Dr. Reyes Goes Dark

The call from Reyes's laboratory came on a Tuesday, nine days after the murder, and it was not the kind of call Wells had ever received from that number before. Reyes's lab manager was a young woman with a voice that had already made its apologies and gotten them over with. Dr. Reyes had not come in since Friday, she said; he had dismissed his appointments without reasons; and when she had gone by his house the housekeeper had met her on the step and would not let her past it. And then she said the thing that mattered.

"He asked for a lawyer. He wouldn't say whose. But when I pressed him he said your name, Mr. Wells. He said tell Martin Wells it isn't the police he wants. Tell him not to bring the police."

Wells wrote none of it down.

Reyes lived on the western slope of the city, in a shingled house on a steep street where the sun came through at five o'clock the way it does in photographs of other places. Wells had been there a dozen times over thirty years — dinners in the era when Vale and Reyes still spoke the same language, the two of them arguing chemistry at the whiteboard in the dining room while the household talked in the kitchen about anything at all. The whiteboard had been gone for a decade now, and the friendship a good deal longer than that, but the house was the same, and the housekeeper was the same, and she met Wells on the step the way she had met the lab manager, with her arms crossed and her face closed.

"He's asking for you," Wells said. "That's the whole of it. He sent for me."

She looked at him for a long moment, deciding, and then stood aside, and the decision cost her something visible.

Reyes was in the back room, in an armchair by the window, in a dressing gown Wells did not recognize and could not have imagined him in. The man Wells had known was thickset and loud and given to laughing at his own jokes before the joke was finished. The man in the chair was thin in a way that was not weight loss but subtraction — as if something had reached in and begun removing him from the inside, quietly, an organ at a time. His skin had the gray of unlit paper. His eyes were still his own, and they were clear, and they were afraid.

"Wells." He did not get up. He did not, it seemed, get up for anything anymore. "You came. Good. Sit down, and shut the door."

Wells sat. The room was warm and smelled faintly of camphor and of something else beneath the camphor, medicinal and sweet, that Wells could not place. On the table by the bed stood a glass of water and a Bible, and Wells, who had never once seen Alan Reyes hold a book that was not a journal article, understood from the Bible more than any physician's report could have told him.

"You look like hell," Wells said.

"I've felt better." Reyes smiled, and the smile was an old smile wearing a stranger. "You want to know what's wrong with me. The doctors don't know what's wrong with me. They've had me on a table twice, and they've told my housekeeper to prepare for a long convalescence, and they write words like idiopathic in their reports because idiopathic is Latin for we give up."

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened." Reyes said it too quickly, and then looked at the window, where the light was going to waste over the rooftops. "Nothing I can tell you," he said, more slowly, and that was the true sentence, and both of them heard it be the true sentence.

Wells leaned forward. "Alan. Nine days ago an old man was beaten to death under the bridge at Rincon Hill. The letter in his pocket was addressed to me. You knew Adrian Vale before I did. If there's anything you know — anything at all —"

"No." It came out fast and hard, a door slamming, and Wells saw the effort it cost, the way a man's hand shakes after he has used all his strength to lift something light. Reyes closed his eyes. When he opened them again his voice had come back down to something like his old courtesy. "I wish to hear no more of that man. Not his name. Not that street. Not the letter. I am done with him, Wells, and what is between him and me is not a legal matter, and it will not be a police matter, and if you bring Inspector Merrick to this house I will not receive her, and I will not receive you again either. Is that understood?"

"Understood," Wells said, and did not mean a word of it, and watched Reyes understand that too, and neither of them said anything more about it.

He stayed an hour. They talked about the firm, about a case from the old days, about the housekeeper's nephew in Sacramento, and the whole time Wells was aware of the conversation as a kind of roof built hastily over a cellar, with something moving down there in the dark that both of them could hear and neither would name. When he stood to go, Reyes caught his sleeve. The grip had almost nothing left in it.

"There was a letter," Reyes said. "Some weeks — no. Never mind. There was no letter. Forget I said it."

"You said some weeks."

"I said never mind." Reyes let go of the sleeve and lay back in the chair, and his voice, when it came, was so low that Wells had to lean in for it. "When the end comes, do the decent thing. The firm's way. Papers, flowers, the whole performance. But do one thing for me that isn't performance. Don't let them put me in the ground still believing I failed him. He was the finest mind I ever stood next to, and I loved him like a brother, and if I failed, then God help the rest of us, because I was careful."

Wells did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing, and the nothing stood in the room like furniture.

The decline, after that, was fast the way rot under paint is fast — invisible at the surface and catastrophic underneath. Wells saw him once more, six days later, and by then the man in the chair had given up even the effort of the old smile. The housekeeper did the talking: the doctors came daily now; he took no visitors; he had begun putting his affairs in order, folder by folder, a man tidying a life as if it were a desk he was leaving. He had burned papers in the yard, she said — she had watched him feed the yard bin for an hour with documents from his study, and when she asked, he had said, old files, and had gone on burning, and she had swept the ash off the porch without a word because there was nothing a word could do.

And there was the midnight business. She told Wells about it on the porch, in a low voice with her back to the door, because she had promised discretion and was spent. That Friday — the night Reyes had first taken to his bed — a letter had come for him by hand, past midnight, delivered by a courier who would not give a name. The master had read it standing in the hall, and she had watched his face while he read, and she had never seen a face do what his face did. He had gone to his study and made a telephone call, she thought, and he had spoken only a few words, and then he had come out of the study gray as ash and had said, if anyone calls for me, I am not at home, and he had not been at home, in any sense, since.

"Did he say who called him?" Wells asked.

"He said one sentence, walking past me on the stairs. He said, forgive me, I am quite lost." She wrung her hands inside her apron. "I thought he meant himself, sir. But the way he said it, I have wondered since if he was passing on a message that came to him."

Wells drove home with the radio off. Forgive me, I am quite lost. He could hear the sentence in Vale's voice, in the voice that had said I can be rid of Mr. Crow the moment I choose — and the two voices would not stay apart in his head, and he pulled the car over on the bridge approach and let the traffic pass him until his hands were steady.

Reyes died on a Friday, eleven days after Wells's second visit, seventeen after the first.

The end, when the housekeeper telephoned, had been quiet; he had gone in his sleep, in the armchair by the window. But the week before, there had been a scene at the firm that Wells did not learn about until afterward, and when he did learn of it he understood that it had been staged, deliberately, with himself kept offstage. Reyes had had himself driven downtown. He could barely walk; the driver had supported him to the elevator. He had asked for the firm, and for the partner, and not for Wells — his instructions on that point had been explicit, the partner told Wells later, and had been repeated twice. Wells's partner was a grave, deliberate man, and Reyes had sat in the conference room with his coat hanging off him like a tarpaulin and had laid a sealed envelope on the table between them. The seal was wax, old-fashioned, pressed with a signet — Wells saw the envelope afterward, in the fireproof cabinet, and recognized the signet as the one Vale and Reyes had had made together, thirty years ago, when the lab was two rooms and a rumor: two interlocked Vs.

"One condition," Reyes had said, and the partner quoted him verbatim because he had understood that he was receiving a dying instruction and that it would be a kind of desecration to paraphrase it. "The envelope is to remain sealed, in your cabinet, untouched. It is to be opened only upon the death of Dr. Adrian Vale. Not before. Not upon rumor. Death. If he outlives me by forty years, it waits forty years. Do we have an agreement?"

The partner had agreed. Reyes had stood — it took him two tries — and had shaken the man's hand with both of his own, and had said, thank you, you have no idea what you are carrying, and had let the driver take him home. He never came downtown again.

Wells heard all of this on the Saturday, and he sat in his office with the door shut for a long time afterward, looking at the fireproof cabinet across the room as if it had a face. The envelope was in there, sealed, waiting on the death of a man whose death, Wells now understood with a certainty that arrived in the body and not the mind, would not be a natural event. Alan Reyes had written down what he knew, whatever it was, and had rigged it like a dead man's switch.

He went to Folsom Street first, on the Monday evening, after the building had emptied. The front of the Vale Biolabs headquarters was all glass and good intentions, the lobby lit gold, the reception desk unmanned and beautiful. Wells walked around the block, into Harriet Alley, where the cold came down between the loading docks and the rear brickwork of the lab and pooled there like something that had learned the trick from water.

The steel door stood at the bottom of three concrete steps, gray as the alley, with its one light burning above it and its card reader dark. It had no nameplate. It had no number. It was a door built by people who understood that every building tells two stories, and that this one was not for the glass front to hear. Wells climbed the steps and knocked — not the polite knuckle-tap of a visitor but the flat blow of a man who has decided to be heard — and the sound went into the building and did not come back.

He knocked again. And then, close to the steel, he heard it: not footsteps — the thing made no footsteps — but the soft electric click of the intercom waking, and then a voice, inches from his ear on the other side of an inch and a half of metal.

"Go home, Wells."

He knew the voice and did not know it. It had Vale's pitch and none of Vale's grain; it was thin where Vale's voice was built, and there was a roughness in it, a dry scraping, like cloth moving over paper. And under the words themselves there was something worse than the words: the voice was afraid. Not of him. A fear with its back pressed to a wall.

"Adrian. It's Martin. Two people are dead, and Alan Reyes is dead, and I have stood in the room on Eddy Street and read eight words in your handwriting. For God's sake, open the door. Let me in, or let me see you at Broadway, or tell me to go to hell in a whole sentence — but say something that is yours."

For a long moment there was nothing but the hum of the light above the door. Then the voice came back, quieter, and this time there was no mistaking the thing underneath it, which was a grief so far past weeping that it had come out the other side as protocol.

"I can receive no one," it said. "Pray God I never receive anyone again. Leave me alone. If you have any care left for what I was — leave me alone."

The intercom died. The light above the door burned on. Wells stood on the steps in the dark with his hand raised to knock again, and did not knock, because there is a time to pound on a door and a time to understand that the man behind it is not refusing you — he is containing something, the way the door contains the alley, and both refusals are for your sake.

He drove to Broadway anyway. It was past ten when the Victorian house came up ahead of him, every window dark behind its shutters but one, high in the back wing — the wing Wells had never been invited into. He rang the bell. Denise answered with the chain on, and her face in the gap was the face of a woman who had been answering bells at night for a month and had stopped sleeping about it.

"Mr. Wells. The doctor isn't receiving."

"Denise. I heard his voice tonight, on the intercom at Folsom. It isn't his voice."

The chain did not come off. Her eyes went past his shoulder to the empty street, and then came back, and she was quiet a long time, and when she spoke it was barely above the hiss of the gas lamps.

"Then you've heard it too," she said, and closed the door.