The Fall-Down Artist Page 5

  “Your true talent may lie in being unpopular,” Martin Dorsey said. “But arrangements and compromises and understandings are reached every day by reasonable men. You want in, you’re in. Tomorrow, if you like. You like?”

  “No,” Dorsey said. “I’m just not ready to wage the war against crime and solicit campaign contributions at the same time. Don’t have the energy level for it. Besides, as Mrs. Boyle no doubt told you, I’m busy enough these days to have a machine taking my calls.”

  “Business is good, huh?” Martin Dorsey rested his glass on the desk blotter and then removed it, inspecting the wet ring it left behind. “Glad to hear it. Maybe it makes the reason I asked you to stop by null and void.”

  “Suppose you reveal your reasons, allow my input, and we’ll see.” Dorsey grinned. “Picked that one up in a meeting between two lawyers. They were hoping to settle a domestic dispute by using my input—videotapes.”

  “Carroll, please.” His father had his hands out in supplication. “No more cute shit for a few minutes?”

  “Fine, let’s get to it.”

  “You and I,” Martin Dorsey began, “father and son, but with nothing but a name in common. A lot of crap has taken place over the years, but I can’t change that and you don’t want to, so that’s that. But you did toss away a lot of chances, chances to be much more than you are.”

  “I’ll drink your beer,” Dorsey said, “but the lecture you can pack up your ass.”

  Martin Dorsey smiled thinly. “I don’t give lectures, I make speeches. I’m a politician, remember? Regardless, I have to start out this way. Making things your fault makes me feel better. Makes what I’m about to say sound much more caring. Makes me feel I’m giving the prodigal son his room back.”

  “Now that you have yourself completely fooled”—Dorsey saluted his father with his beer can—“please continue. Tingling. I’m simply tingling.”

  From the desk’s deep center drawer, Martin Dorsey produced what appeared to be a leather-bound photo album. On the red cover, in raised gold script, it read Steel Center Restoration Project, Phase One. Martin Dorsey pushed the album toward his son and began his presentation.

  “I assume you realize that I have not been sitting on my hands since leaving office. I’m a politician, like I said. And a politician is a deal-maker; it’s his job to make the best deal all ways around. It’s always been my favorite part of public life. I know how to make deals, and there are lots of people with money who know I know how. People with money who are looking to make a move.”

  “Keep going,” Dorsey said, crossing the room for another beer. His father waited for him to return to his seat before continuing.

  “I’ve been very busy,” his father said, “making money by closing deals. Making sure the government-backed loans come through, discussing the possibility of a tax break for a company looking to move into the area. I know the people to talk to and I know how to talk.”

  “Who’s disagreeing?”

  “This time,” Martin Dorsey said, tapping his finger on the album cover, “the deal is huge. I’m in with a business group, real top-drawer men with enough vision to see that the old way of making money is dead. Steel, foundry equipment, tractors: that’s all out the window.”

  “Lots of people disagree,” Dorsey said.

  “You one of them?” Martin Dorsey opened the album and nudged it to the edge of the desk, flipping the pages before his son. The first pages held photos of idle and decaying steel mills and equipment plants. In the foreground of these pictures were railroad lines overgrown with vegetation. A few pages later came blueprints and diagrams for new commercial construction. Near the end began a series of artist-conceptualized drawings of sleek metallic-looking industrial buildings, long low barns with additions for office space and newly paved parking lots.

  “Your people behind the new industrial push?” Dorsey asked. “All that high-tech stuff? These are the folks trying to buy up old mill sites, am I right?”

  “Right you are,” his father said. “High tech is a piece of it, but any interested firm is welcome to come take a look. We’re going to pave the way for them, literally. The mills and plants, we’ll buy them up and knock them down. Hell, with the shape they’re in, a good stiff wind will do the job for us. Then rebuild and attract the new companies, the new employers, the new blood. This place, Steel Center, is up in the Mon Valley. The deal for that place, my deal, is cinched. But it’s just the first of many. Look around; every river valley in the area is on its last legs. We’ll rebuild them all.”

  “It could happen,” Dorsey allowed. “The papers have stories about Carnegie Mellon and Pitt research projects that the high-tech people should eat up. But this stuff is all in its infancy. Be careful with your dough.”

  “Again, all types of companies will be enticed,” Martin Dorsey said. “But you seem concerned about our ability to attract high tech. Well, don’t be. Listen, son, they’re here. There’s a company, up off Route Twenty-eight along the Allegheny, that’s already putting out all types of electronic equipment. Defibrillators, the electric paddles they use to whack a person after a heart attack? They’re making experimental ones that are implanted into a patient’s chest like a pacemaker. They can’t fill the orders, there’s that much demand.”

  “Sorry, Pop,” Dorsey said. “I’m in no position to make an investment, if that’s what this is about. Business is good but not that good.”

  “Carroll, I do wish you would stop looking at the world through a green beer bottle,” Martin Dorsey said, shaking his head. “You think I started this speech with a near apology for our lives just to hit you up for a donation? You’re right, you don’t have what it takes for a deal like this. But I do. Not in money, in services; that’s where my value is, and I stand to make a mint. I asked you here to let you know I intend to cut you in on my take. What you’ll get is a fraction of a fraction, but it will pay the mortgage on your Polack town house and keep People’s Natural Gas from removing you some winter from the preferred customers list.”

  “Save it,” Dorsey said. “I’d just have to hire an accountant who would steal it in the end. Besides, why so generous in your old age?”

  “Who’s generous? What am I giving away?” Martin Dorsey asked. “I’m seventy-one years old, and money doesn’t mean what it used to. I can get all I want just by reminding a few guys here and there about some old debt from years ago. It’s the deals that matter, making things happen when maybe they’re not supposed to. Convincing people to see things my way against what they think is their better judgment. Keeps me going like I was thirty again. But you, you’re young and you’re not ambitious by anyone’s standard. You need money to get along. And this I can provide right now.”

  “Don’t need it,” Dorsey said. “Thanks, but I get along okay.”

  “Yes, you do need it; think it over. And don’t thank me because thanks are not in order. I’m old and I want to feel good about myself. This will help to do it. Makes me feel that everything between us has turned out okay. It’s my illusion, my present to myself.”

  “Don’t need it,” Dorsey repeated, shaking an empty can and thinking he had closed the discussion.

  “Think about it,” Martin Dorsey hissed, his eyes suddenly cold. The effect was not lost on Dorsey.

  “I’ll toss it around.”

  “Good,” Martin Dorsey said. “Now get out. I’ll give you a call.”

  5

  Although it might have its rivals, Dorsey was sure the emergency room at Mercy Hospital was the city’s most hectic. Located in Uptown, the hospital sat in the middle of a crumbling neighborhood in which a number of federal renovation projects had fallen miserably short. Patients, mostly violent trauma victims, were abundant, and the most popular insurance was the Department of Public Welfare card. At times the emergency room resembled a battlefield aid station, echoing with the screams of the injured and filled with a rush of interns and residents in blood-smeared white smocks. And yet Dorsey knew Gretc
hen embraced it as the finest classroom she had ever entered.

  In a misting rain Dorsey drove through the hospital’s parking lot and saw Gretchen at the ER door, examining her reflection in the glass. She was dressed in her customary working clothes: the Reebok shoes that allowed her to stay on her feet for hours, corduroy slacks, button-down oxford shirt, and white smock with nameplate. Dorsey could see that a twenty-four-hour on-call shift had done little to disturb her professional appearance. Tall, just a fraction under six feet, with slim legs and hips and just a hint of breasts, she looked striking and dignified.

  Dorsey pulled up and tooted the horn. A short black man in a security guard’s uniform joined Gretchen at the door with an umbrella and led her out to the car, opening the passenger door.

  “You late again,” the security guard said. “You always late. Take care with this woman. She’ll leave your ass behind.”

  “Thank you, Henry.” Gretchen slipped into the car and brushed a drop of rainwater from her hair, which was short and tightly curled. “Let’s hope he learns in time. Have a nice evening.”

  “ ’Night, Dr. Keller.” Henry returned to his station inside the ER door.

  “Sorry, I really am.” Dorsey put the car in drive and started back through the lot. “My father called and wanted to see me.” From the car’s tape deck, Sinatra sang “A New Kind of Love.”

  “And the Celtics and Atlanta went into overtime.” Gretchen smiled and jabbed a finger in his shoulder. “The residents’ lounge has cable TV. We do get an occasional break.” She gave him another jab, then settled into her seat. “But you said your father called. That’s something different.”

  “Well, actually he didn’t call. Ironbox Boyle did the calling. She said that although he refuses to feed me he was willing and even interested in speaking with me.”

  “What was on his mind?” Gretchen looked off at the water as the car started across the Tenth Street bridge, heading for the flats of South Side.

  “Says he wants to make me rich.”

  “That would be a decided improvement.” Gretchen leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes. A grin worked its way across her face. “After he puts you in the chips, you can send a limo to pick me up twenty minutes late.”

  “The shift was a bad one, huh?” Dorsey asked. “You said so in your message.”

  “A madhouse,” she said, letting the other matter drop. “Oh, the first six or seven hours were smooth enough. I even got a few hours’ sleep in the lounge. But then things started downhill. About ten this morning we got an eight-year-old boy with a broken left arm. The fracture was about midshaft in the ulna, and it was a clean one. No shattering and no splintering. We didn’t even bother with the orthopedic resident; I did the setting myself. Plastered myself, too. Well, halfway through the casting the cops come in with this guy for detox and he’s in the absolute depths of the DTs. The whole deal, seeing snakes and slapping at the bugs he says are swarming on his pants. Next thing you know, and I’m not sure how it happened, he breaks loose from the cops—one of which was a female, you’ll be pleased to hear.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with female police officers.” Dorsey turned onto Wharton Street. “It’s just that most of them look more like female impersonators than female police officers.”

  “Thank you for your tolerance.”

  Dorsey pulled the Buick to the curb in front of his row house and Gretchen opened the passenger door and rushed up the front steps in the rain. Dorsey hurried behind her to unlock the door. Inside, she tossed her wet smock over the staircase handrail and continued down the hallway to the kitchen. Dorsey followed behind.

  “So, the boozer breaks loose and he’s a wild man, smacking the walls and stomping on snakes. And, of course, the only thing between him and my eight-year-old patient, who is frightened half to death, is me, having just sent the nurse to the phone to answer a page on my beeper.”

  “Things got a little rough, sounds like.” Dorsey bent down to search for a frying pan in a cabinet below the sink. “Bet he took the first round, but you came back and cleaned his clock in the second.”

  “You can be sure neither of us went the distance,” Gretchen said, seating herself at the kitchen’s Formica-topped table. “I stood straight and tall, hid my trembling knees, squared my shoulders, and yelled for the guy to back off. He in reply smashes right into me. We both go down, and I slipped away and rolled into a ball. At that point the kid was on his own, I’m afraid, but the cops must have caught their breath. They took hold of the boozer and dragged him out.”

  Dorsey set down the frying pan. “You okay? Sure there’s no damage?”

  “Fine. Slight bruise on the right hip, but it’s okay. The kid was a wreck, though. I gave some thought to slipping him a Valium, but the nurse came back and was able to calm him. She’s got kids.” Gretchen took a deep breath that came out as a long sigh, signaling that the story was over and the incident forgotten. “I’m hungry. What’s to eat?”

  “Bacon and eggs,” Dorsey said, peering into the refrigerator. “You like the way I make them.”

  “Not always.” Gretchen laughed. “But tonight they sound good. I’m going to grab a shower while you cook.”

  “Your robe’s in the bedroom closet,” Dorsey said. “Hey, before you go up, take a look at the medical in that file.” Using the frying pan, Dorsey indicated the manila folder on the tabletop. “You take your shower, I’ll never get you to do it. It’ll take five minutes, no more.”

  Gretchen opened the file and studied the contents for a few silent moments. “Can’t anybody in this part of the state drive without getting hit? It’s all I ever see you handle, that and some really hokey comp cases. And something else: must everything I look at be from these cock-and-bull chiropractors? It’s insulting, equating me with them.”

  “C’mon, I don’t do that.” Dorsey forked bacon into the pan. “Besides, there’s some X rays and a CT scan report in there.”

  “And both of them say nothing.” Gretchen closed the file and rose from the table. “No pathology; no disc problems, herniated or bulging. A whiplash case is what you have.” Gretchen pushed the folder away. “Let the bacon fry crisp. I’m going to take a long shower and try to loosen my hip.”

  Dorsey lowered the flame under the bacon and went to the office for his tape player. When he returned he plugged it in above the kitchen counter and put in a cassette of Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert.

  He had first met Gretchen in the waiting room of a large law firm in the Oliver building. The firm did a lot of insurance defense work, and Dorsey was there to be deposed on a personal injury case. Gretchen had accompanied a fellow ER physician who was being questioned about a negligence suit filed against the hospital. Seated on the waiting room’s brown herringbone sofa, Gretchen spoke first, curious as to what Dorsey was doing there. She had been in Pittsburgh for only two weeks, he gathered, was a little on the lonely side, and talked to anyone she rubbed up against. In doing so, she went on to explain that she had just finished her intern training at Hershey Medical Center near her native Lancaster.

  Dorsey was irritated by her at first. The case he was to be deposed on had some serious holes in it, double-and triple-checking that should have been done but proved impossible. But Gretchen was a notch away from being soft-spoken and in an odd, endearing way could not be put off. When Dorsey explained his business she became intrigued, and as Dorsey was being called off to a corner office Gretchen asked if he would like to meet later for a drink. Yes, I would, Dorsey had answered.

  Dorsey fell hard for her. She was young but not so terribly that he found himself explaining himself and his favorite TV shows from boyhood. She was strong and she was tranquil and, though they argued, her even manner usually won out. Everything I’ve never had, Dorsey would tell himself, everything I’ve never had. He knew the beer and jazz was a kick for her; beyond that he didn’t know why she loved him in return. After six months she kept half her wardrobe at Whart
on Street.

  “Please turn that off—please?” Gretchen entered the kitchen, pulling tight her terry-cloth robe. Dorsey hit the stop button, and the tape fell silent. “Over the last twenty-four hours, with the exception of the basketball game from Atlanta, I’ve been cut off from the world. Let’s catch the cable news.”

  At the end of the counter sat a portable TV with the cable lead running under the windowsill, courtesy of Al’s electrical prowess. Dorsey flicked on the set, then went about dividing the food onto two plates before sitting down across from Gretchen. Gretchen chewed each forkful slowly and patiently watched the TV screen. He wondered if the food was registering in her mouth and admired her powers of concentration.

  “Hey.” Gretchen indicated the TV with her fork. “Isn’t that the priest you told me about?”

  Dorsey twisted in his seat and watched as a short, slight priest, bald but with a full salt-and-pepper beard, was led away in handcuffs by sheriff’s deputies. As the videotape played, a monotone commentator explained that Father Andrew Jancek and thirty members of Movement Together had been arrested when they attempted to block the main gate of a steel mill in McKeesport. The mill was scheduled for demolition, and Movement Together had vowed to impede the work. Following their arrest, the commentator went on, the priest and his followers had been released when bail had been posted by the organization’s attorney, Jack Stockman.

  “What is this shit?” Dorsey muttered. Not enough money coming in from the insurance companies, P.I.? Or is this just branching out, tired of kicking my sorry ass? New worlds to conquer, or just dabbling in labor? For money, of course.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” Dorsey said. “Eat your eggs.”

  After making love, they rested in bed and Dorsey gave Gretchen a full report on the meeting with his father. “He says my little piece can grow into a big slice. I said no, he got persuasive, and I said I’d think about it. Which I will do. But for now, what do you think?”