by Lee Lamothe
“Mr. Evans, I have to make a call, okay?” She dialled Marty Frost. “Hey, is Ray with you guys?”
“Nope. Me and my poet are having a healthy breakfast. We’re hooking up with Ray later at the Bottomless on Ontario.”
“I’m with Mr. Samual Evans, the father of the lady in the hospital? We’re just heading over there now. He said Harris is actually Horace, named after Horace Smith, Smith & Wesson? Horace is a gun. It wasn’t found at the scene, so probably the doer took it with him.”
“Okay, good. Call us when you’re done, come over to the Bottomless.”
Djuna Brown clicked off and swung into the parking lot at St. Francis’ Heart. Samual Evans saw some media crews set up at the Emergency entrance.
“Is that for us? For Eve?”
“No. You heard about the riots the other night? Those people.”
Before getting out of the car, Samual Evans looked at her with huge sadness. “I made a mistake. I should never have let her come north. There are universities in the South.”
She patted his huge hand with her little elegant one. “None of us is perfect. We’re just people, like everybody else. Don’t blame yourself.”
At the nurses’ station a harried doctor wearing a white jacket over a bulging T-shirt was flipping charts while a world of activity broke around him, as though he were a rock in a river. He looked vaguely familiar. She thought: Bronstein.
“Doctor Bronstein?” She showed him her badge. “You were out in the riot the other night? Chinatown?”
“I was. You were with that bearded officer. Last time I saw you, you were running down the street with a shotgun. A permanent image. Beautiful woman, slippers, and a gun. When you were a little girl, did you imagine that? That image? You, with a shotgun running towards a riot?” He rubbed his hands over his face. “Sorry. I’m having those kinds of thoughts lately. The mind has no neutral, sometimes, so racing the engine becomes the status quo. It protects itself with wide cerebral thoughts so it can ignore little physical realities that confront you. When I was in med school in Boston did I see myself in Burma, removing a bullet with a chisel and a pair of manicure scissors? And when I was there, did I see myself in the middle of an American street taking a Chinese kid out with a tire iron? That kind of stuff.” He shrugged. “Are you here to lay some charges on my patients? Get in line.”
“No, no. This is Mr. Samual Evans. His daughter came in a few days ago, she was found by the river? Head injuries? Massive body?”
“Yeah, she’s one of mine.” He shook hands with Samual Evans and said he was pleased to meet him, regretting the circumstances. “I meant to call you people, Officer, but, well, you know it got really busy really fast. Miss Doe, Miss Evans, briefly regained consciousness yesterday. Very briefly. Then she lapsed out. Then she did it again, this morning, this time for a minute.” He said to Samual Evans, “I’m sorry what happened to your daughter, sir, but this is good news. She’s got a long road ahead, there’s some optical damage, there’s some brain injury we haven’t been able to fully evaluate. She’s got the strength. I wondered where she got it.”
“From her mother.”
“I’m sure.” Bronstein gave him a nod of appreciation at this. “Anyway, we’ve had to move people around. She’s up on Five. Give me two minutes and I’ll take you up there.” He stopped a passing nurse and handed her a stack of files. “These ones we lose. We don’t know where they are. They didn’t come in and if they did come in, they didn’t. Blame the filing system. Blame me.” He glanced at Djuna Brown, turned slightly away and told the nurse. “The cops don’t get these people.” He picked up a phone off the counter. “Five-o-seven. I’m going in there with family visitors in two minutes. Clean things up. Make the lady as presentable as you can.”
Djuna Brown saw in his lined face an inexhaustible, tough compassion. A multi-tasker of the physical and the spiritual and the practical and the emotional. She wondered how the night in Stonetown would have gone for her if she’d had his qualities and Samual Evans’s strengths. She thought again about her father, down in the capital. She thought how much she was lacking as a person.
Bronstein took the remaining files to a frazzled-looking nurse. “These, Mavis, in this order, please. There are two more patients coming over from Mercy in about twenty minutes.”
“We have no room, you know that.” She shook her head, sternly. “We’re all filled up.”
He pointed into the nursing station. “Get maintenance up here, move those two desks out, swing some gurneys in, get some screens. We got lots of space. We can play tennis in here, if we have to, and still have room to dance, you and me, after work.”
The nurse laughed and shook her head. “Okay, Doctor, okay.”
He led the way to the elevators.
Djuna Brown asked, “What was that, about the cops not getting people?”
He wasn’t evasive. “No record of them being here. They’re gone.” They boarded the elevator and he pressed 5 with his elbow. “Chinatown kids. Their addresses are in Chinatown, in the streets around the arsons. Students, restaurant workers. They were scooped up in Stonetown in the riots and pretty badly beaten. They paid a pretty heavy price for getting angry about their community being massacred. So, you don’t get ’em.”
When they stepped out onto Five, he led the way down the corridor past a waiting room crammed with people. “You guys didn’t horse around.”
She could say nothing to that.
At 507 he stopped. “Mr. Evans, I need you to listen to me for a minute, okay, sir? It’s going to look bad. It’s going to look a lot worse that it really is. There’s damage you can see, there’s damage you can’t see. I need you to stay on the right-hand side of her. If you need to touch her, touch her on the right-hand side. Maybe her shoulder, maybe her hand. That’s it. Don’t touch her face, even on the bandages. You’ll want to. I would. She’s still a beautiful girl. But you can’t, sir, okay? She can’t move her head. If she awakens, you can move into her field of vision. Her eye won’t move much. But don’t get into the wires. Those wires are keeping her going.”
Samual Evans nodded. He clamped his lips, took out his bible and clutched it in his hand.
Bronstein steered Djuna Brown away a couple of feet. “I can’t stay. You’ve got five minutes before a nurse will come in. She’ll evaluate Miss Doe … Miss Evans. She’ll kick you out or she’ll give you more time. There’ll be some crushed ice in there, he can rub her lips with it if she wakens. He can come back any time he wants, never mind that visitors’ hours bullshit. Tell ’em at the nurses’ station Bronstein said it was okay. I’ll leave a note.”
“Thank you.” She put her hand on his arm and looked up into his eyes. He’d been in the riots, at the beginning, and he was dealing. He looked like he’d been in a lot of faraway shit, and he was dealing. “You’re a good person, aren’t you? In spite of all this? Of where you find yourself?”
“Not always, Officer.” His face darkened a shade for a split second. He was intuitive and recognized she was asking something else. “None of us is at all times, in every place. We have to live with it as best we can.”
She watched him stride down the dingy corridor past a garbage container overflowing with newspapers and tin cans. He veered into the nurses’ station, took a plastic garbage bag from under the counter, and dumped the container into it, tying the bag with a flourish.
She could hear him whistling, swinging the bag, as he leaned over to hit the down button with his elbow.
If I’d gotten shot, she thought, if I’d gotten shot, boy.
Chapter 20
At breakfast in her apartment, Martinique Frost told Brian Comartin about Horace the gun. She made a show of relishing her buttered and jammed toast, sunnyside eggs, and crispy bacon, with endless mmms and yums. For fun, she poured extra cream into her coffee. Making his bran cereal with zero-percent milk last as long as possible, Brian Comartin watched her enjoyment morosely, but he was secretly pleased at this attention to his
well-being. His coffee was black and sour. He had to get on top of his body issues. An advertisement for waffles came on the television in the kitchen. Brian Comartin groaned at the melting pat of butter, the pouring of syrup.
Marty Frost was sympathetic. “Twenty-nine more days, Brian, and we go to IHOP, my treat.” She made a relaxed smile. “And, oh, three hundred and six days after that, I figure, we’ll be eating breakfast every morning in Barcelona. Hang in there, man.”
“Bar-tha-lona. In Spanish they pronounced the C as a th. Bar-tha-lona.”
They were watching the waffles being devoured by insanely voracious children when the telephone on the kitchen table buzzed. Marty Frost hit the mute on the television and picked up the phone. “Who wants to see me? Joe who? Don’t know him. Oh, wait, yeah, I know that guy. The firebomber, right? Okay, I’m gonna pick up my partner on the way in, we’ll go straight to the secure lockup. Give us an hour, let them know I’m coming.” She clicked off.
Brian Comartin said, “An hour? It’s ten minutes, we take the Eight down to Huron, cut across the park, pop out a block from the lockup. Run a half-block the wrong way on the one-way and we’re in the back of the parking lot. Twelve minutes, max.”
She nodded. “But that doesn’t allow for a detour in the shower, right? Diet without exercise is pointless.”
He thought her greying cornrows and the grooves of life in her face were the most beautiful thing he’d seen. It was beyond sexy. There was a poetry there. He’d caught Ray Tate looking at Djuna Brown with what he imagined was the same feeling. There was life and possibility. Yesterday and today weren’t the only available future. He saw her on Las Ramblas, sipping sweet, thick coffee; he saw himself, slimmer, fit, maybe a little ex-cop tough, sitting opposite in a ten-cent shirt and long, baggy shorts and espadrilles, reading an El Periodico, referring occasionally to a Spanish-English dictionary. At night after they had a good late dinner together, he’d sit by a window overlooking a town square and write poetry.
He had the perfect feeling that this part of his life was over.
Joseph Carr wore a full-body baby blue jumpsuit with wide belt loops and a waist-chain running through it to steel handcuffs, then down to shackles on his ankles. The slippers on his feet shuffled across the floor, and the chains clinked. Someone had been at him: he had a blackened eye, but his fists were scabbed and bruised. He was maintaining, holding his ground. He looked glad to see her, the familiar face who’d aced him into fatal declarations of guilty knowledge.
The custodian, specially trained in security of defendants in death penalty cases, sat him down, pushed Joseph Carr’s cheek down into the tabletop, neither gently nor aggressively, slipped the waist-chain to the back, unlocked it, then secured it to the back of the chair. He fastened the handcuffs to an iron ring driven deeply into the metal tabletop. He stepped back, then used a chain attached to the chair to secure Joseph Carr’s ankles to a ring in the floor. “He’s all yours, Miss. Nobody that secure can get at you.”
“Harry Houdini.” Marty Frost smiled at him. As she always did, she tried to make a personal connection. “Harry Houdini. He’d get out of this. I saw it in a movie.”
“Well, no. Harry didn’t have me locking him down. Trust me, if Harry had had me in there with him, I don’t care if he swallowed the key and puked it up, he’d still be trying to breathe through his ears.” He tapped Joseph Carr on the shoulder. “Okay, Joe? Stay in the chair. Okay, Miss? I’ll be behind that glass. I can see but not hear. The door lock is on a foot switch. I can be in here in literally two seconds. You just have to stand up, I’m in. Don’t stand up unless you need me. Adrenaline kills.”
When the custodian was gone, she asked Joseph Carr how he was making out.
“Okay. An awful lot of black people in here. I had a couple fights before they laid the charges and moved me to my own cell.”
“Anybody I can call for you, Joe?”
“Naw. I mean, no, my lawyer called my wife. She knows about the … those sex charges. That it wasn’t me. She’s standing by me on that. Chinatown, too. It had to be done. But she knows I wasn’t in on any sex stuff. I’ll go for Chinatown.”
“Maybe, maybe, Joe, you’ve got some time in here, you might want to use that time to think things out? Maybe it isn’t so cut-and-dried? This black, white thing? Chinese? Maybe people are just people, trying to bust themselves a living? I’ve seen everyone, black, white, Asian, Mexicans, everyone do the most horrible things. It always broke my heart and I admit I cried, but it didn’t make me put it all on anyone.”
She took a cigarette package from her pocket and held it up to the plexi-window where the custodian was watching. He shook his head sternly and pointed his finger at a No Smoking sign above her head. He wagged his finger at her, then closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. She lit two cigarettes with a plastic lighter and leaned across to put one into Joseph Carr’s lips. She didn’t smoke, much, but the companionship of it felt right. He took a deep drag, then bobbed his head down to his chained hands and took the cigarette from his mouth in his fingers. A second later he bobbed his head again to the cigarette, inhaling and exhaling. He seemed to have all the time in the world to think about what she’d said.
“People are just people, Joe. Like us, you and me. We’re just people who need to make a human connection. Just like us, you and me. Are we race enemies, Joe? Do you hate me, want to beat me to death? I mean, you know me.”
“No. I guess not. I dunno. No. I’m getting the needle for Chinatown, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know, Joe. Depends on your lawyer.” He’d tell her, she figured, in his own time why he’d voiced out for her. “You can make some kind of a deal, I’m sure. If there’s anything you need me to do, well, I can’t promise. What you did was pretty outrageous. I’m not going to pretend it’s forgivable. It’ll take a lot of time for a lot of people, me included, to get past this, past what I saw you did in Chinatown. But maybe, maybe if you need something … Maybe.” She sat smoking the cigarette as if she had all day.
“How come Ansel isn’t in here? I’m here, Peter’s here. I can’t talk to him, but I saw him going to the visitors’ room. I haven’t seen Ansel. My lawyer doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I ask.”
“Who’s Ansel?”
“The other guy, the one with the tattoos? Was picked up with us in Chinatown? He joined up about a month ago, Corey brought him in, said he was a righteous guy, a fugitive from Idaho. He’s the guy that got arrested with us in Chinatown. Ansel Partridge. He was always off doing missions, he said. He’d be gone for a few days, then back with us. It was his idea, the firebombs. He brought the gas and the bottles. Let’s make a strike for America. Burn ’em, burn ’em, burn ’em.”
Martinique Frost felt a chill. “I don’t know, Joe. Maybe they’re holding him in federal lockup. The feds are hungry for this case. They aren’t into making deals, but maybe they need this Ansel for something else.”
“Yeah. Yes, I guess.” He thought about that for moment. “So. They said Corey killed himself? In the raids?”
“Yes. He hung himself in a room he had hidden in his house. He was into porn. Black porn. It was everywhere. He never mentioned that, to you guys?”
“No. No, that’s sick, Miss. Any kind of pornography is a sin. Women are to be respected.” He bent to his hands and smoked at his cigarette until it was a stub. He looked around. She reached over and took it from his fingers and pinched it out. She pinched hers out, feeling a little nauseous.
“I guess, Miss, he was a troubled soul, Corey. The Lord sure don’t make it easy.”
“Joe, let me ask you one, okay? With what you know, this racist porn he had, the suicide, do you think Corey was capable of beating black women to death? Was he that hateful?”
Joseph Carr thought about it. His face went through several changes and she believed what he was going to say would be the truth. Most liars operate off the face of confusion or innocence. One or the other; lying can get complicated, best
to stick to a simple set of expressions. Joseph Carr was actually processing. “No. No, I don’t see it, but how do we know what’s in the hearts of others?” He nodded to himself as if he liked the phrase he’d come up with. “In the hearts of others.” He took a deep breath. “Look, can I talk to you about something? I don’t want Corey’s family hurt any more than already.”
“I’ll listen, Joe, but I have to tell you, my entire focus right now is on getting justice for the poor ladies. That’s my mission, my duty. We’re thinking it was Corey, some twisted race thing. He went off. If what you tell me is going to get me there, I’m going to use it. If what you tell me doesn’t do that, then I have some leeway, what I do with it.”
He nodded. “Ansel. After Corey brought Ansel around, they’d go out sometimes, just the two of them. That was weird. Corey was afraid of Ansel but Ansel was all chummy. Once, Ansel made some crack, like he was teasing. An inside joke, you know, how a guy says something that nobody else understands? And they laugh between themselves? Well, with Ansel, that time, it wasn’t for pals laughing. It was Ansel laughing and Corey getting all white in the face. He was terrified. But Ansel just went off on something else, another plan, another action.”
“You remember what it was about, that Ansel put to him?”