“Freshman year, I didn’t get Shylock either, and I’m half-Jewish.”
Hardy clucked. “No wonder you became a cop. To fight injustice.”
“Well,” Glitsky deadpanned, “it was either that or girls liked the uniform.”
“Your school did a lot of Shakespeare.”
Glitsky slowly savored a peanut. “It was a different era,” he said. “The old days.”
35
Rajan Bhutan gripped the telephone receiver as if his life depended upon it. He sat at the small square table in his kitchen that he used for eating and reading, for his jigsaw puzzles and bridge games. This evening, the tabletop was bare except for a drinking glass that he’d filled with tap water against the thirst that he knew would threaten to choke off his words when he began to speak.
Since Chatterjee had died, he had been continually downsizing, winnowing out the superficialities most people lived with and even felt they needed. Now the simplicity of his life was monastic.
The two-room studio apartment in which he lived was at the intersection of Cole and Frederick, within walking distance of Portola. It consisted of a tiny, dark bedroom and a slightly larger—though no one would call it large—kitchen. The only entrance to the unit was a single door without an entryway of any kind. The framing itself was flush to the stucco outside and all but invisible. Painted a cracked and peeling red, and seemingly stuck willy-nilly onto the side of the four-story apartment building, the door itself might have been the trompe l’oeil work of a talented artist with a sense of humor. Because of the slope of the street, most of the studio itself was actually below street level, and this made the place perennially cold, dark, and damp.
Rajan didn’t mind.
Rent control would keep the place under seven hundred dollars for at least several more years. He had a hot plate for cooking his rice and one-pot curries. The plumbing was actually quite good. There was regular hot water in the kitchen sink and in the walk-in shower. The toilet flushed. The half refrigerator stuffed under the Formica countertop on the windowless front wall held enough vegetables to last a week, sometimes more. A portable space heater helped in the mornings.
Now, as the first ring sounded through the phone, he raised his head to the one window, covered with a yellowing muslin cloth. Outside, it wouldn’t be dark for another hour or more, but the shade cast by his own building had already cloaked the block in dusk. A couple walked by, laughing, and he could make out the silhouettes of their legs as they passed—at this point, the bottom of the window was no more than twenty inches above the sidewalk.
The muscles around his mouth twitched, either with nerves or with something like the sense memory of what smiling had been like. A tiny movement on the Formica counter drew his gaze there—a cockroach crossing the chessboard. For a year now, he’d been enjoying the same game, conducted by mail with Chatterjee’s father in Delhi. He thought in another two moves—maybe less than a month—he could force a stalemate, when for a long while it looked as though he’d be checkmated. He believed that a stalemate was far preferable to a defeat—those who disagreed with him, he felt, missed the point.
The phone rang again. He ran his other hand over the various grains of the table, which was his one indulgence. He had always loved woods—he and Chatterjee had done their apartment mostly in teak from the Scandinavian factory stores. Cheap and durable, he had loved the lightness, the feel of it, the grain. They used a sandalwood oil rub that he could still smell sometimes when he meditated.
But he had changed now over the years and this table was something altogether different—it was a game table of some mixed dark hardwoods laid in a herringbone fashion. Each place had a drawer built into the right-hand corner, which players could pull out and rest drinks upon. He hosted his bridge group every four weeks, and the other three men admired the sturdy, utilitarian, practical design.
“Hello. Ross residence.”
“Hello. Is Dr. Malachi Ross at home, if you please?”
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“My name is Rajan Bhutan. He may not know me, but please tell him that I am a nurse at Portola Hospital attached to the intensive care unit. He might remember the name. It is most urgent that we speak.”
“Just a moment, please.”
Another wait. Rajan closed his eyes and tried to will his mind into a calm state. It would not do, not at all, to sound frightened or nervous. He was simply conveying information and an offer. He straightened his back in his chair. Drawing a long and deep breath down into the center of his body, he let it rest there until it became warm and he could release it slowly. He took a sip of water, swallowed, cleared his throat.
“This is Dr. Ross. Who is this again, please?”
“Dr. Ross, I am Rajan Bhutan, from Portola Hospital. Perhaps you remember, I was in the ICU with Dr. Kensing when Mr. Markham died. I am sorry to bother you at home.”
“How did you get my home phone number?” he asked. “It’s unlisted.”
“It can be found if it’s needed. If one knows where to look.”
After a short silence, Ross sounded slightly cautious. “All right. How can I help you? The maid said it was urgent.”
Rajan reached for the water again and drank quickly. “It is that. I need to speak with you frankly. Are you in a place you can talk freely?”
Ross’s tone kissed the bounds of aggressiveness. “What’s this about?”
“It is something we need to discuss.”
“That’s what we’re doing now but I’m afraid I don’t have too much more time. My wife and I are going out in a few minutes. If it can wait—”
“No! I’m sorry, but it cannot. It has to be now or I will speak to the police on my own.”
After a short pause, Ross said, “Just a minute.” Rajan heard his footsteps retreating, a door closing, the steps coming back. “All right, I’m listening. But make it fast.”
“As you may know, the police are looking into the deaths now of several patients at the ICU that they are calling homicides.”
“Of course I’ve heard about that. I run the company. I’ve been monitoring it closely, but that has nothing to do with me personally.”
“I’m afraid it has, instead, to do with me, Doctor. The police have talked to me more than once. I am the only nurse who has worked the shifts when several of the deaths have occurred. I think they will decide I have killed these people.”
He listened while Ross took a couple of breaths. Then, “If you did, you’ll get no sympathy from me.”
“No, I would not expect that. No more than you would get it from me if they charged you with killing Mr. Markham or the others.”
This time the pause lasted several seconds. “What are you saying?”
“I think you know what I am saying. We would not be talking still if you did not know. I saw you.”
“You saw me what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Please, Doctor, please,” Rajan said. He could feel his throat catching, and reached for the water. “We don’t need to waste time in denials. We don’t have time. Instead, I have a proposal for you.”
“You do? How amusing. You’ve obviously got an agile mind, Mr. Bhutan. So I’d be curious to hear what it was, although your premise is fatally flawed.”
“If it is, we shall see. My idea is only this—you may remember the day after Christmas, four months ago, when you did a drop-in at the ICU? Is that still familiar to you? I was on that shift and there was a patient named Shirley Watrous.”
“And the police think you killed her? Is that it?”
Rajan ignored the question. “But you were there with me. I keep a daily diary, but also I remember. You and I had a pleasant discussion about working during the holiday season. People don’t like it, but it is in many ways preferable to the family obligations and raised expectations. You may remember.”
“Maybe I do, but what’s your point? Was that the day after Christmas? I don’t remember that.”
“But you must, you see.”
“I’m hanging up now,” Ross said.
But he did not, and Rajan went on. “I didn’t even realize what you were doing, of course. And then the police told me the names of some of the others. And I realized you’d been there for all of them, and what you’d done.
“I feel like a fool, really. Perhaps I always knew, but how could one in my place ever even suggest that you were doing…what you were doing? I, not even a doctor.
“And who was to say it was the wrong thing, to put these people beyond pain, even if I had been sure? No one even questioned the deaths before, so how could I accuse you when everyone else seemed to take these things for granted?”
Rajan’s clipped tones were speeding up and he forced himself to slow down. “Then when I saw you with Mr. Markham’s IV, I thought again I must have been wrong. I did not want to know. I was too afraid to say anything. Then I was afraid because I had not said anything sooner. But now I am most afraid of all, because I know if I accuse you, you will accuse me. But I was not at the hospital for all these killings, and I know you had to be, because you did them.”
He was at the end. He closed his eyes for the strength to finish. “So please, Doctor. Please. You must tell the police I was with you when these people died. You will be my alibi. And, of course, I shall be yours.”
“You can’t be serious?” Ross’s tone was harsh, filled with disbelief and even outrage.
But he was still on the line. Rajan had seen similar bluster among the vanquished during bridge tournaments, and even chess games, when in fact they had known all was lost.
“Your nerve amazes me, Mr. Bhutan. Are you sure that’s all you want?”
“No, not quite. I’m afraid I will have to be leaving the country soon. So I will also need to have fifty thousand dollars, please. Tonight. In cash.”
Panic was the devil.
Ross had a core belief that it was a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate acts. His great talent, he sometimes thought, was in recognizing the desperation of others.
Emergency at the office, he told Nancy. Something to do with an audit. Yeah, even Friday night. These people worked all the time. He had to go in, but he’d make it up to her. Tell the Sullivans he was sorry—to make up for the last-minute cancellation of their dinner date, maybe they’d fly them all up to Tahoe next weekend.
In his office, behind the locked door, he was pulling the tenth pitiable little stack of bills out of his safe. This man Bhutan…he shook his head, almost smiling at the man’s naivete. Fifty thousand dollars for what he knew? That was yet another problem with most people—very few had a clue about value. If it were Ross, it would have been ten times that, and a bargain at the price. But perhaps Bhutan really was being shrewd. If he accused Ross, Ross would indeed accuse him, but that would lead to awkward questions about why he had not spoken up sooner.
Just for a moment, he stood stock-still, trying to remember. He had been alone in the room. He was certain. Bhutan had not come in until he was done. Could he really have seen him from the hall? Seen him without being seen?
Not that it was going to matter. He couldn’t take the chance that Bhutan would panic and talk to the police despite being paid. Or not panic and decide he needed more money. Or just do something stupid and give them both away.
And if Bhutan was bluffing, if he really hadn’t clearly seen Ross at the IV, so much the worse for him. He actually presented an excellent opportunity to resolve this increasingly sticky problem.
The bills would be back in here by tomorrow morning, although he would miss owning what he called his Bond gun. There was a certain charm in the Walther PPK that his father had chanced upon in a downtown gutter one evening, and had eventually given to him. He loved the secret sense of sin it gave him, the thrill of private power.
Carla had brought it all upon herself. “I know what you’ve been doing,” she told him in the hospital that morning. He was almost certain that she was referring to his second source of income, the kickbacks. But it might have been the other, the patients. He’d had a sense that Tim was closing in on that somehow. Checking his drop-in dates at the hospital. Asking questions he must have thought were subtle.
The accident had thrown Carla into a panic. And under that panic was an insane, inflexible resolve. There was no mistaking the hysterical edge to her control as he’d come up to her in the corridor outside the ICU. Seeing her husband smashed up, intubated, unconscious, had undone her. Ross walked up to her, ready with a comforting hug and some platitudes about bearing up and supporting each other. But her eyes had been wild and desperate as she whirled on him. “Don’t you dare insult me with your phony sympathy.”
“Carla? What?”
“Whatever happens here, you’re finished with us, Mal, with all of this. You think this will free you, don’t you? You think this will be the end of it.”
He tried again, a comforting hand on her arm.
“Don’t touch me! You’re not our friend. You’re not kidding me anymore. You’re not Tim’s friend and you neverhave been. Do you think he hasn’t told me what you’ve been doing? Well, now I know, and I will not forget. Whatever happens to him—whatever happens!—I promise you, I will take you down. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he was going to do to save the company from all you’ve done to destroy it, and if it’s the last thing I do, I will see that it happens.”
“Carla, please. You’re upset. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
But she’d kept on, sealing her own death sentence. “Even if Tim doesn’t pull through, I’ll owe it to his memory to take it to the board. Even to the police.”
After the explicit threat, did she think he wouldn’t act? Could she imagine he wouldn’t? Unless he acted swiftly, boldly, without mercy, he was done.
Knowing this and what he had to do, Ross first had to disarm her. He took her hands forcefully in both of his. They were eye to eye. “Carla. First let’s get through this. Let’s get Tim through it. I have made mistakes and I’m sorry for them. But so have we all. I promise you we’ll work it out. If I have to leave, so be it. But never say it has anything to do with our friendship. Nothing can touch that. That’s forever.”
The plan presented itself full-blown. Potassium would leave no trace, and the hospital’s PMs were hopelessly shoddy. If the medical examiner hadn’t autopsied Tim—and Ross had never envisioned that—the whole plan would have worked. He realized that if he could make it appear that Carla was distraught enough to kill herself and her family, the police would never even look for a murderer. He would use the gun Tim kept in his home office.
When he got to the house, the upstairs lights were out. He wanted the kids to be asleep so he would not have to see them. He would do that part in the dark. They would feel nothing, suspect nothing. Sleep.
But Carla stood inside the door and at first would notopen it to him. “There’s nothing to talk about, Mal. We’re all exhausted and at the end. We can meet tomorrow.”
But he’d worn her down. “Please, Carla. I know Tim must have told you some things, but we were working them out, just like we always have. I loved the man. I need to explain. I need you to understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand.”
“Then I need you, at least, to forgive me.”
And she’d paused a last time, then unlocked the chain. As he entered, he took the Walther from his pocket and told her they needed to walk quietly to the back of the house.
Now he would do it again. He had experience now. It had to look like suicide. It had to look as though Bhutan, knowing the police were onto him for all the murders at Portola, including Markham’s, chose to take the coward’s way out. That would close all the investigations.
He also had to make sure no one heard the shot, which he supposed would be louder with the Walther than Tim’s .22 had been.
First he would have to distract Bhutan, then use chloroform to put him out. Except it would stay in t
he system long enough to be detected. Maybe ether? He had ether in his medical bag right here. That would do, as well. And of course he could simply shoot him as though it had been a robbery attempt or something. But a suicide was far preferable. He’d have to consider his options on the drive over, then play the thing by ear.
Bhutan obviously thought the police were coming to get him at any moment. So he wanted fifty thousand dollars tonight. He was desperate and, being desperate, he was doomed to commit foolish acts, to make dangerous decisions.
Just like Tim, for example. He couldn’t get over Tim. When they’d both been humping to get the business up and running and there’d been so many opportunities to make hay under the table—much smaller potatoes than now, of course, and much of it in soft currencies and perks—theweekends in Napa or Mexico, the fine wines, the occasional corporate escorts for the convention parties when the wives couldn’t make it. Tim had willingly enough succumbed to those temptations, right along with him. But the first hard money payoff had scared him off. This, he thought, was wrong, where to Ross it was no different than what they’d been doing. In fact, it was better.
But Tim always wanted to believe that somewhere inside he was essentially an honest and good person, the fool. Hence all the agony he’d put himself through over wanting to schtup the admittedly sexy Ann Kensing. Ross couldn’t believe that the guy had nearly ruined his life over what should have been at most a playful dalliance. But, no, he’d been “in love,” whatever that meant. Stupid, stupid. But not as stupid as letting himself believe that just because Tim had decided not to take anybody’s dirty money, Ross was going to do the same thing. Oh sure, Tim had had his little crisis of conscience all those years ago and had come to Ross saying they had to stop—not just because it threatened the health of patients and the company, but because it was wrong. And Ross had pretended to go along. And why not? Why burden the self-righteous idiot? Why split the money with someone who didn’t want it? Ross knew the truth was that he wasn’t really harming any patients by taking the odious drug money. If Tim was happier living with the fiction that Ross had found the Lord with him, he’d let him enjoy his fantasy.
The Dismas Hardy Novels Page 93
