The Ragman's Memory

by Mayor, Archer

  “Bernie,” the orderly kept saying, “Rolly’s one of the good guys. You know that.”

  The old man shouted past him, “Who’s the Splendid Splinter?”

  Willy smirked. “Jesus Christ.”

  The orderly’s voice was low and gentle. “He doesn’t know, Bernie, but he’s on our side.”

  “Who’s Yehudi?” The old man shouted.

  I crossed over to Sue Pasco. “What’s going on?”

  She looked up, startled to see me. Rolly, her bearded patient, answered me. “That crazy bastard tried to strangle me, that’s what. Says I’m a Kraut spy, that he’s going to force it out of me.”

  “Rolly,” she soothed him. “There’s hardly a mark on you. I’m sure it was some misunderstanding.”

  “Yeah. Well, I want him locked up from now on. I was asleep, for Christ’s sake. There was no misunderstanding.”

  “Who’s the Splendid Splinter?”

  “Shut up, you crazy fuck,” Rolly bellowed, rubbing his throat.

  “Tell him Ted Williams,” I suggested quietly.

  Both Rolly and Sue stared at me. “Just tell him,” I repeated to Rolly.

  “Ted Williams,” Rolly said halfheartedly.

  “Who’s Yehudi?” was the response.

  “The guy who turns off the refrigerator light after you close the door,” I murmured.

  “Do it,” Sue urged Rolly.

  Rolly unhappily did as he was told.

  We heard some quiet discussion between Bernie and the orderly, and then they both approached us. Rolly threw his arms across his face in a dramatic defensive posture. “Get him away from me.”

  But Bernie was all smiling apologies, “Rolly, Rolly. I’m real sorry, buddy. Word was out they’d broken through—more spies. They got Johnnie. They talk better English than we do. Dressed in our uniforms, know who we are and where we are. Only way to trip ’em up—ask ’em stuff only a real American knows. I had to know you were the real McCoy, see? For the rest of us.”

  His left hand was extended in friendship. The right one was encased in a small cast. After some prodding, Rolly gave Bernie a halfhearted handshake before the orderly escorted the older man out of the room.

  “I want him out of here,” Rolly repeated with a little less conviction.

  Sue Pasco rubbed his shoulder soothingly. “Rolly. Has he ever done this to you before?”

  “It only takes one time.”

  “Oh, come on. Besides giving you a bad scare, what was the damage, really?”

  Rolly’s outrage climbed a notch. “What’d you mean? You ever been woken up with someone trying to strangle you?”

  “If we make a big deal about this, Rolly, he’ll be sent to Waterbury and maybe lose his bed here. You’ve been to Waterbury… You could even go back yourself if things got bad again, like they used to be. You don’t wish that on Bernie, do you?”

  Rolly’s eyes widened at the threatening implication, and he nervously rubbed his bristly cheek. “No, I guess not. But keep him away from me, okay?”

  She stood up and patted his shoulder. “You got it. We’ll leave you alone so you can get back to bed.”

  Rolly nodded, lost in his own thoughts, and Sue escorted Willy and me outside. “Let’s go into the other section. It’s easier to talk there.”

  We followed her beyond the corridor’s double doors. She stopped and smiled weakly. “Sorry about that.”

  “What’s Bernie’s problem?” Willy asked.

  She sighed. “He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and dementia. He’s also been an alcoholic for the past fifty years and has related, permanent short-term memory loss. Bernie is a Battle of the Bulge vet—he’s shell-shocked, as they used to call it. He spent years in VA hospitals, was finally let go, managed a few decades as a classic ‘normal citizen/closet drinker,’ complete with wife and daughter, and ended up abandoned, broke, and mostly talking about a world that’s been gone for fifty years.” She looked at me gratefully. “Thanks for your help, by the way. How did you know what to say?”

  “I’ve read a lot about World War Two, and what he said rang a bell. The Germans did put troops behind our lines in the Battle of the Bulge, dressed in American uniforms. And he was right—once word got out, the real American troops started inventing cultural quizzes, designed to trip up any foreigners. One American general almost got killed because he didn’t know anything about baseball. What did Bernie mean about seeing spies around here, though?”

  “That was probably you people,” she answered. “All those interviews this afternoon—men in uniforms he’s not familiar with. We lead a very structured, protected life here—it doesn’t take much to set someone like Bernie off.”

  “But we didn’t go into that ward,” Willy countered.

  She looked surprised. “It’s not locked. We’re not that kind of facility. We might restrain a resident now and then but only temporarily, to see them over a hump. If they ever got really bad, we’d have to ship them out, like I was telling Rolly. The rest of the time, they can move around the building. We keep a closer eye on them than on the others, but that’s all. I’m sure Bernie saw you and took you for German spies.”

  “You said he talks about fifty years ago—does that mean he just keeps refighting the same battle over and over? Wouldn’t that tend to make him violent?”

  “Oh no,” she answered emphatically. “I shouldn’t have put it that way. He talks about all sorts of things, not just the war—his daughter, animals, the weather—but it’s all disjointed, like a scrambled recording. What I meant is that the further back in time he gets, the clearer he sounds. It’s still pretty confusing, because he really has no short-term memory at all—he doesn’t remember any of us from day to day—so he tells the same stories again and again, thinking they’re new. He actually doesn’t talk about the war much at all—usually only when he’s upset, like after a nightmare. The war’s the source of his troubles, so he tends to avoid it. That’s why this thing you just saw was such a surprise. I’ve never seen him do anything like it before. It’s almost like something hit a switch inside him.”

  “If he’s free to wander around, couldn’t he’ve taken a whack at the old lady?” Willy asked.

  Sue Pasco looked horrified, a credit to Willy’s subtle approach. “But he barely touched Rolly. Just because he lost his temper doesn’t make him a killer.”

  “He couldn’t’ve done it anyhow,” I said. “He has a cast on his right hand.”

  “And that happened two weeks ago,” Pasco volunteered, slightly mollified. “He slipped and fell… Besides, like I said, we keep a pretty close eye on them—room checks every hour on the hour, in fact. That orderly that was talking to him? That’s Harry. He’s like the den mother up here, and at night he keeps a tight rein.”

  She paused reflectively. “Something must’ve set him off. It could’ve been something you folks did without realizing it—the uniforms, the guns you wear… I don’t know. And he probably can’t tell us.”

  Given what Bernie might have seen, I wasn’t willing to write him off so quickly. And with as many cases as we were handling, I also didn’t want to miss the opportunity to wrap up at least one of them.

  “Could be we just need to find the right way to ask him.”

  20

  WILLY KUNKLE AND I WATCHED Nurse Pasco walk back down the hallway to resume her ten o’clock rounds.

  “I think there was a reason Bernie flipped out,” I told him. “His timing’s too coincidental to ignore—acting out a strangulation exactly twenty-four hours after the real thing. Let’s have a chat with Harry.”

  We found the orderly folding sheets in an oversized linen closet, his enormous frame making the room look cramped. “Harry?” I interrupted him. “We were never formally introduced. I’m Joe Gunther, this is Willy Kunkle, from the PD.”

  Harry smiled. “Yeah—nice move with Bernie.” He pointed at Willy. “I saw you this afternoon when I was coming on.”

  That surprised me.
“When’s your shift?”

  “Four to midnight. We got different hours from the nurses. We overlap so the residents don’t get a new crew all at once. Some of them are sensitive to that. That was sad about Mrs. Sawyer.”

  Willy struggled to keep the incredulity from his voice. “You liked her?”

  Harry finished folding the sheet in his hands and placed it on a shelf with a doting gentleness. “Sure. People thought she was a little rude, but you had to know how to talk to her. She didn’t mean most of that stuff personally.”

  “What’s Bernie like?” I asked.

  The broad smile returned. “He’s great. You start asking him about the old days, and he’s full of information. Too bad about the war, though—it’s like a black cloud he can’t get away from. You know anything about the Battle of the Bulge?”

  “Enough,” Willy said curtly. “How do the others get along with him? Like Mrs. Sawyer?” Harry looked momentarily stumped. “I don’t think she knew him. They sort of kept different hours,” he added slyly.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Bernie’s a night owl—we call them ‘sundowners,’ or ‘wanderers.’ That’s pretty typical of PTSDers—their internal clock gets screwed up. Nights’re when the bad dreams come, so they try not to go to sleep.”

  “I thought Nurse Pasco said the people in this ward were encouraged not to wander,” I said. “That they were checked every hour.”

  “We check ’em,” Harry admitted. “But they know the schedule as well as we do, so they pull a fast one once in a while. Bernie’s big on that. He’ll put his pillow and a blanket under the sheets to make it look like he’s asleep—just like a kid. I never told anybody about it—didn’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “And where’s he go?” I asked cautiously.

  “Around,” came the guileless answer. “I see him hiding in the hallways sometimes, in the dark. I pretend not to see him. He’s just a harmless old guy who wants to be alone.”

  “Harry,” Kunkle asked in a surprisingly gentle voice. “How was Bernie acting when you came on this afternoon?”

  “I saw him before that. As soon as I heard about the murder on the radio, I came in to check up on them this morning. Like I said, they’re real sensitive, and I wanted to see how they were doing. Bernie was in tough shape. He was going on about Krauts and spies and people dying—more than I ever heard before. He reminisces a lot, you know? But not about the bad times. This morning, he was really wound up. They finally gave him something to make him sleep.”

  “You think he saw something last night?” I asked. “Like maybe who killed Mrs. Sawyer?”

  Harry looked shaken. “Wow—and him of all people… Sure, could be.”

  “How’s he doing now?” I asked.

  “Not too good. Talking to himself. He’s very tense.”

  “Not a good time to talk?”

  Harry shrugged. “You can try if you want to, but I couldn’t get anything out of him, and he usually talks to me most. Right now, he’s holding both ends of the conversation, like he was reading all the parts in a play. He did that once before, after he saw two people fighting outside the window—in the street. I couldn’t get to him at all.”

  “Does he have any family in the area?” Willy asked. “Pasco said he had a wife and daughter.”

  “No. His wife died years ago, and his daughter, Louise, lives in Florida. She’s only visited once. He loves her a bunch, though—or at least the memory of her. The best talks we have are about her. He’s sort of put her in a time capsule.”

  Harry leaned against the shelves and placed his hand up to his cheek in an oddly child-like gesture. “That was one of the saddest things I ever saw—the one time Louise came to visit. It was years ago—and he was pretty new here—and all he did was talk to her about herself. But he didn’t know who she was, you know what I’m saying? He was talking to a middle-aged woman about her own ghost. She couldn’t stop crying, and she never came back.”

  “Who’s his doctor?” I asked quietly.

  “His psychiatrist is Dr. Andrews, but I doubt he could tell you much. I hate to say this, but I’m not so sure Dr. Andrews would know who Bernie was without his chart in his hand. Dr. Stover was just the reverse—he loved these people. But he moved to Milwaukee. I guess that’s the thing here, you know? The world keeps spinning away—people coming and people going. But here they pretty much stay still—until they die.”

  I let a small pause fill the room, during which I could feel Willy’s impatience beginning to climb. “Harry,” I finally asked. “I’d like to talk with Bernie soon. Could you keep an eye on him, and let me know when that would be possible?”

  He slowly emerged from his reverie and gave me a gentle smile. “Why not now? I know I said he was a little out of it, but it might do him good to have some company. That way you’ll know what he was like when you see him later, after he’s calmed down.”

  I glanced at Willy. “Sure. Why don’t we go in just the two of us so we don’t crowd him. You mind waiting, Willy?”

  He looked at me as if I’d just put a lampshade on my head.

  “Right,” I said to Harry. “Lead the way.”

  Bernie was being kept in a room at the far end of the hall. A bedroom much like the others I’d visited, it had a few discreet extras that distinguished its role on this ward—the bed was bolted to the floor, the windows were covered with steel mesh, and there were no loose items lying about that could be used offensively.

  Bernie, still in his pajamas and bathrobe, was pacing back and forth energetically, his chin tucked in, his eyes locked on the floor before him. His fists made tiny jabs into the air at waist level.

  “Hi, Bernie,” Harry said cheerfully.

  Bernie whirled around. “Duck, you guys, and keep it quiet.”

  Harry touched my shoulder and we both crouched down, making me doubly glad Willy had opted out of this one. “What’s up?” Harry asked in a stage whisper.

  Bernie was back to pacing, apparently not needing to take cover. “They’re all around us—we’re all on our own now—and they’re dressed like us, talk like us. God, it’s cold.” He continued talking, but in a mutter I couldn’t hear. Following Harry’s lead, I rose back up and crossed over to the bed, sitting quietly next to the orderly.

  “How’re things going, Bernie?” Harry asked.

  The other man’s voice rose in reaction, but he didn’t acknowledge us—as if all dialogue in the room were solely contained in his head. “How the hell do you think they’re going? They’re killing us. We’re dying like flies, killed in our beds, freezing to death. We got no support, no orders, no ammo, no front line, no rear. We are fucked, buddy. We are going to die in this frozen piece of French shit.”

  “Who died in their beds?” I asked.

  “This isn’t supposed to happen,” he wailed, still pacing, still punching the air. “We’re here on R and R, for Christ’s sake. ‘A quiet corner of the war,’ they said. Dumb bastards. God, it’s cold… Cold, cold, cold, cold. Wish I could light a fire.” He lapsed back to muttering.

  I nodded to Harry and pointed toward the door. Outside, I asked him, “You said he acted like this once before, after seeing a fight. Did he mention people dying in their beds?”

  “No—never.”

  “How long did the episode last?”

  “A few hours. He was twitchy for days afterward, but at least he knew you were in the room. It was the only other time he got so lost in the war memories.”

  “Let me know when he starts to climb out of it, okay? And thanks.”

  The shy smile returned. “Sure thing.”

  · · ·

  Willy picked me up outside the ward and escorted me downstairs and out into the freezing cold. “That was quick. He spill his guts?”

  “He’s a little out of it. I do think he saw something, though.”

  Willy sighed. “So that’s the plan? Wait around for him to snap out of it and give us a statement?”

  “
If he saw what I hope he did, we could do worse,” I answered simply. “You have any other leads?”

  He’d left his coat inside and crossed his chest with his right arm in a vain attempt to keep warm. “We just started, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What’s Sol doing?”

  “I got him looking into Sawyer’s past history.” He hesitated, glaring off into the night—not a happy man. “We don’t have shit,” he finally said.

  I stepped into his line of vision, forcing him to look at me. “We’ve got five major cases so far. Some of them look connected, like Wallis and Shawna. Some of them might be connected, like Wallis and the building project, and others so far look totally independent, like this killing of Mrs. Sawyer. What if we’re missing a common link—something we haven’t found yet?”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “Shawna Davis spent the last week of her life under sedation. Why do that if you’re going to kill her anyway?”

  “’Cause you’re using her for leverage.”

  “Probably, but you also do it because you can afford to—you’ve got the time. You’ve even got the time to make her death look like a Satanist sacrifice, just in case the body’s discovered.”

  “All right.”

  “Milo’s death is looking pretty screwy. Pending what the ME’ll say, let’s say he was murdered, too—purely for argument’s sake.”

  Willy shook his head but remained silent.

  “Again, you’ve got time—at its fastest, rabies takes a couple of weeks to kill someone—and as with Shawna, you’ve pointed the finger at someone, or in this case something, else as the culprit.”

  “What’s that got to do with Sawyer?” Willy asked irritably.

  “Maybe nothing, except that Dr. Riley said Sawyer’s killer obviously wasn’t a patient man, since she was so close to dying anyway. What’s the other one of our five cases that looks rushed and unplanned?”

  “Wallis.”

  “Right. The same element of time is there, only now you’re running out of it. You can’t wait to arrange something clever for Wallis, so you just grab her in the middle of the night and hope the cops’ll think she split. And you can’t wait for Sawyer to die of natural causes, so you strangle her and hope the ME’ll miss it.”