“Yes.”
Detective Delgado moistened her finger again and flipped a page. “At about four-forty, a hospital volunteer entered the nursery and told Verna Rountree that her husband was in the cafeteria and urgently wanted to speak to her. Verna Rountree is separated from her husband. He left her a few months ago to live with another woman. This, says Verna Rountree”—the detective turned the page—“broke my heart. Quote unquote. Verna was desperate, quote unquote, to go see him, but she couldn’t leave her post and was afraid to ask the head nurse for a replacement because she knew the head nurse disapproved of personal visits during the shift and she thought, rightly, it turns out, that the head nurse didn’t like her anyway.”
“So the volunteer offered to stay in the nursery till she got back.”
Detective Delgado glanced up sharply. “That’s right.” Her reddened eyes focused on Nina for a moment; she wrote a few words on a fresh page of the notebook. “Taking the stairs so she wouldn’t have to go past the nurses’ station,” the detective continued, “Verna went as fast as she could to the cafeteria, failed to find her husband and hurried back to the fourth floor. When she reached the nursery, she found that the volunteer was gone and that the four infants in her charge were all sleeping quietly. She says. But—she didn’t bother to check each one up close. What she did was amble to the middle of the nursery and look around from there. They were all wrapped up in their blankets, three pink and one blue. Then she returned to her chair at the back, where she found a Hershey Bar, which she assumed the volunteer had left for her. She checked the time—it was four-fifty—realized she’d been gone ten minutes at the most, and that no one had noticed. She ate the Hershey Bar and threw the wrapper in the wastebasket. It’s been recovered and is now being checked for fingerprints.
“A few minutes later, just after she had finished with the candy bar, you returned for your baby. At that point Verna Rountree went to his bassinet and discovered what she discovered.”
Nina sat up a little higher. She was beginning to feel stronger. Her mind filled with questions. For no reason that she could explain, the first one that came out was: “What’s happened to Verna Rountree?”
“Suspended without pay,” said Detective Delgado. “Pending investigation. Of course, if her story doesn’t hold up, it’ll be much worse than that.”
“Why wouldn’t her story hold up?”
“For one thing, no one else on the ward saw a volunteer during the relevant time period. No volunteer was scheduled to be on the ward at that time, and all the volunteers who were in the hospital have been questioned and been able to show they were elsewhere. In addition, Verna’s description of the volunteer is very sketchy.”
“I saw her,” Nina said.
“You saw who?”
“The volunteer.”
Detective Delgado leaned forward in her chair. She still had the red veins in her eyes and the puffiness under them, but she didn’t look as tired. “Where? When?”
“In the hall, past the nursery on my way to the stairs. Just after I—just after I gave the—my—baby to the nurse.”
“You took the stairs?”
“Yes.”
“Why not the elevator?”
The reason was because she had wanted to pass by the nursery to see the baby, although, by that point, according to Detective Delgado’s calculations, they had only been separated for about two minutes. So Nina toyed with saying, “Because I felt like walking,” or “I don’t like elevators,” or “I don’t know.” She said: “Because I wanted to see the baby on the way by.”
Detective Delgado wrote in her notebook.
“Do you have any children, Detective Delgado?” The question just popped out.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
“I don’t have children,” Detective Delgado said. She gazed down at her notebook, but wrote nothing and didn’t appear to be reading either. “I have a nephew I’m close to,” she said. Fatigue struck her again; Nina could see it whiten her face. Detective Delgado pinched the bridge of her nose, hard, and asked: “Did you get a good look at the volunteer?”
“I got a look at her. I wouldn’t say a good look.”
“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”
“I might.”
Detective Delgado got on the phone. In a few minutes, a uniformed policeman entered the room and handed her a manila envelope. “Sergeant Shapiro wants you to call him,” the policeman said. “And Ezekial made bail last night.”
“Christ Almighty,” Detective Delgado said. She handed Nina the envelope.
Inside were laminated ID photographs of every volunteer associated with the hospital. Nina examined them all.
“No,” she said.
“Any of them close?” asked Detective Delgado.
“No.”
Detective Delgado sighed. “Describe the woman you saw.”
Nina closed her eyes. She saw a blurred image, a face without eyes, nose, mouth. “She was between fifty and sixty, I guess. Wispy hair.”
“How do you mean, ‘wispy’?”
“Thin. Not neatly combed or brushed.”
“What color was the hair?”
“Grayish.” The vague image she had was fading entirely. Nina opened her eyes. “I remember thinking she had spent a lot of time in the sun.”
“She had a dark tan?”
“Not really.”
“She was a white woman, right?”
“Yes.”
“But not tanned?”
“No.”
“So why did you think she had spent a lot of time in the sun?”
“Her skin, I guess. It was all wrinkled and leathery. Like a farm woman in the Depression, or something.”
“Did you see her hands?”
“Not that I recall.”
Detective Delgado wrote in her notebook. She filled about a page and a half. “Anything else you can remember?”
“She had a kind of accent.”
“You spoke to her?”
“She spoke to me.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t remember the exact words. She asked if I wanted a chocolate bar, I think. She called me ‘dear.’”
“‘Dear.’”
“Yes.”
“Think hard. Had you ever seen this woman before?”
“No.”
“Did she seem to recognize you?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“What kind of accent did she have?”
“Sort of English.”
“Sort of?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Like Princess Di?”
“Nothing like that.”
“The Beatles?”
“No. It was more old-fashioned. Old-fashioned and … genteel.”
“Genteel.”
“Yes.”
“Double-ee-el?”
“Yes.”
“So you do mean upper-class.”
“No. More like Blanche Du Bois. Only English.”
“Okay,” said Detective Delgado, her voice suddenly more lively, as though things were starting to make sense. “Is there anyone in your life who might consider you an enemy?”
Nina thought. She had business competitors, but not many, and had been involved in some difficult negotiations where harsh words had been exchanged, but afterwards everyone made a point of saying it was nothing personal. So she answered, “No.”
“You’re not estranged from your husband?”
“There is no husband.”
“You’re divorced?”
“I’ve never been married.”
“What is your current relationship with the father of the child?”
“There is no father,” Nina said. Detective Delgado’s eyes narrowed, and Nina saw the toughness, even meanness, that was in her. “I used artificial insemination,” Nina explained, “and the donor was anonymous.”
Detective Delgado relaxed. “So thi
s isn’t one of those custody affairs.”
“It couldn’t be,” Nina said. “But what is it?”
Detective Delgado made a few more notes in her book, then sat back, crossing her legs, heavy legs that stretched the seams of her trousers. “It’s too early to tell. But my hunch is—and I’ve been involved in a number of these now—that we’re dealing with an unstable, very screwed-up woman who gets it into her head that she wants a baby and just walks into a hospital and takes one. There was a case at Bellevue just last month.”
“And what happened?”
“There was an anonymous phone call a couple days later, probably from a neighbor of the woman, and we went in and got the baby. He was fine. Sometimes it’s a psychotic episode that passes and the woman strolls back into the hospital, leaves the baby in the lobby and strolls out. We even had a case where a baby was delivered right to the nursery.”
“Do you always get them back?”
Detective Delgado yawned; this time she couldn’t stifle it. “There’s no ‘always’ in my line of work.”
Nina pushed back the covers; she couldn’t think straight, lying there like an invalid. She sat on the edge of the bed, put her feet on the floor, took a deep breath and stood up.
“What are you doing?” asked the detective.
Nina was too busy fighting off dizziness to answer. She walked to the window and opened the curtains. Hazy daylight glared through the dirty window. “What floor am I on?”
“Twelfth. General surgery.”
“What time is it?”
“Nine-oh-five.”
“Tuesday?”
“Yeah.”
Her baby was two days old. Nina gazed down at brightly colored dashes far below, going nowhere in heavy traffic. “Do these women you’re talking about usually do a lot of planning?”
“Planning?”
“Like getting hold of a volunteer badge and a cart of magazines and candy. And finding out about Verna Rountree and her husband.”
Nina turned from the window in time to see Detective Delgado shrug. “That’s not much planning, really. She could have grabbed someone’s badge in the volunteer supply room on the ground floor and dropped it off on the way out—that’s where the cart probably came from too. As for Verna, our volunteer probably didn’t know she was having trouble with her husband, but Verna wears a wedding ring, so—” Detective Delgado shrugged again. “She was improvising, role-playing. It fits—like the way she offered you chocolate. That’s typical psycho behavior. She played volunteer for a while, now she’s going to play mom.”
Nina turned and looked down at Detective Delgado, stretched out in the chair. “But why my baby? Why did—” She cut herself off, afraid of the tears she felt building inside her. She didn’t want to cry in front of Detective Delgado.
Detective Delgado rose to her feet. She was taller than Nina, and much broader. A gun butt stuck out past the lapel of her suit jacket. “That’s just bad luck,” she said. “And wasn’t he the only boy in the nursery?” Nina nodded. “Well, there you go,” said Detective Delgado. “We’re checking out all the women with a history of this sort of thing. We’ll keep you informed.” The detective turned to go.
“But there must be more we can do.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know what. You’re the cop. You tell me.”
Detective Delgado’s eyes narrowed again. Then she said, “Aw, shit,” reached into her pocket, took out the cigarettes, lit one, sucked deeply and tossed the match on the floor. She blew a cloud of smoke luxuriously through her nostrils. “The Surgeon-General says I’m an addict, like a drug addict, you know? I know what an addict is. I bust them every goddamn day of my life.” She took another deep drag. “You got any money?”
“What kind of money?” Nina asked, wondering for a second if some sort of incentive beyond the detective’s salary was being suggested.
“Reward money,” replied the detective. “For information leading to the recovery of. Don’t say arrest or apprehension or any of that shit. In fact, say no questions asked.”
“How much?”
“Not too much. We don’t want anyone to think you’re rich. You’re not, are you?”
“No. What about five thousand?”
“Make it ten if you can. People will do a lot for ten grand in this town, even something good.”
After Detective Delgado left, Nina lay down again. She had to get the reward set up. She thought about the best way to do that, wishing she had asked Detective Delgado. Then she tried to recall the clinical definition of “psychotic” from Psych 101, especially what it said about violence. Her eyes closed. She drifted toward a dream. It began with a genteel voice saying: “Candy, dear?” Then the telephone rang. Nina jerked up in the bed, grabbed the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Where the heck are you?” said a high-pitched voice. “It’s nine twenty-three and I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”
“Who is this?” said Nina, fighting to shake off her dream, and whatever drug they had her on.
“Who is this? Who is this? Is something wrong with you? We just talked yesterday and you said you’d get back to me.” It was the Birdman.
“Oh God.”
“Oh God? What do you mean, ‘Oh God’? I’m at Condé Nast right now and the most crucial meeting of my entire life starts in … four and a half minutes.”
“Postpone it till next week.”
“Postpone it? What do I tell them?”
“Tell them anything. Tell them your mother died.”
“My mother’s been dead for ten years.”
“Then it won’t be a lie.”
“Listen, god darn it. Is this some kind of what-do-you-call-it? Shakedown? Are you trying to get more money out of me? Because if that’s the case, I think it’s highly unethical, and what’s more—”
Nina hung up. Now she was wide awake. She started to get out of bed. The door flew open and Jason rushed in.
“Oh, Nina,” he said, “I’ve just heard everything.” He hugged her. She began to cry. Jason cried too. She felt his tears falling on her shoulder. She stopped crying and patted him on the back.
“I want to get out of here,” she said.
“Then goddamn it, I’ll get you out,” he said.
The hospital released Nina thirty minutes later. “Where do you want to go?” Jason asked.
“Home.”
In the taxi, Nina told Jason about the reward.
“Good idea,” Jason said. “I’ll put ads in the papers, and maybe get some posters printed too. But we can do more than that.”
“Like what?”
“You’ve got some pull in this town, Nina. It’s time to use it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the kind of psycho—the kind of unbalanced woman—who does a thing like this maybe doesn’t read the papers, or look at posters. But she watches TV.”
“So?”
“So I’ll call Hy Morris.”
The name sounded like one Nina should know, but for some reason her mind couldn’t supply the details. Nina felt weak; the alertness stimulated by her conversation with the Birdman seeped away; what remained was a slow-growing ball of dread in her stomach, and the pain between her legs. “Who is Hy Morris?”
“The NBC guy,” replied Jason, sounding surprised.
“But he’s in entertainment.”
“He’ll be able to get you on the local news. That’s what we want.”
“It is?” said Nina, picturing herself on television, another forty-five-second mom-face that might or might not crumple in tears before it was time to move on to a fire in the Bronx or Joe Isuzu.
“Of course,” said Jason.
Was there even the smallest chance that Jason was right? “Okay,” said Nina.
The taxi stopped outside Nina’s building. “Hey,” said Jules as he opened the door. “Had the baby yet?”
Nina couldn’t answer. “Everything’s goin
g to be all right,” Jason told him as they went past.
“Is something—” Jules clamped his mouth shut on the rest of the question.
In the apartment, Jason picked up the telephone in the hall and began making calls. Nina found herself being pulled toward the study, like a bit of space debris caught in the gravity of the sun. She went into the study. Of course it was no longer a study: in the past month she had changed it into a baby’s bedroom. She had removed the Lifecycle, the desk, the PC, and replaced them with: a white crib, its headboard and footboard painted with apple trees heavy with big red apples; and a mobile of mirrors cut in different geometric shapes that hung between the rails.
And: a changing table, already stocked with a giant box of Pampers in the smallest size, and a giant box of Huggies in case the baby was allergic to Pampers, as well as powders, creams, lotions.
And: stuffed animals. A polar bear and a baby polar bear; a penguin; a goose with a gold-painted egg inside; a tiger; an elephant as tall as Nina; Winnie-the-Pooh. She was gazing at all of this when Jason came into the room.
“All set,” he said. “I’ve got ads in the News, the Post and the Times, and a film crew’ll be here in an hour.”
Nina turned to him: her partner, a man she had worked with almost daily for five years, who laughed at her jokes and made her laugh at his; and she saw the determined optimism in his eyes and how hard he was trying to help.
But she said: “Where’s Suze?”
Jason’s eyes darkened a little. “I can’t get in touch with her. She’s in L.A.”
“L.A.?”
“Something about a performance artist. The woman at the gallery wasn’t too clear.”
“Le Boucher,” Nina said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m going to lie down.”
Nina went into her bedroom and lay down. She closed her eyes and saw painted apple trees, gravid with big red apples, big and red as the apple the witch gave to Snow White. When she opened her eyes, Jason was sitting on the chair by the dressing table, watching her.
“Go back to the office, Jason. I’ll be all right.”
“But ‘Live At Five’ will be here any minute.”
“I can handle them.”
Pressure Drop Page 11
