Come Out Tonight (27 page)

“But how?”

The doctor smiled.
 
“I’d say that it’s somehow triggering the gamma rhythm, which synchronizes the parts which were on but disconnected.
 
Synchronizing those parts is enough to bootstrap the whole thing, and the whole brain reconnects.
 
The dormant parts turn on.
 
Consciousness comes forth.”

In my mind I couldn’t help hearing:
Oh, the leg bone’s connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone’s connected to the foot bone....
“Is that what really happens?” I asked.
 
It all seemed too neat, somehow.

“You got a better explanation?” the doctor asked, and laughed.

I laughed, too, I didn’t know why.
 
Science didn’t know a damn thing.

DONNA

I got the unexpected news from Henry Jackman that Sherry Pollack has just woken up.
 
Ironically, a dose of her own drug had done the trick, something for which Henry claimed credit, along with reminding me that he always knew it would happen, even when I said it wasn’t
gonna
.
 
Resisting the urge to tell him what a big dope he was, I said I was very happy for them both, and didn’t mind in the least that she proved me wrong.
 

The next day, full of curiosity, I signed out one of the Crown Victorias and drove myself to Sherry’s nursing home in the
Bronx
. The Henry Hudson Parkway was as bad as ever with a long backup on the 96
^th
Street access, but the Cross Bronx was worse: six lanes of misery crammed bumper-to-bumper, with each and every car inching forward to within an inch of the vehicle in front of it, everyone in the grips of some mass paranoia that the enemy in the adjoining lane was ready to cut in and deprive him of his rightful place.
 
Times like this I miss the subway. The fifteen mile trip that should have taken twenty minutes took me an hour and a half, but I got there.
 

Parkhill Nursing Home sits on a little green hill overlooking a very urban neighborhood of boarded-up buildings and littered sidewalks, kids shooting baskets into netless hoops set in crumbling patches of asphalt, where the only greenery in sight is the scrappy weeds that push their way through the cracks in the pavement.
 
A couple of generations ago it used to be a nice place to live: unpretentious but clean, black and immigrant mostly, your usual working class neighborhood with a lot of local color and a polyglot of different languages; kids playing stick ball in the street and young parents pushing baby buggies to the park.
 
Now, not so much.
 
But who knows?
 
What with
Manhattan
’s prices,
Bronx
might just be the next hot neighborhood.
 
After all,
Brooklyn
did it.
 

The nursing home was mobbed, not so much with residents and their families as with journalists, doctors, and curiosity seekers.

“When can we see her?” shouted one man with a Channel 5 logo on his sports jacket.

“I heard the parents were in town.
 
Are they here yet?” asked some woman in front of me.

“This is intolerable,” said one distinguished-looking doctor.
 
“How many times do I have to tell you that I was
invited
to examine Ms. Pollack?”

I shoved my way through a sea of white coats and TV cameras, mostly on the strength of my badge, making my way to the front desk.
 
The single nurse in back was already harried, talking to several people at once.
 
Once again, the badge got her attention.
 
She pushed several layers of insistent people away in her effort to point the way for me to Sherry’s room.
 
“Not yet,” I heard her tell the others.
  

I followed the carpeted hallway to Room 128 and looked in.
 
Surprisingly, there was almost no one inside.
 
Over by the bed stood Sherry’s parents.
 
Rhonda dressed and jeweled as if to go to the theater, had pulled up a chair, Phillip in a navy blazer with a crest, was standing back a few paces, staring at his daughter as if she were the creature of the blue lagoon.
 

“So how are you, honey?” Rhonda was saying as she wet a tissue with her tongue and wiped something off Sherry’s chin.

Sherry was answering in monosyllables.
 
“Okay,” she said.

Her father said, “So you still can’t wake up by yourself?”

“No,” Sherry said after a pause.

“And you can’t stop yourself from falling back asleep?”

Another pause.
 
“No.”

“Do you try?” Phillip asked.

“Honestly, Phil,” Rhonda scolded, but Sherry was already answering, albeit very slowly.

“Daddy,” she asked.
 
“You think…I’m doing this on…on…pur…pose?”

They stood for a minute just looking at each other, Sherry very earnest, tears in her eyes, her father unreadable. “The doctors here are clueless,” Phillip responded at last.
 
“I’ve called in a few top specialists.
 
If anyone can get to the bottom of this, they can.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Sherry said.

I coughed.
 
All three heads snapped around, with Sherry’s by far the slowest of the bunch.
 
She might be awake, I thought, but she’s not the way she was.
 
“I’m Detective Donna Sirken of the NYPD,” I said, moving toward the bed with my hand out.
 

Sherry turned white.
 
“What did I do?” she asked her mother.

“It’s all right, honey,” Rhonda said, stepping quickly between the bed and the big, bad cop.

“Nothing, Sherry,” I replied.
 
“You were the victim of a vicious attack. The NYPD has assigned me to your case.”

“They told me,” Sherry said, her color coming back to her face.
 
“But I don’t remember anything.”

“You don’t?” her father asked, some fleeting expression crossing his handsome features: sympathy, distress, or relief.
 
It was hard to tell.

Sherry shook her head.
 
“Nothing,” she said.

I reintroduced myself to her parents and we all chitchatted, if you can call it that, for the next fifteen minutes until all of a sudden, Sherry’s head fell backwards against the pillow, and her body went limp.
 
Rhonda gasped, and her husband took a step backwards.
 
But Sherry had simply timed out.

The three of us went out into the hallway to ask a nurse whether she could be given another pill, but the crowd at the front desk had swollen to a mob, and the sight of us coming out of Sherry’s room seemed to incite them.

“The parents!” shouted someone carrying a spiral bound notebook, and in a moment the crowd had surged past the front desk and halfway down the hall, suddenly beyond the pale of the nurse who stood in back, protesting.

The moment Phillip saw them coming toward him, he turned frantic, eyes darting everywhere.
 
I urged the Pollacks back into Sherry’s room, and closed the door.
 
Rhonda walked slowly to Sherry’s bedside, put her hand on the railing, seemingly content to watch her sleep, but Phillip was madly scanning the room with his eyes like a claustrophobe searching for a way out of a sealed box.

Finally, his eyes lit on the back door, which led out to the garden.
 
Before I could stop him, he had thrown it open and was halfway out.
 
An alarm sounded.
 
Sherry moaned slightly, as if in response.
 
Rhonda seemed conflicted. Should she minister to her daughter or follow her husband out the door?
 
I wasn’t surprised when, after one last look of longing aimed at the bedside she sped out the door in Phillip’s direction.
 
I could hear a crowd at the door and the voice of a cranky nurse ordering them to wait where they were.
 
And then I was out, too.
 
I had waited four months to question the Pollacks again and I wasn’t going to let a little thing like alarms and mob hysteria stop me now.

Dr. Pollack was way up ahead, making his way past the wooden benches with their little bronze plaques in memory of Fanny Bernbaum and Vincento DeLorenzo; winding through an obstacle course of wrought iron tables with their jaunty, striped umbrellas; skirting the carefully manicured flower beds, up through the shrubbery, toward the parking lot.
 
Rhonda was running to catch up, and I was bringing up the rear.
 
I caught up with Phillip at last in the vast parking lot, his eyes scanning the horizon, looking for taxis.

“My car is over there,” I said, pointing to the Crown Victoria parked three rows away.
  
He scurried over to where my finger pointed, Rhonda following his every move.
 
I clicked my key fob to let them in, and both of them crowded into the back seat, Phillip with his head down.
 
It was a weirdest manifestation of sociophobia – a fear of people - I had ever seen.
 
This guy wanted to be out of sight and fast.
 

“Where to?” I asked, thinking I’d lighten the situation.

“The Ramada,” he replied with a look of a man in pain.
 
I wasn’t sure if his expression was the consequence of escaping the madding crowd or whether it was a comment on being forced to stay at such a plebian establishment.
  
“Go south on this street, then loop around to come back going north and it’ll be on your right.”

I did as I was told.
 
The Ramada Bronx Hotel loomed up on our right, a large, square brick behemoth of a building with a red roof.

“It was close,” Rhonda explained, with that same look of pain, as we entered the vast, generic-looking lobby.
 
That clinched it.
 
The Ritz Carlton or the Pierre would have been far more their style, but this was simply the sacrifice one sometimes has to make for one’s children.

The elevator took us to the top floor.
 
Down in the corner was their suite.
 
Phillip slid his key card into the door.
 
There was a large HDTV in a living room decorated in tones of antique gold, a small kitchen and a Jacuzzi down the hall.
 
Phillip was already raiding the mini bar: three little gins and a miniature Vermouth.
  
He carried them over to the kitchen counter and poured everything into a Rubbermaid pitcher, along with the scant contents of an ice tray he’d just found in the freezer.
 
It was eleven o’clock in the morning.
 
“Martini?” he asked me.
 
I demurred: I was on duty.
 
He poured the mixture, ice cubes and all, into two wine glasses, handed one to his wife, and dropped down onto an antique gold upholstered chair.

I let him sip his drink in silence for a few minutes.
 
The man had just had a traumatic experience.
 
For the life of me, I couldn’t guess why, but clearly that was the case.
  
Rhonda had taken her martini glass into the powder room, and was gone so long I thought she might already be splashing in the Jacuzzi.
  
By the time she came back, her glass was empty, and it was almost eleven-thirty.
 
By now Phillip seemed much more relaxed.
 
In the meantime, he’d called down for another four little bottles of gin and one of Vermouth, a plate of mixed sandwiches and a side of onion rings; and a young man in a bellboy uniform had brought them up and arranged it all as pleasantly as possible on the coffee table.
 
It was now or never, I thought.

“Dr. Pollack,” I said, “I have evidence that you and your wife did not come in on the morning of May 3 as you claimed, but flew into
New York
three days earlier to take your daughter out to a birthday dinner.”

“I’ve already told you about that,” Rhonda said. “And I already told you why.
 
My husband is a very private man. He cannot abide his name in the news. He doesn’t react at all well to crowds or publicity, a circumstance that you just saw for yourself.”

“Let me handle this, Rhonda,” Phillip told her, pouring the last of the mixture into his glass and holding out the pitcher for Rhonda to dispose of. Rhonda took it, and brought it over to the sink.
  
Meanwhile, her husband took a sip of his refreshed martini. “Mea culpa, Detective,” he said.
 
“I did not tell you to whole truth. We were already in town.
 
We were there, as we try to be every year, to celebrate Sherry’s birthday. This time, however, Sherry was in a depressive funk.”
 

He took another sip.
 
“Somnolux!
 
How I wish that so called wonder drug had never been discovered!” He paused to effect.
 
“I guess you know most of this by now, anyway, Detective.
 
How the drug has side effects.
 
Not many, mind you, but serious enough to raise questions about whether it was fully tested.
 
Well, Sherry was terribly upset about all this.
 
She wanted to warn the patients, to get out the word to the media. She wanted to do this despite the horde of Vandenberg lawyers who counseled against it.
 
If she did this, I told her, not only would her brainchild Somnolux die a horrible death, but Vandenberg would find some way to fire her.
 
And, she might never find another prestigious job like this, because her reputation would suffer.
 
She would be known ad infinitum, not only as a whistleblower to a distinguished organization, but as the discoverer of a drug that made people do crazy things in their sleep.