He Done Her Wrong: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Eight) (Toby Peters Mysteries) (22 page)

Sklodovich nodded, reached down, and removed a plasterboard panel from the back of the closet wall. Beyond the panel I could see a tile floor. Sklodovich stepped through the hole and motioned me to follow. I stepped into a large bathroom, and the bird replaced the plasterboard and whispered: “You think I don’t know they out there you got anudder think?”

“Who does he think is outside the door?”

“I don’t know,” said Sklodovich. “He’d rather not say.”

Sklodovich listened at the door for a second, then strode to the nearest stall to the accompaniment of swirling water in the line of automatic constantly flushing cleanser-needful urinals.

I followed.

Inside the stall, above the toilet, was a small, metal door painted battleship gray. Sklodovich pulled it open.

“Up the pipe,” he whispered, pointing his finger up the dark shaft beyond the door.

At first I thought he was muttering a dark-purpled curse against pipes and tubular constructions. After all, he was, by confession and choice, a lunatic. Headfirst, Sklodovich disappeared through the hole.

“Close the door behind you,” his voice echoed seconds after his slippered toes vanished.

Reaching into the darkness, I felt a moist water pipe and began to pull myself painfully into the darkness, pausing to close the metal door behind me.

There I balanced, clinging to a wet pipe with one hand and both legs while with my other hand I attempted to close a heavy metal door that had no handle on the inside, nothing but a protruding bolt, which I struggled to grasp with unprotected fingers.

Plunged in darkness, my fear increased. How many floors below me did this blackness fall? If my grip and the surrounding wall in the narrow tunnel failed me, would I zip down into a limbo like razor blades into those shafts in hotel bathrooms? And up? What was up above me except the retreating sound of Sklodovich’s breathing?

Using the wall, a jagged mass of rough bricks, and piping, I managed to follow within hearing distance of my guide. I skinned my right arm on an unidentified outcropping, and my wet hands kept slipping, but I rested without too much difficulty by holding the pipe and letting my rear end rest against a smooth section of wall. I continued like this in the timelessness of darkness for a period of between two minutes and four hours.

My back ached, but I climbed upward. My pajama bottoms slipped, but I grappled upward. My palms blistered, but I moved onward. My foot found an exceptionally good hold on a protruding brick and I pushed myself forward and found a long, thin face gazing at me. The face included a mouth that hung stupidly open, inches from me. A gray stubble of beard surrounded the open mouth, which reveled a pitted and not very pleasant tongue. I almost let go.

Sklodovich’s face replaced the one that had startled me.

“Where have you been, Toby? I thought you changed your mind. Hell, I guess there aren’t many men who can make it up the shaftway as quickly as I can. Dynamic tension does it. With nothing but dynamic tension Charles Atlas got strong enough to pull railroad cars. Think of that. Railroad cars. A man who can pull railroad cars doesn’t get sand kicked in his face at the beach, or anywhere else. You know Atlas volunteered to beef up old Gandhi in India?”

“Can I come in? My feet are slipping.”

“Sure, I’m sorry,” said Sklodovich, helping me through the hole, which turned out to be another shaftway entrance in another washroom like the one we had left. I stepped over the toilet and leaned against the wall to catch my breath.

A man with his mouth open stood there with his pajamas at his feet, watching us. He was very tall and thin and leaned forward with rounded shoulders. His grayish skin made him look like a wilted stalk of celery. He had obviously been interrupted while seated.

“Let’s go,” said Sklodovich, walking to the door.

“Does he know what we’re doing here?” I asked.

“He?”

“This man,” I said, nodding toward the celery-man, whose look of astonishment was firmly frozen on his face.

“I suppose not. Why?”

“Why? I think we scared the hell out of him.”

“You think so,” asked Sklodovich seriously. “Did we scare the hell out of you, fella?”

The man shook his head wildly.

“See we didn’t scare him. You can have your pot back, mister. Now let’s go. If you see anybody in the hall, walk as if you belong here.”

Without knowing how one walks when one belongs on a particular floor of a nut house, I followed Sklodovich into the hall, leaving the bewildered man to make his own peace with reality.

There were patients in the hall, but they paid no attention as we went down a corridor like the one on our own floor. A nurse passed, paused, and turned to me. Sklodovich kept walking, but I stopped when I felt her arm on my sleeve.

“Don’t you think you should take off that robe and get a clean one?” she asked. “You look as if you’ve been crawling down a greased pole.”

“I don’t know how it got so dirty. Must have fallen. I’ll change it right away.”

“See that you do.”

She walked away to talk to another patient, and I hurried after Sklodovich, whom I found down a short corridor. He stopped in front of a window overlooking an enclosed courtyard. The window was hidden from the main corridor by a pillar. Sklodovich opened the window and gently pushed two of the bars covering it out of the way. He slid through and motioned for me to follow. I did.

Sklodovich closed the window and pushed the bars back in place. It was only then that I noticed we were standing on a narrow ledge four floors above the ground, a ledge that tilted slightly downward. A thin rain was falling, but Sklodovich began shuffling along the ledge, and I followed. After two steps on the wet ledge, I decided to climb through the next window and turn myself in for the safety of my room. We inched our way along the ledge, but came to no window. Sklodovich stopped.

I could see him from the corner of my eye. My back was tight against the wall and my head as far back as I could pull it without cracking the stitching open. Sklodovich reached up to an old rainspout, pulled himself up with one hand, and disappeared.

With trembling hand and rain-moistened body I shuffled over, reached for the rainspout, and tried to lift myself, but my foot slipped. “Not in my pajamas,” I screamed, picturing myself plunging downward.

Sklodovich reached over and grabbed my wrist, but my legs gave way and I glanced down to watch my slippers plunge, bounce against the wall, and melt into the rain. Twisting, I tried to regain a foothold. My robe flapped in my eyes, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that my pajama bottoms had slipped and I was, like the celery-man in the washroom exposed from the waist down.

Sklodovich lifted me easily over the top without bouncing me against the rainspout. I found myself on the roof of the hospital, lying on a pebbled asphalt surface and feeling like a mop left out overnight in the rain.

“I’ll carry you the rest of the way if you like,” Sklodovich offered.

“No, thanks,” said I, rising amid the sparse jungle of chimneys and parapets. “I’ll make it.”

Limping barefoot on the pebbles, I followed Sklodovich behind a protuberance of concrete and found us facing a green door. Sklodovich put his ear to the door and opened it gently.

“It opens from the outside but not the inside,” he whispered.

“I see,” I panted, but I did not see at all.

“Put these on,” Sklodovich ordered as we stepped through the door. He handed me a pair of sunglasses, which I put on and which did not help at all in navigating the narrow stairway down which we tiptoed.

“If anyone asks you, we’re on our way to Dr. Keaky for a heat treatment,” he said, putting on a pair of sunglasses.

“What if they ask us why we’re wet?”

“We just took showers.”

“But our robes and pajamas are wet.”

“I know that.”

“I know that you know it,” I whispered. “But what do we tell someone if they ask why our clothes are wet?”

“We fell in the pool.”

“Is there a pool?”

“I don’t know,” said Sklodovich as we hurried down a dozen stairs in sticky flight. “But no one will question it. We’re supposed to be mentally unstable, remember?”

“What else is there to remember around here?”

We reached another door and Sklodovich turned to me.

“Remember, we’re on our way to Dr. Keaky for a—”

“Heat treatment.”

“Right.”

Dripping, we stepped into another hospital alcove. The sunglasses made everything seem warm and sweaty, which it was.

“Wait behind the door,” he said. “Dealer is somewhere on this floor, but I’m not sure of the room. It’ll just take me a minute.”

Before I could protest, he plunged his hands into his pockets and stepped into the hallway, whistling more conspicidusly than I thought safe.

Alone, I noticed a single door in the alcove where I was standing. The door was slightly open, and glancing at it, I was sure it was opening an almost infinitesimal fraction each second. Just as I was about to step back behind the safety of my own door, the door swung open and a short, dark man who looked like an Italian bus driver stepped out. One hand was calmly resting in the pocket of a black silk robe. The other hand, his left I believe, held a pistol pointed at my stomach.

CHAPTER 12

“You will please step into this room,” said the dark-haired man quietly.

“I’m on my way to Dr. Keaky for a heat treatment.”

“Nonsense. There is no Dr. Keaky. Please step into this room with no more trouble.” He looked toward the hallway, where Sklodovich had disappeared, and motioned with his gun toward the door before which he was standing. I stepped in, leaving moist footprints on the tile floor.

He followed and closed the door. The room was much like the one that my dubious friend and I occupied, except that it seemed much more permanent and held only one bed in the corner. There was a simple, unpainted wood table and chair, a reproduction of a van Gogh sunflower on one wall, and a big trunk in another corner.

“You will sit on the chair, and I will sit on the bed, where it will be quite impossible for you to make a move toward me and live. Very good. You did not know that I could open the door, did you? Of course not. You never see the obvious. In many ways you are clever, but in the end, your overconfidence will trip you up.”

“You’ve got me confused with someone else. To be frank, I’m a patient, like you. My name is Peters. I’m just looking for someone on this floor named Dealer and—”

“Take off your sunglasses, please.”

I took them off and found the man not so dark as I had thought, but the pistol was much larger than I had feared.

“We might be able to arrange some kind of deal,” he said.

“A deal?”

“Perhaps. Remember, I can always kill you, push you outside, and close the door. The others do not know that I’ve got this gun nor that I can open the door. Do not move.”

“I’m not moving.”

“As I was saying,” he continued, “no one would suspect me.”

“Who would they suspect?”

He laughed.

“You don’t trust each other. You fight. I’ve heard you at night when you think I’m sleeping. You have an enemy here, I’m sure. You all have. They’ll blame him. So you see you have no choice but to help me. You understand?” He waved the gun.