Falling Angel Read online

  Inside, the place was all hospital, walls a pale, institutional green and the gray linoleum floor clean enough to operate on. A glass-topped admissions desk was built into a recessed alcove along one wall. Across from it hung a large oil portrait of a bulldozer-faced dowager who I guessed was Emma Dodd Harvest without reading the little plaque screwed to the gilt frame. Straight ahead, I could see a gleaming corridor where a white-clad orderly pushing an empty wheelchair turned a corner and disappeared from view.

  I’ve always hated hospitals, having spent too many months recovering in them during the war. There was something depressing about the efficient sterility of such places. The hushed tread of rubber soles down bright hallways reeking with Lysol. Faceless attendants anonymous in crisp, white uniforms. A routine so monotonous that even changing a bedpan takes on ritual importance. Memories of the ward rose in me with a choking horror. Hospitals, like prisons, are all the same from the inside.

  The girl behind the admissions desk was young and homely. She was dressed in white and wore a small black nametag that said R. FLEECE. The alcove opened onto an office lined with filing cabinets. “May I help you?” Miss Fleece had a voice as sweet as angel’s breath. Fluorescent light glinted on her thick, rimless glasses.

  “I certainly hope so,” I said. “My name is Andrew Conroy; I do field work for the National Institute of Health.” I set my black calfskin attaché case on the glass-topped desk and showed her some fake I.D. in an extra wallet I carry as a dummy. I rigged it going down in the elevator back at 666 Fifth, changing the front card in the glassine window.

  Miss Fleece regarded me suspiciously, her dim, watery eyes wavering behind the thick lenses like tropical fish in an aquarium. I could tell she didn’t like my wrinkled suit or the soup stains on my tie, but the Mark Cross attaché case carried the day. “Is there anyone in particular you’d like to see, Mr. Conroy?” she asked, experimenting with a weak smile.

  “Perhaps you’ll know the answer to that.” I slipped my dummy wallet back inside my jacket and leaned against the desk top. “The Institute is conducting a survey of incurable trauma cases. My job is to gather information about surviving victims currently in private hospitals. I understand you have a patient here fitting that description.”

  “What is the patient’s name, please?”

  “Jonathan Liebling. Any information you can provide will be kept strictly confidential. In fact, no names at all will be used in the official report.”

  “One moment, please.” The homely receptionist with the heavenly voice retreated into the inner office and pulled out a lower drawer in one of the filing cabinets. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. She returned carrying an open manila folder and slid it across the glass top in front of me. “We did have such a patient at one time, but as you can see, Jonathan Liebling was transferred to the V.A. hospital up in Albany years ago. These are his records. Anything we’d have on him would be in there.”

  The transfer was duly recorded on the form, and beside it the date, 5/12/45. I got out my notebook and went through the motions of jotting down a few statistics. “Who was the physician attending this case, do you know?”

  She reached over and turned the folder so she could read it. “It was Dr. Fowler.” She tapped the name with her forefinger.

  “He still work here in the hospital?”

  “Why, of course. He’s on duty right now. Would you like to speak with him?”

  “If it’s no trouble.”

  She made another attempt at a smile. “I’ll call and see if he’s free.” She stepped to the switchboard and spoke quietly into a small microphone. Her amplified voice echoed down a distant corridor: “Dr. Fowler to the reception desk, please … Dr. Fowler to the reception desk.”

  “Were you working last weekend?” I asked as we waited.

  “No, I was away for a few days. My sister got married.”

  “Catch the bouquet?”

  “I’m not that lucky.”

  Dr. Fowler appeared as if out of nowhere, cat-silent on his crepe-soled shoes. He was a tall man, well over six feet, and walked with a stoop that made him look slightly hunchbacked. He wore a rumpled brown herringbone suit several sizes too large. I guessed him to be somewhere near seventy. What little hair he had left was the color of pewter.

  Miss Fleece introduced me as Mr. Conroy and I fed him the line about the N.I.H., adding, “If there’s anything at all you can tell me regarding Jonathan Liebling, I’d appreciate it very much.”

  Dr. Fowler picked up the manila folder. It might have been palsy that made his fingers tremble, but I had my doubts.

  “So long ago,” he said. “He was an entertainer before the war. Sad case. There was no physical evidence of neural damage, yet he didn’t respond to treatment. There seemed no point in keeping him here, what with the expense and all, so we transferred him to Albany. He was a veteran and entitled to a bed for the rest of his life.”

  “And that’s where he can be found, up in Albany?”

  “I would imagine so. If he’s still alive.”

  “Well, doctor, I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “That’s quite all right. Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

  “Not at all, you’ve been very helpful.” And he had. One look at his eyes told the whole story.

  FOUR

  I drove back into Poughkeepsie, stopping at the first bar and grill I came across. First, I called the V.A. hospital in Albany. It took a little time, but they confirmed what I already knew: there never was a transfer patient named Jonathan Liebling. Not in 1945; not anytime. I thanked them and let the phone dangle while looking up Dr. Fowler. I wrote the address and phone number in my notebook and gave the good doctor a call. No answer. I let it ring a dozen times before hanging up.

  I had a quick drink and asked the bartender for directions to 419 South Kittridge Street. He drew a crude map on a napkin, remarking with studied indifference that it was a classy part of town. The bartender’s cartography proved right on the money. I even got to see a few Vassar girls in the bargain.

  South Kittridge was a pleasant, tree-lined street not many blocks from the campus. The doctor’s house was a carpenter Gothic Victorian with a circular turret at one corner and quantities of elaborate scrollwork hanging under the eaves like lace on an old lady’s collar. A wide veranda with Doric columns surrounded the building, and tall lilac hedges screened the yard on either side from the neighboring houses.

  I drove slowly past, checking things out, and parked the Chevy around the corner in front of an ashlar-walled church. The sign out front announced this Sunday’s sermon: SALVATION IS WITHIN YOU. I walked back to 419 South Kittridge Street carrying my black attaché case. Just another insurance salesman hunting a commission.

  The front door framed a beveled-glass oval, allowing a glimpse of a dim, wainscoted hall and a set of carpeted steps leading up to the second floor. I rang the bell twice and waited. No one came. I rang again and tried the door. It was locked. The lock was at least forty years old and I had nothing to fit it.

  I went along the side veranda trying each window without success. Around back, there was a lean-to cellar door. It was padlocked, but the unpainted wooden frame was soft and old. I got a jimmy out of my attaché case and pried off the hasp.

  The steps were dark, festooned with cobwebs. My penlight flash kept me from breaking my neck. A coal furnace crouched in the center of the cellar like a pagan idol. I found the stairs and started up.

  The door at the top was unlocked, and I stepped into a kitchen that would have been a modern miracle during the Hoover administration. There was a gas range with tall curving legs and a refrigerator whose circular motor perched on top like a hatbox. If the doctor lived alone, he was a tidy man. The breakfast dishes were washed and stacked on the drainboard. The linoleum floor was waxed. I left my case on the oilcoth-covered kitchen table and cased the rest of the house.

  The dining room and front parlor looked never used.
Dust powdered dark, ponderous furniture arranged with showroom precision. Upstairs were three bedrooms. The closets in two were empty. The smallest, with a single iron bed and plain oak dresser, was where Dr. Fowler lived.

  I had a look through his dresser, not finding anything other than the usual round of shirts, handkerchiefs, and cotton underwear. Several musty woolen suits hung beside a shoe rack in the closet. I felt the pockets without knowing why and didn’t turn up a thing. There was a .455-caliber Webley Mark 5 revolver in his bedside table lying next to a small leatherbound Bible. This was the sidearm issued to British officers in World War I. Bibles were optional. I checked the breakfront action, but the Webley wasn’t loaded.

  In the bathroom I got lucky. A sterilizer was steaming on the washstand. Inside, I found a half-dozen needles and three syringes. The medicine cabinet yielded nothing more than the standard array of aspirin and cough syrup bottles, toothpaste tubes and eye drops. I examined several vials containing prescription capsules, but they all seemed legit. None was narcotic.

  I knew it had to be somewhere, so I went back downstairs and had a look in the old-fashioned fridge. It was on the same shelf with the milk and eggs. Morphine; at least twenty 50-cc bottles at rough count. Enough to keep a dozen junkies stoned for a month.

  FIVE

  It grew dark outside by degrees, the bare trees in the front yard becoming silhouettes against a cobalt sky before merging altogether into blackness. I chain-smoked, piling a pristine ash tray with spent butts. A few minutes before seven, the headlights of an automobile turned into the driveway and went out. I listened for the doctor’s footsteps on the porch but didn’t hear a thing until his key turned in the lock.

  He switched on an overhead lamp and a rectangle of light pierced the dark parlor and illuminated my outstretched legs as far as my knees. I made no sound other than exhaling, but expected he would smell the smoke. I was wrong. He hung his overcoat on the banister and shuffled off toward the kitchen. When he turned on the lights, I started back through the dining room.

  Dr. Fowler seemed not to notice my attaché case sitting on the table. He had the refrigerator door open and was bent over, poking around inside. I leaned against the arched dining room entrance and watched him.

  “About time for your evening fix?” I said.

  He spun around clutching a milk carton to his shirt front with both hands. “How did you get in here?”

  “Through the mail slot. Why don’t you sit down and drink your milk and we’ll have a nice, long talk.”

  “You’re not with N.I.H. Who are you?”

  “The name is Angel. I’m a private investigator from the city.” I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and he sat down wearily, holding the milk as if it was all he had left in the world.

  “Breaking and entering is a serious crime,” he said. “I suppose you know you’d lose your license if I were to call the police.”

  I turned a chair around across the table from him and straddled it, folding my arms on the bentwood frame. “We both know you’re not calling the law. Too embarrassing if they found the opium den in the icebox.”

  “I’m a medical man. It’s perfectly within my rights to store pharmaceuticals at home.”

  “Come off it, doc, I saw your works cooking in the bathroom. How long have you been hooked?”

  “I’m not … an addict! I will not stand for such an inference. I have severe rheumatoid arthritis. Sometimes, when the pain is overwhelming, I employ a mild narcotic analgesic. Now I suggest you get out of here or I truly will call the police.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll even dial them for you myself. They’ll get a kick out of seeing your Nalline test.”

  Dr. Fowler sagged within the folds of his oversized suit. He seemed to be shrinking before my eyes. “What do you want with me?” He pushed the milk carton to one side and propped his head in his hands.

  “Same thing I was after back at the hospital,” I said. “Information about Jonathan Liebling.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Doc, let’s not kid around. Liebling was never transferred to any V.A. hospital. I know because I called Albany myself and checked it. Not smart making up a story as thin as that.” I shook a cigarette out of the pack and stuck it in my mouth but didn’t light it. “The second mistake you made was using a ballpoint pen to record the fake transfer on Liebling’s chart. Ballpoints weren’t such a hot item in 1945.”

  Dr. Fowler groaned and cradled his head in his arms on the tabletop. “I knew it was all over when he finally had a visitor. In almost fifteen years there were never any visitors, not one.”

  “Sounds like a popular guy,” I said, thumbing my Zippo and tilting the cigarette into the flame. “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.” Dr. Fowler pulled himself upright. It seemed to take all he had in him to get the job done. “I haven’t seen him since he was my patient during the war.”

  “He must have gone someplace, doctor.”

  “I have no idea where. Some people came one night long ago. He got into a car with them and drove away. I never saw him again.”

  “Into a car? I thought he was supposed to be a vegetable.”

  The doctor rubbed his eyes and blinked. “When he first came to us he was in a coma. But he responded well to treatment and within a month was up and around. We used to play table tennis in the afternoons.”

  “Then he was normal when he left?”

  “Normal? Hateful word, normal. No meaning whatsoever.” Dr. Fowler’s nervous, drumming fingers clenched into fists on the faded oilcloth. On his left hand he wore a gold signet ring engraved with a five-pointed star. “To answer your question, Liebling was not the same as you or me. After recovering his senses, his speech and sight and so on, the use of his limbs, he continued to suffer from acute amnesia.”

  “You mean he had no memory?”

  “None whatsoever. He had no idea who he was or where he came from. Not even his name meant anything to him. He insisted he was someone else and would eventually remember. I said he left with friends; I have only their word for it about that. Jonathan Liebling didn’t recognize them. They were strangers as far as he was concerned.”

  “Tell me more about these friends. Who were they? What were their names?”

  The doctor closed his eyes and pressed his trembling fingers to his temples. “It’s been so long. Years and years. I’ve done my best to forget it.”

  “Don’t you go pleading amnesia on me, doc.”

  “There were two of them,” he said, speaking very slowly, the words dragged out of the distance and filtered through layers of regret. “A man and a woman. I can’t tell you anything about the woman; it was dark and she stayed in the car. In any case, I’d never seen her before. The man was familiar to me. I’d met him several times. He was the one who made all the arrangements.”

  “What was his name?”

  “He said it was Edward Kelley. I have no way of knowing if that was the truth or not.”

  I made a note of the name in my little black book. “What about the arrangements you mentioned? What was the deal there?”

  “Money.” The doctor spat the word out as if it were a piece of rotten meat. “Isn’t every man supposed to have his price? Well, I certainly had mine. This fellow Kelley came to see me one day and offered money —”

  “How much money?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like such a vast sum now, but during the war it was more than I’d ever dreamed of.”

  “It still might make for some sweet dreams today,” I said. “What did Kelley want for the money?”

  “What you probably already suspect; discharge Jonathan Liebling without keeping a record. Destroy any evidence of his recovery. Most important, I was to maintain the pretense that he was still a patient at Emma Harvest.”

  “Which is just what you did.”

  “It wasn’t very difficult. Aside from Kelley and Liebling’s theatri
cal agent, or manager, I forget which, he never had any visitors.”

  “What was the agent’s name?”

  “I think it was Wagner; I can’t recall his first name.”

  “Was he in on the arrangement with Kelley?”

  “Not to my knowledge. I never saw them together, and he didn’t seem to know that Liebling had gone. He called every few months for a year or so to ask if there was any improvement, but never came up to visit. After a while, he stopped calling.”

  “What about the hospital? Didn’t the administration suspect they were missing a patient?”

  “Why should they? I kept his charts up to date, week by week; and every month a check came from Liebling’s trust fund to cover his expenses. As long as the bills are paid, no one is going to ask too many questions. I made up some sort of story to satisfy the nurses, but they had other patients to worry about, so it wasn’t very hard, really. As I said, there were never any visitors. After a while, all I had to do was fill out a legal affidavit which arrived every six months, regular as clockwork, from a law firm in New York.”

  “McIntosh, Winesap, and Spy?”

  “That’s the one.” Dr. Fowler raised his haunted eyes from the tabletop and met my gaze. “The money wasn’t for me. I want you to know that. My wife, Alice, was alive then. She had carcinoid syndrome and needed an operation we couldn’t afford. The money paid for that, and a trip to the Bahamas, but she died anyway. Didn’t take a year. You can’t buy off pain. Not with all the money in the world.”

  “Tell me about Jonathan Liebling.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything at all; little things, habits, hobbies, how he liked his eggs. What color were his eyes?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Give me what you can. Start with a physical description.”

  “That’s impossible. I have no idea what he looked like.”

  “Don’t crap around with me, doc.” I leaned forward and blew a stream of smoke into his watery eyes.

  “I’m telling the truth,” the doctor coughed. “Young Liebling came to us following intensive facial restoration.”