A Victim Must Be Found (28 page)

“Lemme see.” I handed it to her and she held it up very close to her face. “Paddy asked me to make tags for a bunch of the pictures he’s got in tonight’s show. He said he likes the way I write. I used to do calligraphy, you know. I bet you never even knew that, and you’re supposed to be some kind of detective or something.” She looked at the paper again. “Ending it all,” she said. “Very melodramatic. He took the rest of them with him. I must have written out twenty of them. Do you like sushi?”

“Let me smell your glass.” I reached over and took it from her.

“Hey! I was using that!” I took a sniff. I got the smell of the rye first, but my second sniff took in something faintly chemical, like the glass had been disinfected in a strong solution of caustic.

“Do you have any sleeping pills here?” I had to repeat the question.

“Sure. You’re not bad looking, Benny. Did you know that? In your oh-so-quiet way.” I reached over and took her hand, not because I had suddenly seen the beauty of her mind and body, but because, by holding it tightly, I could get a better share of her attention.

“Where are they? The sleeping pills?” She regarded me with strange eyes, like I was changing the subject unreasonably. “Where are the damned sleeping pills, Mary?”

“Bedroom, of course.” I got up and rushed through the bungalow looking for the bedroom. I didn’t have to run far through this oddly furnished love-nest with its secondhand furniture and framed prints. The phial of pills looked empty even from across the room. It lay on its side with the top and a cotton wad next to it. I checked and I was right. The cotton ball smelled a little like the caustic scent of the rye Mary was sipping. I came back to the kitchen. Mary’s head was now resting on her arm flung across the table.

“Mary, where’s the telephone?” Again, I had to repeat the question.

She looked at me like I’d just reappeared in her life after thirty years’ absence. “Fr-front room, Benny. Don’t phone and tell anybody I’m here. That’s the big secret. Shhhh!” I didn’t wait to hear more, but returned along the corridor to the front room with its brushed plush easy chairs and couch. The telephone was where you’d expect to find the television set. I dialled the number for the Emergency Service. Behind me I could hear Mary going on about the sushi bars in Toronto and the lack of them in Grantham. It was only then, while waiting to be connected with the ambulance service, that I remembered what sushi was. I’d never had any, but I had a picture of people sitting around a bar eating raw fish off wooden rafts passing for platters. Once I got the dispatcher I discovered that I didn’t know the street number. I had to dash to the porch to read it off the front of the house. I thought I should be able to behave like a tried professional, but I found myself sweating and giving unnecessary details over the phone. At least I repeated the important information:

“Hurry, it’s a drug overdose!” I was assured that the vehicle’s status was now active. I hope he meant it was on its way. I hung up and returned to the kitchen. Mary was quiet, with her head buried in her crossed arms on the table. I slapped her face twice before she opened her eyes slightly.

“Hey! Quit that!”

“Mary, I want to talk to you. I need to know all about you. Mary! Wake up! Don’t go to sleep while I’m talking!” She stirred, then closed her eyes again. I swatted her again until her eyes came open again with irritation showing.

“It’s raw fish-sh-sh,” she said. “Sing a song of sixpence, a belly full of rye. Raw tuna’s best. You ever looked a monkfish in the eye?”

“Mary, try to get up!” I lifted her to her feet. I tried to wrap the dressing gown around her so that I could concentrate on business. “Come on, Mary. We’ll go for a walk.” I tried to take a step with her and we fell over in a pile on the linoleum.

“Hey, buster! What’s the big idea?” I tried to unscramble myself from her and got to my knees. She was out again. I couldn’t get her off the floor. I tried, but I had to face facts. I tried slapping again, but it wasn’t reaching her. She curled up into a fetal position on her side. I got to my feet and tried to imagine what thinking clearly might be like. I went back to the bedroom and pocketed the phial that had contained the pills. I collected some clothes into the suitcase under the bed and went back to where I’d left her. I shouted at her, calling her name loudly, but it made no dent in her unconsciousness. I gave up and sat down in one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs. I could hear the sound of the ambulance coming in the distance. That made me feel better.

The boys in white got Mary MacCulloch into their ambulance. I remember her hunched shoulders as they lifted her to the stretcher. They were able to rouse her slightly. An eye blinked and I crossed my fingers as they slammed the double doors and hurried off in the direction of the General. I took a brief look around the house without turning up much of interest. It was clear that bills weren’t paid from there. There were no stacks of last year’s Christmas cards in the back of a drawer. For the most part, the closets were empty. Alex Favell had made sure that if anybody could link him to this place it would have to be the forensic experts in Toronto. I tucked the bottle of open rye under my arm and pocketed the suicide note. I even checked to see that the stove and the lights were out before I locked the door and headed for the car.

* * *

The waiting room at the General is not a place I like to spend much time in. In spite of efforts to take the institutional curse off the place, it remained, under the curtains and the assortment of recent magazines, exactly what it was. Across from me a middle-aged couple sat as close together as the seats would allow. She was staring a hole in the wall; he worked a set of amber worry beads between his large worn thumbs. A fourteen-year-old kid sat bolt upright every time an intern or orderly walked by the glass windows that looked out into the corridor of the Emergency Department. I’d already started distorting time; hospitals do that to me. When I arrived, I handed in the empty pill phial and gave the nurse on duty my health insurance number. When they thought that Mary was my wife, I let them go on thinking it. I could clear up any misunderstanding later on. I sat in a seat watching the old couple and the teenager. It probably calmed me to be a watcher instead of a waiter like them. It suited my personality. I went through to my last cigarette in spite of the intimidating signs that warned of the evils of smoking. I read all the posters. Even as a smoker, I agreed with the message. I’d been promising to give up the filthy habit as soon as things calmed down and I could give it the attention it deserved. But I still resented the superior moral tone the posters took. Why couldn’t they find a way to say what they had to say without sounding smug and selfrighteous?

“Are you Mr. Cooperman?” I got to my feet and found myself face to face with a good-looking Chinese in operating room greens. A surgical mask hung around his neck, and his hair was still covered by a green cap. I guess by standing up, I acknowledged his identification. He went on. “I’m Dr. Leung,” he said. “I just left your wife and I want to tell you that we think she’s going to be all right. She’s a very lucky woman, you know.”

“She’s going to be all right?” I know he’d just said that, but sometimes you just have to say the things that pop into your head without editing or polishing them.

“You’re Dr. Young?” I was still trying to take hold.

“Not Young, Leung. Kiu Leung,” he said patiently. “If you’d delayed another half-hour, I don’t think we could be so certain of recovery. I could have been giving you some very bad news. You understand?” I nodded gravely, which seemed to be what was required of me. Did he think that we were playing games with those pills and one went off by accident or what? “We had to pump her out thoroughly. She’s going to feel like hell for a couple of days. We’ll be admitting her and there will be more information later tonight, if you’d like to check in. You can see her now, if you want, but they’ll be moving her to a room very soon.”

I never seem to take in more than about forty percent of what a doctor tells me. If I concentrate on getting the name, I lose his message. If I get the message, I can never locate the doctor again. I should always leave my office with a wire taped to my liver so that everything will be recorded and nothing will be lost. Even while I was thinking this, I was missing something Dr. Leung was saying. “Now, Mr. Cooperman, I’d like to get the details of how this accident happened. Who prescribed these pills in the first place? The combination of the drugs and the alcohol gave us a very hard time in there.”

“Well, I’m not sure I know about all that. But could I get back to you when I’ve got the details fixed in my own head? Right now, I have to get in touch with the police. Can I use your phone?” He pulled at his chin, trying to decide whether or not to quiz me further on this or to return to his patient. He indicated a phone inside the nurses’ station and I helped myself. When I looked up again, Dr. Kiu Leung had gone through one of the doors back into the wonderful world of medicine and the thousand-and-one stories that unfold every day in a general hospital. I called Savas.

* * *

I could say I went up to the Medical Records Department to kill time while waiting for Savas to arrive, but the results deserve a better place in the record than that. And it didn’t hurt when I saw that the clerk on duty was Alison Simmers. She read the letters from George Tallon and his lawyer, then disappeared into the office of her supervisor after asking me if I had seen my brother, Sam, recently. I confessed that it had been some weeks. While she was gone I realized that it was really several months since I’d been to Toronto to see him. By the time she returned, I was quite homesick for my older brother and feeling guilty about not getting to Toronto more often.

Alison brought me the file and showed me where I could sit down while looking through the forms. Basically, there were three of these: the Emergency Report, an Itemized Clothing List and Admission Form. Tallon had arrived by stretcher from an ambulance, had been treated in Emerge by Dr. Kiu Leung, of recent acquaintance, but had died before he could be properly admitted. I tried to read about all the work the resuscitation team had tried on him, but I couldn’t make out much of it. It looked like they tried everything in the book. The clothing list included the following items of interest. The printed words were accompanied by numbers and check marks in ballpoint pen: