Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

“Drink?” she offered.

“Scotch and water.”

“I remember.” She vanished a moment and came back with two glasses and handed him one.

She sat.

He sipped. The drink was incredibly strong. “Still trying to sell me an apartment?”

“I figured you could use it.”

“An apartment?”

“A drink.”

“It shows?”

“You look lousy. Great but lousy. The way a cop’s supposed to look.”

He sensed that she might be coming on to him in her sweet ladylike style and he didn’t want to encourage it. “Can we get the cop stuff out of the way?” he said.

“Fine by me.”

He showed her a photograph of Jodie Downs in his all-American jeans and high school sweatshirt.

She looked at it very sadly, a long time. She took a cigarette out of the crystal box on the polished maple tabletop and lit it.

“Bad habit,” he said.

She exhaled twin jets of smoke. “Tell me,” she said. “About him.”

“His name was Jodie Downs. He was a student at Pratt. Ring any bells?”

Her eyes turned murky gray and she kept smoking. “None.”

“He also had a fondness for very kinky, very sleazy sex clubs. Maybe that rings a bell?”

“Look, I work in a crooked business with opportunistic people, but I don’t go to sex clubs. It’s not my scene.”

“Okay, so we know that wherever you remember his face from, it wasn’t a sex club. And we know his name. Let’s put it together.”

“I was wrong,” she said. “The man I thought he looked like is alive—he sells me my New York Times every morning at the newsstand on Sixty-sixth Street.”

The last time Cardozo had questioned Melissa Hatfield she’d told him she led a lonely life and the claim hadn’t fitted with his impression of her. Again he felt a dissonance between what she was saying and what his instincts were telling him. He believed her that she didn’t go to sex clubs, but he didn’t believe she’d never seen Downs’s face. She was holding something back.

Cardozo was aware of the purring of the cat at his feet.

Melissa handed back the photograph.

“What do you feel when you see a dead man like that?” she asked.

“I feel I have a job.” He sloshed his drink, helping the ice melt.

“I felt anger, hate, and doom,” she volunteered.

“Why doom?”

“If it can happen to him it can happen to anyone.”

“It’s not going to happen to you.”

“Oh, no? There’s a lot of death around.”

“That’s a cheerful thought.”

“I’m a cheerful girl.”

“Okay, cop stuff concluded.” He knew he wasn’t going to trap her. The only other way to go was to talk trivialities, get her to lower her guard and maybe let something slip.

He said it was a hot day, and she said it was turning into a hot night.

Through the window behind her the summer light was fading and the sky above the horizon of penthouses was going from violet to blue. She said even with air conditioning there was sometimes no way to get cool except to go out to a movie, and they began chatting about their favorite films, and it was as though they were taking a stroll nowhere special, just heading the same way together.

After the third round of drinks she asked if he was hungry.

“Thought you’d never ask. I’ll eat a zoo.”

“Not on the menu. Will cold pesto salad do?”

The salad was delicious. It brought back the intense and uncomplicated pleasure of eating. Cardozo lifted his glass of chilled white wine. “To the cook.”

She raised her glass.

“Melissa,” he said, “is it easy for you to check a deed?”

“What kind of deed?”

“Who owns the building at Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue?”

“What’s at Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue?”

“A sex club called the Inferno. If I check, it looks like the police setting up a bust. If you check—”

“It looks like Nat Chamberlain setting up a new luxury co-op. Sure, I can find out.”

The strident jangle inched into Detective Greg Monteleone’s awareness. He rolled onto his side to squint at the digital readout on the Japanese clock-radio.

It was two minutes after one A.M.

His wife was stirring beside him in the bed. As he searched for the switch on the lamp her sleeping hand went out, trying to stop him.

His finger connected with a plastic button and there was an exploding cone of light, horrible light.

Gina lay shading her eyes in shock, blinking at him. “Don’t answer,” she moaned.

His eyes apologized. He snatched up the phone in his fist and brought it to his ear. “Monteleone.”

A voice said, “It’s Will Madsen.”

Monteleone had to think before the name clicked into place. The Episcopal priest whom he’d questioned in Beaux Arts Tower. “Yes, Father.”

“There’s been something on my conscience. I did see something the day of the murder—something I didn’t mention.” Madsen sounded nervous. He also sounded drunk. “I hate to make trouble for other people.”

“I certainly can identify with that.”

“Could we meet somewhere? Now?”

Monteleone wasn’t going to bicker about the hour. Information on murders was a seller’s market. “Where would you like to meet, Father?”

22

TASK FORCE MEETING, SATURDAY, June 7, fourteen days after the murder.

Siegel was winding up her Inferno report, telling how she’d connected with one of the hard-core regulars. “He’s bisexual, and he knows everything that goes on in that place. He wants to see me again.”

“Good,” Cardozo said. “Did you make a date?”

She regarded Cardozo steadily for an instant. “We left it open. He’s not going to forget me.”

It was Malloy’s turn. He seemed shaky and nervous as he drew a deep ragged breath.

“The bartender—Stan—gave me free beers. Real chatty type. Offered me coke, I said my doctor told me to lay off. He gave me his home phone.”

“Did you give him yours?” Cardozo said.

“Told him I was married, said he couldn’t call me at work or home. That turned him on.”

Monteleone smirked. “Carl, you’re so hard to get.”

“Date him,” Cardozo said. “Get close to him.”

Malloy’s Irish eyes were thoughtful. “Okay.”

Monteleone’s turn. “Had a talk with Father Will Madsen. He seems to be a periodic lush. Turns out he’s been withholding a piece of information, but this morning around one A.M. he got drunk and spilled. The day of the murder, a little before noon, he saw Debbi in the lobby flirting with Hector Dominguez.”

“The guy with the dead muskrat on his head?” Sam Richards said.

“What a lousy rug,” Malloy said.

Monteleone continued. “When Madsen was passing through the lobby again, Debbi was back, totally crazed. She was trying to claw Hector to pieces. Madsen feels very guilty telling this. It’s taken him two weeks and a few fifths of Stoli to come forward.”

Cardozo pondered, trying to stick events together.

“Remember those scratches on his face?” Siegel said.

Cardozo nodded. “Hector said the cat did those. Greg, when did this happen?”

“A little after 2 P.M.”

Silence came down, broken an instant later by the sound of Richards making a hacking attempt to recover from coffee swallowed the wrong way.

“What did Madsen mean, Debbi was flirting with Hector?” Cardozo asked.

“He said it looked like Debbi was coming on to the guy.”

“He didn’t say coming on,” Siegel said. “A priest wouldn’t use that expression.”

“He said flirting. That means coming on, right?”

Siegel made an impatient face. “Flirting is courtship, Greg. Coming on is hard cruising. One is flattering and one is demeaning.”

“Got it,” Monteleone said. “Gracias mucho.”

“Like she was offering herself?” Cardozo said. “Like she was willing to make it with Hector?”

“Father Madsen seemed to think so.”

Cardozo was thinking of the possibilities, everything going through his mind at once. He had three facts: at noon a not very bright upscale hooker had been trying to wheedle good graces from a Neanderthal doorman, and two hours later she was physically attacking him. And sometime during those two hours a man had been murdered on the sixth floor.

“What turned Debbi around in two hours?” Cardozo said.

“I saw someone change like that once,” Siegel said. “It was a psychotic break brought on by cocaine.”

Sam Richards’s lower lip moved. He ran his tongue along it. “There’s another witness—he’d be able to shed some light.”

Cardozo looked at him. “Who’s that, Sam?”

“Jerzy Bronski’s taxi was parked in the garage. He says he was taking a pee, but it stands to reason he was boffing Debbi, right?”

Cardozo picked up the telephone. He dialed. The line buzzed eight times.

“Ms. Hightower’s residence,” a woman’s harried voice said.

“Miss Hightower, please.”

“This is her service. She won’t be back till Sunday evening.”

“What time Sunday evening?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Her father.”

“Hello, Dr. Hightower. I didn’t recognize your voice. Debbi will be back after eight o’clock.”

A wave of annoyance swept Cardozo. He set his coffee down. He looked at the Beaux Arts Tower service personnel work schedule. Hector Dominguez would not be working until Monday, 4 P.M. to midnight.

He phoned Hector’s home number and after two rings thought better of it and hung up. Save that one for face-to-face. He pulled the fives on Jerzy Bronski.

The sky had turned dusky gray. Heat waves rising from the street were tinged with the neon of shop signs.

The garage occupied a corner lot. There was a cardboard sign in the glass pane of the dispatcher’s door: do not enter.

Cardozo entered. He flashed his open wallet and asked for Jerzy Bronski.

The dispatcher, tufts of black hair poking out from his sweat-soaked T-shirt, glanced over from his desk. “Not back yet.”

Cardozo sat uninvited in the free chair.

Stuttering fluorescent light flicked the peeling wall.

At quarter after eight a tall, slender man came in with his taxi sheets.

“Visitor,” the dispatcher said.

Jerzy frowned at Cardozo, a sharp line jagging down between his eyebrows.

Cardozo rose and introduced himself. “Good meeting you, Jerzy. How about some coffee?”

“How about a drink?” Jerzy said.

Three minutes later they were settling down at a table on the glass-enclosed terrace of the Sazerac House across the way.

Jerzy tapped a Lucky loose from a crumpled pack and laid the pack on the table beside the metal ashtray. He lit the cigarette, striking a match from a book one-handed. He leaned back against his chair. “It makes me look bad, cops coming into my garage asking about me like I was a criminal.”

“Jerzy, believe me, for a guy who moonlights his ass off the way you do, you’re looking great.”

Jerzy shaped an O with his mouth and blew out a perfect smoke ring.

“We know you’ve been making it with Debbi Hightower,” Cardozo said. “And we know you were with her the day of the killing.”

The legs of Jerzy’s chair came back to the floor and denial began gathering itself in his face.

“We have a witness who can place your cab in the garage.” Cardozo went out on a limb. “And who saw you take the elevator up to Debbi’s. Hightower isn’t the point, you weren’t breaking any laws that we’re interested in enforcing. What we want from you is information.”

Jerzy’s finger drew a track in the condensation that had formed on his glass of Scotch and water.

“Why did Debbi attack the doorman?”

Jerzy was silent.

“We know you falsified your cab sheets. We know you were driving Debbi home every day after she hooked in the hotel. We know, but Ding-Dong Transport doesn’t need to know.”

Jerzy’s expression was undecided: he wanted to save his ass but he didn’t want to wind up parking it in a fry pan. “She freaked out,” he said.

“Why?”

Jerzy mopped his face with a dime store handkerchief that needed to see some action in a washing machine. “A delivery was late.”

“Jerzy, I’m not a narc, so let’s get this out of the way. It was coke, right?”

Jerzy put his drink down. He spoke quietly. “She’s one of those chicks that live on the stuff. We were having a great time, and then she flipped.” He imitated the intonation of Debbi flipping. “Gotta see my dealer, gotta see my dealer.”

“Who’s her dealer?”

Jerzy sucked in breath, hollowing his cheeks. “Do you have to drag me into this? You’ve been watching the building, you know who runs the coke in that place. He promised her the stuff: she went down and he didn’t have it. She flipped out.”

The third time Cardozo buzzed, the decibel level of punk rock dropped to something approaching bearability. The door opened a crack. A young woman’s face stared at him above the safety chain. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders, curly in a way that suggested she had just bathed.

She looked curiously at his shield and then curiously at him.

“They said the police were coming up.”

“I am the police.”

“You’re not the black dude that was here before.”

“No, I’m not.”

“He was nice.”

“So am I.”

She worked her eyelashes. “What’s this about?”

“Just a few questions.”

“The place is kind of a mess—the maid’s been sick.”

“That’s okay, we can talk here in the hallway.”

“What the hell, you’re not my mother, you’re not going to criticize. Are you?”

“Promise.”

She stepped back from the door, her loosely tied bathrobe a swirl of Day-Glo ruffles.

The furniture in the livingroom was minimal: beanbag chairs, bookcases, lonely objects in a dim cavern. Magazines and show business newspapers littered the floor.

She sank onto a beanbag chair and he sat on the other.

Her eyes fixed on him in uneasy expectancy.

“You had a fight with the doorman a week ago Saturday,” he said.

“That’s not true.”

“Come on, Debbi. We know why you’re wearing a false nail and we know how Hector got his face scratched. We have a witness.”

“Who?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“I have rights.”

“You don’t have those rights till I arrest you, Debbi. I’m asking you some questions hoping maybe I won’t have to do that. Just tell me what you and Hector were fighting about.”

Her eyes became pools of evasion. “Hector’s an s.o.b., that’s what we were fighting about.”

“Debbi, we know about Hector’s sideline.”

She got up from the beanbag. “No way I’m going to get into this conversation.”

“We know he’s dealing coke to you.”

The face was defiant now, eyes blazing. They were blue-gray eyes, a wild blazing blue-gray. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

A beige decorator phone lay on the floor at the end of a tangled plastic line. She didn’t make a move toward it.

“Debbi, we’re not interested in the coke. We’re interested in what happened in this building a week ago Saturday when a man in six was murdered.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Does the name Jodie Downs mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Inferno?”

“What inferno?”

She said it without a capital I. That satisfied him.

“Why did you attack Hector?”

She didn’t answer.

“Debbi, I don’t care about that coke, but some friends of mine would care a whole lot.”

Behind the bright glitter of her mascaraed eyes, he caught a sudden note of pleading.

“In my business, I have to stay alert. So sometimes I do a little coke.” She grinned nervously. “Sorry ’bout that.”

His mouth smiled back at her. “A lot of people do coke. Hell, cops have been caught doing it.”

“Tell me. It’s strictly personal use. I don’t deal.”

“We understand that, Debbi. We’re not accusing you of dealing.”

“I was expecting a gram of coke. I prepaid. With Hector you prepay. He said he’d have it at one thirty. All right, I was a little late picking it up—but that’s no reason for him to sell it to someone else.”

“Who’d he sell it to?”

“He said it was a real good customer who needed it real bad, needed it more than I did.”

“Do you have any idea who?”

“Look, I make it my business not to know other people’s business, you know what I mean?”

“Someone else in the building?”

“I absolutely don’t know that.”

Broome Street was dark as Cardozo stepped out of the car. A summer wind gusted along the pavement, swirling sheets of newspaper. Tiredness was all through him as he let himself into the apartment.

“You look beat.” Terri walked toward him, and the soft cone of the hallway light sculpted her out of the darkness. She had a springy step and her body radiated a comfort with itself.

His arms went around her, folding her to him.

“You had a call. A woman.” She handed him the piece of paper with the number.

He sensed her attention and looked at her sideways. Her oddly adult, humorous eyes met his and the flicker of a smile passed between them.

He went into the hallway and dialed. His reflection in the mirror told him he needed a shave and he’d been sweating into his shirt a few hours too long.

On the second ring Melissa Hatfield answered.

“Am I calling at a bad time?” he said.

“No, I’m watching TV.” Behind her cheerful voice something solemn was waiting to come out. “I checked into that address. Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue is leased to a company called Pegasus International, and Pegasus is renting the adjoining cellar space to the Inferno Fraternal Society.”

Holding the phone receiver in one hand, Cardozo stretched to pick up a pencil. He found a blank space on a junk mailing from the Museum of Modern Art. “Who’s Pegasus?”

“I think they’re a paper company. They’re leasing on a month-to-month basis, which is unusual for a building, to say the least.”

“Who are they leasing from?”

There was an odd pausing before she spoke again. “They’re leasing from us. Balthazar. We picked up the building about four months ago. They were already in occupancy. We’ve picked up a few odd lots in the meat-packing district. My boss, Nat Chamberlain’s, trying to put the lots together. So he leases month to month. When he gets enough property he’ll rip down and put up a condo.”

“Doesn’t Chamberlain care who he rents to?”

“The theory is in case there’s a stink he can claim he didn’t know who Pegasus was renting to. It’s like Mayor Koch or President Reagan not knowing their handpicked deputies are breaking all the laws. I could check the Pegasus incorporation papers, but it’ll be the usual New York labyrinth.”

“Don’t bother with that. You’ve told me enough. Thanks.”

“Vince, I enjoyed last night.”

“So did I.”

At one o’clock the following morning, Detectives Carl Malloy and Sam Richards entered the underground premises of the Inferno Recreational Club, signing in as Mr. Warren and his guest, Mr. White.

23

ON SUNDAY, THE EIGHTH of June, a little after 8:00 P.M., Babe Devens’s nurse wheeled her out of the side entrance of Doctors Hospital to a gray stretch limousine double-parked on 89th Street. The chauffeur came around to help the nurse lift Babe into the back seat. Lucia Vanderwalk watched, and something locked in the stern planes of her face.

The back of the car smelled of fresh roses. Babe and her father sat facing traffic, and Lucia and the nurse took seats facing Babe.

They took the FDR Drive south. Seven years had made their difference, but Babe was relieved to see that the city was still there. The same East River was awash with reddish light. The same jagged skyscrapers loomed dark purple against the fiery sky, pillars holding up the sunset.

The limousine swung off the drive, smoothly catching green lights all the way to Fifty-seventh Street, where children were playing in the little riverside park. Babe smiled at the peaceful scene with its golden long-ago glow.

One block north a dense group of people stood clustered on the sidewalk, shouting and pushing and spilling over into the street. Advance copies of New York magazine, available that day, had carried a column by Gordon Dobbs reporting Babe Devens’s recovery. A white-panel truck was double-parked just ahead of Babe’s town house. The blue lettering on its side said WCBS-TV NEWS.

“Revolting,” Lucia muttered. “Hadley, you were going to see that this didn’t happen.”

“It’s a free country, my dear.”

Honking a path clear with his horn, the driver brought the limousine to the curb. The crowd surged toward the car.

The chauffeur came sprinting around to open the door. Lucia stepped out, slicing space with her handbag, holding reporters at bay.

The chauffeur quickly set up the wheelchair and then E.J. helped him load Babe into the chair. E.J. steered the chair across the pavement and Hadley, walking with a slight limp, went ahead and pushed the buzzer of number 18.

The crowd pressed in. A bearded man in fatigue trousers came dashing forward, balancing a minicam on his shoulder. Babe looked up into wild, snapping light. Mikes thrust themselves into her face.

“Looking great, Babe!”

“Did Scottie do it, Babe?”

The door of number 18 was opened by a stranger who regarded Babe with a look of extraordinary gravity.

The wrought-iron grill clanged shut and then the front door closed. Street noises were blotted out, and Babe found herself once more in the house she had left only a week ago, a week that other people called seven years.

“Beatrice,” Lucia said, “this is Wheelock, your new butler.”

The man’s face was gray, composed like a stone, and he seemed tall and cadaverous in his servant’s cutaway.

“How do you do,” Babe said.

“How do you do, ma’am. Welcome home, ma’am.”

“Where’s Methuselah?” Babe hadn’t thought of Methuselah, the highland terrier, till this moment. Suddenly she missed his running leap, his paws mauling her dress, his damp breath and warm animal smell in her face.

“Methuselah had to be put to sleep,” Lucia said.

There was a stab in Babe’s heart. She wheeled herself into the hallway. Her eyes took in the familiar framed pictures on the wall, the Sheraton table, the umbrella stand. They all told the bygone story of yesterday.

“I want to see the house,” Babe said.

“Of course,” Lucia said. “E.J. will help you.”

“Thanks, I can manage this chair myself.”

Babe rode up alone in the elevator, the same mahogany-paneled elevator she remembered, yet in some elusive way different. It took her a moment to see that the floor buttons had been replaced, black numbers on white and not the white on black she recalled.

She stopped on each floor and wheeled her chair along the corridors.

Every room, every passageway, was quiet and mysterious and changed: spotless new coverings on the chairs in Cordelia’s room, not quite the same blue as before; a firescreen in the guest room, copper where it had been brass—one by one the little shocks built up, signs that the house had been shut for years and hurriedly reopened.

A lump of mourning lodged in her throat as she wheeled to the open doorway of the master bedroom.

She hesitated at the threshold of the well-furnished, handsome room, pulling in sensation through every pore. A scent of dried-rose potpourri drifted to her. Her eyes traveled across the canopied double bed, the bentwood chairs and loveseat with their shapes that were like chamber music made visible, the shelf of Limoges figurines.

She saw herself in the mirror wall, an unfamiliar woman in an unfamiliar wheelchair, saw her own dismay at these reminders of the life she had built young and lost young.

She wheeled forward to the chest of drawers. Her mind was in motion, counting and registering and remembering. Her eyes looked down at the silver-backed hairbrush and mirror and comb, then played across the space where Scottie’s things should have been.

She felt the beginning of a spear going through her breastbone.

She wheeled to his closet and opened it, needing to persuade herself it was true. A pleasant masculine smell of well-cared-for closet floated out, gradually translating itself into darkness, emptiness.

To her right, a last pale remnant of evening fell through the window. Just one night, she thought, and everything’s gone.

In the aching stillness she felt the vibration of something more, some other absence.

She wheeled to the door that opened on the other half of the enormous closet, her side. She pulled it open and sat there, tasting coolness and enclosure and a shadow that devoured all solidity. She reached her hand out in front of her and swept the rack of gowns—that rack that should have been gowns.

Her fingers touched night.

“We gave them away,” a voice said.

Babe turned and saw her mother watching her from the hallway. A taste of betrayal flooded her. “You gave my clothes away?”

Lucia’s eyes met Babe’s carefully. Babe detected hesitation on her mother’s face, quickly giving way to decision.

“Only the gowns. It was seven years ago, dear heart—not yesterday. What were we to do? We weren’t sure you’d recover—and fashions change—and so many people need clothing.”

“I designed most of those gowns.”

“And you’ll design others.”

Lucia took charge of the wheelchair, steering Babe back down the hallway into the elevator. She looked at her daughter as though she were very anxious to play this scene well. “Times change, dear heart.”

“Why have you hired Wheelock? What happened to Banks?”

“We couldn’t keep Banks on salary for seven years.”

“And Mrs. Banks?”

“You’ll like Mrs. Wheelock every bit as well.”

The elevator hummed down the shaft toward the second floor.

“There’ve been offers for this house,” Lucia said, the brightness of her voice signaling that the subject was herewith changed. “Real estate values have shot up in this city—tenfold and more.”

“I’m not interested in selling,” Babe said.

“But you can’t live here.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve got to face facts. Scottie isn’t coming back.”

“There are other people in my life.”

The elevator stopped on the second floor. Babe took the wheels of the chair and gave it a hard push forward, out of Lucia’s grasp.

Her eyes inventoried the drawing room, sweeping familiar antiques and leather-bound books. The boiserie was hung, as always, with the Pissarro, the Sisley, the Flemish flower paintings.

But the ivory-pale wall panels were a slightly fresher ivory than she remembered, the carpets were a little brighter, and there were cut begonias in a vase on the Boesendorfer she had bought for Scottie, who had never allowed anything, not even a photograph, to be put on that piano.

On the mantelpiece above the unlit fire, the ornate ormolu clock that had never ticked before was marking time with audible tick-tocks.

The room was tidier than Babe had ever seen it. She was reminded of those rooms in her friends’ houses that were always camera-ready, in the hope that Architectural Digest or The New York Times Sunday Magazine would drop by.

As she wheeled across the Aubusson, Bill Frothingham rose from the chair by the fireplace. “The house is looking grand, Babe. As are you.”

“It’s nice of you to welcome me, Bill. Did Mama ask you here for any particular reason?”

“I asked Bill,” Hadley Vanderwalk said, and Babe turned and saw that her father was standing by the sideboard making himself a whiskey sour.

“Oh, it’s business then?” Babe said.

“Just a little something that ought to be taken care of,” Hadley said.

Babe wheeled herself to the sideboard. “I’d like a drink before I hear about this little piece of business that can’t wait till Monday.” She tonged ice into a highball glass.

“Are you allowed to?” Lucia said, coming into the room.

“Ginger ale, Mama.”

“Let me help.”

“Too late.”

The ginger ale fizzed up over the edge of the glass. Babe sopped up the overflow with two swipes of a cocktail napkin. She saw that the napkin had a monogram embossed on it, Babe Vanderwalk’s curling B and V surrounding Scottie Devens’s large D.

An immaculately uniformed gray-haired maid came in to pass a tray of hot hors d’oeuvres.

“Beatrice,” Lucia said, “this is Mrs. Wheelock.”

The maid gave a thin smile, her eyes opaque and unreadable.

Babe took a chicken liver wrapped in bacon and speared with a toothpick. “Thank you, Mrs. Wheelock. How do you do.”

Bill Frothingham opened his briefcase and took out two documents. “How’s your right hand, Babe? You remember how to sign things?”

Bill handed Babe the documents and she saw that they were two copies of a divorce petition, signed by Scott Devens as petitioner and by Hadley Vanderwalk exercising power of attorney for Beatrice Vanderwalk Devens.

“The divorce was granted on the assumption that you wouldn’t regain consciousness,” Bill Frothingham explained. “But since you have—”

“And thank God you have,” Lucia said, folding herself into a tapestry chair of leafy green.

“Since you have, thank God,” Bill Frothingham said, “your signature would be a good idea.”

For a moment Babe’s mind darted ahead, skimming possibilities. “But since I am conscious, and haven’t signed, are Scottie and I divorced?”

Bill Frothingham’s heavy eyebrows creased. “Certainly you are. The state granted the decree.”

“But is it valid if I don’t sign?”

“You have to be reasonable, dear heart,” Lucia said.

“Being reasonable seems to be a way of letting other people make decisions I should be making myself.”

Bill Frothingham was somber. He placed his hands together, interlacing his fingers stiffly. “It was Scottie who petitioned for divorce. Your signature is a formality. All it means is that you acknowledge you were informed.”

“I don’t think that’s all it means.” Babe stared coolly at the lawyer. “Scottie petitioned for this divorce thinking I would never regain consciousness. Doesn’t the whole thing have to be reviewed? Surely the law gives Scottie a chance to reconsider?”

“Scottie doesn’t deserve a chance to reconsider,” Lucia said. “And he certainly isn’t getting one.”

“What about me? What if I want to be married to my husband?”

Looks were exchanged.

“You’re being perverse, Beatrice. You know perfectly well what Scottie tried to do to you.”

“No I do not. All I know is what you claim he tried to do, and he’d be in jail if the court had agreed with you.”

“I see we’re in for a painful conversation.” Lucia sat on the edge of the chair, bristling with resolve. “Your husband,” she said, “your dear charming Scottie, confessed to the court that on the night of the celebration, after you passed out—”

“I did not pass out,” Babe said.

Lucia went at her own unhurried pace, like a clock during a tempest. “I beg your pardon, dear heart, but four men had to help you to the car. There were witnesses aplenty. Scottie brought you home and while you were unconscious, he injected you with insulin. Enough cc’s, the experts said, to kill a normal person. Well, either the experts aren’t particularly expert or you’re not especially normal.”

“Thank God,” said Hadley.

“Since you didn’t die,” Lucia continued, “Scottie couldn’t very well be tried for your murder. So your papa and I did the next best thing. We had him indicted for attempted murder.”

Babe sat stiffly forward in her wheelchair. “You had him indicted?”

“We gave the state every possible encouragement,” Hadley said.