Flying Crows (7 page)

“The man grabbed a pistol from his belt and pointed it right at me, right,
it seemed to me, at a spot between my two eyes, both of which were at that
moment filling with fear and tears. I was certain I was about to die. At age
fourteen, my life was now ending. We all knew about the bushwhackers. I
had heard they loved to cut off pieces of Union soldiers they had killed and
keep them as souvenirs. What part of me would he chop off and display?”

Josh stopped and gave a slight pointed bow to the five or six Somerset
bushwhackers, employees of the state of Missouri, who were standing
around the auditorium in their white attendants' uniforms. Most of them
seemed to puff up, to smile.

He continued, changing his voice back to the stiff, formal one with which
he began. “The word
bushwhacker
according to the dictionaries is, quote,
‘one accustomed to beat about or travel through bushes.' ”

The 1933 bushwhackers of the Missouri State Asylum for the Insane again
preened. They appeared to appreciate the definition even though, as one
had said to Josh before, they mostly had no idea what it really meant. Why
would people go around beating up bushes? Whacking patients in insane
asylums made more sense.

Josh continued in his Centralia performance voice. “Their supporters around our town claimed they were only matching the Yankee soldiers' meaness and murder and savagery. My family was mostly neutral about the war, with my mother and father and uncles and aunts trying their best to stay out of it altogether. Only my grandmama took sides, and that was for the Union. I knew there was no way she was going to make a meal for a bushwhacker.

“ ‘I just came from the El Dorado, boy,' the bushwhacker said to me. His voice was as clipped and direct as his eyes. ‘They got nothing there I want 'cept whiskey, which I've plenty of. Now come over here, boy, and get up behind me on this horse. You're going with me to find some breakfast.'

“The man extended his right hand down toward me. It was covered in a
slick black leather glove. ‘We don't kill women and children, boy, if that's
what's got your mind occupied.' ”

V

WILL

SOMERSET

1918

Will Mitchell, MD, came running to the infirmary in the basement of Old Main. An attendant had summoned him with the alarming news that a patient had tried to kill himself while working at the asylum's farm. Dr. Mayfield was seeing to him now. Randall Mayfield, MD, was the asylum's medical director and Will's boss.

But Will couldn't find anybody. Not only were the patient and Mayfield not around, neither was the duty nurse—at least, not in the treatment room or the operating room. There hadn't been time to get the injured man out of here to town to the local hospital in Somerset.

So where was everybody?

The infirmary consisted of four designated spaces, the largest being the treatment room, where the patients were routinely examined and their physical ailments seen to. The other two areas besides the operating room were the administrative offices and the autopsy laboratory.

The autopsy laboratory. Yes. That must be where they were. The poor bastard must be dead, and Mayfield, true to form, was wasting no time. Will hurried down the narrow hallway that separated the lab from the rest of the infirmary. As he went, he began to hear voices. That was it. The patient had succeeded in killing himself.

Will, the son and grandson of Kansas City doctors, had grown up around the unpleasantries of human death. They were part of his life long before he went to medical school at the University of Missouri at Columbia. So when he opened the door to the autopsy lab, he barely noticed the horrendous odors that immediately filled his nostrils. They were as routine to him as walking through snow was for a postman.

But there was something here that was not routine. The man laid out naked on the stainless-steel autopsy table in the middle of the room was not dead. It was Joshua Lancaster, a patient everybody called Josh.

Mayfield and a nurse, a sour woman named Ruth Jensen, were getting autopsy cutting instruments ready at another smaller table. Their backs were to the door and to the corpse—which was not a corpse at all. Will's eyes had gone right to the man's chest, which was scarred with five large bloody holes, the work, no doubt, of a farm tool of some kind. It didn't appear to Will that the wounds had been dressed or even cleaned.

But, more important, the chest was moving up and down in that slow rhythm associated with breathing—with being alive.

“What have we got here?” Will asked Mayfield, who turned around at the sound of Will's voice.

“We're preparing to take the brain for study,” said Mayfield, as if announcing the page number of the next hymn in church. “It promises to be a most interesting specimen. You are welcome to assist, Dr. Mitchell.”

“But, look—he's still breathing!”

“I know, but he soon won't be,” said Mayfield, a tall, skinny, pinched man of fifty who—Will had come to believe—suffered from his own special kind of mental illness.

“There doesn't seem to be that much external bleeding or major trauma,” Will said. “Shouldn't we do a little something to see if we can save him first?”

“It would be a waste of time and purpose,” said Mayfield. “His use to society lies now in the extraordinary potential for what we can learn from the study of his brain.”

Mayfield was obsessed with the brains of dead insane people. That was his sickness. He couldn't keep his hands and scalpels and theories off of lunatics' brains. Will understood that it was a peculiarity that had begun quite normally, and even quite professionally, out of a desire to discover the underlying causes of lunacy. Mayfield had concluded it was physical; the way cells of the brain developed and functioned was the answer to insanity. The task, then, was literally to track each and every one of those cells, identify those that cause people to commit specific types of violence and other acts of lunacy, and remove them as you would a tumor.

Based on nothing much more than instinct, Will had a hunch there was more to it than that. He moved over to Josh, the naked man on the steel table. He was unconscious. Will knew that Joshua Lancaster's symptoms were common ones. Something had happened to cause him to go mute and dysfunctional, to become unable to sleep normally or even to close his eyes without screaming bloody murder. The paperwork said, in fact, that a bloody murder was the cause of his insanity. Will hadn't had time yet to pursue the case beyond that.

Will picked up Josh Lancaster's right hand and felt his pulse. “It's weak, but steady,” he announced, in a loud voice.

He placed the silver hearing valve of his stethoscope down on the man's battered chest and listened. “Heartbeat's still there,” he said.

So. Here now for the first time—to Will's knowledge, at least—Mayfield's obsession with the brain had gone so far as to kill a man to get a particularly enticing one. Is that what was going on here?

“I'm sorry, Dr. Mayfield,” said Will, without a second's hesitation. “I'm taking this patient back to the treatment room, and I'm going to make a run at saving his life.”

Will had no idea how Mayfield, the man who hired him and had the power to fire him, would react. And, given his emotional state at the moment, Will didn't much care. He simply was not going to stand by while Josh Lancaster or any other patient was murdered for his interesting brain!

“I trust you are aware of the circumstances that caused this patient to be adjudged insane, Dr. Mitchell,” said Mayfield. “Clues to the causes of his behavior that might be found in his brain cells could provide breakthrough findings of important dimensions.”

“Fine. Then wait until he dies—really dies.”

“
Wait.
That is a word, Dr. Mitchell, that has no place in our work, our search for answers to insanity. This man is clearly doomed to spend the rest of his life, no matter its length, in this institution as an incurable lunatic. I would remind you, also, that he is alive now only because he was adjudged to be insane. Otherwise, he would most surely have already expired unaturally at the end of a rope, hanging from a gallows in a public square.”

Will didn't know about any of that. But whatever the consequences, he was going to prevent Joshua Lancaster's death on this day, at this time, by this method.

“I'm taking him out of here,” said Will. Using a rubber sheet, he covered Josh up and pulled him off the autopsy table on to a wheeled wooden gurney.

Was Mayfield or Ruth Jensen going to make a move to stop him?

No. In what Will could only conclude was a sudden flash of sanity, Mayfield said, “All right, Dr. Mitchell. The patient is yours. For now, at least.”

And Will wheeled Josh out of the room and back up the hall to the treatment room, where he began the work of saving a life.

VI

RANDY

KANSAS CITY

1997

Janice Leona Larson Higgins, former Harvey Girl. Randy knew from her write-up in “The Harvey Girls Menu” that Larson was her maiden name and Higgins came from Billy Higgins, a traveling book salesman she was married to for forty-five years. He died two years ago of prostate cancer. They had two married daughters and five grandchildren, all of whom lived in and around Kansas City.

It was with the help of an old railroad friend of his own family that Randy had located Janice through the Kansas City chapter of the Harvey Girls alumni club. There was a Janice with employment dates that seemed to match. So, after getting her address as well as her life story from the “Menu,” the club's membership roster and newsletter, he went to see her.

“I'd like to talk to you about Birdie Carlucci,” Randy said to the elderly woman after introducing himself—but only by name, no title. Nor did he say he was a police officer or show her a badge, justifying the omissions on grounds that he was not really on official police business.

She had answered his knock at the door of a small green-shingled house in the 6500 block of Holmes Avenue, in an old neighborhood off Troost in south Kansas City that once, to Randy's memory, was near the southwest limits of the city. Now, with its suburbs and interstates, the Kansas City metropolitan area sprawled hundreds of blocks—and miles— farther south, as well as way westward, over the line into Kansas.

“Birdie Carlucci? I'm not sure I know anybody—”

“From Union Station. He was at Union Station when you were a Harvey Girl.”

“Birdie! Oh, yes. I never knew his last name,” she said. “Birdie Carlucci. I never figured he was Italian. I've seen that name Carlucci somewhere, but not . . . oh, never mind.” Her words were accompanied by a beaming smile.

Janice Higgins was very old but very well cared for. Her face was cracked and wrinkled but powdered almost white, her lips colored dark pink with precisely placed lipstick. Her white hair was cut short, perfectly combed, and held behind her ears with a dark blue ribbon. She was wearing a light-green housedress that was not only freshly pressed but also starched. She had had no idea Randy was coming to see her this morning. This was a woman who still lived her life in accordance with her training and habits as a Harvey Girl. Randy loved that—and her—as he had all Harvey Girls.

Janice Higgins invited him to come in, and he stepped into what was clearly her living room. There was no entrance hall or vestibule. It was a small house, probably built in the 1920s.

The cop in Randy wanted to warn this little old woman about the dangers of allowing strange men into her house like this. But as a cop on an unorthodox freelance mission of curiosity, he was delighted.

He declined her offer of coffee or tea but did sit down on a small blue-and-white flowered couch across a low table from her. She had gone to an overstuffed chair that was covered in a matching fabric. The set reminded Randy of a similar one—in red and white—in his own house. He and his wife, Melissa, had bought their set at Sears. Wonder where Janice Higgins got hers?

“Well, tell me about Birdie,” she said in a sweet, open way. “I have often wondered what became of him. I lost track after I met Billy, got married, and left the Harvey House service. Billy was a traveling man. He came in one day for lunch when his train to Des Moines was late. Of course, that's how I met Birdie too. Is Birdie your father?”

Randy had come to ask questions, not answer them. But he said, “No, ma'am.”

She was wearing large black-rimmed glasses but he had a good view through them of two bright blue eyes. They were focused right on him, too, waiting for him to say something. Your turn now, young man. If you're not his son, who in the hell are you? No, no. A Harvey Girl would never say
hell.

“I only recently met Mr. Carlucci,” Randy said, kicking himself for not having worked out in advance a good line of approach. He had just jumped in his unmarked police Chevy and driven out here, telling the various detectives in the office that he had to run an errand. “I'm on the box if you need me,” he had said. That was not exactly true. He had left his handheld two-way radio in the car.

“I'm delighted to hear he's still with us,” she said, her smile from the front door beginning to disappear. “My Billy died last year. He was the best salesman who ever worked for Zondervan—that's a religious book publisher. Billy had this territory for thirty years. He covered everything from Minneapolis south to Wichita, the Mississippi on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west. He was gone a lot, but I got used to it.”

She stopped and waited for a response. It was again Randy's turn.

He elected to stay on his subject, not her's. “I assume you knew that Birdie actually lived at Union Station,” he said, deciding that he had to get on with it. And the truth—some of it, at least—was the way to go.

The smile began to return. “Oh, yes. He told me he had witnessed an awful crime somewhere but he didn't want to talk to the police and FBI about it because it involved some of his relatives—I think that's what he said. It was a long time ago. At any rate, that's why he stayed out of sight there at the station for a while.”

A while? How about sixty-three years? Did she not know how long Birdie was there?

Randy held that thought to himself. “He told me you brought him food from time to time.”

“That's right. We became good friends—in a way. Maybe in more than one way.”

Randy thought he saw a quick flash of red appear under the white powder on her cheeks. Once a Harvey Girl, always a Harvey Girl.

“Do you ever remember meeting another friend of his, someone named Josh?”

She shook her head and looked off to an end table on the left at a large photo portrait of a man in a dark suit whom Randy figured to be Billy Higgins. “Josh,” she repeated. “Frankly, I didn't realize he had any other friends around the station besides me. He kept himself washed, shaved, and neat and had nothing to do with the other men who hung out at the station. Birdie was no bum like they were.”

“The Josh I'm talking about came with Birdie to the station the first time, I believe.”

Her eyes brightened. “Oh, yes. There were two men with him the day I met Birdie. They came into the Harvey House for breakfast. There was an older man who had pancakes and a younger one who just ordered coffee.”

Randy marveled at her ability to remember such details. But of course, she
was
a Harvey Girl. “Josh was the older one,” he said.

“I was only with him and the other man for a short time. What do you want to know about him?”

“His last name. Did you hear—and remember—a last name?”

She thought again for a few seconds. Then, as if recalling something, she turned back to Randy. “I do remember something about the other man—the younger one. He was a doctor. His name was Mitchell. Yes, I'm pretty sure it was Mitchell. I know that because there were some big doctors in town then by that name—still are, for that matter.”

Randy felt good. He had another name. His curiosity had somewhere else to go.

Common courtesy dictated that he stay and chat with Janice Higgins for another couple of minutes. But common sense told him to go. Who knows what might be squawking out of that radio on the front seat of his car.

So he said he had to go and rose to his feet.

She stood also. “You're a police officer, aren't you?”

Randy was certain she could see the red that was coming from the heat he felt in his cheeks. “Yes, ma'am, I am. I should have identified myself. I apologize.”

“Are you people still trying to get poor Birdie to talk about whatever it was he witnessed those many years ago? That's it, isn't it?”

Randy just shook his head. He didn't know what she was talking about.

“That's really stupid, if it's true. Have you read that new book about the Union Station massacre Jules Perkins wrote? It amazes me the way people keep looking at things that happened years ago. I was working there at the station that morning, but I didn't see a thing except the commotion afterward. I can't believe J. Edgar Hoover would just make it up the way Perkins said. But I
do
love Perkins's novels. Don't you?”

Randy nodded his head to acknowledge he had read
Put 'Em Up!
and that he, too, enjoyed Perkins's other books. Most were high-action crime stories set in Kansas City in the seventies, and Randy had, in fact, read two or three of them.

“Well, if you see Birdie again, tell him ‘Thanks for the Memories,' ” said Janice Higgins. “That's Bob Hope's song. Birdie'll get it.”

Randy promised to deliver the message.

He waited until he had turned the corner at Linwood Boulevard a block away before picking up the radio and checking in. There had been no emergencies, no important calls. Nothing had happened.

Except that he now had the name of Josh's doctor—and he had promised to say “Thanks for the Memories” to Birdie Carlucci.