Familiar sensations were beginning to stir in my mind, the first signs of the case taking hold of my imagination. I knew that, like most homicides, this one probably had an easy and reasonable solution. I was fully prepared to discover that Fuller had been shot accidentally by a.22 pistol ten years ago. But until such a possibility metamorphosed into legal fact, I thought I’d better hedge my bets. “Could you put Mr. Fuller on ice for a few days, until I get a better handle on him, or until someone claims him?”
She hesitated. “It’s a little unusual. We normally don’t do that unless it’s a study cadaver… But sure, I don’t see why not. I have space. If it causes a problem down the road, I’ll let you know. Don’t leave me out on a limb for too long, okay?”
“I promise.”
I hung up and stared out the window that separated my office from the rest of the detective squad, grateful that this was cropping up when our work load was comparatively light. My cubicle, small but well lit, and recently remodeled, along with the rest of the ancient building, was the sole display of rank I could brag of as chief of detectives.
I got up and opened the door. Off to one side of the central cluster of four desks was a fifth one, facing the entrance to the public corridor outside. This was Harriet Fritter’s station, the squad secretary, or clerk, whose frightening efficiency and competence allowed me to duck most of the paperwork that would otherwise have kept me anchored indoors.
“Harriet,” I asked her, “could you call Dr. Michael Brook at the hospital and see if he’s available for a quick chat? Also, did you see anything from the town clerk’s office listing the week’s death certificates? I thought we were supposed to get a copy of that as a matter of routine.”
She smiled, already dialing the hospital. “We used to, years ago, but when I told them we were throwing the list out, also as a matter of routine, they quit sending them.”
She turned back to the phone, and I retreated, suitably abashed. Harriet was a grandmother and the leader of an enormous familial clan. That she could run both her family and our office with good humor and no side effects proved she had little tolerance for wasteful habits, and no bashfulness about correcting them.
She buzzed me on the intercom moments later. “You’re in luck. He’s got a free hour right now. Nine Belmont Avenue, second floor.”
Nine Belmont was a remarkably plain red-brick barracks building, attached to the side of the hospital by a narrow corridor like a near-severed limb. A professional building designed to house a variety of medical offices, it had always struck me as the ideal place to receive bad news about a terminal illness: low-slung, cheap-looking, and generally unpromising. I pushed open the glass and aluminum front door, crossed the worn, water-stained foyer carpet, and made for the stairs to the second floor.
Halfway down the dark corridor, I came to a door marked MICHAEL BROOK, M.D.-ORTHOPEDICS. I knocked and walked in.
Brook was standing in his own empty waiting room, leaning on the counter in front of the nurse/receptionist, picking a piece of candy out of a jar to the side of the sliding glass window. He looked up and stuck his free hand out as I approached. “Hi, Joe. I’m test-marketing my reception room. Got to see if I’m invoking the proper element of dread. Want a candy?”
I accepted a blue cellophane-wrapped offering and followed him through the far door into a hallway lined with suitably soothing calendar art. He led the way to an office at the end, stumping from side to side like a land-bound sailor. As ironies would have it, Brook was an orthopedist with one artificial leg, the original having been lost to disease as a teenager. He motioned me into one of two guest chairs, settling into the other one himself.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, unwrapping his candy and popping it in his mouth.
He was a big man, in all dimensions, and had always reminded me of a sheepdog: all bushy gray hair, bearded and uncombed, surrounding two soft brown eyes that hovered above a pair of half glasses like children looking over a fence. I’d met him more than twenty years earlier, when my wife had consulted him for a pain in her shoulder. That hadn’t turned out to be his particular expertise-the pain had been cancer, and Ellen had died within a few months-but Michael Brook had kept by both of us, smoothing the introductions to the many doctors we quickly acquired and translating their incantations into the kind of English we could grasp and digest. While I’d never had to use him professionally since, and our paths rarely crossed socially, his compassion back then had forged a friendship I’d never questioned.
“Mike, I just got a call from Beverly Hillstrom about Abraham Fuller.”
Brook’s face lit up with interest. “Right. What the hell was that, anyway? We were all stunned when he died; didn’t make any sense.”
“She called it a traumatic aortic aneurysm, caused by the creasing of a bullet years ago.”
His mouth fell open and he pulled his glasses off his face. “Damn. That scar he had. He said he got it falling against a tree branch when he was a kid.”
“Apparently, there was an entrance wound near his belly button-a small one. Hillstrom guesstimates a.32 caliber at most.”
He shook his head in wonder. “Christ. It never even crossed my mind. Did this guy have a record, too?”
I smiled at the imaginative leap. “Not everyone with a bullet scar is a crook, Michael. Although, for all I know so far, you may be right. I’m just starting to look into his past. I thought I’d start with you.”
Brook waggled his shaggy eyebrows at me and pushed himself forward in his chair. “You’re not going to get too far. He wasn’t a great historian.” He twisted his phone console around to face him and pushed one of its many buttons. “Bernice? Could you pull everything we have on Abraham Fuller and bring it in? Thanks.”
He settled back in his seat with a small grunt. “I was called in by the Emergency Department a few days ago. Rescue, Inc. had transported a middle-aged male with back pain resulting in paraplegia. The X-rays revealed vertebral osteomyelitis, complicated by an abscess, all stemming, I thought, from the patient’s decades-old encounter with a tree branch…”
“Did he pinpoint the time of the injury?”
Mike shook his head. “No. That’s what I meant when I said he was a poor historian. He just said it happened when he was a kid. I asked him the usual background questions, so I could rule out any underlying congenital or genetic causes for his problem, but every time I wanted specifics, he got vague. Maybe that’s why I thought he was a crook just now.”
There was a knock on the door and a nurse handed Brook a slim folder before retiring. Brook leafed through it cursorily and handed it over to me. “No date of birth, no place of birth, no names of parents, no address, no phone number, no Social Security number, no family physician, no prior records at the hospital. No nothin’, when you get down to it.”
I glanced over the admission sheets at the front, not bothering with the treatment pages, which were indecipherable scrawls, in any case. They were virtually blank. “Hillstrom told me he stayed several days.”
“That’s right. I wanted to do a biopsy on the abscess, and I was planning surgery regardless.” He paused. “If that damned aneurysm had held on a little longer, we might have caught it in surgery and saved his life.”
“Why did it blow, after all this time?”
He shrugged, much as I’d guessed Hillstrom had earlier to the same question. “That kind of aneurysm acts like a stretched-out water balloon. If either the pressure inside increases too much or the outer envelope weakens, it goes pow.” He retrieved the file from my lap and flipped it open. “His blood pressure was on the high side, probably due to the pain and anxiety. That alone might have been enough to do the trick.”
I let my eyes wander across the walls before me, registering but not reading the various diplomas and citations. A secretive man, admitting to no past, is forced by medical necessity to come out of his hole and then dies. I shook my head. This was turning out darker than I’d feared… and more intriguing.