No Cure for Death

EIGHTEEN

There was a moon tonight, or a slice of it, anyway, but it was up under some clouds that were rolling by like dark smoke. Despite the darkness, I could see the Norman house plainly. The grounds directly surrounding it were free of trees and brush and sloped gently, very gently up around the house, which was outlined stark against the sky, sitting back from the edge of a hill that fell sharply to the Mississippi. The river’s waters reflected what light there was back up against the smooth, unpainted cement walls of the Norman house.

It looked like a Moorish fortress or castle, as cut to scale and modified by a would-be Frank Lloyd Wright; something like some of the things put up in the thirties in California towns, only more so, and minus the stucco. The top floor sat on the bottom like a smaller box on a slightly larger one, with a one-story wing on either side; the roof was tower-cut, with fat, stubby turrets on every corner. In its original conception it had been a combination penthouse above and radio station below-the back wall still had the shadow where a giant radio antenna once climbed. The front wall, the face of the house standing watch over the river, had three irregular windows along the bottom floor, like odd teeth, and, on the upper floor, running near the house’s width, a long horizontal window looking out on the river like the viewscreen on a welder’s mask.

We had found the gate open, Rita and I, and had followed the narrow drive up to the house. The drive was bordered by thick dead brush and the occasional outstretching arms of a skeletal tree, all part of a thicket that served to isolate the Norman house and its sloping grounds, making it an island in the midst of a heavily populated section. That island was a part of the uneasy transition between downtown Port City and East Hill, with supermarket, filling station, hardware store and lumberyard just across the way, and on either side of the protective thicket were clusters of middle-class housing. The way to the gate of the Norman drive was via an alley bordered on either side by frame houses.

I got out of the car just before we cleared the thicket and turned the wheel over to Rita, let her drive up toward the house alone. I stayed back in the brush and watched her pull my Rambler into the open graveled area and park by the back door. There were no other cars in the parking area; opposite the house, across the graveled space, was an unpainted cement garage, built years ago for three cars, big enough now for two, at a slant.

About the time Rita would have been taking her keys out of the ignition, the back door to the house opened, and in the light it let out I saw a big black man come out and rush over to help her out of the car. He was wearing a well-tailored, well-cut houndstooth suit, with a white shirt, open at the collar, and he wore a black eyepatch where a left eye had been.

Harold Washington.

We’d met before.

He and Rita embraced, and with an arm around each other’s waist, they went inside.

I approached the house carefully, staying within the confines of the thicket, and moved slowly around until I reached the point where the brush met the slope of the hill that dropped to the river. I crouched and stared at the building for something like five minutes, then crawled up by a slant-roofed wing, edged around it and went in through the same door as Rita and her brother.

I’d managed to get the layout of the house from Rita, so I wasn’t worried about finding my way around. The door to her brother’s living quarters was to my right and tight-shut, though soft sounds of conversation were seeping out. The game plan I’d outlined to Rita was that she would talk to Harold for half an hour, brother-sister small talk, and then break it to him she’d brought somebody along to see him. I had something else in mind, though, which necessitated a mild double cross.

The lobby I was in was boxlike, and its ceiling went the building’s full two stories. The walls were smooth plaster, cream-colored, bare. A coatrack by the door was the only furniture, a tiny throw rug the only carpeting. The floors were well-varnished wood that yellowly reflected an overhead light. In the middle of the facing wall was an archway that cut through an otherwise enclosed hall.

I went over and stood within the hall. Its ceiling was as high as the lobby’s. I checked my bearings: beyond the archway was the living room-big, sparsely furnished, much like an extension of the lobby, with various large, oddly shaped, undraped windows. To my right was a steep incline of stairs, no rail, crowded by claustrophobically tight walls.

I climbed the stairway, palms scraping against the confining walls, and at the top of the stairs found a landing. On the left was a door. I turned the knob and found the door unlocked and pushed it gently open and stepped in.

The room encompassed the whole top floor. There was no carpeting, again only bare, but well-varnished wood. The walls, too, were bare, except in the middle on the left where an artificial fireplace with elaborate woodworking stood dark and absurdly out of place in this cream-walled context. An oil painting of a pontifically smiling, handsome man in a purple suit and tie hung over the mantel, and on the mantel in front of the Rockwell-style portrait was a single silver-framed photograph. Along the end wall, with its long window looking over the Mississippi, the floor was raised half a foot, like a stage, and center-stage was a battered desk, coming up to the sill. The back wall was relatively crowded: a door in either corner-one I’d just come in, the other to a bathroom, I presumed-and a bed. Its head was to the wall, with a cluttered nightstand on one side and a dresser on the other, a wheelchair in front of the dresser, and a portable television on a movable stand in front of that. The bed had a man in it.

The man said, “Well. Hello. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

He was old. The bedcovers were tucked up under his arms, which lay straight and limp in front of him like the limbs of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He was so old he was shrinking; the gray silk pajama top was sizes too big, a parachute he was lost in. The flesh of his hands was like parchment, and you could’ve stored things in the hollows of his cheeks. His hair was white and long, longer than mine, as though he didn’t bother having it cut anymore. Though the handsome cast of his features hadn’t been completely dimmed by time, the gray-blue eyes, once hypnotic and piercing, were milky and confused now.

“Hello, Mr. Norman,” I said.

“Do… should I know you, young man?” The voice was resonant and not as old as the rest of him. “That is, I don’t remember meeting you, but as you might guess, my mind is not all it once was.”

There was a chair by the nightstand. I pulled it around by the bed and sat down. “We haven’t met, sir,” I said. “Excuse me for barging in, but I needed to see you.”

He smiled, and in it you could imagine the masterful con man’s smile it had been; unlike his nephew Stefan’s, Simon Norman’s teeth were his own.

“I haven’t received many guests in the past few years,” he said. “But now, this particular moment, even an uninvited guest is welcome. It’s Thanksgiving evening, you know, and the kind of time best not spent alone. If one can’t share such times with relatives or friends, then a stranger will do. What was your name?”

“Mallory,” I said, and offered my hand.

He took it. His grip was firm, but the flesh around it seemed ready to jump ship. The eyes got a little brighter and he said, “You aren’t here to do me in, are you, Mallory? I didn’t swindle your mother, did I? Or would that be grandmother? Did I swindle your grandmother out of her hard-earned dollars and are you here for retribution for that misconduct?”

“No,” I said, “nothing like that.”

“I must confess, if you were on, well, a mission of vengeance, you’d’ve picked a good night for it. You’d have a willing victim, as I’ve been rather melancholy this evening.”

I nodded. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, sitting up somewhat straighter in the bed. “You assume I mean guilt, don’t you? Well that’s not it, not at all. Oh, hell, it was wrong of me, wrong to charge so high when times were so tough back in my clinic days. I was wrong. I was wrong, I’m first to admit it. Can you deny that? Hmmm?”

“I guess not.”

“You know, I wasn’t the black villain you’d think I was, if you heard those politicians tell it. The way they talked, bringing Richard down with all of it, and distorting it besides… hell. I gave them a lot of comfort, do you know that? Many people had hope, thanks to me. In their final days, even their final hours, they had hope because of me. False hope, you might argue, but it was hope, whatever kind, and real enough to them.” He coughed. “You… you just try to put a price tag on that, try to say you can charge too much.” He coughed some more.

I grabbed a stack of tissues off the cluttered nightstand and handed it to him. He coughed into one, crumpled it and tossed it on the stand.

He said, “People thanked me, you know.”

I nodded.

“You don’t know, you weren’t born. Listen here, you see that desk back there? Back by the windows.”

I nodded.

“Go over there and look at the top of it. Go ahead!”

I got up and walked across the room and stepped up on the platform by the window and looked down at the desktop. Under glass were photographs, aging, of varieties of people in snapshot poses, all of them with personal notes written on them thanking Simon Norman. In the middle was a signed photo of Herbert Hoover: “Best wishes, Doc Sy!” All of the inscriptions but Hoover’s were in the same hand.

I walked back and sat down.

“What do you think of that?” he said.

“Impressive.”

“Are you surprised?”

“Yes, I am. You seem in better spirits now.”

He smiled and reached out and patted my shoulder. “I like having someone your age to talk to. You know, when you spend a holiday evening alone like this, it makes you reflective, makes you think on things-and people-that you’ve lost. My son, I lost my son, you know, did you know that? He might’ve been president one day. Before that May Belle, and now…”

“Now?”

“Say, did you look at the picture on the mantel?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Go on over and look at it.”

I got up again and went to the fireplace and lifted off the silver-framed photo. The portrait in purple smiled down at me as I looked at the photo, a studio shot of a pretty young woman, in the thirties manner: plump face, wide bright eyes, rosebud mouth, dark tight curls.

“Your wife, Mr. Norman?”

“She was a dancer,” he said. His voice was soft now, as if in another room. “You never saw her feet touch the floor, that’s how she danced. I took some patients down to Miami that winter and she was dancing in a club. Not just the chorus line, mind you, she was featured. Everyone loved her, but it was me she came back with and married. Ah, you should have seen this place then. White fluffy carpet, all the latest furniture, mirrors everywhere. She liked mirrors. Over there was where the baby grand was, a white baby grand; I hired a fella to come in and play on it now and then so she could dance. Over against the wall there was the bar, and oh, it was stocked with everything, you wouldn’t believe… the funny thing is, she died of cancer, did you know that? Do you have any idea what it’s like to help others and not be able to help somebody you love?”

“Mr. Norman.”

“Yes, uh… Mallory, is it?”

“That’s right. Mr. Norman, a young woman named Janet Taber died the other day. Did you know that?”

His eyes became cloudy again, then immediately hardened. “Yes,” he said, “yes, of course, I mentioned that, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t… I…”

“Mallory. Mallory. You’re the one Stefan called about. He said I shouldn’t…” And he leaned over to the nightstand and pressed a white button.

I didn’t bother moving. Five seconds later the door opened behind me and I didn’t have to turn around to know there was a big black man back there waiting for me.