“He’s a detective, Doctor. Detectives find out things.”
“So do doctors — damned if I’ve ever figured out why.” He looked at the monstrous skin-diver’s watch again. “My wife gave me this, fantasies me as a scuba diver, I suppose. I imagine eventually we’ll only be able to make it in a bathtub full of warm salt water. If you want an opinion to support a thesis, here: the nature of the injuries do not preclude felonious assault with something like a sockful of sand or a leather-covered lead blackjack.”
“Thanks, Doctor,” said Ballard. He added stubbornly, “I’d still like to see him, talk with Corinne.”
Whitaker threw his arms wide in sudden resignation. “Oh, shit,” he said precisely. The gray head of a nurse behind the desk snapped up to reveal a pair of shock-widened eyes. “Go on in. Your presence isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference to the patient. You can keep your hands off the girl, can’t you? She’s very vulnerable at the moment.”
Ballard almost got sore, grinned instead. “I’d better keep my hands off her. Bart’s a former professional fighter.”
“Former is probably right, Mr. Ballard. He might well end up with a plate in his head from this, residual weakness or even partial paralysis on the left side is a possibility — if he doesn’t wake up a carrot.” He then added, as an afterthought, “If he wakes up at all.”
The nurse was staring at them again, reprovingly: a large fleshy woman with eyes right out of Buchenwald and a heavy bosom as comforting as a bag of cement. “Doctor, you have no right to say—”
“Shit,” said Whitaker again, very distinctly. Her face went pale. He turned back to Ballard, said, “Seventy-two hours is as long as I would give him in coma without serious permanent brain damage either causing it or resulting from it. I’d have a hell of a hard time keeping my hands off Miss Corinne Jones in a darkened room — even if her boy friend was Joe Frazier.”
He nodded and strode abruptly away toward the elevator. Ballard crossed the hall and pushed open the door of Heslip’s room gingerly, half expecting to catch the nurse’s beefy shoulder in the small of his back. He paused for a few moments, blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness which contrasted so sharply with the bone-whiteness of the corridor. Only a single small night light was on; with the curtains drawn and the door reclosed behind him, it was really quite dark.
“Larry?” A dark figure rose from the chair on the far side of the bed. “Larry? Oh, thank God!”
He held Corinne for a moment as she clung to him with convulsive strength. The beautifully female body was warm in his arms. He released her quickly and stepped back, disturbed a little at his physical reaction to her. His eyes had accustomed themselves to the dimness enough for him to make out her features. She had a heart-shaped face so strikingly pretty that she approached true beauty.
“Rough, kid?”
“It’s been so damned... lonely. Did you talk to the doctor?”
Ballard nodded. There was another chair, which he pulled up next to hers. But instead of sitting down, he moved to the head of the bed to stare down at Bart’s still, grayish features under their absurd crown of bandage. Through his mind, like a sleep-learning tape under the pillow, reeled Bart’s words from the night before: I got something funny on one of the files. Probably just a coincidence, but I wanta ask what you think...
“And?” prompted Corinne.
“No change in diagnosis yet,” he said absently. It couldn’t be that...
“What about... when he wakes up?”
“Russian roulette. If he ever...” He caught himself belatedly, pulled his eyes from Heslip’s deathly still face to her. She was hunched over in her chair, crying silently. “Hey...”
He sat down beside her, but she shook off the arm he tried to put around her. Anger glinted through her tears. “I hate that bastard! Hate him!”
Ballard was confused. “Who?”
“Kearny. Him, and the goddamn detective business, and—”
“He’s paying for the room,” said Ballard. The tape had begun playing again. Something funny... probably just a coincidence... Something? No. Couldn’t be. Nothing. Still...
“Big deal!” she exclaimed bitterly. “I’ve got a good job, I can manage Bart’s hospital bills, don’t need his charity. If it weren’t for Kearny there wouldn’t be any hospital bills. Wouldn’t—”
“It could have happened against a ring post,” said Ballard.
“He quit the ring almost four years ago...” She was crying openly by this time, without lowering her furious grief-stricken face or trying in any way to check the tears flowing down her cheeks.
“Only because he found something he liked as well.”
“Oh, go to hell!” she exclaimed fiercely. Then she pressed her face against his shoulder and squeezed his hand so hard that his fingers reddened with trapped blood. “Oh, Larry, I’m so damned scared!”
The door opened to let a reedy red-headed nurse stick in a sympathetic face. “You’ll have to wait in the hall.”
They stood up. Corinne left her purse on the narrow roll-away table beside the bed. There for the long siege, Ballard thought. Better not tell her that seventy-two hours was the outside limit Whitaker was giving for Bart’s unimpaired recovery. He held her hand as they went out; Whitaker was in the doorway. The dapper little doctor nodded.
“Couldn’t keep your hands off after all,” he beamed.
“What was that all about?” Corinne asked as they moved down the hall.
“He’s got the hots for you,” said Ballard. “He and his wife do it in the bathtub, and he’s having a wish projection that you—”
“But it doesn’t wash off!” she exclaimed.
It was the tag end of a joke among the three of them that, recalled, gave her momentary pleasure. Then her face tightened, got angry again. They had gone to the end of the hall to look down on drab, deserted Bush Street from a large round porthole-like unglassed window beside the rear stairwell. Corinne’s emotions had always bubbled near the surface.
“At least in the ring the other guy’s only trying to beat you, not kill you,” she said.
“What do you mean?” demanded Ballard, more sharply than he had intended. It was too close to his own unformulated thoughts: something funny on one of the files. She was staring blindly down into the street, her face in profile severe of line like that Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, something like that — he’d seen her in an encyclopedia in high school, never had forgotten her.
Corinne met his eyes. “Bart wouldn’t have been driving around in that Jaguar, Larry! What for? Cars don’t mean anything to him, to any of you. You deal with them all the time.”
“Don’t tell me you think that somebody deliberately set him behind the wheel and then ran the Jag off Twin Peaks.”
“Don’t you?”
Ballard opened his mouth to say no, then closed it. Dammit, as she said, the only thing that made sense. He straightened away from the porthole, suddenly in a hurry. “I’d better, ah, get back to the office, kid. Giselle said to tell you how sorry she is, and how much she hopes that—”
“Kearny didn’t send any kind words, did he?” Before Ballard could speak, she added, “Don’t bother to make anything up so I’ll feel good. The only thing that mean son of a bitch could do to make me feel good is drop over dead.”
“Oh, hell, Corinne, make sense!”
“You’re all the same, all of you!” she flared. “Giselle included. Look at you! Can’t wait around the hospital, hell no. You have to get back to work...”