Silent Treatment

by Michael Palmer

  Harry looked over at Mel Wetstone, who simply shrugged and nodded.

  “You have my word,” Harry said.

  “In that case,” Erdman concluded, “you have our blessing to continue with your work.”

  “Are you going home?” Wetstone asked as they headed out of the hospital.

  “No, I’m headed to the office. I think Mary deserves a lunch.”

  “Dinner at the Ritz would be more like it.”

  CHAPTER 28

  The thermometer, mounted on the wall just outside the Battery Park IRT station, was in direct sunlight. Still, ninety-four degrees was ninety-four degrees. As he entered the station, damp and uncomfortable, his briefcase in one hand and his suit coat scrunched in the other, James Stallings cursed his penchant for dark dress shirts. He loved the way they looked on him, and the statement that they made among his white-shirted colleagues. But on a day like today, wearing royal blue was simply dumb.

  But then again, he had been doing a lot of dumb things lately.

  The station was mobbed. Tourists from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty jostled with passengers off the Staten Island ferry and a crowd of kids in their early teens wearing Camp Cityside T-shirts. Almost everyone was talking about the heat. Stallings shuffled through the turnstile behind two Cityside girls, who were giggling about a boy being disallowed on their field trip. Caught up in their conversation, Stallings tried to piece together what it was the boy had done and where they were all headed. But before he could, the teens took up with a dozen other campers and moved like a jabbering phalanx down the broad stairs.

  There was a train waiting at the platform. Battery Park was at the beginning of the run, so there were almost always seats, even at rush hour. Today, though, it was standing room only. From snatches of irritated conversation around him, Stallings discerned that there was a delay of some sort. And of course, while the cars themselves were air-conditioned, the platforms were not. Thick, steamy air billowed in with the passengers and overwhelmed what little cooling the system was generating. Beneath his arms, Stallings’s shirt was soaked through. He glanced out the window at the crowd still pouring down the stairs and across the concrete platform. Loomis was supposed to wait ten minutes before heading back to Crown. It had probably been close to that already. Not that it really mattered if they ended up on the same train. Especially different cars. But Stallings, who had never been the nervous or paranoid type, was frightened—irrationally frightened, he kept trying to convince himself.

  Sir Lionel had posed something of a threat to The Roundtable, and he had died suddenly and mysteriously. A year or so later, Evelyn DellaRosa had been murdered in her hospital bed. She, too, had crossed paths with the society. The drug used to poison her had been discovered, but almost by accident. Were the two deaths coincidence? Possible, but doubtful, Stallings thought. Now, within twenty-four hours, he would either have to submit a list of hospitalized clients to be terminated, or become a potential threat to The Roundtable himself.

  Meeting with Kevin Loomis was the right thing to have done, he decided. Loomis seemed like an up-front, decent enough guy. Even though he remained noncommittal and maybe even unconvinced, as soon as he had the chance to sort through everything, he would come around. And together they would figure out something. They simply had to. Stallings wiped perspiration from his forehead with his shirtsleeve. The car was nearly packed. The heat oppressive. It was only a matter of time before someone passed out.

  “Hey, watch it!” one of the passengers snapped.

  “Fuck you,” came the quick retort.

  A gnarled old woman with a pronounced hump and an overfilled shopping bag worked her way between him and the seats and stopped with one of her heels resting solidly on Stallings’s toe. Stallings excused himself and pulled his foot free. The crone glared up at him with reddened eyes and muttered something that he was grateful he couldn’t understand.

  The doors glided shut and for a moment it seemed as if they had been condemned to a new brand of torture. But slowly, almost reluctantly, the train began to move. Stallings was taller than most of those standing in the car. Clutching his briefcase and his hopelessly wrinkled suit coat in his left hand, he was able to keep his balance in part by holding onto the bar over the old lady’s head, and in part by the force of those pressing around him. He commuted to work from the Upper East Side on the IRT, and so was an inveterate and extremely tolerant rider. But this was about as bad as he could ever remember. To make matters even worse, the train was lurching mercilessly—perhaps responding to an effort by the driver to make up for lost time.

  A minute out of the station, the old lady’s heel again came down on his foot. This time Stallings nudged her away, earning another glare and another epithet. Moments later, a particularly vicious lurch threw a crush of people against him. He felt a sharp sting in his right flank, just above his belt. A bee? A spider? He reached down with his right hand and rubbed at the spot. The stinging sensation was already almost gone. His shirt was still tucked in all around. His hand was still off the bar when a tight curve pitched him against the passengers behind him.

  “Hang on to something, for chrissake,” someone cried as he was pushed back upright.

  “Idiot,” someone else added.

  “Sorry,” Stallings muttered, still trying to make sense of having been stung in such a way. He had been stung before, any number of times, by both bees and spiders. He wasn’t allergic to either. But whatever had bitten him this time had done so right through his shirt.

  The train slowed as they entered the City Hall station. The crush of passengers intensified as some tried to make their way to the doors.

  “Excuse me,” a woman said, trying to get past Stallings. “Sir?”

  Stallings couldn’t respond. His heart had started pumping wildly. His pulse was resonating in his ears like artillery fire. He felt a terrifying nausea and dizziness taking hold. Sweat cascaded down his face. The car lights blurred, then began spinning, faster and faster. His chest felt empty, as if his lungs and heart had been torn out. He needed desperately to lie down.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” someone shouted.

  His hand had slipped off the steel bar.

  “Hey, buddy …”

  Stallings felt his knees buckling. His head lolled back.

  “Hey, back away, back away! He’s passing out!”

  Stallings knew he was on the floor, his arms and legs jerking uncontrollably. Feet hit against him as people tried to back away. He sensed himself bite through his lip, but felt no pain. A flood of words reached him as distant echoes through a long, metal tunnel.

  “He’s having a seizure” … “Get something in his mouth” … “Roll him over! Roll him over on his side!” … “I’m a paramedic. Move aside, everyone. Move aside” … “Somebody do something” … “I am, lady, just back off” … “Get a cop.…”

  The words became more disconnected, more garbled. Stallings felt the people kneeling around him, touching him, but he was powerless to react. He knew he was losing consciousness. Blood flowed from his lip onto his royal blue shirt. He sensed his bladder give way. The blurred images faded to blackness. The voices and sounds died away.…

  All but one of the tangle of people were focused on Stallings. This one, a nondescript man in a print sports shirt, reached between two would-be rescuers and grasped the handle of Stallings’s briefcase. Then, ever so slowly, he slid it free of the crowd. He smiled inwardly at the image of Sir Gawaine utilizing one evasive tactic after another to avoid being followed to Battery Park, never realizing that the state-of-the-art bugs Galahad routinely placed in each knight’s room had made tailing him quite unnecessary.

  The car doors were open now, and people were pushing and jamming to get out onto the platform. The man with Stallings’s briefcase moved calmly with the flow. The syringe in his pocket would be tossed into a sewer within a block. The cardiotoxin he had emptied into Stallings was one of his favorite weapons—a drug virtually unkn
own outside of the lower Amazon, so potent that the poison remaining along the barrel of the syringe would probably still be enough to kill. The thirty-gauge needle attached to the syringe was so fine it could pass through a pore, making the puncture wound essentially invisible. And even if the injection had produced a tiny droplet of blood, the man’s dark blue shirt would have made it virtually impossible to notice. Just another statistic—another heat-related death. Beautiful, just beautiful.

  Anton Perchek exited the station just as two policemen were rushing in.

  “Take your time, gentlemen,” he whispered. “Believe me, there is no need to rush.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The mood in Harry’s apartment was decidedly upbeat. Walter Concepcion and Maura arrived within a few minutes of each other, both with good news.

  Harry needed it. After the hearing, as he was getting out of Mel Wetstone’s Mercedes in front of his office, he had experienced another bout of chest pain—more sharp than dull or squeezing, moving from deep in his back through to the middle of his breastbone. The whole episode didn’t last long—maybe three or four minutes. And it wasn’t all that severe. But it was the worst pain he had had in a while. By the time he had given Mary Tobin a quick kiss of gratitude and hurried to the medication cabinet to try a nitroglycerine pill, the pain was subsiding. If it was angina, he told himself again, it certainly wasn’t a textbook case.

  Still, Maura was going to keep her part of their bargain by going to an AA meeting with Concepcion. The least he could do was schedule a stress test. He went back to his desk, dialed the office number of a cardiologist friend, and actually let the phone ring once before he hung up. He would keep the nitroglycerine in his pocket, he decided, and take it at the first sign of chest pain. If it worked, if the pain subsided, there was a fairly strong likelihood that the problem was his heart. Then he would call the cardiologist. Meanwhile, he told himself, the stress test could wait.

  Harry gave Maura and Concepcion a vivid account of the hearing at the hospital—especially the nearly catastrophic speech by Caspar Sidonis, and the remarkable performances by Mel Wetstone and Mary Tobin.

  “This Sidonis,” Concepcion said when he had finished, “does he know about your wife—I mean, the research she was doing?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t shared what I know about her other life with anyone except the police. Telling Sidonis seemed to serve no purpose. I doubt he would believe it anyway.”

  “He sounds like he could be a dangerous enemy. I would recommend you stay as far away from him as possible. Will he follow through on his threat to quit?”

  “I doubt it, but you never know. He makes it sound like he could just walk out of MMC and hang up his shingle at another hospital. But he has a huge research lab, and when you’re in the million-plus-a-year category, which I’m sure he is, things are seldom that simple. There’s no hospital in the city without a chief of cardiac surgery. And I doubt any of them would be too pleased to have ol’ Caspar decide to horn in on their territory.”

  Maura next told of how Lonnie Sims had helped her produce a series of photo-quality pictures of the man she had seen. There was the original, and three other front-and-side views—one with glasses and a beard, one with a mustache and blond hair, another with blue eyes and long dark hair. Sims had reduced them all in size and placed them on a single legal-size sheet along with an empty box for the addition of other information. He then printed out ten copies for her.

  “Should have done one as a woman,” Concepcion said, studying the images.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just blabbing. This guy seems like he can almost walk through walls in hospitals, so I was wondering what he’d look like as a nurse.”

  “Actually, Lonnie tried out a number of feminine wigs and makeup of various kinds. That opened up dozens of combinations and possibilities. The pictures would have been awfully small if we had tried to print too many. Plus, we felt it might be too confusing for anyone looking at a set of fifteen or twenty composites to focus in on one of them.”

  “Good point,” Concepcion said. “Well get a batch of color Xeroxes and put them up on every floor in the hospital. Maybe in other hospitals, too.”

  “We can’t,” Harry said.

  He reviewed his clash with Owen Erdman and his agreement that Erdman alone would supervise distribution of the drawings, and then only privately to department heads.

  “It won’t work,” Concepcion said, more agitated than Harry had ever seen him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s not much chance that someone’s just going to look at these posters and say, ‘Ah ha! That’s our man right over there.’ It happens that way sometimes, but not often. What we’re really trying to do is annoy The. Doctor, upset him to the point where he does something careless—jab and run, jab and run until he doesn’t care about anything except getting even with you.”

  “You talk as if you know him,” Harry said.

  The tic at the corner of Concepcion’s mouth fired off several times.

  “I don’t know him specifically, Harry,” he said. “But I know psychos. Our tripping up that man is not nearly as likely as his stumbling over his own ego. But our best chance of having that happen is to find a way to rile him up.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it, Walter. I gave the hospital president my word. My position’s shaky enough around that place without pushing my luck with him. He’s famous for his temper. In a week or so, we can try approaching him again. But not now.”

  “Whatever you say, Doc.”

  Concepcion studied one of the posters for a few seconds.

  “Maura, this is really quite amazing,” he said, slipping it into a battered leather portfolio.

  She looked at him curiously.

  “How do you know?”

  “Hey, I may be a little rough around the edges,” he responded cheerily, “but I know good artwork when I see it.”

  “Thanks,” she said, shrugging off her momentary concern. “We’ll know just how amazing a likeness that is when we see the guy looking out at us from behind a set of bars.”

  If he lives that long. For a moment, Concepcion was afraid he had said the words out loud.

  It seemed to Maura as if a shadow had passed over Concepcion’s face—as if he had quite suddenly drifted off to some faraway place. He took a long drink of the lemonade Harry had made for them. When he set his glass down, the shadow was gone. His grin was broad and engaging.

  “So, then, mis amigos,” he said, “it’s my turn to tell you about Elegance, The Escort Service for Discerning Gentlemen. The woman who runs it is Page. She wouldn’t tell me any more than that. I met her at this dark bar on the East Side that has no windows. Not one. It turns out that my suspicions were right. Desiree did a kind of freelance work for Elegance on and off for four or five months. Um … I’m sorry to say this, Harry, but apparently she was very much in demand.”

  “Swell.”

  “Hey, are you going to be okay with this?”

  Harry shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. Anyhow, this Page is very angry because some wealthy, powerful people pulled out of a contract with her when they found out Desiree was a reporter. What happened was Desiree tried interviewing some of the other girls and one of them ratted on her. Page thought that by firing Desiree she’d get rewarded. Instead, she and Elegance got canceled. She ended up losing a hell of a lot of money. She seemed angry enough to talk about the men involved, but she also seemed really frightened of them. Apparently two of them paid her a visit and gave her the third degree about Desiree. I couldn’t get her to tell me anything at all about them at first. So I kept sweetening the pot until she did.… Harry, I’m … ah … I’m afraid the fifteen hundred’s gone.”

  “All of it?”

  “It was kind of a do-or-die situation. She’d had a few drinks, and was just on the edge. I figured that if I didn’t nudge her over with a good offer, I might lose her for good.”r />
  “Well, five hundred of that’s yours,” Harry said.

  “Harry!” Maura exclaimed.

  “Sorry, sorry. Go on, Walter. I trust you. Really I do.”

  “She didn’t know any of the men’s names except someone named Lance. I guess that’s his last name. He paid her in cash and let her know if a girl was unsatisfactory for whatever reason. The girls, seven of her very best, went to the Camelot Hotel twice a month and stayed the night. She didn’t know for certain what the men were doing there, but from things her girls told; her from time to time, she thought some of them might have been in the insurance business.”

  “Insurance?”

  “That’s all she said. It isn’t that much, but it certainly got my attention. I was thinking I could approach some of the chambermaids at the Camelot. Chambermaids in hotels know everything, and in this city half of them are Latino. Maybe I can learn who some of the guys are, and we can go from there.”

  They meet every two weeks at the Camelot Hotel …

  “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary,” Harry said, remembering one of the few lines of Desiree’s writing he had gotten the chance to read. “I think Evie might have already named a couple of them for us.”

  He had copied the two names he found in Evie’s address book and kept the copy in his wallet. The original was wedged into the toe of an old pair of sneakers in the hall closet. Now, he smoothed the names on the table, called information, and then dialed the New York Public Library. He was looking for a reference-room librarian named Stephanie Barnes. Barnes had been one of his first medical assistants, and one of the few who left the office to go back to school rather than to have babies or to make more money than he could afford to pay. Harry had given her a nice bonus to help with her first year. Now, happily married, with a master’s degree in library science, she had both the babies and more money than he could afford to pay.