“You got her back. Is she there with you? Peg, I mean?”
I smiled over at Peg and she smiled lazily at me. Did I ever mention she had violet eyes?
“Yes, Bill. She’s with me. She’s going to stay with me, too. I’m not giving her any choices.”
“You better give her some support, Nate.”
I winced. “What the hell’s happened?”
“Her uncle’s suffered mercury poisoning. Nobody knows how it happened yet.”
“Mercury poisoning…”
Peg sat up in bed, eyes wide now; she held the covers to her breasts, as if seeking protection.
The voice from the phone said: “He’s dying, Nate.”
It was well after visiting hours, in fact approaching midnight Saturday, when Peg and I walked down the hall at Meyer House toward her uncle’s room, footsteps echoing. Lou Sapperstein was standing guard, a uniformed cop sitting next to him, snoozing; Lou was in shirt-sleeves and suspenders and I hadn’t seen him look so haggard since those weeks after his brother died in the war. At least this time Lou wasn’t wearing a black arm band. Jim Ragen was still alive.
“I think he’s sleeping,” Sapperstein said. “His son Jim, Jr., is in there, keeping up the vigil. Family members been taking turns.”
Peg said, “I’m going in there.”
Sapperstein held open the door for her. I stayed out in the hall. This was family. I was just the hired help.
“You look like shit,” Sapperstein said.
“I feel worse. If God had meant for man to fly, He’d have given airliners comfortable seats.”
“All day ordeal, huh?”
“Yeah. Peg slept a lot, thank God. She was up most of last night, crying, wanting to talk it through. That made her tired enough today to sleep through most of the trip home.”
Lou shook his head. “I’m sorry as hell about this, Nate. I don’t know how our security could’ve been any tighter.”
“What happened, anyway?”
“Nobody’s sure. They’re saying mercury poisoning, but it’s a guess. Uremic poisoning I’m also hearing. He had a kidney operation Thursday. It’s been downhill ever since.”
“I want to talk to one of the medics. Who’s around?”
“One of the two family doctors. Graaf.”
“Where?”
“He’s been in and out. Try that lounge area down the hall- he’s probably grabbing a smoke.”
I walked down there and Dr. Graaf, a short, well-fed, mustached man of about fifty, in a brown rumpled suit, was sitting, smoking, looking dejected and tired.
He looked up and smiled wearily. “Mr. Heller. Back from the land of make believe.”
I sat next to him. “That’s right, Doc. I only wish I could make believe this isn’t happening.”
“You want a smoke?”
“Yeah. Why not.”
He fired me up and I sucked the smoke into my lungs, held it there, let it out slow.
“So,” I said, “is he going to make it?”
“If you’d asked me that Monday, I’d have said hell, yes. In a week I’d be calling him fully recovered from the wounds and the shock. Oh, impaired, certainly. But he was damn near out of this place, way ahead of schedule.”
“Then what?”
He sighed, raised his eyebrows. “Then he had a sharp decrease in elimination. Blood pressure rose sharply. Decreased urine output. Bloody stools, vomiting…”
“This is all very colorful, Doc. But what does it mean, besides I just lost my appetite for this year?”
“Those are symptoms of mercury poisoning.”
“So we’re talking foul play, definitely.”
“Very likely.”
“How?”
“How does the poem go? ‘Let me count the ways…’”
“I don’t buy that-I set up the security here myself. We put a lid on this joint.”
Graaf sighed. “Mr. Heller-mercury could enter the body through an alcohol rub, the likes of which Mr. Ragen has gotten daily; by enema; by intravenous or intramuscular injection, or absorption through the skin from an ointment.”
“But not orally?”
“That’s the easiest way of all. A tablet the size of an aspirin would contain approximately twice the dosage it would take to kill a man.”
“That’s the only other way-in a pill?”
“Hardly. The mercury could have been administered in coffee, milk, or tomato juice, or sprinkled on food. It would’ve been as tasteless as it was deadly.”
“You’re saying they’ve killed him.”
Graaf looked at the floor. “We don’t make judgments like that, not when a patient is still breathing. Tell me, Mr. Heller. In your line of work, do you ever take on a job that’s more or less hopeless?”
“Never,” I said, and shook his hand, and ground the cigarette out with my heel, and went back up the hall.
Sapperstein was leaning against the wall, standing next to the seated uniformed cop, who was awake now. Frankly, I trust Chicago cops more when they’re sleeping.
“It’s a poisoning, all right,” I said to Lou. “Somebody on the hospital staff, most likely.”
Sapperstein nodded. “I know. I already started poking around-they got twelve hundred people on staff, and in the menial areas, a lot of turnover.”
“Yeah, but we got a restricted guest list.”
Sapperstein gestured down to the clipboard leaned against the wall. “Sure we do, and that may help us find out who slipped your friend this killer Mickey Finn-but the damage is done, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It is. Damn.”
“He’s a tough old bird, Nate. I like him. I hate to see it end like this.”
“He’s an idiot. Banging his head up against the wall and expecting not to get it bloody. Goddamnit, I should never have played along on this one!”
Sapperstein, not much given to such demonstrations, put his arm around my shoulder and said, “We did what we could, Nate. I don’t think anybody could’ve done any better. He’s your friend, and your girl’s uncle, and this is a tough one to lose. But you been right all along-there was no winning this game. It was rigged from the start.”
I nodded. Smiled at him and rubbed my fingers over my eyes and got rid of the moisture.
Then I went into the room. Jim was asleep, all right; he already looked dead, only you could see his chest moving some. He looked skinny. Pale as milk but nowhere near as healthy. You could smell death in the room. Death and flowers.
Peg was sitting next to him, leaning in toward him, holding his hand as he slept. She was crying; not making any sound, just tears flowing. She hadn’t cried at all today, before now- when she hadn’t been sleeping, in the window seat next to me, she’d been angry. Not really saying anything about anything, just balling fists and shaking them at the air, face balled up, too. That expression “You’re so beautiful when you’re mad” didn’t apply to her; she was a lovely girl, but anger looked ugly on her.
She wasn’t mad now. She was merely devastated. It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d lost her father to a stroke. Now the man she’d put in her father’s place was slipping away from her, water through her fingers.
Jim, Jr., sat in the flowery chintz lounge chair, but he didn’t look very comfortable. He was in his shirt-sleeves, tie loosened, complexion gray, expression blank.
I went over to the boy-boy, hell he was probably my age- and squeezed his shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
“Okay,” he said, with a small, brave, entirely unconvincing smile. “My dad sets a good example. He never gives up, does he?”
“No. It’s not in him.”
Jim, Jr., swallowed. “Sometimes I wish it was.”
“Yeah. Me, too. Let’s step out into the hall and talk. I don’t want to wake your father.”
He nodded and rose; lost his balance momentarily, and I helped him. He’d obviously been sitting in that chair for hours.
We walked down to the lounge area; Dr. Graaf was no longer around. We sat.
“How’s your mom doing?”
“Terrible,” he said. “Just terrible. She’s so devoted to him. She’s not at all well herself, even without this.”
“Have they got her under sedation?”