Right there and right then, a grown man, a court investigator and a private eye, I did the unthinkable. I blushed.
Outside the hospital room where James Neville was currently residing, Cliffie had stationed one of his auxiliary cops, a scrawny kid named Sullivan who stood rather than sat in the chair they’d provided for him. Hard to look tough when you were sitting down. Leaning against the wall like this, your right hand on the handle of your holstered weapon, a suspicious squint for everybody who passed by in the hall, people knew you were tough. Except he’d spilled some coffee or cola on his tan cotton auxiliary police shirt and that detracted from his tough-guy pose. Tough guys should never be spillers.
“You got permission to go in there, McCain?” He hated me because Cliffie hated me. That was the first thing they learned under his tutelage. Cliffie good, Judge Whitney/Sam McCain bad.
“Do I need permission?”
“You do as far as I’m concerned.”
“All I need is five minutes.”
“That ain’t what the chief said.”
“How about the district attorney?”
“Who?”
“Cliffie’s cousin.”
“You ain’t supposed to call him Cliffie.”
“Well, she’s technically his boss. And she gave me permission.”
“Is that true?”
“Which part?”
“Her bein’ his boss?”
“That’s how I learned it in law school.”
Like hell I did.
“And she really gave you permission?”
“She did indeed.”
He looked around. I didn’t feel good about lying to him. Sullivan was stupid but he wasn’t mean. He just liked to play dress-up like most of the other auxiliary cops. I’d seen him playing cop at the county fair and the Fourth of July corn roast. He was nice to everybody. Why couldn’t he be one of Cliffie’s thugs? Then I wouldn’t feel so guilty about getting him in trouble with Cliffie.
But then I remembered the promise I’d made to Cy out there on his porch.
“Five minutes is all and if Clifford says anything to you, tell him to call me and I’ll take complete responsibility.”
“You will?”
“I will.”
“Say, you wouldn’t happen to have any gum on you, would you?”
“Two sticks or three?”
“Two’d do fine. I got a break comin’ up here.”
While he was unwrapping the first stick, I made my way inside the room where Will Neville sat on a chair talking to his brother James, who lay in the bed with his right arm in a cast and enough gauze and tape on the rest of him to wrap up Boris Karloff in a Mummy sequel.
“You get that son of a bitch out of here,” James said. “I wouldn’t be in here except for him.” James grimaced. He was in pain of some sort.
Will got up. He was going to lumber over to me and pound my head in. I reached in my back pocket and brought forth my sap. “This can put you in a bed right next to James here, Will. I’d think it over.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“I think James already said that, Will.”
“You got no business here.”
James grimaced again.
“Boys,” I said. “I’m here to find out who killed your brother. And I expect you to help me find out. Otherwise, James, you’re going to go straight from the hospital here to a jail cell. Personally, I’d prefer the hospital. You don’t get all those cute nurses in jail.”
“What the hell’s he talking about, James?”
“Yeah, McCain, what the hell are you talking about?”
I lit a Lucky Strike. “You ran some kind of blackmail ring in Chicago. You told Richie how to set one up here. That comes under the heading of felony, in case you forgot all the law you learned while you were in Joliet.”
Will looked at James, then at me. “You can’t prove that.”
“Well, among all the rubble at the murder scene, I found several pieces of equipment in the darkroom that had been bought in Chicago. Sounds like you bought him one of those handy-dandy blackmail kits, huh?”
“You can’t prove that,” Will said again.
This was where I decided to risk another lie. Two a day is usually my limit, but this was a sudden-death playoff and I needed it bad.
“I haven’t figured out your share of the proceeds yet, but after Richie made his collections — once a month, I suspect — he sent you your cut. Fine and dandy, but he did it by check.”
Both their faces froze as what I’d just said registered in their small criminal minds.
“So any smart detective and any smart DA could lay their hands on bank records and demonstrate the pattern of payout you and Richie had going.”
I pulled up a chair and sat down. “If you think I’m lying about any of this, wait and see how fast I can have a detective up here.”
“A detective from Cliffie’s office?” Will sneered.
“Even a detective from Cliffie’s office could figure this one out. And even if he can’t, the DA can.”
“I hear you’re trying to get into her panties,” Will said.
“And I hear you don’t wear any panties, Will.”
And the troops arrived. A doc and two nurses. They swept in as if they had been dispatched by Divine Providence. One of the nurses pushed a wheelchair.
The doc didn’t deign to look at me or Will. To James, he said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to run some more tests on you, Mr. Neville.”
“When can I get the catheter out?” James said. No wonder he’d been grimacing.
Will glanced at me and said sotto voce, “That’s got to hurt.” And then he pointed to his crotch in case I hadn’t heard.
Both nurses scowled in Will’s direction.
“I’ll wait out in the hall,” I said.
Nobody was crying, there were no code blues, nobody was wheeled past in the last stages of their lives. The three or four times I’d been in the hospital I’d enjoyed myself. When I was a small boy, I got Green Lantern and Captain Marvel comic books. And when I was older, I got the names and phone numbers of several nursing students who later proved to be damn good dates.
But as the years pass, hospital visits start to get grim. No more bad tonsils and busted legs from sliding into second in the kids’ league. Now you’re into the real business of hospitals: hushing up and sanitizing the process of death. But every once in a while all the hushing-up fails and you get a glimpse of a frightened doctor or the knife-sharp sob of a loved one or the stark stink of bowels bursting at the point of death itself.
The irony of standing in a hospital hall smoking a cigarette, after several years of the surgeon general pounding home the connection between cancer and heart attack and cigarettes, wasn’t lost on me. If I ever managed to get married and have kids, would they be standing in this very hall twenty, thirty years down the line wishing that the old man in the room behind them had never taken up the devil weed?
The nurse pushed the wheelchair carrying James Neville out of the room and down the hall. Then came the doc and the other nurse. Both heading to the elevator, too. No sign yet of Will.
When I entered the room, he was standing by the window, looking down at the activity in the parking lot.
“I know you think we’re dumb,” he said, knowing who was there without turning around. “But that don’t mean it hurts any less.”
“Richie?”
“He was a good kid.”
“Then help me catch his killer.”
He swung his large head around and looked at me. “Can’t. We say anything it’s like confessing we were in on it.”
“I wouldn’t have to tell anybody what you told me.”