The Night and the Music by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781937387327
Publisher: Telemachus Press, LLC
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

“People come here to die, Mr. Scudder. They check out of hospitals, give up their apartments, and come to Caritas. Because they know we’ll keep them comfortable here. And they know we’ll let them die.”

Carl Orcott was long and lean, with a long sharp nose and a matching chin. Some gray showed in his fair hair and his strawberry-blond mustache. His facial skin was stretched tight over his skull, and there were hollows in his cheeks. He might have been naturally spare of flesh, or worn down by the demands of his job. Because he was a gay man in the last decade of a terrible century, another possibility suggested itself. That he was HIV-positive. That his immune system was compromised. That the virus that would one day kill him was already within him, waiting.

“Since an easy death is our whole reason for being,” he was saying, “it seems a bit much to complain when it occurs. Death is not the enemy here. Death is a friend. Our people are in very bad shape by the time they come to us. You don’t run to a hospice when you get the initial results from a blood test, or when the first purple K-S lesions show up. First you try everything, including denial, and everything works for a while, and finally nothing works, not the AZT, not the pentamidine, not the Louise Hay tapes, not the crystal healing. Not even the denial. When you’re ready for it to be over, you come here and we see you out.” He smiled thinly. “We hold the door for you. We don’t boot you through it.”

“But now you think — ”

“I don’t know what I think.” He selected a briar pipe from a walnut stand that held eight of them, examined it, sniffed its bowl. “Grayson Lewes shouldn’t have died,” he said. “Not when he did. He was doing very well, relatively speaking. He was in agony, he had a CMV infection that was blinding him, but he was still strong. Of course he was dying, they’re all dying, everybody’s dying, but death certainly didn’t appear to be imminent.”

“What happened?”

“He died.”

“What killed him?”

“I don’t know.” He breathed in the smell of the unlit pipe. “Someone went in and found him dead. There was no autopsy. There generally isn’t. What would be the point? Doctors would just as soon not cut up AIDS patients anyway, not wanting the added risk of infection. Of course, most of our general staff are seropositive, but even so you try to avoid unnecessary additional exposure. Quantity could make a difference, and there could be multiple strains. The virus mutates, you see.” He shook his head. “There’s such a great deal we still don’t know.”

“There was no autopsy.”

“No. I thought about ordering one.”

“What stopped you?”

“The same thing that keeps people from getting the antibody test. Fear of what I might find.”

“You think someone killed Lewes.”

“I think it’s possible.”

“Because he died abruptly. But people do that, don’t they? Even if they’re not sick to begin with.

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