direction of the door.
Ike eyeballed a pair of crutches leaning against the wall in the corner. “Good. Tomorrow some bright-eyed twenty-something will drop by and make you walk with them. You will end your day hating that person’s guts. Trust me, been there, done that. P.T.s show no mercy.”
“Not going home?”
“Not right away, Sweetie. Soon.”
Ruth closed her eyes. For a moment, Ike thought she had gone back to sleep. Then the corners of her mouth turned up.
“Love you, Ike.”
“Love you, too.”
“You’re my hero.”
Ike smiled and patted her hand. “Thank you for that, but you aren’t going to sweet talk me into taking you home today.”
“Bastard.”
“There you go. See, you’re beginning to sound like your old self already.”
Finding God In Digby
For those who might like to read the story Ike read to Ruth about the “woman and her cat” in its entirety, I have added it here. Enjoy.
It had started innocently enough. A week after her sixtieth birthday, Darcie Starling saw her cat, savaged by her neighbor’s pit bull. The image seemed so real, she dashed into the back yard screaming at the dog’s owner. He, a glass of lemonade in one hand and a tattered copy of Agatha Christie’s A Holiday for Murder in the other, nearly fell out of his Pawley’s Island hammock at her verbal onslaught. Cleopatra, the cat in question, watched all this with feline disinterest. Her neighbor, momentarily stunned, recovered and had some strong words for Darcie in return. Mixed in among them was the news that Jaws (the name of the pit bull in question) had spent the day at the vet’s and had not yet returned. At that moment Cleopatra announced her presence by rubbing against Darcie’s legs. Abashed and thoroughly confused, she retreated to her kitchen and poured a bowl of milk for the cat.
The following day, Cleopatra was, in fact, crushed in the jaws of Jaws, so to speak. In a déjà vu moment, the scene from the previous afternoon was played out once again. This time the neighbor, frantic at the prospect of losing his dog, apologized profusely and begged her not to call the authorities. He would make it up to her, he promised. Darcie called the police anyway. They, in turn, took a snarling, unrepentant Jaws away. Her neighbor muttered something about getting even and she guessed that was why she now sat handcuffed in the backseat of a police cruiser. But this would come much later—after the holdup and shooting at the Digby Savings and Loan.
Indeed, two and a half years would pass between those two pivotal events, years during which Darcie saw many more things about to happen. They came to pass on the day following the vision. Like the mythic Cassandra, she felt overwhelmed by omens and portents. Impending disasters robbed her of her sleep. Since she assumed this pernicious gift had been His, she prayed to her God to take it away. She’d been raised a low church Episcopalian and the God that made his home there did not, as a rule, respond to petitions. He, Darcie had been taught at an early age, remained an aloof but distant Presence. And as for his son…well, he was rarely, if ever, mentioned except when featured in the Sunday readings. For the most part, the Almighty was simply referred to as “the Lord.” Darcie always imagined the name set in bold face, capital letters—THE LORD—and given the respect the title carried. No other demands were made on Him…or his. In this, she discovered, churches on her side of town were in general agreement.
Darcie’s butcher’s daughter, on the other hand, attended the First Assembly of God Church out on the highway. She declared that God answered prayers all the time and recounted in great detail instances when divine intervention had, in fact, saved one or more of her friends. Given the vagueness of theological thought that permeated the churches near her, and the insistence by most of her caste that religion was to be a private, that is to say, an unspoken matter, she was led to wonder if her God would mind very much if she were to drop in on the one at the Assembly of God
Church and do her praying over there. She really did not want this awful gift and would try anything, even a visit to the Holy Rollers, which is how she thought of the butcher’s daughter’s place of worship. She finally decided against it.
She had strayed from the correct, that is to say Episcopalian God, once before with disastrous results. When she was sixteen she desperately wanted to be asked to the junior prom by Erik Fosom. Her friend, Bridget O’Reilly, persuaded Darcie to accompany her one evening to the Irish Catholic Church, Our Lady of Perpetual…something. There, immersed in the mixed scents of incense and hot candle wax, they prayed to God’s Mother to intervene on Darcie’s behalf. The next afternoon Erik slipped from a wagon filled with freshly cut alfalfa and caught his leg in a silage chopper. Naturally, the invitation to the prom never arrived. Bridget insisted it had something to do with the fact that Erik was a Lutheran and you know how God’s Mother felt about them. Darcie thought, but never said, that going around God’s back and praying to his Mother had probably provoked him into reverting to his Old Testament self. Either way she could never look Erik Fosom in the eye after that. She felt certain her indiscretion with the Irish deity had cost him his leg.
So, in the present instance, even though Christmas did involve God’s mother somewhat more than usual, she decided the risk was too great and resigned herself to five minutes daily on her knees discussing her problem with the God of her upbringing who, she sensed, had no more interest in it than Cleopatra who had, by that time, succumbed to her terrible fate, but who would readily have made some sort of feline petition had she been able.
***
It was a shock, certainly, that the police would call in such a manner. The front door slammed against the wall, bounced, shuddered, and slapped shut again. Darcie, mouth agape, stood as her father’s picture wobbled on its hook in the foyer, seemed to hesitate, unsure if it should, and then plummeted to the floor with a crash, scattering glass shards across the floor. Seconds later, the Digby police, search warrant in hand, pushed their way in, this time more gently, and proceeded to search her house. Ransack would be a more accurate description of what they were about. Clumsy and heavy footed, they tipped over her Christmas tree, the almost new artificial one which she’d bought at the Goodwill Store. Drawers, cabinets and her purse were unceremoniously dumped.
Her beautiful faux alligator luggage, a high school graduation present, lay on the floor; lids flopped back like filleted fish. She’d only used the set once forty-five years before when she went east to college. The huge state university campus and its masses of students so intimidated her that, except for trips to the bathroom and to purchase peanut butter crackers and soda pop from machines, she refused to leave her room. She never registered, never unpacked. Several visits from the Dean of Students and a Health Service nurse could not move her. Mercifully, at the end of the fifth day of her hold-out, her father called her home to care for her critically ill mother. And when that good woman died, Darcie stayed on as her father’s housekeeper and hostess, not that the Regional Superintendent of Schools required much in the way of the latter.
For over an hour the police traipsed though her house like a herd of errant hippopotami, crushing fallen Christmas decorations under foot, knocking over lamps, and displacing furniture. They ground the delicate ornaments into the carpet and left footprints of brightly colored crushed glass in the foyer. They dumped her dresser drawers. Her face turned bright crimson when a grinning, gap-toothed cop pawed through her underwear. And as if that weren’t enough, protests ignored, she was arrested, handcuffed, and stuffed into the backseat of a police car.
The ride downtown through the slush and gaudy Christmas lights seemed interminable. Cheery versions of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer racketed along the route as the cruiser splashed to the police station. Her mood did not match their happy cadence. Handcuffs pinioned her hands behind her back. Their sharp steel edges cut into her flesh. No one spoke to her, no one answered her questions, and the heater didn’t work. Finally overwhelmed by frustration and discomfort, she began to cry. Not sobs. She had been schooled as a small child to never lower herself to expressing base emotions. But in the rear seat of that icy Crown Victoria, tears streamed down her cheeks as she choked back the howl that sat poised somewhere just behind those two lumpy things in the back of her throat.
When the cop in the front seat Mirandized her and she heard the word lawyer, she settled down. She didn’t know any lawyers. The church seemed full of them but she made a point of ignoring them, politely of course, as a matter of principle. Her late father had a low opinion of any profession that would knowingly protect a guilty man. However, she did know Judge Horace Graybill. She remembered that prisoners were allowed to make one phone call. She knew the judge’s phone number and she knew he could straighten out this mess in a heartbeat.
She started to feel better.
***
Judge Horace Graybill had the voice of an Old Testament prophet. When he spoke, people, even those merely within earshot, fell silent and listened. His critics, primarily those in the legal profession and who had to try cases before him, said that voice notwithstanding, most of what proceeded from his mouth made little or no sense. The County Bar Association routinely reported to the Governor the all too frequent instances when the judge’s rulings were reversed on appeal. Nevertheless, he had a constituency which regularly reelected him, and the judge remained sublimely indifferent to his record. In his view, one he expressed often to his cronies at the Digby Country Club, the Court of Appeals had been stacked with liberals by President Carter and what else could you expect. The fact that Jimmy Carter had been out of office for decades and the court in question had one or two sitting judges on it who were not even born when he left office did not dissuade him from that view.
“So what’s all this fuss and feathers about, Dorothy?” He insisted on using her real name. Darcie was a corruption of Dorothy and a name she’d bestowed on herself at age two when she had attempted to pronounce Dorothy. Almost nobody called her anything but Darcie. But the judge, being of a formal disposition and accustomed to having correct nomenclature used in his court, insisted on Dorothy.
Once, she had changed her name. About the time she had her fixation on the not as yet one legged Eric Fosom, she started signing her name D’Arcy. She thought it had a romantic French look to it. She reverted to Darcie after the incident with the silage chopper and never used that spelling again.
“I have no idea, Judge,” she said. “These people seem to think I had something to do with a shooting this morning and they arrested me.”
”Nonsense. Pure hoo-haw if you ask me. Wait here.”
Since she’d been put in a jail cell, they’d called it, she was not going anywhere. Had it been a weekend, she might have had to share the space with any number of felons and miscreants but luckily, it was late Monday morning and, except for her, the cell was empty. She slumped back on the narrow cot and tried to think. Her attempts at cognition were disrupted by the extreme lumpiness of the mattress and the stench it emitted. She stood and moved forward and tried to see into the corridor. Nothing. She heard singing off to her right, mournful, Negro singing. African-American had not made it into her lexicon and as far as she was concerned, it never would. All nonsense, stirring people up against one another. Amy, her black nanny, had looked after her as a child and into puberty. There was never any problem with saying Negro to her. Not the other “N” word, of course. The Starlings were not bigots, everybody knew that. And Amy said so, too. Darcie could not remember Amy’s last name. She wondered if she ever knew it—not that it made any difference. Amy was like one of the family and that was all there was to that, thank you very much.
She paced the cell, measuring its length and width, and tried to ignore its pervading aroma of urine and Lysol. Horace Graybill reappeared.
“All hoo-haw, Dorothy,” he repeated, “but I can’t get any help
here. They say they have a witness who’s on his way down here to ID you. And because I’ve known your family since forever, they recused me. What’s all this about a witness?”
“My neighbor. He has it in for me. I had his dog arrested for murder and he never forgave me.”
“Well, I’ll find you an attorney. In the meantime you just sit tight. You have money for a lawyer, Dorothy?”
“Umm…I can probably find some.”
In truth, Darcie was as poor as a church mouse. When her father died, he left sums for her support. He had no concept of inflation and believed that with a Republican administration firmly in charge of the nation’s economy, he’d set enough aside to last her lifetime. The bulk of his estate went to his son, who played the guitar and lived somewhere in Mendocino, California. No matter how she scrimped, the money dwindled away. The house, the only other thing she’d inherited, was mortgaged to the hilt. Darcie had no marketable skills. How she would pay a lawyer would have to come from some other quarter. She dropped to her knees and concentrated on the Holy Roller God. She would pray to him here in the holding tank and Eric Fosom, or whoever else might be at risk, would just have to take his chances.
The cell door screeched open and a large black woman staggered into the cell.
“In you go, Dolores,” a guard said, and slammed the door closed. The woman collapsed on the cot.
“Whoo-ee,” she said. “This is not been a good day. What you doing on your knees, Lady?”
“Praying, or I was about to when you came in.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you. Lord always have time to listen to a sinner.”
“It wasn’t like that—I mean about the sinning. I wanted him to take something back.”
“Take somethin’ back. Somthin’ that he give you and you don’t want no more? Maybe he give it to me instead. Can’t have too many blessings, no sir.”
“You wouldn’t want it.”
“Depends on what it is. How about you let me decide?”
7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7 Page 24
