Irish Eyes (18 page)

“Think about it,” I said, leaning closer to her. “The bad guy had to have been back in that stockroom when Bucky went into the store. I think Bucky saw him, maybe recognized him, and that’s why he got shot. Then the shooter bolted out the back door. And I think that clerk disappeared because she knew something about it. And she was scared. Scared shitless.”

Lisa shook her head, as if it would shake the idea of a killer cop loose.

“You don’t know the shooter was already in the store. You said yourself that you were almost asleep. The shooter could have gone in the store without you seeing him. And the clerk boogied because she could. She probably thought it would look like the robber had taken the money.”

She tugged Kyle’s arm. “Come on, sport. Time to go home.”

“You know I’m right,” I said as she pulled her son out of the booth and helped him put on his jacket.

“I know you’re not helping Bucky with all this talk,” she said, biting her lip.

“Lisa?” I tugged at her hand. “Please. Stay and talk to me. I need to understand what’s going on. And I want to see Bucky.”

“Go to hell,” Lisa said. She grabbed her pocketbook with one hand and her son with the other and literally ran out of the restaurant.

I
slept late that night, and badly. Blue and red lights flashed through my dreams, where I was strapped down to a table, with tubes running in and out of every orifice. And all the while, through a billowing white mist, I could hear a distant piper’s mournful skirls.

In the morning I stumbled into the kitchen. Edna was gone. In the middle of the floor, though, was a towering mound of pink cotton smocks. I curled my lip. Laundry day. For years we’d gotten the House Mouse cleaning smocks through a uniform service. On Mondays the service dropped off clean smocks, and Fridays they picked up the soiled ones. Earlier in the year, though, Edna had fired the service on one of her economy kicks. She’d gone to a supply house and bought three dozen smocks and declared that we would launder them ourselves.

Today was my turn.

I scooped up an armload of smocks and marched into the laundry room, where I dumped the first load into the washer.

While the water was running into the tub I looked idly
down at the wad of pink. Uniforms. Identity was just a question of the right uniform.

I snatched up the cleanest smock from the dirty pile, grabbed a caddy of cleaning supplies, and headed over to Dunwoody. Maureen lived in Dunwoody. She had uniforms. Lots of lovely uniforms. And she was already at work.

“Ca’han!” At the sight of me, Maura’s face was wreathed in smiles. Also in oatmeal.

Steve Cucich, my brother-in-law, did not look nearly as excited to see me. Maureen’s husband and I have an unspoken, if tacit, agreement. We pretend to tolerate each other, at least in front of civilized society. Since it was just the two of us, not counting Maura, who was busy hugging my knees, he dropped the civil act.

“What do you want?” he asked, eyeing the cleaning caddy.

“It’s a peace offering,” I said. “I woke Maureen up last night, and I’m feeling kind of cruddy about it.”

“You should,” Steve said. “She didn’t get back to sleep until almost midnight. I had to drag her out of bed this morning.”

“I know, and I’m really sorry,” I said. “Edna says I’m a thoughtless bitch. So I thought I’d try to make it up to her.”

“How?” Steve wanted to know.

I walked past him into the kitchen. “A day of House Mouse,” I said brightly. “And because you’re family, I’ll throw in my ultra-exclusive baby-sitting service.”

“You’re cleaning our house?” he asked. “That’ll be a first.”

I picked up the caddy I’d set down on the kitchen counter. “Okay, suit yourself. I’ll leave. Make sure you mention to Maureen that you turned down an offer to have her house cleaned, laundry done, and child entertained.”

“Whoa!” Steve said, holding up his hand. “Never mind. I just wanted to make sure I understood you clearly. Are you serious about watching Maura? She’s a handful, you know.”

A bowl of tapioca pudding would have been a handful to Steve Cucich, who, Edna likes to say, is “one ant shy of a picnic.”

“No problem,” I said, reaching down and picking Maura up. “We’ll play house, won’t we, punkin?”

“House!” Maura agreed, nodding her head vigorously.

I set her down and gave her the smallest pink smock we had. It reached to her ankles. I handed her a spray bottle with her name on it.

“Whoa!” Steve said. “Chemicals? I’m not sure this is such a good idea, Callahan.”

“It’s just water,” I assured him. “Maura always plays house with me and Edna when she comes over, don’t you, punkin? She’s even got her own feather duster and her own little broom.”

I produced both and handed them to Maura, who immediately began sweeping her daddy’s shoe tops with the broom. She spritzed his knees with the water, then pretended to wipe them off.

“Well,” he said hesitantly.

“Run along,” I said, making a shooing motion with my hands. “Isn’t there some kind of boy thing you’d like to do today?”

“There’s the auto show down at the World Congress Center,” he said, his face brightening.

“Go, go, go,” I said. “I’ll give Maura lunch and put her down for a nap afterward.”

“All righty then!” he said, punching the air with his fist. “I’m outta here.”

“Thank God,” I said under my breath.

Maureen, of course, is the world’s most fastidious housekeeper. It was downright depressing, trying to find something to clean. In the end, I disinfected all the bathrooms, mopped and waxed the kitchen floor, vacuumed all the carpets, cleaned out the refrigerator (actually, all I did was dispose of one aging head of lettuce), and straightened the sheets and towels in her linen closet.

While Maura and I swept and mopped, I ran the laundry, which amounted to only two paltry loads. Child’s play. I found Maureen’s stack of hospital scrubs on a shelf in her closet. Pink
ones, blue ones, green ones. The greens looked closest to what I’d seen nurses wearing at Grady. I locked myself into the bathroom and squeezed into the pants, which were so tight I could barely breathe. In addition to being hideously clean, Maureen is also much thinner and shorter than I. The pants only reached to the top of my ankles. Looking at myself in the mirror, I had to admit I looked slightly clownish. Still, they would have to do. Maybe if I skipped lunch the pants would get a little looser.

I lucked out on one account, though. In the jewelry box on top of her dresser, I found Maureen’s clip-on Grady I.D. badge. Although she’d worked full-time in Grady’s emergency room for at least a dozen years, after she and Steve had adopted Maura, my sister had gone to work for a nursing temp agency, which meant she subbed for staff nurses at any one of a dozen hospitals around the Atlanta area. And she had badges for all of them.

I slipped the uniform and badge into the suitcase-sized pocketbook I’d brought for just such a purpose, then helped myself to a stethoscope, which I found hanging from a hook in the closet. One of the rubber earpieces was missing, but it would do. Might as well make the disguise believable, I thought.

Maura and I had the laundry washed, folded, and put away by eleven o’clock. After that, we watched her Barney video a couple times, and then I disobeyed my sister’s strictest orders by tuning in to
The Simpsons,
which made us both laugh so hard we nearly wet our pants. Actually, Maura did wet her pants.

“What shall we have for lunch?” I asked, standing in front of the open refrigerator door. Another depressing sight. Maureen is big on nutrition. Three kinds of low-fat yogurt, a carton of low-fat cottage cheese, all kinds of fruit juices, and a row of containers filled with carrot sticks, celery sticks, and broccoli flowerets.

“How about a nice broccoli sandwich?” I asked.

“Yuck!” Maura said.

“Yogurt?”

She held her nose.

“A McDonald’s Happy Meal?”

Maura got my purse and car keys. “Okay,” I said in my strictest tone of voice. “But it has to be the low-fat Happy Meal. And we’re not super-sizing those fries, little missy.”

After lunch, we romped around on the McDonaldland playscape for a while, and a couple little kids looked at me funny when I tried to go down the slide, but all in all, we had a delightful Saturday morning.

Maura fell asleep in her car seat on the way home.

Steve was waiting at the front door. “Where’ve you been?” he asked. “Maureen called twice. You didn’t say you were going to take Maura out.”

“I took her out,” I said over my shoulder, carrying Maura in and placing her on the sofa in the den. “We had lunch. Spinach and tofu and apple slices.”

“Right,” he said suspiciously. He bent over and pried Maura’s fingers apart, holding up the plastic toy that had come with the Happy Meal.

“Where’d she get this?” he asked.

“Must have been that stranger in the park who was offering her candy,” I said, picking up my cleaning caddy and heading for the car.

“Steve?” I said, stopping at the front door.

“What now?”

“You’re welcome!”

Shift change would be at three
P.M.,
I knew. I went home and poured myself into Maureen’s uniform, which made me look like a Girl Scout on steroids.

I was pinning the I.D. badge on the collar of the shirt when I took a close look at the photo. Maureen and I bear only a slight family resemblance to each other. Her hair is dark like mine, but poker straight. She’s thinner, of course, and has a pointy chin. And she wears wire-rimmed glasses. That, at least, I could take care of by dashing into the drugstore on the way to the hospital. As for the rest of the resemblance, if anybody stopped me, I planned to just say I’d had a permanent and put on a little weight since the photo had been taken.

My pulse quickened a little when I entered the side entrance at Grady, but people were so busy, nobody even stopped and gave me a second glance. I found the elevator to the seventh floor with little trouble, but finding Bucky wasn’t so easy.

Twice I’d passed his glass cubicle before I doubled back a third time, looked at the name on the door, and tiptoed inside the room. What was left of Bucky Deavers seemed only a pale, dried-up husk. His head was enveloped in white gauze only a shade lighter than skin the color of parchment. A tangle of tubes ran from his nose and mouth and arm. I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself that this waxen figure was my friend, but I couldn’t. Instead, I stared down at the monitors attached to the tubes. But there was nothing they could tell me that I would understand. I stood at the foot of the bed and wept, for the second time in two days. I even wiped my nose on the sleeve of my uniform. Maureen’s uniform.

“Bucky?” It came out a whisper. But there was no reply, and I didn’t expect one. I inched toward the side of the bed, put my fingertips on the back of his hand, jumped a little at the warmth there. Clinically, he was alive. All the monitors seemed to say so, anyway. Gradually, my fingers curled around his, and I gave his hand a little squeeze.

“This sucks,” I said chokily.

“Nurse?” The voice was so loud, I jumped, then turned.

An older man, bald, with a blue Braves baseball cap that he kept twisting in his hands, stood in the doorway. “Nurse, my wife isn’t breathing so good. Could you come see about her?”

I blinked. “Your wife isn’t breathing?”

“Somebody needs to see about her,” he said. “I’ve been pushing the call button, but nobody will come.”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s see if we can get somebody. What’s your wife’s name?”

“Naomi. Naomi Butler,” he said. “Could you hurry? Please?”

My sneakers made squeaking noises on the waxed linoleum floor as I hurried toward the nurses’ station I had crept past ten minutes before.

“Stay right here, Mr. Butler,” I called over my shoulder. The
elevator doors were just opposite the nurses’ station, where a black nurse was reading a chart. I pushed the “down” button and prayed the car would come fast. Finally, the bell dinged and the doors slid open. I stepped inside, immediately pushed the “door open” button. Then I hollered. “Somebody needs to see about Mrs. Butler! “The black nurse looked up to see who was causing all the commotion.

“Go check on Mrs. Butler,” I yelled again. “Stat!” I let the elevator doors close.

When the doors opened again, I hurried out of the hospital, my knees shaking. This had been a mistake. A big mistake.

B
ucky’s apartment was on North Highland Avenue, across the street from Manuel’s Tavern. He always claimed it was a coincidence, but he also freely admitted he was basically on the Manuel’s food plan, eating dinners there most nights he wasn’t working.

The apartment building was a prewar number, sturdy gray brick, and the second- and third-floor apartments had balconies overlooking Highland, which was nice if you liked watching traffic.

The key was where he always left it for us when we cleaned the apartment for him, on the ledge above the door.

I didn’t bother with caution. People move in and out of the apartments all the time, most of them young professionals or well-heeled college students. Bucky had lived there for four years and I’d never known him to mention a neighbor by name.

I unlocked the door and stepped inside, and relocked the door.

For a long minute, I stood there, just smelling and remembering.

The apartment smelled like sweat and boiled hot dogs and something else, a faint perfume. The wooden floors were coated with a fine sheen of dust. Bucky hadn’t spent much time here in quite a while, from the looks of things.

It was really only two rooms, plus a kitchenette and a bath. The living room was furnished in standard-issue single-guy stuff—a black leather couch, stereo speakers the size of my van, and a large-screen TV. There was a coffee table with a stack of unopened mail atop it.

I walked into the bedroom. A lumpy-looking double bed had a dark gray spread pulled sloppily up over the pillows. The nightstand held a clock radio, a couple of paperback books, and a bottle of Di-Gel. The drawer contained a package of foil-wrapped condoms, a pack of Dentyne, and some old pay stubs. I opened a drawer in the dresser. Not much here. A few ratty T-shirts, some grayed-out socks, and a pair of pajamas still in the plastic wrapper they’d come in.