The Sleepless (20 page)

‘Thank you, Michael, but all my lunches are booked.’ 

‘Jasper’s?’ 

‘Thank you. I’m tempted, but sorry.’ 

‘Okay ... ‘ said Michael, standing up. ‘I’m not sure how old man Bedford’s going to take it, but – what? You still play golf together, don’t you, you two?’ 

Dr Moorpath checked his glittering Jaeger-le-Coultre wristwatch. ‘Listen, Michael ... I won’t be long. Give me twenty minutes. Read some magazines. Janice will bring you some coffee.’ 

Michael sat down again. ‘Raymond ... Edgar’s going to appreciate this.’ 

But Dr Moorpath had already swept like a low-pressure storm-front out of the door, leaving Michael alone in his eighth-floor country house, with nothing but silence and air-conditioned coldness and a view of Boston burning. 

He circled the room, picking up a china shepherdess and reading the label on the base. ‘Oliver Sutton Antiques, London. Staffordshire,
ca
1815. Guaranteed genuine.’ He carefully replaced it. He didn’t like antiques very much. He didn’t like to think that the people who had fashioned them, and the people who had first bought them, were long since dead and forgotten, their names unrecorded, their lives blown away like dust. 

He went to the window and watched the smoke rising and the traffic sparkling. Eight floors below, in the hospital parking lot, he saw two miniature doctors walk up to each other and hold an ant-like conversation. He saw both of their heads turn as a nurse walked briskly past. 

He was still staring out of the window when the door opened behind him. 

‘Oh, I’m sorry ... ‘ said a girl’s voice. ‘I was looking for Dr Moorpath.’ 

He turned around. A tall brunette girl in a grey pin-stripe suit was standing in the doorway, holding three manila folders. 

Michael said, ‘It’s okay ... Dr Moorpath was called down to emergency.’ 

‘I have these photographs, that’s all. He wanted them urgently.’ 

‘You can leave them here. He’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’ 

The girl held the envelopes protectively close to her chest. ‘I’m not so sure ... I was told to give them to Dr Moorpath personally.’ 

‘Well ... you can wait, if you want to. He won’t be long.’ 

The girl anxiously glanced at her watch; then stepped into the office; and waited, fidgeting from one foot to the other. Michael thought she was very attractive: rather like Linda Carter when she used to play
Wonder Woman.
In spite of the severity of her suit, she had a very full figure, and her eyes were brilliantly hyacinth-blue. 

‘I have a lunch appointment at twelve,’ she said, with a quickly-evaporating smile. 

‘Dr Moorpath shouldn’t be too long,’ Michael reassured her. 

‘These are blow-ups, you see,’ the girl explained. ‘Dr Moorpath wanted computer-enhanced blow-ups.’ 

Michael nodded. He wasn’t really interested. ‘Quite a war going on out there,’ he remarked, inclining his head toward the rising smoke and the circling helicopters. 

The girl smiled, and fidgeted, and checked her watch a second time. Eventually, she said, ‘Listen ... I’m really tight for time. If I leave these here, could you make sure that Dr Moorpath gets them? I mean, right in his hands? They’re real important.’ 

‘For sure,’ said Michael. ‘Just leave them on the desk. I’ll make sure that he gets them.’ 

‘Thanks,’ flustered the girl. ‘You saved my life.’ And with that, she laid the envelopes on Dr Moorpath’s leather-topped desk, blew Michael a kiss, and left. Michael sipped his beer and smiled to himself. Before he was married, he would have asked her out by now. Or at least asked her what her star sign was. Sagittarius, he guessed. A beautiful, flustered ditherer. 

Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Still Dr Moorpath didn’t return. Michael heard sirens down below, and saw three more ambulances arriving, their red lights flashing. Doors opened, miniature paramedics rushed around miniature casualties. He didn’t want to look. He had a sudden sense of vertigo, of falling down to the concrete apron two hundred feet below him. He had a sudden memory of broken bodies and trees that grew human hands. 

He prowled around Dr Moorpath’s office some more, staying away from the window. Eventually, maybe inevitably, he arrived at Dr Moorpath’s desk, where the envelopes lay. The top envelope was labelled
ROOSA,
followed by a long serial number. Michael knew all about Democratic state senator George Roosa. He had been discovered hanging from a roller towel in a gas station men’s room in New Brighton, Watertown. Some said homicide, some said suicide, some said sexual peculiarity. Michael decided that he didn’t want to look at blown-up photographs of George Roosa, dead or alive. 

He lifted up the
ROOSA
envelope and underneath was one labelled
ZERBEY.
Michael had never heard of anybody called Zerbey, and he reckoned that he could probably live quite comfortably for the rest of his life without finding out who Zerbey was – particularly if he or she had suffered a horrifying death. 

He heard distant ambulances wailing. Then he lifted up the third envelope and it was labelled
O’BRIEN.
 

For a long time, he held the envelope in his hand and his hand was trembling as if he had been carrying a heavy suitcase from one end of Park Street subway station to the other. 

O’BRIEN,
343/244D/678E/01X. He even knew what the numbers meant. They were file numbers from the coroner’s office, and the ‘01X’ suffix meant that the contents of this envelope and everything connected with the O’Brien case were strictly confidential, and only for the eyes of authorized personnel. ‘01X’ meant ‘you talk to about this to
anybody –
even your wife – you’re going to end up jobless and poverty-stricken and maybe worse.’ 

Michael looked around, and then listened. The office was silent; he couldn’t hear elevators whining; he couldn’t hear footsteps. 

He waited for a moment longer, keeping his breathing slow and shallow and very quiet. He couldn’t hear anybody. With chilly sweat trickling down inside his shirt, he turned the
O’BRIEN
envelope over, and started to unwind the waxed thread that held its flap fast. 

He paused again, and listened. He heard somebody quickly approaching along the corridor outside, but just as quickly their footsteps Dopplered into the distance, and the office was silent again. 

He eased the glossy colour photographs out of the envelope. There were eleven in all, and he laid them out on Dr Moorpath’s desk in a fan shape. He stood and stared at them and for a moment he felt that he was going to lose his grip, and that the floor beneath his feet was going to open up like the belly of the L10-11 over Rocky Woods, and that he was going to go plunging into darkness and trees and rocks and smash, and be shattered into bones and blood. 

He saw a burned man, hunched over, a man with no legs. He saw a burned woman, her body opened up from her crotch to the top of her skull. He saw a burned man lying between the burned seats of a helicopter, a man with no head. 

He saw a man in a broken flying-helmet, what was left of a man, his face oddly and frighteningly distorted, like a gruesome Picasso, his cheekbones raw and sooty from fire. 

Jesus Jesus Jesus —
 

Michael closed his eyes. He could still see the images, even with his eyes closed. Staring eyes, exposed jawbones, contorted arms and legs. He said to himself:
steady, for Christ’s sake, steady.
 

He examined each photograph again, one by one, comparing, frowning. His breath sounded harsh and ragged, and his hands were trembling. He could feel that dark amorphous shape rising beneath him. He could feel that huge black octopus rising out of the ocean to entwine itself around his sanity. But he stopped, and held his breath for a moment, and said to himself:
keep a grip on yourself ... this is important.
 

He studied the photographs with the slow, analytical care of somebody who knows what to look for. How were the bodies lying? How had they fallen into those positions? Had they been mutilated by impact or by explosion or by fire? Why was one of them hunched on the floor? How had the woman’s body been cut open so violently? What had happened to the headless man’s head? 

Michael could see at once that the burning of the bodies was far less severe than the press had obviously been led to believe. He thought: we’re not talking ‘unrecognizable’ here. We’re not talking ‘wizened black monkeys’. These are four distinct and identifiable cadavers that have been momentarily flash-flamed by the explosion of several hundred gallons of kerosene, but not totally incinerated. Anybody could have counted how many corpses there were. Those first official reports that had claimed that ‘physical trauma was so severe that full identification is still inconclusive’ – they simply hadn’t been true. Michael could easily pick out four separate bodies; and he could easily see who each of them was. Frank Coward, pilot. Dean McAllister, assistant at the Justice Department. Eva Hamilton O’Brien, wife of John O’Brien; and despite the fact that his head was missing, John O’Brien himself, Supreme Court justice-as-never-quite-was. 

To Michael, something else was glaringly obvious: these corpses must have been corpses
before
they were burned. The stumps of Dean McAllister’s legs had been partially cauterized by flame. Mrs O’Brien’s intestines had been shrivelled by heat, which was a clear indication that she had been disembowelled
before
the fire. Frank Coward’s face was scorched scarlet – but only those parts of his face which were exposed
after
his helmet had been crushed. 

John O’Brien was headless, yes, but only the back of his suit was burned, which was vidence that he had been sitting bent double in his seat when the wreck exploded. 

Michael lifted up one photograph after another, checking and comparing. No wonder there was so much secrecy surrounding this crash. No wonder Murray and Rolbein had been stonewalled by the police department and the coroner’s office. He had seen this kind of ‘accident’ dozens of times before, in burned-out buildings and skeletal automobiles. 

There was no question about it: Somebody had killed the O’Brien family – and somebody had killed them so gruesomely that it was almost more than Michael could take. 

He closed his eyes for a moment. He heard sirens shrieking and chorusing in the street. Then, decisively, he shuffled the photographs back together, and carried them over to Dr Moorpath’s mock-Jacobean dresser. He opened the front of the dresser, and switched on Dr Moorpath’s NEC fax machine. Quickly, he punched out his own fax number at Plymouth. His mouth had been dry before, but it was even drier now. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking as he inserted the photograph of John O’Brien’s headless body and waited for the first transmission. 

The fax chirruped, warbled, and accepted his call. He felt the sweat gradually chilling in the small of his back. The first photograph slowly edged its way through the scanner. It seemed to take hours. He drummed his fingers on the edge of the dresser and prayed under his breath that Dr Moorpath wouldn’t come back until he had finished. 

Just as the first transmission was completed and he was taking the photograph out, the door of the office was flung open and a tall black doctor in a white coat appeared. 

‘Dr Moorpath?’ he asked, perplexed. 

‘Down in emergency,’ said Michael. 

The doctor looked around the office. Then he said, ‘May I ask what
you’re
doing here?’ 

Michael nodded toward the fax. ‘Maintenance,’ he replied. 

‘Oh ... ‘ said the doctor. ‘Okay,’ and left, closing the door behind him. 

As quickly as he could, Michael inserted a second photograph into the fax. 

It took him nearly fifteen minutes to transmit all eleven photographs, but Dr Moorpath didn’t return from emergency for almost a half-hour, and by that time he had switched off the fax and returned the photographs to their envelope. 

Dr Moorpath looked pale and distracted. ‘Everything all right?’ Michael asked him. 

‘It’s like Viet Nam out there,’ said Dr Moorpath. He went to his liquor cabinet and poured himself another large Scotch. He drank it all in three gulps, and then coughed. 

‘Maybe I should come back tomorrow,’ Michael suggested. 

‘Yes, why don’t you? Make an appointment with Janice. I think I’m free after four o’clock.’ 

‘I’ll do that. Thanks for your time.’ 

Michael shook Dr Moorpath’s hand; and for a split second Dr Moorpath looked him sharply in the eye, and frowned. 

‘Something wrong, Michael?’ he asked, still tightly clasping Michael’s fingers. 

‘Nothing at all. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. Not used to working nine-to-five.’ 

Dr Moorpath kept hold of his hand for a few moments longer, and Michael sensed that he suspected something, but plainly didn’t know what. 

‘Take care of yourself,’ he said, at last, and went over to his desk and picked up the envelopes of photographs.