Prelude to a Scream (7 page)

“Make what official?”

Iris released Stanley's hand and stood up from the bed. “Please Sean,” she began, “I know you're upset…”

Along with her use of the cop's first name, Stanley took umbrage at the antecedent of her sympathy. The
cop
was upset?

“…But don't annoy the patient. He's had a lot of trauma.”

“How much trauma is a lot of trauma?” Stanley wondered aloud.

“Oh he has, has he?” said Corrigan.

“Yes, he has,” Iris said, standing up to him.

“Is that what you call chasing hookers on payday?”

Stanley tried to sit up, the better to project his indignation. But he only succeeded in thrashing feebly in his bedclothes, giving his sutures a good tug, rattling the IV pole, and yelling, “That's none of your goddamn business!”

“Please, Stanley,” said Iris, stepping to the head of the bed and placing a gentle hand on Stanley's chest. “Try to relax.”

“Yeah,” said Corrigan. “Like with the girls.”

“Fuck you,” said Stanley.

“Inspector Corrigan,” said Iris, reverting to the cop's official title, “this is a hospital, not a church. And you're hardly a priest,” she added knowingly. And then she threw in, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

“Not only that but people who live in that glass whorehouse called City Hall shouldn't throw rocks,” Stanley croaked feebly through his embarrassment. “Get to the point. What the hell's wrong with me?”

“You'd think he'd never paid for it in his goddamn life,” Corrigan said mockingly, pulling a little palm-top computer out of his inside coat pocket. He pushed a couple of buttons and watched the tiny screen. “It's all here.” He raised an eyebrow and said, “Does the name Dalmatia Snood mean anything to you?”

Stanley stared stupidly at him. “Are you kidding me?”

“Southwestern accent?” said Corrigan mildly.

“I don't think I'd easily remember a name like that,” Stanley said finally. “And if I were able to remember it, I'd never be able to forget it.”

“In other words, no?”

“In other words, no.”

Corrigan massaged a key, stopping when he found an interesting screen to read. “Stanley Clarke Ahearn,” he began, “aged forty-six years.”

“Forty-seven, gumshoe.”

“Happy birthday.”

Iris laid a soothing hand on Stanley's brow. “Please, Corrigan,” she pleaded. “He's really in no condition to get this upset.”

Indeed, the scene had begun to spin around Stanley like a zoetrope.

“Stanley Clarke Ahearn,” repeated Corrigan, looming like a seedy gargoyle over the foot of the bed. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“You're probably my long-lost mother,” Stanley said weakly. He couldn't understand why such a brief outburst of caustic antipathy had left him so exhausted. He could barely hold his head up. Iris smelled of talcum powder. “It's just a name, is all,” he mumbled. “Just a goddamn name…” He broke out in a sweat. His voice was failing him. He couldn't track all the sensations coursing through him. “I just want to go home. I never should have left my room in the first place… Just a goddamn name…”

“Okay okay,” said Corrigan, as if he were bored. “Stanley Ahearn; age, forty…” He pressed several keys with his thumbs, frowning and biting his tongue. “…seven years. Address, 17 Brooklyn Place, San Francisco, 94108. That address work for you, Stanley?”

“I wouldn't know. Nobody writes me.”

“Sounds familiar, though? You got an address but you got no phone number. You got no kids, no wife, no mother to look after you. No friends to bring you flowers.”

“There's no ring,” Iris said brightly.

“He was cruising for hookers,” said Corrigan harshly. “Ahearn!”

“Hey, man,” Stanley said, not entirely faking his weakness, not to mention his nausea. “I'm the
victim
, here.” He looked around the room. The room looked back. “…Aren't I?”

“He's got a point,” Iris said.

“Bingo,” said Dr. Sims, tilting his head back. He had his finger on the film covering the lightbox.

Corrigan and Iris looked at him.

“Bingo?” Corrigan said.

Sims grasped the temple bar of his glasses between his thumb and forefinger, the rest of his fingers splayed straight up, and tilted the lenses slightly as he looked at the film and announced, “Nephrectomy.”

Iris caught Stanley's hand between both of hers.

Corrigan rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Hell's bells, Sims. I could have told you that much.”

Stanley rolled his eyes in an attempt to see the nurse's, but she wouldn't look at him. “What's that? You mean I gotta have one? What's a knee- knee-freck…?”

“Very little collateral damage, however,” Sims continued. “Other organs intact. No peritoneal intrusion. A clean job.”

“This is his way,” Iris whispered earnestly. “He's too sensitive to come right out and—.”

Stanley ignored her. “Put that in English.”

Sims tapped the film with his forefinger. “Definitely a single nephrectomy. And that's the extent of it.”

“I'll bet it was the right one,” Corrigan observed acidly.

“They took the right one,” Sims continued, as if he hadn't heard Corrigan.

“They took the right one, he tells us,” Corrigan repeated under his breath. “Goddamn wonder boy. Apple of his mother's eye. A tourniquet on the blasted leg of society.”

“They took the right one?” Stanley wailed.

Sims removed his glasses. “They took your right kidney, Mr. Ahearn.”

“Oh, dear,” Iris sighed, turning to watch Stanley's reaction.

Corrigan exhaled loudly through his teeth, as if cursing, and began to thumb the keys on his little computer.

Sims leaned forward from his waist to puff a speck of dust off his film.

Stanley passed out.

Chapter Six

W
HEN STANLEY REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, THE FIRST TWO THINGS
he saw were the eyes of Iris.
This too, shall pass,
these eyes reassured him.
We shall help to make it go
.

Of course they may also have been thinking,
We quit at five
.

She was still sitting on the bed, however, holding a little brown jar of smelling salts. The room had gotten darker.

The memory jolted him. “They took my kidney?” he said abruptly, pushing the salts away.

A man's voice said, “Afraid so.”

“Who is this ‘they'?” he croaked.

“We were hoping you might tell us that.”

“I don't feel so good.”

Iris retrieved his hand to gently squeeze it.

Rarely had he felt so badly. His mind scanned its imagination of his lower back, looking for a cavity or hole. A kidney was big, wasn't it? A kidney had volume, a certain mass? About the size of an avocado? A fist? A peach? But more intrinsic? How does this effect nutrition? Will I still be able to metabolize whiskey? If not, can we settle on wine or beer?

Ever since Stanley had been a younger drunk, a certain “familiar”, a disembodied voice, advised him in times of stress. The voice occupied the catbird seat in the bar of Stanley's mind, where it could be found, figuratively, every afternoon at about five, nursing a beer and a shot while watching the world come and go through Stanley's eyes. A figment of Stanley's imagination, of course, and an undependable one at that. But it comforted Stanley to consult this erratic little presence. Right or wrong, it's nice to know you're not alone.

Take it easy, kid. Don't panic. There's a spare kidney, right? Everybody has two.

But to remove the one would leave a hole, Stanley said to it. Wouldn't it? A hollow or a pit? An excavation?

He imagined the voice as a paternal old prospector—spiculated salt and pepper whiskers in a beard like a hawthorn bush, the eyes a rheumy blue yet clear and bright from years of enduring his hangovers outdoors, a sweat-stained Australian bush hat wadded over his liver-spotted forehead, its left brim pinned to the crown by an Adlai Stevenson campaign button, and his favorite drink scotch and buttermilk.
Beats me
, the old man muttered now, copping out completely, and he lowered his eyes as he raised to his grizzled lips the brimming frosty glass of his first beer of the day. The image made Stanley thirsty, even as it faded.

His mental scan encountered only the new pain in his lower back, underneath the blanket of morphine and a row of sutures that felt, but surely couldn't be, as big as barbs on a length of wire. To touch it was a matter of revulsion. But there was no tangible awareness of a
missing organ
, like it was Sunday morning and… Altogether now,

Christ the Lord is risen todaaaay,

Haaa-al-aaaa-laayyuuu-uu-ya…

— Hey. This doesn't sound right. Where's the organ? “They” have robbed the church, and
they've stolen the organ
. Ah, ha ha ha… I don't feel so good. Take it easy, big boy, and above all don't cry. Those people are watching, The Staring Choir, good name for a band. Since when do I care about names for bands? Witnesses witnessing… Must be fascinating for them, to watch a man wake up somewhat less than he used to be, less than whole, reduced, partially diminished, decrementally dwarfed by his subconscious memory of his corporeal self, a man of kidney… if splenetic.

“The proper thing was to go in and have a look,” the Sims guy was saying to Corrigan, as he exchanged a new film for the previous one. “No telling what else those renal bandits left in there.”

Renal bandits?

“If it's the same gang it's clean as a whistle,” said Corrigan, and he projected a chirp through the gap between his front teeth.

“And so it is,” said Sims. “Snug ligations, purple aster, and all.”

“Mm…,” said
Corrigan.

“Mr…,” Sims turned from the film. “Ahm…”

“The patient is called Mr. Ahearn, Dr. Sims,” said Iris coolly. She took her celestial lamps off Stanley long enough to glance at her watch.

She'd been taking his pulse for a half hour, now.

“Thank you, Iris.” Sims cleared his throat. “Now, Mr. Ahearn. Do you have any sort of… medical insurance?”

In other words, thought Stanley, am I a happy man?

His mind crept around his skull like a cowed dog hoping to pass a shooting range unnoticed. Sweat prickled the surface of his scalp. His eyes watered.
Mewling
came to his mind, if not to his throat. Even Iris, ever attentive, suddenly seemed foreign and undesirable.
Say yes
, implored her violet eyes,
Yes, I have insurance
! He removed his hand from hers.

“Who's ‘they'?”

“What's your blood type, Ahearn?” Corrigan asked abruptly.

“How the hell should I know?”

“Many people know their blood-types, Ahearn.”

“Are cable cars going up in flames because I don't know my blood type?”

Sims showed the cop his clipboard.

“My, my,” said Corrigan, without surprise. “Blood Group O-Negative. The donor in demand.”

“That lends you a certain… marketability,” Sims noted, apparently under the impression that he was giving Corrigan a hand in his investigation. “Or should I say viability?”

Corrigan cursed under his breath.

Sims blundered on. “Although how could they know his blood type ahead of time? Let alone,
schedule the operation
?”

“Yes,” said Corrigan acidly. “Schedule the operation.”

It took Stanley a tremendous effort to bring his attention to bear on what Sims and Corrigan were saying. Whole categories of questions occurred to him. A recurring theme among them was, how had it come to pass that he now felt dirty? Unworthy? Abject? Debased?

Sims charged ahead, like a waiter with a big party. “I've got a complete workup here, Mr. Ahearn. Blood, tissue, major histocompatibility complex… As soon as you or your co-signer fill out a few forms, even though your blood type is least common, we'll put a beeper on you and find you a replacement donor in no time.”

While Corrigan watched Stanley, and Stanley watched Sims, Iris busied herself with the apparatus plugged into his arm.

“But, Dr. Sims,” Stanley said finally, “I have no insurance.”

Iris said, “Oh,” very softly.

Sims pursed his lips. Then he closed Stanley's file. He clicked the pen and drew a couple of blue lines down the front of his shirt. Then he parked the clipboard between his hands behind his back, drew himself up and said, “Of course with careful attention to diet and nutrition thousands of people find it possible to live quite normal and even productive lives on a single healthy kidney. Studies have shown life expectancies of healthy donors to be—.”

At the word
donor
, Corrigan raised an eyebrow.

Sims droned on, “—to be no different than that of those with two kidneys within the general population and get plenty of rest and we'll have you out of here within oh,” he shot a cuff and checked his watch, “tomorrow at the latest.”

Iris mopped Stanley's brow with a damp cloth.

Stanley had been expecting this passage. But before the floor could open up and drop him into the parking lot he asked again: “Who is ‘they'?”

“Ah,” Corrigan finally said. “‘They' is the rub.” Sims looked nonplused that anybody was even wasting talk on Stanley.

“
They
,” repeated Corrigan, mulling the word.
“
They
, indeed. Perhaps you can help us determine the answer to that most interesting question,” Corrigan's unctuous tone implied that, while he might be willing to pursue this other tack for sport and perhaps out of charity toward Stanley's feelings, he could in the end accept nothing less than a full confession from Stanley as to his own complicity in the crime.

Stanley didn't understand this attitude. Why should he be considered complicit?

“I asked a logical question, didn't I? Just a minute ago you said that if it were ‘they' who took my kidney, ‘they' would have done a clean job of it.”

“Actually,” said Corrigan thoughtfully, looking at his watch, “that was yesterday.”

Stanley was appalled. “Yesterday… ?”

“For a while you were not of this earth, as it were. But yes. Just yesterday, I did say that.”

Her back to Dr. Sims as she adjusted Stanley's pillow, Iris cast her eyes toward the ceiling and stopped the bed's ascent.

“Thank you,” Stanley said coldly to her. “Now get out of my field of fire. As for you, Doctor Sims, the last time I spoke with a doctor, we were sharing a narrowly pukeless bit of floor space in the Marin County drunk tank.”

Iris suppressed a smile.

“You, flatfoot,” Stanley continued. “If I get your drift, you are all but accusing me of selling my own kidney for profit. Nuts. You also have made reference to my commerce with hookers. Double nuts — it's none of your goddamn business. Then there's talk of advanced knowledge of my blood type. Treble nuts — my knowledge of my own blood type goes along with my brand of medical insurance: Neither exists. A ghoulish
they
have been suggested, too, yet you coyly withhold what information you may have as to their identity. Let's try something. Let's pretend for a moment that I know absolutely nothing about kidneys, about the selling of kidneys, about hookers, about donor blood-type statistics or insurance scams — no more than I know about who
they
might be. Is it in your experience that this ‘they' generally do a clean job of removing kidneys from people who have little or nothing to say about it? That is, they steal them and they're good at it? Can we look at it that way?”

Corrigan, unmoved and unmoving, now said coldly, “Describe to me your movements of five days ago. Then maybe we'll see about, let's say, your interest in hookers.”

Stanley bristled as well as a man can bristle, who's taking the high road on morphine. Then something caught up with him and he paused, looking from Corrigan to Iris to Sims and to Corrigan again.

“How many days ago? Did you say?”

“Let's say four to six days ago,” Corrigan growled. “Start with last Friday night. We're interested in the unusual—.” He held out a forestalling hand. “Don't start up with me. Given that a hooker is normal for you — don't deny it, Ahearn. You want a parade up here? They all know you in the Tenderloin, all the girls. They even extend their sentiments to you. They chew gum, they align their bra straps, they twirl their keys, and they think it's awful, what's happened to you. They wink, they say get well soon, they wonder if it's going to affect your,” Corrigan glanced modestly at Iris, “
driving ability.
”

“Oh,” chirped Iris blithely, “just give it a week after the catheter's out and you should—.”

“The point is,” said Corrigan “you have a certain reputation. You want to hear more?”

Stanley said nothing.

“They also say you're very concerned with being safe. Which is interesting. I presume you know that most johns will pay more to a girl if she'll do it unprotected?”

“Why,” put in Sims, “that's suicide.”

“It might be going a bit far to presume Mr. Ahearn thinks life is worth living,” Corrigan continued, “but let's do so. Let's leave the girls out of it too, for the moment. What if we presume your innocence? Let's say you didn't sell your kidney outright for cash. And, I admit, we haven't found any evidence of recent large deposits into your pitiful bank account. At least not into the one that's in your name.”

Stanley rolled his eyes. “The Swiss wouldn't grant you access, eh? Why do you think I use them?”

“Right. But your presumed innocence leaves us with a different set of questions. Did you encounter anybody unusual last weekend? Somebody you didn't know? Was there someone who took an inordinate interest in you, say to the extent of getting you drunk and testing your blood while you were passed out on their couch? Were you followed home from a bar? Did somebody buy you a lot of drinks? Did you become irresistible to a beautiful stranger who, in the course of a surprisingly and increasingly intimate conversation laced with alcohol, discovered she couldn't bear to sleep another night without you?”

Stanley blinked. “How long did you say I've been here?”

Sims looked at his clipboard, then checked his watch. “Eighty hours and fifteen minutes.”

Stanley stared at him.

Sims shrugged. “We charge by the half day.”

Stanley blinked. “Four days?”