The Nanny (20 page)

“Yes, Pa?”

She was wearing the blue robe with a round collar like a choir boy's.

“Why did you sneak out of the hospital?” Why did one bother asking?

“You know I hate it there, Pa.”

“You like to stay home with me. I know all about that. Oh, what the hell, go to sleep again. I'll attend to you in the morning.”

“Sure, Pa.”
She knew that she would get away with what she had tried to do to the boy and he knew it, too, but he always
said
he'd do something. As if there was anything he could do. The doorbell rang.

“Good evening, Doctor,” Patrick said. “Doctor, that cop Shelley just went by. I was out having a smoke and I saw him. You know, Doctor, Shelley, the one who's so down on doctors because his son died under the knife, God rest his soul, and the gig of it is, he likes nothing better than to hand out parking tickets to doctors. You're too near the fire hydrant again, Doctor, so if you'll just let me have the car keys, I'll move the car for you.” The way he figured it, the doctor would have to go and fetch his keys and that would give him a chance to tell that one that his wallet had dropped out of his pocket. And it did work out that way with plenty of time because then the telephone rang for the doctor. He came back in a blood red rage.

“They're batting one hundred at the hospital tonight, Roberta. They've lost another of my patients.”

She rounded her eyebrows. “No kid, Pa, who?”

“You didn't … no, it couldn't have been you!”

Patrick saw that the doctor was in a fog. “The car keys, sir.”

“I'm not going out again. Be damned if I will. Okay, Patrick, I'll get the keys. Park it in Coney Island if you want. I'm not going out again this night.”

Patrick asked again about the wallet. She said she had no chance to look yet, but she would. He was to come to the bedroom window, she said. When the doctor returned she was giving him a look which made him swear to himself that it would only be the outside of the window he'd go to this time, and maybe the doctor saw the look on her because he told him not to come back with the keys, that he'd come out and get them. And glad enough he was not to come into the cursed place again, for a fact.

Dr. Meducca ordered Roberta back to bed and went into the kitchen to feed his ulcer a glass of milk, then he went out into the lobby to wait for Patrick. He thought of what Roberta had tried to do to the boy and might have saved the milk because at the memory, the gush of fear-acid poured over his ulcer. How could that helpless little thing have sneaked out of the hospital? “My poor little Madam,” the old nurse called her, and rightly. He didn't believe Mrs. Fane could get out of a paper bag without help. He told himself that just because he had found Roberta in bed, that didn't mean … he told himself that because the hospital had checked and said Mrs. Fane was in her bathroom didn't make it conclusive. Why had Roberta come straight home tonight when she knew he'd try to punish her for what she'd done? The more he thought about it, the more he knew that Roberta wouldn't have come straight home. She would have holed up somewhere. With someone. It was always easy for a girl who looked like Roberta to hole up with someone.

He decided to have a look in the Fleuroscopy room again, although the one thing Roberta had never done was repeat herself. He started across the lobby to the office.

“Sir,” Patrick said, panting. “I found a fine place on First Avenue, just around the corner.” If that one hadn't seen the wallet on the bedroom floor, it could mean he had dropped it in the doctor's office. The way she'd pulled him about there, there was every reason for it to have dropped out. And if the doctor went in and found the wallet, with his papers and all … “Can I help you, Doctor? Can I fetch you whatever it is you want, sir?”

“No. Well, wait a minute. Patrick, you've been on duty all evening, haven't you?”

God forgive me for a liar. “Yes, sir.”

“Then did you see Mrs. Fane come back? Apartment 8A? The lady who was taken to the hospital in an ambulance with her husband?”

“Yes, sir, I did. Mrs. Fane came in a taxi with your daughter, sir. She went right up to her flat, sir.”

“You're sure of this, now?” What had Roberta got out of it, he wondered.

“Yes, sir. I'm sure. Mrs. Fane came in and went right up to her flat. She was anxious about the little boy, sir.” The doctor gave him a dollar bill and it burned his hand to take it, but he would put it into the foreign missions box at St. Augustine's, he told himself. “Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, Patrick. I was worried about that little lady. Well, I'll just call up and make sure she's okay.” He looked at his watch. “Hate to disturb them this late. There's a sick woman staying there tonight, but until I find out …”

Patrick felt in his pocket for the passkey which the night man was given so that if a tenant forgot his key, the super wouldn't have to be rung up. It was there. He pulled it out. “I have this passkey, sir. If you went in, it wouldn't wake the lot of them like a telephone would. I can go up and let you in, Doctor.” He thought of this at the last minute. How, with the doctor upstairs and out of the way, he could get into the office with the passkey and make sure the wallet wasn't there. “Sure, since you're the doctor, that would be okay, wouldn't it, sir?”

“Thanks, Patrick.” The worry ending, anger flooded in. Why couldn't she have stayed put? Why did she have to get into the act? He had told her the old woman had enough on her hands without her getting into the act! Angry with her because it was no good being angry with Roberta; hitting your head against a stone wall. Or with the child, or with a child like that. Dr. Meducca stormed into the elevator, Patrick following. Perfect right to give her a piece of his mind, he thought. Disregarding his express orders.… Making him look like a fool in the hospital. Mightn't they withdraw his hospital connection after tonight? They needed a physician whose patients sneaked out in the night like a hole in the head, and without entree to a first-class hospital, he'd really be sunk.

Both of them could see the line of light under the front door of apartment 8A, but since Patrick was there with the key, Dr. Meducca let him use it. As he closed the door softly, he heard the elevator descending.

But Mrs. Fane wasn't in the lighted living room. Not wishing to awaken the sick woman or the nursemaid or the boy, he walked quietly through. (If someone takes me for a burglar and I'm arrested, I deserve it.) Mrs. Fane, he told himself, would be sharing the bedroom with the Englishwoman, unless she'd sent the Englishwoman home. She could have sent her home, he thought. And then he saw a woman in bed. Before he could get out who he was and why he was there, he realized that he was looking down at the body of the Englishwoman and that she had had an acute pulmonary edema.

It figured, he told himself, sighing. He rubbed his face. It figured. What a place this was for her with her rheumatic heart! He wondered whether her death was directly attributable to the little psychopath. The mother would deny it, of course, he told himself, and left the bedroom, closing the door after him.

The bedroom across the hall was empty.
Where were they all?
He went back through the living room, up into the kitchen, switching on the light. Empty, which left only the maid's room. (There were only four apartment layouts in the house and, of course, he knew them all.) Were they all in the maid's room in the dark? The mother, having defied him and sneaked home, could be in there with her darling child, and the poor old nursemaid could be there, too, keeping guard.

He opened the door to the maid's room and in the light from the kitchen saw the plump shiny-skinned foot caught on the rope which stretched from the foot of the bed diagonally across the room to the chest of drawers in the opposite corner. He moved farther into the room, aware now of the deep regular breathing from the bed. Dr. Meducca clenched his fist at the child who slept as Roberta did, like an angel, who slept like an angel, just beyond the big body resting on a pillow which she must have been carrying, her hands flung out to break her fall. Her neck had been fractured so that her head was twisted at a fantastic angle, and, on its side, near her bloody head, the blood on it indicating she had struck her head on it, was a child's bathroom step.
History repeating itself. Hell, no, he thought, not history! The boy repeating himself, the boy!

Dr. Meducca, his hand trembling, clicked the light switch to see better. Nothing happened. The overhead light didn't go on and there was a child's lamp by the bed, a brightly painted wooden figure of a clown balancing himself with a parasol which was the shade; that didn't go on, either. Dr. Meducca peered up, swore under his breath, took out his handkerchief and, standing on tiptoe, stretching, screwed the light bulb back in. He hoped that this way, with the handkerchief, he wouldn't remove the boy's fingerprints on the bulb, because the unscrewed bulb settled it. He had no doubt, now.

The boy stirred but didn't wake. Dr. Meducca, listening more carefully to his breathing, decided he was drugged. Those sleeping pills the school doctor let him have.

He looked from the pitiful corpse to the boy, noting, with unutterable loathing, a cuddly leopard and a plush elephant which lay near the boy's head. You wouldn't believe there could be such a combination, would you? Mother Goose and Jack the Ripper! But he knew there could be; he knew, no one better than he, that there could be! Then, for relief, because dead, distorted, the head at its preposterous angle, the faded blue eyes milky and open, he stared at the corpse again since it was an easier sight than the dark-haired boy sleeping like an angel.

This is worthy of Roberta, he thought. Hell, no, if he can do this at eight, he'll beat Roberta hollow by the time he's eighteen! Think of it! He called her in a sleepy voice—oh, God, the innocent sleepy child voice he must have used, knowing that it would have drawn that poor old woman into the mouth of hell! What did he call her now?
Nanny
. “Nanny,” he had called in a sleepy voice which would have drawn her like a magnet, “I want a pillow, Nanny.” There was no pillow on the bed, he noticed. Even if the old woman had bothered to try the light and it hadn't gone on, she would have walked in, walked a tightrope over Niagara in the dark to any child who called her. And well did this monster know that! He put nothing past him!

And this—this contraption all prepared, the light bulbs unscrewed. Finished in a minute. All over. Plenty of time to get a good night's rest and then set the scene the way he wanted to. Well, his coming in unexpectedly had upset the apple cart, the execution cart, the—the
tumbrel
, wasn't it called? Because he had appeared now, it wasn't going to be quite as easy as the boy had thought, not quite so easy! (Would have screwed back the bulbs. Would have removed the rope, then, with Roberta's clear gaze, would have looked back into the eyes of those who were trying to find put how this second terrible
accident
had happened.)

Then Dr. Meducca remembered that he had come here to find little Mrs. Fane. He clutched his abdomen where a Niagara of acid flowed over his ulcer because Patrick had told him she was here, and backed out of the room, returning to the other bedroom, the one he had thought was empty, since it, too, might contain a corpse. Why not? Each of the other two bedrooms did and the boy had tried to kill his mother earlier.

This time, Dr. Meducca looked more carefully behind the screen, under the bed, in the bathroom, in the closet. After this, gingerly, feeling like hell, although he should be used to that, he opened the linen closet in the hall, the two closets in the room where the Englishwoman lay, half off the bed, and also in the bathroom there.

When he had examined the guest closet and Mrs. Fane's body wasn't in it, the pain in his gut eased a little. She wasn't dead, the pretty little thing was safe. Since she wasn't here or with Roberta, she was safe. It was ridiculous, perhaps, but this was how he felt. She, anyhow, was safe.

Now, what must he do? Well, he must foil the boy's plan and make sure that nothing in the maid's room was disturbed. He hurried back there and lifted Joey carefully so that he wouldn't awake and see the old woman. Oh, not for the boy's sake, not to spare him, but because she should be protected, because the boy had done enough to her. He would not let him see her like this, with her red bathrobe hiked up and her poor old knobby varicose-veined legs exposed. He wanted—how stupid could you get—to pull down the hiked-up skirt and arrange her limbs decently. He wanted to undo those tight, thin braids of gray hair so that they didn't stick out like Topsy's. But that was because in life she had kept herself decent. “And a lot of good that did,” he told himself.

When he lifted the boy, he muttered but didn't wake. Dr. Meducca stepped high, to avoid the rope, to keep from tripping and killing himself. But what for? Why not die? Why go on?

Because, he told himself, he had something to do first.

What did he have to do?

He laid the boy on the couch in the living room and went to the big chair by the window, leaning against it. From there, he stared across the street at all the dark windows, knowing—he was, after all, a physician and a man of fifty-one—that behind most of those bedroom windows sleepers repudiated, evaded or threw off their heavy burdens. He knew the load they carried of fear and loneliness and disease and madness, and a whole Pandora's box of disappointments, but none of them across the street, he hoped, had what he had downstairs and what those poor slobs here had on the couch behind him. He turned to the boy, who, breathing evenly, threw a touchingly thin arm out in a Roman gesture: “Friends, Romans, countrymen—” but that boy and Roberta had no friends and no countrymen, living as they did in a place so without all mercy or human feeling that hell, where, after all, justice was done, was Paradise compared to it.