Hide (Detective D.D. Warren, #2)(38)

Both of them snapped to attention.

"What can you tell us about Eola?" Warren asked Charlie now.

Charlie tilted his head to the side. "You want the straight story or the version with the gossip mingled in?"

"We'd like to hear it all," Warren said.

"Eola came to us a young man. Admitted by his parents, that's what I was told. They dropped him off and hightailed it back to their mansion, never to return. Rumor was, Eola had had an inappropriate relationship with his younger sister. His parents discovered them together, and that was that. Bye-bye, Christopher.

"Eola was a good-looking kid. Light brown hair, bright blue eyes. Not big. Maybe six feet, but slender, refined. Maybe even a tad effeminate, which is why most of the ANs didn't consider him a threat right away.

"He was also smart. Very social. You'd think someone with his privileged upbringing would hold himself apart. Instead, he liked to hang out in the Day Room, playing music for his fellow patients, holding a reading hour. More important, he'd roll cigarettes—I know that's all considered evil now, but back in those days, everyone smoked, the doctors, the nurses, the patients. In fact, one of the best ways to guarantee cooperation from a patient was to give him a cigarette. It's simply how things were done.

"Well, most of the cigarettes were roll-your-own, and some of the patients whose motor skills were impaired by various medications had a hard time getting it done. So Christopher would help them. That's what he was doing the first time I saw him. Sitting in the Sunroom, cheerfully rolling cigarettes for a line of patients. It's funny, but first time he looked up and saw me, I knew I didn't like him. I knew he was trouble. It was his eyes. Shark eyes."

"What did Eola do?" Dodge interrupted. "Why was he considered such a menace?"

"He learned the system."

I perked up. I couldn't help myself. Sitting in the nearby car, my ear glued to the cracked open window, I had a sense of deja vu, of my father talking, of a shadowy man named Christopher Eola taking the same notes I once did. It gave me a chill.

"The system?" Dodge was asking.

"Hours, shift changes, dinner breaks. And, more important, medications. No one put it together until after poor Inge's murder. But as management started asking more questions, it came out that some of the ANs had been falling asleep on their shifts. Except it wasn't just one guy or one time. It was everyone, all the time. Well, this got the head nurse's goat. So one night Jill did a surprise inspection of admitting. She found Eola in the office, mixing something into the AN's brown-bag dinner. He looked up, spotted her, and, quite suddenly, smiled.

[page]"Moment she saw that look, Jill knew she was dead. She grabbed the door and slammed it shut, trapping Eola inside. Eola tried to reason with her. Told her she was overreacting, swore he could explain everything. Jill dug in her heels. Next thing she knew, Eola was throwing himself at the door, snarling like an animal. A large man probably could've busted himself out, but like I said, Eola was all brains, not brawn. Jill kept Eola trapped for fifteen minutes, until another attendant arrived and they'd loaded up some sodium amytal.

"Later, they determined Eola had been stealing thorazine capsules from his fellow patients and mixing the powder into the ANs' food. Furthermore, he would encourage his fellow patients into various disagreements, creating situations upstairs. When the AN rushed up to handle the problem, he'd slip into the office and go to work. Of course, Christopher never admitted to anything. Anytime you asked him a question, he'd just smile."

Warren and Dodge were exchanging looks again. "Sounds like Eola had plenty of opportunities to wander the grounds."

"Guess so."

'And what year was this?"

"Eola was admitted in '74."

"How old?"

"I believe he was twenty at the time."

"And what happened to him?"

"He finally got caught."

"Doing what?"

"Organizing the patients into a revolt. Somewhere along the way, he'd commandeered one of the leather mats from an isolation room. Then he recruited the more 'with it' patients into creating a disturbance. When the AN appeared upstairs, the patients charged him with the mat, knocked him out cold. But Eola had made a slight miscalculation. We had another patient here at the time— Rob George. Former heavyweight champion. He spent his first two years in the hospital catatonic. But just three days earlier, he'd walked all the way to the Day Room by himself. The AN on duty got him back to bed without incident, only to find him sitting up an hour later. Clearly, he was coming 'round.

"Well, the night of Eola's revolt, the whole unit got hopping. And apparently this got our boxing champion outta bed. Rob appeared in the middle of the Day Room. He looked at the AN, unconscious on the ground. Then stared at Christopher, grinning back up at him.

" 'Good news, man—' Eola started to say.

"And Mr. George pulled back his fist and knocked Christopher out cold. Good solid left-hand hook. Then he went back to bed. One of the other patients went down to the office at that point and took the phone off the hook. Without Eola, no one knew what to do.

"The ANs arrived, got everything in order. Next morning, Rob woke up and asked for his mother. Six weeks later, he was released. According to him, he never remembered the events of that night. I understand from the doctors, however, that upon emerging from a catatonic state, most patients' first movements are reflexive, a matter of muscle memory. Like sitting up. Or walking. Or, I guess, if you're a former boxing champ, a solid left hook."