Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

I denied that I had some kind of legal paper.

“Usually visitors up there do,” she confided. “Things like habeas corpus and so on. Mostly the visitors are lawyers.”

The chief nurse, similarly stumped by my lack of a legal paper, shunted me off to the chief of staff, who passed me on to the hospital superintendent. By the time I reached the latter’s office, I was getting mad.

“Look, Doctor,” I started to say.

“Not doctor,” he corrected. “I’m not a physician.”

He was a thin, precise man with gold-rimmed glasses and an air of waiting for someone to hand him papers to sign. A discreet desk marker announced his name was M. M. Witherspoon.

“All right,” I said. “Mister, then. I’m trying to see a patient, but all I get is the run-around.”

He glanced at his watch. “Visiting hours are on now. See the registrar. Room one hundred.”

I said, “I’ve seen the registrar. I’ve seen the chief nurse. I’ve seen the chief of staff.” I drew a chair from next to his desk, sat in it and stretched out my legs. “You have any influence around here, Mr. Witherspoon?”

He snapped a sharp, dignified look at me. “I beg your pardon?”

Sliding my license across his desk, I said, “I want to talk to a patient named Percival Sweet. He was brought in with multiple contusions last night. He’s under arrest in ward sixteen.”

His eyes raised from the license to my face. “I know the case.” He glanced back at the license, said, “Private detective,” and looked up again. “Sorry, Mr. Moon. You’ll have to have police permission.”

Retrieving my license, I politely asked to use his desk phone, and when he granted permission with equal politeness, I told the switchboard operator to get me Homicide.

“Get me either Inspector Day or Lieutenant Hannegan,” I said.

Warren Day came to the phone. “Yeah?” he growled.

“Moon,” I said. “I’m in the superintendent’s office at City Hospital. Will you tell him it’s all right for me to see Percy?”

“Can’t get in, eh?”

“Oh, sure. I can get in. That’s why I phoned. To tell you I can get in.”

He laughed, apparently in one of his pixie moods. “What you want to see Percy about?”

I removed the phone from my ear long enough to scowl at it. Warren Day in a sour humor, which is his normal state, is hard enough to get along with, but when he feels playful he is impossible. I could visualize myself begging and pleading for clearance for an hour unless I stopped him cold.

I said, “I want to ask his lawyer’s name. You’re holding the man on an assault-and-battery charge, and no one’s even sworn out a complaint. The poor guy hasn’t done anything. As I remember it, Percy and I were having a friendly talk in the alley when he tripped over a garbage can and banged himself up on the concrete.”

No reply came out of the phone.

“I can’t spare any more time,” I said. “I’ll phone my own lawyer.”

In a heavy voice Day said, “Let me talk to the superintendent.”

I passed the phone over to M. M. Witherspoon, who listened for a minute, said, “All right, Inspector,” and dropped the instrument back on its cradle.

Ripping a sheet from a three-by-five pad on his desk, the superintendent scribbled a few words on it and pushed it toward me. The note authorized me to visit Percival Sweet in ward sixteen.

An overage cop named Mike Sullivan was on sentry duty in front of the barred entrance to ward sixteen. He sat tilted against the wall in a straight-backed chair reading a detective magazine. I thought Mike had long ago retired, since he had walked a beat in my neighborhood when I was in grammar school, and on more than one occasion I had felt his night stick across the seat of my pants for stealing apples.

As I approached, he looked up from his magazine and said in a pleased tone, “Hello, Manny.”

“How are you, Mike? Thought you’d retired.”

“Next month,” he said. “Ain’t this a fine detail to end with after thirty years?”

“Somebody’s got to do it.” I handed him my pass. “If I’d known you were back here, I wouldn’t have gone through all the rigmarole of getting this.”

He raised his eyes from the scribbled note. “You wouldn’t have got in without it. With only twenty-three days to go, I ain’t breaking any regulations.”

Drawing a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door and followed me through it, carefully relocking it from the inside.

The room was clean and airy, and except for the barred windows and door, looked like any other sick ward. Of the dozen beds arranged foot to head alongside the inside wall, only two were occupied. One contained an old man with red-flecked eyes and the rasping cough of a chronic alcoholic. Percival Sweet occupied the second bunk beyond his.

With the head of his hospital bed cranked up to form a back rest, the ex-pugilist sat half erect, his spine cushioned against a pillow. One eye was swollen shut, a piece of sticking plaster bridged his nose, and the rest of his face was a mottled purple and yellow. As we neared the bed, he drew thick lips back over large yellow teeth in a snarl.

“How you feeling, Percy?” I asked.

“None of your damned business!”

I clucked my tongue. “It’s not my fault you’re a washout as a hood. Why don’t you try another profession?”

He glowered at me without making any reply. I sat on the vacant bed next to his and let my feet dangle.

“Don’t they have nurses in this ward?” I asked Mike.

“When they want a nurse, I have to get one. I got them trained not to ask between regular rounds.”

Feeling in my breast pocket, I found I had just four cigars. “All right to smoke in here?” I asked Mike.

He shrugged. “The patients do, when they got tobacco.”

I handed one of the cigars to Mike, tossed another over Percy to the old man, who caught it with the skill of an inveterate butt sniper, and offered a third to Percy. In the back of his eyes disdain fought an heroic battle with tobacco hunger, but lost. He accepted it surlily, as though doing me a favor.

After setting fire to my own cigar and Percy’s, I tossed the match folder onto the old man’s bed. Mike used one of his own matches.

Percy leaned back and greedily drew his lungs full of smoke, then let it roll slowly through his nostrils.

I said, “You’re out of smokes, eh?”

He drew again on the cigar without answering.

I said, “Of course you won’t need smokes where you’re going.”

A deepening of creases between his eyes was the only evidence of attention to my last remark. I pretended absorbed interest in my cigar ash while I let him think it over. For a full minute the room was silent as Percy turned my remark over in his mind, Mike and the old vagrant concentrating on nothing but their cigars, and I amusing myself by swinging my feet.

Finally Percy rose to the bait. “Okay, shamus. Where am I going?”

“The name is Moon,” I said. “With a mister in front of it.”

He raised his eyebrows, winced as though the facial expression hurt and let his face go blank again. “I’ve heard that gag about you. You like to work guys over who don’t call you Mister.”

“Not guys,” I said. “Just hoods. Guys can call me anything they want.”

“So suppose I tell you to go to hell? You gonna work over a hospital patient in front of a cop?”

“There’s always the chance you’ll beat this rap,” I said. “Then I’d look you up. Of course your chance of beating it is pretty slim, so you wouldn’t be risking much.”

He studied a smoke ring he had blown until it disintegrated, then asked, “Where am I going, Mr. Moon?”

I raised my eyebrows, mutely implying he knew very well where he was going. “To the gas chamber, of course.”