Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  Hospitals are the best places to approach the insulated in our society. They lock up the drugs all right, but you can get drugs anywhere; while their biggest cash asset, the patients, are exposed to the bright loud thorny world in wards and semi-private rooms without door latches, as cozy as the johnny robes they’re forced to wear with the backs flapping open. You can look like Charles Manson on a tear and stroll through the intensive care units gaily kicking out plugs and never get stopped. Unless you’re smoking.

  I ditched my Winston butt in a potted plant in the lobby that looked to be doing better than most of the people seated there and used the elevator. It stopped on the next floor to admit a tragic-faced woman in her forties wearing a tailored suit and clutching a bright orange teddy bear under one arm with the tag still attached and a young bald orderly with an empty gurney. The orderly was humming the theme from The Magnificent Seven.

  The doors let us all out into a bright corridor like every other corridor in every other hospital, paved with linoleum as tough as a night nurse and echoing with the padding of rubber soles, the trundling of equipment on wheels, voices rising and falling at the nurses’ station down the hall like switch engines dragging the same tired cargo back and forth in a railroad yard, someone coughing dryly and without much hope in a room with the door open — all the canned flat reheated sounds of life in a sterilized bottle. I passed two nurses walking the other way in white pant-suits and orthopedic sneakers, splitting the air with their stride, and an old woman in a sky-blue robe pulling her way along the wall rail with both hands.

  Security got a shot in the arm in front of the room I wanted. As I slowed down by the door, a young man with short dark blond hair, wearing a blue suit, rose from a chair by the wall and laid his paperback book open facedown on the seat. He was built to scale and didn’t seem very big until I was standing in front of him. He had smooth pale features, a short nose and a long upper lip that made him look younger than he probably was, and dark eyes with long Mediterranean lashes, a contrast to his generally Nordic coloring. Well, the Vikings got around. I glanced at the book he’d been reading. The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman.

  “Must be the new breed,” I said. “It used to be Leather Sheets, by Anonymous.”

  He asked me if I was with the hospital. He didn’t stutter like an ex-pug and he had no regional accent. I handed him the card I’d gotten out when I left the elevator. He read it without moving his lips, tore it in two, and gave me back both halves. His hands were long and white, with slender fingers. He would be accustomed to doing most of his communicating with them.

  I put the pieces in my coat pocket. “Sam Lucy in there?”

  He said nothing.

  “I don’t even have to go inside,” I said. “I just want a look at him.”

  Still nothing. When a man that size says it, it is a lot of nothing.

  “Nuts.” Carefully I unbuttoned my coat and then my jacket and opened it to show the fat rubber grip of the Police Special in its belt holster. The sight of so much lethal equipment shocked him into silence. He was about to fall asleep on his feet. I’d have bet my car he could get the L-frame automatic that was rubbing a hole in the lining of his jacket out and pumping before I had a hand on the .38.

  “Every job has its ethic,” I said. “I don’t guess bodyguarding is different. You’re paid to lay down your life. It’s a lot of life so I imagine you’re getting better than union scale, if you had a union. Large men who can handle themselves come in case lots, so you’re also loyal. But you’re not working for a man anymore. If Lucy’s as bad off as I hear, you’ve got to have asked yourself if it’s worth collecting a couple of holes for someone who can’t go to the toilet without General Electric.”

  A muscle flickered in his jaw.

  Half a minute bumped by on square wheels. A gray-haired doctor wearing a white coat over golf greens passed us with a curious glance. It would be the one he reserved for an irregular heartbeat or a rough lie.

  “What’s the incentive?”

  It had been so long since the young man had spoken I had to chew on it for a second. “Secrecy.”

  “Keep on.”

  “I just found out today Lucy’s been in there fourteen months. That means your employers are spending a lot of money to keep the news from spilling out. Hospitals are full of prowling press. If we get into a hassle here it’ll draw attention, someone’s going to start asking who’s in there that was worth the fuss. Okay, Lucy’s retired, but he’s got holdings. Whoever put the wraps on needs more time to nail them down before the scrambling starts. He’s going to be sore.”

  “Maybe there won’t be any fuss.”

  “There’ll be a fuss.”

  The square wheels took another turn. He was thinking.

  I helped him out. Moving very slowly, I raised my right hand where he could see it and used the thumb and forefinger of my left to lift the revolver from its holster. I worked the barrel up into my hand and offered him the butt. After a beat he curled the slim fingers of his left hand around it.

  “Careful,” he said. “I could make you crawl to the emergency room from here.”

  The door to the room was wide, to admit a wheelchair. I pushed down the handle and went in with it, into the thick muted dimness of the room where time lay like a rock in its depression. No one shot me in the back.

  5

  A STROBE ROCKETED across the backlit screen behind the little stage, accompanied by an angry swishing noise like George Reeves used to make when he whipped in through a window on the old Superman TV show. In its wake twinkled a green phosphorescence, turning the stage and the walls and the faces above the tables the color of crème de menthe. Then the light show started in earnest, rainbow lasers and Star Wars sound effects and a throbbing instrumental rendition of “Sea Cruise.” I figured it was safe to light a cigarette.

  By the time I discarded the match in the nondescript little period ashtray on my table, the music had stopped with a thump, extinguishing the lights. The stage was black for half a minute or more; long enough anyway for the anticipation to start to break up into whispers and self-conscious giggles. Then a powder-blue spot sprang on over the stage and Gail Hope appeared suddenly from darkness, encased in glossy satin from jacked-up breasts to five-inch stilts and flanked by four tanned miracles of male construction in disco suits and patent-leather boots. The audience gasped. Gail’s hair was piled on top of her head and she had on elbow-length gloves that made her look like a blonde Natalie Wood from Gypsy. The backlit screen showed a montage of scenes from her leather-and-suntan-oil pictures while she did a few dance turns to “Sea Cruise” that looked trickier than they were because of the hobble-skirt, and the beach boys did some time steps and tried not to knock anything over. The audience hooted and applauded. That ten-dollar cover will do it every time.

  I wasn’t swept away. As loud as the music got, I kept hearing the climate-controlled silence of a private room at St. John’s, interrupted irregularly by the apologetic bleep of the heart monitor. As bright as the lights got, I saw only the forced twilight of a room with the blinds drawn and a pale sunken figure, whiter than the sheets it lay on, with tubes in its potato-shaped nose and wires plugged to its narrow hairless chest and bony left arm and the slow flutter of the chest like a parked butterfly pulsing its wings in the final moments of its seventy-two-hour lifespan. The chest, like the wings, would continue to rise and fall tenuously, quiveringly, rise and fall and rise until — no one could predict when, even within a beat — it would rise and fall the same as it had been doing for hours, days, months; rise and fall and then not rise. The monitor would go to a flat whine and there would be some fevered activity for a while involving oxygen and a crash cart, and then someone would roll back the cobwebby eyelids and a head would shake and the monitor would be switched off and the tubes removed. The body would be wheeled out, the sheets changed, and after fourteen months (or sixteen or eighteen or two years or however long it took) someone else would occupy the b
ed within hours and it would be as if he had never been there at all.

  Sam Lucy. He had ridden in a bulletproof Cadillac and dated a Hollywood movie queen and threatened people with blowtorches and made good on the threats. J. Edgar Hoover had called him a cancer, he had had his picture taken with Truman Capote and Castro. What dreams do you dream in a coma? Are they in color, and do they resemble the floor show at the Club Canaveral?

  The show ended finally. The lights came up a little and the band, a six-piece mix of aging rockers in clean denims and tie-dyes and young barracudas in Italian sport coats, took over the stage. A few couples got up to dance. A waitress dressed like a carhop came over and took my empty glass and asked if I wanted seconds. I said yes. I couldn’t remember what I’d ordered the first time.

  It was a whiskey sour, and it came just as Gail Hope joined me in full kit. Sitting down in the dress required some engineering, but she managed it without alerting the vice squad and ordered a tonic water. “Bum a butt?” she asked, when the waitress clattered off. “These things don’t come with pockets.”

  I tossed her the pack. She plucked one out and leaned forward for me to light it, giving me a slant down the front of her dress. She’d aged nicely. She sat back and blew smoke over her left shoulder. “You should’ve told me you were coming. I’d have gotten you a better table.”

  “This one’s swell.”

  “So what did you think of the show?”

  “Beethoven would’ve flipped over it. He was deaf already.”

  “I like quiet places myself. But people don’t come here to talk.” She looked around, her cigarette pointed at the ceiling. “Half of this crowd wasn’t born when the sixties ended. They watch Easy Rider and The Graduate on their VCRS and get the hippies all mixed up with the antiwar activists and think everyone listened to this music all the time. If I served it up the way it was they’d walk out. Why not? Reality they can get at home.”

  “That’s why I’m paid in advance.”

  The waitress brought the tonic water and left. Gail sipped at it, put it down. “Needs rye. I didn’t expect to see you so soon. What did Sam say when you gave him the money?”

  “He doesn’t talk much.”

  “He can talk your ear off when you get to know him, about everything but his work. He can avoid talking about that in two languages.”

  “Cut.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said, ‘Cut.’ It’s a wrap. Take five. Whatever they say when the cameras stop turning. You’re not on a soundstage. Bubble-headed chatter’s out of character.” I took the fold of stiff paper from my breast pocket and laid it on top of the pack of Winstons.

  “What is it?” She didn’t pick it up.

  “It was easier to carry than the briefcase. I’ll send that around tomorrow. It isn’t my color.”

  She picked up the money order and unfolded it, looked up at me from the forest of zeroes. Before she could speak I said, “I used my favorite teller for the conversion. The expression I got was almost worth the day lost. I’m hanging on to the retainer, by the way. My time’s worth something. About half the cost of that dress.”

  “You saw Sam?”

  “I saw him. He didn’t see me.”

  “I didn’t think you’d get to him that quickly.”

  I had some whiskey. There was more sour in it than spirits, or maybe that was just me. “It’s none of my business,” I said. “I used to charge just two hundred a day. The extra fifty is the surcharge for being lied to. You paid for the privilege. But it was a lot of cash to let me lug around to buy your freedom from that living waxwork at St. John’s.”

  “It was a test.”

  I said nothing. The boy in front of Sam Lucy’s room had nothing on me.

  “I had to know if you could be trusted with this much cash. I used hard currency because it’s more tempting.” She refolded the money order and tucked it between her breasts.

  “Suppose I skipped.”

  “You wouldn’t have gotten far. You were followed.”

  I watched a couple dancing the Twist near our table. The boy was all elbows and Adam’s apple in a shiny black leather jacket and white chinos carefully smeared with grease and the girl had on a poodle skirt and her hair in a ponytail. I wondered if they were following me. It seemed to be the national pastime.

  “Where’s Lucy figure?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t. Everything else I said about him is true. He’s just not in a position to stop me from leaving him even if I wanted to now.”

  There was an interior fallacy there, but the music was making my head hurt, so I didn’t tinker with it. “I’m bonded up to a million, but I guess you knew that.”

  “Anyone can post a bond. I had to know. Now I do.” She put a hand to Fort Knox. “I’m in trouble.”

  “Um.”

  “A lot worse trouble than having to get out from under a bad relationship,” she continued. “I made a mistake once, a big one. I’m being bled.”

  “Who’d you kill?”

  The music had stopped unexpectedly. I said it loudly and it hung there on the sudden stillness like a sour note on the bass. A couple in early middle age seated at the next table glanced our way, then back. The man said something to his companion. They both laughed.

  When the next number started, Gail said, “How’d you know someone was killed?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a lot of blood. It’s the current price in certain circles. You didn’t answer the question.”

  “Not here. Not tonight. I’ve got another show later. Can you meet me tomorrow?”

  “Where?”

  “The bookstore in the New Center Building. Take the concourse from the Fisher. I’ll be coming in the front door. That way it will look as if we met by accident. Is ten o’clock okay?”

  “If that’s the hour you like. You bought three days.” When she started to rise I touched the back of her wrist. “One lie’s all you get. After that we go into overtime.”

  “I understand. Thank you.” She gave me the smile she would reserve for an autograph hound. Then she left.

  The band was playing “Dancing in the Street.” I didn’t hear much of it. My built-in smoke alarm was still hooting.

  6

  IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN when I got home from the Club Canaveral. The air inside the house felt as clammy as a wet galosh. The indoor thermometer read fifty-two. I checked the thermostat, which was set at sixty-five, and went down into the little half-cellar, where I spent a cozy hour cleaning the nozzle of the oil furnace that had come over with Cortez and knocking particles out of the filter. I used a twist of burning newspaper to ignite the pilot and hit the reset button. The motor chattered, wheezed, and kicked in with a deep gulp. I screwed the panel back in place and went upstairs to scrape off the soot.

  Showered and in a robe, with a glass of Scotch in my hand, I turned on the television set. I was too tired to read and not tired enough to sleep, although it was well past midnight. A talk-show host with an eyetooth grin was interviewing Fats Domino on Channel 2. Channel 4 was playing a Gidget movie and there was a rerun of LaughIn on 7. I couldn’t get away from the sixties that night. I turned off the set and sat in the dark with my Scotch until it was gone. Then I went to bed. The house smelled pleasantly of burning oil.

  I rolled out at eight-thirty, made pancakes for breakfast, and ate them with honey. I shaved, put on the blue worsted and a light topcoat — the outdoor thermometer read forty-three, six degrees warmer than yesterday’s high — and drove downtown to pick up my mail at the office before heading over to the Fisher Building. The mail, waiting for me on the floor under the slot in my little outer office, included a missing-child circular with a five-year-old Xerox photograph on it and a bonanza, the December issues of Smithsonian and the National Geographic. I put the magazines on the flea-market coffee table and interred a copy of Time with Idi Amin on the cover and a People of similar vintage in the wastebasket in my private womb. I called my service f
or messages — they reported none — and flicked the feather duster I keep in the file cabinet at the top of the desk. The motes swarmed around in the shaft of sunlight coming through the open blinds and settled into a new arrangement on the blotter. My morning’s business finished, I left.

  In the Fisher I passed the usual cluster of jaded business types and jittery radio chitchat guests waiting for the elevators in the tower and took the stairs opposite the guard’s station down to the underground concourse. The Art Deco exclamation point of the Fisher Building is connected to the combtoothed General Motors Building across Grand Boulevard and the New Center Building next door by means of a subterranean walkway, tiled and clean and clanging with the echo of busy footsteps day and night. It’s like a little city beneath the asphalt the way Fritz Lang would build it. I walked past a sawhorse by the wall and a man in coveralls on a cigarette break and around the bend toward the New Center Building, where the foot traffic thinned out a little. It was two minutes to ten; I was right on time for my bookstore meeting with Gail Hope. Wood scraped on tile behind me. The break was over, the man in coveralls was setting his sawhorse in place.

  Farther down the concourse, a slender man in a gray suit and belted tan topcoat stopped leaning against the wall and stretched, yawning. It was a real jawbreaker; he’d had a long hard day by ten o’clock. He started briskly in my direction, in a hurry to get somewhere now. His hands slid into the side pockets of his topcoat. I laid my fingers on the grip of the Smith & Wesson under my coat and jacket.

  Something hit me hard between the shoulder blades and I stumbled. A foot tried to hook my ankle from behind but I hopped over it, turning to put my back to the wall as I drew the revolver. The edge of a stiff hand struck my wrist at the break and my hand went dead. The gun clattered on tiles.

  I was getting stale, all right. If I’d heard the two men coming up behind me at all I’d have classed them as ordinary pedestrians. They were both my size in business suits and light coats and held no weapons. I elbowed the one who had disarmed me in the ribs, but he was backpedaling and the blow skidded off. His companion swung his toe at my crotch. He would be the one who’d tried to trip me. I had my balance now and some feeling in my right hand; I caught his ankle and shoved. He hit the wall deliberately with his shoulder to keep from falling. I jabbed straight out, second knuckles foremost, and connected with his temple hard enough to jar my own teeth loose. He dropped then. I turned to take a bow just as the other one charged in like the Lions’ offensive line, all bunched shoulders and the top of a dark head with a bald spot at the crown. The bald spot was all I had time to focus on before my lungs collapsed. I sat down hard.