“How about you and I have lunch, and Charming Manheim pays?”
“As long as that doesn’t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.”
“Everyone’s a critic.” Ethan named a famous west-side restaurant where the Face had a standing reservation.
“They have real food or just interior decoration on a plate?” Hazard asked.
“There’s going to be fancy carved zucchini cups full of vegetable mousseline, baby asparagus, and patterns drawn with sauces,” Ethan admitted. “Would you rather go Armenian?”
“Do I have a tongue? Armenian at one o’clock?”
“I’ll be the guy looks like an ex-cop trying to pass for smart.”
When he pressed END, terminating the call, Ethan was surprised that he had managed to sound entirely normal.
His hands no longer trembled, but cold greasy fear still crawled restlessly through every turning of his guts. In the rearview mirror, his eyes weren’t entirely familiar to him.
Ethan engaged the windshield wipers. He drove out of the Palomar Laboratories parking lot.
In the witches’ cauldron of the sky, late-morning light brewed into a thick gloom more suitable to a winter dusk.
Most drivers had switched on their headlights. Bright phantom serpents wriggled across the wet black pavement.
With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, Ethan decided to pay a visit to the living dead.
CHAPTER 6
OUR LADY OF ANGELS HOSPITAL WAS A TALL white structure with ziggurat-style step-backs in its higher floors, crowned with a series of diminishing plinths that supported a final column. Aglow in the storm, a dome light capped the high column and was itself surmounted by a radio mast with a winking red aircraft-warning beacon.
The hospital seemed to signal mercy to sick souls across the Angelean hills and into the densely populated flatlands. Its tapered shape suggested a rocket ship that might carry to Heaven those whose lives could not be saved either by medicine or by prayer.
Ethan first stopped in the men’s lavatory off the ground-floor lobby, where he washed his hands vigorously at one of the sinks. The lab technician had not scraped every trace of blood from under his fingernails.
The liquid soap in the dispenser proved to have a strong orange fragrance. The lavatory smelled like a citrus orchard by the time that he finished.
Much hot water and much rubbing left his skin a boiled red. He could see no slightest stain remaining. Nevertheless Ethan felt that his hands were still unclean.
He was troubled by the disturbing notion that as long as even a few molecules of that stigmatic residue of his foretold death clung to his hands, the Reaper would track him down by smell and cancel the reprieve that had been granted to him.
Studying his reflection in the mirror, he half expected to see through his body, as through a sheer curtain, but he was solid.
Sensing in himself the potential for obsession, concerned that he might wash his hands without surcease, until they were scrubbed raw, he quickly dried them on paper towels and left the men’s room.
He shared an elevator with a solemn young couple holding hands for mutual strength. “She’ll be all right,” the man murmured, and the woman nodded, eyes bright with repressed tears.
When Ethan got off at the seventh floor, the young couple rode farther up to higher misery.
Duncan “Dunny” Whistler had been abed here on the seventh floor for three months. Between confinements to the intensive care unit—also on this floor—he was assigned to different rooms. During the five weeks since his most recent crisis, he’d been in Room 742.
A nun with a kind Irish face made eye contact with Ethan, smiled, and passed by with nary a swish of her voluminous habit.
The order of sisters that operated Our Lady of Angels rejected the modern garb of many nuns, which resembled the uniforms of airline flight attendants. They favored instead the traditional floor-length habits with commodious sleeves, guimpes, and winged wimples.
Their habits were radiant white, rather than white and black. When Ethan saw them gliding ethereally along these halls, seeming less to walk than to drift like spirits, he could almost believe that the hospital did not occupy only Los Angeles real estate, but bridged this world and the next.
Dunny had existed in a limbo of sorts, between worlds, ever since four angry men shoved his head in a toilet bowl once too often and held him under too long. The paramedics had pumped the water out of his lungs, but the doctors hadn’t been able to stir him from his coma.
When Ethan arrived at Room 742, he found it in deep shadow. An old man rested in the bed nearest the door: unconscious, hooked to a ventilator that pumped air into him with a rhythmic wheeze.
The bed nearest the window, where Dunny had spent the past five weeks, stood unoccupied. The sheets were crisp, fresh, luminous in the gloom.
Drowned daylight projected vague gray images of ameboid rain tracks from the window glass onto the bed. The sheets appeared to be acrawl with transparent spiders.
When he saw that the patient’s chart was missing, Ethan figured that Dunny had been moved to another room or transferred to the ICU yet again.
At the seventh-floor nurses’ station, when he inquired as to where he might find Duncan Whistler, a young nurse asked him to wait for the shift supervisor, whom she paged.
Ethan knew the supervisor, Nurse Jordan, from previous visits. A black woman with a drill sergeant’s purposeful carriage and the soft smoky voice of a chanteuse, she arrived at the nurses’ station with the news that Dunny had passed away that morning.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Truman, but I called both numbers you gave us and left voice-mail messages.”
“When would this have been?” he asked.
“He passed away at ten-twenty this morning. I phoned you about fifteen or twenty minutes later.”
At approximately ten-forty, Ethan had been at Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door, trembling with the memory of his foreseen death, pretending to be looking for the nonexistent Jim Briscoe. He’d left his cell phone in the Expedition.
“I know you weren’t that close to Mr. Whistler,” said Nurse Jordan, “but it’s still something of a shock, I’m sure. Sorry you had to learn this way—the empty bed.”
“Was the body taken down to the hospital garden room?” Ethan asked.
Nurse Jordan regarded him with new respect. “I didn’t realize you were a police officer, Mr. Truman.”
Garden room was cop lingo for morgue. All those corpses waiting to be planted.
“Robbery/Homicide,” he replied, not bothering to explain that he had left the force, or why.
“My husband’s worn out enough uniforms to retire in March. I’m workin’ overtime so I don’t go crazy.”
Ethan understood. Cops often went through long law-enforcement careers without worrying much about the dust-to-dust-ashes-to-ashes business, only to tighten with tension so much in the last months before retirement that they needed to eat Metamucil by the pound to stop retaining. The worry could be even worse for spouses.
“The doctor signed a certification of death,” Nurse Jordan said, “and Mr. Whistler went down to cold holding pending mortuary pickup. Oh…actually, it won’t be a mortuary, will it?”
“It’s a murder now,” Ethan said. “The medical examiner’s office will want him for an autopsy.”
“Then they’ll have been called. We’ve got a foolproof system.” Checking her watch, she said, “But they probably haven’t had time to take custody of the body yet, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Ethan rode the elevator all the way down to the dead. The garden room was in the third and lowest level of the basement, adjacent to the ambulance garage.
Descending, he was serenaded by an orchestrated version of an old Sheryl Crow tune with all the sex squeezed out of it and with a perkiness squeezed in, retaining only the skin of the melody to wrap a different and less tasty variety of sausage. In this fallen world, even the most insignifica
nt things, like pop tunes, were inevitably corrupted.
He and Dunny, both thirty-seven now, had been each other’s best friends from the age of five until they were twenty. Raised in the same worn-down neighborhood of crumbling stucco bungalows, each had been an only child, and they’d been as close as brothers.
Shared deprivation had bonded them, as had the emotional and the physical pain of living under the thumb of alcoholic fathers with fiery tempers. And a fierce desire to prove that even the sons of drunks, of poverty, could be someone, someday.
Seventeen years of estrangement, during which they had rarely spoken, dulled Ethan’s sense of loss. Yet even with everything else that weighed on his mind right now, he was drawn into a melancholy consideration of what might have been.
Dunny Whistler cut the bond between them with his choice of a life outside the law even as Ethan had been training to enforce it. Poverty and the chaos of living under the rule of a selfish drunk had given birth in Ethan to a respect for self-discipline, for order, and for the rewards of a life lived in service to others. The same experiences had made Dunny yearn for buckets of money and for power sufficient to ensure that no one would ever again dare to tell him what to do or ever again make him live by rules other than his own.
In retrospect, their responses to the same stresses had been diverging since their early teens. Maybe friendship had too long blinded Ethan to the growing differences between them. One had chosen to seek respect through accomplishment. The other wanted that respect which comes with being feared.
Furthermore, they had been in love with the same woman, which might have split up even blood brothers. Hannah had come into their lives when they were all seven years old. First she had been one of the guys, the only kid they admitted to their previously two-boy games. The three had been inseparable. Then Hannah gradually became both friend and surrogate sister, and the boys swore to protect her. Ethan could never mark the day when she ceased to be just a friend, just a sister, and became for both him and Dunny…beloved.
Dunny desperately wanted Hannah, but lost her. Ethan didn’t merely want Hannah; he cherished her, won her heart, married her.
For twelve years, he and Dunny had not spoken, not until the night that Hannah died in this same hospital.
Leaving the ruination of Sheryl Crow in the elevator, Ethan followed a wide and brightly lighted corridor with white painted-concrete walls. In place of ersatz music, the only sound was the faint but authentic buzz of the fluorescent tubes overhead.
Double doors with square portholes opened onto the reception area of the garden room.
At a battered desk sat a fortyish, acne-scarred man in hospital greens. A desk plaque identified him as VIN TOLEDANO. He looked up from a paperback novel that featured a grotesque corpse on the cover.
Ethan asked how he was doing, and the attendant said he was alive so he must be doing all right, and Ethan said, “Little over an hour ago, you received a Duncan Whistler from the seventh floor.”
“Got him on ice,” Toledano confirmed. “Can’t release him to a mortuary. Coroner gets him first ’cause it’s a homicide.”
Only one chair was provided for visitors. Transactions involving perishable cadavers were generally conducted expeditiously, with no need of waiting-room comfort and dog-eared old magazines.
“I’m not with a mortuary,” said Ethan. “I was a friend of the deceased. I wasn’t here when he died.”
“Sorry, but I can’t let you see the body right now.”
Sitting in the visitors’ chair, Ethan said, “Yeah, I know.”
To prevent defense attorneys from challenging autopsy results in court, an official chain of custody for the cadaver had to be maintained, ensuring that no outsider could tamper with it.
“There’s no family left to ID him, and I’m the executor of the estate,” Ethan explained. “So if they’re going to want me to confirm identity, I’d rather do it here than later at the city morgue.”
Putting aside his paperback, Toledano said, “This guy I grew up with, last year he gets himself thrown out of a car at like ninety miles an hour. It’s hard losing a good friend young.”
Ethan couldn’t pretend to grieve, but he was grateful for any conversation that took his mind off Rolf Reynerd. “We hadn’t been close in a long time. Didn’t talk for twelve years, then only three times in the past five.”
“But he made you executor?”
“Go figure. I didn’t know about that till Dunny was here two days in the ICU. Got a call from his lawyer, tells me not only I’m the executor if Dunny dies, but meanwhile I have power of attorney to handle his affairs and make medical decisions on his behalf.”
“Must’ve still been something special there between you.”
Ethan shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Must’ve been something,” Vin Toledano insisted. “Childhood friendships, they’re deeper than you know. You don’t see each other forever, then you meet, and it’s like no time passed.”
“Wasn’t that way with us.” But Ethan knew that the something special between him and Dunny had been Hannah and their love for her. To change the subject, he said, “So how does your friend come to be pushed out of a car doing ninety?”
“He was a great guy, but he always thought more with his little head than his big one.”
“That’s not an exclusive club.”
“He’s in a bar, sees three hotties, no guys with them, so he moves in. All three come on to him, say let’s go back to our place, and he figures he’s so Brad Pitt they want to three-on-one him.”
“But it’s a robbery setup,” Ethan guessed.
“Worse. He leaves his car, rides in theirs. Two girls get him hot in the backseat, half undress him—then push him out for fun.”
“So the hotties were hopped on something.”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” said Toledano. “Turns out they’d done it twice before. This time they got caught.”
Ethan said, “I came across this old movie on TV the other night. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello. One of those beach-party flicks. Women sure were different back then.”
“So was everybody. Nobody’s got better or nicer since the mid-sixties. Wish I’d been born thirty years sooner. So how’d yours die?”
“Four guys thought he’d cheated them out of some money, so they thumped him a little, taped his wrists behind his back, and submerged his head in a toilet long enough to cause brain damage.”
“Man, that’s ugly.”
“It’s not Agatha Christie,” Ethan agreed.
“But you’re dealing with all this, it proves there must’ve been something left between you and your buddy. Nobody has to be executor of an estate, they don’t want to be.”
Two meat haulers from the medical examiner’s office pushed open the double doors and entered the garden-room reception area.
The first guy was tall, in his fifties, and obviously proud about having kept all his hair. He wore it in a pompadour elaborate enough that it should have been finished with bows.
Ethan knew Pomp’s partner. Jose Ramirez was a stocky Mexican-American with myopic eyes and with the sweet dreamy smile of a koala bear.
Jose lived for his wife and four children. While Pomp dealt with the paperwork supplied by the attendant, Ethan asked Jose to see the latest wallet photographs of Maria and the kids.
Once formalities were completed, Toledano led them through an inner door, into the garden room. Instead of a vinyl-tile floor as in the reception area, this chamber featured white ceramic tile with only sixteenth-inch grout joints: an easy surface to sterilize in the event that it became contaminated with bodily fluids.
Although continually cycled through sophisticated filters, the cold air carried a faint but unpleasant scent. Most people didn’t die smelling of shampoo, soap, and cologne.
Four standard stainless-steel morgue drawers might have held bodies, but two cadavers on gurneys made an immediate impression. Both were draped with sheets.
A third gurney stood empty, trailing a tangled shroud, and to this one Toledano proceeded with a stupefied expression. “This was him. Right here.”
Frowning with confusion, Toledano peeled the sheets back from the heads of the other two cadavers. Neither was Dunny Whistler.
One at a time, he pulled open the four stainless-steel drawers. They were empty.
Because the hospital sent the vast majority of its patients home rather than to funeral services, this garden room was small by the standards of the city morgue. All possible hiding places had already been explored.
CHAPTER 7
IN THIS WINDOWLESS CHAMBER THREE STORIES underground, the four living and the two dead were for a moment so silent that Ethan imagined he could hear rain falling in the streets far above.
Then the meat hauler with the pompadour said, “You mean you released Whistler to the wrong people?”
The attendant, Toledano, shook his head adamantly. “No way. Never did in fourteen years, not startin’ today.”
A wide door allowed bodies on gurneys to be conveyed directly from the garden room into the ambulance garage. Two deadbolts should have secured it. Both were disengaged.
“I left them locked,” Toledano insisted. “They’re always locked, always, ’cept when I’m overseeing a dispatch, and then I’m always here, right here, watching.”
“Who’d want to steal a stiff?” Pomp asked.
“Even some perv wanted to steal one, he couldn’t,” Vin Toledano said, pulling open the door to the garage to reveal that it lacked keyholes on the outside. “Two blind locks. No keys ever made for it. Can’t unlock this door unless you’re already here in this room, then you use the thumb-turns.”
The attendant’s voice had been quickly worn thin by worry. Ethan figured that Toledano saw his job going down the drain as surely as blood was drawn by gravity down the gutters of an inclined autopsy table.
Jose Ramirez said, “Maybe he wasn’t dead, you know, so he walked out himself.”
“He’s deader than dead,” Toledano said. “Total damn dead.”