Instead, Elizabeth went down into the underground to wait for a train. When she saw the headlights, she stepped off the platform, but she felt hands grab her and pull her back, and she had cried, "No, please, no, I want to die, I want to die!"
The police had taken her to a hospital. She awakened the next day in a psychiatric ward, and she had been frightened and scared. She told the doctors everything they wanted to know. She just wanted out of there, but they had kept her in that hospital with wire over the windows and the woman who told her the trolls would come at night and cut her heart out if she wasn't careful, and Elizabeth was sitting there in that awful green room with all the crazy women who were chain-smoking, not moving, not talking, trying not to look at the woman eating ice out of a bowl with a spoon, slurping, making dreadful sounds, when Dorothy Hillings walked in. Although Elizabeth had told them everything at the hospital, she had not told them she had a family because she was too ashamed and it seemed so unfair for such a strong family like hers to have to know "the brilliant one" was merely a sick and weak and crazy woman who was no good at life. So she had given them Dorothy's name as her next of kin and here she was.
Mrs. Hillings covered her alarm by saying in the most soothing way to Elizabeth, "What we must do, my darling, is get you somewhere safe and warm and restful. Then you will have a chance to sort all this out. Oh, dear, how did this happen, how did these bruises get on your wrists? There, there, don't cry, darling, but if you need to, then yes, cry as hard as you want and I'll hold you. We'll sort this out, I promise you, my dear."
And Mrs. Hillings had sorted it out, and Elizabeth had gone to the Knight Institute in Kent, a lovely place full of caring people. When Elizabeth got the bills she could see why—"My God, what crazy people have to pay, Monty, to get someone to help them, you have no idea!" She stayed there for two months and worked very hard with her doctor to figure out what had gone wrong, where she had derailed. Now she was on an antidepressant, one of those drugs Monty made so many jokes about on the air, but it really had helped, she did not sink into that awful abyss the same way anymore, didn't feel compelled to hide for days and weeks and even months in her own head. She was sure Monty couldn't know what it was like to be ill, and to think there was no reason to be ill but to know that you were. To know that you were growing sicker each day, even though you were working like a maniac to cling to something.
"In the hospital I prayed they would tell me I was schizophrenic, but I wasn't. I wasn't even manic-depressive. I was only—I don't know what I was—I was a teacher, for God's sake. So now, you see, everything you thought about me has been confirmed, hasn't it? The one academic who wanted to be the exception to your case against them turns out to be mentally ill. Isn't that right, Monty? Isn't it?"
Elizabeth was sobbing into his shoulder and he was holding her tight and it was a while before she could hear what he had been saying in her ear, over and over and over again, like a mantra. "Elizabeth, I love you. Elizabeth, I love you. Elizabeth, I love you."
57
The hand on Georgiana's arm startled her awake. "What are you doing here?" Georgiana said, looking at the clock. It was a little after 6 P.M.
"Harold's going to anchor tonight," Alexandra said softly. She was sitting on the edge of the twin bed, her expression one of concern.
Georgiana propped herself up on her elbows. "I must have fallen asleep," she said, looking down at her clothes.
"Why are you in here? In the guest room?" Alexandra asked, stroking her hair.
Georgiana looked at her. "I don't know. I guess I thought it was where I should be—if I should be in your apartment at all."
"You should be in our room," Alexandra told her.
Georgiana closed her eyes and reached for her. "I'm so scared something might happen to you," she whispered, clinging to her.
"The best thing that's ever happened to me is you," Alexandra murmured. "And I will not let you go."
Dorothy Hillings was smiling as she opened the door of the apartment, but she took one look at Elizabeth and the smile vanished. "Darling, what's wrong?"
"I'm fine," Elizabeth said. "I'm just tired. I need to lie down." She met the older woman's eyes. "I'm fine, really. I swear."
Dorothy nodded. "I'll peek in later and see how you are."
Elizabeth went down the hall to her room, leaving Dorothy standing there with Monty.
"She told me everything," Monty said in a low voice. "About what happened in London, the hospital and everything."
Mrs. Hillings nodded. "It was a very difficult time," she said carefully. She looked Monty straight in the eye. "She would have rather died than tell anyone she needed help. What do you think about that, Monty?"
"I think it's wrong that she was made to feel that way," he said softly.
"Do you really?"
He nodded. "I do."
She smiled. "Come in, dear, I think you and I need to have a chat."
"Everybody ready?" Patty yelled down the stairs.
"Yes!" Ted and Tim and Kevin and Mary Ellen yelled.
"Okay, close your eyes," Patty said, peering down into the living room. Her family had their eyes shut. On this score-playing games with established rules—they always did very well.
She quickly moved down into the living room, expecting the worst but feeling excited anyway. She had on the platinum blond wig and a black cocktail dress she had bought in New York with her temp money. Her makeup was done the way Georgiana had showed her.
She took a breath, struck a pose in front of her family, and braced herself. "Okay, open your eyes."
Ted reacted first, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head. "Patty," he gasped.
"Oh my God, Mom!" Tim said, with panic in his voice.
"Mom?" Kevin said, looking utterly lost and confused as to who this was.
Only Mary Ellen did not say anything, but simply stood there, looking at her mother.
"Honey, when you told me about the wig," Ted said, "I thought you'd look cheap or something. But this…”
"I don't like it," Tim said. "You look like the women in the magazine ads."
"I do?" Patty said, feeling wonderful.
"I don't like it either," Kevin said, disturbed.
"Why not, baby? It's still me," Patty said, walking over to touch him.
"It's not easy suddenly having a sex symbol for a mother," Ted observed.
"Oh, gross!" Mary Ellen said.
Patty turned. "That bad, huh?"
"Not you, Mom, you look great," Mary Ellen said. "It's Dad's icky pop-psych diagnosis."
"And what do you know about pop-psych diagnoses?" Ted asked his daughter, sneaking a pinch on Patty's bottom and making her jump.
"She watches 'Oprah' and 'Donahue,'" Tim said. He looked at his mother. "I'm sorry about what I said. You do look nice. It's just such a change."
"Well, I like it!" Mary Ellen announced, coming forward to get a closer look at her mother. "Turn around, Mom."
Patty complied.
"Yep," Mary Ellen said, "it's definitely a go, Mom. You and me? We're finally going to look like we're related."
There were no cars in the driveway when the cab dropped him off, and David thought no one was home. But when he unlocked the front door, the alarm didn't go off, and so he called, "Susie?"
"I'm here!" she called from upstairs.
He put his bag down and sifted through the mail that was stacked in the front hall. Susie came down in black spandex pants and a pink leotard top. "Hi," he said.
"You're home," she said, tentatively.
They kissed and hugged; then she slid away.
"Still angry?" he asked.
"Look, I didn't want you to get upset, but I really need to step back and see where this relationship is going—if anywhere." He was confused. He held his hands out, questioning. "I've moved back to my apartment," she said.
The anger surged through him and he blurted out, "Well of course, the movie's off, so why do you need me now?"
/> She stared at him for a long moment. "You've got a mind like a city dump."
He took a breath, the anger receding.
"I've been thinking, David, and I don't like what's going on. One day you're warm, the next cold. You're here and there and then you disappear, taking phone calls in the study, not calling from New York. And then you make that crack about the movie just now. Well," she sighed, shaking her head, "to hell with you, if that's why you think I've been here. I've gotten a job on my own anyway."
"What job?"
"Listen to the way you say that. You sound so contemptuous, as if anything I could get on my own couldn't be worth having."
"Susie, that's not true."
"I'm so tired of feeling like nothing!" she said, bursting into tears and running out of the house.
58
On Tuesday afternoon, after his show was over, Monty walked across town to the Hillingses'. When he reached the square he spotted Elizabeth and Dorothy sitting on a bench in the park. Elizabeth was talking, making all kinds of dramatic gestures, and Dorothy was listening.
Monty turned around and quickly walked back to Park Avenue. He found a police car and waved it down. "Kudos, Big Mont," the policeman said, rolling down his window.
"Hi, fellas, good to see you. Listen, I need some information. If someone tried to kill themselves—like right here—and you stopped them, what would you do with them?"
"Take 'em to Bellevue," the officer replied. "They'd put them on the flight deck."
"Flight deck?"
"Psychiatric ward," the other officer said, leaning across the seat to see Monty better.
"If it was a homeless person?" Monty said.
"If it was anybody," the first policeman said. "If someone tries to kill themselves, by law they're supposed to stay under observation for three days."
Monty thanked them and flagged a cab and asked to be taken to Bellevue. The driver knew where it was without asking. Monty leaned forward. "You ever take anybody there?"
"Half of New York goes there," the driver told him, "and the other half belongs there."
Montgomery walked into the emergency room of the hospital, feeling a bit spooked by the people in the waiting room. One guy was bleeding, holding wads of gauze on his face; a woman sat there struggling to control three small children; everybody else just looked awful. Monty walked up to the desk and waited for ten minutes before anyone was free to talk to him. In the meantime he watched a feverish-looking woman start gagging and throwing up. An orderly came out to get her and a maintenance person cleaned up the floor.
"Yes?" a hassled nurse asked. There were moans coming out of one of the rooms behind her.
"I'm Montgomery Grant Smith, the radio host?"
She nodded, unimpressed.
"I was wondering if you could tell me what would happen to a person if he or she tried unsuccessfully to kill themselves and was brought here."
"We would check them out first, and once we were satisfied that he or she was stabilized, we would admit them to psychiatric for observation."
"For how long?"
"Three days," she said.
"On the flight deck?"
She winced. "Psychiatric," she insisted.
"Could I see the ward?"
She frowned. "Why? Is a friend of yours up there?"
"He might be," Monty lied.
"What's his name?"
"Creighton Berns."
"Let me check," she said, picking up the phone. She asked for the correct spelling, spoke it into the phone, and shook her head. There was no one named Creighton Berns, but what did his friend look like? There were three patients in the ward with no identification.
"Urn, well, he's Hispanic," Monty said.
"Creighton Berns?" the nurse asked.
"You know, darker complexion," he told her.
She looked at him as though he were crazy. "We have two black patients and one white patient who are unidentified."
"It may be him."
"Which?"
"The white one."
Now she was outright leery of him. "I think you should go to the administrative office in the front of the hospital and talk to them."
He did, only this time Montgomery said he had a black friend he thought might have been brought in last night for trying to kill himself.
"How?" the woman at the desk asked.
"I don't know. A friend just said he was taken to Bellevue."
"He may be able to identify bed six," the woman said to the security guard. "Take him up, please."
The "flight deck" was unlike anything Montgomery could have imagined. Two men in straitjackets were screaming; the others were either curled up or lying listlessly in their beds. The bed he was brought to contained a man in a hospital gown who was whimpering into his pillow.
"Come on, fella," the security guard said gently, touching the man's arm. "We think this is a friend of yours."
The black man turned over and gave Montgomery a frightened look, pushed himself back up against the wall, clearly scared to death.
"No, that's not him," Montgomery said quickly. "I'm sorry for disturbing you. I hope you get better real soon."
The black man screamed and Monty hurried out of the ward.
When he arrived at the Hillingses', Elizabeth immediately noticed how shaken he was. "What's wrong?" she said. "What's happened?"
"Nothing," he told her. "I just needed to see you." He took her in his arms, his throat closing up because he felt close to crying.
Early Wednesday morning all was quiet and still at U-File-With-Us in Queens. The security lights beamed down onto the dark lot surrounding the cement building.
Suddenly there was movement.
Two men dressed in dark clothes, each carrying something large, advanced through the shadows that surrounded the building. They put down their packages and one boosted the other up to a high office window. The tinkle of broken glass followed. They waited a minute, listening, and then proceeded. A hand unlocked the window and a figure slithered in. A few minutes later, a side door opened and the two men carried their loads inside.
They turned on a flashlight and looked at the floor plans in their hands, before moving down a hallway and stopping at a sign marked LOCKERS 10-42. They checked the numbers on the doors and stopped at eighteen. Ignoring the padlock, the two men started to work on the hinges with a crowbar. One hinge snapped and then, after quite a struggle, the other. The door was pried out and pulled sideways as their lights played over the shelves of boxes clearly marked HILLINGS & HILLINGS.
"This is it," one man whispered, hoisting one of the heavy metal containers into the room. There was the sound of a cap being unscrewed just before the lights came on and members of the New York City Police Department and a fire marshal announced they were under arrest for breaking and entering with the intent to commit arson.
The suspects and eight gallons of gasoline were taken outside, where FBI Agent Andraya Lafayette and others were waiting.
59
On Thursday afternoon at one o'clock, Agent Healy told Bernadette to make the call.
She swallowed, dialed the number, and waited. "Mathew, please. It's urgent," she whispered. "Tell him I only have a few seconds." After a moment she said in a rushed whisper, "Listen, tomorrow morning the ICA offices in New York and Los Angeles are going to be searched, along with Metropolis Studios." There was a pause. "I don't know, the Hillingses are in there talking to the cops now." Pause. "Warrants and stuff. Something about files and some kids' movie." Pause. "Yeah, tomorrow morning, I'm positive. I don't know what time." Pause. "That's right, New York and Los Angeles. Hey, I gotta go!" And she hung up.
"Well done," an FBI agent said, taking off his headphones.
"Yes," Healy said, picking up another phone and dialing a number. "We just made the call," he said into the phone. "Give 'em twenty minutes and then go in. That should be just enough time for Berns to alert everyone and send them running to what we want."<
br />
At 1:23 in the afternoon, James Stanley Johnson was returning to ICA with a special diet plate from a nearby delicatessen when he overheard a man in the reception area announce that he and the men with him were from the Federal Bureau of Investigation with a warrant to search the ICA offices of Marion Ballicutt and James Stanley Johnson. He calmly turned the corner away from the reception area and tore down the hall, nearly colliding with Miss Andersen, who had her arms full of files.
"Watch out!" she yelled, falling back a step and trying to keep the folders from slipping out from under her arms.
"Creighton called," Marion shouted to James. She was inside her office pulling files out of the cabinet. "We've got to get all the Mathew files out of here."
"The FBI's out front. It's too late!" James called.
"That's right," the agent said from behind him. "Kip, I think Miss Andersen needs some help with those files. Perhaps you should relieve her of them. Doris, why don't you help out that lady over there?"
"I want to see your warrant!" Marion Ballicutt demanded.
"Marion Ballicutt, I presume," he said, flashing his ID. "Maldwin Healy, Federal Bureau of Investigation." He snapped his ID case shut and withdrew some papers from his breast pocket as more agents came swarming in from behind him. "Not only do I have a search warrant for the premises, Ms. Ballicutt, but I believe I also have a warrant for your arrest."
Metropolis Studios had withstood many attempts to violate its security, partly because the famous actors who worked on films and television shows produced at its facilities tended to lure every nut case imaginable, but also because the studio had for years been linked to a money-laundering operation for a South American cocaine cartel. The FBI, DEA, and even the CIA, therefore, had been interested in the internal executive movements of the studio for quite some time.
Any Given Moment (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 3) Page 34
