“You’ll get something to eat tonight,” the nurse said. “Juice, broth, like that. If everything goes well, the catheter will come out in the morning. Then we’ll get you on your feet, see how strong you are. In the meantime, stay in the bed.”
“What if I need to use the bathroom?”
“That’s what the catheter’s for. Anything else, you call me.”
Moodrow watched her execute a perfect about-face, listened to her uniform crackle as she marched through the open doorway, then took a moment to look around the room. The walls were a dull, faded orange, in deference, Moodrow suspected, to the belief that hospital rooms should be warm and cheery instead of cold and clean. Several shiny-blue plastic chairs, further proof, were scattered about his bed and the empty bed next to the window. Above and behind him, a computer monitor displayed his blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and body temperature.
“Stanley?”
He turned slowly, took her hand. In stark contrast to her normal efficiency, Betty seemed tentative, almost frightened.
“Just the facts, ma’am.” He managed a weak smile, though it was the last thing he wanted to do. “How long have I been here?”
“A day and a half.”
“What happened to me?”
Betty let go of his hand, offered the water again. “You had an infection. From when you got hit.”
Moodrow took a minute to digest the information. “With the trash can? That’s what you’re talking about?” The incident seemed infinitely remote, as if it had happened in another lifetime. To somebody else.
“You let it go too long, Stanley. When they brought you in, you had a fever near 104.”
Moodrow let his eyes close. His shoulders and back ached, the pain dull, but insistent. He managed to shift his weight a bit, but the effort exhausted him and he quickly fell into a dreamless sleep. Two hours later, as he began to wake up, an idea crawled into his drifting consciousness.
Maybe, he thought, I had a fever when I decided to chase Jilly Sappone. Maybe I didn’t know what I was doing.
The idea beckoned to him, as sweetly seductive as his memories of Annabella Sciorio, his first love. If he could somehow make it pass through hope and belief to firm conviction, he’d be all right.
“Stanley?”
He opened his eyes to find Betty leaning over him.
“You’ve got visitors.” She gestured to Jim Tilley and Leonora Higgins standing by the foot of the bed.
“How are you feeling, Stanley?” They said it together, then laughed nervously.
Moodrow took the water from the bedside stand and drank. “I feel like I tried to empty the Hell’s Angels’ clubhouse on Third Street. By myself.”
“He must be doing better,” Leonora observed. “If he’s making jokes.”
It didn’t seem like a joke to Moodrow. He tried to roll onto his side, found it difficult to balance himself.
“Do you want me to raise the bed, Stanley?” Betty pressed the button before he could answer, and the top half of the bed rumbled upward. “Better?”
Moodrow nodded, then turned to Jim Tilley. “They get him yet?”
“Not yet, Stanley. But his face is all over the tube. It’s just a matter of time.” Tilley paused, smiled, then realized that Moodrow wanted more detail. “I don’t know shit,” he finally admitted. “The job’s not in the precinct. I’m out of it.”
Leonora took a step forward. “The NYPD formed a task force, naturally. After…”
Higgins stopped abruptly, tried to hide her embarrassment. She and Jim had decided not to mention the child, Theresa Kalkadonis. Without hearing it from Moodrow, they’d simply assumed he’d eventually blame himself. Moodrow, for his part, recognized the assumption and drew the obvious conclusion: If Leonora had made the same decision, the decision to chase Jilly Sappone, she’d hold herself responsible for the child’s death.
Maybe, he thought, maybe I was already infected. I could have been running a fever. It isn’t impossible.
“Anyway,” Leonora finally continued, “if the detectives on the task force have any serious leads, they’re keeping it to themselves. Ditto for the feds. There’s a special agent named Holtzmann who won’t return my calls.”
The nurse came back into the room, accompanied by a small Asian man with a stethoscope draped around his neck.
“I said a minute and a minute’s up,” she declared. “He’ll be out of the ICU tomorrow. Visiting hours are one till eight.”
Moodrow watched Tilley and Higgins wave good-bye, then march out. Tilley, predictably old-fashioned, stepped back to let Higgins go first. Suddenly, Moodrow realized that he both wanted to be alone and was terrified at the prospect. He looked over at Betty. Sooner or later, she’d go, too; sooner or later the staff would turn down the lights and leave him to himself. He decided to ask for a sleeping pill, to keep asking until he was unconscious.
“Mr. Moodrow, how are you feeling? I’m Doctor Chen.”
“All right.” The shorter the answers, the faster he’d be gone. Doctors, in Moodrow’s experience, were always in a hurry.
Chen nodded enthusiastically, then put the metal face of the stethoscope against Moodrow’s chest and listened for a moment. “Can you roll onto your side? I need to get to your back.” He tugged at Moodrow’s shoulder, had the stethoscope against Moodrow’s ribs before he settled onto his stomach. This time Chen moved the scope around and thumped Moodrow’s back several times with his fingertips before standing abruptly.
“You had a serious staphylococcus infection, Mr. Moodrow,” Chen said. “We treated it with antibiotics, and your temperature’s returned to near-normal. We’re going to draw some blood, and culture the wound tissue again. If the test results are favorable, you’ll be out of here the day after tomorrow. Assuming, of course, that your fever doesn’t return.” Finished, he spun on his heel, started toward the door.
“Doctor Chen.” Betty, a trial lawyer for almost thirty years, addressed the doctor in tones usually reserved for hostile witnesses with extensive criminal records. She waited for the doctor to stop and turn around before continuing. “I have a few questions.”
Moodrow watched Chen smile, alert enough to recognize the underlying annoyance. “Doctor,” he said, interrupting Betty, who’d been about to speak. “The fever. Can you tell me when it started?”
“I don’t understand.” Chen ran the fingers of his right hand along the narrow tubes of the stethoscope.
“How long before I was brought into the hospital? When did the fever actually start?”
“There’s no way to know. The infection probably began within forty-eight hours of your receiving the injury. The fever could have started any time after that. It would depend on the strength of your immune system, your general health…” His voice trailed off as he turned to Betty. “You said you had some questions?”
“About his recovery.” Betty was smiling, now that she had his attention. “What can we expect?”
“A week to a month before he’s fully recovered. Remember, he had a general septicemia. His whole body was affected. If we don’t expect miracles, we won’t be disappointed.”
“Will he have to see you again?”
This time Chen’s face actually registered his annoyance. He glanced at his watch before answering. “Does he have a regular doctor?”
“Yeah,” Moodrow said, “but he died two years ago. They’re running a phonesex operation out of his office now.”
“Well, I’ll give you a referral to our clinic. It won’t hurt to have somebody take a look at the wound in a couple of weeks. Maybe run some bloods.” He stepped back toward the door. “I’ll be in to see you tomorrow morning, of course. In case you have any more questions.” He took another step. “I’m not anticipating a problem here. These kinds of infections, once we get them under control …” He was gone before he completed the sentence.
“They’re always in a hurry,” Betty observed, turning back to Moodrow. “Stanley, is there anything I can
get you?”
“How about another chance?” The words were out before he could call them back.
Betty moved closer to the bed. “Was that why you asked him when the fever started?”
“Yeah, well …” He took a deep breath and let his head drop onto the pillow. “I’m trying to figure out why I did what I did. Why I chased him.”
“How could you know Sappone was going to do … that?”
Moodrow felt his eyes begin to close. “You remember,” he said, his voice reduced to a whisper, “when the FBI attacked that cult in Texas? When the compound went up in flames and all those children died? Afterward, the feds claimed the fires were deliberately set, but that was just a diversion. When you pressure a crazy man, you have to expect a crazy reaction. Jilly couldn’t run away from me and he couldn’t surrender, so what he did was take the only way out. The only way out for a crazy man. Meanwhile, he stopped me cold and got away.”
“Maybe you should tell me exactly what happened. Remember, I was in Los Angeles at the time.”
Moodrow looked up. Betty was smiling at him, a good sign, no doubt. Pausing occasionally to order his thoughts, he worked his way through the events leading up to his and Sappone’s mutual recognition. The words came more slowly as he went on, but he was determined to get the whole story out. Knowing the longer he waited, the harder it would be.
“It was just bad luck,” he concluded. “Me and Jilly coming into that intersection at the same time. But it didn’t have to end the way it did. I should’ve let him go.”
“I think you need some rest, Stanley.” Betty lowered the bed down without asking permission. “But you might want to consider this. Neither Jim nor Leonora blame you; in fact, they were both amazed that you actually found Sappone.”
“What about Ann? Ann Kalkadonis.”
“She released a statement to the press. You weren’t mentioned by name, but she said she was satisfied with the police effort. From what you just told me, the police weren’t involved, so I guess she must’ve been talking about you and your partner.”
“What she told the vultures doesn’t have to be the truth. You have to give them something or they’ll never leave you alone.”
“Good point, Stanley. Because somebody released your name to the press and the hospital security already caught a reporter trying to get into your room.”
Later that same night—it could have been any time after visiting hours, though it had the feel of early morning—Moodrow woke up to a room lit only by the monitor behind his bed and a dim, shielded bulb over the closed door leading to the nurse’s station. His strength was clearly returning, enough so that rather than remain imprisoned in his own thoughts, he seriously considered the pros and cons of checking himself out of the hospital.
A tug on the heavy plastic tube jammed into his penis demonstrated the clear impossibility of that impulse. There was something holding it in place and he couldn’t very well carry a bag of urine under his coat, the ultimate kinky flasher. That was assuming he had a coat, or any other clothing, in the hospital.
He pulled himself to a sitting position, found the switch that controlled his bed, kept pressing buttons until the head rose. He wanted to swing his legs over the edge of the mattress, but the rails were up on both sides and he couldn’t find the release. Never a quitter, he kept trying until the pulse monitor sounded an alarm. Nurse Rashad entered a moment later.
“I thought I told you not to get out of that bed.”
“Does it look like I’m out of the fucking bed?”
“Don’t run your mouth to me. I’m your nurse, not your wife.”
His anger having fled as suddenly as it had appeared, Moodrow offered a quick apology. He didn’t know what had provoked his reaction, but it clearly wasn’t Nurse Rashad.
“Are you hungry?”
Moodrow took the question to mean she was making an apology of her own. “No, not really.”
“I’ve got some cold orange juice in the pantry. In case you’re thirsty.”
He shook his head, let himself fall back against the sheets. “What time is it?”
“It’s three-thirty.”
“In the morning?”
“That’s right.”
“How long have you been on?”
“Since four o’clock in the afternoon. I’m working a double shift, sixteen hours.” She smiled, shrugged her shoulders. “What could I say? I’ve got two growing MasterCards and an aging grandmother to support.”
Nurse Rashad was gone before Moodrow remembered to ask for a sleeping pill. He spent a minute looking for the call button, then, when he couldn’t find it, resigned himself to the inevitable. Moodrow had joined the NYPD in 1953, been promoted to the rank of detective five years later. Cold factual analysis was as much a part of his ordinary life as washing his hands before lunch or brushing his teeth in the morning. He might avoid it with Betty or Nurse Rashad for company, but not at three-thirty in the morning, not alone in a darkened room.
He listened to a monitor alarm sound in one of the other rooms on the ward, heard the distant wail of sirens on First Avenue. Background music to the scene he had to reconstruct. His eyes closed briefly, then opened to stare at the blank orange wall across the room as he visualized an intersection in Suffolk County.
When he could see it clearly, the traffic lights, the cars rushing by on the Long Island Expressway, Gadd sitting next to him, he began to work with his own mood. Remembering that he was annoyed with himself because they’d taken the long way around instead of making a U-turn on … He couldn’t recall the name of the street for a moment, but then it came back to him, Middle Island Road in the town of Medford. They were stopped there, at the intersection, and despite his annoyance, he was very excited, very pleased with himself because every decision he’d made that day had brought him a step closer to Jilly Sappone. Because he’d done everything right.
Moodrow had a prodigious memory. He wasn’t sure if it came by way of a Catholic school education or if he was born with it, but either way, he truly believed his memory to be the single attribute separating him from other NYPD detectives. He remembered everyone he met, good guys, bad guys, and noncombatants, had an internal file of mug shots and brief bios to go along with them. Even after thirty-six hours of near delirium, he could see the two cars, an ancient, rusted Cadillac and a small Toyota, turn left onto the Long Island Expressway service road, see the Taurus sliding up to the intersection.
The seating arrangement, two adult males, one in front, one in back, had intrigued him and he’d examined the men closely as the car rolled by. That was when he and Sappone had recognized each other. There’d been that moment of shock, of suspended animation, then the small Ford had careened across the intersection.
There’d been no time for calculation, for any weighing of profit and loss. Moodrow was on unfamiliar territory, a few seconds and Sappone would be gone, lost in the maze of some residential development. So, what he, Moodrow, had done, before he even considered the child, was give chase. What he’d done was confirm his identity by coming up on Sappone’s bumper, then slamming on the brakes.
He didn’t take it any further. What was the point? Every significant event had occurred in that intersection, every important decision had been made then and there. He shook his head, took a deep breath, then returned to the scene. Again, the Taurus rolled up, again his attention was drawn to the two men in the car. Sappone had been staring straight ahead, maybe focused on home, only a few blocks away, then he’d turned and their eyes had locked.
What he, Moodrow, should have done was hide his face, maybe turn to Gadd, lower his head, whisper, “That’s Sappone, don’t look at him.” Anything but sit there with his mouth open, dumbfounded, like the time Father O’Shea caught him masturbating in the rectory bathroom.
It didn’t sound much like delirium, he finally decided. In fact, it didn’t sound anything like delirium. Picking up on the odd seating arrangement was not the act of a deluded man, a man lost
to fever. No, the simple truth was that he’d reacted too slowly. And not once, but twice. After he came up on the Taurus, he’d remembered Theresa Kalkadonis all right, remembered her in time to jam on the brakes, but not, of course, in time to actually save her life.
TWO
CARMINE STETTECASE LIKED TO think of his row house on East Tenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues, as “my brownstone.” In the most literal sense, he was entirely correct—located in the middle of a block of renovated town houses, the five-story building did, in fact, retain its original facing of milky brown, New Jersey quarried sandstone. That, however was its only resemblance to the 1861 town house constructed in the emerging Italianate style for Braumeister Willem Bauer and his large, extended family. Not that Carmine—who had as much respect for tradition as anybody in the organized-crime business—had been the one to butcher 671 East Tenth Street. Far from it. In his own mind, he was the one who’d restored the structure, if not to its original glory, at least to solid, middle-class respectability.
The butchery had been accomplished a year after WWII, when Martin Tighe, a small-time landlord (formerly slumlord, this being his big move up) bought the building from the heirs of Miss Octavia Shankman, an octogenarian who’d maintained herself (and her middle-class sensibilities) by cleaning and cooking for six respectable female boarders. Tighe, in the habit of predicting the postwar housing crunch to anyone who’d listen, began by dumping the tenants, none of whom had had the foresight to secure a lease. New York, at the time, was locked into a rigid system of rent control; serious landlords either built new or bought empty. Tighe, the way he figured it, had bought empty, and the courts had backed him up.
Once the old ladies were packed off to whatever fate awaited them, Martin proceeded to the building itself. The high stoop leading to the parlor floor went first, along with an elaborate cast-iron railing, the double oak doors, and the carved brackets supporting the stone hood over the entranceway. A new entrance was cut into what had formerly been the basement, while the old one was sealed with brick and faced with sheets of stone stripped from a demolition site in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Damaged Goods Page 17
