Deadly Beloved (36 page)

“McDonald’s isn’t even making French fries this early in the morning,” Evan told her. “They don’t start making lunch until eleven o’clock. Would you want one of those hash brown potato things?”

“No,” Karla had said. “God no. French fries.”

“Okay. But—”

“I know,” Karla had said. “I’ll wait. Do me another favor. Go out and get me some papers.”

“And leave you alone?”

“Well, Evan, you can’t very well run errands for me if you aren’t willing to leave me alone.”

“I know,” Evan said. “But you were the one who said you were worried about, you know, a recurrence of what happened—”

“If anybody knew I was awake. Yes, Evan, I know. But nobody does know I’m awake. Except you. Unless you told somebody.”

“Me? No. Of course I didn’t tell anybody.”

“Good. Then go out and get me the papers and come back with them and then do something about the French fries. God, but I’m hungry. I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry. Have you ever been to Morocco?”

“No,” Evan said.

“I think that’s where we’re going to go when we get out of here,” Karla said. “It’s the only place in the world where they’ve got something I like as much as McDonald’s French fries. You can go to these little places in the old city of Tangier and eat appetizers for hours. And drink wine. You don’t know what I would give right now for an enormous bottle of wine.”

“You don’t drink,” Evan said. “I’ve never seen you drink.”

“You’re right. I don’t drink. But something like this calls for it. Do you know that I’ve been in six civil wars and never been hurt once?”

“Is it six?” Evan asked.

“And here I am, back in Philadelphia, and what happens? And all because of Patsy MacLaren, for God’s sake. I think she’s crazy, Evan.”

“Who?” Evan said.

Karla lay down flat in the bed and closed her eyes. “I think I’m going to pretend to go to sleep now. I might even sleep. Go get me the papers.”

“If you really do go to sleep and something startles you, you’re going to get found out,” Evan said.

But Karla was asleep again, already. It was one of the ways Evan could tell that she was still in very bad shape. One minute she would be sitting up, bright-eyed and energetic. The next minute her eyes would be closed and she would be out, just gone, lost to the world. There were big dark circles under her eyes too, and her skin was too white. Evan thought that as soon as she ate those French fries, she was going to heave them right back up again, but he also thought it was useless to argue with a woman who could fall fast asleep in the middle of your peroration.

Now it was eleven o’clock, hours later, and Evan was back. He had the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the Philadelphia
Star
and all three New York papers spread out across the foot of Karla’s bed. He had the door to Karla’s room firmly shut, but not locked, because there was no way to lock the room doors on this floor from the inside. This was, after all, supposed to be an adjunct to the intensive care unit. Karla was sitting up in bed, sucking on long strands of French fries as she went through one paper after the other. Evan had gotten the French fries by pleading with a motherly-looking woman who served as day manager for the McDonald’s in Liberty Square. He had had to give Karla an imaginary baby that he was the imaginary father of, but he had done what he set out to do, and that was the main thing. That, Evan Walsh thought, was the entire point of his life.

Outside, the promise of a storm had turned into a real one, thunder and lightning, wind and darkness. The hospital room was air-conditioned, so the window was shut, but the shade was up. It could have been the middle of the night out there. Evan wouldn’t have believed that there were so many trees in the middle of Philadelphia. He’d never noticed them until they started blowing around like that.

Karla paged past a full-page department store ad featuring a bride in the world’s most elaborate bridal train and settled on the continuance of a story she had started to read on page one.

“None of these is saying anything,” she said. “There isn’t any real news at all. I wish I’d been able to talk to Liza before she died.”

Evan hadn’t wanted to tell Karla about Liza. He had thought the news might traumatize her. That would be all he needed. Karla back in her coma. Karla sick unto death. Everything his fault. He had no idea if bad news could put a coma patient back into a coma. He had no idea it would be so hard to keep things from Karla. He hadn’t realized how it would be with the nurses either. They talked a convincing line about how any coma patient might actually be conscious under the veil of unconsciousness, but they said things in the sickroom as if they were dealing with a deaf-mute. Karla seemed to have heard all about Liza Verity before she ever woke up.

“Is the television news any better?” she asked now. “This stuff is really awful. Nobody is saying anything about anything.”

“I think that’s deliberate,” Evan told her. “I think the police don’t want the public to know exactly what’s going on. Because it might jeopardize their case, you know.”

“You watch much too much American television. What about this Gregor Demarkian person? You met him.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And? What was he like? If you got him over here and I talked to him, would he insist on telling everybody on earth that I was awake?”

“Karla, I think you should tell everybody on earth that you’re awake. You’re not going to be able to keep this up much longer. You have to realize that. Every time a nurse comes in here and you play dead, I cringe. You’re not any good at it.”

“Every time a nurse comes in here and I’ve got my eyes closed, all I want to do is laugh.” Karla sighed. “I wish these papers were more informative. I wish I knew what to do.”

“Fess up,” Evan said.

“I wish Liza were still around to talk to. Do you know, I was thinking about it. If I’d known Liza was available and I had gotten in touch with her before the reception, then the reception would never have happened, and—”

“Shh,” Evan said.

Karla got immediately quiet. They could both hear sounds in the hallway, big booming voices, male and unmedical. Karla pushed the papers off the bed and lay down again. The little white bag of McDonald’s French fries landed on the pillow next to her chin and she shoved it into the air in the direction of Evan, anything at all in order to get rid of it. Evan grabbed the bag of French fries and stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. Then he bent over and started taking sections of newspapers off the floor.

By the time the door opened, seconds later, Karla Parrish was completely still. Evan tried to see signs of incipient laughter in her face, but he couldn’t. She was made of stone. One of the nurses he knew well, a very young Latino girl named Carmencita Gonzalez, ushered Mr. John Jackman and Mr. Gregor Demarkian into the room.

“Hello, Evan,” Carmencita said. “There, you see it,” she told the two other men. “Just the way she’s been for days now. As far as I know, her vital signs are good, and that tells us nothing at all. Unless Evan has seen something the staff of the hospital hasn’t.”

“Me?” Evan said. “No. I wouldn’t know what to look for.”

“Speech would be a good sign,” Carmencita said.

Gregor Demarkian walked over to the bed and looked into Karla’s face. Evan shifted nervously back and forth on the balls of his feet. Demarkian was supposed to be a great detective. Surely, at this close range, he would be able to tell that Karla was faking.

He wasn’t able to tell. He backed away from the bed. Evan tried hard not to be too obvious about heaving a great big sigh of relief.

“I know I should know better,” Gregor Demarkian said, “but I’m always looking for the Gordian knot solution.”

“What’s a Gordian knot solution?” Evan asked.

“Alexander the Great,” Gregor said. “He’s supposed to have gotten to the gates of this city nobody had ever been able to conquer because they were held shut by a thick rope tied in a knot so intricate nobody had ever been able to untie it. So Alexander got out his sword and hacked the thing to shreds.”

“Smart man,” Evan said.

“He was a boy, really,” Gregor Demarkian said. “He was only twenty-six on the day that he died.”

“Forget Alexander the Great,” John Jackman said. “What are we going to do now?”

“We’re going to go visit Julianne Corbett,” Gregor said. “That’s all we can do. She’s the only link left.”

“Maybe we ought to do something about putting guards around her,” John Jackman said. “We don’t want somebody blowing her to kingdom come and doing God only knows what to the image of law enforcement in the city of Philadelphia.”

“Well, we at least ought to go see her. Although I think she’s told us all she really can, under the circumstances. It’s worth one last try.”

“And if it doesn’t work? Then what?”

Karla’s body shifted on the bed. Carmencita was instantly alert. She hurried to Karla’s side and peered down into her face. Then she got out her tiny flashlight and started poking at Karla’s eyes. Evan thought he was going to faint.

“That’s interesting,” Carmencita said.

“What?”

It was Gregor Demarkian who said “what,” but Jackman got to the bedside before him. Evan backed away a little and winced. Karla wasn’t perfectly still anymore. Something odd seemed to be happening to her chest. It was hitching and heaving at uncertain intervals, and the rest of her body seemed to shudder.

Carmencita leaned forward and hit the emergency light. “Get out of the way,” she told Jackman and Demarkian. “This may be a seizure. I need room to work.”

Seizure? Evan felt suddenly sick. It was his fault. Of course it was. He should never have gotten her those French fries.

At just that moment Karla’s eyes flew open and she sat straight up in bed. She looked wild—and she definitely looked green—but she didn’t look as if she was having a seizure.

“Oh, shit,” she said in a perfectly clear voice.

Then she threw up all over Carmencita Gonzalez’s bright white uniform.

B
Y THE TIME GREGOR
Demarkian and John Jackman got downtown to Julianne Corbett’s constituent office, the clouds were pasted across the sky as far as anybody could see, and they were dead black. The rain was thick and hot and heavy in the air. The lightning was random and sharp and the thunder was loud and deep and much too close. Gregor could remember only one other storm in his life that was anything like this, and that had been a full-scale hurricane, lashing at an island he hadn’t wanted to be on in the first place. Somehow, in spite of the fact that there was nothing for the wind to blow against here but solid brick, this was worse. The taller buildings all looked blank and uninhabited, like the buildings on the eastern side of the old Berlin Wall. The few places where there were lights looked just plain wrong. This was a relatively old section of the city, although not as old as the one around Independence Hall. The buildings here had metal fire escapes fastened into the backs of them and windows that opened so that people could get some air or jump. The cars parked against the curbs were either old or oddly tentative, as if they wished they were someplace else. Gregor saw at least six of those metal steering-wheel clamps, the suburbanites’ vehicular protection against the big city. Gregor had no idea if it worked.

John Jackman got a couple of umbrellas out of the trunk of his car and handed one to Gregor. By the time he had gone through all the motions, he was already soaking wet.

“God only knows what these are going to do,” he said. “The office is only over there.”

Gregor looked “over there.” The big plate-glass revolving doors were still and dark. On the floors above the street, almost all the windows were lit up. People were working.

“Does she know we’re coming?” he asked.

“I called her up and told her this morning, just the way you told me to. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Of course I know what I’m doing,” Gregor said.

The street was empty of traffic and very wet. Gregor strode across it, jaywalking and not caring if he did, and went in through the revolving doors. John Jackman followed him and went to stand by the elevators. Gregor stood next to the small newsstand and looked at the magazines. Whoever was supposed to man the newsstand was missing. He and Jackman were the only people in the lobby. The magazines looked damp and wilted in spite of the fact that they had been safely out of the rain. The one
Bride’s
magazine looked positively grim.

“It must be something psychological,” Gregor said. “Every picture of every bride I see lately looks grim.”

“Let’s go,” John Jackman said. “Here’s the elevator.”

Gregor made himself stop wondering what was going wrong with this poor bride’s marriage—she wasn’t even a real bride, for God’s sake, she was just a model—and went to join John in the elevator. John pushed the button for Julianne Corbett’s floor and looked up at the ceiling.

“You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” John Jackman said again. “You haven’t lost it all somewhere along the line? You aren’t about to get me in some kind of trouble I won’t be able to get out of?”

“I’m taking the next logical step. We have to find Patsy MacLaren.”

“Who doesn’t exist.”

“We have to find her anyway. And the best place to start is with the last person who saw her alive.”

“Which Patsy MacLaren are we talking about here?”

“There’s only one,” Gregor Demarkian said.

The elevator opened at Julianne Corbett’s floor. The hallway felt too cold and too wet. The carpet under Gregor’s feet seemed to squeak when he moved, the way cheap carpets do when they’ve been saturated. John Jackman had his umbrella tucked under his arm, the way British bankers did in Walt Disney movies.

The hall smelled as if someone had just walked a very hairy and very wet dog through it. Gregor got to Julianne Corbett’s door and went in without knocking. Tiffany Shattuck sat at her desk, reading another bridal magazine, chewing gum. Gregor was willing to bet anything that Tiffany did not chew gum when Julianne Corbett could see her.

John Jackman came into the office waiting room and closed the door behind him. Gregor cleared his throat. Tiffany Shattuck looked up and dropped the magazine.