It was a good bet to stay in the river forever, he told Julia, and if it ever did get hauled out, nobody was going to bother looking for the serial number.
Back in the city, he took her for a ride in his truck.
28
Her father seemed at first to be recovering from his stroke. Then he must have had another one, because when Julia went in there one morning he had taken a sharp turn for the worse. His speech was impossible to make out, and he didn’t seem able to move his legs. Earlier, he’d had to use a bed pan; now Keller found himself called to help when Julia changed her father’s diapers.
The doctor came and hooked up an IV. “Otherwise he’ll starve,” he told Julia, “and even so we can’t monitor him the way we should. He can’t change his mind now, you know, so it’s up to you to let us hospitalize him.”
Later she said, “I don’t know what to do. Whatever I decide is going to be wrong. I just wish—”
“You wish what?”
“Never mind,” she said. “I don’t want to say it.”
It was pretty clear how she’d have finished the sentence. She wished the man would die and get it over with.
Keller went in and watched the old man sleep and wondered how anyone could wish otherwise. Left to his own devices, Roussard would likely turn his face to the wall, refuse food and drink, and be gone in a day or two. But through a miracle of medical science he’d been hooked up to an IV, and Julia had been instructed how to replenish the liquids that dripped into his body, and so he’d go on, until another of his failing systems found a way to shut down.
Keller stood by his bedside and thought of another old man, Giuseppe Ragone or Joey Rags or, God help us, Joe the Dragon. Keller had never thought of him as anything but the old man, and had never actually called him anything to his face. Or had he called him Sir early on? It was possible. He couldn’t remember.
That old man was in decent shape physically until right up to the end, but it was always something, wasn’t it, and in his case it was the mind that didn’t hold up. He started making mistakes and losing track of details, and one time he sent Keller to St. Louis to take care of business, and the business was in a particular hotel room, the number of which the old man wrote down for Keller. Except he didn’t write down the room number, he wrote down 3-1-4, which was nothing like the room number, and all Keller could figure out later was that it was the area code for St. Louis. Keller, sent to the wrong room, did what he was supposed to do, but not to the person he was supposed to do it to. There was a woman in the room, too, so two people died for no reason at all, and what kind of a way was that to run a business?
There were other incidents, enough of them to cut through Dot’s denial, and the capper was when the old man recruited some kid from the high school newspaper to help him write his memoirs. Dot managed to nip that in the bud, and told Keller to take a trip. He was collecting stamps by then, preparing for his retirement, and she urged him to go to a stamp show and register under his own name and use his own credit card for everything.
In other words, be someplace else when it happened.
She’d put a sedative in the old man’s bedtime cup of cocoa, so he’d be sound asleep when she held a pillow over his face. And that was that. Sweet dreams, and a gentler exit than the old man had provided for no end of people over the years.
“I can’t say it’s what he’d have wanted,” Dot told him later, “because he never said, but I’ll tell you this much. It’s what I’d want. So if I ever get like that, Keller, and you’re around, I hope you’ll know what to do.”
He agreed, and she’d rolled her eyes. “Easy to say now,” she said, “but when the time comes, you’ll say to yourself, ‘Let’s see now, wasn’t there something I was supposed to do for Dot? I can’t seem to remember what the hell it was.’”
“I was looking in on your father,” he told Julia. “You know, if there’s anything you want to say to him while you’ve got the chance, this might be a good time.”
“You don’t think—”
“It’s nothing I can put my finger on,” he said, “but for some reason I don’t think it’s going to be more than another day or two.”
She nodded, got to her feet, and went to the sickroom.
Later that night she went upstairs with him. They didn’t make love, but lay together in the dark. She talked about when she was a girl, along with family history that went back before she was born. He didn’t say much but mostly just listened, and thought his own thoughts.
When she went downstairs he got up and went out onto the upstairs porch. It was overcast, with no moon or stars. He thought about the faithful old Sentra, rusting away at the bottom of the Mississippi, and he thought about Dot and his stamps and his mother and the father he’d never known. Funny how there’d be things you wouldn’t think of for ages, and then they’d just pop into your head.
He stayed on the porch for an hour or so, long enough for her to get to sleep, and he was careful on the stairs, avoiding the board that creaked.
Dot had used a pillow. Simple enough, and quick, and the only problem was that it would leave petechial hemorrhages, most noticeably on the eyes. That hadn’t mattered, because the family physician Dot called signed off with barely a look at the deceased. When an elderly person dies of apparent natural causes, you don’t usually have to worry about an autopsy.
Nor would there be an autopsy in this house, for a man who’d suffered two strokes that they knew about and was on the way out with liver cancer. But the doctor might take a more careful look than the old man’s physician in White Plains, and if he saw red pinpoint dots on Clement Roussard’s eyeballs, he’d think Julia had given him a helping hand into the next world. He might not disapprove, he might think it was the final loving act of a dutiful daughter, but why should he get to have an opinion one way or the other?
If they’d been allowed to hospitalize him, and were thus able to monitor him closely, they might have put him on a blood thinner to make further strokes less likely. But with his compromised liver, Coumadin, the blood thinner of choice, could easily make him hemorrhage and bleed out internally. Since that might happen anyway, even without Coumadin, there’d be nothing in such a death to raise suspicions.
Coumadin was a prescription drug, and Keller didn’t have access to it. But before Coumadin was prescribed to prevent clotting in humans, it was called warfarin and used to poison rats; it thinned their blood, and they bled to death.
You didn’t need a prescription for warfarin, but he hadn’t even needed to buy it. He’d come across an old packet of the stuff in the garage, with the gardening supplies. He couldn’t find a sell-by date on it, but thought it would probably still work. Why should the passage of time render it less toxic? And it was very likely not pharmaceutical grade, so you would be well advised not to use it on a human being for therapeutic purposes, as you might with Coumadin. But this wasn’t a case where he had to worry about impurities or side effects, was it?
He added powdered warfarin to the bag holding the IV drip, stood at the man’s bedside while it dripped into his vein. He wondered how it would work, and if it would work.
After a few minutes he went to the kitchen. There was coffee in the pot and he heated a cup in the microwave. If she woke up and came in he’d just say he’d been unable to sleep. But she didn’t wake up and he finished his coffee and rinsed his cup in the sink and went back to the old man’s side.
The doctor barely examined the patient beyond feeling for a pulse. Keller didn’t think he’d have noticed petechial hemorrhages, or even a gunshot wound in the temple. He signed the death certificate, and Julia called the funeral director her family used, and fifteen or twenty people, family or friends, attended the service. Donny Wallings and his wife were there, and he met Patsy and Edgar Morrill, and both couples returned to the house after the service. The body was cremated, which Keller thought was a good idea, all things considered, so there was no cemetery visit, no second service at graveside.