Irish Chain (32 page)

For the rest of the afternoon, while helping sell pots, quilts and wooden toys, I worried about Aaron. The parade always started promptly at 6:31 P.M. when the Mystik Krewe of Mardi Gras blew the official Mardi Gras trumpet, so around five-thirty, people started claiming spots and setting up lawn chairs along Lopez Street. I decided that once the parade started, after seeing Elvia’s float, “Harry’s Blind Book Krewe,” I’d stop by to the hospital. Surely Gabe and I could maintain an amicable manner long enough to visit Aaron.

I was folding up the unsold quilts when a voice with the same tonal quality of tin foil across the teeth whined, “I want one, Eddy. Please, pretty please.”

Walking around the corner of the booth was a bubble-haired, tiny-waisted lady in her thirties with hair as red and shiny as a grocery store apple and probably just as natural. She unfolded a queen-sized maroon and black quilt, letting the edge of it scrape the pavement.

“Careful,” I said irritably, lifting the edge and brushing it off.

“Eddy,” she whined again. “I want it. It’s only four hundred dollars. It’ll match my bedroom and you won all that...”

“Sure, why not?” Her companion stepped out from behind the side of the booth. I looked up into a face I’d seen way too often in the last month.

“Enjoying the festival, Edwin?” I asked politely, trying not to show I’d heard his companion’s comment about winning money.

“How much did you say the quilt was?” he asked, looking down at me, his voice cool. He pulled out a thick roll of bills.

“Four hundred dollars,” I said.

He peeled off eight fifties and handed them to me.

“Oh, Eddy, thank you, thank you,” the woman gushed, hugging the quilt to her chest as I wrote out a receipt. “He’s such a generous man,” she said to me. “You should have seen him today. It was like he was psychic. I took my manicure money and put ...”

“Dodie, I don’t think Ms. Harper is interested in what we did today.” He grabbed her arm and pulled at her to leave.

“On the contrary,” I said, holding out his receipt. “I could use a little extra money myself right about now. Who looks good in the fourth tomorrow?”

He frowned and pulled again at Dodie’s arm. “Let’s go. We want to get a good spot for the parade.”

“Don’t you want to know the pattern of the quilt you just bought?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t, but thinking some things are just too right not to have a divine hand in them somewhere.

“Oh, yes,” his date crowed. “What is it?”

I looked Edwin straight in his protruding eyes and grinned.

“Spiderweb,” I said, smiling sweetly. “The pattern’s name is Spiderweb.”

Edwin shot me a furious look before pulling Dodie into the crowd.

“What was that all about?” Malcolm asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just bored and teasing some twerp.”

“Better be careful,” he said. “You know how weird people get around Mardi Gras. Jon’s on a double shift down at the emergency room tonight.”

“Poor guy.” I had met his sister’s husband at the last co-op potluck. A tall, easygoing black man, his specialty was emergency medicine. He had worked at County-USC Medical Center in Los Angeles for ten years until burnout from gang warfare sent him home to San Celina.

“Yeah, well, they need the money. She’s pregnant again and the ultrasound says it’s twins.”

By six o’clock, thirty-one minutes before the parade was due to start, it was already dark. We packed up all the unsold items and Malcolm loaded them in his pickup to take back to the studios.

“We can dismantle the booth after the parade,” he said. “There’s an hour before the Masked Ball, so we’ll have plenty of time.”

“I can do it,” I said. “I’m not going to the dance anyway.”

He looked at me in sympathy. “Chief stood you up, huh? Want me to see if I can scrounge you up a date? I think I saw some desperate-looking characters down in line at the Mission Food Bank.”

“Look, pal, when I need help in the romance department, I’ll put an ad in the Personals,” I said, throwing a pot holder at him and laughing.

A light rain started ten minutes before the parade, but it only seemed to dampen the streets, not anyone’s spirits. In the dark, the painted faces and feathered masks seemed to multiply, and in the misty shelter of the foggy night the crowd became louder, acted bolder. The various Krewes were lining up their floats; screams of liquor-induced laughter and carefree tossing of cheap plastic necklaces and the coveted Mardi Gras doubloons had already started. The police had replaced their dark windbreakers with yellow slickers and were strolling up and down the street, asking people to please stay on the sidewalk. I pushed through the throng, trying to maneuver a spot where I could catch a glimpse of Blind Harry’s float, a contraption shaped like a huge sparkly book. A young man in a metallic brown wig, wearing a suede Daniel Boone outfit and a stiff cardboard canoe strapped around his waist, fell against me, pushed by the crowd.

“Sorry,” he said, swinging his boat around and smiling. “Canoe forgive me?”

“It’s okay,” I said, smiling back. After I was elbowed in the ribs by a clown, accidentally tripped by Richard Nixon and had beer spilled across the front of me by a man in white face wearing a green top hat and tails, I decided that Elvia would just have to show me pictures of the float. I pushed my way to the back of the crowd and started walking toward my truck. Luckily, the municipal parking lot where I’d parked exited to a side street that completely avoided the parade route. I’d stop by the hospital and see how Aaron was doing, then head home. I cut through Gum Alley to avoid the crowds.

“Happy Mardi Gras!” A blond half-drunk Indian brave in a full feather headdress with red and yellow lightning bolts painted on his cheeks offered me a strand of shiny pink carnival beads.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching out for them.

He pulled them back, staggered a little, and gave me a lascivious smirk. “You have to earn them, darlin’. What’re you going to do to earn them?”

I leveled a cold look at him and showed him a fist.

“Good enough for me, lady.” He tossed the beads at me and walked away muttering. “Criminy, some people just don’t know how to have a good time.”

I picked them up off the ground and slipped them around my neck. If Aaron was feeling okay, I’d give him the beads and tell him the story. He’d get a big kick out of it.

I was almost to the end of the alley when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Thinking it was another Mardi Gras crazy, I started to turn around, a retort all prepared.

“Don’t!” the low, disguised voice said. A cold damp hand grabbed the back of my neck. Something hard and metallic poked into my side. I froze, my heart a hard knot in my chest.

“All I have is ten dollars,” I said. “You can have it. Just let me go.”

The hand tightened. There was an overpowering smell of wet rubber as strong fingers dug into the side of my neck. I gagged low in my throat.

“No,” the voice said. He pushed me through the alley, the hard object jabbing my side, toward the back of a sandwich shop. A trio of garbage cans overflowed their metal sides. The thick odor of rotting vegetables and old meat caused me to gag again.

Oh, God, please help me, I prayed. Frightening images spiked like electric currents through my mind. Break away, part of me said.
Run
. Wait, another part cautioned. It might be a gun. You could die.

“Take the money, please,” I said, despising the begging tone in my voice. I reached for my pocket.

“Stop!” the voice said and jerked my neck. The wet rubber slipped against my skin. I bit my tongue. Tasted blood. White-hot anger burst out of me.

“No!” I yelled. I wasn’t going to be killed or raped. Not without a fight. I twisted my body, tried to stomp the top of his instep and screamed from the bottom of my toes.

“No!” he echoed and grabbed my shoulders. We struggled in an awkward dance. I caught glimpses of a rainbow metallic wig and a grotesque rubber mask.

“Hey, what’s going on back there?” a deep voice called from behind me.

The mugger shoved me into the trash cans. Something sharp scraped across my temple. I heard a rustle in the trash. Just before my head hit the pavement, I screamed again.

The grotesque mask loomed over me for a split second. “No more questions,” the voice hissed. A thought flashed through my mind right before everything went black. That voice. I know it. I
know
that voice.

16

“HELP’S ON THE way,” George Washington told me. His breath smelled like beer, but his watery eyes were kind.

“You’re going to be fine.” A woman wearing a red beret dabbed at my aching head with a dark scarf. A glittery painted spider spun a web on her cheek. I blinked my eyes and the spider crawled down her neck.

“I’m okay,” I said, struggling up. A shotgun blast exploded in my head. I gasped and lay back down. The spider lady brushed back my hair and kept dabbing.

By the time the paramedics arrived, the whole world was spinning. They talked to me in their soothing, professional voices, hooking me up to plastic bags and carefully lifting me onto a gurney. In the gathered crowd of people, I listened for the voice of the person who mugged me, the voice I recognized but couldn’t place. My head ached with the effort. A tiny involuntary groan rumbled deep in my throat. A deep shiver rippled through me. One of the paramedics tucked a blanket around me. Inhaling deeply, I gasped in pain.

“Easy there,” he said, his friendly dark eyes smiling at me. “We’ll get you to the hospital in no time.”

“Benni?” Lieutenant Cleary’s sharp tenor broke through the buzz of spectators. His worried face appeared behind the paramedic.

“Jim?” My voice sounded like a parrot’s.

He pushed up to the side of the gurney and bent over me. “What happened?” He flashed his badge when the paramedic protested.

“Someone tried to mug me,” I said, giving a small laugh. “I offered him ten bucks, but he wouldn’t go away.” Another hysterical laugh gurgled up. His warm hand squeezed my icy one.

“Did you get a good look at him?” Jim asked.

I lifted my head slightly. “He wore a mask, one of those monster kind. Gray-colored. And a wig. A rainbow metallic one.” I grabbed Jim’s arm. “Would you call Elvia Aragon, Miguel’s sister? She’s with the Blind Harry float. Tell her to call my gramma at home and tell her I’m okay. I don’t want her to hear that I’m dead or something. You know this town.” I dropped my head back down, exhausted.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “I know this town. I’ll take care of it. Do you want me to call Gabe over at the hospital?”

“No.”

His brown eyes admonished me.

“He has enough to worry about with Aaron,” I said. “Tell him tomorrow.”

He shook his head and stood up. “Whatever you say. I’ll get a call out on this guy, but with what little we have to go by, I don’t anticipate finding him.”

“He was probably just a junkie looking for some money,” I said, turning my head. I knew that wasn’t the case and I don’t know why I didn’t tell Jim that. But what could I tell him? That the voice sounded vaguely familiar? That he was telling me to quit asking questions I wasn’t supposed to be asking to begin with? And what questions exactly did he mean? I had to think about it, try and place that voice. But I wasn’t going to do it while I had this splitting headache.

The emergency room at San Celina County Hospital looked like a cast party of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. On the bed next to me, a turbaned man with a large gold ring in his nose held his stomach and moaned for a nurse. His companion, Cat Woman, looking as uncaring as the animal she portrayed, patted his hand silently, an unlit cigarette dangling from her black lips.

“I know this sounds like a line,” Malcolm’s brother-in-law, Jon, said, about a half hour later—he peered into my eyes with his small fiashlight—“but haven’t we met somewhere before? Follow my finger.” I did as I was told, then closed my eyes. My head felt like someone had set off a cherry bomb in it and I swore if someone didn’t stop shaking my bed, I was going to really get mad.

“Benni Harper,” I answered, groaning a little when he pressed gently on my stomach. “The folk art museum potluck ... Malcolm ...”

“Right,” he said, pulling out his stethoscope and listening to my heart. “You’re the lady who found the bodies in the museum a few months back. And a couple more recently, if I remember correctly.”

“I prefer to think of myself as the museum’s curator,” I said.

“Well, you’re my first mugging victim of the night,” he said. “Brings back old memories, believe you me.” He turned to the nurse who’d appeared beside him. “Get her into X-ray and let me know when they’re through.”

“Am I going to live?” I joked weakly.

“Got insurance?” he asked with sober brown eyes.

“Yes.”

He wrote something on my chart, then looked up and grinned. “Then we’ll do our best.”

By the time I was X-rayed, brought back down to Emergency, then stitched and bandaged by an intern, Dove had arrived. From behind my curtained-off area, I could hear her strident voice arguing with an admitting nurse.

“It’s very crowded tonight,” a stem, edgy voice told her. “You can’t go back there.”

“I’d like to see the person who can stop me,” she declared. Seconds later her voice reverberated through the emergency room, calling my name.

“Over here, Gramma,” I croaked.

“Oh, honeybun,” she said when she saw me. Her cool hand touched the bandage on my forehead, smoothed my hair. The downy feel of her fingertips, the sweet almond scent of her Jergens hand lotion let loose the flood of tears I’d been holding back

“Now, you hush that bawling,” she said, folding me into her cushiony chest. “Nobody’s going to hurt you now.”

Within minutes, we were joined by Daddy, Elvia, and Miguel. They surrounded my bed and were all talking at once when the curtain was flung back and Gabe loomed over us. His eyes were bright as marbles against his dark, angry face.

“What happened?” he demanded, looking straight at me.

“I told Jim not to tell you,” I said.

“Fortunately he realizes who his commanding officer is. All he’d tell me over the phone was you were here in Emergency. I repeat, what happened?”