Джо Горес - Gone, No Forwarding

“Verna Rounds, I know you’re in there!” He yelled. He smashed his fists against the door. “You and that pimp of yours!”

Silence, within and without. He was silent himself, listening. Nothing. He went to the stairwell, leaned down, listened. Nothing. Had the bastards shucked him, and been waiting at the foot of the back stairs to grab Johnny Mack?

Heslip went up the hall to the outside door he’d kicked in, and out onto the front porch. From there he could see down the three flights of wooden stairs to the street. It had gotten darker while he’d been inside, but he could see the men weren’t on the stairs.

At the railing he leaned out to crane down the street and saw Johnny Mack running across toward the parked Pinto, where he stopped to fumble at the unlocked door.

Heslip leaned out further yet to look up the next block at the Chrysler New Yorker. He almost fell over the railing. The Chrysler was gone. Gone? But then... he knew the two men had been the same ones who...

He looked back to the Pinto. As he did, it dissolved into a fireball. The thud of concussion sent a shock wave of air against his face. As he stared in horror, frozen for the moment there on the third-floor porch, the realization rose up like vomit in his throat: the killers hadn’t been after Verna Rounds. They had been after Bart Heslip.

Heslip came back to his table in the lower-floor cafeteria below the Boston Lying-In Hospital with a refilled coffee cup and another doughnut. He sat down, checked his watch for the dozenth time. It was 7:45 on Saturday morning. Better wait another fifteen minutes for his best shot. It was a scam he’d picked up from Ed Dorsey, who’d quit DKA a couple of years ago after a severe beating by a couple of thugs, and he’d never tried it himself.

To pass the time, he read the newspaper account of his death.

At least he hoped the guys who had done it would assume it had been him in that Pinto. He figured that since it was the weekend it would probably be forty-eight hours before a positive I.D. of Johnny Mack Brown would hit the papers, letting the killers know they’d gotten the wrong man. Until then, he was clean in Boston. Nobody from the other side knew he was alive, would know, until Johnny Mack was identified. Unless he blew his own cover.

Which meant no calls, not even to Corinne, not even if she would somehow receive notification that Bart Heslip had been killed in a drug-connected car-bombing in Boston — which was what the newspapers were hinting the hit had been all about. The opposition didn’t know he was alive, and didn’t know there was a lead to Verna here at the Boston Lying-In Hospital.

He checked his watch again. Eight o’clock. Put down his tip and left. Climbing up the stairway to the broad front entrance of the hospital, he felt good. Rested. After the bombing he’d walked for miles, dazed. Had finally realized what the hit men had realized earlier: that they didn’t have to find Verna, all they had to do was keep Heslip from finding her before that all-important — God knew why — Monday morning hearing in San Francisco.

A simple box bomb under the car seat. Anyone sitting on the driver’s seat would push down the top of the box, which would thrust a spike down into an acid detonator, breaking the bottle, and WHOOMP!

So Heslip had gotten a hotel room and slept for ten hours, since eight in the morning was the best time for the scam he was about to run.

Inside the front door of the hospital he went into a phone booth and looked up the number of the front desk. On a board opposite were the names of the doctors who worked with the hospital. He picked one that had no flag showing he was at the hospital at the present time. He dropped his dime and dialed. “Boston Lying-In Hospital.”

“Records, please.”

A wait. “Record Room.”

“This is Dr. Robert Cohen’s office,” said Heslip. “We need the Patient’s Number for a Miss Verna Rounds.”

“One moment, please.” There was a waiting silence. The voice came back, clipped and efficient. “Is the date of admission for the patient July twenty-eighth?”

“That’s right.” How many Verna Rounds could they have?

“That Patient Number is 471-30-6801.”

Heslip thanked her and hung up. While having coffee he had seen that the Record Room was one floor down. Dispatch was on this same floor, right near the rear entrance of the hospital.

Down by the U-shaped Dispatch desk, Heslip found a row of hooks holding the faded green coats worn by dispatch runners. He slipped one on. It was soiled down the front, tight in the shoulder, but it made him anonymous. He took a deep breath and walked over to the desk and picked up a pad of requisition forms and one of the wire mesh dispatch baskets. The sleepy-eyed intern waiting for records on the far side of the counter didn’t even see him.

When he had gotten down the corridor and out of sight of the intern, he stopped and examined his prizes. To the bottom of the list of requisitions he added 471-30-6801, ROUNDS, VERNA. He handed the pad in at Records on the next floor down and, in due course, was rewarded with a basketful of beige file folders with red tabs.

On his way back up to Dispatch, Heslip detoured into a men’s room for a quick perusal of Verna’s record. Attending physician: R. Parton, M.D. He saw something else, too, that struck him like a physical blow. Man, what had that done to Verna Rounds? If he ever did find her, she’d be so spaced-out on H he’d probably have to mainline her all the way back to San Francisco so she could get on the stand.

Heslip dropped the records off at Dispatch — Dr. Cohen would probably just put it down as a hospital screw-up when Verna’s records showed up at his office — hung the green coat on the same hook from which he’d gotten it, and in the phone booth by the front door once again called the hospital and asked for Obstetrics.

Yes, Dr. Parton would be on duty from midnight.

He left, planning to kill the hours by walking and gawking, maybe some good old double bill at a convenient movie house, maybe a hotel-room TV. Anything to keep from thinking about the fact that Verna’s baby had died two days after birth.

It was seventeen minutes past midnight when Heslip looked up from his magazine in the patients’ lounge of the second-floor maternity wing at the clack of the nurse’s approaching heels. She was slim and elegant-looking and black, and reminded him too much of Corinne. Corinne filled all the holes and cracks in him, fit into them, made him strong where he was weak, stronger where he was strong.

“Mr. Rounds?”

Up close she had a poorer complexion than Corinne, a nose a bit shorter and flatter, lips a little fuller.

“That’s right, nurse, I’m waiting for Dr.—”

“Parton. That’s me.”

Heslip was on his feet. “I goofed that one, didn’t I?”

“Because I was a woman you thought that I had to be a nurse rather than a doctor?” She shook her head as they started down the hall together. “Everybody operates on whole sets of presumptions. Only when presumptions become pernicious do they become prejudices.” She lead him down a side corridor. “This time of night nobody’ll complain if we talk in the doctors’ lounge.”

It was a square windowless room with a couch, three chairs, a Formica-topped breakfast table, and a hot plate by a small stainless-steel sink. Dr. R. Parton motioned Heslip to a chair and sat down across the table from him. “So you’re Verna’s brother Sammy.”

Heslip nodded. “I’m glad you remember her. With all the cases you must handle—”

“Verna was special.” Then she added, “It’s sort of like we were saying a minute ago...” Her eyes narrowed slightly, “about the assumptions we make concerning people. Take you. You sure are the huskiest fourteen-year-old kid I’ve ever seen. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to con me with—”