Silent Treatment (14 page)

“That’s him. Anyhow, I think he’ll be able to get the print records from security or personnel, or wherever they’re kept.”

“Great,” Sims said, slipping on rubber gloves and handing a pair to both Tom and Harry. “I have some people at the FBI lab in D.C. who can help us, too. Now, we’re going to play a little acting game. Tom, do what you can to have your sister direct us, and try not to touch anything, especially those metal bed railings. Harry, you’re going to play the mysterious stranger. Don’t you touch anything either.”

“Okay.” Harry glanced past Maura’s bed to where Evie lay. Even her decerebrate posturing had stopped now. She had led at least one secret life with Caspar Sidonis. Had there been others? Had one of them led to her death? He headed toward the doorway to begin his part in the performance. One thing seemed almost certain to him. The laboratory studies of Evie’s blood, which could take days or even weeks to complete, were going to turn up something. And sometime tomorrow, Evie would be gone and her room scrubbed down. If they were going to have any chance at picking up the fingerprints of Doctor X, it had to be done now.

“Tell me,” he said, “why do they call you Dweeb?”

Lonnie Sims glanced over at Tom.

“He … um … he did pretty well in grad school,” Hughes explained. “In fact, pretty well doesn’t really cover it. The truth is, if they had curved the grades in our class, only Dweeb, here, would have passed.”

*   *   *

By the time Harry left the hospital, the first hint of dawn was washing over the city. The session with Lonnie Sims had taken over two hours. And as far as Harry could tell, the man was, as advertised, a genius.

“The thumb’s the ticket,” the Dweeb told him. “That sneaky, opposable thumb. Most forensic so-called experts dust on top of things. The key is to dust under them. Show me a lab man with floor dirt ground into the knees of his trousers, and I’ll show you a man who knows what he’s about.”

With Maura’s help, he guided Harry or Tom slow-motion through half a dozen possible scenarios, watching their movements closely and calling out, “Freeze!” whenever he wanted to check a spot for prints. The mystery Doc had not worn rubber gloves, Maura assured them. Sims dusted beneath the Formica tray tables and along the underside of the bedrails. He did the door handles and the light pulls, both sides of the headboards and footboards of both beds, and even the fixtures in the bathroom. He used special powders and an infrared light, magnifiers and a tiny, state-of-the-art camera. He lifted about fifty prints—some quite clear, some badly smudged.

In the end, he told them, if Doug Atwater could arrange access to the hospital’s personnel fingerprint files, anything was possible. By the time Sims folded his tackle box, closed his briefcase, and accompanied Tom Hughes off of Alexander 9, it was 3 a.m. Harry called Phil and Evie’s family. Then he sat by Evie’s bedside in the darkened room for a time, his thoughts focused on nothing … and everything.

“You take care now, Gene,” Maura said as he headed out of the room.

Harry had thought she was asleep. Only now did he realize she was quite awake and had been keeping quiet for him—for the time that might be his last alone with his wife. Perhaps her sedation had kicked in, he reasoned. Perhaps the horrors of her DTs were abating. Or perhaps she had just enough willpower to hold them off for a while.

“I will,” he said. “You take care, too, Maura. And thanks for your help tonight.”

On the way off the floor, he stopped at the nurse’s station and signed permission for Evie’s organs to be taken. The notion that somewhere, someone was about to receive the heart they had desperately been praying for did help ease the profound sadness he was feeling. But nothing helped lessen his confusion—or his sense of foreboding.

The streets were virtually deserted. Emotionally drained, Harry drove home peering through a film of gritty fatigue. He parked in the indoor garage a block from his apartment. As usual Rocky Martino, the co-op’s night doorman, was asleep in a worn leather chair in clear view of anyone who chose to look through the glass front doors of the building. Although he would never admit it, Rocky was well past sixty. He would also not admit to drinking more than was healthy, or to drinking on the job, although most of the residents knew he did both. Firing him had been on the agenda of virtually every co-op meeting for as long as Harry had been part of the building. But since nothing of consequence had ever happened during Rocky’s shift, and because he was a sweet guy, no action had ever been taken. Harry debated knocking on the glass, or even ringing the ancient doorbell. Finally, he took out his keys. With the first touch of metal on metal, Rocky was on his feet.

“Doc, you scared the crap out of me,” he said, opening the inside door. “I thought everyone in the building was tucked in for the night. When did you go out?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I didn’t see you go out after that Chinese food you ordered was delivered.”

Harry felt his pulse jump.

“You sure it was me the food was for?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Did you buzz me before you sent the delivery man up?” he asked.

“I … um … I think I did.”

“And did the guy go right out?”

Rocky was clearly beginning to panic. He was also clearly about to lie.

“Sure,” he said. “He went right up and came right down.”

Harry headed for the elevator.

“Rocky, what time was that?”

“I don’t know, Doc. Ten, maybe. Eleven. Why?”

Harry stepped into the elevator and held the door open.

“Because, Rocky,” he said, more testily than he had meant, “I haven’t been home all night, and I didn’t order any Chinese food.”

The apartment door was locked, but that meant nothing. They had a police lock, but he and Evie never bothered using it unless they were home. Once, when Evie had locked her keys inside, the super had gotten her in with a credit card. Harry thought about calling the police without going inside. But he was exhausted and the cops might take hours to get there.

He opened the door slowly, expecting darkness. Lights were on in the foyer and, it appeared, in every room as well. Even from where he stood, he could see that the place had been ransacked. He considered the possibility that the intruder was still inside. A sane person would definitely retreat to the lobby and call the police from there. But at that moment, Harry was feeling anything but sane. He stalked down the hall half hoping the man would jump out at him. He desperately needed someone to hit.

The apartment was empty, the carnage extensive. Every painting had been removed from the wall, every drawer opened and emptied. The mattresses had been moved and all the contents of all the closets thrown onto them. Even the rugs had been lifted. It was as if the intruder was searching for a safe. If so, he had to be disappointed. They kept little cash in the apartment, and Evie’s most precious jewels—by far their most extravagant possessions—were in a safe-deposit box. Still, it seemed that a number of the most valuable portable items they owned had been taken. Evie’s jewel box had been emptied. Her mink coat was gone, as
was their silver, some crystal, and several small pieces of art, including a Picasso drawing Evie had taken from her first marriage that was worth maybe fifteen thousand dollars.

But it was in the small study that the most thorough work had been done. The desk drawers had been emptied and the contents screened and quite carefully set in a pile by one wall. The drawers themselves had been broken apart, the seat of the desk chair slashed. Every book from the floor-to-ceiling shelves had been opened, examined, and tossed aside. There was something wrong, Harry thought, pushing some of the mess aside with his foot. This was a robbery, all right, but a robbery with a purpose.

He wandered into the kitchen. That room had been ransacked as rudely and thoroughly as the rest of the place. He surveyed the wreckage for several minutes before noticing the four unopened white cartons on the table. Each contained a Chinese dish, now cold. Set atop one of them, in a stapled wax-paper holder, was a fortune cookie. Harry’s first impulse was to heave it and the rest of the food against a wall. Instead he cracked it open.

The Beacon of Good Fortune Will Continue to Brighten Your Path
, it read.

It was almost eight when Harry finally left the wreckage of his apartment and took the crosstown bus back to the hospital. The two policemen who had been sent in response to his call had tried for a few fingerprints, but in the main, their crime-scene check was uninspired. A robbery in a Manhattan apartment was clearly of little more interest to them than a derelict shaking the coins in his cardboard cup at passersby on the street.

The officers’ conclusion, arrived at after a half hour, was that this was a run-of-the-mill B and E by a professional thief who might or might not have known Harry would be staying late at the hospital. They brushed aside Harry’s concern that the thief had another agenda, and told him that the best he could hope for was that some of the stolen items surfaced at a pawnshop or fence known to the police. Meanwhile, Harry would be doing the smart thing to get what he could from his insurance company, replace whatever he wanted to, and bank any money left over.

Harry crossed the MMC lobby and headed down the corridor toward the Alexander Building elevators. All around him, it was business as usual. He wondered how many hundreds, even thousands of families he had passed over the years who were heading into the hospital just as he was today, to see a spouse or child or parent for the last time. His life with Evie had been strained and emotionally barren for a long time. But until last night, he had never completely stopped believing that they would somehow make it back to the way it once had been between them.

As he passed the nurse’s station on Alexander 9, he was aware of the sideways glances and changes in conversation. No doubt the tale of Caspar Sidonis’s accusation had already reached the outermost branches of the hospital grapevine. He had never enjoyed being the subject of gossip, negative or positive. Now, he shuddered to think of the distortions the Sidonis story had undergone from one retelling to the next; the simple truth was bad enough. He also knew that unless explanations surfaced for the telephone order that established Evie’s IV and for Maura Hughes’s mystery doc, there would be more tales to come. Many more.

Evie’s parents, Carmine and Dorothy DellaRosa, were seated silently at Evie’s bedside. A retired postman and an administrative secretary, married well over forty years, they were pillars of the Catholic church in their small New Jersey town. They were also as ordinary and reserved as their daughter was vibrant and spectacular. Evie was their only child.

Harry shook hands with Carmine and kissed Dorothy on the cheek. The couple had always been cordial enough toward him, but could not at their most open ever be considered warm.
New Jersey Gothic
, Evie sometimes called them.

“We think Evelyn moved her arms,” Dorothy said.

“She might have. There are reflexes that cause muscles to contract. They don’t really mean anything though, Dorothy. I can’t let you think they do.” Harry gestured to
Maura’s bed, which was empty and freshly made. “Where’s the woman who was here?”

“Down the hall in a new room, poor soul,” Dorothy responded. “The nurses said a bed just came open. They didn’t want her disturbing these … these moments.”

Harry knew that unless he asked Carmine DellaRosa a direct question, and then only one he was uniquely qualified to answer, Carmine would let his wife do the speaking for the two of them. Harry had decided against sharing news of the break-in. Sooner or later he might have to, but at the moment they were already upset enough by the tragedy and by Harry’s decision to have Evie’s organs donated.

On the bed beside them, Evie lay peacefully. Her eyes were taped shut, and she remained attached to a ventilator and IV. But the treatments to reduce brain swelling—hyperventilation to lower her carbon dioxide level and raise her blood pH, and diuretics to induce dehydration—had been stopped. A second set of required tests—cerebral blood-flow scan, EEG, and attempts at making her breathe spontaneously—had all confirmed the diagnosis of functional brain death.

Now, there was only the matter of saying good-bye and having an attending physician pronounce her officially dead. Then the people from the New York Regional Transplant Services would take over. He took Evie’s hand and held it for a time, wondering if the DellaRosas had heard anything yet of Caspar Sidonis. Before long they would. With the cause of Evie’s death clearly established as a ruptured aneurysm, there was no need for the medical examiner to demand an autopsy—especially with multiple organ donations at stake. But he had ordered extensive toxicology studies.

“Father Moore just left,” Dorothy said.

“I’m sorry I missed him.”

“He administered the Sacrament of the Sick to Evelyn.”

“Good.”

Evie had not considered herself a Catholic for years and had made no attempt to have her first marriage annulled.
But neither of her parents would ever admit to the fact.

“I’m just not sure this organ business is the right thing to do. Evelyn was so … so beautiful.”

“It’s the right thing, Dorothy. Evie will be just as beautiful when this is all over—
more
beautiful.… Okay?”

“Yes. I … I suppose so. Um … about the funeral?”

Harry sensed what she wanted him to say.

“Would you like to make arrangements?” he asked.

“Thank you. I would.”

“Anything you do in that regard will be okay. The funeral people you decide to use can call and make arrangements with the hospital.”

“Do you know if Evelyn has an address book of some sort?”

“Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, she has it here. I’ll call you later if you want and go through the names with you.”

“That won’t be necessary. I have friends who will call all the numbers. That way anyone who wants to come can do so. Our church isn’t that large, but we don’t have that much family, so there should be room. You’ll speak to people here?”