“Who’s the other one?”
Was there a slight pause?
“Amahl Washington, played on the same team as Earl. Amahl-it was his real name. He was a gent. Matter of fact, he lived over at the Armstrong.”
“Lived?”
“He passed.”
I was interested now. “When?”
“Six months, seven.”
“What did he die of?”
“Lungs. Then liver. Cancer spread everywhere, but I never knew how sick he was. I felt really bad. But you know how us cops are, crybabies about stuff when we care. You know that, Artie. ‘You cops are such bleeding-heart liberals some of the time,’ Well, anyhow, Jesus, I hope they just give me a shot and put me out of my misery when the time comes. Poor Amahl. I really loved that guy. What a fucking talent!”
“So it seemed sudden?”
“I don’t know, these things go real fast some of the time.”
“Can you get me the name of Washington’s doctor?”
Wagner looked surprised. “Sure,” he said. “I sent some money for us over to the hospital when they set up a fund, so yeah, I got it some place. I’ll call you. What’s this about, man?”
“I’ll let you know.”
I stood out by the front door of the station house and tried to get my bearings. My car was parked at the curb. Again, I wondered vaguely why Julius Dawes had taken an interest in it, but I had something else on my mind.
Amahl Washington had died in the Armstrong from lung disease. Jimmy Wagner had been surprised he went so fast. Lily had already been in the building when it happened. She had never mentioned it. I was zipping my jacket when somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I jumped.
“You OK, man?” said Wagner, and I turned. He had a piece of paper in his hand. “I got it for you, Artie. To tell the truth, the whole thing with Amahl, it all stuck in my craw. I didn’t fucking like it, the way he went so fast. It gave me pause, you could say,” Wagner added. “Still, there was no evidence of nothing, not so far as I could see.”
“But it bugged you?”
“Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it, end of an era.”
“So it was the cancer that finally killed him?”
“They said it was his heart gave out; he couldn’t breathe.”
“But there was something else?”
“I saw him one day, it’s a Sunday when I go over, and he’s OK. I mean, he’s sick, but he’s walking and talking, and the next day, that Monday, I get a call that Amahl passed. Fuck. You get older, it happens,” he said. “You wanted the doc’s name, I found a thank-you letter she sent us when we gave some money in Amahl’s name.”
“Thanks, Jimmy.”
“Name’s Lucille Bernard. Dr. Bernard. That help you out, Artie? That works for you?”
CHAPTER 14
In my hand was a hot pretzel with yellow mustard I bought from a guy on the corner near the hospital. I was hungry as hell. I hadn’t eaten all day. I sat in my car and ate, and tried to process what Jimmy Wagner had told me. The pretzel tasted fantastic. I washed it down with a Coke.
Lucille Bernard was Marianna Simonova’s doctor. She had treated Amahl Washington. Both of them died at the Armstrong.
As soon as I’d left the precinct, I’d tried to call Lily, see if Dr Bernard had been over to sign the death certificate. No answer. Bernard didn’t answer her phone, either. I finished the pretzel, wiped my hands on a Kleenex, and got out of my car.
Two patients stood outside the main door at Presbyterian, leaning on walkers, coats over their hospital gowns, smoking. The overhang of the roof kept the snow off them. Out for a smoke. One of them, a young woman with red hair, waved a hand at me as she saw me looking. I waved back.
Who could blame them? What else did you have by the time you were in the hospital for Christmas and needed a walker to get around? By the time you were falling apart, all you had were cigarettes. Maybe music.
Lucille Bernard’s office in the hospital was empty except for a distracted woman in jeans who told me she was gone for the day. It took me a while to find somebody else, an Indian doctor, who said Dr. Bernard was in a conference in the other building, where I went, only to discover nobody knew anything about a conference. I called Bernard again. I left another message. I got hold of a secretary and told her it was urgent. She gave me directions.
I had to double back twice, had to cross a bridge between two buildings. Everything looked the same, everyone was in a hurry, doctors, nurses, visitors. The elevators were packed, the halls blocked by people pushing the sick on gurneys. Only the patients were still, staring at the ceiling as somebody pushed them, like trays of meat, to another part of the hospital, to surgery, or who knew where, maybe to die.
Come on!
Finally, back at Bernard’s office, I bullied a young guy, an intern, maybe, into getting her home address for me. Either my badge impressed him, or he didn’t care, and he simply walked into her office and looked in her Rolodex, and as he came out, I noticed a woman with little piggy eyes and a pinched mouth watching us. I didn’t care. At least I got a smile and a cookie in the shape of a Christmas tree from a small, sexy nurse. I ate the cookie. It had red sugar on it.
When I got into my car and looked in the rear view, I saw red sprinkles all over my mouth and I laughed at myself, first time that day, then wiped it off with a Kleenex I found in the glove compartment, put a CD into the slot, and listened to Louis Armstrong. “West End Blues” cheered me up even more than the cookie.
Twenty minutes later, I was on 139th Street in front of Dr. Bernard’s house. The traffic was jammed up because of the weather and hard pellets of ice hit my windshield.
“Yes?” Her voice through the door was pitched low. I knew she was looking at me through a peephole. I gave her my name and waited, looking at the beautiful brass knocker and knob, polished up to shine. The door opened a crack.
“Yes?”
I showed her my badge, and she opened the door wider to let me in. She was a tall, handsome woman of about forty. She didn’t like me the minute she saw me.
Wearing a gray suit, her hair caught back with a velvet headband, she had an impatient face.
“You better come inside,” she said, looking at the wet snow on my jacket.
The heels of her boots rang on the dark wood floors of the long hall, and I followed her, keeping up as she walked faster and faster. It was a beautiful, high-ceilinged town house that must have dated back to the turn of the twentieth century. I said so. “Stanford White designed this house,” she said. I said I had read Ragtime, in which the architect had featured. She seemed faintly surprised that I’d read a book.
On the deep red walls of the hall were photographs, sepia studies of Harlem in the early twentieth century, as well as a framed poster of Angela Davis.
Bernard saw me looking.
“You know who that is?”
“Yes.”
It was the second time that day somebody had quizzed me on my knowledge of famous black Americans-first Robeson, now Davis. Angela Davis had visited the USSR. She had been a member of the American Communist Party and was much admired. She was also stunning and articulate. People in Moscow were charmed by her. “She speaks such nice French and is so kind,” my mother, an obsessive Francophile, had said after she met Davis at a party. There were plenty of places where the Soviet Union and black America had once intersected.
I didn’t want to risk crossing Dr. Bernard when I needed information from her about Marianna Simonova, so I just nodded again and said, “Yes. I know.”
“Please sit down,” said Dr. Bernard when we got to a small study. There was a red and blue kilim on the floor, the walls were lined with books. On a shelf some antique surgical tools were displayed. The windows, old-fashioned wooden shutters folded back, looked out onto a courtyard, where there was already half a foot of snow.