Michael Baden - Remains Silent

“According to a logbook at the historical society, patient number 631217 was one James Albert Lyons. Height, race, and age match the skeletal findings. I’m trying to locate his next of kin.”

“You don’t waste any time.”

“At my age, time’s precious. So haul your ass up here and help out.”

“Really, I can’t. Pederson will have my head if I take time off, and I’m being deposed on a double murder on Thursday.”

“Jake, it’s urgent!”

Despite himself, he was getting annoyed. “Why? It’s routine work. Get one of the hospital staffers to help.”

“It’s not the identification. I have to talk to you.”

“What about?”

Pete’s voice dropped to a whisper. “It has to be in person. Has to be.”

He’s going to tell me about the cancer. “I’ll come up Friday night, then. It’s the soonest I can make it.”

A pause.

“Okay?”

Pete sighed. The sound of despair. “I can live with it.”

JAKE KNOCKED on the door: no answer. He tried the knob: locked. “Pete, you home?”

Silence.

Jake walked to the back of the house. The kitchen lights were on, the door open. Jake entered. There was a dirty frying pan in the sink, along with a single plate and some cutlery. Pete had made himself a steak for dinner.

“Pete?”

He moved through to the living room. One light was on, but there was no sign of his friend. Frightened now, Jake opened the door to the master bedroom, hoping Pete had simply gone to sleep after his meal. The bedclothes were rumpled, but there was no one on the bed. Jake could feel his heart pounding; the quiet was oppressive.

Only the study, where just a week ago they had talked of ghost spots and shared the finest scotch in the world, was unexplored.

“You in there?” He opened the door.

Pete was slumped at his desk, a book open in his hands. In two steps Jake was at his friend’s side, taking his pulse, feeling for life but finding none.

He let out a little moan. I should have talked Pederson into letting me go. I should have spent more time with him. Told him I loved him like a father. Too late. Dear God, forgive me. Too late.

Verify. He bent over the body and tried to move the jaw, confirming the presence of rigor mortis. Then he gently lifted Harrigan’s face from the desktop. Lividity had developed, but it wasn’t fixed yet. Jake pressed his thumb against Pete’s right cheek, noting that an oval of pale skin appeared and then faded away. Time of death, Jake knew, was about three-thirty, four hours before he walked through the door.

Science finished, he sat in the chair facing the desk and let himself weep.

A small private funeral mass was held for Dr. Peter Harrigan in the local parish of his Catholic church in the Queens neighborhood where he and Dolores spent most of their married life. Given Elizabeth’s position as New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney, there would be a large reception afterward at her home, but Pete had wanted a simple ceremony, and Elizabeth had honored his wishes. Jake spotted her in the front row, her head buried against the shoulder of a man- Daniel Markis, Jake figured. He had never met her husband, but who else could it be? There were two girls on one side of her, a boy on Markis’s right. Their children, but Jake couldn’t remember their names. The sight of them was disconcerting. It had been fifteen years since he’d last seen her, and though Pete had told him of her marriage and the births, it still came as a shock to find they were flesh and blood. He recognized Dolores’s sister- Ruth?- but none of the other fifteen or so mourners. Just as well. The intensity of his grief would have made small talk- even commiseration- impossible.

To Pete’s delight, Elizabeth, a lawyer, had risen from ten years with the U.S. Justice Department to become New Jersey’s first female U.S. Attorney. Recently, she had uncovered major corruption in Monmouth County involving kickbacks by a contractor to mayors and assemblymen to assure his participation in a public housing project already behind schedule and running three times its estimated cost. Word was, Jake knew, that she was angling for governor, and he suspected she’d succeed. Her ambition and single-mindedness had scared him off when years ago they had dated briefly (Pete’s idea); he supposed those attributes had only intensified. Markis, Jake guessed, didn’t mind them. He was a high school football coach, affluent by inheritance and arrogant by nature, but, Pete had told him, “so much in her shadow it was sometimes tough to see him at all.”

Elizabeth caught up to him on the church steps after the service and took him over to Markis and the kids. Markis was younger than Elizabeth, in his mid-thirties, Jake guessed, with thinning brown hair and dark eyes. His hostility toward Jake was badly disguised; he glared as though Jake were responsible for his father-in-law’s death. Probably hates me because I once went out with her. If I tell him all I got out of her was a kiss, and that an icy one, would he feel better? Markis insisted on being called by his last name by anyone outside his family, his only pretension. Elizabeth didn’t object- maybe, Jake guessed, because it made him sound important.

Elizabeth grabbed his arm. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” She was tall and thin and auburn-haired. Jake remembered how beautiful she was, but also how indifferent when they dated.

She led him up the stairs to the door of the church. “Elizabeth, I’m so sorry.”

She bowed her head. “Thanks. I feel terrible that we didn’t visit him more, but”- a rueful smile-“the kids are a handful, and I’ve been incredibly busy.”

“So I read in the papers. No need to blame yourself. I didn’t see enough of him, either.”

“Still, I should have been a better daughter. It’s not that his death wasn’t expected. I mean, he had a heart condition and couldn’t sit still for two seconds. I tried to talk him out of working. Fat chance.”

“He was stubborn as hell.”

“You said it.” She blew her nose, took a step closer. “And on top of everything else… A couple of times when I called him at night, I could tell he’d been drinking. I hardly knew what was going on in my own father’s life. Made me feel like a truant until Dad owned up.”

“Cancer,” Jake said, the word escaping too loudly.

“So Dad told you, too.”

“No. I guessed. What kind was it?”

“Pancreatic. A death sentence. Incurable, inoperable, unbeatable.”

Ah, Pete, you stoic bastard. I hope the rest of that scotch was ambrosia. He remembered something Harrigan always told his medical students before they entered the morgue for the first time: “It’s the heart that animates life. When the murmur of the heart finally ceases, the rest remains silent.” He wanted Pete to break his silence for one more day so he could tell him he loved him.

“Daniel and I drove up last Monday, after Dad and I had a heart-to-heart over the phone earlier that morning and he admitted he was sick. We had dinner with him. Daniel went back to New Jersey, and I stayed the night and had a federal marshal pick me up and take me to the office. He didn’t seem particularly upset- said he knew his body and that something was very wrong. He spent most of the time telling us about the case he was working on, the one with the skeletons, and how you’d come to help. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I was there. It was the best talk we ever had.” She squared her shoulders. “At least I got to see him. But I didn’t think it was going to be this quick.”

Jake felt a twinge of resentment. Pete confides in his daughter but not in his best friend? He put his hand on her back. “He had a good life and a long one. He got to see you that Monday night- you know how much he adored you- and then he worked until the last second, until the last breath.”