by Elaine Viets
Valerie came out for a minute to say hi. I asked her, “Did you know the doctor who got shot?”
“Dr. Jolley? No, never met him.”
“How do you think the killer’s getting into these places?”
“Beats me,” Valerie said. “I’ll tell you this, because it’s no secret. We tightened our security after radiation oncology. Hired more guards. Put cameras at all the exits. Made sure all delivery people showed IDs and signed in at the desk. Locked all entrances except the main one after seven P.M. Didn’t do any good. The killer walked into the Wellhaven building the next week and shot Dr. Brentmoor.”
“So how do you think the shooter’s getting in?”
Valerie shrugged. “For all I know, you’re doing it. You could be using Georgia here as a cover to get in these doctors’ offices.”
“But she never went to Dr. Jolley,” I said seriously. Valerie laughed, and so did other waiting room patients.
“I’ll come back for Georgia in about ten minutes,” she said.
“Nice interview technique,” Georgia muttered. “Why not use a rubber hose next time?”
“You don’t think I’m a good reporter?” I said, suddenly sounding defensive.
“I think you’re way too good for the Gazette,” she said firmly. “I don’t understand why you stay.”
“Fine talk from management. It’s simple. I like my job.”
“You could work for any paper in the country.”
“Not as a columnist. We’re white elephants these days. You know that. Papers don’t want us anymore. The only reason the Gazette keeps me is that readers would go ballistic if they got rid of me. At another paper I could be a reporter, but I’d never have the freedom I do here.”
“What freedom? Charlie’s always on your ass.”
“Not if I solve these killings,” I said.
She snorted. “Why not buy lottery tickets instead? If you win the thirty-eight-million-dollar Powerball, you could buy the Gazette.”
“First thing I’d do is fire you,” I said. Several patients laughed, and I realized we’d been entertaining the waiting room with our conversation. I was relieved when Valerie called Georgia in for chemo.
The treatment rooms had bare white walls, white tile floors, and two big blue recliners for the patients. The nurses and caregivers sat on spindly metal-legged chairs with thinly padded gray seats. A TV bolted to the wall played a soap opera no one watched. Valerie set up Georgia’s IV drip and left.
At first Georgia and I shared the treatment room with a wan thirty-something woman who had dark circles under her eyes. But then Valerie came in and said, “I’m really sorry, Judy, but your white blood cell count isn’t high enough. You can’t take chemo this week.”
“But I have to,” Judy pleaded. “I missed last week, too.”
Valerie shook her head. “It’s not a good idea. I’ll call your doctor, but I expect he’ll confirm this decision.”
Judy waited for the doctor to call back. We could hear other nurses in the break room, singing happy birthday to someone. Judy began to cry silently. I wondered if she was crying because she feared she wouldn’t have another birthday. A few minutes later, Valerie came back and gently told Judy her doctor definitely said no. Judy picked up her book and purse and walked out, her shoulders slumped in defeat. The only thing worse than taking chemo was not taking it.
“Jesus,” Georgia said. “The things we see here.”
We had the small, bare room to ourselves now. The big recliner seemed to overwhelm Georgia. She shivered slightly in the refrigerated air. I got up, went to a cabinet, and found a thin hospital blanket. Georgia pulled it up around her and said, “Thanks, Francesca. You’ve done a lot of favors for me. Now I want you to do one more. Call Lyle. Quit being so goddamn stubborn.”
Tears welled in my eyes, but I wouldn’t cry. “I can’t do that. This is something we can’t work out. I don’t want to marry. He does.”
“What’s wrong with marrying Lyle?” she said.
I laughed bitterly. “How can you say that, knowing what happened to my parents?”
“Your parents had a booze problem, plus a few dozen other problems. I’ve never seen you drink anything but club soda.”
“There’s hardly a happy marriage at the Gazette. Look how Charlie and his pals cheat on their wives.”
“You really think Lyle would be like Charlie?” she asked, incredulous.
“No. I don’t. I just haven’t seen any happy marriages.”
“If it doesn’t work out, you can always divorce.”
“Divorce isn’t the answer. Look at Marlene and her ex. She spends more time thinking about that man now that they’re divorced. She has to haul him into court to collect every dollar of child support. Marriage may not last, but divorce is forever.”
I sat there, defiant and hurting, waiting for her next snappy comment. Instead, she hit back with the one thing I can’t stand—sympathy. “Is there anyone else, Francesca?” she said softly. “Is there another man? Or are you just restless? You dated Lyle a long time. Maybe you need to check out the competition.”
I shook my head. There was no one else.
“I didn’t think so,” she said. “Then look around here. Quit spending your days around computers and cancer wards. Life is short, too short for stupid stubbornness. You love that man. He loves you. What difference does a piece of paper make? You’re married to him, anyway.”
“I don’t want to be a fool,” I said.
“You already are,” she said, angrily. We sat in silence until Valerie came back and disconnected Georgia’s IV.
The next day, Georgia was not at the office. I called her home, but no one answered. I checked with her secretary. “There you are. I was just going to call you,” she said. “Georgia called in with a touch of the flu, but she says it’s nothing to worry about. She wanted me to tell you that she was skipping her radiation treatment today, but not to worry.”
There was a lot of flu going around this spring, but I was still worried. Flu could wreck her white blood cell count. After work, I stopped by Kopperman’s deli for chicken soup. I’d been raised Catholic, but I believed in the healing power of chicken soup from Jewish delis, especially when they used lots of dill.
I had a key to Georgia’s penthouse. She’d given me one when I started driving her. I rang the doorbell and knocked loudly, for good measure. When no one answered, I let myself in and put the chicken soup on the kitchen counter. I found Georgia in bed, weak and sweating, racked with pain. She was wearing a jaunty pink turban that only made her look sicker. Her hands scrabbled at the sheets as the pain hit her in waves.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, and then doubled up in another spasm. “I have terrible cramps. I can’t even sit up. I called my oncologist this morning, but the bastard was too busy to get back to me. His assistant called at five and said the doctor on call would phone me. He hasn’t yet.”
I looked at her bedside clock. “It’s after seven. You’ve been lying here suffering all day. That’s outrageous. What’s that doctor’s number?”
I called the number and half an hour later, the doctor finally called back. He said to take Georgia to the Emergency Room, and he’d fax his orders to the ER staff. Georgia didn’t want an ambulance. I helped her dress and half-carried her to the car. At the Emergency Room, the knife-and-gun club was out in full force. A woman had slashed her boyfriend across the face and genitals, and he needed eighty-five stitches. A drug dealer had a gunshot wound to the chest. There was a two-car accident on Lindell, and the bloody human wreckage was brought in. Georgia and I spent the whole time sitting on molded plastic chairs. Overhead, a TV mindlessly blared away. I was sure they had TV in hell.
It was almost midnight when the medics got around to Georgia, and I’d been fuming the whole time. The doctor hadn’t faxed his orders. Finally, Bruce, the male nurse, a kindhearted fellow, called the doctor directly. “I don’t believe
this,” Bruce said, and slammed the phone down. “The doctor’s emergency number is a recording! I had to keep pushing buttons and hitting the pound key to get to his answering service. I got lost and now I have to start over.” Exasperated, he went through the routine again and finally said, “This is an emergency. I’m calling from Moorton Hospital …”
I looked over and saw Georgia huddled in an uncomfortable chair. She looked cold. Why were hospitals such refrigerators? I found a blanket in a supply closet and wrapped her in it. Twenty minutes later, she was taken to a cubicle, where the doctor on duty said she’d probably had a bad reaction to her pain pills. He put her on an IV and left her there for a while, then sent her to X-ray to check for a possible bowel obstruction, then brought her back and took some blood tests, then left her alone some more. Sometime during the next two hours, her cramps went away, and she fell into a restful sleep on the gurney. I felt achy and stiff from sitting on the hard plastic chair at her side. At two-thirty A.M. the doctor pronounced Georgia fit to go home.
“You must stop at a drugstore on the way home,” he told me, “for her new medicine.” I asked if he could give us samples, but the doctor said he couldn’t. “There’s an all-night pharmacy right up the road.”
Georgia was sleeping when I parked the car at the pharmacy, and I didn’t wake her. I went into the vast, empty drugstore. It was one of those places that sold ice cream and lawn furniture, cameras and clothes and cosmetics. The pharmacy was way in the back. The pharmacist was a young Hispanic woman with long dark hair and creamy skin and a name tag that said Rosie.
“That will be fourteen seventy-five,” she said, as she handed me Georgia’s prescription. I handed her a twenty.
With that, the lights went out. The big store turned into a black cave. Then the emergency lights flickered on, providing an almost useless brownish light. The bright counter displays and seductive products were now threatening obstructions, dark with shadows.
I would have to pick my way carefully to the parking lot. I had to get out to Georgia. What would she think, waking up alone in a pitch-black parking lot? Where would she go for help? There was a Chinese restaurant on one side and a bagel shop on the other, both closed for the night. We were surrounded by a vast empty parking lot. We were absolutely isolated. I understood at last those news stories about how five or six people in a store were shot by a single gunman. That’s when I heard the angry voices up front.
“It’s a holdup!” Rosie the pharmacist said fiercely. I froze. She grabbed my arm and pulled me into a storeroom. Rosie bolted the door from the inside and whispered urgently, “Get over there in the corner, behind those boxes. If he shoots through the door, you have a better chance of surviving.” I wondered if the last thing I’d see on earth would be a giant carton of Charmin bathroom tissue.
We could hear a man talking and the sound of a struggle. It was hard to tell, but he seemed to be dragging the manager through the store to the back. He was coming our way. No. Please god, no.
“Where’s the tall one?” he kept asking. “I want the tall one.” The manager kept protesting there was no one tall here. She was telling the truth. The pharmacist was about five-two. The manager was even shorter. The only tall one in the store was … me.
Was the gunman after me? Why? That made no sense. There must be another store employee.
Rosie and I heard the holdup man demanding once more, “Where is the tall one? I said I want her,” then the cracking sound of a hard slap.
I made a move, but Rosie pushed me back down behind the Charmin boxes with surprising strength and whispered, “You cannot help her. You can only get yourself killed.”
I waited for the gunshot. Instead, there was the blessed sound of sirens, then footsteps running out the back door. The gunman was gone.
“It’s okay,” the manager said, knocking on the storeroom door. “The police are here.”
Rosie cautiously opened the door. I followed her out, weak-kneed and wobbly. Red-and-white police lights were strobing through the semidarkness. I could see Anitra, the manager, rubbing her face where the gunman had hit her. She was a small dark woman with high cheekbones and beautiful bronze braids pulled into a chignon. Her cheek looked swollen, but she didn’t seem to be hurt otherwise. Rosie wrapped Anitra in a blanket and gave her hot coffee, but Anitra couldn’t stop shivering. Rosie took her shaking hands. She said they were cold and clammy. The coffee cup didn’t seem to warm them up.
Anitra could tell the police nothing except that her assailant was a white male, “kinda tall,” but compared to Anitra, everyone was. He wore a navy knit ski mask with red trim, so she couldn’t see his face and neck. But she knew he was white because she saw his hands. She didn’t know how old he was. Maybe twenty. Or thirty. Even forty or fifty. He had on jeans and some kind of long-sleeved shirt but she was too scared to notice what color and the store was so dark she couldn’t see it, anyway.
She knew one thing for sure. “He had a big gun and he shoved it right in my face, but he never asked for the money in the register. He kept asking for the tall one, and when I said there weren’t any tall people here he hit me. He said I was lying and started dragging me toward the back. I thought I was dead.”
Anitra had one more comment before she started shaking again and the paramedics arrived to treat her for shock. “He was weird,” she said firmly. That really narrowed down the suspects, especially when you’re talking about people out at three A.M.
I was worried about Georgia, sitting alone on the parking lot. I found a police officer named Mullanphy and he went out there with me. Georgia was sound asleep. We woke her up.
She was the one who’d called the police. “I woke up when the store lights suddenly went off and used my cell phone to call 911. Then I dropped off again. Chemo does that,” she said. “Sorry.”
Sorry? She’d saved us all.
The police asked if I thought the gunman was after me. I didn’t know. I didn’t think so. If he wanted me, wouldn’t he say, “Where’s Francesca?” I was a columnist, a local celebrity. He was probably one of those looneys you encounter in any big city.
The cops weren’t so sure. They thought I could be the tall one. They asked me who I’d offended recently. No one except Charlie, and he’d rather kill my column than me. Had I been working on any controversial stories? Well, there was the missing stripper and my Doc in the Box inquiries. But Leo D. Nardo was still missing, and the killer was still loose, so I was hardly a threat.
The police weren’t so sure. They were concerned about my safety. Did I live alone? they asked. Was there anyone I could stay with tonight? No, I said. I wanted to go home, to my own bed. I was perfectly safe. If the gunman knew where I lived, he wouldn’t be following me into all-night drugstores—if it was even me he was following. The police cautioned me to take extra care. They asked again if I was sure I didn’t want to stay with someone.
I wasn’t going to do that, but I was still shaken. Officer Mullanphy offered to radio ahead and have someone check out my flat, but I said I’d be fine. Besides, I had to take Georgia home. She said I could spend the night with her, what was left of it, anyway. But I wanted to go home. How could staying at Georgia’s provide any safety, when she was so weak and sick? If the guy really was after me, I’d just be a danger to her. I’d stay with her if I thought I could help her, but she only wanted to sleep. I could go to a hotel, but I’d written too many stories about hotel rapes and break-ins to feel safe there.
I told the police I was better off in my own place, in my own neighborhood, where everyone knew me. I said the ever vigilant South Siders were better than any security service. The neighbors would watch my flat and call the police if they saw anything out of line.
I couldn’t tell the police the real reason I wanted to go home. I had nowhere else to go. My family was dead. Tina was my closest friend at work, but I didn’t feel I could turn up on her doorstep at four-thirty in the morning. My other choice was to ask Lyle for help. I’d rather die.
It was after five by the time I got Georgia in her bed and headed for mine. I parked under a streetlight. The moon was still bright, the sky was blue-black, and the zoysia grass was wet with dew. I wished I hadn’t refused the cop’s help to look around my flat for me. But then I saw my neighbors two doors down had their kitchen light on. The warm, gold glow in their curtained window was reassuring. Cindy and Joe left for work at six-thirty. If anything went wrong, they were within shouting distance.
Still, I spent extra time checking my front and back doors before I went in. There was no sign anyone had disturbed them. I carefully opened the front door, flipped on the light, and climbed the long, narrow inside stairs, wishing I’d used a brighter bulb. I stood cautiously at the top and looked around the living room, then walked through the kitchen, bedroom, and dining room. I checked all the closets and the bathroom and opened the shower door.
Next I checked all the windows to make sure they were locked. Then I found the canister of pepper spray and put it on my bedside table next to the phone.
For good measure, I stacked my grandmother’s noisiest pots and pie pans in front of the doors—the South Side burglar alarm—and put a kitchen chair on its side at the top of the steps. If I needed to leave in a hurry, I’d probably fall over it and kill myself, but I felt safer.
CHAPTER 8
The phone was ringing.
I reached for it, knocking off the pepper spray and overturning my bedside clock. I felt like I’d been asleep for about two minutes. Who was calling at this hour?
It was the day-shift pharmacist. Rosie had left instructions to call me about the five dollars and twenty-five cents change from my twenty I’d left behind last night. Too bad Rosie didn’t tell him to call at a decent hour on a Saturday morning.
“What should I do with your money?” he asked in a whiny voice. Nobody should hand me a straight line like that. Especially not a whiny man. So I told him exactly where he could stick the five dollars and twenty-five cents.