Black Cat Weekly #2

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD GIRL! by Jeff Cohen-2

“Jonesy,” I breathed when it was possible, “there’s a guy in blue scrubs attacking a woman in the supply closet with a knife or something.”

Her neck snapped up to look at me on the other side of the desk, and she said what everybody says when they’ve heard something clearly but weren’t prepared to hear it. “What?”

I did not repeat myself because I knew she wasn’t asking me to. “We have to get security or the cops or somebody. She was bleeding.”

Jonesy was a professional and this was not her first emergency. She grabbed the phone on her desk and pushed a button. “I need security in maternity,” she said. “Now.” She hung up the phone before anyone could ask for details and then stood up. The other nurse at the station, a man who looked like he could bench press Schenectady, hadn’t heard what I’d said, but must have heard her on the phone and looked at her.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Supply closet,” she said. “Man with a knife.”

The guy was out of his chair and heading toward the closet faster than Harpo Marx could pull a hot cup of coffee out of his battered trench coat. (That’s fast, for you Philistines.) “Show me,” he said to me.

I wasn’t crazy about the idea of rushing back to the scene of the crime while my child was being born, especially since Sharon and I hadn’t agreed upon a name yet. If I got killed now, she’d probably end up naming the kid Phillip. That’s no thought to take with you to eternity.

But I went anyway because I didn’t want the hospital staff to think I was a chicken. I had met them three hours ago and already their approval meant more to me than my own life. It was possible I had to reprioritize.

I’d made it down this hallway in about six seconds when I was operating strictly on adrenaline. Now that the rush was being replaced by abject terror, I was a little slower retracing my steps.

The burly nurse, whose name tag insisted he be called Randy (which seemed incongruous), led the way, and he was not taking his time. In fact, he was running. I got the impression Randy had played linebacker in high school. I, on the other hand, had played chess and organized trips to Bugs Bunny cartoon festivals.

Randy reached the supply closet much faster than I did, and he did not fumble for keys. The door had been unlocked when I’d walked over before, so I guessed it was always left unlocked. Randy grabbed the knob and pushed the door open. I worried he was obscuring fingerprints on the knob.

Then he just stood in the doorway and stared inside. He didn’t move a muscle.

He stayed that way until I chugged up next to him a few (or more) seconds later. “What did you see?” Randy asked as I came even with him.

“Why?” I was pretty sure I didn’t want to look.

“Because there’s nothing there now.”

That took a second to process, but I’m proud to announce that I did not say, “What?” I walked around Randy, since he was my obstacle toward seeing into the room and was roughly sixteen times my size.

Sure enough, inside the supply closet where I had seen the young man in scrubs stabbing the curly-haired blond woman to death there was a grand total of nothing to indicate there had been something at all unusual going on there maybe a minute earlier.

The two people were gone. All the supplies (which did not include an ice machine, to my chagrin) were in perfect order. I looked at the wall in question and the floor in front of it.

No trace of blood.

“I guess he cleaned up,” I said, and it was the weakest-sounding thing I’d ever uttered in my life. Which if you know me at all is saying a lot.

“Uh-huh,” Randy said. It’s possible he did not totally believe my story.

There was no time to debate the question, however, because two hospital security personnel, in uniform and armed, were suddenly right next to Randy and me. The taller, darker-haired one looked at me and asked, “What’s the emergency?”

Having suddenly entered an Abbott and Costello movie where there’s a gorilla in the room and nobody sees it—seriously, people in Abbott and Costello movies seem to have no peripheral vision—I stammered a little. Randy picked up the slack (and ducked any responsibility for summoning the two guards) by saying, “Gentleman here says he saw a woman being stabbed in this closet.”

The shorter of the security guards looked at Randy, not at me. “When?”

“Like two minutes ago.” Randy was being generous.

Taller guy—they weren’t wearing name tags—turned in my direction. “What did you see, sir?”

I had regained the power of speech and decided to try it out. “Young guy, maybe late twenties, in blue hospital scrubs. Was holding up a young woman, blond hair, curly, also in scrubs, against that wall. He had a blade of some kind in his hand. She was bleeding, here.” I indicated my own midsection around the spot where I’d seen the stain on the woman’s clothing.

The shorter guard walked into the closet to get a better look. “Nothing there now,” he said.

“Well, I guess he cleaned it up.” I know; it sounded even stupider this time.

“I guess.”

I wasn’t in the mood to be taken for a fool. In truth, I don’t remember ever being in that mood. “Shouldn’t you guys be locking down the building or something?” I asked. Wasn’t it Vince Lombardi who said something about being offensive whenever you could? I knew it wasn’t Yogi Berra. “There’s a guy running around here with a sharp object who may very well have killed a young woman in this closet.”

“She was dead?” Randy asked. “You’re sure she was dead?”

The three of them looked at me.

“Well... no. I’m not sure. She had her eyes closed, and he was holding her up. She was definitely bleeding from the wound. She didn’t say anything when I walked in. Seems to me pretty likely she was dead. What should we do about that?”

I had said “we” simply to be polite; I had no intention of doing anything about it. I had a baby getting ready to be born and did not want to disappoint him by not showing up for the birth because I’d gotten a scalpel-wielding maniac mad at me.

It seemed a perfectly reasonable plan at the time.

The two security guards exchanged a somewhat irritated glance at having been summoned double-time to a closet by a deranged man making up nutty stories. The taller one then looked at me. “Why are you here, sir?”

It seemed a somewhat existential question—why is any of us here, really? “What do you mean?” I asked.

“In the hospital. Why are you here in the hospital today?”

“My ex-wife is having a baby.” I didn’t really see how this was relevant to the guy with the sharpened blade, but then I run a one-screen movie theater that shows only comedies. Who was I to argue with a professional?

The shorter guard spoke slowly. “Your... ex-wife is having a baby.”

I figured I knew that already, so he must have meant it in the form of a question, although Alex Trebek, may he rest in peace, would no doubt have disagreed. “Yeah,” I answered.

“So why are you here?” the shorter guard asked.

I felt my eyes close a little. Just a little. “Because I want to be here for the birth of my child. I’m sorry. Why does this matter?”

“Your child?” Randy asked. They were just repeating things I had said now. This did not seem a crime-fighting strategy of which even Inspector Clouseau would have approved.

“Yes, it’s my child.” Because that was true. It was my child. And I resented these guys forcing me to refer to my offspring as “it.” I’d get them for that. “I’ll ask again. How is that relevant?”

The taller guy closed the closet door and then the three of them started leading me down the hallway away from the nurse’s station. “Sir, is this your first child?” the shorter guard asked.

“Yes.” Asking why they wanted to know was just becoming passé, and I saw no reason to continue. Why we were walking in this direction was another mystery I wasn’t sure I wanted solved.

“Sir,” the guard said again, “sometimes when a man’s first child is being born he gets a little overwhelmed, you know? A little nervous. I’ve seen it happen a lot of times here. It’s natural. Your life—” He stopped and looked at the other two men. “—Or at least you ex-wife’s life is going to change. Makes sense you’d be on edge. If you weren’t that would be weird.”

Subtle and nuanced as this approach might have been (if someone else had been using it), I had managed to break through the intricate code he’d been weaving and wasn’t crazy about the insinuations. “I’m not crazy,” I told him. Has that line ever worked on anybody in history? Don’t crazy people say it all the time? “I wasn’t seeing things. There were two people in that closet and one of them was motionless and bleeding. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“You’ve done your bit,” the shorter man said. We had arrived at the destination they’d apparently had in mind, the elevator banks. The other guard hit the “down” button, and it lit up. “We appreciate your letting us know, and we’ll be on the lookout for anyone who matches the description you’ve given us.”

“So that’s it?” I said. “You’re not going to do anything else? A woman might be dead.”

The three men looked around to see if anyone had heard me. There were a few people milling about—no one else waiting for the elevator—and I hadn’t seemed to traumatize anybody. But when the shorter man spoke again, it was in a stage whisper.

“You probably saw something but you’re not thinking clearly,” he hissed. “Now why don’t you go back over there and help your ex have the baby, okay?” He pointed toward the delivery rooms just as the elevator doors opened. The taller guy held the doors open with his left hand.

I still felt insulted and ignored. I wasn’t insane, or at least no more than I had been the day before. “What happens if I call the police?” I asked.

“You’re free to do that,” said the shorter guy, who appeared to be the leader of this merry band. “But if you want to, I’m going to have to insist you use this elevator and call them from outside the hospital. You’re causing a disturbance.”

“A disturbance?” I could play this repeating game if they wanted me to. I gestured in a 360-degree motion. “Who’s disturbed?”

“Don’t make me say it, sir,” he responded. “Now go back and watch your child be born. Okay?”

I went back. I suppose you would have done otherwise?

Back at the maternity suite (which is what I had been instructed a room with various monitors, a hospital bed, a tray of plastic-wrapped surgical instruments “just in case,” several backless paper gowns, and also one comfortable “birthing chair” should be called), I saw that my parents, who had been on high alert since about Sharon’s fifth week of pregnancy, were standing in the room. No doubt they had appeared out of thin air like someone had rubbed the entirely wrong lamp in an Arabian Nights comedy.

“Where’s my milkshake?” my lovely ex-wife said as I made my way back in.

“Can you have that today?” my mother asked Sharon. I kissed her on the cheek because that’s what you’re supposed to do.