The Merciful Angel of Death (A Matthew Scudder Story Book 5)

  A Matthew Scudder Story

  “People come here to die, Mr. Scudder. They check out of hospitals, give up their apartments, and come to Caritas. Because they know we’ll keep them comfortable here. And they know we’ll let them die.”

  Carl Orcott was long and lean, with a long sharp nose and a matching chin. Some gray showed in his fair hair and his strawberry-blond mustache. His facial skin was stretched tight over his skull, and there were hollows in his cheeks. He might have been naturally spare of flesh, or worn down by the demands of his job. Because he was a gay man in the last decade of a terrible century, another possibility suggested itself. That he was HIV-positive. That his immune system was compromised. That the virus that would one day kill him was already within him, waiting.

  “Since an easy death is our whole reason for being,” he was saying, “it seems a bit much to complain when it occurs. Death is not the enemy here. Death is a friend. Our people are in very bad shape by the time they come to us. You don’t run to a hospice when you get the initial results from a blood test, or when the first purple K-S lesions show up. First you try everything, including denial, and everything works for a while, and finally nothing works, not the AZT, not the pentamidine, not the Louise Hay tapes, not the crystal healing. Not even the denial. When you’re ready for it to be over, you come here and we see you out.” He smiled thinly. “We hold the door for you. We don’t boot you through it.”

  “But now you think—”

  “I don’t know what I think.” He selected a briar pipe from a walnut stand that held eight of them, examined it, sniffed its bowl. “Grayson Lewes shouldn’t have died,” he said. “Not when he did. He was doing very well, relatively speaking. He was in agony, he had a CMV infection that was blinding him, but he was still strong. Of course he was dying, they’re all dying, everybody’s dying, but death certainly didn’t appear to be imminent.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died.”

  “What killed him?”

  “I don’t know.” He breathed in the smell of the unlit pipe. “Someone went in and found him dead. There was no autopsy. There generally isn’t. What would be the point? Doctors would just as soon not cut up AIDS patients anyway, not wanting the added risk of infection. Of course, most of our general staff are seropositive, but even so you try to avoid unnecessary additional exposure. Quantity could make a difference, and there could be multiple strains. The virus mutates, you see.” He shook his head. “There’s such a great deal we still don’t know.”

  “There was no autopsy.”

  “No. I thought about ordering one.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “The same thing that keeps people from getting the antibody test. Fear of what I might find.”

  “You think someone killed Lewes.”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “Because he died abruptly. But people do that, don’t they? Even if they’re not sick to begin with. They have strokes or heart attacks.”

  “That’s true.”

  “This happened before, didn’t it? Lewes wasn’t the first.”

  He smiled ruefully. “You’re good at this.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “Yes.” His fingers were busy with the pipe. “There have been a few unexpected deaths. But there would be, as you’ve said. So there was no real cause for suspicion. There still isn’t.”

  “But you’re suspicious.”

  “Am I? I guess I am.”

  “Tell me the rest of it, Carl.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m making you drag it out of me, aren’t I? Grayson Lewes had a visitor. She was in his room for twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour. She was the last person to see him alive. She may have been the first person to see him dead.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. She’s been coming here for months. She always brings flowers, something cheerful. She brought yellow freesias the last time. Nothing fancy, just a five-dollar bunch from the Korean on the corner, but they do brighten a room.”

  “Had she visited Lewes before?”

  He shook his head. “Other people. Every week or so she would turn up, always asking for one of our residents by name. It’s often the sickest of the sick that she comes to see.”

  “And then they die?”

  “Not always. But often enough so that it’s been remarked upon. Still, I never let myself think that she played a causative role. I thought she had some instinct that drew her to your side when you were circling the drain.” He looked off to the side. “When she visited Lewes, someone joked that we’d probably have his room available soon. When you’re on staff here, you become quite irreverent in private. Otherwise you’d go crazy.”

  “It was the same way on the police force.”

  “I’m not surprised. When one of us would cough or sneeze, another might say, ‘Uh-oh, you might be in line for a visit from Mercy.’”

  “Is that her name?”

  “Nobody knows her name. It’s what we call her among ourselves. The Merciful Angel of Death. Mercy, for short.”

  A man named Bobby sat up in bed in his fourth-floor room. He had short gray hair and a gray brush mustache and a gray complexion bruised purple here and there by Kaposi’s Sarcoma. For all of the ravages of the disease, he had a heartbreakingly youthful face. He was a ruined cherub, the oldest boy in the world.

  “She was here yesterday,” he said.

  “She visited you twice,” Carl said.

  “Twice?”

  “Once last week and once three or four days ago.”

  “I thought it was one time. And I thought it was yesterday.” He frowned. “It all seems like yesterday.”

  “What does, Bobby?”

  “Everything. Camp Arrowhead. I Love Lucy. The moon shot. One enormous yesterday with everything crammed into it, like his closet. I don’t remember his name but he was famous for his closet.”

  “Fibber McGee,” Carl said.

  “I don’t know why I can’t remember his name,” Bobby said languidly. “It’ll come to me. I’ll think of it yesterday.”

  I said, “When she came to see you—”

  “She was beautiful. Tall, slim, gorgeous eyes. A flowing dove-gray robe, a blood-red scarf at her throat. I wasn’t sure if she was real or not. I thought she might be a vision.”

  “Did she tell you her name?”

  “I don’t remember. She said she was there to be with me. And mostly she just sat there, where Carl’s sitting. She held my hand.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “That I was safe. That no one could hurt me anymore. She said—”

  “Yes?”

  “That I was innocent,” he said, and he sobbed and let his tears flow.

  He wept freely for a few moments, then reached for a Kleenex. When he spoke again his voice was matter-of-fact, even detached. “She was here twice,” he said. “I remember now. The second time I got snotty, I really had the rag on, and I told her she didn’t have to hang around if she didn’t want to. And she said I didn’t have to hang around if I didn’t want to.

  “And I said, right, I can go tap-dancing down Broadway with a rose in my teeth. And she said, no, all I have to do is let go and my spirit will soar free. And I looked at her, and I knew what she meant.”

  “And?”

  “She told me to let go, to give it all up, to just let go and go to the light. And I said—this is strange, you know?”

  “What did you say, Bobby?”

  “I said I couldn’t see the light and I wasn’t ready to go to it. And she
said that was all right, that when I was ready the light would be there to guide me. She said I would know how to do it when the time came. And she talked about how to do it.”

  “How?”

  “By letting go. By going to the light. I don’t remember everything she said. I don’t even know for sure if all of it happened, or if I dreamed part of it. I never know anymore. Sometimes I have dreams and later they feel like part of my personal history. And sometimes I look back at my life and most of it has a veil over it, as if I never lived it at all, as if it were nothing but a dream.”

  Back in his office Carl picked up another pipe and brought its blackened bowl to his nose. He said, “You asked why I called you instead of the police. Can you imagine putting Bobby through an official interrogation?”

  “He seems to go in and out of lucidity.”

  He nodded. “The virus penetrates the blood-brain barrier. If you survive the K-S and the opportunistic infections, the reward is dementia. Bobby is mostly clear, but some of his mental circuits are beginning to burn out. Or rust out, or clog up, or whatever it is that they do.”

  “There are cops who know how to take testimony from people like that.”

  “Even so. Can you see the tabloid headlines? mercy killer strikes aids hospice. We have a hard enough time getting by as it is. You know, whenever the press happens to mention how many dogs and cats the SPCA puts to sleep, donations drop to a trickle. Imagine what would happen to us.”

  “Some people would give you more.”

  He laughed. “‘Here’s a thousand dollars—kill ten of ’em for me.’ You could be right.”

  He sniffed at the pipe again. I said, “You know, as far as I’m concerned you can go ahead and smoke that thing.”

  He stared at me, then at the pipe, as if surprised to find it in his hand. “There’s no smoking anywhere in the building,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t smoke.”

  “The pipes came with the office?”

  He colored. “They were John’s,” he said. “We lived together. He died… God, it’ll be two years in November. It doesn’t seem that long.”

  “I’m sorry, Carl.”

  “I used to smoke cigarettes, Marlboros, but I quit ages ago. But I never minded his pipe smoke, though. I always liked the aroma. And now I’d rather smell one of his pipes than the AIDS smell. Do you know the smell I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not everyone with AIDS has it but a lot of them do, and most sickrooms reek of it. You must have smelled it in Bobby’s room. It’s an unholy musty smell, a smell like rotted leather. I can’t stand the smell of leather anymore. I used to love leather, but now I can’t help associating it with the stink of gay men wasting away in fetid airless rooms.

  “And this whole building smells that way to me. There’s the stench of disinfectant over everything. We use tons of it, spray and liquid. The virus is surprisingly frail, it doesn’t last long outside the body, but we leave as little as possible to chance, and so the rooms and halls all smell of disinfectant. But underneath it, always, there’s the smell of the disease itself.”

  He turned the pipe over in his hands. “His clothes were full of the smell. John’s. I gave everything away. But his pipes held a scent I had always associated with him, and a pipe is such a personal thing, isn’t it, with the smoker’s toothmarks in the stem.” He looked at me. His eyes were dry, his voice strong and steady. There was no grief in his tone, only in the words themselves. “Two years in November, though I swear it doesn’t seem that long, and I use one smell to keep another at bay. And, I suppose, to bridge the gap of years, to keep him a little closer to me.” He put the pipe down. “Back to cases. Will you take a careful but unofficial look at our Angel of Death?”

  I said I would. He said I’d want a retainer, and opened the top drawer of his desk. I told him it wouldn’t be necessary.

  “But isn’t that standard for private detectives?”

  “I’m not one, not officially. I don’t have a license.”

  “So you told me, but even so—”

  “I’m not a lawyer, either,” I went on, “but there’s no reason why I can’t do a little pro bono work once in a while. If it takes too much of my time I’ll let you know, but for now let’s call it a donation.”

  The hospice was in the Village, on Hudson Street. Rachel Bookspan lived five miles north in an Italianate brownstone on Claremont Avenue. Her husband, Paul, walked to work at Columbia University, where he was an associate professor of political science. Rachel was a free-lance copy editor, hired by several publishers to prepare manuscripts for publication. Her specialties were history and biography.

  She told me all this over coffee in her book-lined living room. She talked about a manuscript she was working on, the biography of a woman who had founded a religious sect in the late nineteenth century. She talked about her children, two boys, who would be home from school in an hour or so. Finally she ran out of steam and I brought the conversation back to her brother, Arthur Fineberg, who had lived on Morton Street and worked downtown as a librarian for an investment firm. And who had died two weeks ago at the Caritas Hospice.

  “How we cling to life,” she said. “Even when it’s awful. Even when we yearn for death.”

  “Did your brother want to die?”

  “He prayed for it. Every day the disease took a little more from him, gnawing at him like a mouse, and after months and months and months of hell it finally took his will to live. He couldn’t fight anymore. He had nothing to fight with, nothing to fight for. But he went on living all the same.”

  She looked at me, then looked away. “He begged me to kill him,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How could I refuse him? But how could I help him? First I thought it wasn’t right, but then I decided it was his life, and who had a better right to end it if he wanted to? But how could I do it? How?

  “I thought of pills. We don’t have anything in the house except Midol for cramps. I went to my doctor and said I had trouble sleeping. Well, that was true enough. He gave me a prescription for a dozen Valium. I didn’t even bother getting it filled. I didn’t want to give Artie a handful of tranquilizers. I wanted to give him one of those cyanide capsules the spies always had in World War Two movies. You bite down and you’re gone. But where do you go to get something like that?”

  She sat forward in her chair. “Do you remember that man in the Midwest who unhooked his kid from a respirator? The doctors wouldn’t let the boy die and the father went into the hospital with a gun and held everybody at bay until his son was dead. I think that man was a hero.”

  “A lot of people thought so.”

  “God, I wanted to be a hero! I had fantasies. There’s a Robinson Jeffers poem about a crippled hawk and the narrator puts it out of its misery. ‘I gave him the lead gift,’ he says. Meaning a bullet, a gift of lead. I wanted to give my brother that gift. I don’t have a gun. I don’t even believe in guns. At least I never did. I don’t know what I believe in anymore.

  “If I’d had a gun, could I have gone in there and shot him? I don’t see how. I have a knife, I have a kitchen full of knives, and believe me, I thought of going in there with a knife in my purse and waiting until he dozed off and then slipping the knife between his ribs and into his heart. I visualized it, I went over every aspect of it, but I didn’t do it. My God, I never even left the house with a knife in my bag.”

  She asked if I wanted more coffee. I said I didn’t. I asked her if her brother had had other visitors, and if he might have made the same request of one of them.

  “He had dozens of friends, men and women who loved him. And yes, he would have asked them. He told everybody he wanted to die. As hard as he fought to live, for all those months, that’s how determined he became to die. Do you think someone helped him?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “God, I hope so,” she said. “I just wish it had been me.”

  “I haven’t had the test,” Al
do said. “I’m a forty-four-year-old gay man who led an active sex life since I was fifteen. I don’t have to take the test, Matthew. I assume I’m seropositive. I assume everybody is.”

  He was a plump teddy bear of a man, with curly black hair and a face as permanently buoyant as a smile button. We were sharing a small table at a coffeehouse on Bleecker, just two doors from the shop where he sold comic books and baseball cards to collectors.

  “I may not develop the disease,” he said. “I may die a perfectly respectable death due to overindulgence in food and drink. I may get hit by a bus or struck down by a mugger. If I do get sick I’ll wait until it gets really bad, because I love this life, Matthew, I really do. But when the time comes I don’t want to make local stops. I’m gonna catch an express train out of here.”

  “You sound like a man with his bags packed.”

  “No luggage. Travelin’ light. You remember the song?”

  “Of course.”

  He hummed a few bars of it, his foot tapping out the rhythm, our little marble-topped table shaking with the motion. He said, “I have pills enough to do the job. I also have a loaded handgun. And I think I have the nerve to do what I have to do, when I have to do it.” He frowned, an uncharacteristic expression for him. “The danger lies in waiting too long. Winding up in a hospital bed too weak to do anything, too addled by brain fever to remember what it was you were supposed to do. Wanting to die but unable to manage it.”

  “I’ve heard there are people who’ll help.”

  “You’ve heard that, have you?”

  “One woman in particular.”

  “What are you after, Matthew?”

  “You were a friend of Grayson Lewes. And of Arthur Fineberg. There’s a woman who helps people who want to die. She may have helped them.”

  “And?”

  “And you know how to get in touch with her.”

  “Who says?”

  “I forget, Aldo.”

  The smile was back. “You’re discreet, huh?”

  “Very.”

  “I don’t want to make trouble for her.”

  “Neither do I.”