The Three Dollar Phoenix by Walt Sautter (rooftoppers .txt) 📖

emerged, holding a set of mud spattered, license plates and a screwdriver. He slowly made his way to the Ford, bent over as best he could, and attached the plates.
“That’ll do it Doc” he said in an out of breath gasp.
Ed thanked him and drove away towards downtown..
He pulled up to the curb, in front of an old, red brick building. Allbright Hotel, read an unlit neon sign hanging over its entrance. He walked to the desk, behind which a thin, elderly man sat in a tattered easy chair. He looked up from the newspaper he held, but remained seated, as Ed approached.
“Seventy-five, that’s all I got” he said before Ed could utter a word.
“Seventy-five?” Ed repeated.
“Yeah, seventy-five, sixty-five by the week or fifty-five a month. Wanna see it?”
“Martin, come here” he shouted through the wrinkled curtain covering the door behind the desk before Ed could even reply.
In an instant, a skinny black kid appeared in the doorway.
“Show this man one fifteen the seventy-five”, the clerk commanded. Ed followed the kid silently down a narrow corridor, past the wooden panel doors which lined its crack covered walls. The dim lights made the old red carpet look even more worn than it was and several pieces of missing plaster on the ceiling, added to the look of deterioration.
The kid stopped at one fifteen, unlocked and opened the door. A faint trace of mildew odor emanated from the room as Ed entered. It was about ten by fifteen with a single bed at its center, covered by a faded blue quilt. A dresser was placed between two large windows overlooking a narrow alley, with an adjacent brick wall for scenery. Matching night tables were pushed against the bed on either side and the bare floor was covered by three small throw rugs.
Ed could see the bathroom in the cocked mirror, above the dresser. It had an old fashion, cast iron bathtub, the kind with legs, and a sink on a long, porcelain pedestal. He walked over to the bed and pulled back the cover to expose the clean, white sheets. The place seemed pretty clean, in spite of the obvious wear and tear it had endured.
“Looks OK” he said to himself and the boy simultaneously.
He followed the boy back to the desk, paid a month in advance and got his suitcase from the car. He put it in the room, but didn’t bother unpacking, instead he walked to the bank on the corner. It had one of those money machines, the kind that was open all the time. That would be fine. Machines never ask for I.D., as long as you’ve got your plastic card. He opened an account for George Plumber, with sixty-five hundred dollars.
The next morning, Ed awakened with a start. He wasn’t sure where he was for a moment. Then, he remembered and relaxed back against the head board. He couldn’t be sure of the time. The sun rarely struck the wall in the alley facing the windows and the room was always poorly illuminated, no matter what time it was. He reached for the watch on the night stand, eight ten it read.
He wanted to call Angie this morning. The coffee shop down the street had a pay phone. He’d have breakfast there and make the call. He showered and dressed.
The desk clerk was seated exactly as he had been the night before. His manikin like pose remained undisturbed as Ed passed through the lobby. He walked the short distance to the shop, entered, placed his order and went to the phone booth, while it was being readied.
“Hello, Angie, this is Ed, Ed Bennett” he began.
“I got the papers from the funeral home, Doctor Bennett” she replied intuitively.
“The certificate was one of them. I’ve got it right here, in front of me.”
“What is the cause of death listed on it?” he asked.
“Myocardial infarction” she recited, in a slow, labored, phonetic voice.
“That’s a heart attack” Ed translated.
“What’s the doctor’s name at the bottom?”
“A. K. Thompson, MD” she read carefully.
Ed tried once again to comfort her before the conversation ended. He knew that time, not words, would be needed to heal the deep wound Al’s death had inflected on her. He hoped his words however, could ward off the infectious depression that often attacks those bereaved and he spread his soothing, verbal ointment, as best he could.
He hung up the phone with one hand and simultaneously reached into his pocket, with the other, for more coins. He called information and then dialed St. Anne’s. No A.K. Thompson was employed here, not now anyway. He was a part timer in the emergency room, who worked but a few weeks and had quit three days ago, the day after Al died.
Ed left the booth and went to the counter, to be greeted by a plate of cold bacon and eggs. He was on the phone longer than he had planned. He ate the cold food without complaint, stopping periodically and gazing with trance like stares, trying over and over again, to piece it all together.
He’d have to go St. Anne’s, he decided, as he rose from the half eaten meal. Maybe some answers could be found there. Although, he knew that realistically, the odds were against it, he’d go anyway. He was running out of choices. He was beginning to feel like a rat trapped in a maze. He was being occasionally tantalized by crumbs of true and then, suddenly, finding himself at the end of a blind passage. Escape from the labyrinth was beginning to seem as impossible. He was emotionally imprisoned by it, fully committed to its resolve, in spite of the consequences.
He drove to St. Anne’s, his head spinning with ambiguous thoughts, of what to do next and the fate that might await him. As he parked the car, he strained to rid the self doubt, that was starting to gnaw at him.
“You can’t chicken out now. It’s too late for that” pounded through his brain. Then, his thoughts turned to the clinic and Al’s still, white face and he drew strength from the rage that began to re-ignite within him.
Within seconds he snapped open the car door and walked briskly towards the emergency room entrance. He stopped for a moment before he reached the door, took out his wallet and fumbled through the collection of business cards he had accumulated. He was never sure why he’d saved them, but now he was glad he had. There was the one he wanted. He put it in his shirt pocket and proceeded to the desk.
“My name is John Volpe and I’m with Country Medical Associates, Incorporated” he began.
“We are interested in hiring a Doctor A.K. Thompson at our facility and he listed St. Anne’s emergency unit as his last place of employment. We, of course, are required to run a routine investigation of previous employers on anyone who applies to our group. We generally like to talk directly to the people that worked with him. I wonder if you might be kind enough to give us some elementary information about Doctor Thompson” he said convincingly and handed the card from his shirt pocket to the woman behind the desk.
She accepted the card and looked at it carefully. Ed purposely used the card of a medical group some fifty miles away. He knew the odds on her recognizing either the group or the name on the card were low but he still felt a bit apprehensive as she examined it.
“He was only here for about two or three weeks, part time evenings, I think” she said as she looked up. “I really don’t know much about him.”
“Is there anyone here who worked with him?” Ed asked.
The woman paused for a moment, then picked up the telephone.
“Doctor Answorth, please come to the emergency room desk, Doctor Answorth” echoed the PA. She repeated the message a second time.
“He should be here, shortly. I’m sure he worked with Doctor Thompson at least once or twice.”
Ed waited patiently. In a few minutes, a short, heavy set man, wearing a white lab coat, with a stethoscope about his neck, rounded the corner.
“Doctor Answorth, this is Mr. Volpe. He’s from the Country Medical Associates. Doctor Thompson has applied for a position with his group and he’s here on a routine reference check” the woman behind the desk announced. Answorth extended his hand with a smile.
“I don’t know what I can tell you. I only worked with the man, maybe three or four times. He wasn’t here that long.”
“Could you tell me something about your impressions of his performance when you did work with him?”
Ed took a pen and small note pad from his pocket so as to give the interview an official appearance.
“He seemed highly qualified, as a mater of fact, much better than the average. He was an older guy, had a lot of experience behind him” replied Answorth.
“Did he ever mention any previous employments?”
“Don’t you have that information on his application?” questioned Answorth.
“Sure, we do, but we want to be able to cross reference some of it, if you know what I mean” replied Ed with a smile. Answorth accepted the logic without argument.
“He talked about a private practice, he had and about working at a private upstate New York hospital. He’d been around. I really couldn’t figure out why he was part timing in a place like this, to be honest with you. He talked like he was used to a lot of money and he wasn’t going to make that here. He could have made a lot more somewhere else.
The guy really knew his stuff.”
“How come he left?” asked Ed.
“That’s a good question. He only worked here for two or three weeks. During the last two days he worked two shifts, days and evenings. He even went around and asked guys if they wanted time off and if they said ‘yes’, he took their shifts. The man was so tired after the third day, he was falling sleep on his feet.
Then one day, I came in and he was gone. He quit, just like that” replied Answorth with a snap of his fingers.
“What day did he leave?”
“It was only a few days ago, last Monday, I guess “ he paused,
“It was Monday.”
Ed continued to question him about other incidentals, in order to give the whole thing a realistic look. Actually, he had already heard enough. The way he figured it, Thompson took the job at St. Anne’s, so as to be there when Al came to the emergency room. He must have known that he would and just about when, but how did he knew? Answorth said he started working two shifts, three days before the Monday he quit. That was the day Druse came home from Caramore. He worked both shifts for those three days to be sure he didn’t miss him. Somehow, the whole thing was planned, of that, Ed was sure.
He left the ER convinced that Al’s death was surely not due to natural causes, although, exactly what had happened, he couldn’t be positive. An attempt to make it look natural had obviously been made and Thompson was a major part of it.
He sat in his car, deciding what to do next. He knew, the only one that might be able