Irish Eyes (27 page)

“God,” I said. “And there’s nothing you can do?”

“We’re giving him the most aggressive treatment we can,”
she said. She gave me a curious look. “You don’t act much like your sister, do you?”

“Not much.”

“Maureen told me the mother is wanted by the police,” Maeve said. “Not that I care about that. I mean, my job is to take care of children. But do you mind telling me what she’s done? She seems like a very loving mother.”

“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said.

Maeve patted my shoulder. “Well, good luck. I hope the baby will be all right.”

“Thanks for everything,” I said.

The girls and I sat around the waiting room well into the afternoon. They amused themselves watching cartoons and old Disney movies on the wall-mounted television. I caught up on a year’s worth of
Highlights
back issues.

Around three
P.M.,
Deecie walked into the waiting room, hollow-eyed and dejected.

“He’s sleepin’,” she said, sitting down beside me. “Doctor said he real sick.” She paused, bit her lip. “I need another favor. I called my aunt to tell her about Faheem,” she said. “And she say she’ll come up here and sit with me. Till William can come. But she don’t have a ride.”

“I can go pick her up,” I said. “And I’ll drop Baby and Sister off at their apartment on the way there. Is there anything else?”

“No. Wait. Yeah. Ask my aunt, could she bring Faheem’s Boo with her.”

“His Boo?”

“He got this ol’ nasty teddy bear he sleep with. I forgot and left it at my aunt’s place. I think he’s missing his Boo.”

“I’ll get it.”

Baby and Sister sulked all the way back to the senior citizen high-rise. “When we gonna get to do some more detectin’?” Sister asked. “You all the time runnin’ around in the streets and we don’t get to do nothin’.”

“I know that’s right,” Baby chimed in. “What about that time we put that purse camera on that old doctor? Didn’t we do good that time?”

She was referring to an assignment I’d given them when I was working for a client who believed her ex-husband was trying to cheat her out of marital assets. I’d rigged up a hidden video camera in the bottom of a pocketbook and sent the two of them in disguise as a pair of senile invalids. They’d performed brilliantly, of course.

“You can do some detecting,” I promised. “Just as soon as I have a job for you.”

“What about finding that little boy’s stuffed toy?” Baby asked. “We could do that, real easy.”

“Not this time,” I said.

We pulled up to the curb at the high-rise, and I paid them each thirty dollars cash for their brief stint of silver polishing.

“I got a good disguise all picked out for next time,” Sister told me. “Got a fancy blond wig and a sparkly dress and everything.”

“She think she Dolly Parton,” Baby cackled. “Old fool.”

After I let the girls off at home, I floored it over to Memorial Oaks. It was too cold for television or basketball, but the cluster of men drinking from paper sacks was there on the corner, watching me with dead eyes. There were a couple girls, too, young, dressed for street success. Cars cruised to a stop beside them, transactions were made. An open-air drug and sex marketplace. The clientele was varied: blacks, whites, new cars, old cars, some with Atlanta tags, some from the far suburbs. I noticed a red pickup truck from Henry County, forty miles to the south. Even a big late-model Chrysler with an elderly ball cap—wearing white man at the wheel cruised past. The same junk cars were parked at the curb. This time, I put my 9-mm in my jacket pocket and locked the van before I got out.

Monique Bell opened the apartment door before I could knock.

“I’m all ready,” she said, fumbling for her keys.

She looked a little like her niece: light-skinned, with Eurasian eyes, a high forehead, and hair cut close to the scalp. I guessed her to be in her late thirties. She was dressed in a black Atlanta Falcons sweatshirt and blue jeans that were a size too big, a belt cinching them around her waist.

“Deecie wanted you to bring Faheem’s teddy bear,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose. “That stinky old thing?”

“She called it his Boo,” I said. “She thinks he might feel better if he had it with him.”

“All right,” she said reluctantly, turning to go back inside the apartment.

I waited in the doorway while she went in search of Boo. The door across the hall opened just a crack. I felt, rather than saw, a pair of eyes looking me over.

“Tell Deecie I say hey,” a small voice called. “Tell Faheem hey too.”

“I will.”

Monique came bustling out, a matted blue teddy bear stuffed under her arm. “Let’s go,” she said brusquely.

M
onique Bell didn’t utter a word all the way to the hospital, just sat bolt upright in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, probably so she wouldn’t have to look at me or talk to me.

I tried not to take it personally, but for some reason, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I found myself chattering inanely, about the weather, about what a cute baby Faheem was, even about the farce of trying to clean Ruth Matthews’s already impeccable pink house.

Monique grunted a couple times; otherwise, I would have been tempted to stop and search for a pulse.

For the second time that day I pulled up to the emergency room entrance and dropped off a passenger. “He’s up in the ICU,” I told her. “Maybe they’ll call up there and let Deecie know you’re here.”

By the time I parked and got back down to the emergency room, Monique had apparently gotten over her speechlessness.

A new nurse was working the triage desk, and she was receiving the full force of Monique’s rage.

“I don’t give a GODDAMN about your rules,” Monique
bellowed. “I got a sick baby in this hospital, and I wanna know where he’s at.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, her own voice rising to the occasion. She was black and middle-aged and would have made two of Monique Bell.

She stood up and put her face right up beside Monique’s. “I called upstairs and they said your niece is gone. Now that’s the best I can do.” She glared right back at the crimson-faced Monique.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“They trying to tell me they don’t know where Deecie gone to,” Monique snapped. “And I know good and well she’s here somewheres, but they won’t let me go up and see about Faheem.”

“It’s against HOSPITAL POLICY,” the nurse said.

I guided Monique to a chair in the waiting area. “She’s right. They only let the parent go with a sick child. And since he’s in the intensive care unit, they only allow one person at a time. Probably Deecie just came downstairs to get a Coke or something. I’m sure she’ll be right back.”

“And then I’ll go on upstairs and see about my nephew,” Monique said, loud enough for the triage nurse to hear.

At four-thirty, I got restless. I volunteered to go to the hospital cafeteria to get a snack for both of us, thinking I might find Deecie there.

She wasn’t in the cafeteria, where I bought Cokes and a package of cheese crackers for Monique. I went out to the main hospital lobby, but Deecie wasn’t there either. Probably, I thought, she’d gone back upstairs to sit with Faheem.

But the triage nurse called the ICU nurse, who said, no, she hadn’t seen Ms. Styles in more than two hours.

Monique Bell was fuming. “That damn girl. Run off and leave a sick baby. Ain’t no better than her mama and all of them, runnin’ around like she do.”

The crankier Monique got, the more concerned I got. Deecie had been beside herself with worry over her baby. I didn’t believe she would go off and leave Faheem alone.

I still had the phone number William had given me when he called early in the morning. I dialed and asked for him.

Five long minutes later, he picked up the phone, breathless. “This is William.”

“William? This is Callahan Garrity. Have you heard from Deecie?”

“When? You mean like, now?”

“I mean anytime recently. She asked me to go pick up her aunt at her apartment, and I just got back here an hour ago, but there’s no sign of Deecie. I’ve looked everywhere, and the nurses who are taking care of Faheem say they haven’t seen her in at least two hours.”

“Two hours? That can’t be right. She wouldn’t go off and leave Faheem.”

I was starting to get a bad vibe about this. “I’m going to go find her,” I said.

“You think something bad happened?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I lied.

“I get off at five,” he said. “Then I’m coming right over to that hospital.”

Monique stood in front of the triage desk, looming over the nurse, who studiously avoided looking up.

“Miss Nurse,” Monique said, snapping her fingers under the woman’s nose. “Hey, Miss Nurse. I’m talking to you.”

“What is it now?” the older woman asked, refusing to look up.

“I want you to call back up to that intensive care place and find out how my baby is, and where my niece has gone to.”

“I’ll see,” Miss Nurse said. She jotted down something on the chart she was working on, then picked up the phone.

“The baby’s in guarded condition,” she said after she’d hung up. “I talked to a nurse who said she saw Ms. Styles around three-thirty. Your niece asked her for change to get something to eat out of the vending machines in the cafeteria. Now, if you can’t be quiet, I’ll have to ask you to leave this area.”

Monique glared at her, and Miss Nurse glared back. I went back down to the cafeteria to see if anybody’d seen Deecie.

“Skinny black girl?” the cashier asked. “She come in here, wantin’ pizza. That was the lunch special. But that was all gone by one o’clock. She said she’d find something else. I told her she oughtta walk over to Jagger’s, and she said maybe she would.”

I went outside the emergency room entrance and looked around. I walked down the drive to Clifton Road, where the hospital entrance was. The Emory University campus sprawled over both sides of the road. Jagger’s was a favorite hangout for Emory students, but it was way across campus, at least a fifteen-minute hike, and I doubted Deecie was that familiar with the neighborhood. And William had said Deecie was broke.

I hugged my arms to try to keep warm, but the chill was coming from the inside as well as the exterior. Each question I asked, every answer I got, added to my conviction. She was gone.

“What you mean—gone?” Monique Bell demanded.

William chewed a fingernail.

“I’ve looked around the hospital, I walked around outside, there’s no sign of Deecie,” I said.

William buried his face in his hands. “I kept tellin’ her I’d take care of her. Sayin’ I wouldn’t let nobody hurt her. Somebody done got her.” He looked up at me. “Ain’t that right?”

“Maybe not,” I said, clinging to hope. “The Emory campus is huge. Maybe she got lost and has been wandering around, trying to find her way back.”

“It’s getting dark out there,” Monique said. “That girl never did like the dark. Used to wet the bed if I didn’t leave a light on.”

Monique was really working on my nerves. Slapping her face would have been highly therapeutic right now, but probably ill advised.

“We could call campus security,” I said.

“Cops?” William looked dubious.

“They’re employed by the university,” I said. “Kinda like kiddie cops. They probably don’t have any contact with the
real thing.” Even as I said it I knew it wasn’t true, but I couldn’t think of any other way to search for Deecie.

“She dead,” Monique said dully. She opened her pocketbook and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a yellow Zippo, then got up and walked outside.

“We could just tell the campus cops Deecie brought her little boy here to the emergency room, wandered outside, and we think she got lost because she’s unfamiliar with the area,” I said. All of which was true.

“What if they seen her picture on the news?” William asked.

“It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” I said. “Look. Deecie was going to have to deal with the police eventually, especially if she turned over that videotape of the robbery. If she didn’t do anything wrong, she shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

He studied his nails, which were pretty unremarkable. “What if she did do something wrong?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“What if she didn’t say exactly how it really happened that cop got shot?”

I clutched his arm. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Deecie knows more than what she said, that’s all.”

“How much more?”

“Enough to get her kilt.”

I took out the key she’d given me, just before I’d left the hospital earlier in the afternoon. “Deecie said I could have the videotape,” I said, turning it over and over in the palm of my hand. “She said she felt bad about lying to me, and she gave me this.”

He took the key and looked at it, then handed it back. “What’s it to?”

“You don’t know?”

“She said she hid it. Someplace safe. That’s all she told me.”

Luckily for us, Miss Nurse was on her dinner hour. A young, slightly effeminate male nurse whose name tag said he was Carl was working the triage desk. He readily agreed to call campus security and let them know about Deecie.

Ten minutes later, a white sedan marked “Emory Police”
glided up to the emergency room door where William and I were waiting.

Officer Cash was middle-aged, with a graying crew-cut and steel-rimmed aviator glasses. He wrote everything we told him on a clipboard, and gave it all some thought.

“You don’t think she might have caught a bus and gone home?”

“Her baby is in the intensive care unit,” I said. “She wouldn’t leave him.”

“Another family member could have picked her up,” he suggested.

“Her only other family is an aunt, who’s here right now,” I said.

“You’ve contacted her friends?”

William plucked the officer’s shirt sleeve. “Look here. I’m her only friend. She didn’t call me. Could we start looking for her? She’s kinda scared of the dark.”

Officer Cash finished writing up his report. “Okay, who wants to ride along with me?”

“I’ll go,” William volunteered.

“I’ll stay here with Monique,” I said. “In case she comes back.”