Night-Bloom (27 page)

The pharmacist looked at him uneasily when he presented himself. Watford at once realized he might well look a fright after the sprint down from Thirty-fourth Street to Gramercy Park.

“Would you wait just a moment, Mr. Mortimer?” the man said. “I’m just making up your prescription now.”

“Dr. Silberfein did phone it in?”

“Oh, yes. He did. Just one moment, please. I’ll be right back.”

Something in the way the man had said it, the stiffness of his voice, the visible tightening of his jaw and mostly the look of distrust in his eyes told Watford that something was up. Whatever might be said of the foolishness and wastefulness of Watford’s life, one thing he had unmistakably in his favor was an uncanny acuity for self-protection. His powers of premonition were extraordinary.

He walked round the counter and peered into the back. Instantly Watford surmised the whole situation—the pharmacist on the phone, leaning forward, whispering hastily into the speaker. Watford needed no additional information to verify that the man was at that moment checking the prescription with the doctor’s office.

Suddenly, the pharmacist looked up and saw him. They gazed at each other like a pair of relatives who had not seen one another for years. Watford’s face wore a pitiful expression, that of a man hurt and betrayed. He turned and bolted.

“Stop!” the pharmacist shouted and started out from behind. But Watford wasn’t stopping for anyone. He barreled down an aisle lined with cosmetics and toiletries, careening off a wire basket full of soaps and sending it scattering. Several women screamed even as the pharmacist, in hot pursuit, kept shouting, “Stop him. Stop him.”

A drab, smallish man grappled Watford by the lapel and made a heroic effort to detain him at the door. In vain, however; Watford thrust the man aside and bolted out onto the street. The pharmacist tore out after him, shouting at Watford over the heads of relentless waves of people bearing down upon him. Halfway down the block the pharmacist stopped short, watching the tail of Watford’s gray plaid jacket disappear wraithlike round a corner. Puzzled, he paused a moment rethinking his situation, then turned, ran back to the pharmacy and immediately called the police.

It was nearly 6:00
P.M.
and Sophie Solomon’s dander was way up. You could tell that from the way her head shook and from the quick vertical up-down motion of the wen on her chin as she spoke.

Defasio’s eye was fixed hypnotically on the small purple blemish with its solitary pole of hair thrusting up out of the center. Mortified that he was unable to avert his gaze, he watched transfixed as she read the riot act to Mooney.

“There’s no way in the world I’m gonna go back and pull out record books now. Do you realize what time it is?”

Mooney hovered there, a look of martyrdom on his face, trying to slip a word in edgewise.

“I have a life too. I’m a human being with rights.” She wagged a gnarled, arthritic finger under his nose. “Listen—I already went through this with your friend here this afternoon. Ask him.” She shrieked at Defasio. “Didn’t I already speak to you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Didn’t I already tell you everything you wanted to know?”

“Unfortunately, Mrs. Solomon …”

“Ms.”

“Ms.,” Mooney pronounced the word with an odd buzz, “but unfortunately my colleague here neglected to …”

“Now, at six o’clock, you got the gall to come barging back in here with a whole new list of questions. I’m due at the airport in an hour to pick up my niece.” She started to rise.

“I appreciate everything you’ve done for us already, Miss, Ms. Solomon.” Mooney sounded his most reasonable.

“If you appreciated it you wouldn’t be standing there asking me to go pull out records at closing time.” Flustered and fuming, Ms. Solomon fumbled into a gray pillbox hat.

“One question is all I’m asking,” Mooney persisted.

“One question comes to two questions. Two questions to four.”

“Believe me, I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I have to. This is critically important. Lives depend on our finding this man.”

Ms. Solomon appeared unconvinced. “You say he’s been missing over a year. He can wait another day.” A second time she rose and started for the coat rack where her tan raincoat hung. Defasio reached for it in order to help, but she glowered at him through her pince-nez and snatched it herself. “I’ll take that, thank you very much,” she hissed coldly.

“Honest,” Mooney implored, “this won’t take more than five minutes.”

“How would you know how long it’ll take?” she demanded. “I know how long, Sergeant. You don’t.”

“Lieutenant,” he corrected her and noticed that one of her legs was shorter than the other and that she walked with a pronounced limp, but briskly all the same. In a trice, he grasped her entire history. Spinsterhood. Small cramped apartment with kitchenette. Rolling beds that folded into walls. Cats for companionship. Suppers of canned soup. Evenings beside a small flickering TV or listening to radio concerts. Alone on holidays. By herself on packaged vacation tours. Not entirely unlike his own dismal regimen, although he never went on tours.

“Please, Ms. Solomon.” He made one final impassioned appeal. The look in her eye was one of tired disgust.

“Okay.” She flung her coat down. “You got just one question. Make it fast.”

“The room Mr. Boyd was in that night—was it a private or a double?”

She looked at him, then past him as if she’d already forgotten the question. In the next moment she laughed despairingly to herself, a look of icy resignation on her face. Eyes fixed straight ahead, she limped past the two detectives into the small cubicle office where she kept her records.

They waited uneasily while she riffled through a long horizontal ledger bound in bogus black leather. The year 1979 was gold-stamped across the face of it. Neither man spoke. They barely breathed and never looked at one another for fear of distracting her or invoking her wrath.

At last they heard the pages stop flipping, followed by Sophie Solomon mumbling to herself. “Okay,” she yelled at them through the open door. “I think I got what you want. Mr. Boyd was in room 382 that night. That happens to be a double.”

“Wonderful.” Mooney beamed gratefully. “That’s wonderful, Ms. Solomon—Now don’t—don’t close that book yet.” He rushed toward her even as she reared back, slightly alarmed. “May I see that page, please?”

For reply she whisked the ledger up and pressed it to her chest. “Private records. I don’t reveal these. Even to the police. Not without a court order.”

A wave of fatigue overtook him—almost despair. “You’re perfectly right, Ms. Solomon.” The s’s buzzed hard in his teeth. “I do need a court order to see your records. It’ll take me seven to ten days to secure one. I’m trying very hard now to locate a man who may possibly kill someone within the very near future.”

There was a look of contempt in her eyes. “You don’t expect me to swallow that one, do you?”

“No,” he replied, looking at her hopelessly. “But it happens to be the truth. I have a theory that this Mr. A. Boyd has already killed five people and crippled another for life. I’m trying to avert another tragedy. I have one last question …”

“Ah-ha.” She glowed triumphantly and clacked her dentures. “Now already you got two questions.”

“But this one is definitely the last. And I’m willing to lay seven to ten the answer is right there on that page you’re already open to.”

She watched him distrustfully through pinkish tinted glasses, her head nodding with a gentle palsy. “Didn’t I say my niece was due at the airport? I should be there now.”

“I appreciate that, Ms. Solomon.”

“For one man you do a lot of appreciating.” She folded her arms across the ledger and glared defiantly at the two detectives. “Okay—this is the last one. Definitely. Let’s have it.”

Mooney inhaled and held his breath a moment. “Was anyone sharing the room with Boyd?”

Ms. Solomon’s smile was edged with venom. “I knew you were going to ask me something smart like that.”

“The answer’s not on that page you’re open to?” Sophie Solomon started to laugh, a cheerless, bitter laugh, full of the painful wisdom of years. “No, it’s not on that page.” Her small, frail figure shook with laughter. “In the first place, we can’t even be sure that anyone shared the room with Mr. Boyd. But in order to verify that I have to check the room numbers of every patient in residence at the hospital that night.” Her smile deepened, became almost beatific. “Have you any idea just how many people we have hospitalized in Beth Israel on any given night?”

Mooney stared expectantly at her. “Nope. Tell me.”

“What about you, young man?” she cooed at Defasio with all the cordiality of an ice pick.

“Two hundred,” Defasio blustered, then gazed sheepishly at Mooney.

Ms. Solomon made a funny quacking sound, then turned back to Mooney. “How would you feel about four hundred?”

“I’d say it’s a helluva lot of names to go through.”

“You’d be right.” Sophie Solomon’s smile turned suddenly to a glare. “But as it turns out, it’s closer to six hundred inpatients on a given night. Now you’re asking me to check roughly six hundred names to see what other person might have shared room 382 with Mr. Boyd.”

“I agree it seems unreasonable on the face of it.”

“On the face of it?” Ms. Solomon’s eyes narrowed to small gashes. Suddenly her mirthless cheer turned to frost. “I’m leaving now.”

“Sophie …” Mooney started toward her.

Glaring at him above her glasses, she appeared to swell. “Forget it, my friend. There is no way that I’m going to spend the next four hours here, going through every name on the patient manifest for the evening of April 30, 1979. Call me tomorrow, then maybe we’ll talk.”

She hobbled to the coat rack and once again struggled into her tan raincoat. By that time her glasses were slightly askew. Then suddenly looking at the overweight, clearly exhausted detective, she hesitated. “However, since I don’t particularly care to have the guilt of unnecessary bloodshed on my head, I’m gonna walk out of here now and just forget to put my books away. If you should happen to look at them while I’m out, I can’t help that. I’m off to meet my niece now.” She turned and hobbled to the door. “Don’t forget to turn the lights out when you leave.” Sophie Solomon had said that the job of checking six hundred names of patients against their room numbers would take four hours. As it worked out she was within ten minutes of her projected time.

The names were listed in the huge ledger in alphabetical order. The patient roll was made up each day, giving date, time of entry, a description of illness, room number and discharge date.

For the day of April 30, 1979, the hospital had logged 553 patients. Defasio groaned as they started with the A’s and worked on through, checking each name and date against a room number. It was 10:35 p.m. when Mooney looked up bleary-eyed from the ledger and said, “Charles Watford, 724 Hauser Street, Kew Gardens, New York.”

It was somewhere near 3:00
A.M.
when he woke. His mouth was dry and something like a pulse throbbed inside his head. It wasn’t the pain that woke him, however, but the hyperventilation—the gulping for air and getting nowhere near enough. The fear of suffocation caused him to sit bolt upright. When he did, his head swam and he nearly toppled over.

The Demerol bottle beside the bed was empty, and the pain was of an order that transcended mere mortal pain. It was so great and all-engulfing that it had the effect of transporting him into some other state. Woozy, half-conscious, hallucinatory, the sense of slipping one’s moorings.

Then came those wracking paroxysms, the gasping for air, the awful terror that he might die (not the fear of death itself, but the idea of dying alone), his body undiscovered for weeks—mortification, decomposition, stench, all maggoty and obscene, discovered weeks later by strangers—some shapeless, reeking thing. The indignity, like fouling oneself in public.

When he threw a leg over the edge of the bed, his head shrieked and he sagged to the floor. The floor was uncarpeted and cold. He lay with his face flat down upon it, rolling his flamed cheeks against the cool wood as if to soothe himself.