Short Stories

Frank and Jon

By Manny Frishberg

Jon didn’t like this a bit. It was just his luck to have been hanging around the squad room at the end of his shift when Frank Spildak, M.D. walked into the precinct house and announced that he was responsible for a pair of murders. He had no reason to hurry home since Helen left. He was stuck taking the doctor’s confession because it was his case and he had been too slow in filing the paperwork to mark it as closed.

The case haunted Morgenthau as few others had in several years. At 14, Willie Stargale had been too young to have working papers, but he ran errands for tips. Everybody in the neighborhood seemed to know him – by sight, if not by name. Neighbors talked about how he’s be whistling some nameless tune – but so quiet they never got annoyed. His teachers all remembered him as polite and respectful – a novelty at  IS 137. When he spoke up he always had something worthwhile to contribute.

Maria Fuentes, the suspect he liked for the Stargale murder, had worked part time as Spildak’s housekeeper, coming in once a week to dust and polish, and to do the laundry. Willie had occasionally accompanied her to and from the laundromat, helping her carry her load and babysitting the machines to make sure nothing got stolen.

It bothered Jon that she had no clear motive for the killing, but the housekeeper looked good for it in so many other ways. She lived half a block from where his body had been found when the late winter snow piled high along the edge of the street melted. Some neighbors heard her calling the boy up to her apartment the last night anyone had seen him alive. But the clincher was the 14-carat gold Madonna medallion he had been given for First Communion, which his mother swore he would not even remove to shower. Morganthau found it in a pocket of the Fuertes woman’s coat. She’d insisted loudly and often that she had no idea how the kid’s medal had gotten there. But Jon had heard that before and, after all, what was she supposed to say? In his experience the only time someone broke down and confessed on the spot when confronted with the evidence was on “Perry Mason.”

True, there were other bits that didn’t add up. She had let the police in and not objected when asked if they could search her apartment. And there were some partial fingerprints they couldn’t ID. But that’s just how things worked in real life.

Morgenthau doodled aimlessly on his notepad, building bridges of stars between roughly sketched cubes, only half listening to the doctor’s ravings.

Jon was on intimate terms with the look on Spildak’s face. He had seen it on the faces of witnesses who had stumbled onto a corpse and on perps when they suddenly sensed the direction an interrogation was leading – weighing the odds before they broke down and confessed. And he’d seen it in his bedroom mirror after waking from a nightmare, groping blindly for Helen before the haze of sleep lifted and he remembered that she had gone to California to visit her sister. They both knew when she left that she would not be coming back.

Of course Morgenthau had interviewed Spildak before but that  just made this all more bizarre. The doctor, a pathologist at New York-Presbyterian, had been cooperative but uninformative. Yes, he had known both the victim and the suspect. No, he did not know much about their relationship and no, he had no idea what would have possessed her to kill the boy. In fact, he’d said, they seemed to be genuinely fond of one another, in a little brother-big sister sort of way, from what he’d been able to observe.

The tired-looking man had not gotten around to saying what his role was in the Stargale killing, or even who his other victim was supposed to be. He went on about a mysterious stranger, a malevolent figure that was really the one in control. Standard paranoiac fantasy, as far as the detective was concerned, if he was concerned at all. Morgenthau didn’t suspect Spildak of anything worse than a chemical imbalance and an overactive imagination.

Jon wanted this to be over already but he had to hear the man through to the end. Some tidbit of information might leak out that would connect with other dots and form an image he hadn’t already seen. He glanced up occasionally at the tiny, barred window behind the doctor’s head, simulating attentiveness.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Frank Spildak said, leaning in across the table. “All doctors stop seeing patients at some point and just see bodies and their physical reactions. The good ones begin to see the people behind the list of symptoms again but I never did. That’s why I went into pathology, the dead don’t care. After a while I began to see death as more natural than disease.

The processes of life are not all that mysterious, just a self-sustaining chemical chain-reaction. But the why – how it starts and what happens when it stops, that’s one thing they can’t teach you in medical school. ‘Philosophy,’ they say, ‘alchemy’ … and you’re expected to leave it at that. Well, I couldn’t. I never stopped wondering” He slumped back in his chair and his eyes faded again into the remote, inner world they had been occupying, looking into some horror visible only to himself.

 “The gap between alive and dead is so astounding that it obscures how little real difference there is at the molecular level. There’s a high energy barrier to initiating it, or re-initiating once it’s stopped. But given the right balance of precursor chemicals and a precisely calibrated jolt, it can be breached.” He shook his head morosely and let loose a burst of harsh laughter. To the detective it sounded like the poor guy had cracked a fiercely cruel joke at his own expense. But his eyes were wide open, white sclera showing all around his pupils in that unmistakable involuntary fear display.

He began talking again, in a bland, distracted tone. “You know,” he said, “when the dead come back to life they have the most extraordinary strength.” Morganthau’s pen stopped in mid-stroke. “Even the cats and dogs – you know, I had to work on them at first. I don’t know if it has something to do with the way the muscles are re-energized or if they’ve seen something that makes them more concentrated and focused on every movement. And when they speak it chills you to the bone. You know that you ignore it at your peril.

Morgenthau showed no outward change but a frisson raced up his spine and his scalp tightened. It was adding up in the detective’s mind as Schitzo-affective Disorder but Spildak now had his full attention. After all, even paranoids have real enemies. And being crazy certainly didn’t eliminate someone as a suspect. The detective waited in silence for the man across the table to carry on. His senses were hyper-keen and focused but mentally he was battling a nearly overwhelming urge to go running from the room.

“You might have thought solving the Mystery of Life would have been enough of an accomplishment. I would have been a shoe-in for the Nobel, not to mention a seven-figure book deal. Written my own contract, done whatever I pleased for the rest of my life. All I had to do was publish my work with the animal models in Cell or the Lancet.

“But I thought I needed something more dramatic, something incontrovertible. My ego couldn’t handle being called a fraud. Besides, I’m a doctor, not a molecular biologist and certainly not a vet.” He spit the last word out with a particular vehemence. The pitch of his voice rose as he talked. “I had bigger things in mind. I had something more to prove. You know what the difference is between a doctor and God?”

“I’ve heard it,” Jon responded without enthusiasm. “God doesn’t think He’s a doctor.”

“That’s right.” Spildak snorted a small, humorless laugh. “You have no idea how right you are.” He leaned back in his chair but this time he did not withdraw. He was on a roll now and his words were gathering speed. “I had to work late – take the night shift, hide equipment in my locker for when the chance would come to use it.

“Not just any corpse would do. It had to be whole, not too old, in good shape. But the biggest challenge was the brain. It doesn’t take long for cellular degeneration to set in and if the medulla or the hippocampus begins to deteriorate – well, I don’t mean to bore you with the medical details.

“In any case, it was a little more than a week after New Years that my luck turned. A fisherman came into the morgue. His boat had capsized and he’d died of hypothermia before he’d even had a chance to drown.  His whole body was blue with cold. The only reason the EMTs took him to the hospital at all was to get the death certificate signed. They brought him straight downstairs to me. I don’t even remember what his name was. Is that really awful?”

Jon was sitting up in his chair, his head cocked slightly to the right; his hands were clasped in front of him on the table. His notebook balanced on his thighs, his eyes focused on the other man but he did not force eye-contact. He wanted the doc to get to the point, already. But at the same time he was fascinated by the sheer scale of the man’s delusions – But then, he thought, doctors start out with a God Complex.

“When you’re deeply engaged in doing something truly extraordinary, the doing is all that matters and you aren’t bothered by any thoughts of consequences At least, that’s always how it’s been for me,” said Spildak.

“Even after all that’s happened I like to imagine I’m not so different from the ordinary man. So it wasn’t until after I’d shocked the heart into beating again and I saw the poor bastard actually start moving, that the totality of what I’d accomplished really hit me.

“At first there was the exultation of having taken the ultimate step – not just saving a life but creating it. I had done what no one had ever done before – I might not be able to build a man from dust like the Almighty, but I breathed life into the clay, just as He did.

“And then, suddenly I truly saw what I had done.” The doctor’s words came in a halting whisper, his eyes focused on some sight that was unavailable to anyone else. “His skin stayed pale even after the blood flow had been restored, adding its own reddish tinge. And it sagged around his cheekbones and eye-sockets like something waxy had melted inside his face. The only sounds I heard were the hum of the refrigeration unit and the thrumming of my heartbeat in my ears. Now they were joined by his thick, raspy breath echoing in his nasal cavities. “My first thought was to kill him while he lay there, still in a stupor. But killing someone is not easy,”

Jon suppressed a laugh – in his experience killing someone is a lot easier than most murderers think before they’ve done the deed. “It is a lot harder than bringing it to life, once you know the trick.”

Jonathan Morganthau found himself only half listening to this part – Spildak was talking about himself, bragging even while he went on about his revulsion at what he claimed he’d created. The detective wondered what actually drove the poor bastard to make this wild, ludicrous confession. For a moment he lost touch with what Frank was saying.

“… to clear my head. I wandered outside into the snow. It’s funny, I have no recollection of even washing my hands, and that’s a ritual that never goes unobserved. Never. But I can still feel the night air on my skin. I see the night sky, clear, bright, bitter-cold, without a single cloud. With the streetlights you couldn’t see more than a handful of stars.

“I remember the sound of every step, every smell that hit me on that walk.”  The sound that came from the man across the table from him grabbed Jon’s chest with a chill hand. It was the rueful laugh of a man who saw nothing funny anymore, anywhere in the world.

“Of course I had to head back eventually. I didn’t even have a coat on. I was glad to see he was still right where I’d left him. Only now he was sitting up on the examining table, his eyes wide open and they had the most malevolent look I’ve ever seen.

“His voice came out as this shrill whisper. Rigor had set in and worn off already. I suppose his mouth was still dry and his lungs were stiff. Still, the anger and hatred in his voice carried just the same.

‘What did you do to me?’ he said, those yellow-tinged eyes staring at me with the pall of death still in them.” Spildak gave an involuntary shudder, as though he could still see them. “Horrified as I had become by what I had accomplished, I think I was still expecting some gratitude from him. After all, I’d restored him to life.

“I assumed wrong. He said some more stuff but I can’t tell you what. I just kneeled there on the floor, retching, trying to keep my lab coat out of the bile. At some point he must’ve walked out of the morgue, ‘cause when I did finally look up again he was gone. Truth to tell, I was glad.

“I had a little sick-time coming so I took it and crawled into a bottle, you know?”  The doc seemed like he wanted some assurance so Jon nodded and made an affirming noise. It made sense that the sick bastard had been on a bender.

The detective still didn’t see what all this was leading to, how in hell it tied in with the kid’s murder. But he thought if he started asking questions the guy would just shoot off on some tangent.

Against his own inclinations Jon had gotten interested in the fool story. In his experience most paranoiacs were bores – they strung together words and thoughts at random like bits of cloth and ribbons to make a kite-tail of fantasies that carried their thoughts off in whatever direction the wind blew them. This was different – the pieces all hung together in a coherent fabric of delusions. He’d even started making actual notes.

“I drank for days – passed out in my easy chair and only got up to get another bottle. I was afraid to go to bed; afraid I’d sober up and find out that it wasn’t all just a horrid dream. Not that I’m a drunk, you understand. The last time I had even had a drink was a champagne toast for New Years.

“Well, eventually my friend Bill showed up to see was I okay. I wasn’t much in the mood for small talk I mean, how could I ask Bill to believe what I had done? But when I opened the door he just pushed past me into the apartment. After a while Bill got me to agree to clean up and go get something to eat. We walked over to a Cuban restaurant on East 110^th. The night air actually did me some good.

“Over a plate of bifstek and papas fritas he told me about a practical joke he pulled after learning about Galvani shocking the frog’s legs. You see, he used a programmable calculator and sent a series of charges through a frog’s body he wired up. Just as they were about to start dissecting it, the frog sat up and waved its arm, Bill said, and the kids nearly jumped out of their skins. He actually had me laughing – something I hadn’t thought possible.

“Somehow I let him talk me into going out on his skiff. So Bill hailed down a cab that took us to the boat basin. The river was grey-green and the wind was churning up frothy white-capped waves. I don’t know what either of us were thinking but I was still drunk enough to make the most awful ideas seem perfectly alright. Bill said the boat was big enough to handle the waves and we were just going up to the George Washington Bridge and coming back in. No need for life jackets, Bill said but I insisted.” He trailed off with another of those sorrowful shakes of his head. Jon jotted in his notebook while he made some mental calculations, trying to trigger something in his memory: a newspaper report on the discovery of a floater.

 “Well, I’ve got to go to the bathroom before I burst. You’ll excuse me,” Morganthau said in what he meant to be a softly reassuring voice. That broke Spildak’s reverie and for just a moment and their eyes met, if not for the very first time, for the first time in a while.  “I think I’ll grab a of coffee on my way back. Can I get you something?” Spildak shook his head and smiled wanly before the detective headed out the door.

Morgenthau logged on to his computer and navigated his way to the Times archives. He typed in the phrase “boating tragedy” and the date “Jan. 10^th.” The brief report in the local news pages said William Newcastle had been fished out of the Harlem River, his life vest still strapped onto his body, an apparent victim of hypothermia. Mysteriously, his boat was located in its berth at the Westside boat basin. A cold finger traced Jonathan’s spine, squeezing his scalp before letting go.

“Crap,” Morgenthau muttered. If Spildak did have a part in this as he claimed, he would have to take a second look at the Stargale murder. The last thing he needed was a raving lunatic unraveling his neatly tied up conclusions, but he’d always sworn he’d quit the day he caught himself ignoring an inconvenient line of inquiry to keep his clearance rate up.

Just in time, he remembered to slosh some coffee into a Styrofoam cup on his way back to the interrogation room. He pretended to sip it on his way to his seat; the tepid liquid left a murky brown stain on the wall of the cup. Jon sat back down with the small pocket notebook on his lap again.

“You were telling me about the boat ride you and Bill Newcastle took,” he said matter-of-factly. “Did he fall into the water on his own or did you give him a hand?”

“Not me!” Spildak said, showing real agitation for the first time since they had come into the room together. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It was that creature.”

“He was on the boat with you?” Morganthau said in his best bad-cop growl, leaning forward to challenge the doctor, holding eye contact and shading his tone with just a hint of sarcasm.

“He’s been stalking me the whole time.”

The detective leaned back in his chair and scribbled “total schitz!” in his notebook –”persecution complex.” Crazy 101, he thought. Projecting his guilt onto the outside world. The spark of interest was fast extinguishing; the weight of the whole miserable week was falling in on him.

“I don’t know how but he was there in the water next to us.” The doctor’s voice was pitched higher than it had been, words spilling out with a renewed intensity, his sad, tired eyes suddenly ablaze. “I could hear him splashing around. All of a sudden he was right there, clinging to the side of the boat and trying to climb aboard. Before I knew what was happening Bill was up and headed his way, swinging away with an oar. I yelled at him to get back and tried to grab him but I was too late. The creature was clinging to the side of the boat with one hand and had a hold of the oar with the other and he wasn’t about to let go.

“I screamed at the monster to just let go and leave us alone,” the doctor went on, spitting out the story in a steady assault of words, none of the hesitancy or distancing that had been in his voice. “Then I saw Bill disappear over the side and heard a splash as he hit the water. I ran over to where he had been struggling with he creature – the boat was heaving in the choppy water and I nearly lost my balance and went in after him.

“After I’d regained my balance I called to him but he didn’t answer – or if he did I never heard.” His tone was calm and flat again. “The monster let go of the side of the boat. He had what he was after. I could make out the churning in the water as Bill struggled to break it’s grip and get back to the boat, then all I could see against the waves was the creature’s wake as he cut across the waves toward the Jersey palisades, and Bill floating face down, not splashing at all anymore.” Frank Spildak stopped talking and held his head cradled in his hands – his palms covering his eyes. His shoulders bumped up and down in a quiet rhythm of despair.

Jon was grateful for the break. His mind was occupied with questions he didn’t want. Too many threads needed untangling but all he felt was a bone-deep tiredness. The doctor’d given him more than enough to ship him off as an EDP – because this person was surely emotionally disturbed, to say the least. He wasn’t going anywhere except Bellevue while the detective sorted it all out.

Jon wished heartily that Helen would be there when he got home to hold him but he knew all he’d have waiting for him was a sink full of dirty dishes, only a glass of bourbon to comfort him. Morgenthau left the doctor handcuffed to the table while he went out into the bubbling chaos of the station house to do the paperwork for a psych hold. Then he got his coat and left the rest in the hands of the desk sergeant.

Alone in the alley behind the precinct house a cold breeze washed over Det. Jonathan Morgenthau like a cleansing shower as he watched the clouds of breath against the pink glow of the street lights. A pale ring circled the moon. A contingent of tiny snowflakes drifted around in the air. He was relieved to see the pavement was black and only a little shiny.

As he started toward the subway, Jon heard a second set of footsteps on the freezing pavement. The unmistakable scent of decay assaulted his nostrils. He wrapped his fingers around the butt of the pistol under his coat, ready to spin on his heels and confront whoever was behind him. He froze in place when he felt a large hand grip his arm. Even through the overcoat and suit jacket, he could feel the pressure of each individual finger.

“I heard him tell you everything,” said a gravel-coated voice, calm yet menacing without need to be loud. “But he got everything wrong.” Jon wanted more than anything to not turn around but he had to in spite of himself. Even in the dim light the man holding his arm had a dreadful cast – the color of an almost-healed bruise, his lips tinged blue. “Everything is wrong,” he added, more to himself than to Jon.

Morgenthau had seen all manner of disgusting things on the job but he had to swallow hard to keep his nausea in check. The eyes, they were just as Spildak had described them, yet so much more grotesque than his imagination had allowed. Fear engulfed him, even though nothing the creature did was actually threatening. He sensed from its tone that he was not in any immediate danger. Despite all his training the detective let loose of his gun.

“It’s just a man. Just a man,” Jon repeated to himself silently, unconvinced. He clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, but not from the cold.

“It’s true that I killed that man on the boat – his friend. But I didn’t mean to,” the man, or whatever it was, went on. “I’d never killed a soul in all my life. I had never been that kind of man. I just needed to talk to talk to the doc,” it said “I had to talk to someone.

“I tracked him, waited for days for him to come out from his apartment. I needed a place where we wouldn’t be interrupted and where he couldn’t just run. So when they got on that boat it seemed ideal.

“That guy, he shouldn’t’ve attacked me – I wasn’t gonna hurt anyone. Then he fell overboard and I was just trying to get hold of him, to drag him onto dry ground. The water must’a been awful cold – I can’t really feel it anymore, y’know?”  Jon made no response and the creature did not wait for one. “Anyway, it wasn’t any time at all before he stopped struggling – just shivered all over, then stopped moving altogether. I was scared. I just swam away.

“Now the kid, that was another story.” Morgethau’s detective mind kicked in at that, his interest overwhelming his fear. That had his attention“By then I was nothing but mad,” he said. Jon noticed that no cloud of breath formed when the creature spoke but he wasn’t going anywhere until he’d heard him out.

“All I could think was I wanted the doc to suffer – to make him feel as helpless, as bewildered and filled with fear as me. I spotted the kid – I’d seen him going in and out of the building, bringing in groceries. I had nothing against him personally, but  he was close to the doc and easy to reach so I followed him to those projects by the river. I grabbed him and snapped his neck. It was like nothing at all – just a little pop.” Morgenthau had heard other people describe that sound. He felt the burn of bile in the back of his throat and swallowed hard. The other took no notice.

“Afterward I took the medal he’d been wearing and went back to the doc’s apartment. The door was unlocked and I could hear him banging around in the next room. Was having anything to say to him past, caring what he had to say. I dropped the kid’s medal into a coat pocket hanging next to the door and took off. I thought I was pretty damn smart.          

“Then I saw a headline saying cleaning lady had done it. The newspaper said you had found the evidence the in her coat. That’s why I have to talk to you. You’ve got to make it come out the right way.” The thing let go of Jon’s arm. “You don’t need to worry, I won’t be bothering anyone anymore. And I’m already being punished.”

Det. Morganthau pulled his gun as the figure receded into the shadows but he wondered what possible good it would do if he did shoot.

“Sure, I’ve got to make it all come out right,” Jon heard himself saying out loud. “Just tell me how.” His quavering voice did not even sound like his own.

He could get the Fuertes woman sprung, alright. He knew where the holes were in the case he’d built against her. Spildak could take the fall and if his lawyer let him testify he would do his time in a psych ward. But that didn’t sit well with him either. The doctor hadn’t actually committed a crime – at least not one in the law books.

The ADA’d be pissed if he torpedoed the case against the Fuentes woman and then didn’t close it. But how was he supposed to explain a dead man’s fingerprints on the Confirmation medallion?

All the way home he listened to the monster’s words echo in the clatter of the subway tracks: “There’s a difference between being able to walk around and being alive. Pray to whatever God you believe in that you never find out what it is.”

The End