Entombed

32

The technician pushed back the enormous shell of the MRI machine that had swallowed my entire body to take the images of my head and chest. "You can open your eyes now. Was that okay for you?"

I had balked at the idea of going back inside such a confining enclosure, the sense of claustrophobia still overwhelming me after the morning's experience. I nodded without enthusiasm.

"What time is it now?" I asked, having spent a long afternoon in the emergency room, being examined and completing a battery of X-rays before this scan was ordered.

"Almost six o'clock."

"Will I be discharged now that you're done?"

"Dr. Schrem has admitted you, Miss Cooper."

I sat up and retied the hospital gown. "I'm really fine. The headache is practically-"

"It wouldn't be smart to let you go without observing you overnight," he said, motioning me to sit in the wheelchair. "You don't even know what the object was that hit you on the head. A mild concussion alone would bear watching."

This was the wrong guy with whom to argue. He handed my record to an older gentleman whose sole job appeared to be to escort me from waiting area to waiting area within New York University's massive medical center. My driver took control of the handles and backed me through the double doors.

When they closed behind me and we started rolling down the corridor, Mike jumped off a gurney he'd been sitting on and grabbed the wheelchair handles.

"Look, I'm sorry I-"

"I don't even want to see you tonight, Mr. Chapman. Get your hands off my wheels-I wouldn't trust you to drive me from here to the cafeteria. I can't believe that you went off and left me for dead. What were you thinking? Where's Mercer?"

"Right here, Alex," he said, walking beside me and taking my hand in his. "You know Mike isn't really a heartless son of a bitch. He's just not a first-grader like I am. Might need to send him back to the Academy for a refresher course in detection. Nobody was going to leave that park on my watch."

"What's the room number, Pops?" Mike asked.

"Six-thirty. Elevator straight ahead."

"I want a drink."

"Not yet, kid. Doesn't mix with those painkillers the doc's got you on."

"Why can't I just take the medications and go home?"

"'Cause whoever tried to put a hole in that thick skull," Mike said, "left a sizable little lump that might have to be coated with peroxide if it sticks out any farther on your scalp. I just knew we'd get to play doctor together eventually."

I looked up at Mercer. "I'm not kidding. I really don't want him in my face all night. I don't want him anywhere near me. He's bad for my blood pressure."

"You want an apology, blondie? That's what you want?"

"I want to be alone," I said, Garbo accent and all.

We got on the elevator and rode it up to six while Mike chattered. "You want me to flog myself and put on a hair shirt for not having had the good sense to think you were walled up behind a door or buried alive with a black cat. Right? It just goes to prove my theory that this would never have happened if you put on a little weight."

"Shut him up, Mercer."

"Fat people are harder to kidnap. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Wallace? You never read in the paper that the victim of an abduction weighed in at three-fifty. They're always skinny broads like you who get carted away. It's simply a fact, and you can do something about it for the future, young lady."

We wheeled in front of the nurses' station and Mike put the brakes on the chair. He lifted a bouquet of flowers from the top of the desk and dropped to his knees in front of several doctors, nurses, and visitors who were passing by.

"Coop, as long as I live I swear I'll never walk out on you again. I'll never criticize your perfume or your heels or your hair color or your temper or-"

I unhitched the brake and pushed myself away from the onlookers toward the wing that corresponded to the room number I had been assigned.

"I'll stop to look under the bed and inside the closet and even rip up the floorboards next time I can't find you."

"So much for my anonymity," I said to Mercer, who had taken charge of pushing me. "If they didn't know who I was before I got up here, I guess they'll figure it out."

A nurse followed us into the room. "Need any help getting into the bed?" she asked, taking my chart from the bewildered escort. "Stanley Schrem called. He'll be by for rounds later this evening."

She waited until I settled back against the pillow and raised the bed's metal railing before she and the escort left the room.

"Feel good?" Mercer asked.

"Safe and soft and clean and better. I would not say that 'good' is a word that comes to mind tonight."

Mike was in the doorway. He must have stopped in every room along the way and cajoled patients out of their flowers. His arms were loaded with assortments-ten or twelve of them in a wild variety of colors-pulled from their vases and dripping water down the front of his clothes and onto the floor.

"I'm just a fool whose intentions are good," he sang to me, crossing the room and laying the dozens of wet flowers across the crisp white sheets that covered my legs. "Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

"Misbegotten, misguided, misogynistic, misinformed," I said. "Just add misunderstood to your long list of 'mis'es."

I looked over at Mercer, who was leaning against the windowsill. "So, the only person who knew we were going to be at the cottage was Zeldin. And I guess Phelps, the groundskeeper, must have heard him suggest it. And Gino Guidi. Maybe three people in the world. Doesn't that give you a head start?"

"Don't make yourself crazy tonight, Alex. We're working on it."

"I've been inside that torture chamber, with clanging noises pounding at my aching head, pinched and prodded and observed by the entire ER staff. What else have I got to think about but who clobbered me and why? And what they were going to do when they came back for round two?"

"Zeldin and Phelps were in a meeting with a dozen other staffers from the time we left the gardens. Guidi's secretary is the one who dispatched Kathleen Bailey to be our guide. He was downtown all morning. She's not even sure she told him about it when he called in."

"Well, is anybody going to tell me what happened to me?" I asked. "And would you please take these back to the other patients, Mike? It smells like a funeral parlor in here."

"I got a pizza on the way. Extra pepperoni, extra mushrooms, no anchovies. No worms, either. Special delivery. You'll be like new in no time," he said, scooping the flowers off my legs and walking to the hallway.

"Soup," I said to Mercer. "A hot bowl of soup is all I want. And a drink."

NYU Hospital was next door to the medical examiner's office. We had tested every deli and restaurant within sight of the morgue and I knew where the best chicken soup and the closest Dewar's could be found.

"The soup we can do. I think you're grounded on the alcohol."

"I suppose they have to put a cop on my door, too?"

Mercer laughed. "We're camping out with you."

"You can't do that. It's ridiculous. I understand they have to station someone outside the room, but you guys can go home and get a good night's sleep."

"Hush, Miss Cooper."

"Now you'll make me feel guilty on top of feeling stupid."

"Battaglia made a few calls. The room next door is empty. One of us will snooze in this chair and the other can stretch out in the bed. We'll take turns. Better us than some guy from the Thirteenth who doesn't know your favorite lullabies like we do."

"Yeah, we get demerits when bad things happen on our shift," Mike said, as he came back into the room. "I'm already down points 'cause of your antics today."

"I'm going to ask you again. What happened?"

Mike and Mercer looked at each other.

Mercer spoke first. "The cops in the precinct think it was a prank. They-"

"A prank? Are they nuts? Haven't they ever read Poe?"

"Hear me out." He stood up and walked to my bed, lowered the rail and sat beside me. "There was a mugging down at the end of the park, in the playground behind the bandshell. A fifteen-yearold girl was watching over her kid brother and she got roughed up by some homies. Threw her down, snatched her wallet, touched some body parts they shouldn't have."

"I heard the screams. I remember that much."

"It was three guys, part of a gang. Wannabe baby Bloods. Punks from the 'hood who were just running around roughing folks up."

"Were they caught?"

"Not yet. They scattered in different directions."

"I saw one run across the street."

"Yeah," Mike said. "He's the one I figured maybe you tried to follow."

"The girl who was mugged-she knows who they are?"

Mercer smoothed the bedcover. "She's not saying yet. She's got to live there on One Hundred Ninety-second Street without any protection-and she's smart enough to know that."

"And what does that have to do with me?"

"The cops figure the gang was just wilding. While a few of them were causing trouble at the south end of the park, a couple of them saw you standing alone and-"

"I was alone for maybe sixty seconds."

"It only took two to smack you over the head with a two-by-four."

"Is that what it was?"

"There was one at the bottom of the front steps. It's at the lab now, being tested for blood and hair," Mercer said. "Then they carried you into the root cellar, tied your hands with your own scarf, gagged you, and tucked you under the boards."

"How could they know? Why would they-"

"Trust me, Coop," Mike said. "It ain't nothin' they picked up spending time at the local library reading short stories. Ms. Bailey says that root cellar is just an empty little room that's been an attractive local nuisance for ages. It's too damp to keep any of their supplies in, it's got no security, except when the entire park is locked at night. All those floorboards are loose-it's not like they were nailed down or anything. Hoodlums break in all the time to sit there and smoke dope. These kids just picked up a few planks and dropped you in to scare you to death."

"And that part of it worked just fine. Tell them for me when you find them. What was I gagged with? And tied?"

"The gag was a sock," Mike said.

"Just like Aurora Tait," I said, thinking of our skeleton in the basement.

"Your scarf was around your hands. Really loose."

"Loose to you, maybe. I'm telling you I couldn't move a muscle. Somebody put me in there to kill me."

Mike looked at Mercer again.

"Don't treat me like a psycho, like I'm exaggerating this. Have they ever found anything under the floorboards there before?"

"Yeah. Dead animals. Half-eaten sandwiches. Weapons. It's a natural. It's like the local haunted house."

"And you're going to tell me no one saw anybody lurking around the cottage before this happened, or running away from it afterwards?"

Mercer hesitated. "We've got a 'scrip, actually. Two kids, probably part of the same gang that worked over the teenager."

"Well, what's the description?"

"What's the difference if you never got a look at them?" Mike asked. "You're not the one who's going to make an ID. The docs tell us even if you'd seen someone or heard them coming right before you got whacked on the head, the blow would have wiped out the short-term memory. You'd never call it up."

"Who's the witness?" I asked.

"You know the rules."

"Well, I can only hope it's not you," I said to Mike. "After today I would hate to have to rely on you for anything. And just for the record, I want the police reports to say that whoever stored me in that-that hole in the ground-was either leaving me there to die-"

"Yeah, right. With visiting hours just about to begin."

"Or planning to come back and get me after dark and then take me somewhere to finish me off."

"These kids wanted you to wiggle loose and pop out of your box right in the middle of some school tour and give the third-graders from the suburbs an urban legend to take home with them," Mike said.

The phone rang. I stared at it and inched farther down in the bed. "Who knows I'm here? I don't want to talk to anyone."

"That's gonna be Sarah," Mercer said. "She's been concerned about you all day. I told her to wait until they got you into a room this evening before she called."

I took the receiver after he answered for me. "Do I still have a job?"

My loyal deputy had held down the fort for me through protracted trials, complicated investigations, and personal turmoil-or mental health days, as we liked to call them.

"How's the head?" It was good to hear the normalcy of Sarah's voice. "You know I wouldn't get to throw my weight around at all if you were here at your desk every day. I'd written you off for the course of the Upshaw matter anyway. The boss wants you to stay out for another week, and I'm just adding my vote to his."

We chatted for a few minutes, while Sarah assured me she was on top of everything that was pending. I thanked her for her friendship and hung up the phone.

By the time my doctor arrived, he had studied the test results and confirmed that I had neither fractures nor a concussion. If I was stable throughout the night, he would sign the release forms on his morning rounds.

Mercer called out for my soup while he and Mike were eating their pizza. We were waiting for the delivery when Mike turned the television on to catch the end of Jeopardy!

Trebek told us the final category was Famous Names.

"Level playing field," Mike said. "Twenty each?"

Mercer agreed.

"I'm not interested," I said. Then I thought of my handbag. "Did they get my pocketbook?"

"You left it locked in the car when we went into the cottage. Don't you remember?"

"Not really. I feel a little disoriented."

"It's still there. How do you think I paid for dinner?" Mike asked.

"Great cartographer, born Gerhard Kremer in 1512, who coined the word 'atlas'-after the mythical Titan he idolized-for his collection of world maps, renamed himself this," Trebek said.

"Help yourself to another twenty. I'm out," I said.

The three contestants drew the same blank I did.

"I guess Rand and McNally weren't born in 1512," Mike said.

"Baby needs new shoes," Mercer said, holding out his hand to Mike. "Who was Mercator? Gerardus Mercator."

"Sometimes you surprise me," Mike said. "The old man?"

Mercer's father had been a mechanic for Delta Airlines. "He used to bring home maps all the time, so I could study the pilot's routes. Don't you guys remember Mercator's projections, with those rectilinear rhumb lines?"

"Sorry, Mercer. I'm fading on you."

"I have one little present I've been saving," Mercer said. "Transit's got the MetroCard decoded-the one from the pocket of the Silk Stocking Rapist. They faxed it up to the office this afternoon. You'll have it tomorrow."

"Any surprises?"

"Lexington Avenue subway. Seventy-seventh Street mostly. Just where we figured he was living or working. You can grid it out yourself when you get home. See if it tells you anything."

By nine o'clock, I could barely hold my eyes open. The guys were playing gin at my bedside.

"Give in to it, Coop. You're whipped," Mike said. He put down his hand and walked out to ask the nurse for my medications.

I was fighting sleep because I was terrified of my dreams. The pain had subsided but the feeling of being entombed infused every one of my senses. I ached to shut down my body and brain, but dreaded the nightmares to come.

The nurse came in with the white paper cup and dumped some pills into my hand. I didn't even ask what they were before I swallowed them.

Mercer stood up to pull the chain that turned off the light over my pillow.

"Leave it on, please," I said.

He kissed the tip of my nose. "I'll keep the one next to my chair on all night. I'm not going anywhere, Alex."

I turned on my side and tried to get comfortable. Think wonderful thoughts, happy thoughts, my mother used to tell me as a child, when I awakened during the night. Then I would close my eyes and imagine myself walking on the beach with my father, holding his hand while he told me stories about his youth and his romance with my mother, or think of my last trip to my grand-mother's farm, and how she indulged me whenever I visited there. Now I called up memories of the happiest events I could conjure, but they were interrupted by dark visions of the day barely over.

I remember opening my eyes, seeing Mike and Mercer engrossed in their card game, and closing them again. I felt the pills start to do their magic. I fell asleep.

It must have been seven o'clock when I awakened. The morning routine in a hospital never allows sleeping in. Nurses and aides changing shifts, meal trolleys carting forty trays down the hall, and janitors mopping floors overcame the strongest sleeping potions.

I stirred and looked up. Mercer and Mike were gone, but the deck of cards was on the table next to my water pitcher.

I sat up and outside the door of my room saw the back of a cop's uniform. The officer seemed to be dozing in his chair, his head hanging forward. I pushed down the bed railing and started toward him. He must have heard the noise and stood up immediately, walking into the room.

"Miss Cooper? Morning. I'm Gerry McCallion, from the Thirteenth-"

"Where's Wallace? Where's Chapman?"

"They were gone when I got here, about oneA.M. Don't worry, ma'am. You were never alone. There was an interim shift-"

"I'm not worried about that. It's not like them to leave once they told me they'd be here."

"It's the one from Homicide, Miss Cooper. Around midnight, he got a call with some bad news."

"What-?"

McCallion spoke over me. "His ladyfriend was in some kind of accident up in Canada. Broke her neck in a fall is what I was told. The girl is dead."