Next I tried the garage door; it went up. I ducked beneath and closed it behind me. In the dusty half-light I recognized Jay's truck, a little slush stain on the sidewalls from the trip three nights prior. The truck's doors were locked. I peered into the windows; nothing. But the walls of the garage, I saw, were lined with large tanks, perhaps two dozen. I turned my attention to some boxes set in the back of the garage. They held car stuff, mostly, plus knitting materials and books on collecting dollhouses. Probably not Jay's. What else?
I slipped back under the garage door, picked up one of the paint cans in the weeds, and climbed the stairs. The apartment door was old, with nine panels of glass. I looked around, checked the street. This isn't much of a crime, I told myself, considering what he's already put me through. I swung the paint can against one of the bottom panels, and it cracked the glass enough for me to break out a few pieces. I checked the street again; nobody saw me drop the paint can into the weeds. I reached inside and flipped the dead-bolt lock. The door didn't open. I felt around and found a slide bolt below the doorknob.
Three minutes, I told myself— in and then get the hell out. Here I was breaking into someone's apartment hours after someone had broken into mine. Nice. I turned the knob and shut the door behind me. Jay would discover that someone had broken in, but he wouldn't know who.
The room was a monk's cell ten feet by twelve. You entered directly into the bedroom. A simple camp bed, neatly made. Next to it, an answering machine, red message-light blinking. To one side sat an enormous stainless steel box with a small window in its top, not unlike a space-age sarcophagus. It was the biggest thing in the room and a quick inspection of its dials and switches revealed it to be a hyperbolic oxygen chamber.
Oxygen. The man needed oxygen?
Three oxygen tanks identical to the ones in the garage stood next to the chamber. Bottled oxygen is a controlled substance, I remembered, considered a medicine. You need a doctor's prescription to get it. The tanks are heavy when full. They had to be delivered, and were probably carried with some kind of dolly up and down the outside stairs, hence the wear on the treads.
At the foot of the bed stood an oxygen compressor that huffed rhythmically, its sound not unlike that of waves breaking on a beach.
I saw two trunks under the bed and slid them out. Look inside? I'd come this far, so yes. The first trunk contained work tools: hammers, screwdrivers, socket wrenches. The second had socks, jeans, underwear, T-shirts, all neatly folded. Such neatness is depressing, as if one is preparing for death. I closed the trunks and slid them back. In Jay's closet hung ten suits arranged by color, each with matching shirt and tie, including the one he'd worn the night I'd met him in the Havana Room. These were expensive, good-looking clothes, but in the context of the tiny room, they seemed costumes for a theatrical production. Here was a man who lived militarily, who could move out in the amount of time it took to carry his belongings down the stairs. Perhaps four trips, not including the hyperbolic chamber. In the back of the closet, under a raincoat, sat the seltzer-water box Allison had given him the night of the deal. I tipped it toward myself to look inside: the cash was gone, all of it. Two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. Where had he stashed it?
Seconds, burning away. I checked my watch. I'd been inside the apartment one minute. The answering machine beckoned. What else? The kitchenette off to one side looked unused. The refrigerator had no food in it, only a carton of orange juice, several bottles of vitamins, and a dozen odd unmarked cardboard boxes. I pulled one out and opened it. Inside clattered bottles labeled UNIVERSITY OF IOWA HOSPITALS PHARMACY, and by hand: Adrenaline, 500 mg. Another marked Dexi-amphetamine. Prednisone in 10 mg pills. Another marked "Andro." Below this were dozens of small inhalers marked Beclomethasone, Ventolin, Serevent, Albuterol. All stuff to open up the airway, get more oxygen in. In a second box was a bottle of white pills marked Singulair. None of the containers carried the name of a prescribing physician.
In the freezer: hot dogs, bread, TV dinners, ice.
The bathroom was spotless. One towel. Shaving kit. I looked inside. Nothing unusual. No pills in the cabinet. No condoms, no electric nose-hair buzzers. Next to the toilet was a stack of reading material, and it was not your usual hodgepodge of glossy magazines and New Yorker cartoon collections: here, with some articles dog-eared for reference, lay copies of the Journal of American Pulmonary Specialists, The Report of the Oxygen Therapists Association, a printout of "Asthma and the Pulsed Administration of Synthetic Adrenaline," Clinical Tests of Respiratory Function, the Research Journal of the New York Hospitals' Endocrinology Association, and so on. Clearly Jay suffered from some debilitating respiratory problem and was more or less managing his own treatment, depressingly so. I heard myself exhale, out of dread, and put the materials back the way I'd found them. I checked my watch. Six minutes, for God's sake.
I returned to the bedroom and froze there— fascinated, saddened, perplexed. Inasmuch as Jay's life had a physical center, this was it, and what a lonely center it was, too. I saw no television, no personal mail, no sign of indulgent activity or relaxation. No wonder he hadn't told Allison where he lived.
Next to the bed stood a wooden desk and a chair. On top was a giveaway calendar from a heating oil company, and this— a full-height photo of Sally Cowles, taken at great distance. She was in her school uniform, walking on a sidewalk with two friends on a sunny afternoon. From the trees, I could see that the photo had been shot in the late fall or early winter. The girls wore coats but not gloves or hats, and the surfaces of the buildings around them suggested a well-to-do neighborhood in the city. Upper East Side, perhaps, behind them a flower shop. Was there a flower shop near Allison's apartment? Around the corner on the avenue? The girls were walking with unconscious happiness, knapsacks jingling, their school uniforms rippling, hair caught by the breeze, matching socks different lengths. I tried to picture Jay studying this photo. It was in no way overtly sexual, at least not to me. But certain men, I knew, were driven into a frenzy by the sight of a girl in a school uniform. The implied innocence sent them into spasms of lust, and despite myself, then and there I remembered a business trip to Tokyo almost ten years earlier when I was dragged by three drunken Japanese businessmen into a strip joint in the famed Shinjuku district, where along with two hundred more Japanese businessmen I watched one near-pubescent girl after another shed her plaid school uniform and bobby socks. The sight had left me cold— I prefer older women with the mark of gravity upon them, with eyes that smoke with the absolute lack of innocence— but the Japanese men were transfixed by the sight, a few even producing expensive cameras and unapologetically recording the open-thighed displays for later review. Was Jay such a man? I couldn't believe it, I didn't want to believe it.
What I wanted to do was listen to the answering machine message. Maybe Allison really did have his number. Instead I slid open the desk drawer, wondering if Jay perhaps kept his legal papers in there, such as copies of the contract for the building on Reade Street. But the drawer was empty, save for a few pens and rubber bands and a paper pad of order slips for Brooklyn Oxygen and Hospital Supplies, adorned with their motto, SAFETY, RELIABILITY, AND PROMPT DELIVERY. This, I remembered, matched the slip of paper Jay had given me two days earlier with the restaurant address where I'd met Marceno.
What else? Hurry, I told myself, find the important stuff. I spied a list tacked to the wall:
Every day:
300 push-ups, no O
500 sit-ups, O afterward okay
Read newspapers (for conversation)
Read one page of the dictionary
Maintain foot hygiene, inspect for infection
Don't obsess about FEV
So here was the O that had upset Allison. O for oxygen, oxygen clearly being delivered to the garage downstairs. This was why the garage door had been left open, so that the empty tanks could be picked up; in all likelihood, I realized, their delivery schedule corresponded to the regularly appearing O's that All
ison had seen in Jay's date book. A man who needs oxygen delivered will know when it is coming.
There, a secret revealed, worth a lot more than my investment of five hundred dollars and a couple of subway rides. But what was FEV? And why might Jay obsess about it? Did the letters stand for someone, another young woman he was stalking? Next to the list hung a small framed newspaper clipping with a photograph. It showed a young man in a bulky baseball uniform and batting helmet swinging a bat. The swing is nearly over and he is off balance from the effort. The headline read CLANKS HOMER IN INTERCOUNTY CHAMP DUEL. I checked the date; the clip was fifteen years old.
John "Jay" Rainey, of Jamesport, hit a towering three-run homer yesterday in the intercounty summer-league play at Bethpage High School, clinching their victory 3–1.
Rainey, who is leading the Bulldogs in slugging this season with sixteen round-trippers in twenty-three games, had every ballplayer's dream come true when he was recently signed to a minor league contract by the New York Yankees, following his second college season. Rainey will report to their double A farm team in three weeks.
His homer came off of Tino Salgado, Bethpage's ace pitcher who went 6–1 during the regular season. Salgado had been throwing a shutout until the Bulldog's homer.
"I got a good look at it," Rainey said after the game. "I'm just glad we won."
To be signed to a minor league baseball contract is quite an honor, of course, but this is not what caught my attention. The article suggested that Rainey's condition worsened after the date of the article, for no major league team signs up a prospect without giving him a thorough physical first. Martha Hallock had mentioned an accident. Was this the cause of Rainey's trouble?
Time to leave, no matter how much I wanted to stay. But at the door I was drawn back to the oxygen chamber, so sleek and streamlined, a bullet-shaped casket. I touched the spring-loaded door and it rose slowly, revealing a white, body-length cushion. Its spotlessness was depressing. Just about the loneliest place imaginable. Inside was a reading light and a pad of paper and pen. I flipped open the pad: Dear Mr. David Cowles, said the first sheet. This is an extremely difficult letter to write. For many years now— The letter ended. The next sheet said, Dear David Cowles, Many years ago, your late wife, Eliza Carmody— The third sheet said, Dear David, My left ear has a small bump on the inside of the curl of cartilage. It's not something people usually notice but—
Now I heard something outside, or perhaps downstairs in the garage. I'd taken too big a chance as it was— on the premises almost twelve minutes. I dropped the pad of unfinished letters back into the chamber, pressed down on the lid until it clicked shut, and glanced around the room to see that nothing had been disturbed. I slipped out the door and locked it from the outside again, not bothering to kick aside the broken glass—
— then pushed back inside the door, cursing myself, and stepped straight to the answering machine. Keeping on my glove, I pressed PLAY.
"Listen, you peckerass!" boomed Poppy's voice through a squall of static, "just pay these guys some fucking blood money, all right? Herschel's family, somebody working for them, are here. They're here! Right here, okay? Found me at the diner this afternoon. Did you tell them I eat there? I don't get it, Jay. They got me. They're listening to every word I'm telling you right now. Said they knew something about Herschel, I said I didn't know what. I said okay I called in the ambulance but he was already dead. They think we killed him! They're not going to the police, either. That's what they say, anyway, what—?" The voice became indistinct. "Yeah, they got— I mean, I told them your phone number, Jay, and where your girlfriend at the steakhouse works, okay? I got to give them something, that's all I got to give, and I don't know what else to say. I told them that's all I know. Just pay them, Jay, just—"
That was it. End of message. My fingers trembled, but I hit the memory button for old messages. Nothing. Time to go. But I didn't. I did one more thing; I dialed my new cell phone from Jay's phone. His number popped up on the display, and I saved it.
This done, I shot out of the room, pulled the door behind me, and scooted down the stairs. I kept my cap low and turned downhill on the street. Had anyone seen me? I caught a getaway taxi on Third Avenue, and the driver flicked on some kind of Indian or Bangladeshi stand-up comedy show. Urmatta-eshi-ohvalindi-halaloo, came a man's voice. Heh-heh, came the response. Durmeshala-burmatta-valnahnah-galod-pulurshindaloo! And then, Heh-heh.
I settled into my seat— Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan would take a while. I didn't want to keep thinking of Jay as an adversary, for clearly he was living under desperate circumstances, to a degree I hadn't realized before. But that same desperation worried me; a man who needs oxygen tanks at night is not as scared of lawsuits and other threat sas is another man. It was also true that my illegal entry of Jay's premises hadn't resulted in any information that would help me deal with Marceno. What, then, had I learned? H.J.'s men were threatening Poppy. I needed to tell Allison to watch out, didn't I? And Jay, involved with Sally Cowles, was trying to draft a strange letter to her father. Had he bought the Reade Street building for some reason involving them? What else? The cartilage in his ear was related to the problem. He had a refrigerator full of black-market pharmaceuticals. He was obsessed with someone or something named FEV.
I leaned across the taxi's partition. The driver glanced in his rearview. "Take me to the New York Public Library," I said.
Varanasi-amattagobi-halapur-geshura-nanaloo!
Heh-heh.
Two hours later I knew that the air humans breathe at sea level is about twenty-one percent oxygen. In polluted American cities such as New York and Los Angeles and Tokyo, the concentration can fall to eighteen percent. Man breathes in about eighteen cubic feet of air per hour, drawing the stuff deep into the sacs of the lungs, making his red blood cells glow as oxygen hits them, and, like a tree or a dog or a worm, returns carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fully a fifth of the oxygen we breathe is consumed by the brain. Not only do we need the stuff, we're made of it: sixty-two percent, by body weight. The lungs grow steadily in children, then quite rapidly during puberty, but also continue to grow after maximum height has been reached. In males, lung capacity may continue to increase up to the age of twenty-five. The greatest variable in maximum lung capacity is, as would be expected, the size of the person, and Jay's theoretical maximum lung capacity was probably about 680 milliliters. But in healthy people the limits of exertion are dictated by the limits of the circulation system, not by the lungs. This is why shorter people can outrun taller people and why Olympic athletes often train at high altitudes to increase their red blood cell concentrations and return to low altitude just prior to competition. For all people, however, lung capacity begins to fall after age thirty. The ability to absorb oxygen is, in fact, one of the medical definitions of aging. The downward curve in our capacity is slow, however, and, in the absence of disease, is usually gentle enough to carry a human being far into old age.
There was more. FEV, the thing Jay wanted so badly not to be obsessed with, stood for forced expiratory volume and was the ratio of an individual's lung capacity to his or her expected healthy lung capacity, given height, age, and sex. A normal FEV score is 85 or higher. The morbid effects of disease can be seen in a low FEV score. The average decline in FEV of long-term smokers, for example, when plotted against non-smokers, is quite dramatic. A heavy smoker in his fifties has often lost so much lung capacity that he or she has reached an FEV rating of 45 or 50, a score that a healthy nonsmoker would not reach until age one hundred, were he to live that long. But slowly smoking a mountain of beautifully poisonous cigarettes is not the only thing that causes a low FEV. Other causes include organic diseases such as severe asthma, cystic fibrosis, pulmonary fibrosis, and environmental irritants, including air pollution, asbestos, and exposure to toxins. These conditions can cause permanent loss of FEV by damaging the elasticity of the lungs and their ability to receive oxygen. They can also cause a reversible, mechanical loss
of FEV by simply irritating the bronchial tubes, which both reduces the air that can get into the lungs and causes intense mucus secretion. Judging from the contents of his refrigerator, Jay was doing everything the books mentioned to marginally increase his breathing ability, dosing himself with steroids, bronchial dilators, and whatever else might increase his uptake and utilization of oxygen. His color, I reflected, was usually pretty good, which suggested his self-medication was successful. The inhalers, I read, reduced the sensitivity of lung tissue, and the prednisone actually shrank the tissue. Did he use these drugs constantly or just for intervention when his FEV was dropping? Put differently, what was his unmedicated capacity? That, I suspected, was pretty low— because of the enormous amount of oxygen Jay was using. An FEV below 60, in itself a very bad sign, requires supplemental inhaled oxygen, at least intermittently, and inhaled oxygen, as Jay no doubt knew, is a deal with the devil.
The more often you use inhaled oxygen, the longer you survive. People with low FEV scores on twenty-four-hour oxygen supplementation live longer than do people with the same FEV using oxygen only fifteen hours, and they in turn live longer than people using it only ten hours. And so on. But the more often one uses supplemental oxygen, the more addicted the body becomes to it, and the more constricted one's life. Clearly Jay was trying to avoid using the stuff, even in moments of high exertion— such as swinging a baseball bat, an activity that no doubt gave him pleasure and release and a sense of his former talents. This explained, perhaps, the shortness of his visits to Allison's apartment. It also begged the question of how he had sex with her. Swinging a baseball bat is a lot less rigorous than sex. Did Jay have on an oxygen mask when he was plugging Allison? That seemed unlikely. Freaky and sick, but unlikely. I kept reading. Jay probably needed a backup source of oxygen, and I wondered if the device in the rear of his truck that he used the night we moved the bulldozer might be what the books called an oxygen concentrator, a relatively inexpensive device that pulls oxygen from the atmosphere and stores it.
The Havana Room Page 30
