Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm Read online

  She nodded in agreement, then brushed back a strand of gray hair that had fallen across her eyes. "I know. Sometimes it isn't so much fun. There are a lot of bad smells in the city, but I'm learning how to kind of ignore the really nasty ones and concentrate on the nice ones, like bakeshop smells."

  "Have you always had this ability?"

  "Oh, no. Only since yesterday morning. I started to get real good at smelling things at the same time I started to feel better."

  By the time we ended our meal with simple orange sherbet and mint tea, my initial surprise and curiosity surrounding Margaret Dutton's olfactory acumen had turned to utter astonishment. All through the six courses following the soup she had carried on a running commentary on the ingredients in the dishes, many of which she could name, most of which she couldn't; when she couldn't identify some particular taste or smell, she would content herself with telling me just how many ingredients were in that particular dish. I didn't care to interrupt the flow of our meal by constantly calling Peter over to verify her proclamations, but I knew enough about Thai cooking to suspect she was right about most of the ingredients she could name. As I paid the bill, I mused on the fact that Mama Spit not only had undergone what seemed a near-miraculous, overnight transformation from raving psychotic to a thoroughly pleasant and lucid woman by the name of Margaret Dutton, but also had turned into something akin to a human bloodhound.

  Chapter 3

  On Friday morning I lent Margaret two hundred dollars to go out and buy herself underwear and some changes of clothing from what she was wearing. And I told her to be very careful; during the night the ice-pick killer had claimed two more victims, one on a street in the Bronx and another at a subway stop in lower Manhattan.

  She returned before noon with a good basic wardrobe of corduroy slacks, a skirt, a print dress, two blouses, changes of underwear, sturdy but comfortable shoes, and a cloth coat, all of which she'd bought at a church thrift shop on the Bowery. She even brought me back change. She'd also found herself a job, just as she'd said she would, responding to a Help Wanted sign posted on a building on Seventh Avenue, in the garment district. I recognized the address, and didn't like it; it was a sweatshop turning out knockoff designer jeans, no place for Margaret. I told her she could work for me, as my secretary's office assistant, until we could come up with something better, perhaps a job utilizing her extraordinary senses of taste and smell, which had to be of value to some enterprise, perhaps a perfume manufacturer or product-testing laboratory. I would pay her what I paid the temporaries Francisco occasionally hired when the paperwork in the office began to pile up. In addition, I would provide her with room and board and forgo payments on her loan, which she insisted she would repay, until she had saved enough money to go out on her own. In the meantime, I would check with some of the city officials I knew and inquire into the availability of low-income housing. The only proviso was that she would have to sleep in a spare bedroom in my apartment if and when Garth and Mary were in the city and wanted to use their apartment. She was grateful, and it took me fifteen minutes to get her to stop crying. Despite my protestations and reminders that she already had a job, Margaret insisted that she was going to spend the weekend scrub-a-dubbing the house from top to bottom. By the time she had finished, the brownstone was cleaner than the professional cleaning service had left it when Garth and I had first bought the property. I almost felt as if I were exploiting the woman, and I suspected I was going to miss Margaret Dutton when she moved on.

  On Monday morning she was downstairs at the office promptly at nine o'clock to meet Francisco, who proceeded to teach her how to use the multi-line telephone and do a little basic filing. I went back into my own private office to prepare for an eleven o'clock meeting with the board of directors of a corporation for which Garth and I had been doing some in-depth vetting of potential CEOs. There was a fax from Garth, who for some reason had assumed I would be away over the weekend. My brother usually wasn't very particular about what he wore, but a monthlong skiing vacation in Zermatt, with its glitzy apres-ski nightlife, was apparently bringing out the finicky in him; the good news was that he was indeed learning how to ski and hadn't broken anything yet; the bad news was that he had forgotten to pack a favorite sweater, which he believed was in the apartment in the brownstone, and he didn't see how he could possibly manage to make it to New Year's without it. Would I send it to him? Well, sure. I couldn't have my brother skiing and partying in Zermatt half naked.

  I finished typing and reviewing the report I was to give, then trotted up to Garth's apartment. It didn't take me long to explore the drawers and closets and determine that the sweater he wanted wasn't there, but when I turned to leave the bedroom I noticed something that was there, and it disturbed me very much. I went over to the nightstand next to the bed where Margaret had been sleeping and picked up a plastic bag containing perhaps two dozen or more rather large black-and-yellow capsules which resembled nothing so much as a pile of dead mutant bumblebees with their heads, wings, and legs chopped off. I shook my head in frustration, then punched the intercom on the wall. When Francisco answered, I asked him to send Margaret up to see me. Then I went into the living room and sat down on the sofa with a sigh.

  She saw the bag of pills in my hand as soon as she entered, and the blood drained from her face. "Oh, dear," she said in a small voice, putting a hand to her mouth.

  "Sit down, Margaret," I said, indicating a chair directly across from me. "I need to talk to you."

  She slowly came across the room and sank down in the armchair, clasping her hands in her lap. She had begun to gnaw at her lower lip, and her pale violet eyes were fixed on the bag of capsules. "I haven't taken one yet today," she said in the same small, weak voice.

  "What are these, Margaret?"

  "I . . . don't know."

  "You lied to me, Margaret. You told me you weren't on medication. Why?"

  Now she looked up into my face, and her eyes swam with the same fear I had first glimpsed in the restaurant on Thanksgiving when I had started to question her. "It's not like medication, Mongo. I mean, I didn't get those from a doctor."

  "Where did you get them?"

  She again put a trembling hand to her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears. "I'm not supposed to tell. I was warned not to tell anybody about the pills, or something very bad would happen."

  "Something very bad has already happened, Margaret. If a doctor didn't give these to you, then they're probably illegal—some street drug you brought into my home. I have a very special hatred for street drugs, Margaret; they cripple, and they kill. There's no telling what this stuff is, or what it can do to you. You're a guest in my home, and that makes me responsible for what you do here and what happens to you. It also makes me responsible in the eyes of the law for what you bring in here. You say you don't know what these are? The drug doesn't have a name?"

  She shook her head.

  "How did you get these pills? You don't have any money, so you couldn't have paid for them."

  "A man gave them to me just before the young people caught him. They killed him and threw him away."

  Her voice had grown even fainter and slightly hoarse, so I wasn't sure I'd heard her correctly. "What?"

  "I was sitting in my blankets on the grate, Mongo, like always. It was last Tuesday night. The streetlight was broken, and it was dark. I was still awful crazy then, so I can't remember everything exactly the way it happened, but I'm sure it was real. I'm sure it really happened. The pills prove that, don't they?"

  "Tell me what happened, Margaret."

  "A man came running around the corner and up the block toward me. He stopped in the middle of the block and looked around, like he was afraid of something, or somebody was chasing him. Then he saw me in the shadows and came running over to me. I started spitting and cursing, and I even hit him in the face when he put his hands on me, but it didn't do any good. He looked real scared, but he also looked determined, like he was going to do something to me
no matter what I did to him. That made me real scared. He took that bag of pills out of his coat pocket. Then he put one of them in my mouth. I didn't want to swallow it, but he put one hand over my nose and mouth so I couldn't spit it out or breathe, and he rubbed my throat with his other hand. That made me swallow the pill. Then he put the bag under my blanket. I started spitting and cursing at him again, but he held my head in his hands and spoke real loud and slow in my ear so I had to hear what he told me. He said I'd feel better after taking the pill, and that I should remember to take one at the same time every day if I wanted to keep feeling better. He said I shouldn't tell anybody about the pills, or something bad would happen to me. I don't know for certain if what I heard next was the man talking or one of the voices in my head, but I seem to remember him saying something about meeting some woman under a Christmas tree, and she'd give me more of the pills. Then he started running up the block, but he stopped when he saw this boy standing on the corner up ahead of him. Then this girl comes around the corner at the other end of the block, and they both start walking toward the man. He tried to run across the street, but the boy cut him off. He kept trying to run away, but the kids—they looked like teenagers—kept cutting him off. Finally they grabbed him. The girl took something out of her purse and put it to the back of his head. I think it was a gun. I didn't hear any shot, but I think she killed him; he slumped all of a sudden, like he was dead, and the kids had to hold him up by his arms. They dragged him away into the next block. I couldn't see much by just the light from the streetlamps, but it looked like they just kind of threw him away. They tossed him into the air, and he disappeared."

  I sighed, averting my gaze from the woman's pain-filled eyes, glanced down at the bag of capsules, which suddenly seemed to weigh very heavily in my hand. My good intentions had bitten me on the bottom, and I was greatly saddened. Margaret Dutton's apparent resurrection from madness hadn't been so miraculous after all, had in fact represented only a transition from one psychotic state to another which, in its way, was even more bizarre than her Mama Spit persona. Her story about being given the capsules by a man who was then shot and "thrown away" by a couple of teenagers was obviously a fantasy. Margaret Dutton was still delusional, which probably meant that her ugly alter ego was lurking just below the surface, waiting to spit, as it were, into action. I had no training in psychiatric nursing, the brownstone was no mental hospital, and I would be doing her absolutely no favors by keeping her with me. I couldn't let her keep the capsules, I couldn't, for both our sakes, allow her to keep living in Garth's apartment, and I couldn't simply toss her back into the rough ocean of the streets. Just exactly what I was going to do with Mama Spit was something I was going to have to think on.

  "We're going to have to discuss this further, Margaret," I said, rising off the couch and heading for the door. "But not now. I have to go to a meeting. I don't want you to worry; I'll see that you're taken care of. You can go back to work now, if you want to. If you're too upset to work, you can just stay up here and rest. We'll talk more later, or in the morning."

  I went up to my apartment and locked the bag of black-and-yellow capsules in my safe. Then I walked the ten blocks to my corporate client's headquarters on Avenue of the Americas. The board of directors was impressed with my report, but had in fact already decided on their choice even before I delivered her clean bill of health. They gave me a generous check, and I was out in less than forty-five minutes.

  It wasn't yet noon. There was plenty of work to do back at the office, and I had tentatively planned to take a late-afternoon flight to Pittsburgh to take the preliminary steps in a HUD investigation that had been farmed out to Garth and me by a Senate subcommittee. But the situation with Margaret Dutton was forcing a change in my travel plans, and I didn't want to go back to the office, for fear I would have to spend the rest of the day looking at the anxiety and supplication that were so clearly mirrored in the woman's expressive eyes. I hadn't even started to think about what I was going to do with her, and so I decided to play hooky for the rest of the day.

  Normally, having not found Garth's missing sweater in his apartment, I would have called or faxed to tell him to forget it, that he'd just have to make do between now and New Year's with the half dozen or so other sweaters he'd taken with him. But the sun was shining, the wind was up, it was surprisingly mild for late November, and the water in the Hudson would still be relatively warm compared to the air; the possibility of getting in just one more sail on my brother's fourteen-foot catamaran was too great a temptation to resist, and the quest for Garth's sweater was just the excuse I needed to remove myself from the city and my distractions.

  I drove out of New York and up the Palisades Parkway to Garth and Mary's home in Cairn, a small, very artsy town on the banks of the Hudson thirty-four miles to the north. I found the sweater he wanted in the bottom drawer of a dresser in his bedroom, threw it on the back seat of my Volkswagen Rabbit. Then I stripped and put on the black rubber wet suit I kept there, went down to the boathouse beneath the eaves of the music room, then huffed and puffed the cat down across the beach to the shoreline. I set sail, and with eighteen-knot winds was soon streaking across the vast expanse of river between Haverstraw and Piermont that the early Dutch settlers had dubbed the "Tappan Sea." There was nobody and nothing else on the river, and conditions were ideal, if perhaps just a bit nippy. I whizzed back and forth across the river between Cairn and Westchester for almost four hours, dumping only once when a wind shift crossed my stern while I was flying a hull. I ran the cat back up on the beach behind Garth's home just as the blood-red sun was sinking behind the craggy, black outline of Hook Mountain, to the south.

  I felt at once completely relaxed yet exhilarated. I took a long, hot shower, then drove south to Nyack for dinner and a movie at Cinema East. By the time I got out of the movie and headed back toward the city I was ready for sleep, for I had decided what I was going to do about Margaret Dutton.

  First, I would turn the capsules I had taken from her over to the police, who would probably tell me they were some new kind of illicit drug; how and where Mama Spit had gotten them would undoubtedly remain a mystery, for she obviously couldn't remember. Then it was going to be time for a lot of tender, loving care and attention to the woman's needs. Margaret would no doubt be disappointed in me for in effect turning her out, but it was my hope that she would continue to trust me; as long as I stayed by her side and walked her through the process every step of the way, I thought she might at last be amenable to letting the city's Social Services Department help her. I was going to have a serious chat with a social worker friend of mine to map out a detailed plan for getting Margaret into a controlled clinical setting and keeping her there, at least until she was officially released as an outpatient under the supervision of doctors. And Frederickson and Frederickson would subsidize some of the cost, if it came to that.

  When I got home I barely had enough energy to brush my teeth and strip down to my shorts before collapsing into bed, pulling the blankets up over me, and immediately falling asleep. I didn't sleep long. Muffled screams and what sounded like crashing, overturned furniture first materialized in my mind as a dream about the demolition of some theater where there were still people inside, and then yanked me into consciousness when I realized the sounds were real, coming up through the floor from Garth's apartment below me. I jumped out of bed and without even stopping to pull on my pants raced out of the apartment and down the stairs, through the door of Garth's apartment, and into the bedroom. What I saw stunned and horrified me.

  Mama Spit had returned with a vengeance. The flannel nightgown I had bought her was half torn from her body and hanging from her shoulders in shreds. Her hair tangled and matted with sweat, Margaret Dutton was once again caught in the throes of madness. Alternately screaming and muttering obscenities, she was slapping at her body and stomping her feet as she slowly circled the nightstand, which she had placed in the center of the room. She would occasionally halt her
mad dance and snatch at the empty space on the wooden table where her bag of capsules had been before I'd taken them away. The bedspread and carpet were spattered with blood; bright crimson arterial blood oozed from her eyes, ears, nose, mouth, vagina, and anus. Margaret Dutton not only had snapped back into violent insanity but was slowly bleeding to death from every orifice in her body.

  She glanced over to where I was standing just inside the doorway gaping at her, paralyzed with shock. She screamed, spat blood in my direction, and charged, but by then I was already on the move. Heart pounding, thoughts tumbling around in my mind in a kind of prayer that I knew what was wrong and was not too late, I sprinted back up the stairs to my apartment, my safe. For a few terrifying moments I couldn't remember the combination, and I forced myself to stop and take a series of deep breaths to calm myself. The combination came to me. I opened the safe, grabbed the bag of capsules, and raced back downstairs.

  I took her low, around the waist, literally tackling her and driving her back on the bed. There I climbed up on top of her and sat on her chest, pinning her arms to her body with the insides of my thighs—no easy task since she was thrashing wildly, probably weighed as much as I did, and was a foot taller. As she opened her mouth to scream at me, I popped one of the capsules down her throat. Then, just as her first benefactor had done, I clamped one hand over her mouth and used the fingers of the other to gently knead her esophagus, encouraging her to swallow. She finally did, and then I lay down on top of her, wrapping my arms around her body to keep her from flailing, burying my face to the side in the bloody bedding to avoid the fusillades of blood and saliva that spewed from her mouth. I held on tight and waited for something to happen—or stop happening.