by Lisa Sandlin
Uncalibrated lighting in these hospital stairwells, combination of too bright and too dim that cast weird shadows. Phelan plowed up the industrial-gray stairs, emerged into a hall, and dodged a runner with a stethoscope bouncing on his chest. Paused to pump the nurse at the third floor station, and then counted his way to room number 303. He couldn’t see her past a blue curtain drawn between the beds.
Fluorescents spilled over the bed nearest the door. It held a lump with a pointy, shelf-like shape near the top end. All covered up by the sheet. Maybe morgue was short tonight.
The sheet slid down past a new, black, squeezed-on Astros ball cap to inquiring eyes, then to a bandage over one cheek, then part of a chin. A moon-face.
“Hey there,” Phelan said as he passed. He peeked around the blue curtain. Darker there, no light on, but the sheet wore the sweet undulation of a woman on her side. She seemed to be breathing steady. Phelan backtracked. He slung a plastic chair and set it down against the wall, equidistant to both beds, so he wouldn’t be invading anyone’s privacy.
“My mom is coming back,” said the moon-face. “She promised.”
Phelan nodded.
“You’re not from Social Services, are you?”
Phelan shook his head. “Bet you’re an Astros fan.”
“Duh.”
“Me, too.”
“Coach Durocher, he don’t take shit from nobody.” The round face challenged him.
“Sure not any umpires.”
“No way. Or batters. Hey, pitcher, stick it in his ear!” Lips that’d been compressed into a bud by heavy cheeks opened, and the kid looked pretty much like a chubby fifth-grader with an ear bandage.
“Durocher’s the man. That your wife over there?”
“Secretary. And friend.”
“She hadn’t hardly woke up yet. What happened to her, car wreck?”
“Bad man hurt her.”
“No shit?” The boy looked shocked for a few seconds, then cut his chin hard and resettled his ball cap to a low and serious angle. “If I had a wife, I wouldn’t let anybody hurt her. Ever. Not till the end of the world.”
“Then you’re the man,” Phelan said.
A middle-aged nurse with a wheelchair blocked the door. “Tommy?”
Phelan’s and the kid’s heads turned together.
“My mom back?”
“Oh, not yet. What say we go visit the babies. Got a new one. Need to tire you out, sport.”
“Far out.” The kid swung his legs to the side of the bed. Pinched the gown to cover a skinny ass and elbowed off the nurse as she tried to guide him into the chair.
“Now, come on,” she said, “be nice.”
Gurgley hooting from the kid. “Nice guys finish last.”
The nurse said, “Men always say that. I don’t get it. I like nice guys. Not that I know any.” They rolled away.
Phelan rose and slid back the blue curtain. He felt a twinge, remembering her pushing the gold-stickered certificate from Gatesville across his desk without saying a word. The whitened scar on the back of her neck.
Delpha’s hand fluttered. “Help me turn over.”
He gingerly fit both hands beneath her side, lifted her body and, rounding his arms, let her slant back into them, stayed that way a while, holding her, then gently replaced her on her back in the bed, slid his hands back to himself.
She was grimacing, brow squeezed. “Thanks. How ’bout some real air?”
Phelan hoisted the blinds and pushed open one side of the window. Rain was falling through the smeary halos of the parking lot lights. It wafted in, little plinks of water along with the wall of heat and humidity. Tree frogs, crickets, katydids, cicadas sharpened their scissors, rubbed their wings, whirred, chirred zzzt-zzzt-zzzt, settled into the room.
“Better?”
Her head nodded.
“How you doing?”
“I hadn’t slept like this since I was three years old.”
“Doc said he fixed you up. Nurse said barring infection, in a week or two you’ll be back to work. Mind if I turn on the lights?”
“Not the ceiling one.”
“There’s a little one on a pull-chain back of the bed. Mind that one?”
“OK.”
Phelan leaned in to snap the chain, stepped back, looking down on her strained, ivory face.
“Police gonna charge me for Deeterman?”
“E.E.’s got a sergeant down at the precinct that’ll call down a Cajun riot if that happens.”
“Fontenot. I remember him.”
“They got Deeterman’s diary from the bottom of hell. And this is Texas.”
“I ’as in Texas last time, too. Never been outta Texas.”
The summer tune thrummed through the window, hospital hummed around them. The bag on the pole dripped without a sound.
“Close, wasn’t it, Delpha?”
She laid an arm across her eyes.
Phelan went over and retrieved the plastic chair, set it between the bed and the window. He tucked her fingers in his, said softly, “Piss-poor timing, but I gotta ask you something. Yesterday night while you were sleeping, a house blew up and took somebody with it. The body, if you can call it that, belonged to the father of the man you went to Gatesville for killing. Or least, that’s who the ’62 Ford parked out front belongs to. Ronald Wayne Pettit. His daughter hadn’t seen him since supper last night.”
Her breath sucked in.
“House is a place of business belonging to one Wallace Daughtry, dba Daughtry & Co., Inc. You can see that…” A specter of ill flittered through him, and he shut up, mulling over how to put it. “It’s just…there’s kinda a collision of circumstances happening here. I know who blew the house. Fire marshal’ll tell us how. But Ronald Pettit. Damned if I know why she’d do that for you. I can live without knowing, but it’s gonna be awkward around the office.”
She moved her arm down from her face, slipped her hand from Phelan’s and laced her fingers tight together. Squeezed eyes, a crease between her brows made her exhaustion clear. A whisper, “You askin’ me for a alibi?”
“’Course not. Etherized on a table. Ringed by medical personnel, A-1 alibi.”
Her eyelids smoothed. The black lashes were glittering.
“That old man dead?”
“He’s carbon, honey.”
The glitter bunched to water that pearled and the pearls flattened as they rolled down the sides of her face.
Damp from the rain sifted through the screen. Damp from the bayou. Phelan sat vigil until something began to leave from her. Her chest rose and fell as she drew in breath, let it go, open-mouthed letting it go, drawing breath and passing it out of her, passing it on somewhere and on and farther while he sat and felt it pass.
Gone to sleep, he thought after a while, needs sleep and here I am keeping her from it. He hovered his hand over hers, barely touching.
Delpha’s head tilted on the pillow so that she was looking at him full-on. Not a cloud in the gray-blue eyes that met his. The horizon inside them was clear.
“I’ll tell you why she did it but…first turn out this light.”
Tom Phelan clicked off the pull chain.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A BILLION THANKS to David Baker for being my closest reader, cheerleader, and wise and tireless advisor. A million to Cindy Black for the secretary suggestion, to Kevin Flatowicz-Farmer for asking the genre question, to Deputy Sheriff (ret.) Gene Langston for the title, to eagle-eyed Eddie Elfers, sympathetic Ruth Elfers, and veteran librarian Laurie Macrae for great catches and comments, to my engineer brother for oil rig information, to my fabulous, generous writing groups: Lynda Madison, Shelly Clark Geiser, Suzanne Kehm, Jane Bailey; Barbara Schmitz, Karen Wingett, Neil Harrison, Lin Brummels. Thanks also to Barbara B. Brookner for getting me into her friend’s office with the Neches River view and to her kind aunt Deanna Ford for the Cajun translation. I’m grateful to Bobby and John Byrd of Cinco Puntos Press for commissioning me to write the stor
y “Phelan’s First Case,” from which this novel grew, to Johnny Temple’s Akashic Press for anthologizing the story in their USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, and—¿cómo no?—to the crafty Lee Byrd, whose skilled, guerilla editing made the book clearer, slimmer, and faster. Deep bow to you all.
In memory of NANCY RICE, 1950 - 2015.
Phenomenal Woman, that was you.