Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Mount Etna has no sense of humor at all.

  Corollary to all this, of course, is the quality of medical service provided—total security is cold comfort if the doctors on staff got their diplomas by mail order. The men who endowed Mount Etna could afford to hire the very best. Results were in no way surprising.

  Despite its background—indeed, as its direct result—Mount Etna Hospital-Medical Center is now recognized throughout the world as one of the miniature gems of medical science.

  In size, Mount Etna is classed merely as a regional hospital with (very) limited teaching facilities and a research program peculiarly devoted to the allied fields of dental and reconstructive (plastic) surgery. Yet in these selected fields, its work is always well beyond the leading edge of the art elsewhere...and other specialties are represented not only by a truly top-notch attending staff resident in the vicinity, but by commanding names from other parts of the world who are on call for immediate consultation or personal services as need may arise.

  It is, withal, a fine and thoroughly discreet place to be sick when you can afford the very best.

  And Sam Goines had the price...

  Walking through the lobby, I glanced around for the traditional information desk and finally managed to pick out a likely-looking facility, complete with exquisitely groomed attendant, partially hidden in a copse of artificial desert vegetation near the elevators.

  But we didn’t have to ask directions.

  Before my eyeballing of the area was half–completed, a beefy individual had detached himself from one of the couches to approach Corner Pocket with a few quiet words in which a number was not quite audible. Mission accomplished, he returned to his assigned duty of guarding the hospital’s frontal access route and we followed what I presumed were his directions to Sam Goines’s floor.

  Security there was tighter and more evident; hall guards were uniformed and openly armed. But they knew Corner Pocket and decided after only a question or two that I might safely be permitted to accompany him. Goines, they said, was in the intensive care wing on the far side of the building, and with the ease of long practice, Corner Pocket traversed the rabbit warren of corridors leading there. He had been a cop in Las Vegas for most of his adult life.

  Access to the ICU, however, involved a different set of procedures altogether.

  Mount Etna Hospital–Medical Center, it seemed, had more than one intensive care unit and more than one surgical floor. This was the one set aside for patients whose “special circumstances” exposed them to risks other than those common to medical practice. Somebody had watched the hospital sequence from The Godfather and taken it all as gospel. This was the floor for hoods.

  The nurse in charge knew Corner Pocket by sight, but still telephoned the main admissions desk for permission to allow him through the door, and I had to hold still for a careful and professional body search before being allowed to accompany him inside.

  “Nothing personal,” the nurse said, grinning a little as she groped my crotch for a concealed weapon. “All part of the VIP service in this part of the building.”

  It felt pretty personal to me, but I didn’t say so and waited patiently, trying to look nonchalant, until she was finished.

  “Okay,” she said at last. “You’re here for Mr. Goines, and he should be conscious again in the next hour or so. But no one is to go into his room, or even near it, until the doctor—and Mrs. Goines—give permission. Clear?”

  We said it was and waited while she went back behind the desk counter and pushed the little electric button that opened the double door.

  The unit’s main monitor station was at the far end of the corridor, but there was a pint-size waiting room just inside the doors, fitted with predictably expensive carpeting and functional-plus couches fronted by a bare little coffee table that seemed to have been dragged into the picture from somewhere else. It seemed well designed for its purpose, which was to keep the nearest and dearest in one place and out of the hair of the working staff until such time as someone was ready to deliver a progress report or bad news bulletin.

  Just beyond, at the edge of the holding pen, two women stood with heads together in conversation so deep and quiet that they did not immediately notice our arrival. One of them was a nurse, starchy and official and clipboard-bearing in hospital whites, complete with crepe-soled white shoes and what struck me as a rather oddly shaped cap.

  The other was Sam’s wife, Mrs. Moira Fonteyn Goines.

  Maxey.

  I had been expecting to see her, of course. Corner Pocket had told me she was in town, and the ICU door-guardian nurse had intimated that she was on the premises, and even if the rumors about a rift between her and Sam were true, she would certainly be at the hospital and waiting here, and I had thought I was prepared. Yet seeing her again was an almost physical shock. As always.

  I hadn’t thought it would be that way.

  Her back was toward me, and it had been more than ten years, and memory is supposed to be a liar. Childhood houses get smaller and meaner when you go back to see them again in adulthood, and old friends are fatter or thinner or smarter or duller. Nothing ever stays the way you left it, and sometimes it is hard to associate old names and places after a while. I had half expected to have trouble recognizing the woman I had known a long time ago in a very different world.

  But nothing had changed, and I suppose a small part of what I was feeling must have shown in my face because the nurse suddenly became aware of us and nudged Maxey, who turned her head to give me the full ultra-light power of the blue-violet eyes I had never quite forgotten.

  There was a moment of pure paralysis.

  But it went on for too long.

  “Hello, Maxey,” I said, responding more to the urge to make a noise in a silent place than from any need for oral communication. Only two words; not at all impressive or original. But the effect was pure disaster.

  The eyes widened to full bore, then fluttered an unmistakable distress signal as all color drained from her face. A tiny, almost despairing whimper emerged from her barely parted lips and then the knees turned traitor, refusing to support the elegant torso.

  Moving quickly, I was just able to prevent violent contact with the floor, and the last traces of consciousness seemed to have vanished by the time my arms were in position under her legs and back.

  It seemed to be my morning for giving people the vapors...

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Other ages have been violent. Others have been perverse.

  The Nazis were not the inventors of genocide, only its best-advertised practitioners. We have been killing one another by every means at our disposal since the beginning of time...

  NINE

  I carried Maxey to the nearer couch and noted that it was, as usual, too short for her. But this time her extra height was an asset, and I used the obstructing couch arm to prop her feet higher than her head.

  Some got it, some ain’t.

  Dealing with me had sent the Voice of Heaven on Earth on an extended trip to never-never land, and now it was Maxey’s turn. Perhaps I had stumbled onto a whole new branch of anesthesiology. It was an irrelevant thought and an idiotic one, but no more irrelevant or idiotic than anything else that had happened in the hours since midnight. What with one thing and another, events were beginning to take on a kind of dreamlike quality, a sense of being a half step removed from the real world. And the illusion was enhanced when I stepped back to let the nurse, who had been standing just behind me, give Maxey the benefit of her professional expertise.

  She was gone. Vanished.

  What in the hell was going on here?

  But I was given no time to wonder about it. Maxey’s breathing had deepened and her eyes were beginning rapid movement behind the lids, and I bent close to take her pulse. It was strong and steady. Unthinkingly, I moved my right hand to brush away the curl of hair that seemed ready to crawl into the corner of her mouth, and my hand was on her cheek whe
n the eyes blinked open, focused, closed tightly, and then hammered me again with that peculiarly penetrating shade of blue.

  I am not really the strong, silent type. That’s just in John Wayne movies. And poker. Confronted with an awkward social situation, my natural tendency is to fill the world with words, and I had been ready to do that until the moment came to say something and then there didn’t seem to be anything to say. My hand was still on Maxey’s cheek and I took it away in a hurry, and then there was another awkward pause and she finally had to start the conversation without me.

  “Preacher?” she said.

  “That’s what they call me.”

  “Preacher...”

  There was something more in her voice than the lingering travel lag of the journey back into the world. She blinked again and moistened her lips and swallowed.

  “Lying...bastards!” she said, with more conviction than had been there before. She shifted on the couch, ready to sit up and rejoin the group, but my hand was still in the right spot to keep her horizontal and I used it. Gently.

  She hardly seemed to notice.

  “Bastards,” she repeated. “Bastards...told me you were... dead!”

  I grinned at her and made a burlesque vampire face. Childish, but I couldn’t resist. Maxey always did bring out the clown in me—which might, I suppose, be one of the reasons she wound up marrying someone else.

  “A moment of pain, my dear,” I said, doing a very passable Lugosi. “And then...eternal life!”

  She didn’t smile. “Not funny,” she said.

  I guess it wasn’t. But it was better than telling her what had been going through my mind as I carried her to the couch.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I’m not dead. Honest...”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and opened them again and then managed the very smallest of smiles. “Nope,” she said. “Still there.”

  I returned the smile with interest. “Who said I wasn’t?” I asked.

  She frowned a little, trying to remember, but gave up without too much effort. “Some damn doctor, I guess,” she said. “This place is full of them.”

  “Hospitals are like that.”

  Maxey made a move to sit up, and I started to restrain her but thought better of it and let her follow her own inclination. Unless she had changed a lot in ten years, she would do as she wanted anyway—and touching her was absolutely out until I had myself under better control. The preacher’s memories were getting entirely out of hand.

  “Said you got shot,” she said when she was upright, back braced into the angle of the couch arm. “Up there in that damn penthouse. With Sam.”

  The name brought everything back into perspective, and I followed the direction of Maxey’s involuntary glance to the nearer of a two-room arrangement on the left side of the corridor.

  “We heard he might be conscious soon,” Corner Pocket said.

  It was the first sound out of him since we entered the ICU, and it seemed to focus Maxey’s attention on him. She looked a question in his direction and I moved, belatedly, to make introductions.

  “Mrs. Goines,” I said, taking the semi-formal tack, “the inquisitive gentleman at my elbow is named Gerald Hope Singleton. He’s chief investigator for the Clark County district attorney’s office, and he never believes anything anyone tells him, so mind what you say when he’s around. You’re as safe with him as you’d be with Torquemada.”

  The smile that cut off the rest of the ritual came direct from Corner Pocket’s own personal Greenland glacier, but it warmed quickly enough when he turned to point it at Maxey. She had that effect on people.

  “Please, call me Corner Pocket,” he said in a voice that would have spread nicely on muffins. “Most people do, and I’m out of practice with the other name.”

  She smiled back. “I know just what you mean,” she said. “My name’s Moira. But it’s been a long time since anyone who knows me called me anything but Maxey.”

  It was the truth and it was a lie and it was getting to be the kind of scene that causes acne and tooth decay, and it might have gotten even worse but for an interruption provided by the nurse at the monitor desk down the hall.

  Even during the introductions, the part of my mind that attends to peripheral vision had noted a sudden increase in activity there. The nurse was standing up, pushing what were probably reset buttons to check one set of monitors. And now she pressed a different kind of switch on her desk and spoke urgently into a microphone that seemed to be attached to the hospital public address system.

  “Dr. Elmer,” she said with an undercurrent of urgency strong enough to survive a passage through the loudspeakers. “Five-Jone. Stat!”

  The words meant nothing to me, but their effect on Corner Pocket was immediate.

  He knew the hospital, and would be acquainted with the codes they used to transmit information quickly without frightening the visitors, and now he was looking toward the room I had decided was probably Sam’s. I noted the number on the door: J-1. And this was the fifth floor.

  “Dr. Elmer?” I inquired.

  “Code for the crash cart,” he said.

  At that instant, the doors to the unit burst open and two men in hospital greens brushed past, pushing what looked like a wheeled telephone switchboard equipped with extra wiring and a pair of metal Ping-Pong paddles.

  They went into Sam’s room, followed a moment later by a tubby little man wearing a white lab coat over an expensive-looking pin-striped vest and matching trousers.

  “That’s...Dr. Morse,” Maxey said in a voice that was suddenly smaller and more apprehensive than it had been a moment before. “He said Sam was better. He said...”

  She stopped talking in midsentence, and I don’t think she knew she had been speaking aloud. No more words came, and we sat and stood and knelt in the positions we had occupied for several minutes, watching the doorway.

  A lot seemed to be going on inside.

  No shouts or alarms, and except for the haste of the crash-cart crew and the doctor as they entered the room, nothing much was visible except for occasional brief and muted flashes of light reflected by the polished surface of the door. But there were occasional peaks in the volume of the vocal exchanges, though no actual words could be distinguished, and at times we could hear the electric hum-and-thump of what I knew from past hospital experience was a heart defibrillator in action.

  Corner Pocket finally broke the spell.

  “That’s why they call it intensive care,” he said, making an obvious effort to relieve tension. “Something comes up, you get quick action.”

  As a social gesture it was only partially successful, but it ended our stasis, and I finally got up from my crouch and Maxey licked her lips and made unnecessary motions to smooth non-existent wrinkles in her skirt and to pull it below its designed position on her thigh. Such excess motion and the uneasiness it indicated were a measure of the concern we all felt. But the minutes passed and activity in the room seemed to subside a bit, and I think we were all beginning to breathe a little easier when the humming finally stopped and the man Maxey had identified as Sam’s doctor emerged from the room.

  His face told it all, and I’m sure Maxey could read the message as clearly as Corner Pocket or I. But the habit of denial and the impulse of hope are strong, and the age-old scene had to be played out to its miserable end.

  The doctor knew Corner Pocket and nodded absently in lieu of greeting.

  I got a more thorough going-over, but my presence inside the doors of the ICU and my position, seated beside Maxey, seemed to satisfy him that I was part of the group, and he paid me no further attention.

  “Mrs. Goines...” he said.

  Maxey’s expression was tense and tightly controlled. Reaching out with my mind, I could feel the effort it cost her to keep it that way and admire the force of will involved. The earlier faintness seemed to have passed entirely.

  “Mr. Goines seemed to be doing all right after we got him stable,”
the doctor went on. “The vital signs were strong and, as I told Inspector Singleton here, we thought he would be conscious again about now.”

  He paused to lick his lips, and I think he was hoping someone would say the rest of it for him. But we waited him out and at last he went on.

  “But something happened a few minutes ago,” he said. “The monitors showed a sudden drop in blood pressure, and the heartbeat became erratic. The nurse reacted promptly and correctly. She called for the crash cart and I was on the floor and came as quickly as possible and everything that could be done was done. But it failed.

  “I am very sorry to have to tell you that your husband simply slipped away from us.

  “Sam Goines is dead...”

  Dr. Morse paused for a moment, letting the information sink in. I needed the time. So did Maxey.

  Her eyes were wide again and everything important had emptied out of her face, leaving it in its original bone-supported perfection. Like the surface of a statue. And just as reactive.

  Not knowing—exactly—what was going on inside her made it nearly impossible for me to offer much help. But I wasn’t sure Maxey needed it. Despite her unusual height and the near-arrogant assurance that goes with trained showgirl posture and carriage, one of Maxey’s most attractive qualities had always been a hint of vulnerability visible just below the perfectly manicured surface. It was a quality she shared with Monroe and Liz and all the other power ladies of the screen whose acting ability was always dwarfed and denigrated by their sheer visual impact.

  But in Maxey’s case, I had reason to know that the defenselessness had always been more apparent than real.

  The woman I had known was a stainless-steel spring, resilient and capable, dressed up in a body that she subjected to the kind of professional maintenance and detached control that a banker would give to his investment portfolio or a race-car driver to his Formula-1.