"Did it show up?"
"Yes, and we had a nice exchange of views. I'm going to go in now and say hello to Mike and then go get something to eat. Have you eaten?"
"Sure, but I'll go with you. Mike has been bugging me and I have to go away and think about something."
"What?"
"You'll hear about it. You'll get it too."
I walked past the skinny, gape-mouthed man who never had any visitors and into Stu Meserole's curtained-off end of the room.
Stu's father, Al, a gray-faced, middle-aged man in a windbreaker, was sprawled dozing in a small wooden armchair at the foot of Stu's bed. Rhoda Meserole, squat and pretty with fresh lipstick and a new perm, was seated in the folding chair alongside the bed and was massaging Stu's unresponsive right hand. Mike Sciola was perched on the stool on the other side of the bed and held Stu's limp left hand.
"Hi, Stu," I said quietly, and could hardly resist the urge to say it more loudly. Maybe he's not brain-dead, just hard of hearing, I thought, and we ought to be yelling in his ear, as if he were Reagan, and that
would make him wake up: "HI, STU! HOPE YOU'RE FEELING BETTER AND ARE UP AND AROUND SOON!"
"It was nice of you to come, Donald," Mrs. Meserole said. It was what she always said. "As you can see, Stuart is still in his coma."
"I'm sorry."
"He's so peaceful."
"I want to talk to you before you leave," Mike said. "Are you in a hurry?"
"No."
"Why don't we go outside now?"
Rhoda Meserole smiled and lowered her eyelids, and her sleeping husband snored comfortably. Mike followed me into the corridor.
"This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do or will ever have to do," he said to me quietly. Timmy came over and listened. "I talked to the doctor today."
"Is there any hope at all?"
"He says no, there isn't. It's not that parts of Stu's brain are dead. It's that-parts of his brain aren't even there anymore." He began to choke up, then struggled and recovered himself. "There's no hope. He's gone. Stu is gone and that's his corpse in that room."
"I believe it. That's the way it feels to go in there."
"For a long time," he said, "I was afraid maybe Stu was alive inside that body and going crazy and screaming to die. I don't believe that anymore. The doctor explained some things to me about how the brain works, and the part of Stu's brain that could think like that is gone."
"Good."
"But the thing is- This is the thing." He started to breathe heavily again and struggled with his words. "I can't leave him there like that-a corpse in a bed with people pretending he's a living human being and pumping food into him. It's gruesome. It's an insult to Stu's dignity." He screwed up his face in disgust. I could see what was coming. I was surprised it hadn't come sooner.
"And the thing is," Mike went on, "I have to go back to school in three weeks. I have a contract. I'm obligated, and anyway I have no other means of support except for what I earn. So I have to go back. But the thing is"-he gave me a look of consuming desperation-"the thing is, I can't leave him like that."
I waited.
"Will you help me?"
He looked at me.
I had heard of situations such as this one, where rules, even laws, had been broken in order to do what was all but indisputably right and humane. But I'd never heard of it done in a hospital, except by physicians in collusion with the patient's legal caretaker, and never with the patient's family sitting guard nearby in order to prevent just such an eventuality.
"What could I do?" I finally said.
"I've figured out a way to do it," he said, sweating and weaving a little.
"What do you mean?"
"There's a little sort of trapdoor in the IV tubing. It's called a port. It's where nurses can inject drugs into the patient's bloodstream. If I had a drug, I could inject it in there. I could do it in ten seconds while Al is asleep and Rhoda is in the bathroom, and then Rhoda would come out of the bathroom and the plug would be in the wall socket, and the machinery would be humming, and everything would look normal. And soon Stu would drift away. 'He went so peacefully,' Rhoda could say. And then it would be over and we could remember the real Stu and miss him." His face contorted.
"I don't think you could get away with it," I said. "They'd do an autopsy and figure it out. They'd find the drug in him, and if they didn't come after you right away, they'd come down on some innocent nurse. There would be an investigation and the Meseroles would fuel the flames. If it was traced back to you, the Meseroles might try to have you prosecuted for God-knows-what murder? You could lose your teaching job at a minimum."
"And your health benefits," Timmy added, not at all trivially, for we all knew what this eventually could mean for Mike himself.
"I've thought of all that," Sciola said. A nurse strode up the hall and Mike waited until she had disappeared into the bishop's room. "The thing is," he said, leaning close to me, "is that an autopsy isn't done routinely. It's not required by law. I called the state and checked. If it's requested by the family, it's done, or maybe if the patient is part of a research project. Or if there are extraordinary circumstances of some kind. But that wouldn't be the case here. Here it's a man in a coma with half his brain gone and his heart stops and that's the end. It wouldn't be medically surprising."
I looked into Mike's face and stood there. "What makes you think I could get whatever it is you would need?"
"You're a detective. You have connections. You could find out how."
Timmy was shaking his head. "Stu is not suffering," he said. "He doesn't know about things like dignity anymore. It's an irrelevant consideration."
"Well then, what about my dignity?" Sciola said in a harsh whisper. "How much longer am I supposed to endure this stupid-bullshit-nightmare crap?"
The nurse came out of the bishop's room and rolled down the hall. We waited. "Death is undignified," Timmy said. "It's undignified being around it. There's no getting away from it. It's an indignity we all have to experience. In a life full of ridiculous indignities, it's the most ridiculous indignity of all."
"Are you objecting on religious grounds?" I asked Timmy.
"I thought you knew me better than that, Donald. The church will always have my heart, but I reclaimed my mind decades ago.
No, I'm against it for the entirely practical reason that Mike might get caught and pay a price that's not worth it. If Stu were screaming in pain, maybe-okay, yes. But this is different. There's too much to lose for what it is you'd gain. I can see how awful you feel, Mike, but I'm afraid you'd regret it. Wait. See what happens.
Stu's life is lost, but yours isn't. Don't risk it for something that, as you've already faced up to, is already gone."
Sciola glared at both of us, turned and fled back into the room.
I looked at Timmy. "Maybe I can do something," I said.
"Let's go get something for you to eat," he said. "Nobody has to decide anything right now."
"I'll just say good-bye to Mike."
"What are you going to say to him?"
"Nothing. Just good-bye."
"All right. I'm not your mother."
"Yes, you are."
I went into the room and Mike looked up and met my gaze. I nodded once. His eyes brightened and he nodded back. Mrs.
Meserole said, "Thank you for coming, Donald," and I went out again.
Queequeg's had set up tables out on the sidewalk under a rickety canopy, and this meant it was possible to have a steak teriyaki platter and a beer while risking respiratory failure from the fumes of the New Scotland Avenue traffic or death from a stray bullet fired during a domestic quarrel in the apartment building across the street.
I was nonetheless chowing down happily, and Timmy was enjoying a small aperitif-we agreed not to discuss Mike Sciola's plea for the time being-when a colleague of Timmy's from the legislature came by and recognized us.
"Don, weren't you working for John Rutka? Somebody said h
e hired you."
"Briefly, I was. Why?" "Didn't you hear?" "Hear what? No."
"Rutka is dead. It was on the radio just now. He was killed in a fire tonight."
I stared at the man and couldn't think of a word to say. end user
11
We drove over to Crow Street. Timmy had re-hooked up the answering machine when he arrived home from work, and now there were two messages on it. Both were from Eddie Sandifer. The first, in a tremulous voice, said, "I think somebody took John. It looks like he was kidnaped. Please, I need your help. Call me at the house as soon as you can. I'm going to call the Handbag police." The second message, delivered in a monotone, said simply, "He's dead. John's dead and I don't know what to do."
I dialed Rutka's number in Handbag.
"Yell-o."
"Eddie?"
"This is Officer Hughs of the Handbag Police Department. Who do you want?"
"Edward Sandifer."
"Hold on."
Half a minute later, an all-but-lifeless voice: "Yes?"
"This is Strachey. What happened?"
"John's dead. Somebody killed him."
"That's- I can hardly believe it."
"I know."
"He was in a fire?"
"They took him from here and tied him up in an old house and burned it down."
"Oh, hell."
"Can you come out?"
"I'm surprised you want me to."
"I do. Please come out."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Do they have any idea who did it?"
"No. They keep questioning me. I don't know how much to say."
"How much to say about what?"
"Well, there are some things you should know."
"Uh-huh. Have the cops asked for the files?"
"They don't seem to know about them. They keep asking for the names of people who threatened John."
"Don't mention the files. I'll be out."
"Thank you. Please hurry."
We were on 787 North in three minutes with the windows down and the hot night air loud in our faces. My headache was back and I was unable to answer Timmy's questions.
"Was Sandifer there when Rutka was dragged away?"
"I don't know."
"Where was the fire?"
"In an old house. That's all I know."
"Was he badly burned? How do they know it was Rutka's body?"
"I don't know. I know what you're thinking."
"I guess they'll be thorough-the medical examiner. Whoever confirms the identification of the body."
"They tend to be. And in this case they'll be extra thorough."
A police cruiser turned out of Elmwood Place as we turned in, and as we pulled up in front of the house a second car made a U at the end of the block and came back down and out of the neighborhood.
"Are they gone?" Sandifer said as we came in the front door.
"They're gone. Who was here?"
"John's sister Ann and Bub Bailey and another policeman." He fell back against the wall, buried his face in his hands, and heaved, up and down.
After a time, I said, "You'd better sit down, Eddie," and led him by the arm into the living room, where he collapsed in a chair, snuffling. The charred odor from the morning fire on the back porch filled the house, and it was as if it was the stench of Rutka's remains.
"I'm sorry, Eddie. What can I tell you."
"Nothing. What can anybody say? Maybe I shouldn't have gone to work tonight and left him alone. But he said I should go ahead. And there wasn't anything he had to worry about. Not really."
"There wasn't?"
He looked up at me and let loose with something that was half sigh, half shudder. "Well, you abandoned him, and you didn't even know."
"Know what?"
"I mean, you didn't know for sure."
"What? That you threw the firebomb today and shot John in the foot last night?"
He glanced at Timmy. "He's okay," I said.
Sandifer looked away. "It was John's idea," he said in a tremulous voice, "not mine. I always told him gay people didn't have to pretend to be under attack from homophobes. All we had to do was go out in public and not hide the fact we were gay and sooner or later we'd get our faces punched in, if that's what he wanted to prove. But he said there was never enough evidence, or gay people were afraid to report it, or the cops would ignore it-if they weren't the ones doing the beating themselves. So sometimes you had to do 'a little reality-based charade,' was how John put it.
Shooting him in the foot last night practically made me want to throw up."
"Staging a fag-bashing does seem a little redundant these days," I said. "And what was my role supposed to be in all this? Why was I lied to and manipulated and conned into the scam? To lend credibility?"
He flushed and couldn't look up at me. "That and to get feedback from the cops. John thought they'd tell you things they wouldn't tell him. And he thought all the people who had threatened him would really be freaked if they thought you might be coming after them."
I felt a rush of fury at Rutka for being dead and not available for me to get my hands around his throat. I said, "You two lunkheads sure botched the whole thing real good, didn't you? You got away with the shooting last night, so far, but your neighbor spotted you on your way to toss the bomb today. Have you confessed to the police?"
His head jerked up. "No! Jesus! I don't want to go to prison. Anyway, now there really is a killer."
"And once he's identified, he might as well take the rap for the two unsuccessful attempts, is that it?"
"Well-why not? Oh, I don't know. What difference does it make? What difference does anything make anymore!"
I said, "Have they identified the body? Are they sure it was John? What happened?"
He started to speak, then wept again. After a moment, he said, "They're pretty sure it's John they found. They'll know for sure tomorrow. Oh, God, it's real, this time! This time it's really real!"
"So you weren't here when it happened?"
He snuffled some more and then said, "I went in to work to finish up some things I didn't get to this morning when I was-you know-out for a while. It was around six-thirty when I went in. John had gotten a call earlier, the one he told you about, saying this time he was going to burn. And at first it freaked us both out, but then he said, shit, he'd gotten lots of threats and none of them ever amounted to anything, so let's forget it. So we did.
"When I got back from the shop a little after eight, I came in and John wasn't here and a chair in the dining room was knocked over and the table was pushed back with the rug all bunched up. It looked like there had been a struggle or fight and John had been kidnaped. I was really scared all of a sudden, and I called you and you weren't home, and then I called the police. They sent a cruiser out, but as soon as the cop got here he got a call on his radio about the fire and he just took off."
"You'd gone into Albany in your car?"
"In John's. It's the one we use. I don't have a car. It's the Subaru back in the garage."
"Where was the fire?"
"Down behind Pocketbook Factory Number Three," he said, and took out a bandanna and wiped his mouth and nose. "There are some abandoned houses down there that belonged to the pocketbook company. Whoever started the fire used a lot of gasoline or something and the place went up like a fireball, Bub Bailey said."
"And John's body was badly burned?"
Sandifer shook and started to lose it again. "They could tell it was John because his wallet was left on the curb out front with a note in it. And from his wounded foot and- they're going to check on other things, dental records and things like that. Ann told them which dentist." He blew his nose in the bandanna.
"What did this note say that was stuck in the wallet?"
"They showed it to me but they kept it and they kept the wallet. It was horrible. The note said-it was printed in big letters on a piece of typing paper-it said, 'This is what happens to assholes who invade people's privacy.
' "
"That's plain enough. It tends to confirm the motive."
"Why else would anybody do it?" Sandifer said. "Who else would want to kill John?"
"Can you think of anyone?"
"No, it must have been one of the people he outed. Or more than one of them. They'd've had to drag John out of here. He had a gun and he wouldn't have gone without a struggle. Maybe there were two, or even three or four."
"Where is the gun now?"
"I haven't seen it. I'll have to look."
"Did the police question the neighbors?"
"Chief Bailey went around himself. He said nobody saw or heard any fight or anything violent."
I said, "What are these, pod people around here? Nobody comes or goes, or sees or hears anything."
"They're elderly," Sandifer said. "They stay in with their air conditioners and their televisions on."
"What did you tell Bailey about the threats John received? You can be sure he'll question everybody who ever threatened John to find out where they were tonight-and last night when John was shot in the foot, and this morning at the time of the fire. You might even get Bailey believing that the other so-called attempts were real. I guess I'm glad you told me the truth, but I'm not crazy about knowing your dirty little politically-far-too-correct secret and having to pretend to Bub Bailey that I don't."
Timmy, who had sat silently scowling through my en tire exchange with Sandifer, suddenly piped up. "I'm not crazy about being in on it either."
This was why I hardly ever brought him along on business. Tonight had been a lapse. I said, "But now you are in on it, so let's just get on with the more important questions."
He looked away in disgust.
I said to Sandifer, "What names did you give Bailey?"
"Just the ones on the list John made up of people who threatened him-Slinger and Linkletter and those. And I gave him a complete set of Cityscapes and Queerscreeds with John's outing columns. I didn't mention any of the anonymous calls though, or all the people in the files. Do you think I should have brought them up?"
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