Eve's Men (10 page)

Charley looked at him in disbelief. “Think what through? I told you she didn’t have any ID. The police have to know who she is. Her brother has to be told what happened.”

“I know that. All I’m asking for is a little time.”

“It’s all going to come out in the end anyway. So why wait?”

Brian looked as if he were teetering between rage and tears. “
Why?
You want to know why, Charley? Because I didn’t give the goddamn girl so much as an aspirin, that’s why. Yet I’ll be the one they blame, you know that, don’t you? I’m the one who’ll have to take the fall for it. The fucking media will see to that. This is just too neat to pass up. They’ll say it’s just like with Kim Sanders—that I gave Belinda her drugs the same as Kim. And when I’m tried for the bulldozing, I won’t have a leg to stand on. I’ll already be Doctor Death or something like that. Something real cute like that.”

Charley sat back on one of the beds, his head in his hands. He was feeling so exhausted, so hungover still, that he could barely think, let alone speak. But he knew he couldn’t just leave things the way they were. “You’re forgetting, Brian—Eve and I were driving the girl. We left the scene of an accident, and that’s a felony. The longer we wait, the harder it will go for us.”

“No way,” Brian said. “As far as I’m concerned, you and Eve are totally out of the picture. All you were trying to do was help me, and I won’t let you suffer because of that. So it was only me and Belinda in the pickup, not you two. I promise—you’re both out of it.”

Charley was not convinced. “Well, you might promise, but reality has a way of muscling in. People on the freeway must have seen us. At the very least, they saw two people—two
heads
, anyway—when we drove off and left her.”

Brian gave a bleak laugh. “A naked Belinda is running across the freeway, and you think anyone was looking at the pickup?”

Charley felt as if he were in the last mile of a marathon. The task of arguing with his brother was one hill too many. Yet he kept going. “All right, let’s say no one saw us and we’re in the clear. Still, what the hell can you do
now
, Brian? You can’t change what happened. People saw you with Belinda at the bar. Rick Whatshisname came right to the table. And then there’s Chester. Little Chester knows you were with her. And if she survives …”

“She’ll be lucky if she remembers her name, after that kind of trauma. As for Chester, he’s the one I want to talk with now. I know guys like him. I’ve worked with them. Just give me a couple hours, Charley. Please.”

“What will you say to him?”

“Just leave that to me. All you have to know is that you and Eve are out of it. I promise, man. I’m the one who got you into this mess, so let me be the one to get you out. Okay? Just a couple of hours, Charley. That’s all I ask. You lie down and sleep, okay? You look like shit.”

“No kidding.” Looking over at Eve, Charley shrugged in defeat and exhaustion, as if they were a couple of grownups trying to deal with an impossible child. Wearily he turned back to his brother. “Okay, you’ve got two hours. Then I call the police.”

“Fair enough,” Brian said. “Now let’s get you to your room.”

Charley waved him off. “I’m not dead yet. I may look it, but I’m not quite there yet.”

An hour later Eve was feeling too exhausted to speak. She was sitting on a couch in the waiting area at one end of a long hospital corridor. Midway there was a nurses’ station and beyond that, the Intensive Care Unit, to which a doctor had just escorted Chester Einhorn, hoping the little man could identify the brutally injured, comatose young woman brought in around three that morning. Near Eve, Brian stood at a tall window looking out as dawn gathered in the east, pearl gray above the hard-scrabble plain. Incredibly, he looked relaxed and thoughtful, as if he had just enjoyed a long night of restful sleep.

Back at the motel, after Charley had dragged himself off to his room, Brian had gone straight for the local phone directory. First, he called Penrose Hospital to see if they had taken in “the girl hit on the freeway.”

After a momentary pause, he asked if she was alive. Then he began to shake his head. “No, I don’t know her,” he said, quickly hanging up.

Then, after looking up another number, he phoned and asked if Chester Einhorn was staying there.

“Yes, I know what time it is,” he said. “But this is an emergency. Please put me through.”

Covering the speaker, he turned to Eve. “Motel Six. Real folksy people.”

When Chester came on, Brian told him that he had just received a call from a man who wouldn’t give his name. “He said that the girl I was with at the Purple Sage has been in some kind of accident and is at Penrose Hospital now.” He paused a few seconds, listening, then went on. “No, I have no idea. We separated after you left. Some guy came by and invited us to a party. She wanted to go, and I didn’t. She left with them, and that’s the last I saw of her.” Again he broke off, then finished. “Yeah, Penrose Hospital—you know where it is? Good. We’ll meet you there.”

After he had hung up, Eve said almost nothing. She was so taken aback, so appalled at her lover’s brass-balled stupidity, that there was not much to say except the obvious. “And when the girl pulls through and tells what really happened, what then? What do you say? ‘Oh, I was just kidding.’”

He had not bothered to answer. On the way to the hospital, though, he apparently had found her silence troubling.

“Just don’t worry about this,” he’d told her. “I know what I’m doing. But the less you know about it, the better off you’ll be.”

“Well, that sure gives a girl confidence,” she’d said. “Nothing to worry about there.”

“Just stuff that, okay?” he’d snapped. “I don’t need that kind of shit right now.”

“Whatever you say.”

Now, down the long corridor, Eve saw Chester and the doctor come out of the ICU. The doctor stopped at the nurses’ station, but little Chester kept coming, walking as if it were a new experience for him, his arms held out from his sides slightly, his cowboy hat somehow not even swinging in his hand. As far away as he was, he still looked so relentlessly self-conscious that Eve looked away, figuring that would put him more at ease.

“Here he comes,” she said.

“Yeah, I see.” Brian walked across the waiting area, toward the little cowboy, who was shaking his head in sorrow and anger.

“It’s her, all right,” he said. “It’s Belinda. And she shore is banged up. Got a fractured skull and broke legs and broke hip and internal stuff too. But the doc says she’s real strong and her coma—how’d he put it?—he says it’s a
shallow
one, like maybe it won’t last long.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Brian said. “It’s something anyway.”

Chester went on shaking his head. “Can you beat it, though—someone jest dumpin’ her like that on the highway, like she was a dog or something’. Guess he was through with her and figured he’d jest dump her like that.” He shook his head, as if in wonderment. “But he’s gonna have to answer, lemme tell ya. Soon as I find out who it was, he’s shore gonna have to answer.”

Brian, cool as a car salesman, nodded in agreement. “I don’t blame you, Chester. I’d feel the same way.”

Eve, who had gotten up by now, still held back, not wanting to spook the cowboy. “It’s good she’s young and strong,” she said. “She’ll make it.”

Ignoring her, Chester kept his attention focused on Brian. “The police, I guess they already took off,” he said. “Doctor told me he’s supposed to call them when she comes to. But I’m gonna be there first, lemme tell ya. Whoever the bastard was, I want to know first. I guess I don’t need to tell ya why.”

Brian nodded gravely. “You sure don’t.” Holding out the keys to the pickup, he turned to Eve. “Listen, why don’t you go on ahead and wait for us down in the parking lot. Chester and me, we’ve got some business to discuss.”

This was not at all like Brian, making her feel like some lowlife employee, someone to push around and ignore. Before taking the keys, she made him just stand there, holding them out like a supplicant. But instead of looking embarrassed, he gave her one of his nicer smiles, a combination of guilt and whimsy and affection. She took the keys and headed for the elevator. Chester appeared relieved to see her go.

Ten minutes later, down in the parking lot, she watched as the two men came out of the building, Brian talking earnestly, his hand on the little man’s shoulder. Chester had his cowboy hat on now and there was something different even in the way he stood there for a moment, slightly bent and still, like a drawn bow about to be released. Then he walked on to his pickup, which was old, red, and gleaming, the opposite of Brian’s filthy, black, new Chevy. As Chester jumped inside, Eve saw the guns racked in the truck’s rear window.

Brian didn’t get in with Eve until he saw the red pickup roar out of the parking lot. As he slipped in behind the wheel, he looked as if he were trying hard not to smile.

“Somebody put a burr under his saddle?” Eve asked.

Brian shrugged. “Not me, certainly.”

Charley had not actually expected to sleep during the two hours’ reprieve he had given Brian, not to mention himself. He figured he was much too exhausted, too addled, too angry to sleep. But being a cautious sort, he set the radio alarm anyway, which turned out to be a good thing, since he fell asleep immediately and kept on sleeping through the radio part of the alarm, not waking till the buzzer came on like a jackhammer in his head.

For a time he felt worse than before, drugged as well as exhausted and hungover, in no condition yet to phone the police or anyone else. In time, though, after brushing his teeth, shaving, and showering, he began to feel at least a little like himself again—except for Belinda of course, except for the burden of guilt and remorse he now carried. If only he hadn’t been drunk, he kept telling himself, then none of it would have happened. She never would have popped the door, never would have slipped out of his grasp, never would have had a chance to make her mad dash across the freeway.

The only problem was, he
had been
drunk. But
why?
Why he had let himself go that far? That he still didn’t know, except that it had something to do with Eve, so beautifully sad, sitting so close to him for so long, her husky voice plucking him like a guitar.

Still, he couldn’t yet bring himself to pick up the phone and call the police, for the good reason that it scared the devil out of him, the prospect of being arrested, fingerprinted, and incarcerated, even if only overnight. Also he had to admit that in this instance Brian for once had made sense. In trying to take Belinda to the hospital, Charley and Eve had only been filling in for him, only doing what he should have been doing. Belinda was his mess, he’d said, and he should be the one to clean it up, a sentiment with which Charley could only agree.

But even as he was thinking along these lines, protecting himself, the pendulum would start its inevitable swing back in the other direction and he would feel scorn for his faintness of heart, worrying about his good name and creature comforts while poor Belinda lay nameless in some hospital, possibly dying. So he resolved to call within a few minutes, in fact as soon as he was dressed. But just as he as finishing, putting on a clean blue shirt, Eve knocked on the door and he let her in.

“So you’re up and around,” she said. “Didn’t succumb after all?”

“Afraid not. Where’s Brian?”

“Downstairs in the coffee shop. Claimed he was going to pass out if he didn’t get some java immediately. So I’m here to collect you.” She was still wearing the same clothes, the same jersey and jeans and boots. And somehow, despite all she’d been through in the last twelve hours, she looked reasonably fresh, unreasonably beautiful.

“Breakfast, huh?” Charley said.

“That’s right. Food.”

“Well, I’ll admit I could use a few gallons of orange juice. But I thought we had some other business, you know? Belinda?”

Eve smiled slightly. “I know. But you asked where Brian was. As for Belinda, it seems your brother has taken care of everything. He phoned Chester at his motel, and we met him at the hospital. He ID’d Belinda. And whatever it is Brian told him, it sure worked. The two of them are tighter than Lewis and Clark.”

“She’s alive, then.”

“She’s in Intensive Care, in a coma. The doctors think she’ll pull through, though.”

“And Chester just accepts all this? He leaves his sister with Brian, she winds up half-dead in the hospital, and he doesn’t have a problem with that?”

“Evidently not.”

Charley held the door open for her. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Eve shrugged. “Well, maybe Brian can explain it.”

Though it was only a little after eight in the morning, the coffee shop was virtually deserted. In a row of booths that looked out on the pool, Brian was the sole occupant, leaning back in the corner of one, basking in a shaft of sunlight while he smoked a cigarette and drank his coffee.

As Charley and Eve sat down across from him, he shook his head admiringly. “Hell, Charley, you’re looking almost chipper,” he said.

“Chipper, my ass. You mind telling me what you said to Chester?”