Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  Hattie went in first, then Sarah. Tom moved into the room. Several children, some of them bandaged, sat in chairs pushed against the wall. All of them were gaping at Sarah, who had pulled her hair out of the collar of the cape. “Oh, my God,” Nancy said as he went past her. “It’s Tom Pasmore.” She laughed out loud—a real ringing laugh that sounded out of place in Elysian Courts—and then put her arms around him and squeezed him. Her head came to the middle of his chest. “How’d you get so big?” Nancy pulled away and crowed to Hattie, “He’s a giant!”

  “That’s what I told him,” Hattie said, “but it didn’t shrink him any.”

  Now all the children in the chairs gaped at Tom instead of Sarah. His face grew hot and red.

  “And I know you too,” Nancy said to Sarah, after giving Tom a final squeeze. “I remember seeing you with Tom, way back then—Sarah.”

  “How can you remember me?” Sarah said, looking pleased and embarrassed. “I was only there once!”

  “Well, I remember most of the things that happen to my good patients.” Smiling broadly, Nancy put her hands on her hips and looked them both over. “Why don’t you sit down wherever you can find space, and I’ll take care of the rest of these desperate characters, and then we’ll have a long talk, and I’ll find out why Hattie dragged you into this godforsaken place.”

  Sarah twirled the cape off her shoulders and folded it over the back of a chair. The children gaped. She and Tom sat on a padded bench, and Hattie plunked herself down on the edge of the little low bed beside them.

  Nancy went from child to child, changing bandages and dispensing vitamins, listening to whispered complaints, stroking heads and holding hands, now and then leading some bedraggled boy or girl to a sink at the back of the room and making them wash. She looked down throats and into ears, and when one sticklike little boy burst into tears, she took him into her lap and comforted him until he stopped.

  Two old quilts, washed almost to colorlessness, hung on the walls. An ornate lamp with most of its bulbs and fixtures intact stood on a drum table like the one in his grandfather’s living room. An empty gilt frame, clearly salvaged from the dump, hung on the far wall near the sink.

  Hattie saw him looking at it, and said, “I brought that for Nancy—looks almost as pretty empty as filled, but I’m looking for another picture of Mr. Rembrandt, like the one I got. You saw it.”

  “Oh, Hattie, I don’t need a picture of Rembrandt,” Nancy said, bandaging a splint onto a boy’s finger. “I’d rather have a picture of you any day. Anyhow, I’ll be back in my own place before long.”

  “Could be,” Hattie said. “When you are, I’ll come in here, couple times a week, to bandage up these little ruffians. If your brother won’t mind.”

  When the last child had been sent off, Nancy washed her hands, dried them on a dish towel, and sat down on one of the chairs against the wall and at last looked at Tom hard and long. “I am so glad to see you, even here,” she said.

  “And I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “Even here. Nancy, I heard that—”

  She held up a hand to stop him. “Before we get serious, does anybody want a beer?”

  Hattie shook her head, and Tom and Sarah said they would split one.

  “You’ll split one, all right,” Nancy said. She went to a small refrigerator next to the sink and removed three bottles; took two glasses from a shelf; popped off the caps, and came back carrying the bottles by their necks in one hand and the glasses in the other. She gave a glass and a bottle each to Tom and Sarah, sat down and raised her own bottle. “Cheers.” Tom laughed, and raised his own bottle to Nancy and drank from it. Sarah poured some into her glass and thanked Nancy.

  “If you’re not going to use that glass, maybe I will have a little bit, after all,” Hattie said. Tom poured some from his bottle into the empty glass and Sarah did the same, and then they all sat smiling at each other for a moment.

  “I wondered about you, you know,” Nancy said to Tom.

  “I know you did,” Hattie said.

  “Wondered what?” Sarah asked.

  “Well, Tom had this special thing inside him. He saw things. He saw how I felt about Boney right away. But I don’t mean just that.” She pointed her beer bottle at Tom and squinted, trying to get the right words. “I don’t really know how to say this, I guess—but when I looked at you in the bed sometimes, I used to think you’d be something like a really good painter when you got older. Because you had this way of looking at things, like you could see parts of them nobody else could. Sometimes, it looked like the world could just make you glow. Or tear you apart inside, when you saw the bad.”

  “I told him that,” Hattie said.

  Tom had the strangest desire to cry.

  “It was like you had some kind of destiny,” Nancy said. “And the reason I’m saying all this is, I can still see it.”

  “Sure you can,” Hattie said. “It’s clear as day. Sarah can see it.”

  “Leave me out of this,” Sarah said. “He’s conceited enough already. And anyhow, it isn’t what I can see, or what you can see, or even Tom can see, it’s—” She gave Tom an embarrassed look, and threw up her hands.

  “It’s what he does,” Hattie said. “That’s right. Well, he must of done something, because Boney rode all the way out to see me today and gave me a cock and bull story about Tom Pasmore getting ready to sue him and the hospital, and how if the boy or his lawyers showed up, I was to turn ’em all away. And a minute later, here comes this tall fellow, and I thought he was a young lawyer, until I took a good look at him.”

  “Boney did what?” Nancy asked, and Hattie had to repeat the whole story.

  “I asked why you were suspended,” Tom said. “And he got flustered. The place was full of police.”

  “Flustered,” Nancy said. “This was today? At the hospital?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Oh, dear,” Nancy said. “Oh, damn. Oh, shit.” She jumped up and went to the back of the room and opened a cupboard and banged it shut.

  “That’s right,” Hattie said. “That boy died.”

  “Oh, hell,” Nancy said.

  Sarah reached for Tom’s hand, and held it tightly. “Does this have anything to do with that letter? Because Tom told me—”

  He pressed her hand, and she fell silent.

  Nancy turned around, angrier than Tom had ever seen her.

  “Why were you suspended?” Tom asked.

  “I wasn’t going to let him die alone. He needed someone to talk to. You remember how I used to come in and spend time with you?”

  “They ordered you to stay away from him?”

  “Mike Mendenhall was getting weaker and weaker—in a coma most of the time—I wasn’t going to let him be all alone those times when he was awake. And it wasn’t an order—nobody ordered us to stay out of that room. After the first time Boney learned I was giving time to him, he reminded me that he asked the nursing staff to do no more than change his linens and attend to strictly medical functions. And I said, if that’s an order, I’d like to see it posted on the board, and he said he was sure I understood that he could not do that.”

  “Did Mendenhall talk to you, when he was conscious?”

  “Of course he talked to me.”

  “Would you tell me what he said?”

  Nancy looked troubled and shook her head. Tom turned to Hattie. “Two kinds of law, two kinds of medicine. Isn’t that what you said at your house, Hattie?”

  “You know I did,” Hattie said. She had her hawk look again. “I didn’t say, quote me, though.”

  Tom said, “I’ll tell you why I’m asking about this.” And he told her about his realization that Hasselgard had killed his sister, about his letter to the police captain, and everything that followed. Nancy Vetiver leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and listened. “That letter is the real reason you’re here instead of your apartment.”

  “I said you must of done something, and I guess you did,” Hattie said. “Te
ll him, Nancy. You can’t get him in any deeper than he already got himself.”

  “Are you sure you want to hear this, Sarah?” Nancy asked.

  “I’m leaving the island in two days, anyway.”

  “Well, after everything Tom said, maybe it’s not such a big deal, after all.” She took a deep swallow of her beer. “Mike Mendenhall was a bitter man. He went to Weasel Hollow to arrest a man named Edwardes for murder, and he knew it was dangerous—a lot of things had been going on at Armory Place that upset him.”

  “What kind of things?” Tom asked.

  “He said there was this one honest detective, Natchez, David Natchez, who had the backing of all the honest officers, and the rest of them would do anything they were told. Before they learned he was honest, some of the older cops used to say anything in front of him, you know, they’d brag about Mill Walk always being the same. As long as they arrested ordinary criminals and kept down street crime, they could do anything they liked, because they were protected. Honestly, Tom, this is terrible, but it’s hardly news to people from Maxwell’s Heaven and the old slave quarter. We know what they are.”

  “Why don’t we, then?” Tom asked.

  “Everything looks just dandy from Eastern Shore Road. When people over there get too near something that sounds too rough for them, they turn their heads away. It’s too scary, and they wait for it to go away. From where they sit, everything works.”

  Tom remembered Dennis Handley, and knew she was telling him the truth.

  “It’s always been that way,” Nancy said. “If somebody gets caught, they make a big public fuss about it, and then everybody’s reassured. Everything’s hunky-dory all over again, and it’s business as usual.”

  “But Hasselgard was bigger trouble than they were used to,” Tom said. “They had to do something drastic, and do it fast. Did Mendenhall talk about what happened on the day he got shot?”

  “A little,” Nancy said. “He didn’t even know who Edwardes was supposed to have murdered. He knew he would be safe, because his partner would be with him. Roman Klink had been on the force for fifteen years. I got the feeling he thought Klink was too lazy to be really crooked, and too much one of the guys to be absolutely straight.”

  “How did they know where Edwardes was?”

  “They had an address. Mike went up to the door first. He yelled ‘Police!’ and then pushed in the door. He didn’t think anybody was there—he thought Edwardes had probably taken the boat to Antigua. I guess he went in—”

  “Alone?” Tom asked.

  “Ahead of Klink, anyhow. He didn’t see anybody in the living room, so he went toward the kitchen. Edwardes jumped out of the kitchen and shot him in the stomach, and he went down. Klink came in shooting. Mike saw Klink dodging toward the bedroom, and that’s when all hell broke loose. The whole police force came screaming up to the house. Captain Bishop started shouting through a bullhorn. Someone in the house fired a shot, and then the police shot hell out of the house. Mike was hit four more times. He was so angry—he knew they wanted to kill him. They wanted to kill all three of them. Klink was expendable too.”

  Nancy looked down at her lap. She drank more beer, but Tom didn’t think she tasted it.

  “He managed to tell you a lot,” he said.

  She looked up without changing position in any way, and seemed as forlorn as one of her small patients. “I’m smoothing it all out a lot. He wasn’t talking to me, half the time. Sometimes he thought I was Roman Klink. Twice he thought I was Captain Bishop. He was out a lot of the time, and he had two long operations. Captain Bishop went into his room once, but he was in a coma most of that day.”

  “What about Klink?”

  “Basically, all we had to do was take out a bullet and sew him up. Last week, Bill saw him tending bar at Mulroney’s. Said he was talking like a hero. The man who got Marita Hasselgard’s killer. He was drinking a lot, Bill said.”

  “Said a lot, for Bill,” Hattie put in.

  “Took him most of the night to get that much out. My brother doesn’t talk much,” Nancy said to Tom, smiling at him. “He has a good heart, Bill. He lets me see the kids here in the afternoons, even though it must turn his whole life upside down.”

  “On the balcony, Bill and I saw Captain Bishop walking through the court,” Tom said. Hattie and Nancy glanced at each other. “If it weren’t for Bill, I think Bishop would have seen me—he motioned me back from the railing.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t see you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tom said. “I didn’t recognize him at first, because he wasn’t wearing his uniform.”

  Hattie snorted, and Nancy still looked uneasy. “Well, he just slides through. He might as well be invisible.” She laughed, but not happily. “You look at him, your eye just slips off his face. He’s not a person you want to have anything to do with.”

  “He might have been visiting,” Hattie said.

  “Visiting?” Tom asked.

  “That devil was born in the Third Court,” Hattie said.

  “His sister Carmen lives back in there,” Nancy said, as if she were talking about a deep jungle. “On Eastern Shore Road—the Third Court. Peers through her curtains, day in and day out.”

  “Looks so meek and mild until you look at her eyes—”

  “And then you see she’d be happy to slit a child’s throat for the sake of the pennies out of its pockets.”

  Nancy stretched her arms sideways and yawned with her whole face, somehow managing not to look ugly as she did so. Then she put her hands at the base of her spine, and arched her back. She looked like a cat, with her small supple body and short shaggy hair. Tom realized that he had been looking at her face nearly the whole time they had been in her room—he had not even noticed what she was wearing. Now he noticed: a lightweight white turtleneck and tight wheat-colored jeans and white tennis shoes like Sarah’s, but scuffed and dirty.

  “We should let Bill back into his room,” she said. “It’s been so good to see you again, Tom. And you too, Sarah. I shouldn’t have let you get me talking, though.”

  She stood up and ruffled her hands through her hair.

  “You’ll be back at work soon?” Tom asked.

  She glanced at Hattie. “Oh, I reckon Boney’ll get word to me in a couple of days. Damn him anyhow.”

  “You got that right,” Hattie said.

  They began to move toward the door. Nancy suddenly hugged Tom again, so hard that he couldn’t breathe. “I hope—oh, I don’t know what I hope. But be careful, Tom.”

  They were out on the ramshackle wooden walkway in the dismal air before he was entirely aware of having let go of her. Bill straightened up from the railing and drew on his pipe.

  “She look okay to you, Hat?” he said in a low growl that cut through the hum of noise from all about them.

  “That girl’s strong,” Hattie said.

  “Always was,” Bill said. “Folks.”

  Tom put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the first note he found. In the gloom, it took a moment to see that it was a ten dollar bill. He put it in Bill’s hand and whispered, “For whatever she needs.”

  The bill disappeared into the shabby clothes. Nancy’s brother winked at Tom, and began to make his way toward the door at the end of the walkway. “Oh,” he said, and turned around. The three of them stopped at the top of the stairs. “You got by.” He must have seen that Tom did not understand. “Didn’t spot you.”

  Sarah clamped herself on Tom’s arm, and together they followed Hattie beneath the overhanging passages, through the narrow streets with mocking names, along the tilting walls. The air stank of sewage. Children jeered at them, and hard-faced men moved toward Sarah until they noticed Hattie, and then backed away. Finally they hurried across the crazed concrete of the First Court, through the darkness of the arch, and back out into the shadowy street, which seemed impossibly sweet and bright.

  Even Percy’s dusty emporium, with its dim parlors and endless stairs, seem
ed sweet and light after Maxwell’s Heaven. Down in the small cobbled court, Percy and Bingo sat companionably on a bus seat from which horsehair foamed through slashes and split seams. Bingo’s nose was deep in the folds of Percy’s leather apron, and his tail moved frantically from side to side. “The girl okay?” Percy asked.

  “Nothin’ can get that girl down,” Hattie said.

  “That’s what I said.” Percy handed the whining, wriggling Bingo back over to Sarah, and Bingo continued to give longing, ardent glances to the leather apron until they had turned into the narrow uphill drive, and even then whined and looked back at it. “Fickle animal,” Sarah said, sounding genuinely grumpy.

  When they came to the top of the drive and out on the street, a police car sped past them and squealed around the corner down the south end of Elysian Courts, its siren screaming. Another screaming police car followed it.

  Sarah drove, more slowly than before, downhill toward the sea, the dump, and the old slave quarter.

  “I have a high opinion of you, young lady,” Hattie said from her perch on Tom’s lap. “And so did Nancy Vetiver.”

  “You do?” Sarah seemed startled. “She did?”

  “Otherwise, why did she say so much? Ask yourself that. Nancy Vetiver’s not a loquacious fool, you know.”

  “Not any kind of fool,” Sarah said.

  At her shack, Hattie took the cape and kissed them both before saying good-bye.

  Sarah leaned over and rested her head on the steering wheel. After a moment, she sighed and started the car.

  “I’m sorry,” Tom said.

  She gave him a smoky look. “Are you? For what?”

  “For dragging you into that place. For mixing you up in everything.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s what you’re sorry about.” She rocketed away from the curb, and Bingo flattened out in his well behind the seats.

  She did not speak until they were past Goethe Park and maneuvering through the eastbound traffic on Calle Burleigh. Finally she asked him what time it was.