Prelude to a Scream (41 page)

“And now,
The Edge of Night
…”

Exactly
…

Chapter Thirty One

H
IS RIGHT ARM WAS GONE.
T
HAT WAS THE FIRST THING HE NOTICED.
He reached for the TV remote and there was nothing to reach with. It was that simple.

There was a smell of disinfectant, too. And IV lines attached to the remaining arm. A tube climbed the side of the bed like a Virginia creeper and disappeared beneath the sheets, waist-high.

Except for the television the room was dark. But that didn't make any difference. A man can tell when one of his arms is missing. For one thing there's a shallow depression under the sheet. If there had been a tattoo it would be gone, too. You can always feel it, a tattoo missing. Like it was stippled on water. There would be the necessity of carrying around safety pins, to pin up the empty sleeve. And compassionate women would light cigarettes for you in bars for up to two years after the fact. Just as soon as you take up smoking.

“Damian,” said a woman on the television. Beneath her voice a synthesizer pulsed insistently.

Damian is propped up on a couple of pillows in a hospital bed. Plastic tubes probably should have been spilling out of his nose like petrified mucus, but that would have spoiled his looks, which are considerable. He lies in enough light to bleach a whorehouse bed sheet but he says, “Berkeley. Is that you, Berkeley?”

Reverse angle, close-up on her face, where glycerine tears agglutinate. “Yes, Damian,” she sobs. “It's me.”

“Wh-where are we?”

“St. Vincent's, Damian. On 6th Avenue. The Village?”

“Wh-why? Wh-what happened?”

Berkeley is not a day over twenty and has cheekbones like Carrara has marble. A tear launches off her cheek and out of the shot. “Oh, Damian. I— You.…”

“Berkeley.” As methane rises to the surface of a tar pit, so Damian is coming to his senses. “Is something the matter?”

The tempo of the music has quickened. The point of view trades three times, three each for her face, unable to bring herself to answer his question, and three each for his face, unable to ask it again.

“Oh Damian,” she finally manages, “They— they've stolen your kidney!”

Her perfect hair drops out of the shot, allowing the camera to slowly close on Damian as Realization steals over his face, towards the commercial, slow as time-lapsed film of thawing tundra. The music crescendos in turgidity until his head dissolves into a bottle of fabric softener.

The lack of one arm presents logistical difficulties, at least in the beginning. After a futile struggle to reach the call button, the cord of which someone had draped over his right shoulder in percipient thoughtfulness, Stanley discovered the TV remote control lying on the covers to his left, next to his remaining hand.

But he couldn't see to his right, and it was then that he remembered his missing eye.

How quickly, he mused, one adapts to adversity.

He couldn't find the power switch on the remote. In the dark he unintentionally increased the volume, then hit the channel selector, and he found himself on a very loud public access channel, featuring a guy wearing a propeller beanie and playing a dulcimer while reciting poetry atop a surf-blasted rock.

…I'd rather be a pagan, suckled by a policy outworn

so that I, smitten by this pleasant condominium,

might hear old Trinitron blow some other theme

than the one currently depresses me.

—O, Prozackia
…

As Stanley left-handed the remote toward the television, throwing like a girl, he suddenly remembered Green Eyes throwing something to him — what?

Unexpectedly, the remote hit the screen's glass just so, and fissured it, before clattering to the floor. The tube issued a prolonged, insidious hiss before it imploded with a sound like a stepped-on flash bulb, and the room plunged into darkness and silence.

Stanley wiggled the fingers of his left hand. Not bad.

To his right, phantom digits wiggled sympathetically.

The door opened a few inches, showing a wedge of light.

“Ahearn?”

Stanley closed his eye and said nothing.

The door closed. He opened his eye. There stood Sean Corrigan, and Dr. Sims.

Sims switched on a light. He appeared the same: stethoscope, spectacles, clipboard; lines of blue and black ink on the breast pocket of his white smock.

Corrigan didn't look like he'd even changed his clothes lately, let alone his personality.

The detective and the doctor stood at the foot of the bed, considering Stanley as if he were a special rock in a carefully groomed meditation garden.

When his eye had adjusted to the light Stanley said, “Dare I ask?”

Corrigan scratched a couple days' growth of whiskers on the side of his face with a folded copy of the
Examiner
.

Dr. Sims said, “Welcome back, and congratulations on surviving another assault on your infrastructure, Mr. Ahearn. Quite extraordinary. Miraculous, really.”

“Did you find me in the park again? I saw Jasper — I mean, I heard his voice. He recognized me. I think. So I figured—.”

Dr. Sims raised his eyebrows.

Inspector Corrigan said, “The park? No, we didn't find you in the park, Ahearn. We found you in the basement of a funeral home in Oakland, bleeding from several wounds,”

This got Stanley's hopes up. “They did it, then? They did it?”

Corrigan and Sims exchanged a glance.

Corrigan said, “Did what, Ahearn?”

“Installed my new kidney? The kidney that—” He stopped.

Corrigan and Sims waited.

Stanley closed his eye. If being a criminal depended on keeping his mouth shut, he was going to have a short, lousy career.

Corrigan cleared his throat mildly. “You were saying?”

Stanley bit his lip.

After a while Corrigan said quietly, “I told you not to mess around with this case anymore. First that kid MacIntosh got himself killed on account of you. Then it turns out they killed his computer-programming buddy, too. Harvested all his organs and sent him up the stack.”

Stanley said nothing.

“His name was Tommy Quinn. We found his teeth.”

Stanley opened the eye.

“You never met the guy.”

Stanley closed the eye again and shook his head, once.

“Well Ahearn, we could easily make you for accessory to murder in both cases. Fit you like your birthday suit. And then there's burglary, possession of a loaded and unregistered handgun, assault with a deadly weapon, two or three counts of manslaughter… There's even possession of cocaine and heroin with intent to sell.”

This elicited a single, soundless laugh from Stanley.

“Take your pick. Kick in special circumstances on account you got these guys killed while you were committing other crimes — it's the gas chamber. Or lethal injection, if this goddamn state ever gets it together.”

Stanley wasn't listening. Behind his closed eye he was seeing a
guiro
atop a folded
rebozo
in the sunlit dust motes adrift above the closed lid of Giles' mother's grand piano.

“Life plus twenty-five, at least,” added Corrigan.

Stanley opened his eye and turned his head with its out-of-focus barrier to his monocular vision—his nose—until he could see the shallow depression in the bedclothes on his right side. The call button was lying there. The overhead light was bright and cruel and specific.

“And while you fiddled around withholding evidence, they harvested yet another guy. Same M.O. — a boozy chump like yourself, a sheetrocking schlub who got himself chatted up by a brunette with green eyes. He went home with her, she slipped him a mickey, and he woke up minus a kidney.”

“Ted Nichols is alive, then?” Stanley asked suddenly.

Sims had fixed his eyes on something no one else could see. His right hand moved to retrieve a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket but stopped with one finger on it, then dropped purposeless to his side.

Corrigan regarded Stanley closely. “Septicemia — blood poisoning to you — killed him two days ago. He died miserably, I might add.”

Sims blinked back his thousand-yard stare and refocused on Stanley.

Stanley groaned.

Corrigan summoned an expression of extreme revulsion, but it was plain he was wracked by uncertainty and guilt. He looked like a man who'd just found a diamond ring on a human finger in the stomach of the trout he was cleaning for dinner. “The place was a crime scene, for God's sakes.… We had no idea Nichols was rolled up in that carpet in the back of that truck.”

I didn't either,
Stanley wanted to wail.

But it wasn't true.

“I don't recall mentioning his name,” Corrigan added quietly.

Stanley didn't either.

Corrigan bored in. “You know the sheetrocker's name.”

“I do?”

“You just said it.”

“I must have heard it on the TV. I was watching just a few minutes ago…”

Stanley instantly regretted saying this. But the remark was so callous that even Corrigan was taken aback.

The detective heaved a sigh great enough to carry the force of a curse and said, “To hell with it. The guy is dead. But what if I told you that after Fong heard what happened to Nichols he sang like a cheap tea kettle?”

Stanley rocked his head onto the useless shoulder. “So put the cuffs on me, Corrigan,” he spat loudly. “Or should I say, put the
cuff
on me?” He held up the left hand.

Corrigan looked disgusted.

Sims nodded vaguely. “We did what we could for his pain.”

“But it was pretty painful anyway,” Corrigan snapped, his eyes centered on Stanley's good one. “As a bad way to go, it's up there with getting
amanita phalloides
in your omelette.”

“Poor guy,” said Sims. “We figure it was the dirt on the aster. Or maybe in the carpet. The dehydration didn't help either.”

“The basement of that funeral home looked like a slaughterhouse,” Corrigan said grimly. “We didn't even think to open a door on that van until twelve hours after we got there.”

“Iris,” said Stanley.

“And you,” said Corrigan, “survived. Of all people.”

“Iris didn't make it?” blurted Stanley, suddenly panicked.

Sims glanced at Corrigan.

“Well?” Stanley shouted. “Did she?”

Corrigan was trying to get a grip on his smile. It was nice to have gotten a genuine reaction out of Ahearn at last, and he wanted to savor it. Finally he said, “Iris made it. No thanks to you.”

Stanley made a slit of his good eye. “She was there,” he said lamely, hastily. “It's all a—.”

“Oh,” Corrigan interrupted warmly. “It's all a blur, is it? Are you sure it isn't a
jumble?
”

“I remember a lot of yelling. There were guns around, too. One of them went off. But I was out of it. They had me all doped up, see…”

“They had you all doped up, see…”

“Yeah,” said Stanley. “I thought I was a goner. And Iris… Tell me, Inspector Corrigan…”

“Yes?
Mister
Ahearn.”

“That woman with the green eyes. Her name was Sibyl. She may have been married to that insane surgeon. They seemed close.…”

Corrigan produced his little palm-top computer and started it. “Dr. Djell.” He tilted the little screen toward the light. “Cashiered out of the medical fraternity eight years ago—.”

“Yes, I'm sure he must have been,” said Stanley hurriedly. “But, tell me. Did his wife…?”

“Sibyl Djell,” Corrigan read. “Born Sibyl Carmegian, in Modesto. Registered Nurse, attended medical school but never got to her residency, dropped out when she married her husband. Drove a Mercedes, her taste in clothes ran to the expensive, worked out regularly at—”

“Yes,” interrupted Stanley impatiently, “that's the woman. The last time I saw her she was in a… a tough spot. Did she—.”

The door banged opened a few inches, pushed awkwardly from the outside.

Sims pulled the door all the way open.

Iris rolled her wheelchair into the room.

She paused to look the scene over. Corrigan, Sims… and, at last, the violet eyes fell on Stanley.

She pivoted expertly and glided to the side of his bed.

“Darling,” she said.

Stanley blinked.

Everybody watched him.

“Iris…,” he blustered. “You… I…”

Her terrycloth robe was cornflower blue. Two blue plastic clips shaped like little birds with tiny loquacious orange beaks and heaven-lifted eyes held her hair away from her face, which was bloodless and pale. Still pretty, she looked older. Dark circles traced her eyes, which were reddened as if from weeping. Her feet were swaddled in blue mohair mules. A Get-Well Bear tilted in her lap, orangish-brown against the blue terrycloth. Except for its rigid arms and shirt-button eyes, it looked like something you'd need to buff car wax.