by Jan Burke
I put my arm around her shoulders.
“Well, well,” came a lilting voice from the doorway. “How nice to see you two girls together.” Sister Theresa walked in, smiling until she saw my forehead. “Irene, I heard you just couldn’t bear to stay away from us. Look at those bruises.”
“It was a real letdown when I realized that you don’t just hover around in here all night like a guardian angel, Sister.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, dear. But I understand you left someone special for us to look after. Detective Harriman has had many visitors from the police force, all very concerned about him.” She paused, then added, “But I daresay he will be especially happy to see you.” There was an impish grin on her face. Great. A nun matchmaker.
“Well, I guess I’ll go over and see him then,” I said.
“Good. Now, Barbara, I think you need to trust an old nun to watch your husband’s bedside for a while. Go tell the nurse at the station out in the hall that I sent you. Our census is just low enough that we can spare a quiet place for you to sleep for a few hours. I won’t take no for an answer. You need to sleep. Go on now, go.”
I felt like I was back in Catholic school. An irresistible force, Sister Theresa. We thanked her and headed out the door. Barbara gave me one last hug and headed over to the nurses’ station. I went in the other direction, to Frank’s room.
I was surprised, then relieved, to see a uniformed officer outside Frank’s door. I told him my name and he checked a list. He took a look at my ID and said, “Sorry to have to check this, Miss Kelly. You understand.” I told him I did, and that I was glad he was there.
As I opened the door, I saw the room was full of flowers and cards from well-wishers. Frank was sleeping. In some ways, he looked worse than the night before. His bruises were quite dramatic, even on his sleeping face. He had two terrific shiners from the broken nose, which was still very swollen. His forehead was swollen, too, and much more discolored than my own. The swelling on his lip had gone down a little. I noticed he wasn’t so pale today.
He opened his eyes and took a while to wake up completely. His face suddenly went ashen, reflecting a wave of pain that was hard to watch. I found myself remembering visits to my father during his last illness, and how he had told me that he always hurt the most when he first woke up. I wondered if it was the same for Frank. He saw me and smiled a little. “Hi,” he said. He tried to bring himself around.
“Hi yourself. How’s the head?” I asked. Damn silly question.
He didn’t answer right away. “Truth?”
“Truth.”
“Hurts. A lot.”
He was talking slowly, with difficulty.
“Do you want me to come back later?”
“No, stay awhile. Okay?”
“Sure. But you don’t have to talk.”
“I know,” he said. He reached for my hand and held it. His was a rough hand, with calluses here and there, but it felt good to hold it. A little scary, but good. He closed his eyes and soon fell back to sleep.
I sat there with him like that for about an hour. Throughout that time, I fought down the panic welling up within me, a rising desire to leave. During the eternity spent sitting in that wreck the day before, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I had tried not to focus on my fears about the seriousness of his injuries. Now I had to admit to myself that even knowing that they were not life-threatening, I was still uneasy. Too much experience with hospitals as places where people were lost to you forever. Too many good-byes to people dressed just as Frank was now, in rooms like this, with rolling trays and curtains and bedrails.
I argued with myself that Frank was not critically injured, did not have cancer like my father had, would only be here for a few days. I didn’t let go of his hand.
As I sat and listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing, I realized that I had naively expected to be able to come in and chatter away with him, as if a good night’s sleep would get him over the concussion. I also realized that I missed having him to talk to about the case. I would have to do what I could on my own until he was up and around.
As if he could hear my thoughts, he woke up again. He seemed a little more alert this time. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s just that… well, I just feel bad that you got hurt like this.”
“Don’t be scared.”
“It’s not a matter of being scared.”
He grinned that half-grin. “I’ll be okay soon.”
He didn’t look as if he’d be okay soon, but I smiled back anyway.
He started to move his head, then seemed to get dizzy for a minute. He blanched and drew in a breath, closing his eyes. He never increased the pressure on my hand, but I saw him clench the sheets in his other hand.
I waited for it to pass, then said, “I’m going to go now. You need to rest. I’ll try to come back later today, after work.”
“Irene, wait,” he said, just above a whisper.
I waited.
“Talk to Pete about everything. No secrets, okay? You can trust him.”
I gave his hand a parting squeeze and said, “Get better, Frank. I’ll come back to see you tonight.”
He held on. “Promise — no secrets from Pete.”
“If Wrigley has this room wiretapped, I’m a dead woman. I’m in here holding hands with a cop, for Christ’s sakes.” I looked at his battered face, then added, “But being as you have saved my life twice in about as many days, okay, I promise.”
He relaxed and let go of my hand. “Thanks. Come back, okay?”
He was asleep again before I was out of the room.
21
ON MY WAY OUT, I decided I would stop by a burger stand I had passed on the way to the hospital. As I exited the double doors of St. Anne’s, I glanced up at the tall monolith of dark mirrored glass across the street and froze on the sidewalk. At the top of the building were the initials BLP.
BLP. Bank of Las Piernas. The fact that I had failed to think of this when reading a reference to money in O’Connor’s notes made me feel like I was losing my edge. I tried to remember the computer phrases. Something about AM. I crossed the street and went into the bank.
The Bank of Las Piernas’s downtown branch was done up in a modern style. Contemporary art sculptures with intriguing but unidentifiable shapes bedecked the interior courtyard entrance. Inside the building itself, the tellers and other branch officers worked in a room that was cavernous and marbled, so that those who applied for loans felt akin to Dorothy stepping up to meet the Great Oz. It was fairly busy for a Wednesday afternoon.
I walked past the dozen or so people corralled in the stanchions and ropes waiting for tellers, and started reading name badges. This behavior was frowned on by the customers in line, who thought I was trying to butt in front of them, and by the tellers, who were wary of the strange bruised woman wandering outside the cattle chute.
Soon a pencil of a woman came striding toward me, purpose in every step. She was tall and thin; there was absolutely no shape on her that couldn’t be drawn with a ruler. She had a gold-plated name tag that said her name was Miss Ramona Ralston. “Can I help you?” she asked, but help didn’t seem to be what she had in mind.
“No, thanks,” I said, stepping around her and continuing my walk past the teller windows. She seemed not to know what to do about it for a minute, but only a minute.
“Excuse me, miss?”
I turned around and looked at her as if she were interrupting a Nobel Prize–winning effort, and said, “Yes?”
“What you need to do is talk to the branch manager.”
“How can you possibly know what I need when you don’t even know why I’m here?”
“Well, if you want to see a teller you need to go over where it says, ‘Please Enter Line Here.’ But if you aren’t willing to abide by the rules of common courtesy, then you need to see the branch manager.”
“Look, Miss Ralston, I am not trying to cut in front of everyone in line. I wo
n’t stop at a teller’s window. I don’t need to talk to you or to the branch manager. You may go back to whatever you were doing before I came in.”
She decided to shadow me, following a few paces behind me. I passed about ten windows, reading the name plates on the desks in the operations area behind the tellers. I stopped abruptly when I saw “Ann Marchenko” on one of them. Miss Ralston plowed into my back, hard enough so that it ended up being a tackle. Before I knew it, I was sprawled on the floor, with Miss Ralston right on top of me.
Unfortunately, my stiff muscles made getting to my feet a slow process. While I listened to a constant stream of flustered apologies from Miss Ralston, I tried to force myself back up to my feet. Soon a small crowd had formed around us, and a tall man with an athletic build came striding over to us.
“Give her some room, everybody,” he commanded. “Give her some room.” He put a burly hand down and I grabbed on, and he lifted me up effortlessly. “Are you all right, miss?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said. He was a handsome man, with dark hair graying at the temples and almost jet-black eyes. He spoke with a slight French accent. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.
“Miss Ralston, what is the meaning of this?” he asked.
“Why, Mr. St. Germain, I — I—” Miss Ralston was stuck in neutral, but the name had helped me place him.
“Guy St. Germain?” I asked, giving it the best French-Canadian pronunciation I could muster. “Didn’t you play defense for the Buffalo Sabres?”
He beamed. “Yes, ma’am, I did. How did you know that? Not too many hockey fans around here, and most of them are only interested in Gretsky and company.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, Mr. St. Germain, the Sabres are my second-favorite team. You’ve met another Kings fan. But I do remember seeing you play.”
“You’re too young for that, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense.”
I introduced myself and we spent a few minutes discussing the recent Stanley Cup play-offs, taking advantage of that rare — in southern California — pleasure of talking serious hockey in the off season. Miss Ralston was dumbstruck, totally unable to comprehend our conversation.
She sidled off and Guy St. Germain led me over to his large desk. He had a vice-president’s title on his name plate and a fancy pen set. The visitors’ chairs were plush. Eventually we wore down on hockey and he asked me if Miss Ralston had hurt me when she gave me that hard check.
“No, I got a few bumps and bruises in a car accident yesterday, and so I’m a little stiff and sore today. She didn’t mean to run into me; I just stopped suddenly when she was right behind me.”
“I’m glad you’re not hurt, and it is kind of you to be so understanding. Is there some way in which I may be of help to you?”
“I’m trying to get in touch with one of the employees here,” I said, praying to God that Ann Marchenko was the AM of O’Connor’s computer notes.
“Really? Which one?”
“Ann Marchenko.”
“Our branch specialist? You have a problem with a safe deposit box here or something of this nature?”
“Oh, no, she doesn’t even know me. She helped a friend of mine who died recently and I wanted to thank her. He mentioned her in some notes he left.”
“I see. Well, Mrs. Marchenko is off today, but she’ll be in tomorrow. Shall I have her contact you?”
“I’m not sure I’ll be in town tomorrow; I’ll stop by again. Is Wednesday her regular day off?”
“No, her daughter was ill today and she couldn’t arrange child care in time. She’s usually here Monday through Friday.”
“Well,” I said, standing up and extending a hand, “I’ll call if I’m out of town, or come by if I’m still in Las Piernas. Thank you for your help, Mr. St. Germain.”
“Please call me Guy,” he said, returning the handshake with a firm grasp. “And please stop by my desk and say hello if you do come in. You have provided a very pleasant change of pace today, even though our acquaintance had such an unfortunate beginning.”
“Don’t worry about it. And I will definitely stop by if I come in, if you promise to call me Irene.” We shook on it and I left him.
As I walked out, Miss Ralston spotted me and started following me again, her long strides catching up to me quickly. She had found her voice again and was chattering away at me. “I’m so sorry, ma’am, I don’t know what got into me. I didn’t realize you knew Mr. St. Germain. I don’t mean knew him — but knew of him, or whatever…” She kept this up, following me all the way out onto the sidewalk. I stopped and turned around, ready to ask her to please forget all about it, when I heard the roar of an engine and noticed something very much out of place: A car was barreling down the sidewalk, headed right for us.
22
I TOOK TWO long running steps and wedged myself between two parked cars, as the car on the sidewalk, an old brown Camaro, sent newspaper stands outside the bank flying as it steered toward me. Next I heard a sickening thunk — similar to the sound a football makes when it’s kicked — and watched Miss Ralston hurtling through the air. She had frozen in place, and now was knocked halfway down the block by the impact. The car never slowed down. There were no plates on it. It jumped back over the curb and onto the street and went squealing out of sight before any of us on the sidewalk had moved again.
A woman who had just missed getting hit as she walked out of the bank started screaming at the top of her lungs. I was shaking, unable to make myself come out from my haven. It took a moment to grasp what had actually happened, and once I did I felt sickened by it.
Eventually I made myself go down the sidewalk to the place where she’d landed. I didn’t have much hope for what I’d find there. It was just as well. She was absolutely motionless, lying face-up with her eyes open, and would have seemed unscathed if it weren’t for the fact that her head was in one of those unnatural positions that can only be achieved with a broken neck, and that her skull was completely cracked open where she had landed on it, spilling its contents out onto the sidewalk. I stumbled over to the gutter and retched.
In moments, I saw emergency-room people coming from the hospital across the street, and Guy St. Germain was running down the sidewalk from the bank. I turned and caught another glimpse of Miss Ralston, and almost passed out.
Next thing I knew, Guy had taken hold of my shoulders and was shaking me gently, shouting, “What happened to her? What happened to her?”
I started crying. “A car — oh, God, have mercy on me, it’s my fault. Sweet Jesus, it’s all my fault — it was me they wanted to kill. It was me. They wanted to kill me.” I was losing it rapidly.
He was taken aback, then put his arms around me and held me, saying, “No, no, chère — hush.” I felt dizzy and sick; once again, I almost passed out, but fought it off. As if it were happening miles away from me, I felt my own crying become sobs. Guy turned me away from where Miss Ralston lay and held me to his shoulder while they found something to cover her. I concentrated on the weave of the fabric in Guy’s suit and calmed down.
Someone came out of a nearby café and gave me a glass of water. It was one of those little kindnesses that make a person feel human again. I washed the taste of being sick out of my mouth, pulled out a Kleenex and blew my nose. I was getting there.
In no time at all, police pulled up, sirens howling. One of the officers gently took me from Guy and sat me down in a patrol car. I asked him to contact Pete Baird. He turned his head to one side and took a longer look at me. “You the lady who was with Frank Harriman yesterday?”
I nodded through a stream of tears.
“Sister, you better think about getting out of town for a few days.”
I had thought about it. I thought about Gila Bend. I thought about running away to some place not even connected to all of this, just long enough to feel sane again. But how could I feel in control of my own life if all I did was run? I
had to face this head on; even if I got scared or cried or whatever — I had to deal with it.
I thought about Miss Ralston, and how sarcastic and mean all my thoughts of her had been, when she was just a busybody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If she hadn’t knocked me down, she wouldn’t be dead. If I hadn’t been walking around in a suspicious manner, she wouldn’t have come over to talk to me. If only I hadn’t looked up and seen the BLP on the building — if, if, if, if.
I thought of something O’Connor once told me. He had read an article somewhere that made an impression on him, and as was his wont, he repeated its salient points for my benefit.
“Irene, “ he said, “do you know what the two saddest words in the English language are?”
“Boo and hoo?” I had guessed.
“No, wise-ass. The two saddest words in the English language are ‘if only.’”
I used to hate it when he’d get into going on and on with all of his quotes and proverbs and old saws, but somehow they always came back to me in times of trouble. And so I left off with the ifs.
By the time Pete got there, I was much calmer; still a little shaky, but calmer.
He sighed. “Hell. I was hoping these jokers would need a little while to regroup. You know, give you a day off.” He turned to one of the uniformed men and asked him to go over and double check on the guard for Frank’s room, and to ask the hospital about tightening security around Kenny as well.
“Have you heard back from the sheriff in Gila Bend yet?” I asked.
“Yeah. They said they had been trying to dig up something for O’Connor since early last week. They think they might have something.”
“I’m thinking of going there.”
“By yourself?”
“My traveling companions aren’t faring too well these days.”
“Don’t start thinking like that, Irene. It’ll make you crazy.”