Turee followed Miss Hutchins into the corridor. “Should I stay around?”
“Oh, there’s no reason to. He’ll be fine. It’s nearly eight o’clock, he may sleep clear through the night.”
“I hope so,” Turee said, wishing he could do the same, sleep through the night right up until noon the next day. By noon some things would be settled. Harry would be free, and Esther would have weathered the first day of widowhood. Perhaps, too, the autopsy would be completed and any uncertainty about Ron’s death dispelled. Turee wondered, and felt a little shocked at himself for wondering, if Ron had made a will, and if he, or any of the rest of Ron’s friends, were mentioned in it. I can’t help it. I have a dollar thirty-five in my pocket.
“... a funny thing about Mr. Bream,” Miss Hutchins was saying. “Before I took in his tray, I checked the result of the blood alcohol test they ran on him. It was only one-tenth of one percent. In a normal person that’s not even intoxication level, yet Mr. Bream was almost dead drunk when they brought him in. I guess he’s the kind who can’t hold his liquor.”
“I guess he is.”
“Or else he’s under some severe emotional strain which aggravated the effect of the alcohol. It’s odd his wife didn’t come to see him.” Miss Hutchins’ tone was casual, there wasn’t the faintest emphasis on the word wife. But her eyes gave her away. They were honed sharp as a fortune teller’s on the lookout for some slight reaction that would indicate she was on the right road to her client’s secrets. “When I talked to her on the telephone she sounded quite cool and collected, just the kind of person you’d think would rise to an emergency.”
Noon. Noon tomorrow, Turee said to himself as a child says Christmas. By noon some things will be settled and Miss Hutchins will have faded into the past and good riddance.
He had no reason to suspect that a long time later Miss Hutchins would reappear in his mind, her features distinct, her voice persistent, her outlines as precise as they were now while he was watching her bustle off down the corridor to the nurses’ station.
Turee began walking in the opposite direction toward the exit door. The policeman Miss Hutchins had referred to was waiting at the registration desk, talking to a young man wearing a crew cut and a trench coat.
As Turee was about to pass, the young man turned and his face brightened with recognition. “Why, hello, Professor.”
“Good evening.”
“I guess you don’t remember me. I’m Rod Blake. I was in a poli sci course of yours a couple of years ago.”
“Blake. Of course.” He recalled Blake now as a brash youngster whose good opinion of himself had been considerably higher than his grades. “What are you doing this year, Blake?”
“A little of this and that. I’ve got my sights set on a job. A good one. Why start at the bottom, I always say.”
“Well, good luck.”
Turee was impatient to leave, but the young man took a step to the left, blocking his way. It was an unobtrusive and expert motion, as if Blake were accustomed to people trying to get away from him and had practiced means of circumventing them.
“Nothing the matter with your family, I hope?” Blake said.
“They’re all well, thank you.”
“That’s good. I thought your being here in this ward might indicate...”
“I was visiting a friend who had an accident.”
“Nothing serious, I trust?”
Turee glanced at the policeman who appeared bored, either by the conversation, his job, or Blake. “Nothing serious, no. Well, good night, Blake.”
“It was a real pleasure bumping into you like this, Professor.”
They shook hands, firmly, like old friends or secret enemies, and Turee went out into the spring night.
The cold wind evaporated the moisture on his brow and spread a chill through his entire body. I flunked him in the course. He hates my guts. I wonder what his angle is.
Sixteen
It was characteristic of Blake that when he wanted something badly he went after it with such tactless determination that he weakened his own chances. The job at theGlobe and Mail was a case in point.
He had decided on journalism as his field because it apparently offered glamour and excitement and a chance for advancement “Wait’ll I’m editor,” he’d told one of his girlfriends. And he had chosen the particular newspaper, the Globe, because it was old, established, solvent, and the news editor was a man named Ian Richards whom Blake respected as much as he could respect anyone.
Every day or two, for the past month, he’d been dropping in at Richards’ office, trying to prove, by means of story ideas, plans for a new sports column, revamping the front-page format and so on, that the Globe had tired blood and needed a quick transfusion of Blake. He oversold himself. Richards’ preliminary interest had turned into dislike, his amusement into acidity. Yet no matter how clearly Richards indicated these changes, Blake seemed to remain obdurately unaware of them.
Late Tuesday afternoon he appeared at Richards’ office in an elated mood. Richards didn’t pay much attention to the mood. He’d seen samples of it before, and it usually meant only that Blake had been thinking beautiful thoughts of himself again.
“I’d ask you to sit down,” Richards said, “but I’m busy.”
Blake grinned. “I can talk on my feet.”
“You can talk on your head, I’m still busy.”
“You’ll be sorry if you don’t listen. I’m on to something.”
“Again?”
“This time it’s big. You’ve been following the Galloway case?”
“I read my own newspaper, naturally. What about it? Suicides are a dime a dozen.”
“And the stories behind them?”
“I’m sure they’re all very interesting, but it’s not the kind of thing we print.”
“You might want to print this one. You, or some other newspaper. I’m giving you first chance. Nice of me, eh?”’
“Dandy.” Richards’ mouth puckered as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Just dandy.”
“Well, the whole thing started in kind of a chancy way. Last night I dropped in at the Emergency Ward at General. It’s a good place to pick up things, there are always policemen around waiting to question accident victims and so on. Anyway, I was just standing there minding everybody else’s business when I happened to see an old prof of mine from U. C., Ralph Turee. He handed me a bum deal in his course but I figured, let bygones be bygones. Besides, I had a hunch — it seemed like the last place in the world you’d meet a guy like Turee. I mean, he’s just not the type you associate with accidents or emergencies or the like. He’s cold, and cautious, probably never even had a parking ticket in his life — maybe a little like you, eh, Richards?”
“So you had a hunch. Go on.”
“It seems Turee was in the ward, visiting a friend of his who had an accident. That much I got from him, the rest got from the nurse in charge. I had no trouble at all. Nurses always go for me. I gave her the treatment and she opened up like a flower. The friend Turee was visiting was a guy named Harry Bream who’d been brought in drunk after hitting a street car. Bream did a lot of ranting and raving during which he dropped some names. Galloway was one, Ron Galloway. As soon as I heard that, bells started to ring.”
“Same old bells, or new ones?”
Blake brushed away the sarcasm as he would a fly, with sweep of his hand. “So I began checking. First the records at City Hall, then your file room downstairs. When Galloway was married, nine years ago, to his present wife, Harry Bream was his best man. And get this, he was also best man at Galloway’s first marriage to the heiress Dorothy Reynold. The conclusion’s obvious: Bream and Galloway have been very good friends for a very long time.”