Hillerman, Tony (3 page)

“I saw the letter,” Moon said. “She will get there, okay? It takes time. You take care of getting well. The nuns in Manila will take care of the baby.”

“He didn’t seem to know anything,” his mother said.

“How about the mother?” Moon asked. “Why can’t she bring the child?” He had other questions. Why isn’t the mother keeping the baby? was one of them. But Victoria Mathias seemed no longer aware that he was there. Her body, already shrunken under the sheet, seemed to shrink even more.

She frowned vaguely, and her lips moved. “Very unsatisfactory,” she seemed to say. But the voice was too weak to be understood and Moon thought he might have only guessed at that phrase. Victoria Mathias communicated by letter. To his mother, all telephone conversations were very unsatisfactory.

The person in charge of saving his mother’s life was a doctor named Jerrigan. Dr. Jerrigan made his rounds from ten to eleven and should have been in this ward at about ten-thirty. Now it was fifteen minutes after eleven and Dr. Jerrigan had not arrived.

Moon had sat on the slick plastic chair in the waiting room for more than an hour. During the first thirty minutes of waiting he’d exhausted every possible speculation about his mother’s condition and what he should do about it. He had devoted only a few minutes to considering what needed to be done about Ricky’s daughter. Obviously, he would first call the lawyer in Manila for today’s reading on that problem. The second step would depend on the first. With that decided, he let his mind drift back to the problems he’d left behind him in his rush to the airport.

First, as always, there was Debbie. He could take care of the birthday by finding her something special in Los Angeles—if he could ever get away from this hospital. And then there was the spaniel left in his custody by Shirley until Shirley was safely moved into her new apartment, where spaniels were tolerated. The spaniel had an appointment with a veterinarian and he was supposed to have dropped the damned dog off on his way to work. He’d forgotten about that until he got to the airport at Denver and had had to call the paper. It was Shirley’s day off, so the burden fell upon Hubbell. Hubbell hadn’t sounded happy about it, but he said he’d try to find somebody to take care of it. And he would. Hubbell was grouchy but reliable. A little like himself, he thought.

So don’t worry about the dog. Worry about the other responsibilities he’d left behind. Like J.D.’s truck. Moon inspected his knuckle, which seemed to be scabbing over nicely, and his hands, which despite heavy soaping in the shower still showed evidence of grease in deep cracks and under his fingernails. The grease and the scab were both evidence of J.D.’s failure to maintain his vehicle properly. The baby blue paint always glittered, but J.D’s interest stopped with appearances. He never kept the engine properly tuned. Or cleaned it, which explained Moon’s greasy hands, slippery wrench handles, and a bloody knuckle. In Moon’s opinion, carelessness was only one of J.D.’s several shortcomings. But he was a good-looking kid, good-natured, and great on the tennis court. And, according to Debbie, even better on the ski slopes. And now J.D’s cute little GMC Jimmy sat in Moon’s garage, its cute little diesel engine not quite reassembled. J.D. would be without wheels, which didn’t bother Moon much. But Debbie was counting on J.D. to drive her up to Aspen this weekend.

The plastic of the waiting room chair crackled as Moon shifted his weight. His back ached. And suddenly the tension that had kept sleep at bay began draining away. He yawned. And when that was accomplished, he felt utterly exhausted. He looked at his watch, eyes barely in focus. Where the hell was Dr. what’s-his-name?

Dr. Jerrigan was walking into the waiting room. He was about Moon’s age, but a third smaller and a lot trimmer, with a California surfer’s tan and the hard, wiry physique of the handball courts. He glanced at Moon, saw nothing to inspire interest, and looked down at his clipboard.

“Morick,” he said. “Morick. It looks from this like he’s suffering a coronary occlusion of some sort. The situation will probably require a coronary bypass. But we won’t know until—”

“Wrong gender,” Moon said. “It’s Mrs. Victoria Mathias Morick. I am her son.”

Dr. Jerrigan frowned at Moon.

“Whatever,” he said, and checked his clipboard again. “Oh, yes. She’s that woman they brought in from the airport yesterday. Emergency Room checked her in.” He flipped through the pages on his clipboard. “We don’t have the data we need back from the lab yet but—let’s see—” Dr. Jerrigan studied his clipboard, frowned at it. “The EKG shows equivocal coronary abnormalities.”

“So what’s the prognosis?” Moon said, hoping that
prognosis
was the correct word. “How bad is it?”

Something on Dr. Jerrigan’s belt went
beep-beep-beep.
Dr. Jerrigan glanced at his watch, walked about ten steps to a paging phone, picked it up, and talked awhile. When he returned, he looked again at the clipboard. “It doesn’t look too good,” he said. “But until we get the results of the tests they did last night, I can’t really tell.”

“Well, then,” Moon said, “let’s go get those test results. Right now. Let’s go find somebody who
can
really tell.”

Like many big men, Moon rarely had any need to show his anger and rarely did. But when he did, most people were properly impressed. Dr. Jerrigan was not one of them. He met Moon’s stare with no sign of a flinch.

“Mr. Morick,” he said, “your mother is not the only sick person in this hospital. She’s not my patient. Dr. Rodenski checked her in at ER. This is Sunday. He’s off today. I’m looking after her along with my own patients. There’s not a damn thing we can do until we know more about her condition except keep her comfortable and stabilized. We can’t get those lab reports until they’re ready. And I’ve got a gunshot victim who seems to be trying to die right now.”

“Well, goddammit, what’s her condition?” Moon asked. “It sounds to me like she had a heart attack. Give me a rundown on her condition. Her chances for survival.”

“You want a guess?” Dr. Jerrigan asked, his face slightly flushed. “How can I guess, not knowing any more than we do? But here is your guess. This was probably brought on by some sort of coronary blockage to the heart. A heart attack. Most people survive them.”

“In other words, some don’t?”

“Of course,” Dr. Jerrigan said. “Some don’t.” Then his gadget was beeping again, and Jerrigan was hurrying away.

At the Pentagon, some senior officers compared the South Vietnamese rout with other military disasters: Napoleon’s debacle in Moscow, the fall of France in 1940, the Chinese Nationalist collapse in 1949.

Time
Magazine,
APRIL
14, 1975

BY MOON’S UNCERTAIN CALCULATIONS of the difference between Pacific Standard Time and whatever time it was in Manila, it was probably the wrong hour to call Ricky’s lawyer. But he placed the call anyway and heard an answering machine click on and a soft voice saying that Mr. Castenada would respond to a message when he became available. With Manila thus made to seem more real, Moon left a message asking Mr. Castenada to call him at the Airport Inn number where Shirley had made his reservation. Then he called a taxi and collected his mother’s luggage from the Philippine Airlines security office.

The traffic noise here from jetliners overhead and the freeway below his window was thunderous.

But he’d asked Shirley for convenience, not for comfort, and Shirley had delivered, as she always did.

He’d take a shower. Maybe that would revive him. He removed his shoes, his socks, and his trousers and then sprawled across the bed, dizzy with that odd sort of fatigue brought on by stress and sleeplessness. He pulled a pillow under his head, put the telephone on his chest, dialed the Colorado area code, then broke the connection and called West Memorial Hospital instead. The nurse who answered in the cardiac unit told him his Mrs. Morick was sleeping and doing as well as could be expected.

Then he called the paper. He asked Shirley for Hubbell, but Shirley wanted to talk.

“How is she?”

Moon felt hazy, one step removed from reality. “As well as can be expected,” he said. But that wasn’t fair. Shirley was a friend. So he gave her the full report, accepted her sympathy, and asked for Hubbell.

“He’s not back from something or other down at city hail,” Shirley said. “That’s the meeting you were supposed to sit in on. And you’ve had five or six calls.”

“Anything that looks important?” He asked it out of habit. What could be important today?

“Some long-distancers. One was from the AP bureau in Denver. Said they’d catch you when you got back to town. And then a couple from Los Angeles.”

“Did they leave any messages?” Again, habit was speaking. Who cared about messages?

“One was from the airline. They want you to let them know about your mother’s luggage. Do you want me to get that taken care of?”

“I picked it up,” Moon said.

“And one from a man.” There was a pause while Shirley shuffled papers. “A Lee Lum. No, I think it was Lum Lee. He had an accent. When I told him you were gone indefinitely, he said he was actually trying to reach your mother, and it was very important, so I told him he might reach you through the security people at Philippine Airlines.”

“Okay,” Moon said. The man must think his business was important to follow Victoria to Los Angeles. But what sort of business could it be? He was too tired to think. Add it to the list of puzzles.

“That it?”

“Except the usual stuff that somebody else can handle.”

“Did Debbie call?”

A slight pause. “Let me see. Yes.”

Moon allowed himself a tired grin. “And said what?” Moon asked.

“She said to tell you she hoped your mother was all right.” Shirley’s tone was precisely neutral. “And to remind you that Saturday was April twelfth. Was it her birthday?”

“If she calls back tell her I’ve been trying to call her.” Which was a small lie but undetectable, because Debbie’s office telephone was notorious for its busy signal, and so was the phone they shared at his house. Living with Debbie had taught Moon the value of small, undetectable lies told in the interest of keeping things peaceful.

“How old will she be?” Shirley inquired sweetly.

“I really don’t know,” Moon said, avoiding another small lie on technical semantic grounds. How old was Debbie? Twenty-two by her accounting, but since Debbie, too, sometimes told small lies, he really didn’t know.

“Is Rooney in? Let me talk to him.”

Rooney was working the slot, editing early and relatively unimportant copy to fill tomorrow’s inside sections.

“I didn’t hire on to do this kind of crap,” Rooney said. “When are you coming back?” Rooney sounded sober, which was encouraging if not an absolute guarantee. “And how’s your mother?”

“I guess she’s going to have to have bypass surgery,” Moon said. “But first I want to get a second opinion from a better doctor, and then if she needs an operation I need to find her a different surgeon. The one that has his hands on her now—I wouldn’t even let him work on you.”

“That bad, huh?” Rooney said. “The way you pick a surgeon is go out in the
DOCTORS ONLY
parking lot and find the custom-built Mercedes with the TV antenna and the chauffeur wiping the bird shit off it. There’s the surgeon who keeps ’em alive long enough to get the bills paid.” Rooney paused to consider this advice. “That’s what my old granny told me.”

Moon was not in the mood for Rooney at the moment. “What’s on the menu?” he asked. “What story are you leading with?”

“I don’t know yet,” Rooney said. “We have a thing out of the State Police and the Game Department about dog packs worrying tourists up around the ski run. I told Hubbell we ought to play that one. Give it eight columns, ninety-six points, all caps:
TERRIERS TERRORIZE TOURISTS
. Or maybe
PET PACKS PROWL PARK
. Or how about—”

“Get serious,” Moon said. Rooney had been hired as a feature writer and did mostly special assignments for the city desk. But once, after too many whiskey sours at an office party, he had confessed to working in a former life as rim man on the
Kansas City Star.
That careless admission of editing experience had made him the paper’s utility desk man, writing headlines and handling copy in emergency manpower shortages. It was a job he detested, and Moon had learned that his news selection tended to be eccentric if he was drinking. But now, as Rooney provided a rundown on what he’d been using on inside pages and what he was stacking up for potential front-page use, his judgments seemed reassuringly orthodox. There wasn’t anything hot going on, either locally or statewide. Rooney had given big inside space to the Senate approval of price ceilings on domestic oil, which Moon would have used on page one, and the same sort of inside treatment to President Ford’s request to Congress for more aid for Saigon. For the front, he was holding the daily Nam battle story, with a sidebar about refugees clogging the highways; a feature about a local kid building his own computer; a two-fatality collision on the Interstate; and a city council discussion of a proposed sewer bond issue. Not bad, considering that Rooney had written the computer yarn himself before Moon’s departure had switched him from reporter to desk man.

“Then there’s another sidebar on Cambodia that maybe ought to go on page one. Sounds like the Khmer Rouge is gobbling up Phnom Perth.” Rooney’s tone had lost its flipancy earlier in the recitation of the day’s woes. Now it was grim. “Some of this stuff sounds like Attila the Hun is loose again. Everything but the giant pyramids of skulls.”

“Yeah,” Moon said. He felt a twinge of anxiety through the fatigue. “Well, tell Hubbell I’m at the Airport Inn and that Shirley has my number. And switch me back to her.”

“Debbie’s been calling. Asking about you. I think she misses you.” Unlike Shirley, Rooney liked Debbie. All males liked Debbie.

“What’s she want?”

“To know when you’d be coming back.”

“Tell her I’ve been trying to call her,” Moon said. “And, look, did I ever tell you how nasty Shakeshaft gets about drinking? If I didn’t, I’m doing it now. When he hired me I got the temperance sermon. My first job is to make sure nobody drinks in the newsroom. And my second job is to make sure nobody’s been drinking before they come in. After that, I worry about getting the paper out.”