Never Street (28 page)

“Who said he was beaten?” I asked.

S
OMETHING THIS TIME:
the slightest tremor in the dark amber liquid in the bottom of the glass he was holding. The light reflected off his spectacles in flat circles, concealing his eyes. “You,” he said. “You said he was beaten.”

I shook my head. “I said he was in the hospital. I didn’t say what put him there. He could have been shot or stabbed. How did you know he wasn’t?”

“It was an obvious assumption, given the psychosis I described.” He took a healthy swallow. I thought of Roy Thibido, gulping his cheap sweetened whiskey from a vending machine cup. They were brothers in spite of the difference in vintages. “The conclusion was logical.”

“Bad save, Doctor. You need a new line of work. You rattle too easily for this one. You know for a fact Leander was beaten, because your pet ape told you all about it. Gordon found out from Leander’s brother-in-law where he was staying and went out there and bounced him around to get him to tell what he did with the videotapes. Maybe he told him and Gordon didn’t believe him. Or maybe he did believe him and kept on bouncing anyway. Having gone that far, he had to finish the job so Leander couldn’t finger him. It was more than just an assault rap now. It might as well be murder.

“Well, he didn’t finish the job,” I went on. “When a man’s lying in his own blood and excrement it’s kind of hard to tell, especially when your own heart’s pounding from the exertion and you can’t tell if you’re getting a pulse.”

He managed to drain the glass and set it down without shaking. It took all his training to do it.

I said, “That’s too bad for you. If he recovers, he’ll talk. Even if he doesn’t, the cops will be here soon, because I told Leander’s sister I was working for her brother’s former employer. I’m only one telephone call ahead of them. That’s all they’ll need to find out from your people at Balfour House where you’re staying. You don’t have what it takes to stonewall your way through a professional grilling. I’ve tripped you up twice, on a pair of tricks so old they ought to be chiseled on stone tablets, and I don’t do this every day. The cops do. Say I’m all wet and you tough it out. Gordon won’t. Why should he? He’ll turn you for the chance to bargain his case down from murder one to assault with intent to cause great bodily harm less than murder. The judge will buy that. Battery’s not an exact science, and one more loose cannon rolling around a crowded deck won’t change the crime statistics. He’ll want the guy who loaded it and pointed it and pulled the string.”

As I spoke, I watched him crumble. It was all inside, and if I hadn’t seen him trying to battle back from unsure ground before, I might not have detected it. He looked older. The pleasant expression was gone. Clearly it was just something he put on for the occasion, like the elegant jacket, which at the moment made the man in it look that much more pathetic. He was someone to feel sorry for, if you went in for that kind of thing.

“I didn’t pull any strings.” He was watching the smoke toil upward from the end of his parked cigar. “I didn’t want anyone hurt. I certainly didn’t want anyone killed. Gordon said he could persuade Leander to give up the tapes. I thought he just meant to intimidate him.”

“That’s what you wanted to think. You just didn’t ask Gordon the questions you didn’t want to know the answers to. That strategy’s been tested and failed. It brought down a president and an Olympic skater.”

“I wanted to protect my patients.”

“You wanted to protect your racket. That bus has left the station. The well-heeled patients you’ve been blackmailing with the information on those tapes have kept silent so far, but once you’re busted and the press gets hold of it they’ll come streaming out of the woodwork. Thanks to Leander, the tapes are in their possession. They don’t have to worry about them leaking out, and the law won’t need them for evidence as long as your victims are willing to testify.”

“God. Dear God. What do I do?”

“The same thing you should have done when you realized the tapes were missing. Call a lawyer. And stay away from Gordon. You’re on different sides now.”

He said nothing. He hadn’t heard.

The first drops struck the window, noiselessly on the other side of the cushion of air between the double panes. I changed my mind about the cognac and went over and poured some into a hotel glass.

“The question is, who tried to shake you down if it wasn’t Leander? Who is Mr. Bell, and how did he lay hands on the videotape he copied and sent you to put teeth in his demands? Where is the tape? Did you bring it with you?”

“Why should I help you?”

“No reason, except you don’t have a choice. If you left it up on the island, that’s that. Your lawyer might be able to get a court order restraining the cops from raiding your video library on the grounds of patient confidentiality. If they find it here in your possession when they come for you, it’s a bird from a different flock. It could air on tonight’s Six O’Clock News. One more nail in your coffin.”

“It’s in my suitcase.”

A pebbled brown American Tourister lay in state on the folding stand in the closet with its latches undone. I opened it and rummaged among the odd items of clothing he hadn’t unpacked until I felt something solid in one of the side pockets. I took it out. It was an ordinary TDK VHS videotape in the manufacturer’s sleeve, without a label or any other kind of identification. The tab had been broken off so it couldn’t be taped over by accident.

A VHS videocassette player rested on a shelf below the TV in the cabinet. I switched on the set, turned to Channel 3, and poked the tape into the slot in the player. It began turning immediately.

At first there was a lot of video noise. Then the screen flipped and the interior of another room in another building slid down from the top, blurred, and focused. I recognized the green leather sofa in Ashraf Naheen’s consulting room on Mackinac Island. A man was seated on the end of the sofa with his knees together and his hands gripping them. It was plain he was unwilling to stretch himself out across the cushions like a character in a
New Yorker
cartoon. The man was a representative specimen of middle-aging American manhood: sad-eyed, hesitant in the jaw, hairline in retreat. I recognized him instantly, although we had never met. At one time the clothes he wore had been chosen for their style and the statement they made, but today they were just something to place between him and his nakedness. He’d neglected to fasten two buttons on his shirt.

Dr. Naheen’s pleasant voice came from offscreen. “At what point did you feel you wanted to get up out of your seat and walk into the light?”

The response was awkward and shambling, a man opening his private trunk in front of a stranger. “I—well, that is, it was never a question of wanting, exactly. I just sort of did. I mean, here I was here, and then there I was there. I don’t recall ever having given it anything like what you would call a conscious thought.”

I was standing in front of the set, not paying attention to anything but what was taking place onscreen. Naheen didn’t stir from the deep chair where he sat slumped in the wreckage of his self-esteem, not looking at anything. He had nothing in common with the confident, controlling voice prompting the man on the tape from just outside camera range.

“I remind you that the conscious and the unconscious are my province. Don’t try to analyze yourself, or to say what you think I want to hear based on psychiatric examinations you may have seen dramatized on television. I realize finding words for your feelings is difficult. We have plenty of time.”

He must have had a key, and he must have suspected the doctor wasn’t alone, because I never heard so much as the scrape of the latch or the doorknob rotating in its socket.

“I’m trying, Doctor,” said the man on the tape. “I want to get well.”

There was a sudden weight on the carpet behind me, bending the floorboards beneath my feet, and before I could react, a thick bare arm with a spotty tan dropped down across my throat from behind and pressed back against my larynx. I wasn’t breathing. I reached up with both hands to pry it loose, but it was like hauling on a tow bar. Then the other arm crossed the back of my neck in a scissors.

“No one is ill here,” explained Dr. Naheen pleasantly. “We just need to identify the source of your trouble and remove it.”

I wasn’t breathing. I knew the hold from my training in the military police; only then it involved the use of an oak baton. This one didn’t need artificial aid. With or without the stick, when applied correctly it was described in the manual as unbreakable.

I had never liked the manual. I brought my knee up almost to my chin and stamped my heel down hard on his instep.

Nothing happened.

I wasn’t breathing. My vision checkered as if someone were twisting a steel net taut against my bulging eyeballs. I reached back for my gun and closed my fingers on the handle, but the body that went with the girderlike arms and iron instep was pressed up against it and I couldn’t work it loose. I sobbed, but no one heard it. The sound had no place to go and died in my throat. I wasn’t breathing.

The TV screen went black, only it wasn’t the TV.

My hearing was the last thing to go. The voice of the man on the tape said, “I guess I always just knew I belonged up there.”

“In the light.”

“In the light...”

R
AIN FLOGGED MY FACE.

Not individual drops, but in great stinging knouts with ice crystals mixed in, like the barbed ends of a cat-o’-nine. It burned my eyes and numbed my skin, saturating my clothes, whose weight tugged me toward earth. The rain was blowing sideways; every fresh surge struck the side of the building with a whump that seemed to rock it. The hailstones were as big as marbles, as big as shooters, bouncing knee-high off horizontal surfaces and falling hard enough to raise welts on naked flesh. They rattled like buckshot. There was a brimstone stench of water striking heated asphalt, and drifting steam. Hell was in office. A broken bolt of lightning shattered the molecules in the air, followed closely by the concussion of the blast. The entire building trembled like the cognac in Dr. Naheen’s balloon glass.

I was not connected to the building, but floating above it. In the first confused seconds of consciousness I thought I was back home in bed, dreaming of flight, but the cold water and screaming wind were too real, too frightening for fantasy. I was being carried.

I knew at once by whom. Gordon, Naheen’s head orderly, the man who had beaten Miles Leander nearly to death and strangled me senseless in Naheen’s hotel room, had me slung over both shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He was stronger even than he looked; strong enough to have lugged close to two hundred pounds of dead weight out of the room, down the hall, up the fire stairs, and across the roof of the 740-foot-tall building. I saw the edge coming up, and beyond it, below it, the tops of the cylindrical towers of the shopping and office complex that ringed the hotel. Below them, spreading out from their foundations, lay Detroit and Windsor and the fragile thread of river that kept the world’s two largest democratic nations from each other’s throat. Through the downpour, scores of lighted windows twinkled like sequins on a blanket. A traffic signal on Jefferson changed from green to yellow to red. In another moment I would be part of the sprawl.

I did the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I did nothing.

Played dead while the priceless few moments that remained between me and the abyss melted away in the rain.

Gordon stopped at the base of the low retaining wall. He shifted his burden, spreading his feet and bending his knees as he prepared to pitch me over. He went down and up, down and up again and ducked his head. I felt his muscles bunching beneath me like rocks shifting.

I grabbed a fistful of his face and squeezed.

It caught him unaware. He’d thought I was out or already dead, and it was the surprise as much as the pain that made him stagger backward, almost dropping me. I twisted loose, landing on my feet hard enough to feel the sting to my knees and jarring my fingers loose from his eye sockets.

For a big man he had quicksilver reflexes. He must still have been blinded, but he lashed out in the pain and darkness with an open right hand that caught me on the side of the head with the force of a shovel. A bulb burst in my head.

I went down, half deliberately, and rolled out of his reach. Lightning flashed again. It outlined his bulk against a bleached sky and pinned me to the roof like a bug to a board. He was seeing now. I braced myself, but he didn’t charge. Instead, he snaked my way, one foot in front of the other like a tango dancer, half crouched with his arms bent up at the elbows and the edges of his hands foremost. That was just plain unfair; karate was invented to tilt the odds toward the smaller man. Out of instinct I reached back for my gun, even though I knew the holster would be empty. I hated being right.

The rain and my own grogginess threw off my timing. Before I thought he was inside range, he pivoted on the ball of his left foot and kicked me with his right. I backpedaled in time to lessen the impact, but not nearly fast enough to duck the blow. His heel caught me an inch above the solar plexus. My wind went out, I slipped on the wet asphalt and fell and rolled again as he moved in for the kill. He spun in mid-spring, staying with me. He maneuvered like a cheetah.

I gasped for air. I wondered if one of my lungs had collapsed. Blackness filled my head. I shook it out. He kicked again, with his left foot this time, and this time the lightning saved me. The sudden white light blinded him; he missed. His foot whizzed past my right ear and I reached up and caught his ankle in both hands and pushed. He hopped back two yards on one foot, arms windmilling for balance. I charged in, a tenth of a second late. The fingers of a stiffened right hand caught me in the arch of the rib cage. I doubled over, and the callused edge of a hand as hard as a splitting-maul struck the back of my neck, a fraction of an inch from permanent damage. Another bulb burst. I went down on my face.