Satisfied with tonight’s appearance, Mrs. Fritz left and locked the safe room, then rode the stairlift up to the ground floor, where her walker awaited. Charles LeGrand was her frequent walker, a cultured homosexual probably even older than she was, neat and tidy in his blazer and ascot, smiling from within his very small goatee. Offering his elbow for her hand, “You look charmante tonight, Helena,” he said.
“Thank you, Charles.”
They walked through the ballroom on their way to the car. Mrs. Fritz noted with approval the ranks of rented padded chairs for the bidders, now in rows facing the auctioneer’s lectern, each with its numbered paddle waiting on the seat. The platform for the musicians was in place, the side tables were covered in damask but not yet bearing their loads of plates and glasses and cutlery, the portable bar-on-wheels stood ready for tomorrow night’s bartender, and all was as it was supposed to be.
The amplifiers under their white tablecloths she didn’t even notice.
10
The Voyager’s dashboard clock read 7:21 when Leslie steered into the visitors’ parking area outside the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital in Snake River. Perfect timing.
In her three previous visits to Daniel here, Leslie had learned what she needed to know about the hospital routine. Was this what criminals called “casing the joint”? She knew, for instance, that visiting hours ended at eight P.M., to accommodate visitors who had day jobs. She also knew that down the hall from Daniel lay an old woman named Emily Studworth, who seemed to be permanently unconscious and to never receive visitors. And she further knew that the clerical staff at the hospital changed shift at six P.M.
Leslie shut off the Voyager’s engine and looked in the rearview mirror at Loretta. “Okay, Loretta,” she said. “We just go and do it and come right back out.”
Loretta was already in the wheelchair that Leslie had rented from a place in Riviera Beach called Benson’s Sick Room and Party Supplies. Her mulish pouting expression fit the wheelchair very well; she was great in the part.
Leslie got out of the Voyager, slid open its side door, pulled out the ramp, and carefully backed Loretta and the wheelchair down to the blacktop. Then she shut and locked the car, and pushed the wheelchair across the parking lot and up the handicap-access ramp to the hospital’s front door.
Since this was the first time she was arriving at the hospital after six P.M., the receptionist who checked the visitors in had never seen her before, and had no way to know that before this she’d always visited a patient named Daniel Parmitt. “Emily Studworth,” Leslie told her.
The receptionist nodded and wrote that on her sheet. “You’re relatives?”
“We’re her grandnieces. Loretta really wanted to see her auntie Emily just once more.”
“You don’t have much time,” the receptionist warned her. “Visiting hours end at eight.”
“That’s all right, we just want to be with her for a few minutes.”
Leslie wheeled Loretta down the hall to the elevators and up to the third floor. The people at the nurses’ station gave them a brief incurious look as they came out of the elevator. Leslie smiled at them and pushed the wheelchair down the hall to Daniel’s room, which was in semi-darkness, only one small light gleaming yellow on the wall over the bed. They entered, and she pushed the door mostly closed behind her.
He was asleep, but as she entered the room he was suddenly awake, his eyes glinting in the yellow light. She pushed the wheelchair over beside the bed and whispered, “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Help me, Loretta.”
Obediently, Loretta stood up from the wheelchair and removed the long coat and big-brimmed straw hat. She put them on the bed along with her purse, which had been concealed in the wheelchair. Then she and Leslie helped Daniel get out of bed.
He was stronger each day, but still very weak. The muscles in the sides of his jaw bunched and moved with his determination. He got his legs over the side of the bed, and then, with one of them on either side of him, he made it to his feet.
Leslie said, “Can you stand alone?”
“Yes.” It was whispered through gritted teeth.
He stood unmoving, like a tree. They helped him put on the long coat, over the hospital gown that was all he wore, then helped him ease down into the wheelchair. He folded his hands in his lap, to not be noticeable, and Leslie fixed the straw hat on his head.
Meantime, Loretta had sat on the bed to remove her fake-fur shin-high brown boots. She had soft pumps in her purse that she now slipped on instead.
The boots had been too big for Loretta; they were the right size for Daniel. The hat, the long coat, and the boots covered him completely. As long as he kept his head down and his hands in his lap, he would look exactly like the person Leslie had wheeled in here.
Loretta stood up from the bed, wearing the blue pumps. She had on a shapeless blue-and-white-print dress. “Do I go out now?” she asked.
Leslie considered her. “Don’t forget your glasses.”
“Oh!” Loretta took her black-framed glasses from her purse and put them on, becoming again the owlish, gawky person Leslie knew.
Leslie said, “You just walk out. We’ll be along in a minute.”
“All right.” Now that they were doing it, and nothing bad was happening, Loretta’s mood had improved considerably. She very nearly smiled at Leslie, and when she looked at Daniel in the wheelchair her expression became concerned. “He should stay here,” she said.
“He has his reasons,” Leslie assured her. “We’ll be along.”
Loretta left, and Leslie looked in the closet, expecting to find his clothes, surprised to see nothing in there at all. “Where’s your things?”
“Cops kept.”
“Oh. Well, let’s get you out of here.”
The return journey was simple, and outside, there was Loretta, waiting for them, standing over there beside the Voyager. As she pushed him across the parking lot, Leslie said, “I don’t know what you expect to do tomorrow night.”
“Kill some people,” he whispered.
11
Jack Young really did care for his new (old) wife, Alice, felt affection for her, enjoyed more about her than her money, though of course the money had come first. In fact, it had been just a joke at the beginning, when he’d met Alice Prester Habib up in New Jersey, where he’d worked for Utica Mutual as a claims examiner, and where, when he first became aware that this particular insured had the hots for him, it was nothing more than the subject of gags around the office.
It was Maureen, an older woman with the firm, computer processor, who’d put the bee in his bonnet. “You could do worse,” she’d said, and when Jack thought about it, he could do worse, couldn’t he? He’d almost done worse, two or three times.
It had been almost a year, at that time, since he’d broken up with his last serious girlfriend, or, more accurately, since she’d broken up with him. His life was a little boring, a little same-old same-old, and the idea of shaking it up in this really different and outrageous way came to appeal to him more and more. And don’t forget the money.
But the fact is, Alice was okay. God knows she was older than his mother, almost older than his grandmother, but she kept herself in shape like an NFL quarterback, and she was of an age where she had no timidity left in bed at all. So that part wasn’t so bad, and for the rest — the knowledge that people laughed at him behind his back, the term “boy toy,” which seemed to hover in the air around him like midges — fuck ‘em if they couldn’t take a joke.