Ouch, I thought. I didn’t have to say anything, because the detective who’d been questioning Peter poked his head out of the kitchen.
“What is it, Morano?” Rogers said.
“He wants to talk to you. Says he has to ask you something.”
“All right, bring him out. Tell Pickens to send the doctor out, too, if he’s through with her.” Apparently he was, because a few seconds later we were all in the living room again.
Rogers told Peter to speak. The youngest Letron cleared his throat, was unhappy with the result, and cleared it again. “It’s about my mother,” Peter said. “Has she been told about this?”
“We have men there, but she hasn’t been told yet.”
“Why did you send men there?”
“To pick something up. And to protect your mother. I understand she’s raising holy hell about it, too.”
“She would, of course. It’s going to be worse when she learns about… about Robert.” When his face finally moved, it worked hard; he struggled to control it, though no tears came. He sniffed, then composed himself.
“Excuse me. I still haven’t been able to… to take it all in. I think, though, that my mother might be more tractable if I were there when she heard the news. I would be willing to tell her myself, if you like.”
To my surprise, Rogers took him up on it. To my further surprise, Rogers told Morano to take Peter over to the hotel, adding, “Let him tell his mother the news, but nobody leaves until I get there.”
I thought, until he gets there. Which meant he wasn’t going himself. Amazing. What was it about me or Barbara or my humble abode that could keep him here when there was someone dramatic like Alma Letron to deal with? Rogers didn’t seem to be the type to let subordinates do all the exciting work. It made me wonder what he had in mind. Did he suspect me, for God’s sake? Or, to be even more ridiculous, Barbara?
We got the answer about twenty seconds after the door closed behind Peter Letron and his police escort. The bell rang, and the door opened again, and a uniformed cop (the same one who’d guarded the used ampoule from the Mad Housekeeper) ushered a nervous-looking Lucille Letron into the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
LUCILLE HAD BEEN CRYING, and as soon as she got one look at me, she started again. “Oh, Harry,” she sobbed. “We did this to him. He found out, and it killed him.”
This kind of remark I didn’t need. I felt guilty enough already, and even before I sneaked a look and confirmed it, I could feel a cold glare from Barbara on me. I heard myself back in the office—no girlfriend, no one having performed the functions of a girlfriend. Well, except one. And here she was.
Her saying what she did gave Rogers a whole bunch more of questions. Undoubtedly, that was why he’d brought her here in the first place, having a cop break the bad news in the elevator on the way up to my apartment. I sometimes think Allen Funt was a policeman gone wrong.
It wasn’t that Lucille’s remorse wasn’t genuine. She sat in a chair, playing with a gold bracelet on her wrist until I thought she was going to unscrew her hand, crying real tears, and telling the lieutenant how much she’d loved her husband, how she was sorry she hadn’t treated him better. Apparently she had so much guilt, she wanted to spread it around a little.
I was willing to carry my share (and I would; I still do), but not now. I sat there trying to look repentant and innocent and misunderstood while Barbara looked at me like a microscope slide.
I had some sympathy to spare for Lucille, too, especially for little Lucille Berkowitz, hidden away in that apartment. She’d built a whole life around deceiving her husband, and not only had he never been deceived, he was now dead. I mean, even a Hostess Twinkie has something at the center.
Further speculation on the topic was forestalled by the doorbell. Who now? I thought. My mother? Barbara’s old boyfriend, for whom, without even knowing his name, I was conceiving an intense dislike? Lucille’s mother?
It was another cop. He had a carton, about a foot and a half long, a foot wide, and four or five inches deep.
“What is it, Jones?” Rogers asked.
“Morano told me to bring this to you, sir. It was in Mr. Peter Letron’s car. It’s addressed to Mr. Ross.”
“Who found it?”
“Morano did, but Mr. Letron identified it. Said I should bring it to Mr. Ross. A gift for him, he said. Should I call the bomb squad?”
“Not yet,” Rogers told him. “Let me see that.” Rogers took the box in his hands, and held it loosely, weighing it. Then he held it to his ear and shook it gently. He held the thing an inch and a half away from his eyes and looked at all the seams in the wrapping. He sniffed it. He did everything but lick it to see what it tasted like.
Then he held it out to me and said, “Here, open it.”
“It’s supposed to be some of Peter’s work in glass. Some animals.”
“Yeah. Well, he sure wasn’t sending me any presents. Don’t you want to open it?”
“The possibility of its being a bomb has been brought up.”
“It’s not a bomb.”
“How do you know?” I asked. Not snotty. I just wanted to know.
“Experience. Come on, you gonna embarrass me by making me call out the bomb squad on this?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We don’t want you to be embarrassed. Of course, if this is a bomb, and anybody here survives to tell about it, you’re really going to look foolish.”
“I’ll risk it,” he said.
Lucille was going to protest, and Barbara’s face said she was working up to it. I had never felt so strongly about a woman before and blown everything so early in the relationship. That knowledge alone made me start to hope it was a bomb.
I skinned the paper off. It was a box of glass animals.
“That was still a foolish chance to take, Lieutenant,” Barbara said.
“Experience,” the lieutenant said. “Besides, on the bottom, in real small print, there was a message from Morano saying he had already checked it out.”
“You sadistic son of a bitch!” I told him. “What possible good could that have done for your investigation?”
“Never mind. This isn’t a computer game or something. We use what we’ve got, do the best we can, and see what happens.”
Now he was seeing what happened when he asked Lucille questions about the box. While she told him she knew Peter did that sort of thing, but she had no idea he was planning to make me a present of any of it, I took the opportunity to look at the present itself.
Peter did nice work. The sculptures were all glass, but they were all different. There was a giraffe that had obviously been ground and etched, a walrus that had been stretched from a blob of molten glass, and a delicate blown swan, the glass stretched so thin it almost disappeared.
He finished with Lucille, and turned to Barbara, who had had about enough of him by now. Every once in a while, he would remind the gathering in general that he was saving me for last.
He never got around to me. The telephone rang. I started to get up, but one of the precinct cops beat me to the phone. He said uh huh, then covered the mouthpiece and asked the lieutenant if he wanted to talk to the Narwood Hospital.
And so much for police security, I thought. They had Faith at the Narwood Hospital, a small private hospital not far from Bellevue (not geographically, at least), and fairly close to Barbara’s office, too. I wondered if the city was actually paying Narwood Hospital rates, or if the hospital was taking this off their income tax or something.
I also wondered about the perversity of life in general. Here’s Rogers, keeping Faith’s whereabouts secret from her own doctor, and one phone call to one precinct cop who’s there because he’s a warm body—and he blurts it out in front of everybody.
Rogers cursed, then took the phone. He said his name, “Right,” and “Yeah, she’s on her way.” He hung up the phone and turned to Barbara. “Come on, Doctor, it’s time. Jones, take Mrs. Letron back to the hotel. She can rejoin her family, but no
thing about the hospital.”
He had his hand on the doorknob before he realized Barbara hadn’t moved from her chair. “Doctor? You wanted to be told the second she went into labor? Well, this is it. Contractions ten minutes apart, they said.”
“We’ve got time, then,” Barbara said calmly, and I thought Rogers was going to start chewing his tie. If he ever makes a woman pregnant, she should probably do natural childbirth, so they can give him the anesthesia.
“What about my car?” Barbara demanded.
“Your car?”
Yes, her car. She had no intention of coming all the way back uptown to get her car when this was over with. Furthermore, she had no idea how long the labor was likely to take, and she didn’t want her car towed away when alternate-side-of-the-street regulations went back into effect tomorrow morning. Mr. Ross knew where the car was. She would give Mr. Ross the keys, and he would drive the car down to the garage where she usually kept it, then meet her at the hospital, and give her the keys and the garage slip. If that was all right with Mr. Ross.
It took me a second to realize that was a question. “Oh,” I said. “Yes. Perfectly all right.”
Rogers by now would have agreed to assign a cop to carry the car downtown on his back, just so they could get started.
Jones left with Lucille, hustling her along so quickly, she didn’t get a chance to remind me of how she and I together killed poor Robert. Barbara went through her purse, handed me her keys, and gave me a wink and a big smile. Suddenly the world looked a lot better.
It looked so good, in fact, that I was even in the mood for the radio when I reached Barbara’s car twenty minutes or so later. It took so long because I cleaned up the apartment a little before I left. Any good compulsion is worth following through.
Anyway, I got to the car, slipped into the seat, and was further confirmed in my speculation that Dr. Metzenbaum might indeed be the woman for me when I found the dial set to WCBS-FM. I hit the ignition, and heard the last notes of “Bad Boy” by the Jive Bombers dying away, only to be replaced by the news.
If I hadn’t been busy pulling out of the parking space, I would have pushed a button, changed the station, and missed it.
“A fire at a landmark New York hotel has caused the evacuation of the building. Firefighters are battling the blaze at the Westbrook Hotel, where the alarm originated from less than thirty minutes ago. Fire Department sources say the twelfth and fourteenth floors are burning, and that the fire may spread. No injuries have been reported as yet. Spokesmen refused to comment on the possibility of arson. In the Middle East today—”
I reached out and clicked the thing off. To hell with the Middle East today. I pulled out onto Second Avenue. Traffic was light, and the avenue was one-way in the right direction. Rogers had to know about this. I made that little French car move.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TWO HOURS LATER, I sat in the waiting room of the maternity ward of Narwood Hospital, looking gloomily at Lieutenant Rogers and feeling like an idiot.
I had made it to the hospital in record time. I had driven without the slightest regard for my life or the lives of others, almost as recklessly as a New York City cabdriver. I had even tried to attract police attention, so that they could risk their lives to bring the news, but without success. The cops were undoubtedly all over at the Westbrook, keeping rubberneckers out of the Fire Department’s way.
When I got to the hospital, I pretended I was in Paris and parked Barbara’s car half up on the sidewalk, dashed inside, talked my way past the cop at the door (he had instructions to let in the guy with the parking slip), confronted Rogers and told him the big news.
“Thanks, Ross,” he said calmly.
“But this means they’re probably running around loose. Peter had a propane torch up there—he used it to make his glass stuff. That’s probably how the fire started.”
“Ross, I’ve thought of all this already. And they are running around loose.”
“How do you know that?”
“They put radios in police cars these days.”
“Oh,” I said. After that, I decided to give my brain a brief rest, like for the remainder of the 1980s. Radios in police cars. What would they think of next?
Rogers, not knowing that I had switched off, went on talking. “I heard from Morano right after the fire started. There was a panic in the building, and my guys got things straightened out. The old lady disappeared; Peter is gone, too—Morano thinks he’s out looking for his mother. Lucille turned up again, bringing the news that she let slip the name of the hospital.”
“That’s why the guard at the door,” I said.
“Right. Not that it will do much good, really. There are a lot of ways in and out of here, and I don’t have the men to cover them all.” He sighed. “Anyway, your doctor friend promises me it will all be over pretty soon. Once the baby’s born, the game is up, right?”
“That’s the theory,” I told him. “We’re dealing with crazy people here, remember.”
“Catch me forgetting,” he said.
So we went to the waiting room. It was a dingy, depressing place. The magazines were ancient. Rogers said, “What the hell is this? For the kind of money this hospital charges—”
“Nobody uses the waiting room anymore,” I told him. “All the expectant fathers are in with their wives, holding their hands and telling them how to breathe.”
Rogers turned a washy sea-green. “Jesus,” he said reverently. “And yet, sex is so much fun at first.”
That was the end of conversation for a couple of hours. I read about Watergate in old magazines, watching Rogers as he lifted his head like clockwork every twenty-five seconds to look at the door to the delivery room.
At last he said, “Ross, you got something serious going with the doctor?”
“Is this relevant to the investigation?”
“To hell with the investigation for a second. Man to man. Humor me.”
I looked for trickery in his face, couldn’t find any, and decided to take a chance. “I’m working on it. Why?”
“I thought so. I’ve done all I could for you. Don’t blow it.”
“All you could? The way you had Lucille Letron show up? I suppose that was all you could do, short of having her waltz in there naked and shoot me.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he informed me. “I’m your best friend, Ross. You screwed Lucille. There was nothing to that but getting your rocks off, right?”
“Right,” I said. I wondered if a homicide lieutenant had ever been punched out in a maternity ward waiting room before. “I’m having it engraved on my tombstone—‘He Screwed Her, But Only To Get Off His Rocks.’”
“Okay, but now you don’t have to go through your life worrying if the doctor is going to find out, do you? Once I saw how it was going down, I saved your ass. I treated you like a turd, and she got all motherly and forgave you. Insisted you drive her car down. Winked at you when she thought I couldn’t see. Your slate is clean; what happens now is up to you. Don’t blow it, that’s all.”
I looked at him. This, I decided, is a man you could never get to the bottom of—he’s never doing what you think he’s doing.
“Why?” I said. “Why go to all that trouble?”
He shrugged. “No trouble,” he said. “Besides, I know what it’s like. There’s a woman I let get away. She’s married to a guy—a great guy—but there’s no way that marriage should work. It just does. And I see her all the time, and it eats at me. I look at you, I see a guy who’d be flat-out killed by something like that, so I thought I’d do the best I could for you.”
I was still taking all that in when Barbara poked her strawberry-blond head through the door and said, “It’s a girl. Seven pounds, seven ounces. I wanted her to name her ‘Lucky,’ but Faith insists on Paula Harriet.”
I’ve never smoked in my life, but at that moment, I wanted a cigar. Rogers was beaming. Barbara was laughing at us. Let her.
> “Harry, she wants to see you,” Barbara said.
“The baby wants to see me?”
“No, idiot. Faith wants to see you.”
“You’re sure it’s all right, now.”
“Who’s the doctor around here? Of course it’s all right.” She came and took me by the hand and led me into the inner precincts.
Faith hardly made a bulge under the blankets. Looking at her face, you could see why they called it “labor.” She looked like she’d just run a marathon. And won.
“Harry,” she said. “Harry, she’s beautiful.”
“I knew we’d see you through,” I said. It was a lie. There were a lot of times when I doubted it sincerely.
“And you did. It’s over, Harry. Little Paula and I can live in peace.”
I sure hoped so. “Peace?” I said. “You have obviously never lived in the same house with a baby.” She laughed. “Seriously, Faith, if she’s half as pretty and half as brave as her mother, she’s going to be one hell of a kid.”
“She will be,” Faith said. “She’s Paul’s child, too.”
“Can I tell my mother the good news?”
“Oh yes! My God, I forgot. And Sue, too.” Her face got grim. “And tell the family. I want them to know.”
“Right,” I said.
Her joy was too big to be kept out for long, and she started bubbling again.
“Harry, go look at the baby. She’s beautiful.”
“Yes, Harry,” Barbara said. “Go look at the baby. Her mother is exhausted, and is going to take a nap.”
I went to tell Rogers I was going to look at the baby, and he decided he’d come along, too.
“Hell,” he said. “I waited long enough for it to get born.”
“For her to get born,” I corrected.
We walked down to the end of the hallway where there was a large plate-glass window with babies behind it like items offered for sale. I pushed an intercom button and said “Letron” to a masked nurse. She held up a squirming something that was moist and red where head and hands stuck out of a garment that was basically a pink cloth sack. She had a full head of black hair, and opened her mouth in a yawn, revealing toothless gums.
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