Kindness Goes Unpunished wl-3

by Craig Johnson

  “Didn’t you care what happened to her?”

  He could hardly speak, he was crying so hard. “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do…I mean, she was just lying there.”

  “Did you even check to see if she was alive?”

  He wiped his face with a sleeve and stared at the floor. “I heard somebody coming, another guy, so I just ran.” He looked back up at me, and I wasn’t so sure I believed him. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I was scared.”

  I nodded and took a deep breath. My head hurt, and I was tired of talking, especially of talking to Devon Conliffe. I rolled to my side and stood up slowly; my left leg was still worrying me from a gunshot wound that I had gotten over four months earlier. I put my hand out and against the toilet partition, steadied myself, and took another breath. “Tell the police.”

  It took a second for him to respond. “What?”

  I looked at him. “Tell the police.” I watched him, not so sure he would, especially once he was out of the restroom. “You call the police and you tell them everything you told me. Understand?” He looked back at the floor, and I waited for a response. “Did you hear me?”

  He inhaled. “Yes.” He glanced up at me again, and there was a strange look to his face. “That’s it?”

  I nodded. “That’s it.”

  I pushed off the partition and stood there. “You call the police and you tell them everything that was said between us.” I started to walk out but paused for a moment. “You tell them…Or you’ll see me again. You’ll see me again just out of the corner of your eye, and I will be the last thing you ever see.”

  The Bear appropriated a bar towel from the waitress as she passed. She stopped and peered at my face. “He didn’ like the beer?”

  I shrugged as I wiped my nose. “Some guys just can’t hold their liquor.”

  As Henry and I walked toward the escalators, he put a hand out and pulled the towel away. He tilted my head back and looked up my nostrils. “So, what does the other guy look like?”

  “I punched him in the fist with my nose, but I think he’ll live.” I pinched the towel over my nose and leaned against the escalator’s moving rubber railing, glad that something else was providing the locomotion. I looked back up at Henry. “I didn’t kill him.”

  The wide face nodded, inscrutable to the end. “Good.”

  As we were riding down, two men were riding up. The one in the front was silver-haired and was sharply dressed in a charcoal suit with a maroon tie and a black trench coat; behind him was a man with a tightly cropped haircut and a suit, tie, and overcoat all the same shade of dark tan. It was difficult to see where the clothes began and the man stopped. They stared at us as we rode closer; by the time we passed each other, I could see that the first man’s designer glasses had small, red dots on the frames that emphasized his large brown eyes. The second man smiled a very becoming smile, and I noticed the bulge of a shoulder holster at his left armpit. “Foul ball?”

  I rolled my eyes and nodded.

  We quickly made our way from the ballpark and walked toward Broad and the subway. Henry didn’t say anything, which gave me plenty of time to think, mostly about whether I believed Devon Conliffe.

  At some level, just about everybody lies to you when you’re a cop, whether they have a reason to or not-some little portion of the truth that they feel would be best omitted in their dealings with you. The only good thing about it is that you start being able to tell when people are doing it, and I was sure that Devon was. The kid obviously had a lot of emotional and mental issues to deal with, but I was having a hard time working up any empathy.

  I watched Henry pull out his cell phone before we got to the subway entrance and call Lena Moretti. I looked south at the big highway overpass that with a few right turns would take me back to Wyoming. I wondered when that would be, if ever. When I looked back, he was closing the phone. “No change.”

  I nodded, and we continued down the stairwell toward the thundering clatter of the Broad Street SEPTA line. We chose an almost empty car and sat across from each other on the orange fiberglass seats at the end. I finished with the bar towel and carefully folded it on my knee. My head was still pounding, and it was good to sit down.

  “Lena says she can stay as long as you would like and, if she has to leave, Michael can take over.” I didn’t respond. “She sounds very nice.”

  “Yep.”

  He watched me. “Are you okay?”

  I looked at the floor. “My daughter is in a coma, I think my nose is broken, and I’m about to have every policeman in Philadelphia after me. How could it be any better?”

  The train stopped at the next station, and a few more people drifted on and sat down. He looked at me but didn’t say anything until a few stops later. There were a lot of other people on the car now, and his voice was low. “I need to go to the museum and help with the installation this evening.”

  “I understand.”

  He waited a moment. “I can cancel the whole thing.”

  “No.” I smiled, but there was no joy in it. “One of us should be doing something constructive, don’t you think?”

  He smiled back, but at least his had some warmth.

  I abandoned him at City Hall and took a regional rail line over to University City and the hospital. It was getting late in the afternoon, and all I could think about were the hours that had been ticking by with no improvement, lowering our odds with every passing minute.

  It was clouding up to the west, and it looked like there might be a few showers in the evening. There was another street person at Convention Avenue, and I gave him the jacket. There were a few blood spots on it and it fit like a blanket, but he seemed happy. I thought about giving him the hat, but it was growing on me.

  When I got to the fifth floor, Lena and Dr. Rissman were waiting for me in Cady’s room; Lena was the first to speak. “She moved.”

  I couldn’t trust my ears. “What?”

  “She moved her leg.”

  Rissman was next. “She reacts to environmental stimuli. There’s still no eye response, but this is very, very good.”

  All the heat came back to my face, making my nose throb even more, and I looked around for a place to sit. I collapsed on the nearest chair and looked at Cady. Lena was crying by the bed and trailed a hand down to my daughter’s foot. Her leg moved, and the sounds erupted from my throat. “When?”

  Rissman was kneeling by my chair, and he looked at the wall and the floor before again finally settling on my left shoulder. “About five minutes ago. What happened to your nose?”

  I leaned back. “I get nosebleeds.” I looked at Cady. “She’s going to make it.”

  “Let’s not get too carried away; she’s moving, and that gives us a lot better odds than before…”

  I looked at him, at the silver bristles of his hair, even if he wouldn’t look at me. “Hell, yes.”

  He nodded. “I just don’t want you to jump to any conclusions; this is a long road, and at any given time it could just stop.”

  I took a deep breath. “I like the odds better now.”

  He patted my shoulder as he stood. “Well, they are certainly better than before.” He smiled a shy smile at Lena’s shoulder. “I’m going to run another series of tests in about an hour, which means the two of you will be looking at an empty bed for the majority of the evening.” He glanced back to me, making eye contact for only a second. “I think you should go home and get some rest.”

  We shared a taxi to Old City, where she dropped me off at Cady’s place. I tried to give her some money, but she wouldn’t take it. She handed me my hat, and I popped it on over the Phillies cap. I’m sure I was a pretty sight. Before the cab pulled away, I remembered to ask. “Did you call Henry?”

  “I left a message.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Speaking of messages, you’ve got a lot of them on her answering machine. I hope you don’t mind that I listened to them, but I thought it would help if
I copied them all down for you on a note pad. It’s by the phone.”

  “I guess I need to call Wyoming.”

  I stood on the Bread Street cobblestones where we had taken our walk. It seemed like decades ago. Night and the city-I found myself wanting to ask her in but realized that the poor woman had a life of her own. “Thank you again.”

  She leaned forward, looking up through the half-light of the cab. “It wasn’t anything.” She ran her fingers through her hair, and I was still amazed at the bluish gloss.

  “Yes, it was. I don’t know if I could’ve gotten through last night without your help, let alone today.” I could see her eyes half closed in pleasure, like a cat being stroked. The smile was there, a soft and easy smile. I didn’t want her to leave without some arrangement to meet again. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

  “Deal. I’ll meet you at the hospital?”

  I nodded and closed the door. The driver was doing some of his paperwork, so we waited for a moment on either side of the window, and I had a strange twinge of something as she looked at me again. I extended my hand; she sat there watching me as the taxi started off down Bread, took a left on Quarry, and disappeared.

  The skies were looking more threatening, and I wasn’t sure if it was thunder I was hearing in the distance or the train on the bridge. I turned and walked to Cady’s door, reached above the junction box, and pulled down a note with the key. Lena had filed it so that it would now operate smoothly in the lock. I opened the door and was immediately mauled by Dog.

  I gave him the ham that had been left over from Lena’s picnic basket and figured I could always get a couple of hamburgers from Paddy O’Neil’s-me too, for that matter. There was a menu, which gave me the luxury of phoning in my order. I opened the fridge and there was a six-pack of Yuengling, so I popped a bottle out and drank it while I looked for the bathroom. I took a shower and got out some clean clothes from my duffle, which I’d left next to the sofa. There was a clock on the microwave that told me I still had three and a half hours before Cady would be back in the ICU, so I got the pad from beside the phone and read the numerous and assorted messages from practically everybody in the Cowboy State. Most of them were from Ruby and Vic, but there were also ones from the Ferg, Lucian, Sancho, Double Tough, Vern Selby, Dorothy, Lonnie Little Bird, Brandon White Buffalo, Dena Many Camps, Omar, Isaac Bloomfield, and Lana Baroja.

  There were no messages from Devon Conliffe.

  I shuttled the dark thoughts toward the back of my mind and placed the notebook on the glass coffee table. I had been here two days and hadn’t called anybody. I wasn’t sure if word had gotten back to Absaroka County through the Moretti network, the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, or the Philadelphia Police Department, but I had a lot of explaining to do. I suppose I had been waiting till I could give some sort of hopeful prognosis and, now that Cady had given even an involuntary response, I should call.

  I looked at the phone but just didn’t have the energy. I took a deep breath, lay back against the pillows on the sofa, and placed my cowboy hat over my eyes. Dog jumped on the couch uninvited and, after what seemed like a long time, we were both asleep.

  I’d been dreaming a lot lately, and there were always Indians in my dreams, so it wasn’t surprising when I could see them from the corners of my eyes. I could feel the wind, the kind we get on the high plains that’s only a notch or two below hurricane force. I was leaning into the gale at the edge of some bluffs near Cat Creek. It was hard to focus; my eyes were thin slits with tears streaming from the sides. I turned my head a little and could see a Cheyenne brave who instructed me to lift my arms by raising his own. He wore a fringed and beaded war shirt with the bands of blue and white seed beads running up the arms, and I could make out a parfleche medicine bag painted red and black with the geometric wind symbol.

  The old Indian half smiled, brushing an arm toward my face and forcing me to concentrate on what was in front of me. I glanced at the horizon as the lightning flashed like the seizures in Cady’s brain and swept across the sky in a silent electrical storm. I looked down into the canyon, and a chill shot from my spine like a fuse; there was nothing below us for at least three hundred feet.

  The phone rang, and I lifted my hat to look at the greenish numbers on the microwave that told me that I’d been asleep for about an hour. A pang hit me as I listened to Cady’s recorded voice on the answering machine and heard the beep. “Walt, it’s Ruby. I hope you’re getting these messages…Vic said she got a phone call from her mother saying that there had been an improvement in Cady’s condition. I just wanted to check in and see if there’s anything any of us can do here. We’ve been trying to call Henry, but he doesn’t answer his phone either.” There was silence on the line as I sat there with my guilt and listened. “Vic is threatening to fly back there, so you better call us.” Another pause, and I would almost swear she knew I was listening. “Please call us. We’re worried about Cady, and we’re worried about you.” I was about to reach for the phone when the line went dead.

  I sighed. If Cady’s situation stayed the same, there would be no going back; it was as simple as that.

  I looked at Dog, and he looked back at me. “You want a hamburger?” He wagged, and I took it for a yes. I ordered us up four cheeseburgers to go from the leprechaun at the end of the block.

  I went to the terrace doors and listened to the sporadic drops hit the leaves of the crab apple tree. It was a gentle rainfall that unfocused the hard edges of the city night, making all the surfaces glisten. It was only about fifty yards to the side entrance of Paddy O’Neil’s, so I figured I could get there and back without getting soaked. I watched the drops fall slowly past the yellow of the streetlights and into the widening pools on the cobblestone street. I looked up at the span of the bridge arching into Old City and listened to the steady thrum of the traffic.

  Even over the blare of the Celtic band and the raucous crowd, the brogue wasn’t a generation removed. Black Irish; a handsome kid about Cady’s age with a wayward eye that kept tracking left. “Yore Cady’s fatha’, the sheriff?”

  I looked up at the brim of my cowboy hat. “Yep.” He was like one of those bundles of baling wire that I had seen in Vietnam, the ones that went into the Vietcong tunnels with. 45s and the balls of a cat burglar. “You O’Neil?”

  He smiled a grin. “Hisself. Took the place over from me Uncle Paddy, the original O’Neil.” He handed me the bag full of cheeseburgers, and I noticed the tattoos up and down his arms. I paid him, with a little extra for his trouble. “Where’s ya daughter?”

  I waited a moment, the hubbub of the bar swirling around me. “She’s not feeling well.” I leaned in and cleared my throat. “O’Neil, can I ask you a question?”

  He wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “Ya?”

  “You ever met her boyfriend, Devon Conliffe?”

  His hands stopped working the towel. “Ya, I met ’im a couple’a times.”

  I nodded, my face only a foot from his. “Nice guy?”

  He worked his jaw for only a second. “Ya.”

  “O’Neil?” He leaned in a little closer with the question. “You’re a liar.” He watched me for a second, then laughed and walked down to the other end of the bar to help the overworked waitresses. He glanced back at me only when I left.

  Dog ate his cheeseburgers faster than I ate mine, so I gave him the last bite of my second one and tried to fade into another nap, but I suppose I was worried that I might oversleep and, as a result, didn’t sleep at all.

  I finally gave up after an hour and called a cab. I looked at Dog from the door; he was watching me with his big, brown eyes. “They don’t allow dogs in the ICU.” He continued to look at me, and I was sure he understood every word. “There’s nothing I can do.” He sat. “I’ll take you for a long walk tomorrow.” He lay down, still watching me. “Honest.”

  It was raining a little harder when I stepped out and, just before jumping into the taxi, I noticed the throb of blue tracer emerg
ency lights that seemed to spring from the support cables of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; in the darkness, it looked like the body of the bridge was hanging in the saturated air. There must have been a wreck. I stood there for a second more, then decided it was somebody else’s problem and climbed in the cab.

  There wasn’t that much traffic this late at night, so we made good time, and twelve minutes later I was sitting at Cady’s bedside. She had just been brought back from testing, and the nurse at the desk said that there wasn’t any substantial change but that the stimulus response was a very positive sign.

  The gentle spring showers had gradually given way to sheets of rain splattering against the windows like waves in some fifth-floor tide. I sat there for a couple of hours before falling asleep to the sound, my chin resting on my chest.

  When I woke up it was still raining, but there was someone else in the room. I blinked and looked at the man standing on the other side of Cady’s bed. His black trench coat and umbrella were still dripping, so he couldn’t have been there long and, when I glanced back at the doorway, I saw wet tracks leading to where he now stood. On the other side of the glass partition, the black man with the close-cropped haircut was talking to the nurse who had assured me earlier.

  When I looked back to the man beside the bed, he was watching me with the brown eyes through the designer frames with the little red dots. “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  He looked back at Cady. “You have a beautiful daughter.”

  “Thank you.”

  His eyes stayed on her. “I don’t suppose you remember…”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He nodded and turned to look at me. “Good. You know why I’m here?”

  “I’d imagine it has something to do with Devon Conliffe?”

  He came around to the foot of the bed. “You’d be right.” The detective pursed his lips and stuffed a hand in his pocket, the umbrella’s handle still over his wrist. “What can you tell me?”