Lifeblood

by Penny Rudolph

  “Yeah,” Goldie said. “But nothing surprises me about Rampart.” Rampart was the nearest LAPD station. “They might be too busy bustin’ the old folks for playing chess in MacArthur Park.”

  “But wouldn’t you think some kind of report would have to be filed? Some routine investigation?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, the only questions I’ve been asked are about almighty money, like who’s going to pay the hospital bill. Not a single soul has asked if I have any information about how one of those kids got sick and the other got dead. Don’t they care about that?”

  “You got me.” Goldie glanced at Rachel. “Come to think of it, there is one thing you can do about this. And maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Like what?”

  “Get your butt down to that hospital tomorrow and visit the kid who’s still alive.”

  999

  The next morning was hectic. Two clients locked their keys in their cars. One had flipped the door lock and wandered off, leaving the motor running. He must have really heavy stuff on his mind, Rachel thought. She didn’t know his name, but she recognized his car. She used the jimmy to unlock the car and turn it off. Then she left a note in the driver’s seat for the owner.

  It was ten-thirty or so when she spotted Irene, sitting on a pink blanket on the sidewalk in front of the garage, playing solitaire. Irene’s persona changed from time to time, like that of an actress, depending on the clothes she put on. Today, in a pink apron over a long blue skirt dotted with pink flowers, she looked as though she had flounced off the pages of a Jane Austen novel.

  Rachel left the glass booth and walked over to her. “Who’s winning?”

  “I am, dear girl. Wouldn’t have it any other way, would I?” A gray felt hat with floppy pink and white flowers all but hid her face. “Would you like a Twinkie?” She pointed to the somewhat battered supermarket cart pushed up against the fire hydrant on the corner near the bench. “I found some in the Dumpster down at Farmers Market. Unopened, of course.” Irene nodded her head up and down until it threatened the hat’s ability to remain seated.

  “No thanks, really,” Rachel said. “I had a bagel earlier.”

  “Good girl. Your age, you got to watch that figure.” Irene patted the long skirt that covered her round stomach. “Luckily, that age passes.”

  “You want to make ten bucks?” Rachel asked.

  Irene removed her hat, exposing hair shorn drastically short. “Of course, luv.” Peering into the hat, she drew out two chiffon ties. “You want I should mind the shop?”

  “Just for an hour or so. I need to visit someone in the hospital.” Rachel had once had someone to help with the long hours the garage required, but with Lonnie’s long detour into drug use, she’d found herself both paying him and running the place alone. After he died, she had decided to get a bit ahead on the bills and maybe even put a little money into savings rather than hire someone.

  Irene replaced the hat, tied the chiffon in a bow under her chin and cocked her head at Rachel. “Not your dear dad in the hospital, I hope.”

  “No, no. He’s fine.”

  “A friend, then.”

  “One of the kids I told you about yesterday. I just want to see if he’s okay.”

  Irene tilted her head. “How thoughtful you are, dear girl.”

  A rendition of the William Tell Overture began softly somewhere nearby and grew louder. Rachel glanced up and down the street looking for the source.

  “Ah, me, I forgot. You haven’t seen my latest accouterment.” Irene pulled a phone from the ruffled pocket of her pink apron.

  Rachel blinked and nodded. There was no use wondering how someone who apparently lived on the street managed to have a cell phone or why Irene wanted or needed one. Acutely aware of her own need for privacy and reluctance to make her own life an open book, Rachel had never asked Irene much about her lifestyle, believing the woman might rightly call her impertinent.

  “Hello,” Irene was saying into the phone. “Hold on.” She peered back at Rachel.

  “You’ll sit in the booth and answer the phone and all till I get back?” Rachel asked quickly.

  Irene scooped up the cards with her empty hand. “Of course, luv. Didn’t I say I would?”

  999

  Rachel parked in the main lot this time and entered the hospital through the front door. Two women and a man sat at counters, behind Plexiglas panels with little speak holes, fielding questions from people who stood in line to ask them.

  When Rachel reached the front of the line, a woman in a bright blue blouse, with frizzy black hair and pallid skin, just stared at her when she asked about the boy who was admitted from the emergency room about noon yesterday.

  “A Mexican boy, I think,” Rachel added. “One of the medics in the emergency room said he was very dehydrated.”

  “Name?”

  “Mine or his?”

  The woman frowned. “His, of course.”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  The woman stared at Rachel, two red splotches appearing on her cheeks. “You want to see someone, but you don’t know the name,” she said flatly.

  “I…uh…yes.”

  “Yes, you do know his name?”

  “No.” Rachel tried to throttle her frustration. “Look, I own the parking garage down the street. Yesterday I found two unconscious boys in a vehicle parked there. I brought them to the emergency room here. The doctor or nurse or whatever he was said it was too late for one of them, but the other was alive. I was just hoping to check on him. He was very young, maybe only nine or so, and I don’t even know if he has any parents.”

  The woman in the blue blouse tapped on the keyboard in front of her computer monitor, then looked back at Rachel. “Sorry, I can’t help you.”

  “What do you mean? I just want to see him, or at least find out how he’s doing.”

  The woman drew together thin red lips outlined in a darker color. “No one of that description was admitted here yesterday,” she said slowly, her tone underlining each word, as if speaking to someone who had little command of English. “Not after nine a.m. anyway.”

  “That’s impossible. I brought two boys here about eleven-thirty. One was admitted to the hospital.”

  The woman tapped some more keys and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, then looked past Rachel to the person behind her. “Next.”

  Chapter Six

  “Just a moment.” Rachel’s voice rose. “Please. He has to be here.”

  “No boy of that age or diagnosis was admitted from the ER yesterday. Period.” The woman looked a bit wild-eyed, as if Rachel had sprouted a horn in the middle of her forehead. Then she picked up a phone, punched three buttons, and murmured something into the mouthpiece.

  Almost immediately a tall man in navy pants, white shirt and a string tie, appeared. He raised his eyebrows at the woman behind the desk. She dipped her head at Rachel.

  The man put a firm hand at Rachel’s elbow. “Come with me, please, ma’am.”

  Glancing at the people in the lobby who were now looking in her direction, Rachel let him steer her to the door.

  “Sorry ma’am,” he said. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  Rachel explained it all again. “The second boy was being admitted. Now she says he wasn’t, that they’ve never heard of him. How can that be?”

  The man gave her a calm stare, as if he dealt with unhinged people every day of the week. “I don’t know. But if they say he isn’t here, he isn’t here. I’m sorry, but if there’s nothing else we can help you with, you’ll have to leave.”

  999

  Irene rolled her eyes when Rachel got back to the garage and told her the hospital had no record of the child. “Doesn’t surprise me dear girl. No, doesn’t surprise me one whit.”

  “Why not?”

  “First off, that is one big hospital. You know how many patients?”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “I hear t
hey have room for seven hundred patients. I reckon they might misplace one here and there.”

  “It still doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Irene said sagely.

  Rachel handed her a ten-dollar bill. Sometimes Irene was a total realist. Other times, just a tad, well, eccentric.

  When the woman had gone back to her card game on the sidewalk, Rachel sat down in the booth, thought for a moment, then picked up the phone and touched a few numbers.

  “I just want to apologize for last night,” she said when Hank answered. “I don’t know what got into me. I guess I’m a little stressed out.”

  She could almost see him lift one shoulder, as he often did when perplexed.

  “Happens to all of us,” he said. “I guess I picked a bad time. Whatever.”

  “You know that kid I took to the hospital? The one they admitted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I went over there today to see him and he wasn’t there.”

  “At the hospital?”

  “No record, no nothing. He’s just gone, missing, lost, kaput.”

  “Maybe they transferred him somewhere else.”

  “Wouldn’t they have a record of it?”

  “If my experience with medical billing is any indication of medical record-keeping….”

  Rachel made a bitter sound meant to be a chuckle. “Well, that’s a point. Maybe they didn’t check him in the right way, so he sort of disappeared.” She stopped, but Hank didn’t fill the gap.

  “Well, I’m sorry. Really.”

  “Apology accepted….” This time it was Hank who paused. “Have you given any more thought to it?”

  “To what?”

  “Setting a date to get married.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m thinking on it—oops, gotta go. I’ve got another call.”

  The incoming call was not good news.

  “Ms. Chavez, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Gerald Mason, Patrick Hutton Advertising.” Hutton leased almost three-quarters of the third level of her garage.

  “Yes. Thanks for calling back. As you probably know, your parking lease expires next week. I guess we need to talk about a renewal.” Normally she would have seen to this a month ago but she had mismarked her calendar. Hutton had been with her from the start, always paid on time, and always expressed appreciation when she went out of her way to help their staff, so she wasn’t worried, but the lease did need to be renewed.

  “You mean no one contacted you?”

  “Contacted me? About what?”

  “We won’t be renewing,” Mason said. “I’m afraid notifying you must have slipped between the cracks. I’m sorry. We’re moving to the Valley. We’re in the process right now. We’ll be out before the lease is up. I’m really sorry no one told you.”

  Rachel put her hand over her mouth as if to stop it from shouting Omigod! Then, “I see. Well, it’s been a pleasure serving you.” The reduction in cash flow would be serious.

  Well, it’s not the end of the world. Then again, she wasn’t so sure.

  999

  The overhead lights in One-Eyed Jack’s poker club shone brightly as the dealer laid out two hole cards face down on the green baize tabletop in front of Marty Chavez.

  A drop of adrenaline charged through him as he lifted the corner of the top card just enough to see what it was. Marty always peeked at one card at a time. Looking at the cards that way had become something of a fixation for him. He wasn’t sure it brought him good luck, but maybe it warded off bad luck. If there ever was a time for good luck, this was it.

  He could almost feel his short salt-and-pepper hair rise on his scalp like that of a dog that sees a choice morsel.

  The first card was the king of diamonds.

  His eyes slid from face to face around the oval table, watching for signs the other players were pleased or unhappy with their hole cards. A ”tell.” The faces didn’t betray much, but Marty had played often with each and knew them well. Sometimes all it took was a twitch, a lick of the lips, a scratch of the nose to give him an idea about the cards a player held.

  Not that his instinct was always right. Rachel would never forgive him for losing the farm that way. Not that he missed the place—he was never cut out to be a farmer. But Marty would never forgive himself for doing Rachel out of her rightful home. He’d been trying to make it up to her ever since.

  His second hole card was a diamond ten. When the bet came to him, he pushed forward a stack of black checkered chips. Hundred-dollar jobbies.

  With a sweeping motion, the dealer laid out the first board card. A seven of spades. Not great. But Marty met the raise from Louis, who sat across the table.

  The next board card…a jack of diamonds. Yes! A line appeared between Marty’s eyebrows as if a ghost had pressed a finger there.

  He pursed his lips to confine a sound that wanted to leak out.

  Today just might be the day.

  Chapter Seven

  It was after midnight, but Rachel wasn’t sleepy. She was compiling a list of businesses within walking distance of the garage. Clancy was sprawled over the top of her computer monitor supervising her work. Clancy was a large orange tomcat with a torn ear doubtless gained during a feline equivalent of a bar-room brawl. He was clearly a street fighter before they met at the animal shelter. It was love at first sight.

  Rachel’s work was slow going, using first the Yellow Pages, then her computer to transfer nearby addresses into Google maps to see if they were within the distance people would be willing to walk to and from work. It might take weeks to find all the possible firms, but in the morning, she would start calling the places she identified tonight.

  She couldn’t last long without replacing the revenue from Hutton. She made a note to add to her standard lease boilerplate a clause about sixty days’ notice to vacate.

  Through an open window, she heard someone calling her from the street. “Rachel? I know you’re still up. I can see the light. Let me in.”

  She ran down the ramp and opened the people door. “Pop? What are you doing here at this hour?” She caught a whiff of whiskey, but he didn’t seem drunk. Marty’s problem wasn’t booze.

  “Came to celebrate.” He produced a bottle of champagne. Nearing sixty, he was still a good-looking man, not tall or heavy, but solid, with a complexion that always looked like he had just left the beach. The crevices in his face only seemed to enhance it. His deep baritone voice could have landed him a job at any radio station.

  She locked the door behind them and started up the ramp. “Celebrate what?” she asked, afraid she knew the answer. This was typical when Marty did well at the poker tables. A week or so of over-confidence would soon cost him more than he’d gained.

  “Biggest win ever,” he exclaimed, turning to beam at her as they reached her apartment door.

  His excitement was contagious. Rachel threw her arms around him. She had decided some years ago that there was no point in depriving him of this moment. The outcome would be the same, regardless, so he might as well have his short season in the sun.

  “I mean really big, this time.” Marty’s grin nearly split his face.

  “That’s wonderful.” Rachel tried to sound enthusiastic as she set out two stemmed glasses on the countertop of the kitchen bar that separated her living room from the eating area. She gestured for him to open the champagne and took a bottle of club soda from the refrigerator for herself.

  “Damn, Rachel, my mind must be going, I don’t know how I forgot,” Marty said as he wrested the cork from the bottle, which gave out a loud pop. “I was just so excited.”

  Rachel had to smile. “I haven’t seen you like this in a long time.” Even if it wouldn’t last long, it was nice to see him happy.

  “But I shouldn’t have forgotten your…thing.”

  “No problem,” Rachel said. “Other than wasting some of that champagne. You can’t take an open bottle with you in the car
, and you can’t leave it here. So we’ll have to pour it out.”

  “Maybe you know somebody you could give it to.”

  “Nope. I won’t have it in the house. Period. Except for right now with you here.”

  “I never really believed you were an alcoholic.”

  “Well, believe it, Pop. And it isn’t were. Or was. I am. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.”

  “I know that’s what they say. You still going to AA?”

  “Yes and no. I haven’t been in a while. I’ll go as soon as I have time.” She settled onto the arm of the sofa. “So tell me about your good luck.”

  Marty launched into a card-by-card description of his game.

  Rachel was always amazed at how he could remember every play. Clancy climbed into her lap and she petted him, pretending to listen until Marty finished.

  “How long were you there?” she asked when he reached the finale.

  “Ten hours or so.”

  “Did you eat?”

  Marty thought for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

  “You can’t drink on an empty stomach.”

  Rachel moved Clancy from her lap and got up. “So A, you’re going to spend the night here, and B, you’re going to eat something right now.”

  “Aw, Rachel….”

  But she was already putting a frying pan on the stove. Taking a carton of eggs from the refrigerator, she stopped and leveled a look at him. “Okay. I should tell you I’m really glad you won, Pop, because it will be a while before I can help you out again. I lost a client today. A fairly big one.”

  “But that’s just it,” Marty said, watching her grate some cheese, “now I can help you.”

  “No you can’t. I won’t let you. You save that money. How much is it?”

  “Almost fifty-six thousand.”

  Rachel almost dropped one of the eggs she was breaking into the frying pan. “You’re kidding!” She tilted her head and watched his face to see if he was fibbing. “You have fifty-six thousand dollars?”

  “Well, I owe Charlie eleven something.”

  “Eleven what something?” Rachel asked, stirring the eggs. She stared across the stovetop at him, hoping she was wrong.

  “Thousand. Eleven thousand.”