Deadly Beloved
Page 22
2.
There was a newsstand in the hospital lobby with its entire top front rack covered in copies of Bride’s magazine. The picture on the cover showed a young woman with a long train swirling out from behind her to make a mountain of lace at her feet. She was holding a bouquet of flowers that was bigger than her head, and she looked scared to death. Julianne Corbett forced herself to look away from the display and smile at the nurse at the visitors’ desk. In this day and age, she probably wasn’t really a nurse, but she was dressed like one, and Julianne was too old to adapt. It didn’t matter that she intended to go to Washington to work on health care reform. In her mind, hospitals were still what they were when she was small, staffed by nurses and nothing but nurses, except for a few aides in candy-stripe pink and white. These days, even the real nurses didn’t wear caps anymore. Everybody’s uniform had been streamlined. Nobody wanted to be what they were.
The woman, nurse or otherwise, behind the visitors’ desk was leaning forward. “Here comes Dr. Alvarez,” she was saying. “Dr. Alvarez can tell you everything you want to know. I don’t know if you can bring all those—people—with you upstairs though.”
All “those people,” as the woman referred to them, were Julianne’s regular contingent when she was on any kind of official expedition. Besides Tiffany, who was indispensable at any time except during a sexual tryst, Julianne had three stenographers, a photographer, a bodyguard, and an aide. They were supposed to provide a buffer between her and the public, and they were also supposed to act as witnesses. If some nut came up and started hitting her with an umbrella, she wanted to make sure that when they all landed in court she wouldn’t be the one who was blamed. In the old days, this sort of caution would have been absurd, but nothing was absurd anymore. Nothing was unthinkable anymore either.
Dr. Alvarez was a young woman with very dark hair wrapped into a knot at the back of her neck. She had glasses with thick black frames and thin lenses. Julianne thought that she could never have been pretty, even as a child, and that now she didn’t seem to care. As she came across the carpet of the lounge, she held out her hand and said, “Congresswoman Corbett? I’m Dr. Teresa Alvarez.”
“Dr. Alvarez.” Julianne took the hand. She had always hated shaking hands, but she had learned to do it. She gave this one a sharp, hard pull and then dropped it. “I’m glad to meet you.”
“I’m glad to meet you too.” Dr. Alvarez looked around. “I’m afraid Mrs. Morrissey is correct. This many people, on an ICU ward…”
“That’s quite all right,” Julianne said. “We can leave most of them down here. I do have to take Ms. Shattuck though.”
“Which one is Miss Shattuck?”
Tiffany stepped forward. “That’s me,” she said. “I’m Tiffany Shattuck.”
“All right.” Teresa Alvarez inclined her head. “We’ll be going up to the fifth floor, to a ward called Five West. You understand that Miss Parrish will not be able to speak to you?”
“I understand that she’s totally unconscious,” Julianne Corbett said.
Teresa Alvarez shook her head emphatically. “Coma is not that simple. It’s true that Miss Parrish does not at this point respond to stimuli. She makes no indication that she can hear or see us at any time. That does not necessarily mean that she cannot do either. Her brain wave patterns are good. She is not in a vegetative state. As far as we can determine, her mind is in good working order.”
“But if her mind is in good working order, why isn’t she awake?” Tiffany Shattuck asked. “If everything is okay, why isn’t she sitting up drinking Coca-Cola?”
“I didn’t say everything was okay,” Teresa Alvarez said. “I said her mind was in good working order. And we have no way of knowing at this point whether or not she is awake, as you put it. We know only that she is making no visible response to stimuli.”
“I don’t think this makes any sense,” Tiffany Shattuck said.
“It makes sense,” Julianne said. “What I think I’m getting here, Doctor, is that as far as you know, it’s perfectly possible that Karla sees and registers the existence of where she is and what’s around her and that she can hear when people talk about her.”
“It’s possible. It’s also possible that she knows when she has visitors. Which is why our visit has to be limited. If Miss Parrish is aware of the people in her room, then too many visitors over too long a period of time could tire her, and we don’t want that. No matter what is or is not going on here, Miss Parrish is still a very sick woman.”
“I understand that,” Julianne Corbett said.
Teresa Alvarez turned her back to them and walked rapidly away. “Come with me,” she said, heading toward the elevators. “After we look in on Miss Parrish, I have to do rounds. There isn’t very much time. I have to thank you for being prompt.”
“I am always prompt,” Julianne said. They got to the elevators and stopped. The elevator doors bounced open and let out what seemed to be a hundred people in various states of cheap dress, old brown nubby coats raveling at the hems, stocking caps and knitted gloves grimy around the seams, heavy lace-up shoes and battered socks. Teresa Alvarez waited until the elevator car was entirely empty and then led the way inside.
“Of course,” she said as the elevator doors closed, “Miss Parrish has a constant visitor. She has a twenty-four-hour duty nurse and that young man friend of hers, Evan Walsh.”
“A twenty-four-hour duty nurse?” Julianne asked. “Is that normal for ICU?”
“Mr. Walsh hired her. The hospital certainly doesn’t mind, as long as she’s a trained ICU nurse, which this one is. The way things are, we aren’t in the business of turning down competent extra help when we can get it, especially for free. Actually, I think Mr. Walsh hired three nurses on three shifts. They seem to be working out.”
The fifth floor was cleaner than the lobby. There was a polished metal hospitality cart parked in the foyer when they got out of the elevator with a stack of Modern Bride magazines weighing down one end of it. The aide who was supposed to be pushing the cart was reading one of the magazines instead, flipping through a full-color fashion section on miniskirted wedding gowns. Julianne had always looked awful in mini-skirts and had no interest in wearing a wedding gown at all. She made a face at the aide and tried to keep up with Teresa Alvarez.
Teresa Alvarez took them through a set of fire doors, down a corridor, through another set of fire doors. In these corridors the hospital seemed quiet and empty, inhabited only by nurses huddled around nursing stations. Most of the rooms had their doors closed. The rooms that didn’t had no people in them. Julianne saw charts and carts and trays and wheelchairs folded up. It wasn’t even all that late in the day. Where had all the people gone? On the coffee table in a waiting room just outside the fire doors marked FIVE WEST, Julianne saw another copy of Modern Bride magazine, wrinkled and used this time, out of date.
“This is the ICU,” Teresa Alvarez said, holding the latest set of fire doors open. “From here on in, we’re under the direction of the head ICU nurse. If she wants to get rid of us, we go.”
“Of course,” Julianne said.
The head ICU nurse was a tall black woman in a uniform so white, it could have been the Virgin Mary’s soul. She came forward as soon as Dr. Alvarez brought Julianne and Tiffany through.
“It’s all right to go back,” she told them. “I’ve informed Mr. Walsh that you’ll be coming. And Mrs. Hiller.”
“Mrs. Hiller is the nurse,” Teresa Alvarez explained.
“I’ve been trying to hire her away from her temporary agency.” The large black woman sighed. “She’s very good at her work. But we don’t pay enough.”
“We never pay enough,” Teresa Alvarez said.
Down at the end of an antiseptic-looking corridor—of course the corridor looked antiseptic, Julianne told herself, it was supposed to look antiseptic; this was a hospital—a small figure in wire-rimmed glasses came out of a room. Teresa Alvarez waved her hand to greet him.
“Yes,” Julianne said.
Suddenly, however, all Julianne wanted to do was to leave. Karla wouldn’t be able to recognize her. Even if everything Teresa Alvarez said was true and Karla was conscious in there under all the blankness, there would still be nothing for Julianne to see but blankness. And then what? It was as if this were some kind of official visit, the kind Julianne hated most, like when the president of the United States took Air Force One out to some disaster area and stood among the wreckage looking concerned.
“Miss Corbett?” Dr. Alvarez asked, polite.
Evan Walsh was shuffling along like an old man. His clothes looked wrong somehow, like the clothes Ozzie Nelson used to wear on that old television program, which Evan Walsh was probably too young ever to have seen. Julianne suddenly wished she had a good stiff drink.
Evan Walsh held out his hand. “Miss Corbett,” he said. “Miss—?”
“Shattuck,” Tiffany said.
“She’s talking,” Evan Walsh said. “She talks nearly all the time now. I wish I understood what she said.”
“She mumbles in her sleep,” Dr. Alvarez explained. “This isn’t unusual in relatively mild cases of this kind.”
“Relatively mild cases of this kind can go on for months,” Evan Walsh said. “There was one a couple of years ago in England. Girl in a car accident. Didn’t even know she was pregnant. And by the time she woke up, she’d had the baby. They say she was happy about the baby.”
“That kind of case is very unusual,” Teresa Alvarez said firmly. “Miss Corbett would like to see Miss Parrish, Mr. Walsh. She’ll be only a minute.”
“Oh, I know. I know. It’s all right. Maybe she’ll be able to understand what Karla is trying to say.”
“I doubt it,” Dr. Alvarez said.
“I think she’s singing,” Evan Walsh said. “Do any of you know a song about Marrakech?”
“No,” Tiffany Shattuck said. “What’s Marrakech?”
“Karla was in Marrakech once,” Evan Walsh said.
Then he turned and walked away from them. Julianne watched him go, feeling sick to her stomach. It was just the hospital, really, the smells and the tension. She didn’t usually get sick in the middle of tragedy. She was used to dealing with trouble. Evan Walsh’s back was bent over so far, he looked like he had a dowager’s hump.
“Well,” Teresa Alvarez said. “Shall we go?”
3.
Halfway across town, Liza Verity, having gotten home from work, put her groceries down on her kitchen table and then sat down herself, as if getting off her feet for a moment would mean more to her than just relieving the pain in her feet. She had been thinking and thinking about things for days now. She had been reading the newspaper accounts of the explosion at Julianne Corbett’s reception. She had been reading and rereading all the articles about the murder at Fox Run Hill and the explosion in the parking garage. She had been looking and looking and looking at the pictures they kept printing of the woman they kept calling Patsy MacLaren Willis. She didn’t know what she was waiting for, or what she wanted or from whom, or what she thought was supposed to happen next to make it possible for her to move.
“I’m just being ridiculous,” she said to herself now, out loud, so that her voice bounced off the walls of her apartment and the soft pile of her carpet. Everything in this apartment sounded muffled. It was that kind of place.
“I’ll bet he isn’t even in the phone book,” Liza said.
The phone book was on a little stand with the phone next to the couch in the living room. The living room and the dining room and the kitchen were really just one big room arranged in a U. Liza got the phone book out and looked up Demarkian, Gregor. There was a phone number there, but no address. She wondered why he had bothered to have his address left out. Everybody knew what his address was. It was in the papers all the time that he lived on Cavanaugh Street.
“I’m just being ridiculous,” Liza said out loud again. “He probably wouldn’t pay any attention to me. He probably has hundreds of people trying to give him information every day.”
She should stop talking to herself, Liza decided. She should have called Gregor Demarkian the other day, after she talked to Shirley at the hospital. It was just that she got to a phone, and then the whole thing seemed ridiculous, and then—
“Jerk,” Liza said.
She picked up the phone, punched in the number next to Gregor Demarkian’s name in the book, and listened to the ring. The next thing she knew, a tape machine was bleeding its message into her ear. She hated tape machines. She hung up on tape machines. She almost hung up on this one, but then she decided she shouldn’t.
“My name is Liza Verity,” Liza said into the phone after she heard the beep. Then she heard another beep and realized she was going to have to start again. She hated answering machines. She hated everything to do with answering machines. She even hated her own answering machine.
“My name is Liza Verity,” she said, starting again.
And then she crossed her fingers and told herself she wasn’t going to give up this time, no matter what, because this whole thing was beginning to get bizarre beyond belief.
SIX
1.
GREGOR FOUND THE MESSAGE on his answering machine when he came in after having dinner with Tibor, but it was so garbled, he couldn’t make out what it said. Gregor didn’t work well with answering machines, or machines of any kind. He could make the VCR go on the blink just by looking at it. In the Behavioral Science Department at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, everything had depended on computers, but he’d never used one. He’d found someone who was good with machines to do all that and bring him the raw data on long folding sheets of paper so that he could read it overnight and be ready for briefings in the morning. The man who had taken over from him when he retired was supposed to be very good with computers. It was one of the requirements the Bureau had made for any new person seeking the job. Gregor was sitting in his old neighborhood in Philadelphia, doing terrible things to a phone answering machine.
The one thing that did come through loud and clear was the name and address. Gregor wrote those down, listened to the tape again, and decided that the message had something to do with the case of Patsy MacLaren Willis. Everything in his life these days had something to do with the case of Patsy MacLaren Willis. Even Tibor had been talking about it, although that might have been a ploy to stay off the subject of Donna Moradanyan. Tibor was all ready to have a wedding, and this new business with Donna’s old friend Peter had thrown him off. Tibor certainly didn’t want to have a wedding for Donna and Peter. Tibor hadn’t liked Peter even in the days when Peter was living in Philadelphia and seeing Donna on a regular basis.
“In the old days, a priest would have hoped for the normalization of relations,” Tibor had said at dinner. “Donna and Peter have had a child together. Donna and Peter should recognize their responsibilities before God together. Donna and Peter should end up married. Now I think I would cut my own throat before I could officiate at the ceremony. Do you think he will come to Philadelphia himself to bother us?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“You’ll have to do something about it if he does. We really can’t have him here, Krekor. It just isn’t right. Russell is such a very nice man.”
“I know Russell is a nice man.”
“And a lawyer, Krekor. It will be good for Donna. And for Tommy. What does Peter do for a living?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said again.
“I will bet anything that he is still in school. That boy is the kind to be in school forever. One degree here. One degree there. Never getting anywhere.”
“I thought you approved of education for education’s sake.”
“We are not talking here about education for education’s sake, Krekor. We are talking about a boy who does not want to grow up. We are
talking here about a boy who does not know how to live outside a fraternity house, where nobody ever cleans.”
Gregor had no idea where Tibor had gotten the idea that nobody ever cleaned fraternity houses. From Animal House, maybe. Bennis and Donna were always renting movies to watch in Tibor’s living room, although most of those were big-bug horror films from the fifties. Gregor picked up his plate and Tibor’s and took them into the kitchen to put them in the sink. They had been eating on folding tables in Tibor’s living room, a quieter place than the Ararat restaurant’s dining room and an easier place to talk without being overheard. All the furniture in Tibor’s apartment was stacked with books. Tibor read at least seven languages, including Latin and ancient Greek. He had copies of Plato and Aristotle in the original, copies of Erasmus and Clausewitz in translation, copies of Harlequin romances in Hebrew. He even had the latest modern Greek edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, which seemed to have something on the cover about rating your marriage for its “satisfaction factor.” The words “satisfaction factor” were printed in the Roman alphabet, as if there were no Greek equivalent, as if there were no translation. Considering what “satisfaction factor” probably meant, there probably wasn’t.
Tibor’s kitchen was full of books too, but the table there was covered over with samples of wedding favors. There were little knots of Jordan almonds wrapped in white net and tied with white ribbons. There were silver and white matchbooks that spelled out DONNA AND RUSS in overelaborate script, in spite of the fact that neither Donna nor Russ smoked. Bennis smoked, Gregor thought, and Lida and Hannah and Helen and Sheila could use the matches to light the gas burners that went out after things boiled over on the stove. There was a stack of small white napkins with silver script on them too, that ubiquitous DONNA AND RUSS.
“She’s going to have to marry Russ,” Gregor said, making sure Lida Arkmanian’s best blue serving platter didn’t get chipped in the mess in Tibor’s sink. All the food they had eaten tonight had come from Lida or Hannah or one of the others. Tibor couldn’t cook anything that would not be responsible for food poisoning, and Gregor made only steaks in the summers on an outdoor grill. Gregor pushed Hannah Krekorian’s rose china soup bowl to the side—what had Tibor had for lunch?—and made sure that Lida’s serving platter was lying flat along the bottom of the sink. Then he picked up one of the matchbooks and tossed it in the air.