A sign on the door said, Ring and Walk In. Meecham rang and walked in.
The orderly on duty was sitting at a small desk in the corner reading a chart.
“Good morning, Gill,” Meecham said.
Gill looked up from the chart, frowning. “How did you get past the gate?”
“The trusty’s an old friend of mine.”
“We have rules, Meecham, you know that.”
“I’m not breaking anything.”
Meecham had known Gill for a year or more. The orderly was a stocky young man whose principal interest was disease. He was the only employee of the hospital who could listen, with intense concern, to the complaints and symptoms of every patient under his care. He was, accordingly, very popular and much more useful than he himself realized. Migraines and stomach cramps, asthmatic attacks and cardiospasms, had been talked away into Gill’s receptive ear, and many a fear had been drowned in his liquid brown eyes.
At his own request he had been transferred to the prison ward because he wanted to study the relationship between crime and disease. He was very conscientious about it; he kept a notebook in which he jotted down all kinds of medical lore and symptoms, and observations and remarks made by his charges. But so far he had reached no conclusion beyond the fact that the prisoners were on the whole quieter and made less fuss over their pains than the men in other wards.
“I just want to talk to him for a minute,” Meecham said.
Gill fingered the stethoscope he wore around his neck. It was his own stethoscope, he’d bought it a week ago, and one of the interns was teaching him how to use it and interpret the meaning of its sounds correctly. He wore it with great pride and self-consciousness, like a diamond necklace.
“I told you over the phone, Meecham, no visitors. He’s a very sick boy.” To Gill all his patients, of any age, were boys, as. if by becoming sick they had retrogressed into childhood. Meecham wondered if Gill knew how close to the truth this was.
“I’m not a visitor.”
“He had to have a blood transfusion last night. They took a test when they brought him in yesterday morning and they found out his percentage of myleo — myeloblasts was very high.”
“What’s a myeloblast?”
Gill colored. “It’s a bad sign, anyway, very bad. The transfusion perked him up, though. In fact, he got restless and couldn’t settle down and go to sleep. He wanted to talk so I stayed with him.”
“All night?”
“Sure. I didn’t have anything else to do except sleep, and I never had a leukemia case before. The fact is, I think it’s a coming disease, so I want to find out as much about it as I can. Then by the time I can afford to go to medical school I’ll know a lot of stuff the other guys won’t know, the real inside stuff.”
“Like myeloblasts,” Meecham said. “What did he want to talk about last night?”
“What most of the boys talk about. Himself and women.”
“What women?”
“His mother, for one. It seems his mother is an alcoholic. I’ve often noticed that there’s a history of alcoholism in most...”
“What other woman?”
“He called her Birdie. She was his wife, but he gave her a raw deal and she left him. Say, what do you want to know stuff like this for?”
“I’m interested. You’re interested in Loftus’ myeloblasts and I’m interested in his wife.”
“Are you trying to find her or something?”
“Just out of curiosity, yes.”
“You must be awfully curious, to want to go where she’s gone.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s dead,” Gill said. “She was killed in a car accident in Las Vegas about a year and a half ago.”
“Killed?”
“Not outright. She died several days later in the hospital.”
Meecham felt a little dizzy and off-balance, as if one of the knots in the net of ropes had been cut away under his hand and left him swinging in air.
Birdie was dead, had been dead for a long time. She hadn’t just vanished for an instant around a corner, she had walked away into the shadows of some strange street.
“That’s — too bad,” he said finally.
“It sure is.”
“He didn’t tell me about it.”
“People tell me a lot of things, I don’t know why. But I never heard anyone talk as much as Loftus did last night. He must have been crazy about that woman. Birdie this, Birdie that, I damn near went to sleep a couple of times except the chair was so hard. The funny part of it is that he never mentioned what he was in here for until I asked him. And then I got the impression that the murder seemed to him a very trivial thing, like parking beside a red curb. I’ve had a couple of psychopaths in here and that was their attitude. But Loftus shows no signs of being a psychopath. Except for that one blank spot, the murder itself, he’s a very moral and responsible man. Do you know his mother?”
“I’ve met her.”
“From what I heard, she’s quite a case, eh? You know, I’ve been sort of thinking things out this morning and I was wondering when I get enough money to go to medical school if I shouldn’t concentrate on psychiatry. I haven’t got any education, just what I picked up here and there, but you’re an educated man, don’t you think psychiatry’s the coming thing?”
“We could all use a little.”
“That’s what I mean. When they get most of the physical diseases licked in a test tube, then I’ll have my psychiatry, I won’t be left flat on my rear.”
“I’ll be your first patient,” Meecham said, “if you’ll let me in to see Loftus.”
“I can’t, Meecham. The boy’s sick. Honest-to-God sick, not like some of the fakers I get.”
“I know that.”
“Besides, he’s sleeping. He had a sedative three hours ago.”
“I’ll wait.” Meecham sat down on the edge of the desk and lit a cigarette. “If he’s too sick to talk, all right, I promise not to ask him any questions. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? After all, the sight of me isn’t going to scare him to death. I’ll walk quietly in, and if he’s asleep, I’ll walk quietly out. Where is he?”
“In the bridal suite,” Gill said. The phrase had lost any connotations of humor long ago; it was the standard term used to describe the building’s only private room where the very ill or the post-operative patients were kept. “You go to a lot of trouble just for curiosity’s sake, don’t you?”
“Occasionally.”
“Who are you working for?”
“Myself only.”
“Well, come on. I’ll see if he’s awake.”
“Thanks, Gill. Show up at my office around the middle of February and I’ll help you with your income tax.”
“Who are you kidding?” Gill reached into a drawer and took out a ring of keys. It wasn’t as large as the ring Miss Jennings had at the county jail but there were more keys on it, of every size and shape. “You know, I get kind of sick of locking things up all the time. Lock the doors, lock the windows, lock the lavatory, lock up the thermometers, the rubbing alcohol, the dishes, even the spoons.”
Meecham followed him to the door. “Why the spoons?”
“A couple of years ago a guy was in here who’d been beaten up in a family brawl. He tried to choke himself by swallowing some orange peelings and pushing them down his throat with a spoon. So, no spoons and no oranges.”
He unlocked a door that led into a long narrow hall. In spite of the sun and air, paint and disinfectant, the odor of rotting wood clung to the old house. It trailed up and down the hall and up and down the hollowed steps like the restive ghost of the superintendent looking for a trace of himself.
There were four rooms on the lower floor. From three of them the doors had been removed and full-length gates had been substituted, made of the same material as the fencing around the grounds.