In sudden guilty haste, he pushed the cart through the swinging door into the hallway, turned right, and nearly collided with Mr. Truman.
?You?re up early this morning, Fric.?
?Ummm, things to do, things, you know, ummm,? Fric muttered, silently cursing himself for sounding devious, guilty, and more than a little like an absentminded Hobbit.
?What?s all this?? Mr. Truman asked, indicating the stuff piled on the cart.
[343] ?Yeah. For my room, things I need, you know, stuff for my room.? Fric shamed himself; he was pathetic, transparent, stupid. ?Just some soda and snacks and stuff,? he added, and he wanted to smack himself upside the head.
?You?re going to put one of the maids out of work.?
?Gee, no, that?s not what I want.? Shut up, shut up, shut up! he warned himself, yet he couldn?t resist adding, ?I like the maids.?
?Are you all right, Fric??
?Sure. I?m all right. Are you all right??
Frowning at the items on the cart, Mr. Truman said, ?I?d like to talk to you a little more about those calls.?
Glad that he had covered the knife with a dishtowel, Fric said, ?What calls??
?From the heavy breather.?
?Oh. Yeah. The breather.?
?Are you sure he didn?t say anything to you??
?Breathed. He just, you know, breathed.?
?The odd thing is-none of the calls you told me about are on the computerized telephone log.?
Well, of course, now that Fric understood these calls were being made by a supernatural, mirror-walking being who referred to himself as a guardian angel and who only used the idea of a telephone, he was not surprised that they weren?t recorded as entries in the log. He also wasn?t any longer puzzled about why Mr. Truman hadn?t picked up on the call the previous night, even though it had rung just about forever: Mysterious Caller always knew where Fric was-train room, wine cellar, library-and using his uncanny powers and only the idea of a phone, he made Fric?s line ring not throughout the house but only in the room where Fric could hear it.
Fric longed to explain this crazy situation to Mr. Truman and to reveal all the weird events of the previous evening. Even as he worked up the courage to spill his guts, however, he thought of the six psychiatrists who would be eager to earn hundreds of thousands of bucks [344] by keeping him on a couch, talking about the stress of being the only child of the biggest movie star in the world, until he either exploded into bloody pieces or escaped to Goose Crotch.
?Don?t get me wrong, Fric. I?m not saying you invented those calls. In fact, I?m sure you didn?t.?
Clenched tightly around the cart handle, Fric?s hands had grown damp. He blotted them on his pants-and realized that he should not have done so. Every crummy, sleazy criminal in the world probably got sweaty palms in the presence of a cop.
?I?m sure you didn?t,? Mr. Truman continued, ?because last night someone rang me up on one of my private lines, and it didn?t show on the log, either.?
Surprised by this news, Fric stopped blotting his hands and said, ?You heard from the breather??
?Not the breather, no. Someone else.?
?Who??
?Probably a wrong number.?
Fric looked at the security chief?s hands. He couldn?t tell whether or not they were sweaty.
?Evidently,? Mr. Truman continued, ?something?s wrong with the telephone-log software.?
?Unless he?s like a ghost or something,? Fric blurted.
The expression that crossed Mr. Truman?s face was hard to read. He said, ?Ghost? What makes you say that??
On the trembling edge of divulging all, Fric remembered that his mother had once been in a booby hatch. She had stayed there only ten days, and she hadn?t been chop-?em-up-with-an-ax crazy or anything as bad as that.
Nevertheless, if Fric started babbling about recent freaky events, Mr. Truman would surely recall that Freddie Nielander had spent some time in a clinic for the temporarily wacko. He would think, Like mother, like son.
For sure, he would immediately contact the biggest movie star in [345] the world on location in Florida. Then Ghost Dad would send in a powerful SWAT team of psychiatrists.
?Fric,? Mr. Truman pressed, ?what did you mean-ghost??
Shoveling manure over the seed of truth that he?d spoken, hoping to grow a half-convincing lie from it, Fric said, ?Well, you know, my dad keeps a special phone for messages from ghosts. I just meant like maybe one of them called the wrong line.?
Mr. Truman stared at him as though trying to decide whether he could be as stupid as he was pretending to be.
Not as great an actor as his father, Fric knew he couldn?t long stand up to interrogation by an ex-cop. He was so nervous that in a minute he?d need to take a leak in one of the Rubbermaid jars.
?Ummm, well, gotta go, things to do, things up in my room, you know,? he muttered, once more sounding like a cousin from the feeble-minded branch of the Hobbit clan.
He swung the cart around Mr. Truman and pushed it east along the main hall. He didn?t look back.
CHAPTER 50
THE DOME LIGHT ATOP OUR LADY OF ANGELS Hospital was a golden beacon. High above the dome, at the top of the radio mast, the red aircraft-warning lamp winked in the gray mist, as if the storm were a living beast and this were its malevolent Cyclopean eye.
In the elevator, on the way from the garage to the fifth floor, Ethan listened to a lushly orchestrated version of a classic Elvis Costello number tricked up with violins and fulsome French horns. This cable-hung cubicle, ascending and descending twenty-four hours a day, was a little outpost of Hell in perpetual motion.
The physicians? lounge on the fifth floor, to which he?d been given directions by phone, was nothing more than a dreary windowless vending-machine room with a pair of Formica-topped tables in the center. The orange plastic items that surrounded the tables qualified as chairs no more than the room deserved the grand name on its door.
Having arrived five minutes early, Ethan fed coins to one of the machines and selected black coffee. When he sipped the stuff, he knew what death must taste like, but he drank it anyway because he?d slept only four or five hours and needed the kick.
Dr. Kevin O?Brien arrived precisely on time. About forty-five, [347] handsome, he had the vaguely haunted look and the well-suppressed but still-apparent nervous edge of one who had spent two-thirds of his life in arduous scholarship, only to find that the hammers wielded by HMOs, government bureaucracy, and greedy trial attorneys were daily degrading his profession and destroying the medical system to which he?d dedicated his life. His eyes were pinched at the corners. He frequently licked his lips. Stress lent a gray tint to his pallor. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he seemed to be a bright man who would not much longer be able to delude himself into believing that the quicksand under his feet was actually solid ground.
Although he was not Duncan Whistler?s personal internist, Dr. O?Brien had been the physician on duty when Dunny had gone flatline. He had overseen resuscitation procedures and had made the final call to cease heroic efforts. The death certificate carried his signature.
Dr. O?Brien brought with him the complete patient file in three thickly packed folders. During their discussion, he gradually spread the entire contents across one of the tables.
They sat side by side in the orange pseudochairs, the better to review the documents together.
Dunny?s coma resulted from cerebral hypoxia, a lack of adequate oxygen to the brain for an extended period of time. Results revealed on EEG scrolls and by brain-imaging tests-angiography, CT scanning, MRI-led inescapably to the conclusion that if he had ever regained consciousness, he would have been profoundly handicapped.
?Even among patients in the deepest comas,? O?Brien explained, ?where there?s little or no apparent activity in the cerebrum, there is usually enough function in the brain stem to allow them to exhibit some automatic responses. They continue to breathe unaided. Once in a while they might cough, blink their eyes, even yawn.?
Throughout most of his hospitalization, Dunny had breathed on his own. Three days ago, his declining automatic responses required that he be connected to a ventilator. He?d no longer been able to breathe without mechanical assistance.
[348] In his early weeks at the hospital, although deeply comatose, he had at times coughed, sneezed, yawned, blinked. Occasionally he had even exhibited roving eye movements.
Gradually, those automatic responses declined in frequency until they ceased to be observed at all. This suggested a steady loss of function in the lower brain stem.
The previous morning, Dunny?s heart had stopped. Defibrillation and injections of epinephrine restarted the heart, but only briefly.
?The automatic function of the circulatory system is maintained by the lower brain stem,? Dr. O?Brien said. ?It was clear his heart had failed because brain-stem function failed. There?s no coming back from irreparable damage to the brain stem. Death inevitably follows.?
In a case like this, the patient would not be connected to a heart-lung machine, providing artificial circulation and respiration, unless his family insisted. The family would need to have the means to pay because insurance companies would disallow such expenditures on the grounds that the patient could never regain consciousness.
?As regards Mr. Whistler,? O?Brien said, ?you held a power of attorney in matters of health care.?
?Yes.?
?And you signed a release quite some time ago, specifying that heroic efforts, other than a ventilator, were not to be employed to keep him alive.?