Deceit

FORTY-THREE

I took an elevator to the top floor.

The one with bars on the windows.

As soon as the elevator door opened, I could feel them. There was an air of palpable constriction. It suddenly felt harder to breathe; I was walking with ankle weights attached to me.

Maybe it was the thick metal door off the lobby-though lobby was overdoing it, since the room seemed to serve no discernable purpose. There were no chairs and no reception desk, just an empty space between the elevator and locked door. There was an intercom on the wall.

I buzzed it.

A face materialized through the metal grill in the door.

I know. It reads like a half-remembered dream. It felt that way. It was after midnight; I’d left Dennis in a morphine-induced sleep floors below.

There was that incessant murmuring, a whispery tower of babble seeping through the locked door-everyone speaking separate languages that were decipherable only to themselves.

“Yeah?”

The voice belonged to the black man staring at me through the meshed grill. Mostly I could see the whites of his eyes.

“I’m Detective Wolfe,” I said, flashing my wallet at the door and hoping the mesh screen would make it as indecipherable as his face.

“Okay?”

“An ex-patient was brought in today. He was attacked at a gas station down the road-you probably heard about it?”

“Nope.”

“He was a patient on the psych ward. Dennis Flaherty?”

“Oh, yeah. Dennis. I heard something ’bout that. Cut his eyes out, huh?”

“His tongue.”

“Okay.”

“He’s in pretty bad shape. Whoever did it killed the gas-station clerk, too.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah.”

“I’d like to take a look around if that’s okay.”

“Here?”

“That’s right.”

“What for?”

“Major DeCola said it’d be okay.”

“Major who?”

“DeCola.”

“He’s a doc down on…?”

“Surgeon.”

“Right. He ain’t a psych. So-”

“He said it’d be okay.”

“Yeah. Well. I’m just sayin’…”

“He’s a major,” I said.

“Shit. Okay.”

The magic words.

The door opened electronically-at least, it was supposed to. The black man, who introduced himself as Rainey, had to push it open himself.

“Everything’s fucking falling apart here,” Rainey said.

Maybe it hadn’t been that hard for Dennis to run away, I thought. Maybe all he’d had to do was push open the door and scram.

There was a small desk on this side of the door. Rainey’s, I guessed. A Styrofoam cup sat on an open newspaper as neatly arranged as a place mat. A metal bridge chair sat on the other side of the desk.

The room itself was about the size of a two-stall bathroom. It smelled like one. There was the odor of stale urine and male sweat. Of confinement.

“You knew Dennis?” I asked him.

“You don’t know anybody here, man. You don’t want to know anybody. Most of them don’t know which way is up.”

“He knew which way was out, though, didn’t he?”

Rainey chuckled. “Sure. Okay. Dennis flew the coop.”

“He stuffed a lot of meds in his pocket before he left, too. What floor’s the dispensary on?”

“Not this one.”

There was a door opposite the door I’d walked through. The door to the actual wards, I guessed. The looney bin.

“Can I see Dennis’s room?”

“It’s just a bed, man.”

“Right. Show me anyway.”

He shrugged, scratched his head, said: “You’re the boss.”

He fumbled for a key and fitted it into the lock; the door swung open.

I’d expected something worse.

It looked like a dormitory. A dormitory in an old boys’ school-okay, an old, old boys’ school. But still. A regular-looking hallway led to regular doors that opened onto regular rooms with regular rows of cots.

We stood in the doorway of Dennis’s old room and Rainey put his finger to his lips.

Don’t make noise.

I doubt we would’ve disturbed anyone. The patients were tossing, turning, mumbling in their sleep. Some of them appeared to be sleeping with their eyes open.

“Which bed was Dennis’s?” I asked.

“Let’s see…” Rainy whispered. “Over there.” He pointed to the far end of the room. “He liked the window. Liked seeing the sky. He was used to living on the streets, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

“See, just an empty bed. Told you.”

“I want to take a look at it.”

“You are looking at it.”

“I’d like to take a closer look.”

Rainey shrugged.

We walked down the center aisle, past the murmuring, shifting bodies flanking both sides of the room. The smell was worse here-sour and medicinal.

Thin beams of platinum moonlight spilled across the wooden floor. I nearly tripped over someone’s shoe.

“This one?” I said. It was the last bed, directly under the window. The mesh screen sliced the moonlight into neat little squares.

“Uh-huh.”

The bed was made up in military style, the gray blanket pulled tight in impeccably neat corners. You could probably bounce a quarter off it. A wooden shelf hung over the bed, but there was nothing on it.

I sat down, tried to imagine what it was like to live here-among other disturbed people who once carried guns.

“What about that one?” I asked.

The bed directly across from Dennis. It was the only other empty bed in the room.

“That one?” Rainey said. “Oh, that was Benjy’s.”