Night-Bloom (41 page)

Gratefully, he had not thought once about the Bombardier. He had pushed it all out of his mind. But at 5:00
P.M.
, as dusk slowly purpled the streets, the shadowy phantom of the rooftops muscled its way back in upon him. He called his office from a small cigar store to get an up-date. Defasio took the call and assured him in a slightly tremulous voice that there was nothing new.

It was twenty past five when he stepped back out onto the street. It occurred to him that it was just about quitting time and that he might take a slow walk up to the Balloon and have a drink with Fritzi.

The Balloon was at Ninety-first and Lexington. He was at Sixty-fourth and Madison and so he started to walk north. At Sixty-seventh Street he happened to glance up and found himself passing directly in front of the Quintius Gallery. His sudden presence there was not fortuitous, he knew.

The lights were lit and there were people inside. On the street, crowds buffeted past him, people streaming from out of office buildings and department stores, dashing for subways and buses. Mooney lingered before the big plate-glass windows, gazing up at the smart marble tablet graven with a large
Q
outside the door.

Through the windows he could see paintings on the walls and tall potted trees set all about. A slight, officious figure glided airily round the floor. He was followed by a tall, smartly turned out matron. The whole setting reeked of money and privilege.

Curiosity piqued the detective. He maneuvered through the crowd to the window, seething at his own gullibility. The fact that he had even taken the time to go there suddenly infuriated him. He was vaguely conscious of trying to slip into the disguise of a potential customer.

For a time he busied himself staring at a cluster of medieval miniatures. There were martyrs, apostles, angels, hermits and saints—triptychs framed in gilt and antique reredos. It all filled him with a rush of anger and distaste.

When he looked up, the man and the woman had moved to a point a mere several feet from where Mooney stood on the opposite side of the glass.

Suddenly a third figure appeared within his purview. Spied first with a flurry of motion on the periphery of his vision, the figure approached, striding fast, looming large, then coming to a halt before the two people. Mooney watched the woman turn and smile. She leaned forward to accept a kiss on the cheek from the man who’d just arrived. Their lips moved soundlessly behind the glass, while the third figure, the short, officious fellow remained silent, a disturbingly ambiguous smile flickering at the corners of his lips.

But it was the tall man from whom Mooney could not avert his gaze. Undoubtedly, this was Quintius, the same individual who’d figured so prominently in Watford’s wildly improbable story.

Standing at the window peering in, squinting against the reflection of lights from nearby shops, Mooney could not recall precisely the chain of events that had led him to this point, only that at that moment, he experienced a strange, incomprehensible agitation at being there. A part of him wondered at this feeling, but another part was simply confounded by it. Try as he did, he was unable to shake it off.

The three people behind the glass turned and walked toward the back of the gallery. Mooney watched them disappear into a lighted office at the rear. For several moments he watched figures move back and forth in the plane of light cast across the partially opened door.

Suddenly he started to laugh. Several people standing nearby, looking in the windows, stared at him. Still laughing, he stared back hard and in the next moment he turned and strode quickly off.

“You discharged him?”

“On an outpatient basis. There was nothing much left we could do here.”

“He told me he had some kind of fatal disease. Is that true?”

“I’m afraid so. We’ll continue to treat him, of course, but as an outpatient only. He wanted to stay. He begged us not to release him.”

“Why toss a guy out if he’s dying?” Mooney fumed. “Because it’s likely to take him six months to accomplish the task. Quite frankly we needed the bed.”

Ramsay reached across the litter of his desk for a cigarette. “Why did you want to see him?” he asked, puffing smoke from the corner of his mouth.

“It’d be hard to explain.”

“Has he done anything wrong?”

“Not that I know of, but that doesn’t stop him from confessing to crimes with which he’s never been involved.”

“I’m not surprised.” Ramsay reflected a moment. “Any man who can inflict as much disease on himself as Watford would have no trouble confessing to crimes he hasn’t committed.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“He’s addicted to Demerol, you know.”

“He told me— He also told me he broke into a pharmacy out in Queens.”

“He very well might have. If he ran out of Demerol and got flaky enough.” Ramsay shrugged. In his white gown with the blue name tag, he looked small and oddly like a ventriloquist’s doll. “Who knows? Devilishly clever, our Watford.”

“A nut case, if you ask me.”

“Borderline psychotic, to put it more clinically.” Ramsay paused, then went on confidentially.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but while he was here we ran a Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale on him. He’s a 142 IQ. That’s well above average. Forget about the impression he gives, Captain. This is a bright man. A very bright man. Lied to me every day for about three months. I was fascinated.” Ramsay continued, caught up in the force of his own narrative. “We also did a Minnesota Multiphasic.”

Mooney made an odd face.

“Personality profile.”

“What’d you find?”

“The obvious things, of course. Brief psychotic episodes. Unstable interpersonal relations. Inadequate social functioning. The list goes on and on. Here’s a man who’s brimming over with guilt and rage, most of it associated with feelings he’s suppressed about his parents for years. Father was something of a bully, I gather. The mother was addicted to drugs. It was she who gave him his first blast of Demerol.” Mooney nodded, his mind flashing back to Quintius on Sixty-seventh Street, even as the doctor spoke.

“Essentially, what you’ve got here is a man in tremendous psychological distress.”

“I knew he was lying to me most of the time,” Mooney said. “I can’t say I got the feeling of psychological distress. You don’t think he’s dangerous?” Mooney asked.

“He could be. There’s a great deal of anger in poor Watford. But since he’s not the sort to externalize it, be turns it inward against himself. That manifests itself in all these crippling migraines he suffers and in self-punishment, such as infecting his own bloodstream with dirty needles, and inducing sickness. In medicine we call that Munchausen’s Syndrome.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Munchausen,” Ramsay smiled in spite of himself. “After Baron Munchausen, the infamous eighteenth-century liar. Watford’s a classic study of Munchausen’s Syndrome.”

“You say these people pretend to be sick?”

“Not pretend. They are sick. They induce real symptoms in themselves.”

“Just to get into a hospital.”

“More or less.”

Mooney smiled oddly. “Ain’t that a kick? A hospital? Why, in God’s name?”

“Simply because they feel more secure being cared for on the inside than having to cope on the outside. Hospitals are great surrogate mothers for some.” Ramsay’s pencil scratched randomly on the pad beside him. “I got very interested in Watford’s odyssey. Once he told me all about his wartime experiences, so I got hold of his VA records.”

“He was in the service?”

“He was, but it was not the way he tells it.” Ramsay grinned at the detective’s growing bewilderment. “To hear him tell it, he was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Actually, he never left the States. The truth is he was in the Coast Guard. Served as a medic on an isolated lighthouse off the coast of Washington. Pity, because there’s a fellow who’d have probably been happier in a theater of war. In the lighthouse he was just bored and depressed. Then one day, to escape the tedium, he faked an attack of acute appendicitis. Just got up one morning and started to complain of sharp pains in the side and feelings of nausea. As a medic he had access to the drug locker. He started taking ipecac to induce vomiting. Then, with a stolen hypodermic, he injected small amounts of saliva subcutaneously in the popliteal area.”

“Come again?” Mooney cocked an ear toward the doctor.

“Popliteal—the area behind the knee. Wonderful spot for the spread of infection. Within a day he developed an abscess and became febrile. Also, his white blood cell count shot up. A local physician was called in and Watford was savvy enough to be able to fake rebound tenderness in the correct anatomical location. The physician put him right into the hospital for an appendectomy.”

Ramsay took a certain pleasure in recounting the tale. “When he was telling me all this, he roared with delight, particularly at the part where the surgeon, postoperatively, described to him his ‘badly inflamed appendix.’ He thought that was a hoot.” Just then the phone rang. Ramsay signaled the detective to stay put while he murmured dosage directions into the phone. When he’d finished he looked up. “Where was I?”

“At an inflamed appendix.”

“Right. Well, that was all fine for Watford. While he was hospitalized he had a grand time. He loves being fussed over. But the moment he got better the Coast Guard sent him right back out to the lighthouse. Once again he was in the middle of Puget Sound, stuck there with the long hours and the boredom and depression. That’s where he learned to fight depression with Demerol. There again, his access to the medicine locker served him in good stead. Eventually, the CO of the lighthouse noticed that larger and larger reorders of Demerol were being requisitioned. He also noticed that they were being used up at a disturbing rate. The source of the reorders and their disappearance were eventually traced to Watford and he was discharged.”

“For misappropriation of drugs?” Mooney asked. “No. It was actually for enuresis. Bed-wetting. The drug thefts they could handle,” Ramsay rattled on. “It was the bed-wetting that actually sprang him.”

Mooney looked away, surprised at his own embarrassment.

“The Armed Services have plenty of experience with guys looking for medical discharges. For reasons that should be obvious, bed-wetters, once they’re spotted, are quickly mustered out.”

“And Watford was that?”

“Possibly. But knowing as much about him now as I do, I doubt it. Actually, I think he was just clever enough to know how to fake a good case of it. He wanted to get off that rock in Puget Sound so he kept pissing in his bed until, after eight months, they just got tired and let him go with a medical discharge.

“After the Coast Guard he must have thought that living in civilian life was going to be a piece of cake. It didn’t turn out that way. He got a few jobs with airlines but he couldn’t hack that. The regimentation, the regular hours, the performance reports. Before he knew it, he was stealing flight tickets and travel documents issued only to top executives. And he got caught there, too. He was fired by Pan Am but they never pressed charges. They just let him go. But, with something like that on his employment record, another airline wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t get any work at all. That’s when it occurred to him that prison might be his salvation. Almost as good as the hospital.”

“That’s one helluva salvation.”

Ramsay’s brow shot up. “Better, isn’t it, then the hassle of life on the outside. The daily scrounge for shelter and fodder. So he contrived to get himself arrested.”

Mooney sighed and pushed the brim of his hat back on his head. By that time he’d given up being amazed.

“He started passing bad checks. Seven thousand dollars’ worth. It’s all in the VA report. For that he was rewarded with two years on Rikers Island.”

“This is all in the VA record?” Mooney asked. “Pretty much. The rest is easy enough to put together.”

“Pathetic.”

“Pathetic,” Ramsay nodded in agreement, then continued. “And he enjoyed prison. Lots of leisure time and no responsibilities. He spent most of his days studying medical and law books in the prison library.
Merck Manual.
Torts and civil law. That sort of thing. Eventually, he became adept in the terminology of both fields. But for a clever, enterprising fellow like our Charles, this was simply not enough. He was very shortly bored out of his mind and started looking for new kinds of trouble to get into. So one day he swallowed a spoon in order to escape to the soft environment of the prison hospital.”

“Good Christ. A spoon? How the hell—”

“Don’t ask me. The prison doctor couldn’t figure it out either. Anyway, they got it out, but he was right back there the next week. This time he’d incised the skin of the abdominal wall with a sharp tool. Claimed he’d accidentally become impaled on it while in the prison workshop. Just to give zest to the diagnostic picture, he pulled the old saliva-behind-the-knee stunt again. Fever and leukocytosis induced by the unnoticed abscess and his expertly feigned signs of peritoneal inflammation got him a laparotomy which revealed no disease but resulted in the secondary gain of a secure hospital environment for several weeks. There he was able to get all the Demerol he wanted. He learned to counterfeit hematuria by introducing a few drops of blood into his urine sample. This was always good for a few days in the infirmary. After that you couldn’t stop him.” Ramsay was beaming with wicked delight. “You have to give it to the man. He has imagination and flair, our Charles.”