A Case of Need

  Judith came in and said, “It’s nine.”

  I got up and put on my suit jacket.

  “Are you going out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  I grinned at her. “To a bar,” I said. “Downtown.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  The Electric Grape was located just off Washington Street. From the outside it was unimpressive, an old brick building with large windows. The windows were covered with paper, making it impossible to see inside. On the paper was written: “The Zephyrs Nightly. Go-Go Girls.” I could hear jarring rock-’n’-roll sounds as I approached.

  It was ten P.M. Thursday night, a slow night. Very few sailors, a couple of hookers, down the block, standing with their weight on one hip, their pelvises thrust outward. One cruised by in a little sports car and batted her mascara at me. I entered the building.

  It was hot, damp, smelly, animal heat, and the sound was deafening: vibrating the walls, filling the air, making it thick and liquid. My ears began to ring. I paused to allow my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room. There were cheap wooden tables in the center booths along one wall, and a bar along another. A tiny dance floor near the bandstand; two sailors were dancing with two fat, dirty-looking girls. Otherwise the place was empty.

  On stage, the Zephyrs were beating it out. Five of them—three steel guitars, a drummer, and a singer who caressed the microphone and wrapped his legs around it. They were making a lot of noise, but their faces were oddly bland, as if they were waiting for something, killing time by playing.

  Two discotheque girls were stationed on either side of the band. They wore brief costumes, bikinis with fringes. One was chubby and one had a beautiful face on a graceless body. Their skins were chalky-white under the lights.

  I stepped to the bar and ordered straight Scotch on the rocks. That way, I’d get Scotch and water, which was what I wanted.

  I paid for my drink and turned to watch the group. Roman was one of the guitarists, a wiry muscular man in his late twenties, with a thick head of curly black hair. The grease shone in the pink stage lights. He stared down at his fingers as he played.

  “They’re pretty good,” I said to the bartender.

  He shrugged. “You like this kinda music?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  “Crap,” the bartender said. “All crap.”

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  “Opera,” he said and moved down to another customer. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding me or not.

  I stood there with my drink. The Zephyrs finished their piece, and the sailors on the dance floor clapped. Nobody else did. The lead singer, still swaying from the song, leaned into the microphone and said, “Thank you, thank you,” in a breathless voice, as if thousands were wildly applauding.

  Then he said, “For our next song we want to do an old Chuck Berry piece.”

  It turned out to be “Long Tall Sally.” Really old. Old enough for me to know it was a Little Richard song, not Chuck Berry. Old enough for me to remember from the days before my marriage, when I took girls to places like this for a wild evening, from the days when Negroes were sort of amusing, not people at all, just a musical sideshow. The days when white boys could go to the Apollo in Harlem.

  The old days.

  They played the song well, loud and fast. Judith loathes rock ’n’ roll, which is sad; I’ve always kept a taste for it. But it wasn’t fashionable when our generation was growing up. It was crude and lower class. The deb set was still fixed on Lester Lanin and Eddie Davis, and Leonard Bernstein hadn’t learned the twist yet.

  Times change.

  Finally the Zephyrs finished. They hooked a record player to their amplifiers and started the records going. Then they climbed down off the stage and headed for the bar. As Roman walked toward me, I came up to him and touched his arm.

  “Buy you a drink?”

  He gave me a surprised look. “Why?”

  “I’m a fan of Little Richard.”

  His eyes swept up and down me. “Get off it,” he said.

  “No, seriously.”

  “Vodka,” he said, sitting down next to me.

  I ordered a vodka. It came, and he gulped it down quickly.

  “We’ll just have another,” he said, “and then we can go talk about Little Richard, right?”

  “O.K.,” I said.

  He got another vodka and carried it to a table across the room. I followed him. His silver suit shimmered in the near darkness. We sat down, and he looked at the drink and said, “Let’s see the silver plate.”

  “What?”

  He gave me a pained look. “The badge, baby. The little pin. I don’t do nothing unless you got the badge.”

  I must have looked puzzled.

  “Christ,” he said, “when they gonna get some bright fuzz?”

  “I’m not fuzz,” I said.

  “Sure.” He took his drink and stood up.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me show you something.”

  I took out my wallet and flipped to my M.D. card. It was dark; he bent down to look at it.

  “No kidding,” he said, his voice sarcastic. But he sat down again.

  “It’s the truth. I’m a doctor.”

  “O.K.,” he said. “You’re a doctor. You smell like a cop to me, but you’re a doctor. So let’s have the rules: you see those four guys over there?” He nodded toward his group. “If anything happens, they all testify you showed me a doctor’s card and no badge. That’s entrapment, baby. Don’t hold in court. Clear?”

  “I just want to talk.”

  “No kidding,” he said and sipped the drink. He smiled slightly. “Word sure does get around.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He glanced at me. “Who told you about it?”

  “I have ways.”

  “What ways?”

  I shrugged. “Just…ways.”

  “Who wants it?”

  “I do.”

  He laughed. “You? Get serious, man. You don’t want nothing.”

  “All right,” I said. I stood up and started to go. “Maybe I got the wrong man.”

  “Just a minute, baby.”

  I stopped. He was sitting at the table, looking at the drink, twisting the glass in his hands. “Sit down.”

  I sat down again. He continued to stare at the glass. “This is good stuff,” he said. “We don’t cut it with nothing. It’s the finest quality and the price is high, see?”

  “O.K.,” I said.

  He scratched his arms and his hands in a quick, nervous way. “How many bags?”

  “Ten. Fifteen. Whatever you have.”

  “I got as much as you want.”

  “Then fifteen,” I said. “But I want to see it first.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right. You can see it first, it’s good.”

  He continued to scratch his arms through the silver material, then smiled. “But one thing first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who told you?”

  I hesitated. “Angela Harding,” I said.

  He seemed puzzled by this. I could not decide whether I had said something wrong. He shifted in his chair, as if making up his mind, then said, “She a friend of yours?”

  “Sort of.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  He nodded slowly. “The door,” he said, “is over there. I’ll give you thirty seconds to get out of here before I tear you to pieces. You hear me, cop? Thirty seconds.”

  I said, “All right, it wasn’t Angela. It was a friend of hers.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Karen Randall.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “I understand you knew her quite well.”

  He shook his head: “Nope.”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “You was told wrong, baby. Dead wrong.”

/>   I reached into my pocket and brought out his picture. “This was in her room at college.”

  Before I knew what was happening, he had snatched the picture from my hand and torn it up.

  “What picture?” he said evenly. “I don’t know no picture. I never even seen the girl.”

  I sat back.

  He regarded me with angry eyes. “Beat it,” he said.

  “I came here to buy something,” I said. “I’ll leave when I have it.”

  “You’ll leave now, if you know what’s good for you.”

  He was scratching his arms again. I looked at him and realized that I would learn nothing more. He wasn’t going to talk, and I had no way to make him.

  “All right,” I said. I got up, leaving my glasses on the table. “By the way, do you know where I can get some thiopental?”

  For a moment, his eyes widened. Then he said, “Some what?”

  “Thiopental.”

  “Never heard of it. Now beat it,” he said, “before one of those nice fellas at the bar picks a fight with you and beats your head in.”

  I walked out. It was cold; a light rain had started again. I looked toward Washington Street and the bright lights of the other rock-’n’-roll joints, strip joints, clip joints: I waited thirty seconds, then went back.

  My glasses were still on the table. I picked them up and turned to leave, my eyes sweeping the room.

  Roman was in the corner, talking on a pay phone.

  That was all I wanted to know.

  FOUR

  AROUND THE CORNER at the end of the block was a stand-up, self-service greasy spoon. Hamburgers twenty cents. It had a large glass window in front. Inside I saw a few teenage girls giggling as they ate, and one or two morose derelicts in tattered overcoats that reached almost to their shoes. At one side, three sailors were laughing and slapping each other on the back, reliving some conquest or planning the next. A telephone was in the back.

  I called the Mem and asked for Dr. Hammond. I was told he was on the EW that night; the desk put the call through.

  “Norton, this is John Berry.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I need more information,” I said, “from the record room.”

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “It seems to be a slow night here. One or two lacerations and a couple of drunken fights. Nothing else. What do you need?”

  “Take this down,” I said. “Roman Jones, Negro, about twenty-four or -five. I want to know whether he’s ever been admitted to the hospital and whether he’s been followed in any of the clinics. And I want the dates.”

  “Right,” Hammond said. “Roman Jones. Admissions and clinic visits. I’ll check it out right away.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You going to call back?”

  “No. I’ll drop by the EW later.”

  That, as it turned out, was the understatement of the year.

  WHEN I FINISHED THE CALL I was feeling hungry, so I got a hot dog and coffee. Never a hamburger in a place like this. For one thing, they often use horse-meat or rabbit or entrails or anything else they can grind up. For another, there’s usually enough pathogens to infect an army. Take trichinosis—Boston has six times the national rate of infection from that. You can’t be too careful.

  I have a friend who’s a bacteriologist. He spends his whole time running a hospital lab where they culture out organisms that have infected the patients. By now this guy is so worked up that he practically never goes out to dinner, even to Joseph’s or Locke-Ober. Never eats a steak unless it’s well done. He really worries. I’ve been to dinner with him, and it’s terrible—he sweats all through the main course. You can see him imagining a blood agar petri dish, with those little colonies streaked out. Every bite he takes, he sees those colonies. Staph. Strep. Gram negative bacilli. His life is ruined.

  Anyway, hot dogs are safer—not much, but some— so I had one and took it over to the stand-up counter with my coffee. I ate looking out the window at the crowd passing by.

  Roman came to mind. I didn’t like what he’d told me. Clearly, he was selling stuff, probably strong stuff. Marijuana was too easy to get. LSD was no longer being made by Sandoz, but lysergic acid, the precursor, is produced by the ton in Italy, and any college kid can convert it if he steals a few reagents and flasks from his chem lab. Psilocybin and DMT are even easier to make.

  Probably Roman was dealing in opiates, morphine or heroin. That complicated matters a great deal—particularly in view of his reaction to mention of Angela Harding and Karen Randall. I wasn’t sure what the connection was but I felt, somehow, that I’d find out very soon.

  I finished the hot dog and drank my coffee. As I looked out the window, I saw Roman hurry by. He did not see me. He was looking forward, his face intent and worried.

  I gulped the rest of my coffee and followed him.

  [Ed note: the three-step synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamine (LSD) from common precursors has been omitted from this manuscript.]

  FIVE

  I LET HIM GET HALF A BLOCK AHEAD OF ME. He was hurrying through the crowds, pushing and shoving. I kept him in sight as he walked toward Stuart Street. There he turned left and headed for the expressway. I followed him. This end of Stuart was deserted; I dropped back and lit a cigarette. I pulled my raincoat tighter and wished I had a hat. If he looked back over his shoulder, he would certainly recognize me.

  Roman walked one block, then turned left again. He was doubling back. I didn’t understand, but I played it more cautiously. He was walking in a quick, jerky way, the movements of a frightened man.

  We were on Harvey Street now. There were a couple of Chinese restaurants here. I paused to look at the menu in one window. Roman was not looking back. He went another block, then turned right.

  I followed.

  South of the Boston Commons, the character of the town changes abruptly. Along the Commons, on Tremont Street, there are elegant shops and high-class theaters. Washington Street is one block over, and it’s a little sleazier: there are bars and tarts and nude movie houses. A block over from that, things get even tougher. Then there’s a block of Chinese restaurants, and that’s it. From then on, you’re in the wholesale district. Clothes mostly.

  That’s where we were now.

  The stores were dark. Bolts of cloth stood upright in the windows. There were large corrugated doors where the trucks pulled up to load and unload. Several little dry-goods stores. A theatrical supply shop, with costumes in the window—chorus girl stockings, an old military uniform, several wigs. A basement pool hall, from which came the soft clicking of balls.

  The streets were wet and dark. We were quite alone. Roman walked quickly for another block, then he stopped.

  I pulled into a doorway and waited. He looked back for a moment and kept going. I was right after him.

  Several times, he doubled back on his own path, and he frequently stopped to check behind him. Once a car drove by, tires hissing on the wet pavement. Roman jumped into a shadow, then stepped out when the car had gone.

  He was nervous, all right.

  I followed him for perhaps fifteen minutes. I couldn’t decide whether he was being cautious or just killing time. He stopped several times to look at something he held in his hand—perhaps a watch, perhaps something else. I couldn’t be sure.

  Eventually he headed north, skirting along side streets, working his way around the Commons and the State House. It took me awhile to realize that he was heading for Beacon Hill.

  Another ten minutes passed, and I must have gotten careless, because I lost him. He darted around a corner, and when I turned it moments later, he was gone: the street was deserted. I stopped to listen for footsteps, but heard nothing. I began to worry and hurried forward.

  Then it happened.

  Something heavy and damp and cold struck my head, and I felt a cool, sharp pain over my forehead, and then a strong punch to my stomach. I fell to the pavement and the world began to spin sickeningly. I heard a
shout, and footsteps, and then nothing.

  SIX

  IT WAS ONE OF THOSE PECULIAR VIEWS YOU HAVE, like a dream where everything is distorted. The buildings were black and very high, towering above me, threatening to collapse. They seemed to rise forever. I felt cold and soaked through, and rain spattered my face. I lifted my head up from the pavement and saw that it was all red.

  I pulled up on one elbow. Blood dripped down onto my raincoat. I looked stupidly down at the red pavement. Hell of a lot of blood. Mine?

  My stomach churned and I vomited on the sidewalk. I was dizzy and the world turned green for a while.

  Finally, I forced myself to get to my knees.

  In the distance, I heard sirens. Far off but getting closer. I stood shakily and leaned on an automobile parked by the curb. I didn’t know where I was; the street was dark and silent. I looked at the bloody sidewalk and wondered what to do.

  The sirens were coming closer.

  Stumbling, I ran around the corner, then stopped to catch my breath. The sirens were very close now; a blue light flashed on the street I had just left.

  I ran again. I don’t know how far I went. I don’t know where I was.

  I just kept running until I saw a taxi. It was parked at a stand, the motor idling.

  I said, “Take me to the nearest hospital.”

  He looked at my face.

  “Not a chance,” he said.

  I started to get in.

  “Forget it, buddy.” He pulled the door shut and drove away, leaving me standing there.

  In the distance, I heard the sirens again.

  A wave of dizziness swept over me. I squatted and waited for it to pass. I was sick again. Blood was still dripping from somewhere on my face. Little red drops spattered into the vomit.

  The rain continued. I was shivering cold, but it helped me to stay conscious. I got up and tried to get my bearings; I was somewhere south of Washington Street; the nearest signpost said Curley Place. It didn’t mean anything to me. I started walking, unsteady, pausing frequently.

  I hoped I was going in the right direction. I knew I was losing blood, but I didn’t know how much. Every few steps, I had to stop to lean on a car and catch my breath. The dizziness was getting worse.