Edward Lee - The Chosen

“Why on earth would you want to subpoena our tax records?”

Mulligan downed the last dram of his Remy. At seventy bucks a shot, it proved a nifty little free pick-me-up. “Well, don’t you think somethin’s a bit off here? And this boss of yours, this Feldspar fella. You know he wired several million dollars into that little bank of ours in town? What’cha think of that?”

Again, Vera hesitated. “Chief Mulligan, it sounds to me like you’re accusing Mr. Feldspar of using The Inn to launder money and to serve as a resort for white-collar criminals.”

“Oh, no, miss, not at all. I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m just a bit…mussed is all.”

A bit mussed? Vera thought. Bullshit. You came in here to plant seeds, and now that you have, you’ll prob ably thank me for my time and leave. This was irredeemable. What right did Mulligan have to imply such things? Moreover, what were his grounds?

Vera brought a finger to her lip. Maybe he’s got grounds that I don’t know about.

“Anyway, thanks for your time,” Mulligan said and got up. “I better leave, get back to the beat. I’m shore this is all nothin’, but I didn’t figure there’d be any harm in me comin’ up here to talk to ya. And please don’t think I’m accusin’ your boss of anything. Just checkin’ things out, ya know.”

“Of course,” Vera said. “It was nice meeting you.”

“And thanks fer the drink.”

Vera bid the large man a cordial good day, and watched him leave. Initially she’d been offended, but only for a moment. Why would he say such things? He must have some reason, she realized. Now she poured herself a drink, a half-flute of the PJ. She watched it fizz. Mulligan’s implications did not mix well with the fact that Kyle had lied about Feldspar’s whereabouts.

And I went along with it, she thought.

Should she say anything, go to Feldspar right now and tell him the chief of police was nosing about? What would Feldspar’s reaction be? Then she remembered their “date,” tonight at The Carriage House.

And a better idea crossed her mind. I’ll wait, bring it up tonight. That way I can catch him off guard.

These feelings fuddled her, though. Why, for instance, should she even want to catch Feldspar “off guard?” He was her employer. He was paying her a lot of money, and had just given her a two hundred thousand dollar automobile to use whenever she liked. Curiosity killed the cat, she considered in afterthought. Might it also not kill the restaurant manager’s job record?

««—»»

Later, she’d finished her trickle of preshift paperwork, mostly stock notices, and the food and beverage orders for next week. All at once there was nothing to do; The Carriage House wouldn’t open for another few hours. She poured herself some more champagne, remembering the figure she’d seen sneaking away from the atrium the other night, and the bottle of rail-brand Scotch. She knew it must be one of Kyle’s people; the liquor supply for The Carriage House was kept locked during off-hours and inventoried daily. Who cares? she thought, drinking herself now. Then she thought back further, to Kyle’s innocent back rub and the brazen fantasies that had accosted her throughout. That had been two nights ago. Last night, however, she’d slept quite soundly. The fantasy of The Hands had eluded her, and she did not dream. Now that she thought of it, last night had been the first night since her arrival that she’d not dreamed or fantasized sexually. By now she’d grown used to the dreams—she even had to admit to herself that she often looked forward to them. The dirty dreams, and the fantasy that seemed to trigger them, felt like an escape to her, her chance to be a naughty little girl behind the curtain of her sudden celibacy. But why should she have the dreams every night but last night? What was it about last night that was different?

Or maybe the dreams are all over now, she nearly regretted. So much for my sexual attraction to Kyle.

Or perhaps that attraction, with time, had supplanted itself with someone more real to her.

Feldspar’s image still lingered, like the scent of his Russian cigarettes and his faint cologne, and the flash of his amethyst ring.

She frowned at herself. Her office was windowless; it felt cramped with hard fluorescent light, which made the fine paneling look sticky. She’d have to change the lights, and hang some pictures. Or was it her mood that made everything look dull? You’re dull, Vera, she came clean with herself. You’re a twenty-nine-year-old spinster, a dull old maid before her time.

The book lay closed at the desk’s veneered corner, The Complete Compendium of American Haunted Man sions. She’d read the Wroxton Hall segment last night, and dismissed the book as a lurid sham. It hadn’t even been scary, it was so ridiculous. Overwritten, sensationalized, and hackneyed. The chapter recounted the takeover of Wroxton Hall in the early nineteen hundreds as a state sanitarium. Apparently the superintendent, a man named Flues, hadn’t placed much priority into the care of his patients. Most of the state funds that maintained the facility were diverted by Flues himself, to support a predilection for the finer things in life: imported gim-cracks, English carriages, opium, and a conclave of young, fiscally demanding mistresses. He therefore left the entirety of the hospital’s logistics and in-patient care to a cadre of ruffians and a pittance of a maintenance allowance. “A majority of the staff,” the author reported, “had not been adequately screened for an aptitude in such intense hospital services. Many were ex-convicts and former mental patients themselves, and some such warders demonstrated ravenous—as well as distinctly aberrant—libidos upon the more desirable female patients, schizophrenia, manic-depression, and acute catatonia notwithstanding. A staff journal, confiscated during the state inquest which would follow, detailed countless acts of unnamable sexual abuse…” The author proceeded to name each unnamable act.

The frequent pregnancies, of course, were blamed on insensible male patients, and were expeditiously aborted via the crude surgical standards of the day. Things went as such for years, in complete ignorance of the authorities, and eventually warders of higher rank developed a knack for, shall we say, creative entrepreneurship. To serve the occasions when patients died, a cemetery was fashioned beyond the estate’s grounds, in a secluded dell, though it was later discerned, after much digging, that not a single cubic inch of earth had ever been turned beneath the countless dozens of gravestones. The bodies, in reality, were sold to out-of-the-way medical schools, and to increase the financial gain of the warders, some of the less manageable and more obscure patients were quickened along to their eventual passings, with the thoughtful assistance of garrotes, bars of soap in socks, and pharmaceutical overdoses. In the early forties, when the country’s involvement in World War II became un-disputable, human freight, for research purposes, became quite lucrative. A discreet lab facility at the Edgewood Arsenal, enthusiastic about germ warfare, paid top-dollar under the table for “lab specimens” of a particular nature, that nature being that they be delivered live to the facility. The warders of Wroxton Hall were all too eager to assist in the defense of their nation, and many times logged certain patients as “deceased” when they were in fact still among the living, only to transport them without reluctance to the open arms of the Edgewood Arsenal.

But this proved merely the icing on the cake. What went on on a daily basis at the hall was even more disturbing. Unruly patients were taken aside and disciplined by a coterie of “technicians” that would make the Inquisitors of the Holy Office look like the cast of Sesame Street. Of course, this was regarded instead as “behavioral therapy”; it was difficult to get out of line when one’s orbital lobe had been thoroughly routed by knitting-needle lobotomies administered up through the anterior eye socket. (Staff members, naturally, sterilized the knitting-needles before each application.) A less sophisticated manner of taming rowdy patients involved a simple tourniquet fashioned about the throat just under the jawline, which cut off blood-flow to the brain. The tourniquet was maintained for just a period of time to effect the level of brain damage desired to take some of the zing out of said patient. The relatively unsupervised staff, too, when they weren’t applying such contemporary behavioral therapies, were quite forthcoming in the application of sexual therapies. All manner of libidinous abuse was pursued at Wroxton Hall, no perversity ignored, and no orifice unplundered. Boys will be boys, after all. And since the induction of semen into fecund vaginal passages was known to result in pregnancies, Wroxton Hall became perhaps the most expeditious abortion clinic in history.