“I’m in your hands, Jim.”
“Let me call Bell Memorial, see if I can get an immediate admission.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
The Better-Dead List
A noise woke me up. I was still in that pitch-dark lorry, clutching Pixel to me. “Pixel, where are we?”
“Kuhbleeert!” (How would I know?)
“Hush!” Someone was unlocking the lorry.
“Meeroow?”
“I don’t know. But don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.”
A side door rolled back. Someone was silhouetted against the open door. I blinked.
“Maureen Long?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“I am sorry to have left you in the dark so long. But we had a visit from the Supreme Bishop’s proctors and we have just finished bribing them. And now we must move; they don’t stay bribed. Second-order dishonesty. May I offer you a hand?”
I accepted his hand—bony, dry, and cold—and he handed me down while I held Pixel in my left arm. He was a small man, in a dark siren suit, and the nearest thing to a living skeleton I have ever seen. He appeared to be yellowed parchment stretched over bones and little else. His skull was completely hairless. “Permit me to introduce myself,” he said. “I am Dr. Frankenstein.”
“‘Frankenstein,’” I repeated. “Didn’t we meet at Schwab’s on Sunset Boulevard?”
He chuckled, a sound like dry leaves rustling. “You are jesting. Of course it is not my original name but one I use professionally. You will see. This way, if you please.”
We were in a windowless room, with a vaulted ceiling glowing with what seemed to be Douglas-Martin shadowless skyfoam. He led us to a lift. As the door closed with us inside Pixel tried to get away from me. I clung to him. “No, no, Pix! You’ve got to see where they take me.”
I spoke just to Pixel, almost in a whisper, but my escort answered, “Don’t worry, Milady Long; you are now in the hands of friends.” The lift stopped at a lower(?) level; we got out and we all got into a tube capsule. We zoomed fifty yards, five hundred, five thousand, who knows?—the capsule accelerated, decelerated, stopped. We got out. Another lift took us up this time. Shortly we were in a luxurious lounge with about a dozen people in it and more coming in. Dr. Frankenstein offered me a comfortable seat in a large circle of chairs, most of them occupied. I sat down.
This time Pixel would not be denied. He wiggled out of my arms, jumped down, explored the place and examined the people, tail up and poking the little pink nose into everything.
There was a wheelchair in the circle, occupied by an excessively fat man, who had one leg off at the knee, the other amputated higher up. He was wearing dark glasses. He felt like a diabetic to me, and I wondered how Galahad would approach the case. He spoke up:
“Ladies and gentlemen, shall we get started? We have a new sister.” He pointed with his whole hand at me, like a movie usher. “Lady MacBeth. She is—”
“Just a moment,” I put in. “I am not Lady MacBeth. I am Maureen Johnson Long.”
He trained his head and dark glasses at me slowly, like a battleship’s turret. “This is most irregular. Dr. Frankenstein?”
“I am sorry, Mr. Chairman. The contretemps with the proctors spoiled the schedule. Nothing has been explained to her.”
The fat man let out a long sibilant sigh. “Incredible. Madam, we apologize. Let me introduce our circle. We are the dead men. All of us here are enjoying terminal illness. I say ‘enjoying’ because we have found a way—hee, hee, hee, hee!—to relish every golden moment left to us…indeed to extend those moments because a happy man lives longer. Each companion of the Committee for Aesthetic Deletions—at your service, Madam!—spends his remaining days in insuring that scoundrels whose removal will improve the human breed predecease him. You were elected in absentia to our select circle not merely because you are a walking corpse yourself but as a tribute to the artistic crimes you committed in attaining that status.
“With that synoptic explanation out of the way, permit me to introduce our noble companions:
“Dr. Fu Manchu.” (A burly Irishman or Scot. He bowed without getting up.)
“Lucrezia Borgia.” (Whistler’s Mother, with tatting in her lap. She smiled at me and said, “Welcome, dear girl!” in a sweet soprano.)
“Lucrezia is our most accomplished expunger. Despite inoperable cancer of the liver she has counted coup more than forty times. She usually—”
“Stop it, Hassan,” she said sweetly, “before you tempt me to put you on your proper track.”
“I wish you would, dear. I grow weary of this carcass. Beyond Lucrezia is Bluebeard—”
“Hiyah, babe! What are you doing after?”
“Don’t fret, Madam; he is disarmed. Next we have Attila the Hun—” (A perfect Caspar Milquetoast, in shorts and singlet. He sat utterly still, save that his head nodded steadily, like a nursery toy.) “—next to him, Lizzie Borden.” (She was a young and beautiful woman, in a provocative evening gown. She looked quite healthy and she smiled happily at me.) “Lizzie is kept alive by an artificial heart…but the fuel that powers it is killing her slowly. Lizzie was formerly a Sister of the Order of Santa Carolita, but she fell out of favor at the Cathedral and was assigned to medical and surgical research. Hence her heart. Hence her fate. Hence her commitment, for Lizzie is a specialist; she terminates only the priesthood of the Church of the Divine Inseminator. Her teeth are very sharp.
“Next is Jack the Ripper—”
“Call me ‘Jack.’”
“—and Dr. Guillotine.”
“Your servant, Madam.”
“Professor Moriarty is lurking back there, and with him is Captain Kidd. That completes our circle tonight, save for myself, chairman for life if I may be permitted a jest. I am the Old Man of the Mountain Hassan the Assassin.”
“Where is Count Dracula?”
“He asked to be excused, Lady MacBeth; he is indisposed—something he drank, I believe.”
“I warned him that Rh negative would poison him. Hassan, you pretentious old fraud, this is ridiculous. My name is not Lady MacBeth and I am not a walking corpse; I am in perfect health. I’m lost, that’s all.”
“You are indeed lost, my lady, for there is no spot on the globe where in the long run you can escape the Supreme Bishop’s proctors. All we offer you, all we can offer you, are some moments of exquisite pleasure before they find you. As for a name, do please pick one that pleases you. Bloody Mary, perhaps? But surely it is prudent to suppress your real name when it is posted in every post office in the realm? But come—enough of business for the nonce. Let sweet music play and good wine flow. Carpe diem, my cousins! Drink up, enjoy the moment. Later, when we again come to order, we will hear nominations of new candidates for termination.” He touched a control on the arm of his wheelchair, spun around, and rolled to a bar in one corner.
Most of the others followed him. “Lizzie Borden” came over to me as I stood up.
“Let me welcome you personally,” she said in a gentle, warm contralto. “I do especially appreciate what you did that got you condemned, as it is much like my own case.”
“Really?”
“I think so. I was a simple temple prostitute, a Sister of Carolita, when I fell from grace. I had always been attracted to the religious life and believed that I had a true vocation while I was still in high school.” She smiled and showed dimples. “Eventually I learned that the Church is run solely for the benefit of the priesthood, not for the good of our people. But I learned it too late.”
“Uh, are you really dying? You look so healthy.”
“With luck I can expect to live another four to six months. Here all of us are dying, including you, my dear. But we don’t waste time thinking about it; instead we study our next client and plan the details of his final moment. May I get you something to drink?”
“No, thank you. Have you seen my cat?”
“I saw him go out onto t
he balcony. Let’s go look.”
We did—no Pixel. But it was a beautiful clear night; we stopped to look. “Lizzie, where are we?”
“This hotel is near the Plaza, and we’re looking north. That’s the downtown district, and beyond it, the Missouri River.”
▣
As I expected, Priscilla set new highs for screaming irrelevancy. She blamed everyone—me, Dr. Rumsey, Donald, President Patton, the Kansas City school board, and unnamed others, for the conspiracy against her. She did not blame herself for anything.
While she was ranting, Jim shoved an injector against her—a tranquilizer, Thorazine, I think, or something about as powerful. We got her into my car and over to the hospital. Bell Memorial used the bed-first-paperwork-later check-in method, so Jim got her treatment started at once. That done, he ordered a barbiturate for nine P.M. and authorized a wet pack if she failed to quiet down.
I signed all sorts of papers, showed my American Express card, and we left—back to Jim’s office, where he took a sample of my blood and a vaginal smear. “Maureen, where was it you sent the boy?”
“I don’t think he had anything to do with it, Jim.”
“Don’t talk like your daughter, you stupid little broad. We don’t guess; we find out.”
Jim dug into a reference listing, called a doctor in Grinnell. “Doctor, we’ll find the lad and send him to you. Are you equipped to do the Morgan test? Do you have fresh reagents and a polarizer at hand?”
“In a college town, Doctor? You can bet your last dollar I do!”
“Good. We’ll track him down and chase him right over to your office, then I’ll wait at this telecode for you to call me back.”
We were lucky; Donald was in his dormitory. “Donald, I want you to go straight to Dr. Ingram. His office is downtown, across from Stewart Library. I want you to go right now, this instant.”
“Mama, what is this all about?” He looked and sounded upset.
“Call me at home, tonight, from a secure phone, and I’ll tell you. I won’t discuss it over a screen in the hallway of a dormitory. Go straight to Dr. Ingram and do what he tells you to. Hurry.”
I waited in Jim’s private office for Dr. Ingram’s call. While I was waiting Jim’s nurse finished my tests. “Good news,” she said. “You can go to the Sunday School picnic after all.”
“Thanks, Olga.”
“Too bad about your youngster. But with the drugs we use nowadays she’ll be home in a couple of days, as healthy as you are.”
“We cure ’em too fast,” Jim said gruffly. “Catching something nasty used to teach ’em a lesson. Now they figure it’s no worse than a hangnail, so why worry?”
“Doctor, you’re a cynic,” Olga countered. “You’ll come to a bad end.”
After an agonizing wait, Dr. Ingram called back. “Doctor, did you have reason to suspect that this patient was infected?”
“No. But he had to be eliminated, under a VD trace required by Missouri state law.”
“Well, he’s negative on both of those and on two or three other things I checked while I was at it. He doesn’t even have dandruff. I don’t see why he would be included in a VD search; I think he’s still a virgin. How shall I bill this?”
“To my office.”
They switched off. I asked, “Jim, what was that about Missouri state law?”
He sighed. “Clap and pox are among the many diseases I must report, but for venereal diseases I not only have to report them but also I must cooperate in an effort to find out where the patient contracted the disease. Then public health officers try to follow each infection back to its source—impossible, since the original source is somewhere centuries back in history. But it does serve to thin it out. I know of one case here in town where spotting one dose of clap turned up thirty-seven other cases before it ran off the map, to other cities or states. When the track does that, our public health officers pass along the data to those other jurisdictions and we drop that search.
“But locating and curing thirty-seven cases of gonorrhea is worthwhile in itself, Maureen. The venereal diseases are ones we stand a chance of stamping out, the way we did smallpox, because—do you know the definition of a venereal disease?”
(Yes, I do, but go ahead, Jim.) “No.”
“A venereal disease is one that is so terribly difficult to catch that only intercourse or deep kissing is likely to pass it on. That’s why we stand a chance of stamping them out…if only the idiots would cooperate! Whereas there is no chance, none whatever, of stamping out the so-called common cold. Yet people pass on respiratory infections with utter carelessness and aren’t even apologetic about it.” He was explosively profane.
I said, “Tut, tut! Ladies don’t talk that way.”
The screen was blinking and its alarm was sounding as I got home. I dropped my handbag and answered it—Donald. “Mama, what’s this all about?”
“Secure phone?” I could not see what was behind him—just a blank wall.
“I’m in one of the soundproof booths at the phone company.”
“All right.” I know of no gentle way to tell a boy that his sister has big and little casino, a full house. So I put it bluntly. “Priscilla is ill. She has gonorrhea and syphilis.”
I thought he was going to faint. But he pulled himself together. “Mama, this is awful. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I was there when she was tested and I saw the test results. That’s why you were tested. I was greatly relieved to learn that you are not the one who gave them to her.”
“I’ll be there at once. Uh, it’s about two hundred and forty miles. Coming up, it took me—”
“Donald.”
“Yes, Mama?”
“Stay where you are. We sent you to Grinnell to get you away from your sister.”
“But, Mama, these are special circumstances. She needs me—”
“She does not need you. You are the worst possible influence on her; can’t you get that through your head? She doesn’t need sympathy; she needs antibiotics and that is what she is getting. Now leave her alone and give her a chance to get well…and to grow up. And you grow up, too!”
After inquiring about how he was doing with his studies, I shut him off. Then I did something I avoid doing as a matter of principle but sometimes must do through pragmatic necessity; I searched a child’s room.
I think a child has a right to privacy but that right is not absolute; his parents have an overriding responsibility for everything under their roof. If the circumstances require it, the child’s right to privacy may have to be temporarily suspended.
I am aware that some libertarians (and all children) disagree with me. So be it.
Priscilla’s room was as untidy as her mind, but that was not what I was after. I worked slowly through her bedroom and bathroom, trying to check every cubic inch, while leaving her clothes and other possessions as much as possible the way I had found them.
I found no trace of liquor. I found a stash of what I thought was marijuana but I was not sure how to tell “grass” when I saw it. That it probably was “grass” was made almost certain in my mind by two things: two little packets of cigarette papers under the bottom liner of another drawer, and a lack of any tobacco of any sort, loose or in cigarettes. Are cigarette papers used for any purpose other than rolling cigarettes of some sort?
The last odd thing I found was at the very bottom of a catch-all drawer in her bathroom: a small rectangular mirror, and with it a Gem single-edge blade. She had a big make-up mirror that I had given her, as well as a three-way that was part of her dressing table; why had she bought this mirror? I stared at those two items, mirror and razor blade, then looked elsewhere in her bath, and found, as my memory led me to expect, a Gillette razor that required double-edged blades, and an opened packet of doubled-edged blades—but no Gem razor. I then searched both bath and bedroom a second time. I even searched the room and bath that had been Donald’s, although I knew them to be as bare as Mother Hubbard’s
cupboard; I had cleaned after he left. I did not find a stash of white powder having the appearance of powdered sugar…which proves only that I did not find such a stash.
I put everything back the way I had found it.
About one A.M. the front door chimed. I answered it from bed. “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Mama. Donald.”
(Dirty names!) “Well, come in.”
“I can’t, it’s bolted.”
“Sorry, I’m not awake yet. I’ll be down.” I grabbed a robe, found some slippers, went downstairs and let my youngest son in. “Come in, Donald. Sit down. When did you eat last?”
“Uh, I grabbed a Big Mac in Bethany.”
“Oh, Lordy.” I fed him first.
When he had polished off all of a giant Dagwood and had eaten a big dish of chocolate ice cream, I said, “All right, why did you come here?”
“You know why, Mama. To see Priss. I know you said she didn’t need me…but you’re mistaken. Ever since she was a baby girl, when she was in trouble, she came to me. So I know she needs me.”
(Oh, dear! I should have fought it in court. I should not have left my two youngest in the custody of—Regrets, regrets! Father, why did you have to go get yourself killed in the Battle of Britain? I need your advice. And I miss you dreadfully!) “Donald, Priscilla is not here.”
“Where is she?”
“I won’t tell you.”
Donald looked stubborn. “I won’t go back to Grinnell without seeing her.”
“That’s your problem. Donald, you two have outworn both my patience and my resourcefulness. You ignore my advice and disobey necessary orders and you are each too big to spank. I have nothing else to offer.”
“You won’t tell me where she is?”
“No.”
He heaved a big sigh. “I’m going to stay here until I see her.”
“That’s what you think. Son, you are not the only stubborn member of this family. Any more of your lip and I’ll call your father and tell him to come get you because I can’t handle you—”