Prelude to a Scream (8 page)

“Going on four, yes.”

Corrigan began to read from the screen of his little computer. “A homeless guy broke the glass out of a fire box at approximately eight o'clock last Sunday morning. Arriving on the scene, which was in the Panhandle close to Baker at Oak, SFFD found you passed out in a sleeping bag. There was a lot of blood.”

Sims checked his chart. “Four units.”

“If that guy hadn't found you,” Corrigan stated, “you'd have bled to death.”

“It was that close? I thought you said this outfit does good work.”

“Usually they do. You may have thrashed around and loosened the sutures. In any case, you lucked out. A homeless guy cared.”

“A little luck at last,” Stanley muttered bitterly.

Everybody looked at him.

“He's just weak,” Iris said. “Tired.”

Corrigan drew a breath. “A paramedic unit had you over here by a quarter to nine. The blood was coming from sutures torn out of a very recent incision in your lower back. There's a name for the incision.”

“Subcostal extraperitoneal approach,” Sims agreed.

“But the interesting part is, we've seen this cut before.”

“A classic,” said Sims.

“We'll get to that. A cursory examination indicated what Doctor Sims here has just confirmed, that your right kidney had been surgically removed sometime within the last couple of days. Since it was such a mess to start with, Dr. Sims and the emergency team elected to remove the original sutures, reopen the incision, inspect the intrusion for sap— sap…”

“Sepsis,” Sims said.

“He means dirt,” Corrigan offered.

“We explored as well for incompetent or traumatized ligations, failed hemostasis, complications due to dehydration, pulmonary congestion, gastric distention or intestinal ileus. Serum creatinine and blood urea nitrogen looked surprisingly good…”

“We thought we might find some evidence, too,” Corrigan interrupted. “As long as we were in there.”

“We?”

“Hey,” said Corrigan, holding both his hands aloft. “I scrub for crime. And Sims did indeed find some disturbed suture ligations, and internal bleeding as a result.”

“But neither the peritoneal nor the pleural cavity was violated, thank God,” said Sims.

“Sims got everything shipshape…”

“A nip here, a tuck there, some simple irrigation.” Sims shrugged. “Nothing major.”

“Thanks,” said Stanley.

“And he sewed you back up. You've been sleeping like a baby ever since. They're generous with the morphine, here at Children's.”

“Children's? I'm in Children's?”

Sims pursed his lips.

“Children's is the best hospital in the city.”

Sims inclined his head in acknowledgement.

“Consider it a fluke in the ambulance rotation,” Corrigan suggested.

“You mentioned evidence.”

“Ah,” said Corrigan.

“A clue,” said Sims.

“In my back?”

“Sure, why not?” said Corrigan. “It's the scene of the crime, isn't it?”

“What clues could you possibly find in my back?”

“Singular ones. In fact, we found the one piece of evidence that circumstantially proves your lack of complicity in the crime.”

“A bolt from the blue,” said Stanley.

“Not so fast, Ahearn. You may have had it planted there for just that reason. Just to throw me off. Don't think I haven't thought of that.”

“Oh, no, Corrigan,” said Stanley. “I'm sure you've looked at this case from more angles than I'm ever going to consider. But tell me.”

“Yes?”

“Do people really sell their kidneys?”

“All the time, particularly if they're a peasant in some place like Calcutta, or Rio, or Cairo.”

“Show it to him,” said Sims, his impatience tinged with pride.

Corrigan fished a small manila envelope out of his jacket pocket and considered it.

“Technically,” he said, “I suppose it's your souvenir.”

Stanley frowned.
“
Souvenir
?”

“And I'll show it to you. But I'll need to retain it as evidence.”

Stanley shrugged impatiently. The tubes on the stainless steel tree rattled.

Corrigan handed the envelope to Iris.

Iris carefully opened the flap and gently inverted the mouth of the envelope.

A purple flower slid onto the palm of her hand.

Iris stared at the flower a moment, fascinated. Indeed, its colors went well with her eyes and hair. With a nervous glance at Corrigan, she held it closer to Stanley.

Stanley looked at it. “What the hell is this?”

“It's a flower,” Corrigan said mildly.

“I can see it's a goddamn flower,” Stanley snapped. “What's it got to do with me?”

“It's a signature,” Corrigan said. “One that we've… seen before.”

“It's a what?”

“Whoever this ‘they' are, borrowing kidneys from people—.”

“Harvesting,” Sims interrupted.

“Whoever these thieves are, when they get to the last layer of stitches as they're coming back out, they leave this calling card, this signature, as we call it.”

“You mean they sewed this thing up inside me?”

“No, outside you,” said Sims. “Just after they closed. The stem was woven among the final sutures.”

“Pretty, isn't it?” Iris asked him.

Stanley stared at the flower. It was purple, with a yellow center.

“Do tell him the rest,” Sims encouraged Corrigan.

Stanley looked up, dazed. “There's more?”

Corrigan nodded. “The flower's always the same species. A purple aster.”

“
Aster alpigenus
,” Sims pointed out.

They all looked at him.

“I've always adored it,” Sims added defiantly, “the alpine aster. It's a dwarf perennial, indigenous to the high Sierra. It grows in the Rockies, too.” Indeed, Sims couldn't have looked at the aster more lovingly if he'd designed it himself.

“So?” Stanley said finally. “
So?
”

Corrigan looked up from thumbing his little computer, a kindly expression on his face.

“So some hangover, eh?”

Chapter Seven

S
TANLEY STUDIED THE FLOWER IN THE PALM OF
I
RIS' HAND
. “I
T
seems small compensation for a kidney,” he observed gloomily.

Sims pursed his lips, as if maybe he weren't sure.

“Not to make value judgments,” Iris added, as if apologizing to the aster.

Stanley considered Iris. He was beginning to wonder about her intelligence.

Corrigan gestured toward the flower. “You through looking at that?”

Stanley waved it away.

Corrigan waggled his fingers. “Don't drop it.”

Iris gingerly slid the aster back into its envelope and handed it over to Corrigan, who tucked it into the side pocket of his jacket.

“Evidence,” he said, gently patting the pocket.

“Of what?”

Corrigan shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it.”

Stanley lay back on his pillows and stared at the light fixture in the ceiling above Corrigan's head.

After a while he sighed loudly.

“So today's Thursday.”

“Good, good,” said Corrigan, retrieving the palm-top.

“So it happened when?”

“You tell us. Last weekend sometime.”

“The incision was very fresh,” put in Sims.

Stanley flicked an eye at Iris. “Friday nights I like to get drunk.” She winked at him.

Thumbing a note to himself, his mouth slightly open, Corrigan looked like a giant kid playing a video game. “Wednesday: Got… drunk. Let's go to Thursday.”

“Ditto Thursday.”

Corrigan looked up. “Again?”

Stanley was back to staring at the ceiling. “Again. Not drunk, actually. Say toasted. Medium crispy.”

Corrigan typed and moved his lips in silence.

“What's the difference?” Iris asked.

Stanley was thinking,
the Tenderloin. That's the difference.

“Okay.” Corrigan was writing. “Wednesday drunk. Thursday… toasted. Friday?”

“Ditto Friday.”

“Say, Ahearn, don't you have any outside interests? Bowling, for example? Butterflies?”

“I never drink outside.”

“So where is all this debauchery happening?”

“Mostly my place. But sometimes…different places.”

“Like?”

“Anyplace. Who cares? This town's full of bars. I even got drunk in San Bruno, once.”

“Busy boy,” said Corrigan sourly.

“Yeah.”

“And this DUI in Marin,” Corrigan said, paging the palm-top.

“Oops,” said Stanley.

“On January twenty-second, two years ago.” Corrigan continued. “DMV matched your prints for us. Hmmm…” Corrigan thumbed a hotkey that brought up a calendar, turning the screen against the light to study it. “January twenty-second, two years ago… That was… A Saturday.”

“Not much of a Saturday, either,” said Stanley. “Though it was a long one. You ever been locked up with a doctor for four hours?”

Sims cleared his throat.

Iris suppressed a titter.

Corrigan smiled grimly as he reopened Stanley's file and typed. “Just another Saturday, eh?”

“Not even,” Stanley muttered.

“How do you pay for all these holidays, and, uh —” he held up the palm-top, “—driving lessons?”

“I drive a truck.”

“When you're sober of course.”

“I make a point of it.”

“For who?”

“For Hop Toy Wholesale Produce.”

“Chinese?”

“Chinese.”

“You're kidding, right?”

“Wrong. I'm not kidding. Why?”

“In Chinatown?”

“It's between Grant and Stockton on Sacramento, a block from Brooklyn Place.”

Corrigan frowned. “What are you telling me? They don't hire no white guy in Chinatown.”

“They hire this white guy.”

“What makes you so special?”

Stanley said nothing.

“If this was 1950, I'd whack you with this computer.”

Stanley shifted his eyes. Corrigan continued to stare at him, frowning. After another moment of silence Corrigan began to gently nod his head. He puckered his unshaven face until his mouth looked like a mollusk on a sunken wreck.

“Bingo,” he said softly. He snapped his fingers and nodded.

Sims looked startled. “Bingo? Ah.” He removed his glasses and began to clean them with a corner of his white smock. “An insight.”

“Stanley Clarke Ahearn,” Corrigan said.

Stanley said nothing.

Corrigan pointed at him over the foot of the bed. “There's that big rock,” he began, “just below the old Sutro Baths.”

Stanley closed his eyes.

“True,” said Sims, holding his glasses up to the light. “I jog out there.”

“Not far away a little trickle of a stream comes down the hill, passes along the edge of the ruins of the Baths, and ends at the beach. A lot of watercress and miner's lettuce grow wild along this stream bed.”

Sims waggled his eyebrows, then refitted the glasses onto his face.

“People,” Corrigan continued, “mostly Asians, gather greens there. The price is right.”

“Is that what they're doing?” piped Sims. “I often see one or two people with baskets hunched down there, along the stream, when I'm out jogging. Always wondered what they were doing. And I guess they're always Asians, though I never paid that much attention to their race.” He turned to Stanley. “I bought a place on 39th Avenue — just off Fulton? — when I worked at the VA Hospital. I like to do three miles at dawn every—.”

“Can it,” Corrigan snapped.

Sims frowned.

“Could I have some water?” said Stanley.

Iris produced an Erlenmeyer flask with a doglegged glass straw sticking out of its top, and placed the tip of the straw between his lips. “Morphine's very dehydrating,” she informed him solicitously.

“Not like the leach of a cop's mind,” said Stanley, sipping feebly.

Iris smiled.

Corrigan continued, “One day three or four years ago this Caucasian guy is taking a walk out there below the Baths, along the beach. An Asian kid, a little girl, is playing on the big rock there, while her mother and a friend gather greens along the stream. The kid's young; nine or ten, maybe. The westerly is up, the moon is close to full, a big spring tide is coming in. The waves are gnarly.”

“Look Corrigan…,” Stanley began, a little water running down his chin. “Let it go.”

Iris dabbed at the driblet with a corner of a sheet. Corrigan ignored him. “Just as this guy is thinking the little girl shouldn't be taking a chance climbing up there — boom!”

Sims jumped, visibly startled.

“Right before the guy's eyes, a huge wave blasts the rock.”

“Oh, no,” said Iris, dropping the corner of the sheet to turn and look at Corrigan.

“What the sailors call a sneaker wave. An anomaly, two or three or even ten times bigger than what's running. When the foam drains off the rock, the kid is gone.”

“Stop it,” said Iris, covering her mouth with her fingers.

“The women up the hill start screaming. Our guy runs down the beach between the surf and the rock and spots the kid, fifty yards out and heading West like she's on rails. There's just her little hand and the arm, showing above the brine.”

Corrigan stopped. Sims and Iris watched Corrigan, horrified. Corrigan, however, was watching Stanley, who in turn was watching his own thumb and forefinger idly pinch at the material of the white skirt covering Iris' thigh, his face visibly burning.

Finally Iris said, “Well? What happened?”

“That's a good question, Iris. Only one guy really knows. But the next thing, this guy has shucked his clothes and is in the surf, pulling for the kid.

“It takes him a while to get to her. Nip and tuck. They start out forty or fifty yards apart. They're both sawing back and forth in this tremendous surge. Every swell begins by bringing them twenty yards toward the beach and ends by leaving them thirty yards further away from it. It was a lot of work. It took time. There was nothing for the mother to do but watch. But then the kid is in the guy's arms, and the undertow is hauling the two of them straight West, out past Seal Rock, they're heading for Japan.”

Corrigan stopped again.

Stanley said nothing.

“Well, finish it!” Sims finally blurted.

“What happened?” demanded Iris.

“There's a crowd of tourists and shopkeepers watching this whole thing from the north terrace of the Cliff House. Somebody calls SFFD, and their surf squad is there in eight minutes. Ever seen them work? A bunch of guys show up with a quarter-mile of rope. One guy wades out with one end of the rope tied around him. He's the lead guy. He's wearing what they call a farmer-john wetsuit, looks like a neoprene union suit with the arms cut out, so they're free for swimming. This guy is built like a truck. After fifty yards of rope another guy goes out, fifty yards after that another, if necessary. The rest of the squad belays the swimmers from the beach. The ones in the farmer johns swim in the open ocean every day, they're all athletes, very fit. They generally go into the surf up-current from the victim, with the hope they can drift across him before he freezes and drowns. Most times of the year they have about fifteen minutes from the moment of immersion, thirty at most. And of course if the victim is under water they have no time at all. So in this case, they send out about three of these guys in wet suits, that's 150 yards of rope, and they manage to bring them both in, the non-Asian guy and the little girl. It's a close thing. CPR on the beach, oxygen, space blankets — the works. The guy and the kid are barely alive, the cold nearly got them both.” Still Corrigan watched Stanley. “They're cold, but they're alive.”

“Brr,” shivered Sims. “That water never gets warmer than sixty degrees, no matter what time of year. The moment you're in it, your thermal core starts telling your head that it's all too beautiful.”

“It's fast water, too,” said Corrigan. “Even the surfers respect it — most of them, anyway.” He was still watching Stanley. Another moment passed, and then Sims was watching Stanley, too.

Iris followed their gaze, turned back to Sims and Corrigan, then slowly turned back to Stanley.

“You're a hero,” she concluded, her eyes shining. She was still holding the flask of water.

“That's what the papers called him,” said Corrigan.

“Television, too, I bet,” said Iris proudly.

“Ahm, look,” said Stanley softly, unable to meet the eyes of anyone. “The fire department saved us both. I just almost got myself drowned along with the little girl, is all I did.”

Corrigan looked to one side and rubbed his bald spot with one corner of the palm-top. “So,” he said. “The women gathering greens see the whole thing. One of them is married to this grocer guy, Hop Toy, that's how I remembered the story, and the little girl is their only child. A few days later Hop Toy shows up at the guy's apartment to thank him, and discovers the guy is out of a job. Not only that but he's sold his car, all his goods are pawned, and he's twenty-two days into a thirty day eviction notice. We won't mention all the empty whiskey bottles under the sink. Hop Toy guy takes action.”

Nobody spoke.

“The story was news for a couple of weeks. That was — what — three years ago?”

“Three and a half,” said Stanley quietly.

“So Hop Toy gave you a job and a place to live. I guess you been living off him ever since.”

“Sean!” said Iris.

“Ever since,” Stanley confirmed evenly.

“Good for Hop Toy,” said Iris defiantly.

“So,” said Corrigan. “You're that Stanley Ahearn.”

“Yes,” said Stanley, even more quietly.

“That clears up something in the CHP report.” Corrigan thumbed his computer. “Their DUI write-up said they had to tenderize you a little bit, when they arrested you that night.”

“Tenderize,” Stanley repeated, with a little smile.

Corrigan kept his face straight. “But they dropped the one count of resisting arrest.” He looked up from the palm-top. “Can I conclude that, before they booked you, somebody at Civic Center recognized you as the Ahearn who saved the little girl?”

“Whatever.”

“So they jailed you DUI but dropped the resisting. Nice of them.”

“Yeah,” said Stanley, without enthusiasm.

Corrigan closed the notebook. “Made the news, of course.”