“I guess I do."
I turned toward the door, then stopped. I was impatient to get to the Medigenic Hospital as soon as possible, but something about Foster's just-completed confessions was bothering me. It wasn't any single thing he'd told me, but rather that he'd been able to tell me so much. For a man who wasn't one of the principals, not a mover-and-shaker of the scam, he seemed to know one hell of a lot about the operation.
What I was planning to attempt at the Medigenic wasn't likely to be easy, even if every single thing Foster had told me was true. But if he'd been inventing part of it, conning me for his own reasons ... Well, a guy could get killed.
So I looked at him again and said casually, “Andy, I'm a little puzzled. You're not exactly Alda Cimarron's right-hand man, but you seem to know a hell of a lot about what he and his pals are up to, about what's going on here. You sure you're not making some of this up just to cool me down?"
He shook his head. “Must be twice as much I don't know zip about. What I do got, prob'ly it just seem like a lot to you, Scott, because you're gettin’ it all at once instead of pickin’ it up over two, three years or more like I did. Outside of the main guys in this—which is Alda and Sylvan and Doc and Claude—there's only a couple of weight-lifters and trash-haulers, plus Groder and Keats—well, not even Keats now. And me. Well, it may flabber-gastonish you to hear me say it right out aloud, but compared to those fleepers I am a ring-tailed gold-plated flamingly illuminated hot-damn genius.” He paused briefly, looked straight at me, and said gently, “Even though the observed demeanor and spacy visage combined with merciless slaughter of the sweet tongue might lead even a perceptive whitey to conclude that this cat's mental development ceased entirely at the age of eleven if not sooner."
“What? What did you say?"
While I was still blinking, Andy went on easily, “Well, boss, besides from all that, them main guys is pretty closed of mouths, but they all—everybody does—lets something slip out sideways from a time to a time. That's accidental. But, plus I get told a lot on purpose when I'm suppose to do somethin', so's there's less chance I'll screw up doin’ it."
“Like what?"
“Like, well, I mentioned workin’ the boiler-room operation myself for a while. What I happened not to mention is I'm the one set it up to begin with. See, I been with Alda more'n ten years, one way or another—longer than any of them other employee types out here. So when he wants to get them phones ringin’ he tells me to put the package together, and in order so's I get the right guys and don't mess up this important part of the whole craperoo, he explains to me some of the reasons behind why it's got to be set up just so. Plus I manage to ask a couple of dumb questions, which it's easy for me to do."
“Uh-huh. I think maybe I'm starting to understand just how easy."
He smiled, continued, “And ... like when Alda found out Claude been buyin’ up shares from the marks, Jay and I was both right there, listenin’ to him yellin’ and swearin'. Hell, we could of been nine miles away and still heard him. Plus, like when he told Jay and me to help Claude into that better world we all dream of where the streets are a-glitterin’ with rhinestones and the pretty girls dance with no pants on, he give us a general idea why dear old Claude had to go there."
“Plus you managed to ask a couple of dumb questions, right?"
“One or two.” He grinned. “Also one or two when he sent me to find Toke and bring him. Plus, I just got through readin’ those three educational pages of Toke's last will and testamanents about why and how he done what was his end and who told him to. Plus..."
He stopped, scowled slightly, squinting at me. “Scott, I could go on quite some while like this, if you still need the convincers. You say so, OK. But you really want me to keep doin’ this scene, or were you goin’ somewheres in my Subaru you just stole?"
I jingled the keys in my hand. “That's good enough,” I said. “I'll buy it. But Lord help you if I get killed. I'll come back and spook you. However, I might add that this is one whitey who doesn't conclude your mental evolution and synaptical pyrotechnics—or whatever it was you actually said a while ago—ceased at the age of eleven. At least, not entirely."
He laughed. “I'll be goddamn go to hell. Shucks."
“Shucks, boss.” I said.
He laughed again.
“Well,” I said, “I'm not sure why I'm saying this, but good luck to you, Andy. Hope you make out."
He grinned hellishly, white teeth flashing. “I'll make out. Maybe I'll even pick up my car—gotta believe you're really gonna leave it in the lot."
He stepped closer to me, stuck out his hand. I shook it. Strange moment, I thought. God knows what Andrew Foster did with his life, besides not shooting people, but he was a very likable guy.
“Can I drop you anywhere?” I asked him.
“Not if you goin’ toward Scottsdale, which I suspect is where you're goin'. Me, I may drift the other way, like Southwest Phoenix. Places down there I can plain disappear in the darkieness.” He grinned again. “No honkies need apply."
I went to the door. When I left, he was sitting at the table, rubbing his jaw and smiling. I hoped I wasn't making a mistake. Or rather—in case I might have made one or two already—making another.
* * * *
I turned left off Hayden into McDowell Road, drove east toward Mesa. After two or three miles I saw the twin buildings, joined by covered walkways at the second and fourth floors, of the Medigenic Hospital on my right.
I drove on by, sizing up the place, checking out the location of parking lots and spaces. There was a row of windows on the fourth or top floor of the west wing: twelve rooms up there, six on the side facing McDowell and six at the building's rear. Nine of those rooms were for patients; the other three were a doctors’ lounge, a small corner office for the chief of surgery, and a spacious 1,500-square-foot office, with wall dividers converting it into a three-room suite for the hospital's president of the Board, Dr. Phillip Bliss. And that's where Andy had seen Romanelle, in a small bedroom of Dr. Bliss's suite. All I had to do was get up there. And get back out. With Romanelle. Or whatever was left of him.
I turned around, drove back past the hospital and into the parking lot on its west side, took a left, and rolled slowly by the entrance. Both of the large steel and glass doors, each about six feet wide and ten feet high, were closed to keep today's near-hundred-degree heat out of the lobby's air-conditioned interior. Arching above the doors, against the building's rust-colored cement face, shiny black letters a foot high spelled out “Arizona Medigenic Hospital."
Somewhere behind me in that west parking lot was the spot where, thirteen days ago, Romanelle had been shot by Cowboy Jay Groder and shot at by Andy Foster. I drove to the far end of the building, passing another parking section on my left about half filled with cars, turned right, and drove toward the rear of the hospital.
So far, so good. According to Andy, here at the east end of the Medigenic's east wing was the Emergency Room entrance, and just past it at the building's rear was, in his words, “where they temporary dump the stiffs after the emergency's over, till they haul ‘em away and hide ‘em permanent,” or what I presumed was a small hospital morgue. Usually the little room was occupied only by the stiffs, and thus should provide a comparatively risk-free entrance into the hospital for me. And exit as well, with my cargo, if I got that far.
I took a right at the rear of the building and parked opposite a pair of plain unmarked wooden doors, wide doors behind which should be the terminal patients who had terminated. I parked as far to my left as I could get, next to a six-foot-high cement-block wall, left-front fender almost scraping one of the white-painted no-parking signs.
That left a space about eight feet wide between my red coupe—or, rather, Andy's, which I hoped nobody here would recognize—and the morgue entrance. Room for another car to squeak by, but perhaps not enough for a speeding ambulance. I refused to worry about those little things: There were enough big worries to oc
cupy my attention.
I picked up my wide-brimmed hat from the seat beside me, put it on. Then I got out, leaving the car unlocked, stepped quickly to the wooden doors. A couple of feet above my head a row of glass blocks dotted the entire rear wall of the building, like a line of transparent hyphens. Picking the simple lock occupied less than a minute; the doors opened inward. I felt refrigerated air pouring out over me, then I stepped into chill dimness, pushing the doors shut behind me.
I was in a small square room. There were no lights burning here, but faint illumination filtered in through the glass blocks above my head and behind me. In the left wall, dimly visible, was a single row of yard-square metal doors, all closed, all flush with the wall. Probably refrigerated cubicles for corpses. The only furnishings were four body-sized rectangular metal tables, three unused and one bearing a body covered by a bedsheet-sized green cloth. The ankles and bare feet of the body projected beyond the table's end, cardboard identification tag tied to one big toe. I wondered if the tag had a name on it, or merely a number. Or possibly a cryptic phrase exemplifying the new identity assumed by the person upon becoming a patient: Gall Bladder 1991 ... Kidney 366 ... Lung Transplant 2.
I stepped toward a wooden door in the far wall, arm brushing one of those metal tables. I noticed that its top was grooved like an autopsy table and slanted slightly downward toward one end, little dikes and channels for the gravity flow of sluggish but still-liquid blood.
I walked on past the table with the covered body upon it, then turned back, pulled off the heavy green cloth and bunched it into a lumpy ball, clamped it against my chest with one arm. The corpse was—or, if death is neuter, had been—male. An old man, shrunken, shriveled, waxy skin mottled. His face, for reasons unknown to me, was oddly discolored, almost a faintly purplish hue, like a bleached eggplant with blank frozen features.
I shivered, told myself it was because of the cold heavy air all around me. But from that dismaying moment on, at least until the next dismaying moment, my journey was essentially a breeze, a walk in the park. The wooden door was open. I went through into a fluorescent-lighted hallway and turned right, then left at the intersecting corridor, walked briskly past the closed door of the Emergency Room from behind which a voice—again neither male nor female, just a sound without sex or identity—grunted “Oh-ah-ah ... oh-ah-ah.” Then, just past the Emergency Room, against the outer wall on my right, the elevator I was looking for. Probably the one in which the old man with the purplish face had been brought down here not long before.
Two nurses in white uniforms walked toward me as I poked the elevator button, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the polished floor. Up in the elevator, watching the numbers, 2, 3, 4, watching the door slide open with a hiss, then two steps forward, doors staying open briefly behind me. Ahead of me was a long corridor that extended the entire width of the hospital, from east end of the east wing to west end of the west wing. My destination was clear down there at the corridor's west end, nine and a half miles away.
Well, as the Chinese philosophers say, the journey of nine and a half miles begins with a single step. So I took that step, then another—and stopped so quickly my heel skidded on the polished plastic flooring. I caught my balance, pulled the loose bundle of cloth higher on my chest until it partially covered my face.
From an open door ahead of me, out of the third room from the end on my right, stepped a short, plump, baldheaded man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, stethoscope around his neck, dangling end resting on his chest between the lapels of a dark brown business suit. This was only the second time I'd seen the man; the first time, he'd told me he was Dr. Robert Simpson, in the middle of a house call to cheer and make better his fine friend, Claude Romanelle. Or: Dr. Phillip Bliss, whose photo I'd recently seen in Whistler's office at Exposé.
If the sight of Bliss started adrenaline oozing in me, the next sight made it squirt. Because next was the huge, wide, muscle-knotted form of Alda Cimarron coming out the same door and into the corridor, turning toward me. I squatted down on my haunches, letting the bunched green cloth cover everything except my eyes peering out from beneath the brim of my hat, let my right arm drop as if I was reaching for something on the hallway floor. But I pulled the arm back up and wrapped my fingers around the butt of the .38 under my coat.
Neither man paid more than casual attention to me. Disinterested, unseeing glances, then into the next hospital room to check and cheer another patient. I took advantage of those moments when they were entering the room and both backs were toward me to straighten up and move with considerable speed straight ahead, toward the Bliss suite at the end of the hall. The door to the suite was closed, but the knob turned easily and the door moved inward half an inch before I held it steady, glanced back down the hall.
Nobody in sight yet. Cimarron and Bliss were still inside that second room from the end. I pulled the .38 S&W from under my belt, wishing it was Alda Cimarron's silenced .22 pistol, not something that would make a noise half the hospital would hear if I had to fire it.
But then I took a deep breath, opened the door, and walked inside. I was in a large room, desk ahead of me with two windows behind it. Two more windows were in the right wall. So this was the corner room of the suite, the office where Bliss did his work, conducted interviews, held court, goofed off. Expensively furnished: thick royal-blue carpet, lighter blue couches and several overstuffed chairs, three filing cabinets against the wall to the right of the desk. To my left, one door was open revealing part of what was obviously a bedroom. Farther left, away from the rear wall and adjacent to the corridor outside, another door was slightly ajar. And next to that door, relaxed in one of the light blue overstuffed chairs, was long and lanky thick-mustached Jay Groder, the Cowboy.
His head rested against the chair's cushioned back; his eyes were closed. No way to tell if he'd dozed off, was asleep or merely resting. I pointed the .38 at him, walked forward, feet almost silent on the carpet. He didn't move. When I stopped in front of him, a foot away, I could see the bristly black mustache wiggle slightly, his lips fluttering as he exhaled. Cowboy was asleep. I took one long step past him, left arm extended, pressed my fingers against the partly open door, and pushed it inward. Saw a couple of chairs, a wheelchair with wide leather straps dangling from it—end of a cot or single bed, a man's feet, his lower legs half covered by the bottom edge of a green robe. At the foot of the cot was some kind of instrument or machine atop a red four-wheeled cart, a rectangular metal box about a foot and a half square and eight or ten inches high with calibrated dial on its face, electrical connections, two strange-looking paddles of some kind with twin disks at one end and dual handles at the other.
I leaned forward until I could see the rest of the bed and the man lying there. He was on his back, arms at his sides, head rolled to his right, face resting against a white pillow. His eyes were open and staring, lips parted and slack. It was, unquestionably, Claude Romanelle; but I couldn't tell if he was alive or dead. He looked dead.
If he was alive, he certainly wasn't excited about my appearance in the doorway. And I had a small problem. If he was dead, my goal was simply to get the hell out of here any way I could. But if there was still some life in that unmoving form, my job was to get it out of here with me.
So I wanted to move on into the small room and check Romanelle's pulse, primarily to determine if there was any. If there wasn't, I'd split; but if there was, I would then—if I'd simply left Cowboy here sleeping—have to come back and attend to him before getting on with what I'd come here to do.
It probably shouldn't have been a problem at all. Logically, the way to go would be to crunch Cowboy on his skull right now, no hesitation, and thus eliminate any possibility of later interference from him. Still, I hesitated. It just seemed so ... dirty. That was it. Clunking him while he was sleeping so peacefully, with his lips and mustache fluttering delicately, would be a dirty thing to do. So what? I asked myself. Probably I would have to get rid of more of my scrupl
es if I wanted to succeed in this business. I looked around, spotted a pair of heavy-looking carved-stone bookends holding half a dozen medical tomes together on a small table, grabbed one, hefted it, and eyed Cowboy's skull, right at the hairline.
These hesitations and scruples simply couldn't be tolerated. They had to go. Hesitating, I glanced back at Romanelle's corpse, or whatever it was—and he himself solved my problem for me. He moved his eyes. It was only his eyes that moved, rolling toward me and then stopping as if he could actually see me. But whether he saw anything or not, that was enough for me. Vastly relieved, I swung the bookend in a nice tight are and slammed it against Cowboy's skull, right at the hairline.
It seemed to make a really horrible thunking sound, like dropping a large watermelon on the kitchen floor, but nothing visibly broke. Cowboy slumped, leaned a little farther over in the chair, that was all. He kept breathing, bristly mustache wiggling and lips moving slightly as air bubbled through them.
I moved swiftly to the small bed, knelt by Romanelle. His eyes followed me, but they were still staring, empty, like orbs of glass. “Romanelle,” I said, “Claude. Can you talk to me?"
His lips moved. I grabbed the front of the green robe he was wearing, put one hand at his back, pulled him to a sitting position. He was trying to say something, but only distorted mewling sounds came out. Saliva slid over his lower lip, coursed in a shiny line of bubbly wetness down his chin, drooled onto his robe.
“I'm Shell Scott,” I said. “Do you remember hiring me, talking to me on the phone?"
Shellshock (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 25
