Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues

by Steven Womack

  The university area was one of my favorite parts of town, though. In a city full of automobiles, with lousy mass transit and few sidewalks, it was a delight to see strollers out enjoying the weather. It had turned into a beautiful evening.

  For once, my parking karma improved, and I was able to find a spot off 21st, barely a block from the emergency room. I limped up onto the walk and inched down to the huge glass doors, which slid open as I approached as if the building were hungry for another one. I checked in at the desk, described my problem, filled out paperwork for twenty minutes, then sat in a chair.

  Thank God I didn’t have a sucking chest wound.

  By nine o’clock, somebody deigned to see me. It was another hour before a doctor walked in and handed me the verdict. “Mr. Denton, we think you’re going to live,” he said.

  Typical E.R. humor. “Your X rays are fine. Nothing broken. I think it’s a bad sprain, maybe a pulled ligament. Nothing to take you down in the lower forty and shoot you over.”

  The doctor was young, fresh-faced, clean-cut, cheerful, with a white lab coat that had his name stenciled over the left pocket in green thread. He was obviously early enough in his shift that he could still put together a coherent sentence.

  “That’s great,” I said. “So what do I do with it?”

  “I’m going to wrap it for you,” he announced, pulling a chrome stool over to the foot of the table where I sat, bum leg dangling over the side. “Keep it elevated. Stay off it a few days. If the swelling hasn’t abated considerably in twenty-four hours, see your own doctor. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. The doctor unwrapped a flesh-colored elastic bandage—one the insurance company would probably be billed about a hundred bucks for—and started gently wrapping the softball attached to the end of my leg.

  “Say, Doc, I got a friend here in the hospital. He’s on staff and the med school faculty both. Conrad Fletcher.”

  I yelped as the gentle healing hand jerked my ankle about sixty degrees to the right.

  “Sorry,” the doctor said. “Hand slipped. Fletcher, you say?”

  “Yeah, Dr. Conrad Fletcher.” I couldn’t fail to notice that he was winding the bandage progressively tighter.

  “Yes, I know him. I did my surgical residency under him.”

  “Great. You wouldn’t happen to know if he’s around the hospital tonight, would you? I’d like to say hi.”

  The young doctor looked up at me, any trace of warmth gone from his face. “Check with the nurses’ station on the fourth floor. If he’s around anywhere, they’ll know.”

  He pushed two silver clips onto the bandage to secure it. He stood up, handed me some papers, and then was gone. A nurse came in after him with another set of papers for my signature. Then, thank heavens, my interface with the healthcare system was over.

  I asked for directions to the fourth floor nurses’ station.

  “East or west?” the blond, teenage candy striper asked. Again, I tried not to drool too loudly.

  “I don’t know. Whatever’s closest.”

  “Follow the yellow line down that hall. It’ll go left, then down another hall to a bunch of elevators. Grab one to the fourth floor and the nurses’ station should be right there.”

  “Great.” I limped away, following the yellow line down the hard linoleum as it ran parallel to, intersected with, and melded with other lines. All I needed was Toto hoofing along beside me.

  Hospitals late at night are weird places. The lights seem turned down low, but they’re probably not. The air is heavier, stuffier, as if the crowds of people who parade back and forth in the halls during the day had sucked all the oxygen out. On this night the people who passed looked more drawn, more tired, than the daytime people. The place was quieter, slower, creepier.

  I was the only one on the huge elevator creaking its way to the fourth floor. The doors pulled apart in front of me. Visiting hours were over, the lights were dimmer than ever. I hobbled down the hall, more from stiffness than pain. The hall dead-ended into a T I stood for a second at the intersection, my head bobbing first one way, then the outer, and did a mental coin flip.

  I turned right and walked maybe ten feet. So far, I hadn’t seen anybody or anything besides a few stainless-steel carts loaded down with medical gear. The place was a freaking ghost town, and if I didn’t find Fletcher quickly, I was going home to catch my nightly rerun of Green Acres on cable. I was tired, sore, and there was a cold one in the refrigerator with my name on it.

  I saw light and headed toward it. The hall intersected with another one again, and off to the left was a glass-enclosed nurses’ station. There were no nurses around, or at least nobody who resembled a nurse. But a woman with her back to me, in a well-tailored red dress, sat at a computer terminal. The phosphorescent green of the VDT bathed her dark hair in an eerie glow.

  I leaned on the counter, in a break between the high glass walls of Fort Nurse. “Excuse me, miss.”

  No answer. Maybe she considered the miss a pejorative. I cleared my throat, leaned in a little farther.

  “Excuse me, Ms. …”

  The wheels of the chair spun on the floor as she pivoted. The woman stared at me through glasses that looked stern on her. Her face was professional, just a little this side of tense, very pretty. Sharp nose, hair pulled back, with a green halo around her head: a high-tech angel with a clamped-shut sphincter.

  “Visiting hours are over, sir.” Voice clear, crisp, professional. Cold.

  “I know,” I said, as warmly as I could muster. “I’m looking for Dr. Fletcher. I was told he might be up here.”

  Her eyes flicked, checking for a staff I.D. badge.

  “I’m a friend,” I explained. “I was in the emergency room for a bum ankle. Thought as long as I was here—”

  “He’s awfully busy,” she said, even colder. Everybody got frosty when I claimed to be Fletcher’s friend.

  “He won’t mind. Trust me.”

  A tiny snort fled the sharply defined nose. She’d heard that line before. “He was on the floor about twenty minutes ago. Head down that hall to your right. You should catch him coming back.”

  I smiled at her, not that it would cut any ice. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  Before the words escaped my mouth, she turned and was back on the monitor. I followed her directions. A long hall was in front of me, the walls converging to a point down where the light got so dim it was only a pale yellow, with the shimmering red of an exit sign over a door to the left. I got a faint whiff of antiseptic as my heels clicked slowly on the hard floor. A door opened ahead of me, to the right, and a nurse with a clipboard and a B.P. cuff exited, made a few notes on the clipboard, then glanced past me and went into the next room.

  I could hear faint television sounds coming from one of those little hospital-bed pillow speakers. The door to my right now was partially open; I glanced inside to see the flickering images of a television bouncing off the glossy wall paint, and a wrapped leg in the air at a 45 degree angle, held suspended by metal framework and a series of wires.

  Still no sign of Conrad Fletcher. I was nearing the end of the hall now, a window in front of me shutting out the city’s nighttime parade. Not only was there no sign of Fletcher, there wasn’t much evidence of anything else: patients, nurses, orderlies. I gave up, turned around, and headed back down the hall toward the elevator, almost relieved that I hadn’t found the guy.

  I heard a swishing noise behind me and glanced over my left shoulder. The door at the end of the hall, perhaps a dozen rooms away on the right, opened and a nurse stepped out. I thought it curious that her hands were free. No clipboard, no sphyg, no medication tray, no gear of any kind. She stepped out into the hall, stopped, and gaped at me. I got the feeling she was nervous about something. I kept walking, but tilted my head and shifted a little so I could catch her out of the corner of my eye.

  She was still standing there, frozen. Then she reached up and fastened the top button of her nurse’s dre
ss. She was smoothing down the front of her uniform when I lost sight of her for a second. She was too far away, and the light too dim, for me to get a decent look at her. I walked on a few more steps, then gave a casual glance backward to see what she was up to now.

  She was gone.

  I came to a full stop, turned. Yeah, she was gone. Screw it, I thought. There were a half-dozen doors she could have gone into, as well as another hallway off to my left. No big deal. I turned around. Again I heard the swishing, airy sound of a door closing behind me, all the way at the end of the hall.

  What the hell?

  Something wasn’t right here, so I turned and limped back down the hall, a little faster this time, headed toward that last door down the hall on my right. From way behind me at the nurse’s station, I heard the low murmur of voices and thought to myself that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to get in trouble. That’s all I needed, to get hassled by hospital security and escorted out of the building. Talk about blowing my credibility.

  I was two doors away, surrounded in the hot red light of the exit sign, when I heard a sound—a rustling maybe-coming from inside the last room. And a voice saying something I couldn’t understand. A strained voice—that much I could tell—and only one person speaking. I walked farther down and I heard a rustling noise, then a squeaking like a weight being dropped on rollers.

  The door was in front of me now. I reached out and grabbed the handle. Then I hesitated. What if there was a patient in there getting, like, an enema or something? My mind ran in a million different directions, thinking of all the potential medical procedures that I didn’t want to see, when suddenly I noticed—

  It’s quiet.

  Not a sound, not a whisper of breath, not the crunch of a disposable needle being stuffed in a Sharp’s container. No sound of hands being washed, relieved groans, drugged sighs. Nothing. Dead silence.

  The handle of the door was cold in my grip. I pushed it open, just a crack. No light escaped. If there was somebody in there, they were either asleep or they liked the dark. I pushed the door open, figuring I could always act embarrassed, apologize, and get the hell out.

  The light in the hall flooded the darkened room. My eyes adjusted—and I saw someone on the bed. Only his legs were dangling off the side. He was wearing street shoes and dress pants.

  And a doctor’s white lab coat.

  I stepped over to the bed quickly, straining to see the face across the bed. The door closed behind me, throwing the room into complete darkness. I fumbled at the head of the bed for the cord that would fire up the fluorescent light. I found the cord, but it kept dancing off my hand; it was as if I was trying to swat an insect at midnight. Finally I grabbed and pulled. The light flickered, then filled the room with a mellow blue-white light.

  And there was Conrad Fletcher, sprawled out on the bed with his arms outstretched. My heart suddenly went into power stroke. I could feel the sucker pounding in my chest like a bilge pump gone wild.

  I leaned over the bed, touched his face. He was cold, but shock-cold, not dead-cold. He was sweating like a wrestler, flushed. His breathing was shallow. I pulled an eyelid open, not that I knew what the hell I was doing. I’d just seen it done that way on television. His eyes were unfocused, staring ahead, pupils dilating fast. I let the eyelid snap shut and felt for a pulse in his neck. There was one, but I wouldn’t have bet the rent money on it.

  “Oh, boy,” I whispered, wondering what to do next.

  When out of nowhere, the sky in front of me exploded into a kagillion-bazillion sparkling lights, and I was weightless, floating high above the bed, then falling down a long dark tunnel. Just like in the movies.

  The last thing I remembered was feeling myself fell forward onto Fletcher, his weight under me like an exhausted lover.

  A minder squad detective once told me that most of the stuff you see in movies and read in books is complete crap.

  Like this business of getting knocked out by somebody. That’s bull. It just don’t happen like that. Somebody taps you on the back of the head, you’re going to be dazed. You might stagger, maybe fell down. But this movie nonsense where somebody wallops the daylights out of you and you gently nod off, then some luscious babe waves smelling salts under your nose and you come to and go “oh, what happened”—that’s a load. Somebody hits you hard enough to do that, you’re either comatose for a month or you’re dead.

  Fortunately, I hadn’t been hit that hard.

  Everything went black, and I saw sparkles behind my eyelids for a few moments. I felt I was going under. But just when I lost all sense of being in the world, I came right back to it. Like diving into a black pool, then coming straight to the surface.

  It was dark in the room again. Whoever decided to play thumper on my skull had yanked the pull chain on the fluorescent light. There was a rustling behind me, then a burst of hot light as the hospital door swung open. Then darkness again, and silence. I fought to turn, to get a glimpse of something, anything, as I lay there tangled and dazed on Fletcher’s body. But my brain was sending out signals my body was still ignoring.

  Whoever it was got away. At that moment, I realized two important things: first, I was in a helluva mess; second, my head hurt so bad I almost forgot my ankle.

  After a few seconds, it occurred to me that if I didn’t start moving, I was going to roll right off Fletcher. I couldn’t feel him moving—or breathing. I knew I had to do something, so I argued with my extremities until I felt something respond to a twitch command. I slid off him and stood up, unsteady, shaky, frightened, hoping there wasn’t a second person hanging around with a slapjack. I fought off vertigo in the blackness of the room, then turned and limped toward the faint crack of light emanating beneath the door.

  The hallway was empty again, and even the dimmed night-shift lights were blazingly painful. My eyes scrunched to slits. I put my left hand out to steady myself against the wall and brought my right hand up behind my shoulder to probe for the knot I knew would be there.

  Bad idea. It was like getting slapped on the back of the head by Edward Scissorhands. I yelped an obscenity, then followed it with a few appropriate self-criticisms.

  I brought my right hand up in front of my face. The hand was slick, wet with the coppery freshness of new blood. Great. I’d never been hit like that before. The movies could use a dose of reality. Only who’d pay to see Mel Gibson get clobbered and go silly for a few hours?

  I still wasn’t thinking clearly; not yet, anyway. So when the door opened a few rooms up and to the left, my first thought was that whoever popped me was coming back to finish the job. I started to turn away and slipped, falling against the cold shiny wallpaper. My footing gave way and I slid down until I was planted firmly on my butt. The young blond nurse with the clipboard and sphyg looked at me, her eyes wide as jar tops. I closed my eyes for a bit, then felt her next to me. If she was going to finish me off, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.

  “Are you all right?” A soft hand with a firm grip settled on my shoulder. Felt good; first time in a while.

  I opened my eyes. Her chest was in my face now as she stretched over me, examining the back of my head. It was a nice chest, but I was too goofy to enjoy the moment.

  “What’d you do?” she asked, her voice sweet, soothing. “Trip and fall?”

  I raised my head. Her fingers were still touching my scalp six inches or so above my collar. She had a gentle touch. I looked into her eyes; in my fog I tried to determine what color they were. Hazel, probably. Then it came back to me.

  “Dr. Fletcher’s in that room down there,” I said, my right hand flopping around in some vaguely accurate direction. “I think he’s dead.”

  A crack of a gasp came out of her, then a second set of white-panted legs appeared next to us. I looked up. An older woman, starched white cap on her head, glared down at us.

  “What happ—” she said.

  “Get security,” the nurse beside me interrupted. She stood, her torso risi
ng smoothly, silently.

  “And watch him,” she ordered, pointing down at me.

  I heard the soft padding of her nurse sneakers as she moved away. I settled back against the hard wall, glad to have somebody else in charge.

  Damn if I didn’t get to make a second trip to the emergency room. This time, though, I didn’t have to wait out front with the peasants. I was taken directly downstairs to a cubicle and plopped on an examining table, with a blue-uniformed hospital security cop standing wordlessly at attention beside me.

  I was beginning to get my wits back, those that weren’t beyond recovery. I knew the cops would arrive soon, and that I would have to figure out what to tell them. The problem was that I wasn’t exactly a veteran at this detective stuff. Maybe it would have helped if I’d had some training first. But how was I to know my first case was going to be a front-page felony?

  High-powered surgeon/compulsive gambler murdered in hospital room! Private detective hired by wife to shadow husband discovers body! I visualized my parents seeing their son’s picture in a tabloid every time they went through the express lane.

  The same young doctor who torqued my ankle came in to work on my head.

  “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” he asked. After a moment, I realized he was serious. I pulled up my pant leg, showing off the elastic bandage.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You’re the …”

  “Friend of Fletcher’s?”

  “Hey, is it true? Fletcher really dead?” The resident’s face brightened at the prospect.

  “News travels fast,” I commented.

  “It would probably be better if you gentlemen didn’t discuss that,” the uniform said. I looked over at him. OFFICER REED, his nameplate read. “The Metro police will want to question you first.”