“Make sure Andre’s mother gets the money,” I said.
“To Andre,” McGinnes said, and raised his bottle in a toast. “The only hero in this whole damn thing.”
I grabbed a handful of McGinnes’ shirt and pulled him up out of his seat. When I looked into his frightened eyes, I let him down gently but still held on. His breath was sour and sickly, like an old man’s.
“Andre’s no hero,” I said softly. “He was, when he was alive. But he died, and then he was nothing. I dumped him in a fucking alley, like a sack of shit. So don’t romanticize it, understand?” I released my grip on his shirt.
“Sure, Nick, I understand.” He tilted the bottle back to his lips.
I wiped tears off my face with a shaky hand. “Try not to sit here all day,” I said.
“The stuff tastes awful good today, Nicky.” I walked to the doorway. “So long, man,” he said behind me.
I looked back to the table. “So long, Johnny.”
I left him there, staring into his bottle. I crossed the dark barroom, passed through the door, and stepped out into the light.
The corridor I had entered marked the beginning of the hospital’s original wing. I followed its worn carpeting as it snaked towards tked towahe ward. Small hexagonal windows had black bars radiating spiderlike from their centers, and were spaced at intervals on the yellowing walls to my left.
At the end of the corridor I pushed open one of two swinging metal doors and stepped into the ward’s reception area. I signed my name and recorded the time in a notebook on the desk. Behind the desk sat a young man wearing a flannel shirt and a brush mustache. I asked him for her room number.
“She stays in eight-oh-two,” he said. “But this time of day you might try the rec room.”
“Thanks,” I said, and headed down the hallway.
I had visited friends on several occasions in places such as this. The alky wards were usually populated by middle-aged individuals who drifted slowly and deliberately, like ghosts, in and out of doorways. In this place they separated the boozers from the druggies. The k-heads and cocaine kids moved about these rooms like hopped-up insects.
I passed a large room that had a shield of gray smoke at its entrance. There were Ping-Pong tables and board games, but everyone was seated in vinyl furniture watching a television mounted high on the wall. A couple of them were laughing.
I stopped at eight-oh-two and knocked on a partially closed door. She told me to come in. I pushed the door open.
There were two cots in the room, with a night table and reading lamp in between. On the night table was some propaganda, and under that a notebook. Next to the notebook was a flat aluminum ashtray filled with crushed filters. She sat on the edge of the bed nearest the window, a live cigarette between her fingers.
“Nicky,” she said, without emotion.
“Kim. May I come in?”
She nodded and I entered. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with a sweater vest over that. Her hair had been cut short and spiky, which made her big eyes even more pronounced above her hollow cheeks. She had the pallid color of the very ill.
“Cigarette?” she asked, rustling the pack in my direction.
“No thanks. I won’t be staying long.”
She took a drag and blew some my way. “I knew you’d be by, eventually. You’re not particularly bright. But you are persistent.”
I let that go and asked, “How’s it going?”
“I’ve been through all this before,” she said with a small sweeping gesture of her hand. “Several times. They tell you to surrender your will to a higher being. Trouble is, I don’t know if there is one.”
“Let’s assume there is,” I said. “But then you still would have a problem. There’s certain people, even He has no interest in saving.”
She calmly shook a cigarette out of her pack and lit it off the one still burning. She butted the shorter one of the two and exhaled a wide cloud that spread around me.
“How did you get on to me?” she asked.
“Nothing set right with you from the beginning,” I said. “Like what you were doing with those kids in the first place. And the fact that you were barely hurt, much less alive, when we found you. I buried those suspicions, though, as I became more attracted to you. At that point I was letting my dick do all the thinking.” I waited for a reaction to the twisting knife. There wasn’t one. I folded my arms and leaned against the wall. “After you left me, I met a geezer in a bar who reminded me of your old man. I started to think about his unused video equipment, and the new stereo in your apartment. And how Maureen Shultz told me that you had worked in some stores in the South before coming up here. Then there was the time you asked about me and Johnny taking ‘ups.’ Only a retail salesperson would know that expression. I made the connection to Rosen and called Ned’s World in South Carolina. You had been on the payroll at one time.”
She nodded. “I was a cashier in one of the stores down there when Jerry Rosen was sales manager. It wasn’t long before he was fucking me, and supplying me with all the coke I needed. We moved up to D.C., I got heavier into drugs, and he lost interest in me. In the end, he only kept me around to help out with his business.”
“He had you hook into Jimmy Broda,” I said, “when he discovered the missing VCR. You were to keep an eye on him and the drugs, maybe take him out of town, someplace where Rosen’s boys could take care of things without much scrutiny, right?”
“Yes,” she said, and looked away. “I didn’t know anybody would be hurt. It was just another free party for me. And for a change, I didn’t have to sleep with anybody to do it.”
Tired laughter ebbed briefly from the television room down the hall. “Back to Wrightsville Beach,” I said. “Jimmy never went out for beer like you said. He was there when Rosen’s boys came in. You must have signaled them somehow. But why didn’t they kill Broda too?”
She blew some smoke at her feet and spoke softly. “After you fought, Charlie Fiora called me at the motel to tip me off that you were on the way. They had just killed Eddie. There wasn’t time to do anything but take Jimmy and leave me behind, to slow you up.” She looked up at me with pleading eyes and began to cry, but I stopped it.
“You can save the crocodile tears,” I said coldly. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way Eddie looked, tied up on that bed. His throat had been cut, left to right. You could tell by the entry wound on the left, and by the direction of the skin as it folded out from the slice. Assuming he was killed from behind, that would have to be done by a right-handed person.” I stepped away from the wall and unfolded my arms. “The other night, I faced the man I thought had killed Eddie Shultz. He proved to me that he didn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. In fact, before his brains were blown out, he dropped his weapon. And he dropped it from his left hand.” I paused and stared at the cigarette in her right hand, then into her eyes. “You cooled Eddie Shultz.”
The silence between us was heavy and long. Finally she spoke just above a whisper and with her eyes down. “They couldn’t do it,” she said. “They were tough, but even they couldn’t do that, not to a kid. ot to a They didn’t know Redman like I knew him. Him and his Nazi friends. They would have queered the whole deal, believe me. He had to die.”
“Everybody has to,” I said. “But nobody has to like that. What were you going to do about me?”
“Nothing,” she said, her voice rising. “Jerry just wanted me to keep you occupied until he could figure out what to do.”
“Relax. I’m not going to turn you in. They’d only treat you and set you free. I’d only be doing you a favor.”
“I know what I did was horribly wrong,” she said. “But this program here… I’m going to clean up.”
“There isn’t going to be any program. Not much longer. Your benefactor is going to be leaving town any day now. When the well dries up, you’re out. You’re a junkie, Kim. That’s your future.”
“I’ll make it,” she said.