by Jana DeLeon
“Amnesia?” Ida Belle asked.
He nodded. “The doctor took over then and started asking some questions and checking her out while he was doing it. I could tell he was trying not to freak her out even more. I went into the hall and called the computer guys and told them to keep looking for something because the victim wasn’t going to be any help. It took them until that afternoon to get something, but they finally ran down a neighbor at the former address who gave us the husband’s name. They found a new address for him in Virginia and sent the local PD to let him know what was going on.”
“So how long was her memory gone?” I asked.
“It started to come back that evening, sometime after her husband showed up,” he said. “I had my team working the video angle and figured I’d stay at the hospital in case she remembered something. I’ll never forget it—he comes running through the door in a panic and rushes over to the side of the bed. She moves away from him, clearly afraid, and I ask him to step away from the bed as I don’t know who he is either at that point.”
We all gave him approving nods.
“So I grab the guy’s arm and he starts yelling at me, asking what happened and where’s the doctor. I drag him out of the room because it’s clear he’s scaring the hell out of her and I finally get it out of him that he’s her husband. I explain that she’s got some memory loss but the doctor thinks it will return and he finally calms down.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Gertie said. “Your own spouse doesn’t recognize you and in the midst of such a tragedy.”
“It definitely took the wind out of his sails,” Bishop said. “But he went back in and pulled out his wallet and showed her a picture of the two of them on a beach somewhere. He said it was their honeymoon and asked if she remembered. She didn’t, so he tried a picture of their daughter. She stared at the picture for a long time, then shook her head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man look so defeated.”
“That’s seriously harsh,” I said.
Bishop nodded. “The doc said since her husband was there it might help her memory so I took off to give them some space. The doctor called me later that evening saying she’d begun to recall some things. Unfortunately, she still didn’t recall the attack. She remembered walking to the parking lot with her sister, then seeing her sister fall, but then she remembered nothing until she woke up in the hospital. It took several more days before she remembered the entire attack up until the moment she was knocked unconscious, but I could tell she was straining for some of it. Like there were still gaps.”
“She remembered Larry though, right?” Gertie asked. “And her daughter?”
“She said she did but her husband said things were still missing,” he said. “For example, she still thought they lived at their former residence but they’d moved a month before. She didn’t remember the new residence at all. She could remember her daughter’s nickname but couldn’t remember her middle name. The doctor said it could take weeks for it all to return and that given the severity of the blow and the extent of the swelling, it was possible she’d always be missing pieces. It was a really sad situation. I could tell the lapses were killing her husband.”
“That has to be hard,” Ida Belle agreed. “On everyone. I’d hate to lose my memory. That’s the only place a lot of people I care about exist anymore.”
Bishop nodded. “I got a few there myself. The weird thing, though, is she remembered her childhood in Russia, remembered her parents, her dog. The doctor said that’s normal—that sometimes only one file gets damaged, so to speak.”
“The mind is a strange place,” Gertie said.
“That’s a mouthful coming from you,” Ida Belle said.
“Since you thought it was a random mugging, you didn’t ask them if they had enemies and the rest of that line of questioning,” I said.
He shook his head. “There wasn’t any indication that we needed to, and since neither of them offered anything up in that direction, I figured we were all on the same page.”
He looked out the window and frowned. “I always got the impression she was hiding something, though. Of course, that could mean anything from she spent too much money to she hooked up with a frat boy and didn’t want her husband to find out, so that’s not really saying anything. You know how it is.”
I nodded. “Everyone lies about something. I worked for the government, so I’m used to it, but it does make it hard to solve cases when everyone’s being less than forthcoming.”
“Anyway,” Bishop said as he rose, “we ran down the handful of leads we had but never came up with anything. I’m afraid that’s usually the case with that type of crime. I have to get back on my route.”
“Hey, what about your partner?” I asked. “Detective Thompson? Do you think he’d talk to us?”
“Probably, if you wanted to fly to Australia,” he said. “He retired a year ago and moved down there to be near his daughter. She married an Aussie. But he couldn’t tell you anything. Not the sort of thing you’re looking for, anyway. Thompson ran the research and camera stuff. He never visited the hospital.”
“So he never talked to Natalia?” I asked.
Bishop shook his head.
“Keep my card,” I said. “If you think of anything else, no matter how small, give me a call.”
He gave me a nod and as soon as he stepped out of the café, he was swallowed up in the crowd.
Gertie stabbed a piece of pot roast and looked at me. “Well? What do you think?”
“I’m not sure what to think,” I said. “If Bishop thought she was hiding something, then maybe she was. But was it relevant to what happened or something completely different?”
Ida Belle nodded. “And then there’s the memory loss. Bishop might have misread a legitimately confused state as intentionally holding back. I imagine it would look the same.”
“Probably,” I agreed.
“So what now?” Gertie asked. “Doesn’t sound like pursuing Detective Thompson is worth the time, even by phone.”
“Given that he never talked to Natalia, I don’t think he’s worth pursuing either,” I said. “The facts, as slim as they are, are in the police report. I was looking more for the personal angle and general feel that detectives get. Thompson won’t be able to help with that.”
“We could try to find an emergency room employee,” Ida Belle said. “Maybe a nurse who worked that night. I doubt we could convince the doctor to talk.”
I nodded and scooped up a big bite of mashed potatoes. “That sounds like a plan.”
“But in the meantime?” Gertie asked, looking hopeful.
“In the meantime, I imagine we’ll get to see some of the parade as we have the walk back to the apartment,” I said.
Gertie clapped her hands and bounced up and down in her seat. “I haven’t been to a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans in forever.”
“There’s a good reason for that,” Ida Belle said.
Gertie waved a hand in dismissal. “You worry too much.”
“Someone has to, since you don’t worry at all,” Ida Belle said.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “If Gertie needs emergency medical attention, we might be able to run down the ER nurse who cared for Natalia while we’re there. You know how I love efficiency.”
“Just once, I’d like to visit an ER without needing to visit an ER,” Ida Belle said.
“That would be different,” I said.
“Well, hurry up and eat,” Gertie said. “So we can get out there and work off some of this pot roast.”
“I plan on taking all of my pot roast back to the apartment with me,” I said.
“Please, you’re young,” Gertie said. “You’ve probably burned off those mashed potatoes just talking.”
“If it worked that way, Celia would be the thinnest woman in the world,” Ida Belle said.
I swallowed my last bite of pot roast and looked across the table. “Are we ready to do this?”
Ida Belle sighed
. “One of us is.”
Chapter Twelve
The Mardi Gras parade was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. The floats were incredible with their artistry and they still didn’t compare to the gowns and masks people on the floats wore. I finally understood why Gertie said some people planned for this for a year. A ton of items were clearly homemade, and the amount of time it took to get all those beads and sequins in place must have been staggering. The floats were a mixture of Louisiana themes, such as alligators, crawfish, and voodoo, and completely unrelated things, such as dragons, dinosaurs, superheroes, and one that had the main cast from The Wizard of Oz. It was absolutely spectacular.
But all of that paled in comparison to the crowd. Talk about an experience—and a lot of it on the sketchy side. We’d barely made it a block before I’d seen more boobs in that short span than I had in my entire lifetime, and I was including my own in that calculation. Men yelled and women yanked up their tops. Sometimes people cheered. Sometimes they groaned. But either way, they always tossed goodies. I found myself saying a prayer of thanks that Gertie had on a sports bra with a gun shoved in it. At least she wouldn’t be tempted to join in the fray.
Of course, I was wrong.
We made it a whole block before Gertie saw people throwing LED beads, and everything she’d promised Ida Belle and me, everything she’d ever known about protecting herself, flew right out the window. She rushed into the middle of the crowd like she was saving a puppy from a speeding car.
Ida Belle and I tried to grab her but she got the jump on us. We scrambled after her, but Ida Belle got knocked into a street sign and I took an elbow to my ear that stunned me for a couple seconds and had me crouching as my vision blurred. By the time my vision cleared, I spotted Gertie through the sea of legs, rolling on the ground. She clutched a handful of beads with one hand and shoved a guy who looked like an extra from Sons of Anarchy with the other.
I sprang up, hoping I got her out of the fray before Anarchy guy got a good lock on her face, but Gertie had finally broken loose with the beads and jumped up, arms in the air and hooting like she’d just won the lottery. I yelled at her to get out of the street but no way could she hear me above the noise. I rushed forward but before I could get there, she was kidnapped.
By a parade float.
It was a giant crawfish, with claws up in the air but legs that hung over the side of the float. Gertie caught sight of me hurrying toward her and did one of those celebratory leaps just as the float approached. She jumped just high enough to get snagged in between the float and the first leg. And then there she was, dangling like a fish on a line.
I ran forward and tried to pull her out of the crawfish’s grasp, but she was wedged tight and with the float moving, I couldn’t get a good grip. Ida Belle dashed up and tried to assist but it was hard for two people to work in such a small space and get leverage while in motion. Finally, a couple of the men on the float noticed and leaned over the side to help. They each grabbed an arm and pulled her up onto the float.
Gertie cheered. The people on the float cheered. The crowd cheered.
Ida Belle and I watched her ride away, not even making an effort to move.
Ida Belle looked over at me. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
We headed directly into the nearest bar and I sent Gertie a text with our location.
“This bar will be out of business before she gets off that float,” Ida Belle said.
“I thought they might kick her off eventually.”
“They’re all drunk as Cooter Brown. They probably think she was with them.”
“Or they got a peek of the gun in her bra and decided it was safer to keep her in beads and happy,” I said, thinking about the view from the rescuers’ perspective.
Ida Belle grimaced. “Things I hadn’t considered and would have preferred not to.”
She waved at the server, a harried-looking young man who trudged over and half-heartedly asked what we wanted. Normally, I would have been somewhat annoyed at the poor service, but given the circumstances, I just hoped he was off shift before he passed out from exhaustion.
“Two beers,” Ida Belle said. “Whatever you have on tap is fine.”
He looked a little less stressed when he realized our order was going to be easy and we weren’t already drunk and belligerent.
She handed him a ten-dollar bill and gave him a sympathetic look. “That’s to start. Hang in there. This day doesn’t last forever. It just feels like it.”
He smiled and perked up considerably. “Thanks, ma’am. Yeah, it’s been a real bitch. Sorry, bear.”
He headed off to get our drinks with a little more pep in his step. I looked over at Ida Belle and grinned.
“Look at you,” I said, “being nice to people. It’s a good thing no one else was here to witness it but me. They might get ideas.”
Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’ve worked enough festivals, fairs, and church put-ons and the like to know that crowds of the general public can make you want to open fire. That’s the reason I was never armed for events when we first got back from Vietnam. Too reactive. I even yelled at someone in the café one morning and insisted they give me twenty push-ups.”
I laughed. “You were used to military discipline. The place where people actually follow orders.”
She nodded. “Even if they didn’t make sense. That was simply the way. Your commanding officer said so and that was as good as your mother saying so. You jumped and never asked why. It took me longer to reacclimate myself to normal people. Gertie never had much of an issue, but Gertie is a whole different story in most cases.”
“Lord, isn’t that a mouthful,” I said.
The server returned and placed our beers on the table along with a plate of loaded nachos. “The guy who ordered them passed out and his friends just dragged him out of here. So they’re on the house.”
“Awesome!” I said, and grabbed a chip piled high with ground beef, queso, sour cream, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and guacamole. “These look great. I can’t believe I’m still hungry after that pot roast.”
Ida Belle nodded and selected a less loaded chip. She took a bite and looked at me. “You know, I thought you were going to have a much harder time adjusting to normal life as a civilian. You’ve really surprised me there.”
“I still get jumpy sometimes,” I said. “I’m good with fireworks now because I force myself to assess before reacting. My ballistics training allows me to determine the difference, but I have to pause that half second to do it. I can see why so many vets have issues with them, though. If you can’t stop your mind from heading straight into the past, then they would be hard to manage.”
Ida Belle nodded. “We have some around town that make sure they’re wearing noise-canceling headphones when fireworks are on the celebration menu. The problems come when the kids do things out of turn.”
“Or when people go firing the real thing in the city,” I said. “Like that idiot Ronald.”
“Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often.”
I raised one eyebrow.
“Sinful’s not Chicago,” Ida Belle said. “But yeah, we probably need some work.”
“To be honest, I thought I’d have a harder time too. But it’s almost like I had three lives—my childhood with my mother, my time with the CIA, and being here. I think moving to Sinful and becoming friends with you, Gertie, and Ally brought back so much of my good childhood memories that they tempered my CIA stuff so much I had no desire to go back.”
“That’s an interesting and perceptive observation,” Ida Belle said. “I’m sure you’re right. Perhaps if my mother hadn’t kowtowed to my father, I would have had better feelings coming back here. But everything worked out in the end.”
I knew Ida Belle’s father had been a hard man and that both he and her mother had passed when she was in Vietnam. They’d been a lot older when they had Ida B
elle after a lot of years with no luck. Ida Belle’s mother had been unable to have more children after her. Ida Belle contended that her father resented her mother for not giving him a son and Ida Belle for not being a boy. I didn’t know much because Ida Belle rarely mentioned them. Most of what I did know came from Gertie, but I didn’t go asking for details. I figured if Ida Belle wanted me to know, she’d tell me herself.
Besides, the past didn’t matter unless you refused to let it go.
I looked out the window and frowned.
Or it came back to haunt you.
By the time Ida Belle and I got back to the apartment, updated Gertie on our location, showered, and changed into clothes that hadn’t suffered the attack of Mardi Gras, Gertie was knocking on the door. She blew inside in a rush of stale beer and sweat, wearing so many beads, I wasn’t sure how she was standing upright. I knew Gertie didn’t sweat that much so I could only assume she’d picked up the extra scent from the float riders.
“That was the best time!” Gertie said.
“It smells like it,” Ida Belle said.
Gertie refused to be deterred. “You two should have climbed up and joined us,” she said as she started pulling off beads and putting them on the counter.
Ida Belle frowned, poured dishwashing soap into the sink, then plugged it and turned on the hot water. She grabbed the beads and tossed them into the soapy water as quickly as Gertie unloaded them.
“There was plenty of room and tons of cool beads,” Gertie said. “I got all the extras, plus a bunch I swiped while I was pretending to throw them. And the guys invited us to a party later tonight in the French Quarter.”
“Hard pass,” Ida Belle said.
“Why not?” Gertie pouted. “They were cute.”
Ida Belle stared. “We could start with I’m engaged, Fortune is dating Carter, and you don’t know them. This is Mardi Gras, for Christ’s sake. Might as well pick up men at a prison. At least then you could get a reliable background.”