Blood Count

CHAPTER 24

Y ou can watch the moon rise right over there, nights when the sky is clear,” said Lionel Hutchison, when I found him on the Armstrong roof. I asked him if he’d seen Diaz.

“You think he’s up to something?”

“He said he’d been on the roof checking something.”

“Didn’t see him.”

“You know him well?”

Hutchison shook his head. “No need. Don’t like the fellow much, I admit.”

“Isn’t it cold, even for you, doctor?”

“Good for the health,” he replied. “And please do call me Lionel. You know, I used to belong to the Polar Bear Club. They swim out at Coney Island every year on New Year’s Day. Terrific,” he said. “I enjoy it here. I come on up mornings, before everybody is around, sometimes bring my coffee. You look cold, Artie. I’ll tell you what, see that toolshed? It’s not much in the way of shelter, but we can sit in there for a minute if you like.”

In the wooden lean-to, cigarettes in hand, Lionel offered me one, and I took it. He sat on a rough bench and I sat next to him. He got out his old Zippo, lit his smoke and mine. “Got this old lighter when I was in the service, back in the war,” he said. “I was just a kid, but did kill a few Nazis,” he added with satisfaction. “You wanted to ask me anything else about Diaz, Artie? Or you’re wanting to ask me some things now we’re out of Lily’s hearing?”

“Yes.”

“What is it you really want to know, then?”

“You knew Amahl Washington?”

“Of course I knew him. He lived here. He was the local councilman, as well, a very decent good man. What’s this about?”

“Did he die unexpectedly?”

“Yes, but he was a sick man, he had been ill for a long, long time. I see the connection you’re making. I’m not unaware.”

“Did you treat him?”

“I helped him out from time to time.”

“You come up here a lot?”

“Detective, just ask me your questions. You don’t have to make small talk.”

“When did Amahl Washington die?”

“I would say approximately six months ago. Let me see. It’s December. That was June. Died from his heart giving up the fight. Still, it was lung cancer that made it all happen,” said Hutchison. “I watched him suffer. Suffering is not noble, you know. Pain cripples our best selves and makes us hopeless at best, at worst evil,” he added. “Do you know how Marianna lost the tip of her finger?”

“Tell me.”

“She was in such pain at one time she bit it so hard it had to be amputated. As for Amahl, I believe it was mainly his own doctor who tended to him.”

“His own doctor being Dr. Lucille Bernard?”

“He had several doctors, I believe. Lucille was called in toward the end.”

“She was married to Carver Lennox?”

“Still is. Lucille’s a wonderful doctor, but she believes in all that Roman Catholic foolishness, like my wife, in fact.” He leaned back comfortably against the wall of the shed. “Do you know what the best thing about this neighborhood was?”

“What’s that?”

“The real advantage of growing up on Edgecombe Avenue was that you had a sense of possibility. Couldn’t not. You knew people, your parents knew people, who had made something of themselves. This building was like a fort where we were protected from even the worst times in Harlem. A lot of people thought we were snobs, of course, and that we looked down on them. Living here gave us a sense of ourselves, especially as kids. It empowered us, we thought we could do anything, even back in what I like to think of as the dark ages, back in the thirties, forties, you know?” He paused. “We met all kinds of people, of course. One of the profits of segregation, I guess you might say was that even in buildings like the Armstrong, we were all thrown together eventually. As time went on, it wasn’t just professionals, there were people who worked as maids downtown. The oldest fellow in the building used to run the elevators. Pullman porters. Doctors like me. All kinds.”

“What year did you move here?”

“I moved in with my mother and daddy in, what was it, 1931, and except for school and my military service, I’ve lived here all these years, had my medical practice in an office right downstairs for a long time. Couldn’t get a job at any hospital in my specialty-hematology. Couldn’t hardly get a job in any hospital at all in New York,” he said. “So I set up in general practice right here on the ground floor. Graduated Harvard Medical School. Couldn’t get a job in a New York hospital. Felt like the whole of America was an alternate universe for us. Sepia universe,” he said. “I stayed on here. By then times had got bad, and after that it got worse and worse; even the Armstrong wasn’t completely immune to it-the murders, the heroin, the poverty, the crack cocaine, the landlords and real estate people who sucked the place dry, the corrupt police force. Whole big areas of Harlem just a burnt-out case. My parents died; I married Celestina. Couldn’t do it until Mother passed, though.”

“How come?”

“Hold on, I just need to light up afresh.” He used the butt of his smoke to light another one. “Calms me down. Must be my blood pressure’s up again.” He laughed. “Old age.”

“Please go on.”

“You like a good story, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Mother didn’t like Celestina. She’s older than I, and she had worked as a dancer at the Savoy Ballroom as a teenager. Didn’t have much education. Her parents had come from Trinidad. Always was a tension between folk from the islands and the rest of us. They felt themselves to be superior. My mother didn’t agree. Celestina was also quite dark-skinned, to my mother’s way of thinking.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You’re surprised by all this foolishness about skin color and class?”

“Yes.”

“Where my folks grew up, Artie, in South Carolina, in one of the churches-a black church, mind you-they hung a comb in the entryway. If you couldn’t pull it through your hair easily, you were not acceptable, you were not allowed in,” he said. “ ‘Important to have good hair,’ many of the church ladies whispered. Same ladies that would inspect a baby’s ear, see what color the child would darken up to. Claimed the ear would tell you. That kind of thing goes on to this day.”

“But you married Celestina.”

“When my mother had passed, only then. Mother had her eye on a nice lady doctor I knew. ‘Blood will tell, Lionel, dear,’ Mother always said to me. When I was little, I thought she meant it could actually speak. People didn’t talk about good genes back then, they talked about blood. ‘Blood counts, dear,’ she’d say, and it turned out she was right in a way she couldn’t have expected. My little brother had sickle-cell anemia, the worst form. Not enough treatments back then. He went blind, his organs failed. He died in agony when he was twenty. I was already in medical school, so I decided I’d study the blood.” He looked at me. “I decided I wasn’t going to watch anybody suffer like that, either. Maybe that’s why I never wanted children-married a woman too old for it. Maybe that’s so,” he said. “I knew I was a carrier.” Lionel pulled casually on his cigarette, but his eyes watered. “Guess I’ve about told you everything. But you didn’t come on up here for that, did you?” Hutchison tossed his cigarette onto the ground and took out a worn leather notebook and a fountain pen. “It’s the pen my father gave me when I finished medical school.”

It was the same kind of ancient Parker my father had, the one he had used until he died.

“What’s that you’re writing?”

He looked up. “Just the name of a song I’ve been thinking about. We better go inside now. You look cold. You’re feeling pain from that blow to the head you received?” He got up and opened the door to the shed. “Get some rest, Artie. And if you need anything, come on by. I’m a pretty good doctor. Come sometime when Celestina is out, and I’ll play you a record. Lily says you like jazz music, is that right?”

“Yes.”

He held up his notebook. “Tune called ‘Blood Count.’ Billy Strayhorn, last thing he wrote when he was dying. Ellington recorded it. I met Strayhorn right over at the Hospital for Joint Diseases around that time. Friend of mine worked there-when was it? It must have been ‘67-and he told me about the tune. Tell Lily to play it for you. I gave her a copy,” he said.

“I’d like that.”

He tapped his cigarette pack. It was empty. “I better go get myself some smokes before Celestina decides she has to lock me in again. Silly woman. Bitter. But you’re not interested in my domestic arrangements are you, Artie?” Hutchison left the shed and I followed him outside, where he crossed the roof toward the door to the building. He paused, turning to look at me. “What you’re really after is knowing if I killed Marianna Simonova, isn’t that right?”