Читать книгу Embracing The Fool - Dawn Leger - Страница 6

It turned out I did have a concussion, a fact I was going to discuss with Phil later, and the ER was unwilling to release me unless I had someone who would stay with me. As I started dialing Michael, Detective Friday blustered into my curtained space and removed the phone from my hands.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said.

He squinted at the screen trying to read the number I was entering.

“Who’re you calling?” he asked.

“A friend to come and get me,” I said. “You should go and get your head examined, too. I’m going home and you can’t stop me.”

“I can and I will. Let’s just say that it’s for your own good. Your life was threatened, and you could be in danger. So, it’s protective custody for you. Plus we should have these fine doctors keep an eye on that pretty little head of yours to make sure your brains didn’t get too scrambled when the bad man knocked you out.”

I groaned. “Can he do that?” I asked the resident, who was occupied with note-taking.

He nodded, never raising his eyes.

Friday smiled.

“Well, I think you should have to stay, too,” I said. “The same terms apply to you.”

“Yeah, but I have a gun,” he said.

“No guns in the hospital,” the resident said, holding out a hand. “Hand it over. We’ll give it to security, and you’ll get it back when you sign out.”

“I don’t think so…Let me talk to someone in charge out there.” And he was gone.

I slept on and off, and eventually I was moved into a semi-private room, where I spent a long night being awakened hourly by someone intent on shining a bright light into my eyes and asking me who was president. The only thing that made this adventure tolerable was the fact that my roommate, Detective Friday, had to endure the same treatment. However, his expression of displeasure was not very respectful of the responsibility of the staff to monitor our conditions.

“Give them a break, will you please?” I said after the third occasion of abusive language.

“Dammit, why should I?” he grumbled. “If they had let me keep my gun, I’d make sure no one interrupted me again.”

“Now you understand the weapons policy,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“Boy, are you always this grouchy?” I asked.

He ignored me.

“I mean, my head hurts too, but you don’t see me complaining or being abusive to people who are just trying to help.”

I heard his pillow being moved.

“Would you like me to hold that over your face for a few minutes, to help put an end to your misery?” I asked.

There was a long sigh, ending in something like a growl, so I decided to be quiet. I was awake now, however, and although my head was still pounding I longed to be able to turn on the light or the television as a diversion. My phone battery was long dead so that offered no entertainment. But I did have a notebook and pen so I decided to do the old-fashioned thing and write by hand.

I tried to quietly slip by the foot of my companion’s bed and enter the bathroom, but he was just as awake as me.

“Where you going?” he said, sitting upright in the bed.

“Bathroom,” I said. “Is that okay with you, or do you want to come, too?”

“It’s tempting, but I’ll pass. Just don’t try anything.”

I closed the door and turned on the light. What did he think I was going to try? An escape in this attractive johnnie? Or to rig up an explosive device that would be a diversion while I strangled him with the television cord? That was all I needed to get my creative juices flowing, and I looked around to find a place to sit and write. Unfortunately, there was no cover on the toilet, so that limited my options. I spread a towel on the floor and attempted to sit with my back against the door and all my privates somewhat covered by the thin cotton nightgown. The expressions “Yikes” and “Yeesh” came to mind.

My crude drawing of the knife had been ripped out of the notebook, hopefully by Dad or Phil, so I started writing on the next page. I began with a synopsis of what I knew about the people who were around Neville, starting with his partner, Kenneth.

Kenneth had been a darling of the art scene when Neville met him, and theirs was a romance that was something of a fairy tale, in a manner of speaking. Many people thought it was a fairy tale, how the washed out old poet came back to life when he met the young painter, his next book of love poems earning the Pulitzer Prize and the announcement of their commitment ceremony breaking the barrier for gay couples in the New York Times. It was a heady time for Neville, and his workshops were revitalized along with his career and his social standing.

I knew about this only by reading along with the rest of America in the pages of New York Magazine and Time Out, because I was nowhere near the epicenter when things started to crack. Apparently, happiness takes work in unions of all kinds, something Neville knew from his previous disastrous marriage and liaisons, but Kenneth had yet to discover. The sudden decline of interest in his art—which his agent kindly ascribed to the crisis in the stock market, naturally—coupled with the daily grind of living with an older and, let’s face it, less attractive man, coalesced into a full-blown depression and slide back into nasty habits of the past. Neville checked Kenneth into a facility, cleaned him up, and they returned from a month-long retreat to a private spa in Europe the proud parents of an adopted daughter.

That’s around the time when I came in. Things were still a little shaky in the marriage and Kenneth was pretty unstable on his own two feet, so adding a baby to the mix was pretty crazy, but I guess if you had money, connections, and access to a private plane, anything was possible. So, the solution to Kenneth’s depression and their marital problems was going to be Amantha. God help us all.

My list now had some interesting entries. Drugs, from where? Private plane, owned by whom? Travel to Europe? How many times, with whom? What kind of art did Kenneth produce? Who bought it? Where did they get all their money? The more I wrote, the more questions I had.

How much money did a person make writing poetry? Even with a Pulitzer, did people really buy poetry books? Yes, Neville had his writing groups, but how much money could he be earning from them? Certainly not enough to pay for all that rehab, plus the month at the spa in Europe, plus the private plane. And the private adoption of Amantha. Did they buy that little girl? I shuddered. This whole thing was beginning to give me the creeps.

Moving on: Who else was in the group? There was Joseph, Neville’s right-hand man. A long-time colleague from back in their “salad days,” as they called them. They’d been to Vietnam together, come back and gotten jobs together at some place in midtown, writing copy for advertising. The end of the “Mad Men” era, I suppose. I couldn’t picture either one of them in that milieu, wearing skinny ties and shiny black shoes, writing jingles for soda pop and then going home in the evening to their wives, whom they avoided talking to and having sex with. Smoking all day until their fingers were stained yellow. Hair greased back so they still felt hip and young, even though it was killing them to be working for “the man,” selling junk food and sitting in a crappy 8 x 8 office all day long. Joseph now wrote violent stories about taking ears off gooks, while Neville changed diapers and wrote about loving cock. I put a star next to his name.

Leslie, a relative newcomer to the group, was another frustrated Neville groupie. Her unrequited love of the poet manifested itself in weekly offerings of baked goods, erotica, and Neville’s oblivious exploitation of the poor woman. I knew that Leslie had spent hours babysitting for Amantha at the drop of a hat, and I had witnessed firsthand how she ran to get the baby whenever Kenneth was out. How many times had I watched her dandle Amantha on her lap over the past year, only to have Kenneth swoop in and snatch her away? While Leslie was no friend of mine—I’d laughed aloud when she produced a knitted bonnet for the baby that I genuinely thought was a potholder or one of those things you use to scrape ice from car windows—I knew that she’d never harm a hair on Neville’s head. Now, if Kenneth was dead, I would definitely put her in my top ten. But unless Neville did something horrid like tell Leslie to stay away from Amantha, I couldn’t see her stabbing him with a knife.

Javi, the sullen Serbian novelist, was an enigma to me. He could be a nice guy, I was certain, but I had no evidence of either the niceness or, to be quite frank, the gayness. This was a very sexually amorphous group, I suddenly realized. Only Paxton was definitively straight, in the sense that he was married with a couple of kids and a wife that he talked about all the time. Wow, what a boring guy to be in a writing group. He must be a killer!

The door jerked against my back, and then I felt someone pounding on it.

“Miss, are you all right? Miss? Oh my God, should I call for help?”

I squirmed to the side, opened the door a crack, and peeked out.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Have you fallen? Can you move?” a young woman asked. “I’ll get some help.”

“No,” I shouted. “Stop right there. I haven’t fallen. I can get up. Just wait a minute. I’m just sitting here, quietly, trying not to wake my neighbor in the bed there.”

“Too late,” Friday said. “I’m awake now. Thanks.”

I opened the door. The little nurse was clutching her chest.

“Are you okay? I’m sorry I scared you,” I said. I helped her get to the chair.

“I couldn’t find you in the bed, and then I couldn’t open the door, and I saw your face down there by the floor,” she gasped.

“Oh my God, you’re giving the nurses heart attacks now. You’re going to kill us all,” Friday said. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was smiling. Then again, maybe not; it was hard to be sure.

I poured her some water and watched as she drank it.

“I’m fine. You just take a minute there. Do you want me to go and get someone to help?” I asked. “That’s a good idea. I’ll just ring the buzzer.”

She was looking a little green around the edges.

“Maybe you should lie down on the bed for a minute. What do you think?”

She wouldn’t do it, but she did fold over and put her head between her knees. Maybe that’s why she was on the night shift, so she wouldn’t have to interact with actual live patients.

I shook Friday by the foot when I passed his bed.

“Keep an eye on her, will you?” I said. “I think she might hit the floor any minute now. I’m going to get some help in here.”

As I went down the hall, I heard him sigh, “Oh, Jeez,” and the mattress creak as he got out of bed.

When I got back to the room with another aide in tow, Friday was sitting on my bed and the nurse was sprawled across the chair with a facecloth over her eyes.

“What happened?” I asked as one woman rushed to help the other.

“And what are you doing with that?” I said to Ty. I grabbed my notebook from his hands. “I didn’t give you permission to read this.”

“You left it here, in plain sight,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was, so I just had a little look at it. Now, if you could share some of your fascinating insights with the police department, we might be able to clear this case in a jiffy.”

“Sarcasm does not become you,” I said. “And I was just trying to sort things out. You know, someone is trying to make it look like I was involved with Neville’s death, and I have no idea why that would be. I have an interest in figuring out who did this, too.”

He groaned. “Please, in the name of all that is holy, do not try to help me solve this crime. The last thing I want is an amateur detective mucking around in my evidence.”

He went back over to his side of the room and started digging in the locker for his clothes.

“I think it’s time to check out of here,” he said.

The nurse, walking slowly out the door with the assistance of the aide, stopped and said, “I don’t think so, officer. You have to wait for the doctor to come by in the morning.”

“No, I don’t,” he said.

He pulled out a pair of wrinkled trousers.

“You can keep her as collateral, but I am out of here. I’ll get some rest at home, and if my nose starts to bleed or my vision starts to get blurry, I’ll come back.”

He pulled the pants on over his boxers and then tossed away the johnnie. I caught a glimpse of a nice chest and a well-defined set of abs before he pulled on a shirt.

“In the meantime,” he continued. “You might want to put some restraints on the doc over there to keep her in the bed so she doesn’t scare anyone else half to death.”

I relaxed on the bed, enjoying his display. The two women, heads shaking, left the doorway, promising to return with some papers for him to sign.

“What’s the big rush?” I asked.

He flopped into the chair, rubbing his eyes.

“My head is killing me,” he said.

“So, stay a few more hours. You’re not going to be able to do much right now anyway. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s the middle of the night.”

He squinted at me.

“Can you turn off that light over your head?”

I reached up and pulled the light chain, putting my side of the room back in shadow. Only the light from the bathroom remained, and it was much better for both of our heads.

“Better?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “So, when you finish your list, will you at least share it with me?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything heroic, believe me. I was just doodling around.”

“Tell me, why would someone want to set you up for this? Do you have any enemies?” he asked.

“No, that’s what I can’t figure out. So, you know, that’s why I was going through the names of people in the group, jotting down what I know about them and why they might want to kill Neville. Or frame me. Or both.”

“And you came up with?”

“Well, not much, but I really just got started and then boom, all hell broke loose out here. I mean, why didn’t you just tell her I was in the bathroom?”

“I’m not your keeper.”

“As if.”

“Oh, please, don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Can you just shut up? Can we not exchange five sentences without an argument?”

“You shut up,” I said, maturely responding to his provocation.

It was quiet for a few minutes.

“What is all that stuff in the storage unit, anyway? Is that yours?”

I didn’t respond.

He lifted his head and looked at me.

“Are you asleep?”

“No,” I said. “You told me to shut up.”

“Oh my God,” he said. “Fine.”

I think we both fell asleep after a while, because the next time I looked, Friday was reclined in the chair and a light blanket had been draped over most of his body. Sunlight was trying to sneak in around the corners of the window shades, and the smell of bad coffee wafted into the room.

“Friday!” I shouted.

“What?” he groaned. “I’m sleeping here.”

“You have to tell me your first name now,” I said.

“No, I don’t.”

“You do. We spent the night together. It’s the gentlemanly thing to do,” I said.

He pulled the covers firmly over his face.

“All right,” I said. "Don't tell me."

The nurse had returned with his discharge “Against Medical Advice” papers, which she left on the tray table at the foot of the bed. I picked them up and read, Austin T. Friday. Lieutenant, Homicide Division.

“Gee, I wonder what the T. stands for? Hey—you should have gone into the Treasury Department, you know? ATF?”

He lifted his head and I saw one eye giving me a piercing stare.

“Not so original, eh?” I asked.

I put down the papers.

“Well, Austin, at least your parents didn’t name you Walter,” I said.

I got back into bed and opened my notebook again, but it was too dark to read my notes. A moment later, I realized the strange huffing noise I was hearing came from my companion, doing his best not to laugh out loud.

Finally, his head popped out.

“Hey, doc?” he asked, chuckling. “Anybody ever tell you that you’re really funny?”

I shook my head, smiling.

“No,” I said.

He smiled back.

“There’s a reason for that.”