Silent Prey

window.
     
    Whitechurch had been a maintenance foreman. A changing roll of a dozen people worked under his loose supervision, doing minor repairs all over the hospital on the three-to-eleven shift.
    “A great goddamn job if you’re stealing stuff,” Fellsaid as they joined Carter in an employees’ lounge. Three detectives were interviewing hospital employees, with Carter supervising.
    “Or if you’re dealing,” said Carter. He looked at his list. “Next one is Jimmy Beale. Goddamn, I got little faith in this.”
    “I know what you mean,” Lucas said, watching the scared employees trooping through the lounge.
    Beale knew nothing. Neither did any of the rest. Fell burned through a pack of Luckys, left to get another, came back and leaned in the door.
    “God damn it, Mark . . . it’s Mark?” Carter was saying. “God damn it, Mark, we’re not getting anywhere and it’s hard to believe that a guy could be stealing the place blind and nobody’d know about it. Or dealing dope, and nobody’d know . . . .”
    Mark, tall, narrow, acned, nodded nervously, his Adam’s apple working convulsively, sliding up and down his thin neck. “Man, you never seen the dude, you know? I mean, I’d come in and he’d say, Mark, g’wan up to 441D and put on a new doorknob and then see if there’s a leak on the drinking fountain up on six, and that’s what I’d do. He’d come by, but like, I never hung out with him or nothing.”
    When he was gone, Lucas said, “Nobody knew. How many do you believe?”
    “Most of them,” Carter said. “I don’t think he was dealing here. And if you’re stealing stuff, you don’t talk about it. Somebody’ll try to cut in—or somebody’ll try to do the same thing, then feed you to the cops on plea bargain.”
    “Somebody must’ve known,” Fell objected. “That was the last of them?”
    “That was the last . . .” said Carter.
    A woman knocked on the edge of the door and stuck her face in. She had curly white hair and held her hands in front of her as though she were knitting.
    “Are you the police?” she asked timorously.
    “Yeah. C’mon in,” Lucas said. He yawned and stretched. “What can we do for you?”
    She stepped inside the room and looked nervously around. “Some of the others were saying you were asking if Lew had a beeper or a walkie-talkie?”
    “Yes. Who are you?”
    “My name is Dotty, um, Bedrick, I work in housekeeping?” She made her sentences into questions. “Last week, Lew split out his pants, right down by housekeeping? There was some kind of pipe thing he was working on and he bent over and they went, split, right up the back?”
    “Uh-huh,” Lucas said.
    “Anyway, I was right there? And everybody knows I sew, so he came in and asked if I could do anything? He slipped right out of his pants—he was wearing boxer shorts, of course—he slipped right out and I sewed them up. He was just wearing a T-shirt on top, and the boxer shorts, and I had his pants. There was nothing in there but his wallet and his keys and his pocket change. There wasn’t any beeper or anything like that.”
    “Hey. Thank you,” Lucas said, nodding. “That was a problem for us.”
    “Why did you have to know?” Bedrick asked. Lucas thought, Miss Marple.
    “We think that—I’m sure you’ve heard this from the others—we think he was dealing drugs. If he was, he needed access to a telephone.”
    “Well, there was something odd about the man . . . .”
    She wanted to be led: Lucas put his hands on his waist,pushing his sport coat back on both sides, like a cop on television, let a hip pop out and said, “Yeah?”
    She approved: “Sometimes when the calls came over the speakers for doctors, I’ve seen him look up at the speakers. And the next thing, he’d be calling in. I saw him do it two or three times. Like he was a doctor. ”
    “Sonofagun,” Carter said. “There’d be a call for a doctor?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Jesus,” he said, turning to Lucas and Fell, dumbfounded. “That’s it.”
    “That’s it?” chirped Bedrick.
    “That’s it,” Carter said. He smiled at the old lady and shook his head. “I never had a civilian do that before.”
     
    Fell decided to stay at Bellevue and work the lead. Lucas, shaking his head, decided to head back to Midtown South.
    “You don’t think it’ll be anything?” Fell asked.
    “It might be—but with Whitechurch dead, I don’t know how you’d find out,” he said.
    “I want