Third man out

10

How is he?" I said.

"The same."

It was a quarter after eight that night and we were in the corridor outside room F-5912 at Albany Med.

"Is Mike in there?"

"Yes, and Rhoda and Al."

"I'll go in and say hello."

"Your note said you quit working for John Rutka. What happened?"

"You can guess."

"He's insufferable."

"That sums it up. It's not just his views, either. Those I can cope with or even agree with. He lies habitually."

"It wouldn't be the first time a client lied to you. Not that I mean to defend Rutka."

"I don't think he knows the difference between when he's lying and when he's not. It seems to be pathological."

Three nuns came out of room F-5913 across the corridor, where the bishop lay comatose, and Timmy gave them a friendly nod. "Did you get a look at the famous files?" he said.

"Yeah."

"Anything I should know about?"

"That's confidential investigator-client information."

"Ha-ha. Cough it up."

"Nothing much, really. The governor and his entire cabinet are transvestites who dress up in a basement room in the capitol every Thursday morning at eleven. The governor is Arlene Francis and the commissioner of corrections is Miss Kitty Carlisle."

"Oh, everybody knows that. It's why he'll never run for president."

"Other than that, there was nothing in the files you didn't already know, I'm pretty sure."

"That's probably true. So who shot Rutka?"

"I think he did it himself, or Sandifer did. It's their little bit of guerrilla theater. Their house was set on fire today and all the evidence points to their being responsible for that, too. The Handbag police chief just wants them to leave town, and at this point I think that's the best deal they're going to get and they should take it."

"Cripes, Rutka is even scuzzier than I thought."

The wife of the unconscious truck driver who shared the room with the bishop came out into the corridor looking red-eyed and defeated, and plodded toward the elevators.

"Rutka is pretty confused," I said. "It's surreal the way he mixes keen perceptions of real threats with screwy paranoid delusions.

Me, I've had enough of it."

"So you're off the case entirely?"

"I'm returning his check. It's as if I was never on it. I've never done that with a client, but the guy was driving me nuts. I had such a headache this afternoon I drove out to Thatcher Park and ambled around in the woods for four hours to clear my head. It was lovely. I loafed and invited my soul."

"Did it show up?"

"Yes, and we had a nice exchange of views. I'm going to go in now and say hello to Mike and then go get something to eat. Have you eaten?"

"Sure, but I'll go with you. Mike has been bugging me and I have to go away and think about something."

"What?"

"You'll hear about it. You'll get it too."

I walked past the skinny, gape-mouthed man who never had any visitors and into Stu Meserole's curtained-off end of the room.

Stu's father, Al, a gray-faced, middle-aged man in a windbreaker, was sprawled dozing in a small wooden armchair at the foot of Stu's bed. Rhoda Meserole, squat and pretty with fresh lipstick and a new perm, was seated in the folding chair alongside the bed and was massaging Stu's unresponsive right hand. Mike Sciola was perched on the stool on the other side of the bed and held Stu's limp left hand.

"Hi, Stu," I said quietly, and could hardly resist the urge to say it more loudly. Maybe he's not brain-dead, just hard of hearing, I thought, and we ought to be yelling in his ear, as if he were Reagan, and that

would make him wake up: "HI, STU! HOPE YOU'RE FEELING BETTER AND ARE UP AND AROUND SOON!"

"It was nice of you to come, Donald," Mrs. Meserole said. It was what she always said. "As you can see, Stuart is still in his coma."

"I'm sorry."

"He's so peaceful."

"I want to talk to you before you leave," Mike said. "Are you in a hurry?"

"No."

"Why don't we go outside now?"

Rhoda Meserole smiled and lowered her eyelids, and her sleeping husband snored comfortably. Mike followed me into the corridor.

"This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do or will ever have to do," he said to me quietly. Timmy came over and listened. "I talked to the doctor today."

"Is there any hope at all?"

"He says no, there isn't. It's not that parts of Stu's brain are dead. It's that-parts of his brain aren't even there anymore." He began to choke up, then struggled and recovered himself. "There's no hope. He's gone. Stu is gone and that's his corpse in that room."

"I believe it. That's the way it feels to go in there."

"For a long time," he said, "I was afraid maybe Stu was alive inside that body and going crazy and screaming to die. I don't believe that anymore. The doctor explained some things to me about how the brain works, and the part of Stu's brain that could think like that is gone."

"Good."

"But the thing is- This is the thing." He started to breathe heavily again and struggled with his words. "I can't leave him there like that-a corpse in a bed with people pretending he's a living human being and pumping food into him. It's gruesome. It's an insult to Stu's dignity." He screwed up his face in disgust. I could see what was coming. I was surprised it hadn't come sooner.

"And the thing is," Mike went on, "I have to go back to school in three weeks. I have a contract. I'm obligated, and anyway I have no other means of support except for what I earn. So I have to go back. But the thing is"-he gave me a look of consuming desperation-"the thing is, I can't leave him like that."

I waited.

"Will you help me?"

He looked at me.

I had heard of situations such as this one, where rules, even laws, had been broken in order to do what was all but indisputably right and humane. But I'd never heard of it done in a hospital, except by physicians in collusion with the patient's legal caretaker, and never with the patient's family sitting guard nearby in order to prevent just such an eventuality.

"What could I do?" I finally said.

"I've figured out a way to do it," he said, sweating and weaving a little.

"What do you mean?"

"There's a little sort of trapdoor in the IV tubing. It's called a port. It's where nurses can inject drugs into the patient's bloodstream. If I had a drug, I could inject it in there. I could do it in ten seconds while Al is asleep and Rhoda is in the bathroom, and then Rhoda would come out of the bathroom and the plug would be in the wall socket, and the machinery would be humming, and everything would look normal. And soon Stu would drift away. 'He went so peacefully,' Rhoda could say. And then it would be over and we could remember the real Stu and miss him." His face contorted.

"I don't think you could get away with it," I said. "They'd do an autopsy and figure it out. They'd find the drug in him, and if they didn't come after you right away, they'd come down on some innocent nurse. There would be an investigation and the Meseroles would fuel the flames. If it was traced back to you, the Meseroles might try to have you prosecuted for God-knows-what murder? You could lose your teaching job at a minimum."

"And your health benefits," Timmy added, not at all trivially, for we all knew what this eventually could mean for Mike himself.

"I've thought of all that," Sciola said. A nurse strode up the hall and Mike waited until she had disappeared into the bishop's room. "The thing is," he said, leaning close to me, "is that an autopsy isn't done routinely. It's not required by law. I called the state and checked. If it's requested by the family, it's done, or maybe if the patient is part of a research project. Or if there are extraordinary circumstances of some kind. But that wouldn't be the case here. Here it's a man in a coma with half his brain gone and his heart stops and that's the end. It wouldn't be medically surprising."

I looked into Mike's face and stood there. "What makes you think I could get whatever it is you would need?"

"You're a detective. You have connections. You could find out how."

Timmy was shaking his head. "Stu is not suffering," he said. "He doesn't know about things like dignity anymore. It's an irrelevant consideration."

"Well then, what about my dignity?" Sciola said in a harsh whisper. "How much longer am I supposed to endure this stupid-bullshit-nightmare crap?"

The nurse came out of the bishop's room and rolled down the hall. We waited. "Death is undignified," Timmy said. "It's undignified being around it. There's no getting away from it. It's an indignity we all have to experience. In a life full of ridiculous indignities, it's the most ridiculous indignity of all."

"Are you objecting on religious grounds?" I asked Timmy.

"I thought you knew me better than that, Donald. The church will always have my heart, but I reclaimed my mind decades ago.

No, I'm against it for the entirely practical reason that Mike might get caught and pay a price that's not worth it. If Stu were screaming in pain, maybe-okay, yes. But this is different. There's too much to lose for what it is you'd gain. I can see how awful you feel, Mike, but I'm afraid you'd regret it. Wait. See what happens.

Stu's life is lost, but yours isn't. Don't risk it for something that, as you've already faced up to, is already gone."

Sciola glared at both of us, turned and fled back into the room.

I looked at Timmy. "Maybe I can do something," I said.

"Let's go get something for you to eat," he said. "Nobody has to decide anything right now."

"I'll just say good-bye to Mike."

"What are you going to say to him?"

"Nothing. Just good-bye."

"All right. I'm not your mother."

"Yes, you are."

I went into the room and Mike looked up and met my gaze. I nodded once. His eyes brightened and he nodded back. Mrs.

Meserole said, "Thank you for coming, Donald," and I went out again.

Queequeg's had set up tables out on the sidewalk under a rickety canopy, and this meant it was possible to have a steak teriyaki platter and a beer while risking respiratory failure from the fumes of the New Scotland Avenue traffic or death from a stray bullet fired during a domestic quarrel in the apartment building across the street.

I was nonetheless chowing down happily, and Timmy was enjoying a small aperitif-we agreed not to discuss Mike Sciola's plea for the time being-when a colleague of Timmy's from the legislature came by and recognized us.

"Don, weren't you working for John Rutka? Somebody said he hired you."

"Briefly, I was. Why?" "Didn't you hear?" "Hear what? No."

"Rutka is dead. It was on the radio just now. He was killed in a fire tonight."

I stared at the man and couldn't think of a word to say. end user