by Elaine Viets
“Sure,” I said.
“Would you go to the cafeteria and get me a Coke? I have this funny chemical taste in my mouth and soda helps get rid of it.”
“Sure. I have to make a call and see if Leo’s turned up yet, anyway. I’ll be back in five.”
I was back in fifteen, actually. The cafeteria was busy. The Heart’s Desire phone was busy. Everything took longer than I expected. A skinny bald guy in a hurry brushed by me and I knocked part of Georgia’s Coke down the back of a tall blond woman. I apologized, but her even bigger blond husband looked like he wanted the death penalty for spilling a spoonful of Coke on a silk blouse. At least I missed the woman in the wheelchair. The boney guy pushing her gave me a dirty look.
I balanced the rest of the Coke on a metal shelf at a pay phone, dug out my phone card again, and called the Heart’s Desire, hoping I could get my two questions answered: Where did Leo go to school? And what made him start stripping? Damn, I was getting careless. I’d spent all that time with the guy and didn’t bother to ask. I wanted to believe it was because I was worried about Georgia. But there was no point in being noble. I knew the sight of a seminude stripper had shorted out my brain cells.
I finally got through to the Heart’s Desire and talked with Steve the manager. No one had seen hide nor hair of Leo D. Nardo. He hadn’t called in yet, Steve said. Officer Friendly was scheduled as the main act for that evening, unless they heard from Leo, of course. Marlene had raised my consciousness, and I was really starting to worry. This was a long time for Leo to be missing: two days at the rate of twelve hundred dollars minimum. This vacation was costing him at least twenty-four hundred in lost income. I wanted him back for purely selfish reasons. If he didn’t show up soon, I’d have to do a day in another stripper’s life.
It was twelve-fifteen when I made it back to radiation oncology. I opened the door, balancing the Coke carefully. The place was dead quiet. No patients were in the waiting room. Georgia was not in her chair. They must have called her inside, finally. I went to ask the receptionist how long it would be. She was sitting at her desk, with an open romance novel in front of her. She didn’t look up.
She never would again. She’d been shot in the back of the head.
“Oh, my god,” I said, the horrifying sight finally registering. “Oh, my god. Georgia! Georgia! Where are you, Georgia?”
I ran inside to the patients’ waiting area, but she wasn’t there. I ran down the inner hall, calling her name, and threw open the door to the radiation therapy room. The flirtatious radiation therapist from yesterday was lying on the floor, shot in the chest. A doctor was lying crumpled behind him, shot in the head. It looked like the doctor had his hands on the therapist’s shoulders. Had he been using the therapist as a human shield? If so, it didn’t work.
There was a funny fresh smell, a rusty smell. The floor and walls were splashed and spattered with blood. For one weird moment, I thought of a charity paintball game I’d covered, where grown guys ran around and shot each other with red paint. Then I saw the pooled blood on the floor and remembered that wasn’t paint.
“Georgia!” I screamed. No one heard me. We were cut off from the rest of the hospital, and the office was supposed to be closed for lunch. No one would come through the doors anytime soon, except maybe the killer. I ran blindly through the warren of rooms and halls, and somehow came back out into the waiting room, where I heard a mewling whimper, and found Georgia curled into a ball under the magazine table. She looked so tiny and helpless. “He didn’t kill me,” she kept saying. “He killed everyone else but he didn’t kill me.”
I pulled her out. She sobbed on my shoulder and I rocked her in my arms like a baby. I was bewildered. The fiercest woman I knew had become this soggy, sobbing creature. I don’t know how long I sat on the floor with her, but it was probably only a minute or so. I felt oddly calm, like I was moving in slow motion. I had to get help. How do you do that in a hospital? Call 911 and tell the police to follow the blue line to radiation oncology? Run screaming down the hall? Wait. The hospital had a switchboard operator. She would know what to do. I used the receptionist’s phone and told the operator three people in radiation oncology had been shot and I thought they were all dead. My voice only shook a little. Next, I called the Gazette city desk and gave them a brief account of what I knew, which wasn’t much. By that time I heard the hospital operator say, “Code Yellow, Radiation Oncology. Code Yellow, Radiation Oncology,” and the first of the hospital security came running through the door.
Soon the place was crawling with police in uniforms, homicide detectives, police brass, evidence techs, police photographers with regular and video cameras. The EMTs couldn’t do anything but fuss over Georgia. The other three were beyond help. The police blocked off the hall and the emergency exits, but the TV reporters, the Gazette staffers, the weeklies, the AP stringer, even the radio stations, were all there, waiting in the main corridor for the body bags to be hauled out and yelling questions that nobody could answer every time they saw someone. But that was their job.
This was going to be a high-profile case, and I was right in the middle of it. Mark Mayhew was one of the homicide detectives. We’d known each other a long time, but he was all business today. He took me to an empty office down the hall, and kept asking me questions. I repeated my story until I was sick of it. I hadn’t seen anyone. I hadn’t heard anyone. I hadn’t heard anything, period. By the time I’d come back with Georgia’s Coke, the shooting was all over.
Mayhew had plenty of evidence to corroborate my story. I was still clutching the cafeteria receipt with the time (12:03 P.M.) printed on it, although I’d dropped the Coke by the receptionist’s desk. My bloody footprints were all over the back rooms and hall, trampling the crime scene, so he could see I’d run around there like a chicken with its head cut off.
From the questions he asked, I knew one thing puzzled Mayhew: Why didn’t anyone hear the shots?
I wasn’t surprised. The radiation oncology department was isolated in a separate wing, off a dead-end hallway. There were no phones, restrooms, or other reasons to wander down there. There weren’t even any benches to sit on. The heavy wooden door was always closed. It was easy to pass by this grim department, when the main corridors were bright and noisy with people talking, babies crying, and food carts rattling by.
A uniformed officer poked his head in the office and asked Mayhew to come with him.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Why don’t you write down what you just told me? And don’t leave.”
I finished writing my statement, and he wasn’t back yet. I shivered in the uncomfortable chair for a while, and when I got tired of that, I got up and looked down the hallway. It was still blocked off, and I figured the bodies hadn’t been moved yet. I heard the police photographers talking in the hall. They’d seen the same thing I did: the doctor had used the radiation therapist for a human shield. He’d died a coward, and everyone knew it. I wondered: If the doc had dropped the therapist and run for it, would he have made it out the door and lived?
I’d covered other random shootings over the years: convenience store holdups, a gunman who went crazy in a cafeteria, another who shot up a supermarket late one night. I did some of the victim profiles. They were the kind of good people that bad things happen to. I still remembered one of the convenience store victims with particular sadness. He was a thirty-six-year-old African American teacher who stopped to buy his wife a rose. That romantic gesture cost him his life. The cafeteria victims included a seventy-year-old nun having lunch with three friends from high school. Yes, high school. St. Louis friendships lasted a long time. In this case, until death. All four women died together. One of the victims in the supermarket holdup was a mother of two who ran out of Pampers at the wrong time. Her husband had stayed home with the kids. The checker who died with her was working her way through college. She was twenty-one.
These people had no connection with the crimes or the shooters. Nobody had anythin
g bad to say about them, and you’d be surprised how eager people are to speak ill of the dead, as long as it’s not for attribution.
That’s what was different about these hospital murders. These victims had been cruel, or at the very least, thoughtless to their patients. It was almost like someone killed them deliberately. If so, the cops were going to have a heck of a time tracking all their enemies. Might as well open the phone book and point.
When Mayhew finally came back, we went over my statement again, and I signed it.
“Now can I see Georgia?” I asked.
“You can see her after she gives us a statement downtown.”
“Downtown? You’re dragging a woman with cancer to police headquarters?”
“The doctors checked her out. She’s fine, Francesca,” Mayhew said. “She’s sitting up cracking jokes.”
“It’s an act,” I said. I’d seen her collapsed and crying. “She’s sick and upset. She needs me to be with her.”
“She needs a shot of Scotch,” Mayhew said. “Quit worrying. I’m not going to beat her with a rubber hose. We just need her statement, and she’ll be more relaxed giving it downtown.”
“At least let me talk to her, so I know she’s okay.”
“After we talk to her, you can see her. You can even take her home.”
“She’d better be okay,” I said, but my threat sounded pointless. The police let me out a back exit, away from the press. I didn’t want to scoop my paper by showing up on TV. I couldn’t believe the sun was shining. I felt like I’d been cooped up in there for a month.
I drove to police headquarters on Clark and Tucker, but Mayhew wouldn’t let me upstairs. I paced around in the lobby. It had that gray-brown marble that’s supposed to be impressive but has been used in too many public restrooms. I saw other worried people who looked like they’d grabbed the first thing in their closet and run out the door. They were waiting, like me. No one said much.
Georgia finally came out of the elevator. She looked wrinkled and worn as a charity suit, but she said she was fine, dammit, and would I quit fussing and take her home. Didn’t I have a story to write for the next edition?
“If I’m writing the story, at least tell me what happened,” I said, opening the car door. “I didn’t see anything.”
She took a deep breath, as if the subject was still painful to talk about, and said, “I didn’t see anything, either. After you left for the cafeteria, the receptionist hung up the phone and probably returned to her book. She was quiet, anyway, and there wasn’t anyone else around for her to torment. I was reading an old Time magazine from December. You’d think for what I’m paying here, they could afford newer magazines.
“I heard a loud pop about five minutes later, and didn’t look up. I thought it was kids setting off firecrackers. Then I heard more pops coming from a back room and a voice begging, ‘Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!’ Then there were more pops and silence. By this time, I’d figured out somebody had a gun and I was probably next. I threw myself down on the floor and crawled under the table, expecting him to come back out and kill me, too.”
“You keep calling the killer he,” I said. “Do you think the shooter was male? Can you give a description?”
“You sound like a cop,” she said, and in her present mood, that was no compliment. “No, I never saw him. I never even saw his shoes when I hid under the table and he ran out the door. I keep saying him, but it could be a her. But it would have to be a big woman. Maybe it was the footsteps that made me think it was a man. They seemed heavy. The person definitely wasn’t wearing heels. But lots of women don’t wear heels, especially at a hospital.
“I’m so useless as a witness. I couldn’t even remember how many shots were fired. And I’m supposed to be a trained observer.”
Her voice was getting weak and wavery. She sank back in the car seat, and her thin bluish eyelids fluttered shut. Her next sentence was almost a wail. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I was sitting right by the receptionist. He could have popped me in the back of the head and I’d have never known what hit me. I don’t understand why he didn’t shoot me like he shot her. No one else could figure out why, either.”
Her hopelessness alarmed me. “You’re not a suspect, are you?”
“No, I’m a witness, but no thanks to me. I didn’t help things much at the hospital. The paramedics were crawling all over me in the waiting room, annoying the hell out of me, and this uniformed cop who looked about twelve years old was standing next to the dead receptionist. He said, ‘Who would want to kill this poor woman?’
“And I said, ‘Everyone who ever met her.’ ”
I knew Georgia would be okay.
CHAPTER 4
The dreams started again that night. I knew they would. They always came when something bad happened.
I did everything I could to ward them off. I didn’t go to bed. I knew that was a bad idea. Instead, I sat up in my grandfather’s recliner and wrapped myself in my grandmother’s yellow-and-brown afghan. Then I stacked my books around me. I told myself I wanted to read my favorites, but I piled them up like a barricade. Comforting old hardbacks by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, early Sue Grafton, and in my lap, a fat brown volume of Dorothy Parker opened to “You Were Perfectly Fine.” I gathered these strong women to protect me: Agatha, Dorothy L., Sue G., and Dorothy P. But they couldn’t help me. Nothing could.
No matter how much I stared at the pages, the words wouldn’t register. Instead, I kept opening the door to the radiation oncology department. I’d walk up to the receptionist’s desk and see her bloody head. Then I’d race into the back rooms, looking for Georgia, and find the therapist and the doctor. And the blood. So much blood spattered and dripped and splashed. It was horrible. But at least I was awake, and as long as I was awake, I was safe.
Then I opened the door again, except this time, I wasn’t in radiation oncology. I was in my parents’ house. I was coming home from school, and I was nine years old, and I knew in some despairing part of me that the dream had started and I couldn’t get away. I knew there was something wrong in the house, just like I knew there was something wrong in radiation oncology. It was very still, except for this odd dripping noise. My mother wasn’t in the kitchen fixing dinner and my father’s car was in the driveway. He never came home from work this early. I went up the stairs, which were tilted at the funhouse angle you find only in dreams, and I opened the door to my parents’ bedroom. I wondered why my mother had a new red bedspread, and why she and Dad were taking a nap in the afternoon on a weekday. I heard the dripping noise, and then I saw the blood. It was dripping off the ceiling light. And I was running screaming from the room and out into the street.
But I didn’t wake up. Instead I ran and ran until I was in the cemetery at their funeral, and now I knew what had happened. My mother had killed my father and herself. Everyone was shocked, except me, because they were supposed to be such a perfect suburban couple. But I knew they drank a lot, and she hit me when she was mad at my father, and she was mad all the time. He fooled around. Sometimes he’d take me along when he saw his lady friends, and I’d have to play outside. I think he liked betrayals even better than he liked sex. Betraying my mother wasn’t enough. He had to have the affair with a neighbor or a woman at church or the wife of a man he worked with. The cruelest thing he ever did was have an affair with my mother’s best friend, Marcie. That made my mother crazy and she shot him and killed herself.
Now I was running through the cemetery’s gray granite tombstones, and everything was gray, grass and sky and graveside flowers, and I was trapped inside that famous photo of me at their funeral, the one in Life magazine. It showed me standing at their grave, in my little blue coat, except in the dream it was gray, too. I was supposed to be the picture of grief, but I was glad they were dead. I never told anyone that, but now I got to live with my grandparents, who never hit me.
In the dream, I was looking down into my parents’ grave. But I didn
’t see the two steel caskets. I saw nothing. Just black. The blackest black. The black was closing in on me, coming for me. It was going to swallow me up. That’s when I began screaming.
Then I woke up.
What time was it? The time glowed green on the digital clock: four-oh-three. Ugh. How long had I been asleep? I didn’t know, but I felt awful. I brushed my hair out of my face and sat up. The recliner squeaked and suddenly lurched shut, almost toppling me out of the chair. My head felt like it was stuffed with old cobwebs and I’d left a little puddle of drool where the afghan was bunched around my face. Lovely. No wonder I lived alone.
My stomach rumbled and gurgled. I was hungry. It was almost breakfast time, except I wanted dinner. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, and god knows what was in a Gazette sandwich. It had tasted like cold, wet newsprint. My system craved the comfort of the four basic food groups: grease, calories, cholesterol, and chocolate. I knew where I could get all four at this hour. There was a twenty-four-hour White Castle a few blocks away. I dressed and drove there. The chilly air chased the last ghosts away, and Ralph, my blue Jaguar, felt smooth and powerful as he prowled the empty streets.
The sky had the eerie blackness that was almost ready to fade into dawn. The people in the stark White Castle interior looked like characters in a Fellini movie. There was an old woman wearing a tight black dress and bottle-blond hair in a glamorous Veronica Lake style. Bright orange lipstick was creeping up the cracks in her lips. Two pale young men, who looked like they’d borrowed the same bottle for their own dandelion-dyed locks, were taking a break from selling their skinny bodies. A workman in khakis was getting his thermos filled with coffee, and a dark-skinned woman in a white uniform was dipping fries in ketchup. I ordered four of the oniony sliders, fries, and a chocolate shake. This food was more soothing than the finest lobster and pâté. Pâté. Wait a minute. Didn’t I see a recipe for an offbeat pâté somewhere? Sure. A wire service story about White Castle pâté. Now that was a recipe.