(1969) The Seven Minutes (79 page)

And then, beyond the driveway lights, he saw a movement. Someone was hurrying along the side of the house, and suddenly the figure of a woman broke into the open, darted across the lawn and onto the driveway, and it was Maggie.

She was beside the car door, and she was breathless. ‘Oh, God, I was scared.’

‘Get in,’ he ordered her.

She was in the car, beside him. ‘I got into the house okay, Mike, but then I had to hide from some practical nurse they’ve just hired to replace me. She was bringing Aunt Ethel downstairs. Then finally I was able to sneak into the study. But as I was coming out, Aunt Ethel spotted me. She knew I’d been fired, and I had to tell her I’d, come back to get some personal belongings I’d forgotten. Then she wanted to talk - she went on and on about how I shouldn’t have fought with her husband, and how sorry she was that she couldn’t make him change his mind about me. Time was going, and I was dying. Then I heard the noise outside, your cars colliding, and I told her I’d better see what had happened. I rushed out the back way and circled the house, and there you were with Uncle Frank. So I ducked behind the house again. When I heard him drive in, I crept along the side yard, and when I heard the front door close I made my dash. Whew. And here I am.’

Barrett had wheeled his convertible and was speeding down the hill. When they neared the gaspline station, he pulled up beside the curb and parked.

He held out one hand. ‘Have you got it, Maggie?’

She smiled, and pulled a postcard out of her purse, and laid it daintily in his outstretched palm. ‘Here it is. The keys to the kingdom.’

He studied the glossy color reproduction of the Sunnyside Convalescent Sanitarium on the front. He turned it over. To the right was Frank Griffith’s name and address. To the left, the space for a message was filled to the last millimeter with crowded sentence after sentence of antlike words written painstakingly in a pinched hand. Only the signature was easily legible. The signature read ‘Cassie McGraw.’

“The message and the signature are in different hands,’ said

Barrett. ‘Let’s see if the signature is for real.’

From his inside pocket he removed the photostats he had had made at Parktown College. He unfolded them. He took the one that bore Cassie’s signature as it appeared on the back of the old photograph of O’Flanagan, Jadway, and Cassie in Paris, and he set it alongside Cassie’s alleged recent signature on the postcard.

‘Well ?’ Maggie asked him.

‘The early one is firm, and this one is as wavering as a cardiogram, but both have the same heavy flat-topped r’s, the same sort of arrow-like dotting of the i’s, the same distinctive downstroke, the same -‘ He looked up and smiled. ‘Yes, the signatures are by the same person. We’ve found Cassie McGraw.’

‘Thank God.’

‘And thank you.’ He started the car once more. ‘Where should I take you ?’

‘I was hoping you’d take me home,’

‘Home?’

‘With you.’

He was about to release the brakes. ‘I’ve got only one bed, Maggie, one double bed.’

‘Double means for two, doesn’t it ?’

He covered her hands resting in her lap with his own hand. ‘Did I tell you I love you?’

‘Why don’t you tell me later tonight?’

T should leave for Chicago later tonight.’

Maggie was close to him now, and her lips were parted, and they kissed, tongues touching. Then she whispered, ‘Can’t Cassie wait until tomorrow ?’

Barrett released her. ‘She’ll wait until tomorrow.’ And then he released the brakes, and they were free and they were moving.

Chicago was not what came between Los Angeles and New York, he decided. It was distinctive.

So many unfriendly eyes had seen it as unbeautiful. Chicago was Carl Sandburg’s ‘Hog-butcher for the world’ and Arnold Bennett’s ‘suburb of Warsaw’ and Rudyard Kipling’s place of ‘dirt’ and ‘savages.’ To others who knew it better, Chicago was also the Chicago Tribune and Vachel Lindsay, the Everleigh Sisters and Jane Addams, Al Capone and Edgar Lee Masters, Samuel Insull and Marshall Field. To others, Chicago was the Loop, the El, the University, the Illinois Central, and it was Sears, Roebuck, and Lincoln Park, and Lake Shore Drive, and Cook County, the Windy City, squalid, attractive, dreary, invigorating, the city you always left when you were very young and that somehow remained in your bones.

Yes it was all things good and bad like many cities and most men, but one thing it was not, Mike Barrett decided as he observed it from his taxicab window. It was not where you would expect to find Miss Cassie McGraw, onetime resident of Montparnasse and Paris, France.

But here she was and here he was, and in minutes they would be confronting each other. And this city of his birth, known to him only as a dim nostalgia for his youth, was suddenly beautiful to his eyes.

It had been daybreak when he had gone from his apartment and Maggie, and taken off from Los Angeles, and now it was early Tuesday afternoon in Chicago. In the sky, the uncertain sun had argued briefly with a horde of bellicose clouds and lost, and the day was gray and gusty and challenging. He had already traveled most of the distance between the Ambassador East Hotel and the Sunnyside Convalescent Sanitarium, which was located on the edge of Chicago’s North Side, and he felt alive and expectant.

Rolling up the taxicab window, he shut the city from his mind, with somewhat more difficulty asked Maggie to wait for any further mental attentiveness (knowing she’d understand), tried not to think of Abe Zelkin’s fruitless task in court today, and finally offered all of his concentration to the impending meeting with Cassie McGraw.

Almost automatically, as if it were a permanent habit by now, he brought the postcard out of his pocket and reread the ant-words addressed to Frank Griffith:

Saw in paper here where I live & read about yr son & trial & yr-attack on The Seven Minutes & blaming the author. I was Mr Jadway’s friend. I inspired book. I swear on life of our daughter Judith - who now serves Lord as nun, as her father once served human freedom - that Mr Jadway wrote book as artist, out of love & desire to liberate young of tomorrow. Book could not harm yr son, could improve & save him in future. Leroux & others don’t know truth. Believe me. Be charitable.

Yrs truly, Cassie McGraw

I believe you, Cassie, he wanted to say and would say, whatever your truth. But will you believe me that the dead past must no 1 onger continue dead and buried? Will you have the courage to shed anonymity, risk scandal, and come forth to save the living?

Will you help us, Cassie?

They had halted, and the cabbie had stopped the meter and twisted around to announce the fare.

While groping for his wallet, Mike Barrett bent his head and peered through the window. Convalescent hospitals were not unfamiliar to him. His mother, in her last years, had vegetated in three different ones in the East. What he saw now merely confirmed what he had known, that they all possessed the same facade, a one-storied, low-slung, whitewashed, locked-in look - except that this one was more stylish and expensive than the average, and there were brilliant potted geraniums on either side of the high glass doors.

Barrett paid the cabbie and tipped him, then stepped quickly out of the taxi, strode up the short cement walk, and entered the Sunnyside Convalescent Sanitarium.

Summoning up memories of the sanitariums of his past, he had prepared himself for the inevitable faint odor that was a combination of urine and detergents. To his surprise and pleasure, what assailed him instead was the smell of lilacs. He had come up a carpeted ramp to the broad main corridor, and ahead of him the glass doors to the enclosed patio showed that the patio was rimmed with boxes of flowers in full bloom, and in the middle of this profusion was a cluster of metal tables sprouting brightly colored umbrellas. Except for one elderly gentleman wearing a hat, a bulky sweater, and baggy slacks and nodding in a chair, the patio was unoccupied.

From a reception desk to the left of the patio doors, a well-groomed, well-bloused, chubby female receptionist was watching him curiously.

Mike Barrett went over to her, introduced himself, and explained that he had just flown in from Los Angeles and was here to see the manager of the sanitarium. Minutes later, after inquiries on the

public-address system, after being guided past the physiotherapy room, the vast recreation room with its droning television sets, the hanging cork bulletin board, he was inside the manager’s claustrophobic office and seated across from a Mr Holliday.

The manager resembled a clean-shaven Christ had the Saviour once been an accountant. His set smile was gracious but harried, a smile reserved for those callers who had not made appointments yet might be relatives of potential patients. He fingered his Rotary Club button as he spoke.

‘All the way from Los Angeles,’ he was saying, ‘to see me? Or do I misunderstand? Do you have someone here with us?’

‘I wanted to see you as well as someone you have living here.’

‘Los Angeles. I was there once about five years ago for a convention,’ said Mr Holliday, reminiscing fondly, and Barrett knew that he had been there without his wife. ‘Didn’t have time to see much, except Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. Great sanitarium city. SRO all over the place.’

‘I guess I never thought of it that way,’ said Barrett with a smile.

‘Well, now -‘ Mr Holliday moved the adding machine slightly on his desk and emptied an ashtray into the wastebasket. ‘Well, Mr Barrett, what can I do for you?’

‘I want to see one of your patients - or, for that matter, one of your employees. I don’t know which she is.’

Mr Holliday had taken up a pencil. ‘Her name?’

‘Cassie McGraw.’

The manager wrinkled his forehead. ‘Caucasian?’

*Yes.’

‘Except for two head nurses, all of our help is colored. So that would rule them out. So that means a patient, except the name doesn’t ring a bell.’ He reached up and unhooked a clip of papers from the wall beside his desk. ‘McGraw, you said ? Let me see.’ He flipped over the first pages, then with his pencil went down the pages of M’s. ‘We’ve got more than one hundred patients in the san right now, but I’m sorry, no McGraw’s, no one with a name remotely resembling McGraw. Perhaps the person you are referring to was someone who was here previously and isn’t with us any longer. There’s a constant turnover in these sanitariums, you know. The result of paranoia and guilts. Old people are brought in, and they resent it and resist what they feel is abandonment and confinement, and they fancy every kind of persecution. When visitors, usually relatives, come once or twice a week, they hear continual grievances and complaints against the administration. The relatives have built-in guilts to start with, so they are conditioned to believe what they hear. Sooner or later they move their mothers or fathers to another sanitarium, and when the same complaints occur again and then again, two or three times, they finally get the message. It’s not us. It’s the old-age syndrome. So likely your Cassie McGraw was here once -‘

‘Mr Holliday, she was here two and a half weeks ago.’

‘Really? Well, let’s see our checkouts in the last month.’ He opened one desk drawer, then another, until he found the right batch of papers. He went down the top page slowly, frowned, and returned the papers to the drawer. ‘No one by that name was here two and a half weeks ago or at any time in the past month. I’m sorry, Mr Barrett. Prehaps you have the wrong sanitarium.’

Barrett took the postcard, as well as the photostats from Parktown College, out of his pocket. He handed the postcard to the manager. ‘Is that yours?’

Mr Holliday glanced at the photograph on the front of the card. ‘That’s us. We supply these to our patients as a convenience, and also hand them out to visitors as advertisements.’

‘Turn it over.’ As the manager did so, Barrett added, ‘Cassie McGraw signed one of your postcards - it is definitely her signature - and she clearly states that she’s living here in your sanitarium.’

“This isn’t easy to read,’ muttered Mr Holliday as he read. ‘Yes, it appears she is a patient -‘

‘Of course, the message is written in someone else’s hand, but the signature is her own. Can you explain that?’

The manager glanced up. ‘Yes. That’s not the least bit unusual. Most of our elderly patients are arthritic or have unsteady hands, so they’ll ask a visitor to write. Actually, different organizations send volunteers around every few weeks, also, to assist our senior citizens in this sort of thing, writing for them, reading aloud to them, entertaining, so this was probably dictated to some visitor and then signed by the patient herself.’

‘Are most of the volunteers from one particular oganization, so that I might - ?’

‘No hope of tracing the person who did this. There are dozens of philanthropic organizations, hundreds of volunteers.’

‘But on the date that was written?’

‘Well, I see your point. Yes, I’ll check the head nurse on that.’ He resumed reading the postcard message, and at the end he sought some elusive recollection, and all at once his head came up fast. ‘Jadway,’ he said. ‘It struck a chord, but now I remember. It’s in the papers all the time. That censorship trial.’

‘I’m the attorney for the defendant,’ said Barrett.

Mr Holliday was suddenly respectful and eager. ‘We-ll,’ said Mr Holliday, ‘why didn’t you say so in the first place? We don’t get celebrities here every day. Of course I’ll do anything in my power to help you.’ He waved the postcard. ‘Has this got anything to do with your trial ?’

‘Everything,’ said Barrett.

Immediately he launched into an explanation of Cassie Mc-Graw’s background, her relation with J J Jadway, and her importance to the defense’s case.

Mr Holliday was as deeply attentive to Barrett’s words as he might have been to a legal drama being enacted on television. When Barrett was through, the manager said, ‘She was something, wasn’t she? But I’m afraid we’ve never had anyone that colorful in a place like this.’

‘Why not ? Elderly people who are alone, no matter how colorful or famous or infamous they were in their early years, have to wind up somewhere. Cassie must be in her sixties by now. She may be infirm. There is evidence that she has no one to take care of her. So why shouldn’t she be here?’