Deadly Beloved (21 page)

“Just a minute,” Gregor told her.

“I’ll break your arm,” Evan Walsh told him pleasantly, smiling through his teeth. “Just you try it and see if I don’t.”

“Gregor,” Bennis said again.

They were saved by the paramedics. Julianne Corbett had followed orders. She had dialed 911, and now the emergency services came barreling through the doors like a SWAT team in white coats, and one of them even yelled, “Nobody move!”

Karla Parrish had a concussion and had to be rushed to the hospital. Bennis Hannaford had a broken arm and had to be taken to the hospital too. The woman with the fake fur button was dead. A dozen people were hurt. The two uniformed police officers kept wandering around the wreckage of the living room, muttering to themselves. Gregor hung around long enough to let one of them take his name and address, and then left. The one who took his address muttered something about “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” but they both had too much on their minds to pursue it, including the possibility that the bomb that had gone off was not the only one that had been planted. After looking Gregor up and down like a prize bull, they both went off to take the names and addresses of other people, and Gregor found himself outside the town house, free to do what he thought best.

Outside on the sidewalk there were more police, and cordons holding back the crowd. The crowd was large and good-natured and unlikely to want to leave anytime soon. They were spiced with camera crews from all the local news shows and reporters with press cards in plastic envelopes on cords around their necks. The reporter from the
Inquirer
recognized Gregor immediately and began to gesture frantically. Gregor walked off in the other direction and had one of the cops let him through the cord and into the crowd. A camera crew from the local NBC affiliate was there, and the reporter leaned a microphone toward him as soon as he came out.

“Mr. Demarkian!” the woman said. “What can you tell us about how it felt to be at the very site of the blast?”

Why did television reporters always want to know how people felt about things? Gregor had grown up in a generation that thought of emotions as private matters, like what went on in the bathroom, and didn’t talk about them in public if they could help it. Now even the most respected news shows paraded sobbing widows and orphans in front of their cameras and asked serial killers if they felt any remorse. For Christ’s sake. If serial killers felt remorse, they wouldn’t be serial killers.

Gregor evaded the microphone and made his way through the crowd. It went a full block without thinning out and then just disappeared. He was on a mostly empty street with small open stores and the amber glow of lights from apartments. He found a pay phone that hadn’t been vandalized and put in a call to John Jackman’s private number. He got the answering machine.

“Drop whatever you’re doing,” he told the buzzing tape after the beep. “There’s been another bomb. Meet me at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Bennis broke her arm.”

That ought to get him, Gregor thought, hanging up. He kept walking toward the lights, looking for a taxi. He didn’t know Philadelphia as well as he should. He had lived so long in Washington, and in the years before that in places as far apart as Encino and Austin. Philadelphia was the home of his childhood, and even then it had been a rather restricted area. Nothing much changes with people, Gregor thought. When he had been growing up the big tensions in Philly had not been between black and white, but between native and “foreign,” with the “foreign” including even those people, like Gregor, who had been born in the United States of parents who had not. In those days, too, the greatest point of tension had to do with young men, because young men are always the most dangerous creatures on earth. Or some of them are. Gregor had been bookish and shy and not very aggressive. He had started hard and gone to the University of Pennsylvania in the days when quotas were meant to keep people like him out. That was why he didn’t know as much as he should about Philadelphia. Those were the days when leaving your home turf meant getting hassled by the cops or even arrested for something minor, anything so that they could pick you up and throw you back in the direction they figured you belonged. Gregor had known a few places in the city well: Cavanaugh Street and the streets around it; the bus route to the University of Pennsylvania campus; the streets immediately around those parts of the campus that he had to go to. Since he had lived at home, he knew nothing about Penn’s dormitories or where they were located. There must be even more of them now, and they could be anywhere. Still, as he walked up the street and looked around, he was fairly certain that they weren’t anywhere near there. He would have to get a map, but he thought he could be safe in assuming that if there was any connection between this pipe bomb and the ones that had gone off in Patsy MacLaren Willis’s Volvo, it wasn’t geographical. Gregor had no idea why it should be. It was just one of those things you had to check out.

Gregor walked one more block—there were a few Spanish stores, including one that seemed to be selling the accouterments of Santeria—and then began to look seriously for a cab. Sometimes you can go for hours looking for a cab on the streets of Philadelphia at night. This time he was lucky, and a cab pulled up to him less than two minutes after he started looking.

“St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,” he said, climbing inside.

The cabdriver shrugged. “Sure. I’m going to take a little extra loop on the way. I’ll turn the meter off.”

“A little extra loop to where?”

“To the bombing,” the cabdriver said. “There was another bombing tonight, just like that thing at the garage. It’s terrorists, let me tell you. The world is full of terrorists. It’s all because of that Saddam Hussein.”

“What?”

The cabdriver had swung back into the street with the crowd on it. Gregor could see that the paramedics were still at work, taking people out of the town house and putting them in ambulances. There were a lot more police than there had been a few minutes ago too.

“Saddam Hussein,” the cabdriver said again. “It’s a conspiracy. It’s like, Reagan and Bush, they were paying this guy Saddam Hussein to hassle the Ayatollah, but now he’s gotten out of hand, and Mr. Chickenshit Clinton isn’t going to do anything about him, and it all ties in with the way those Chinese people keep sneaking into the country. You see what I mean?”

“No.”

“Nobody ever does,” the cabdriver said glumly. “That’s why the country is going down the tubes. You do agree the country is going down the tubes?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Good. Talking to some people, it’s like they just came from outer space.”

Walking into St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Gregor thought, fifteen minutes later, was like walking into outer space. Did emergency rooms always look like this? Gregor didn’t spend much of his time in them. The only one he could really remember with any detail had belonged to a free clinic called the Sojourner Truth Health Center in Harlem, and he didn’t think that ought to count. That was supposed to be in a war zone. This emergency room looked like an outpost in a war zone too. So many people seemed to be bleeding, and so many of them seemed to be young. So many people seemed to be waiting, and so many of them seemed to be poor. The patients at the Sojourner Truth Health Center had been almost universally African-American. Here, race was less of a factor than exhaustion. Everybody he saw looked hopeless and tired and halfway dead.

He went up to the woman in the white uniform at the reception window. She had a plate of bulletproof glass in front of her.

“Name?” she said.

“I’m not registering,” Gregor told her. “A friend of mine was just brought in here with a broken arm and I think one or two contusions. I’d like to know where she is.”

“Are you related to her in any way?”

“Related?”

“Husband? Father? Brother? Uncle?”

“No. We’re not related. We were together at this party—”

“You were together at the party but she came to the emergency room by herself?”

“She was brought here by the paramedic team—”

“A paramedic team had to be called to this party?”

Gregor took a deep breath. “Let’s take this from the beginning,” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”

“Oh, my God!” This was a voice from behind the nurse he was talking to. Gregor couldn’t see the speaker.

“This friend of mine, Bennis Hannaford, and I were at a party in Society Hill given by Congresswoman Julianne Corbett—”

“Congresswoman.” This was the nurse right behind the glass. She was sitting up very straight in her chair now.

Gregor was glad to have found out what made her move.

“Right,” he said. “Congresswoman Corbett. There was some kind of small bomb—”

“I’ve heard about that. What did you say your name was again?”

“Gregor Demarkian.”

“The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” hissed the voice behind the nurse. “Don’t you ever read the papers?”

The nurse ignored the voice. “What was the name of your friend again?”

“Bennis Hannaford.”

“Just a moment, please.”

“You can’t make him sit there and wait,” the voice said, sounding scandalized. “He knows the mayor. We’ll all be in major trouble.”

The nurse Gregor could see went on ignoring the voice. She stood and walked away, leaving nothing but a blank wall behind her. Now Gregor wondered where the other voice was coming from.

He turned around in his chair and looked back out on the waiting room, on all the tired people, on all the pain. Was this a good hospital? He didn’t know. He only knew that the waiting room depressed him, the way cities in general had depressed him. He thought of Fox Run Hill with its gates and its guards, and sighed.

The nurse came back and sat down behind the bulletproof glass again. “That will be fine,” she told him. “You need to go down this corridor to your left all the way to the end and present this pass at the fire doors. Then you go through the fire doors and to the right until you reach Room E143. Do you understand that?”

“Down here to the left to the fire doors. Present the pass. To the right until Room E143.”

“That is correct. Are you carrying any firearms on your person?”

“No.”

“Are you carrying anything else that might be used as a weapon?”

“I’m not carrying a knife or anything of that kind, if that’s what you mean. I have a comb.”

“You will be required to pass through metal detectors at the fire doors,” the woman went on, ignoring everything he had said. “The guards there are authorized to confiscate and retain any item you may have that they consider a potential danger to the hospital, its patients, or yourself. Any such item will be returned to you when you leave. Do you understand this?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, I understand it.”

The woman pushed a bright green paper card through the narrow slot under her window and watched carefully while he took it. Then she looked over his shoulder to see who was next in line.

Gregor got up and started walking heavily down the wide corridor toward the fire doors. The corridor was deserted and the fire doors were bright polished metal, hard-surfaced and grim.

He couldn’t imagine spending any time here, or trying to get well in this place. He couldn’t imagine being able to get well in this place.

He just hoped Bennis was all right, and that she wouldn’t have to spend much time here. He wanted to take her home tonight.

I
F HENRY HADN’T INSISTED
on going shopping with her again, Evelyn would never have been wearing her sun hat when the big red Lincoln pulled into the driveway of the brick Federalist that morning. She didn’t like wearing hats in cars, but she didn’t want to take this one off in front of Henry either. It was a hot day and Henry had the Lincoln’s air-conditioning turned up full blast. Cold air streamed up under the thin fabric of her cotton dress and around her massive thighs. The dress was beginning to feel a little tight, and that scared her. It was a size thirty-two. How much longer would this go on? Would she just get fatter and fatter and fatter until she could no longer fit through the door of the house? She thought about that woman they had done the piece on on
60 Minutes
, the one who weighed a thousand pounds. Then she felt a sharp stab of hunger in her stomach, and wished Henry away, far away, where he wouldn’t be able to see her eating. When people saw her eating, they said things to her. Even if she had the money, she couldn’t go into McDonald’s or Burger King and sit down and have a hamburger. For one thing, she no longer fit into the seats too well. She didn’t fit into the ones that were bolted to the floor at all. For another thing, people passing by her chair said things to her. “No wonder you’re so gross,” they would say even though they were carrying a couple of Big Macs and a large fries for themselves and she had nothing on her table but a cheeseburger and a Coke. It was as if they thought fat people had no right to eat, ever. It was what Henry thought too.

The car pulled into the driveway of the brick Federalist. Evelyn adjusted her hat, wishing her head didn’t hurt so much, wishing she weren’t so cold. She had begun to sweat in the way that meant she was going to throw up. She had eaten an entire eight-inch Black Forest cake in the toilet paper aisle while Henry was off at the cold-cut counter, deciding exactly what brand of superlean turkey he wanted to buy. Her hat was a big straw cartwheel that felt tight in just the way her dress did—did your head get bigger when you got fat? Evelyn closed her eyes and prayed to a God she didn’t believe in for salvation.

“Look,” Henry said, cutting the engine. “They’re back. The police and that detective, Demarkian.”

Evelyn opened her eyes. She felt a lot better with the air conditioner off.

“He was on the news this morning,” she said. “Talking about the bomb last night at that party Julianne Corbett gave. Did you vote for Julianne Corbett?”

“She’s not in this district,” Henry said. “You should know that.”

“Patsy loved Julianne Corbett. She used to point out pictures of her in the newspapers and say what a wonderful woman she was.”