by Rhys Ford
By the time we were finally free, it was nearly afternoon and Bobby and I still didn’t have a solid plan on how to get rid of Marlena if she was standing watch in Arthur’s hospital room.
“Neither one of us is dressed well enough to pretend to be an FBI agent.” Bobby looked down at his jeans and T-shirt, then over at mine. “And neither one of us have fake credentials to convince anyone of that bluff.”
“I just want to ask the old man some questions, not douse him with holy water to see if he’s the undead and I have to go find his grave to salt and burn it,” I replied, shoving the Rover in between two small import cars to the left of us who were refusing to acknowledge my turn signal. I was willing to pit the three tons of steel I was driving against their plastic windup cars any day, especially since I’d been polite and had my signal on for nearly half a block. I eased in, and the traffic stilled once again. “Hospital’s at the next turnoff. We better come up with something, because right now, he’s our only lead unless O’Byrne can shake that guy’s name out of the trees.”
Parking in the hospital’s structure was definitely a business expense I was going to pawn off on O’Byrne. If you asked me, I was fairly certain that’s how the hospital got the organs for their transplants, because it cost a kidney and a liver to park there. As usual, I cursed the lack of covered walkways as we sprinted across a short sidewalk to get to the visitors’ entrance. The drizzle was easily shaken off, but Marlena probably wouldn’t be as courteous. She struck me as someone who needed to control her environment, tightening her grip on any information flowing in or out of her life.
I couldn’t shake off the instinctive dread I had every time I walked through those doors. Even though it had been years since I came in, cold with shock and shaking with fear, I relived every moment of those horrible days when I walked through those automatic glass panes, speckled with the blood of somebody I loved and wondering if I would ever see them alive again. I brought so much violence and pain to everyone around me and was filled with such an intense guilt that I stumbled over my own feet before we got to the elevator.
Bobby knew me well enough to pat my back a few times and murmur, “It’s okay, Princess. Everybody walked back out.”
“Not Rick,” I reminded him, then grimaced. “Not Ben.”
“No they didn’t. I’ll give you that, but there’s one thing you’ve got to remember,” he said softly, ruffling my hair as if I were a little kid. “You walked out of here. And you’ve got a good life now. Your head’s on straight, and I’ve got your back. We’ve also both got guns, so if we run into trouble, try not to pick up a rock and smash the guy’s head like you’re trying to open up a coconut. I’m surprised that guy’s mug shot even looks human. You literally beat the shit out of him with a bag of bricks.”
“Use what you’ve got at hand,” I said, smiling at him when the elevator doors opened and a wave of hospital staff vomited out its long steel box. “Jae tells me that about cooking.”
“Yeah, Jae’s talking about making an omelet,” Bobby snorted, stepping aside to let a couple of nurses out, “not about you making scrambled eggs of some guy’s face.”
We were squished in by a horde of ordinary people looking for joy or answers amid the hospital wards. A young man with a smile so broad his full beard couldn’t hide it clutched a bundle of balloons announcing someone had a baby boy while an anxious-looking older Latinx wrung her hands around an old, worn rosary, her lips moving rapidly but her prayers silent. It was a long elevator ride of emotions running the gamut from exhilarated to resigned, and we stood in the middle of it, two stones worn down around the edges, having already been caught in that river.
We had to fight our way out past the balloons, wishing the guy luck, but I was pretty sure he heard nothing past the white noise and glee in his own head. Mike had a similar look on his face when Mad Dog Junior was born, and considering she was a pretty kick-ass kid, I tended to smile like that too once in a while.
“I wonder how Marlena’s childhood was,” I pondered, shoving my hands in my pockets while we waited for the nurse on duty to finish with the two women in front of us. “Like, did her grandfather explain to her the difference between Monet and Manet and how to tell when a painting was fake?”
“Have you ever considered seeing a doctor about that brain of yours? Because you wander off places that make absolutely no fucking sense,” Bobby muttered at me under his breath. “She obviously did okay, because she’s a goddamned district attorney. Unless she’s pulling the longest con ever and set up her career just so she could get Grandma and Grandpa out of jail when they got caught. For all we know, they’ve got a château down in Belize they’re paying off.”
“Let’s just see if he’s in the same room and—” I stopped when a noise made me look down the hall and the double doors separating the waiting area and the nurses’ station were flung open and our quarry emerged.
The clip of quick-stepping heels beat a machine-gun-fast staccato against the hospital’s hard marble floor. Marlena Brinkerhoff moved like a shark cutting through the currents, her face cold and set into a stony mask. There was more than a little bit of fire in her enormous baby blue eyes, and her gaze flicked over me as if she had never seen me before in her life. She was dressed to kill in a pinup-style librarian’s tweed skirt and a red liquid silk shirt so fluid it clung to her breasts, flowing over their plump curves as if woven from water. Pushing past a small gathering of people waiting by a row of uncomfortable-looking chairs, recognition finally broke through her focus when she saw my face.
She stumbled.
Nothing so graceless as to twist her ankle or miss a step, but there was a slight hesitation before she brought her foot down again. Her pause was only long enough if you were looking for it, and I was certainly looking for it. She was just as beautiful as she had been the first time I’d seen her, but something had changed. The sweet, devoted granddaughter act was gone, and in its place was something much more dangerous and probably much more real.
“There’s our girl,” I muttered at Bobby. Breaking off from the line, I stepped into Marlena’s path, bringing her up short before she could reach the elevator doors. There was a bit of murmuring from the people around us, but we were now far enough away from the orderly line to be considered no longer another supplicant waiting to speak to the attending nurse. Smiling, I said, “Hello, Marlena. My associate and I were just coming to see you and your grandfather. I had a couple of questions I needed answering and was hoping you could spare some time.”
The tightening at the corner of her eyes told me time was the last thing she wanted to give me. In fact, I got the distinct impression that if Marlena had a pair of metal chopsticks secreted somewhere on her body, she would’ve done her very best to shove them into my eyeballs in the hopes of punching through my skull and out the other side. That impression didn’t go away, even when she gave me what should have been a charming, glittering smile and then held her hand out to Bobby to shake.
If I were Bobby, I would’ve checked her rings to make sure they didn’t have tiny needles tipped with poison before I took her hand.
“I really don’t have the time,” she said with another tight smile. She shifted her body, angling it slightly, and very quickly glanced back down the hall. “I’m actually very late. I’m meeting someone downtown. One of the district attorneys from the Los Angeles office. And my grandfather is really in no shape to speak with anyone. Maybe next time call ahead and I can make more time.”
“We just need—” I began, but Marlena shook her head, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“I’m sorry. But I have to go.” She did that little touch thing on my arm, a practice taught at seminars, one of those body cues to communicate sympathy and compassion while telling somebody to fuck off. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
“Tell you what,” Bobby replied with a grin as sharklike as her determination to get off the ward floor and into the elevator. “How about if I ride down with you and we
can talk along the way? McGinnis here can maybe touch base with your grandfather’s doctor and get a better idea about how he’s doing.”
She was too fidgety, and for a moment there I thought she was going to argue, but the elevator doors opened and she practically leaped through them, reaching the relative safety of the lift. Bobby was close on her heels, stabbing at the buttons before Marlena could protest, and I got a wink from him right before the doors shut.
Gambling Arthur Brinkerhoff was in the same room as before, I headed through the small crowd and down the hall. There wasn’t much celebration on this floor. It was mostly filled with anxious tension when most of the conversation revolved around pleas to God or condemning Him. The air was cold enough to hurt my nose, but it was typical for a hospital. They were pretty much cryogenic chambers, possibly preparing the ward’s patients for the steel drawers that awaited them in the morgue downstairs.
The machines in Arthur’s room had multiplied since I’d last been there. Now everything beeped and chimed and sang, loud and cheerful enough that I should’ve looked for a blue hedgehog collecting gold rings, but the man lying in the hospital bed looked even more fragile than he had before. Tubes were plugged in and taped down practically all over his body, and he was motionless, his eyes still beneath his paper-thin lids. I didn’t know if the machines were keeping him alive or if he was breathing on his own. Honestly, considering how many bruises and welts I could see, I was surprised he was still around.
What surprised me more was the stout Teutonic woman sitting on one of the chairs next to his bed. She was perhaps thirty, maybe more, but her age probably would never really matter. She was a block of a woman, staunch and strong, the type of person who could probably build a log cabin if ever she got stuck in a snowstorm, and milk a wandering reindeer so she could make her own cheese. Her light blond hair was cut short, framing her square face, and her skin was lightly freckled, her thin mouth unpainted and set into a stern line. She was dressed in a practical way—a nondescript blouse and black slacks, a pair of no-nonsense loafers on her broad feet. There was something so familiar about her that I could only stare at her, trying to place where we’d met before.
“Who the hell are you?” she snapped, her words a leather whip across my tender skin. I knew that voice. I’d heard it before, only raspier with age.
“Cole McGinnis,” I informed her, not liking the realization digging sharp claws through my guts. “Arthur Brinkerhoff hired me to look into his wife’s murder. Who are you?”
“I am Marlena Brinkerhoff,” she replied, rising up from the chair, a Valkyrie ready to do battle to defend her fallen grandfather. “And I know all about you, Mister McGinnis, so get the hell out of my grandfather’s room before I call security.”
Twelve
“I WAS backpacking through Mongolia when I got the call about Mama,” the real Marlena said, staring at the now empty hospital bed in the room. “I was in the air when he was being attacked, I guess. It’s all a blur. I can’t even tell you what day it is. When I landed in LAX, I had messages from my boss in San Francisco, asking me if my grandfather was all right. Soon as I found out where he was, I headed straight over. The detective on the case left me your name on my voice mail but I already knew it. You’re the man who Poppa hired to catch Mama cheating on him.”
A battalion of scrub-wearing nurses and attendants had bundled the old man off for parts unknown a minute or so before, unwrapping him from his nest of tubing and transferring him to a gurney much like a pit crew servicing a racecar between laps. She’d sat down back into her chair, only the tightness around her mouth and the shadows beneath her eyes giving me any indication of how tired she was.
“You must’ve just gotten here, then.” I knew all too well what she was going through, and there weren’t any words I could say to make her feel any better. She’d been delivered a one-two punch, and I was going to have to scrape at her freshly inflicted wounds to see if she had any information about the blond bombshell posing as a Brinkerhoff. Going slow was probably my best bet, especially since she hadn’t called security yet to have me removed. “They said they were going to be a couple of hours. Do you want to head down to the cafeteria and get something to eat or a cup of coffee? You’re probably dead on your feet.”
She stopped staring at the bed, focusing on me for the first time since they wheeled Arthur Brinkerhoff out to be lubed and x-rayed by trained professionals. There was a hardness to her face I recognized from her grandmother’s expression on the night Adele chased me through a topiary garden with a shotgun. I could see the woman Arthur had probably fallen in love with mirrored in Marlena’s strong features. There was a quiet beauty to her, a strength and resolve I hadn’t seen in the fake Marlena. The other woman who’d tried to pass herself off as a Brinkerhoff had packaged herself as sexy and mysterious—something to tickle a man’s fantasies—but the woman sitting in the unforgiving, much-too-hard-on-the-ass hospital chair promised nothing but the truth. And possibly if you were man—or woman—enough to win her over, you would be set up for life with someone who would love you and fight to the death for you.
The fake Marlena definitely wouldn’t even consider getting a hangnail for someone else. I’d fallen in love with Jae when he wrapped himself in secrets and frothy familial lies, but I’d seen the man who ached to live out in the open—a snarky, intelligent soul who longed to be held in bed and loved being kissed on the neck while cooking. I’d been willing to walk away from him loving me, but I hadn’t been willing to let him be smothered by his family’s hatred. It’d taken years before he felt comfortable enough to hold my hand at a farmers’ market. Marlena Brinkerhoff was definitely not that person. The only reason she wouldn’t hold her lover’s hand was because it was filled with bags of groceries and possibly an anvil she picked up on sale.
I was surrounded by strong women, and I knew I was in for a battle if Marlena intended to kick me to the curb. So I was going to have to talk fast.
“While your grandfather hired me, the LAPD has asked me to help consult on the case. If you like, you can contact Lieutenant Dell O’Byrne at the main number, and she can verify I’m here to help.” Reaching down into the dregs of my logic, I pulled a rather anemic rabbit out of my hat. “Your grandparents worked through their problems, and your grandfather thought enough about me to call me about Adele. He understood I was doing my job, and despite me being the person who found your grandmother that night, called me for help. So you’ve got to ask yourself, Marlena, who would do this to your grandparents and whether or not you’re going to share that with me?”
TO SAY hospital coffee was shitty was being cruel to every pile of feces ever shat out. I could have added an entire cow’s worth of cream and possibly all of the sugar that they’d ever grown in Hawai’i and it still probably would be the color of pitch and taste like the oil scraped off of a pig’s armpit. I don’t know what Marlena was drinking in Mongolia, but she sipped at the coffee as if it were the finest wine. But then, she was also dead on her feet and mourning the loss of her grandmother.
I made some mention of what food was actually edible, but she shook her head, murmuring her stomach probably couldn’t take anything in it. I was mildly surprised she was willing to drink the battery acid served up to us as coffee, but it was probably more to give her something to do besides stare at the nothingness stretching out around her.
Marlena wandered outside before I could steer us to a table, and I followed, guessing she needed a bit of fresh air or a change of scenery to clear her head. As dismal as the cafeteria’s offerings were, it was filled with staff members and a few families sitting tightly around small tables, stewing in various spectrums of devastation or joy. It was getting harder to tell the difference at times, especially when the hollow eyes met your glance with a smile. The glare of the lights stole the color from nearly everyone’s skin, rendering them in an ashen tone, as if they were preparing for Charon’s arrival and still needed to check their pockets for coins.
“Let’s sit over there,” she finally said, her voice tight and strained. “I’ll give you ten minutes of my time—fifteen at the most—and I need to head back upstairs. I don’t want Poppa to come back to the room and find himself alone.”
We settled down on a bench outside of the hospital, sitting silently while bits and pieces of humanity streamed past us. I briefly wondered where Bobby was and how far he’d gotten with our faux-Marlena. I reached for my phone and was about to apologize to the real Marlena when she began to speak.
“I might as well talk to you. Maybe you can help me make sense of all of this,” she muttered. “Because I sure as hell don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Do you know about the woman passing herself off as you?” I led with the softest question I had, saving any discussion about Adele’s murder and the attack on Arthur for when Marlena felt more comfortable talking. There was a fine balance between leading someone toward an answer and accidentally sending them off into areas of speculation that were useless to an investigator. “I assume you saw her or someone told you about her.”