He finally left a gap, as if for me to speak. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and with my hand clamped over my mouth as it was, he wouldn’t have heard the words anyway.
“It could be E. coli,” he said, as if that was in some way reassuring. “We’re pumping antibiotics and fluids into her and we’re putting out the other fires as best we can. At the moment that’s all we can do.”
She looked so pale, so broken, and very far away.
“Is she conscious?”
“Intermittently. She was awake up until about forty minutes ago, now seems to be drifting in and out.”
“I have to go in there.”
“Not right now.”
“Well, when?”
“I don’t know. Maybe soon. It depends.”
“How long has she been here?”
“Since three A.M.”
“But . . . how come the first I hear of this is a message at eight thirty this morning? Why did nobody call me right away?”
The doctor glanced at his clipboard. “The notes say your wife requested you be contacted as soon as she was admitted. Her brother said he’d get hold of you.”
I turned to look at him. “Her brother?”
“Right,” he said, still reading. “He brought her in. I don’t want to be critical, you’ve got enough to process as it is, but she’d evidently been deteriorating for several hours before the guy thought, okay, there’s a situation here, let’s get to the hospital. You might . . . want to talk to him about that.”
“Oh, I will,” I said. “Though I’ll need to discuss a couple other things with him first.”
“Excuse me?”
“Like the fact that my wife doesn’t have a brother.”
The doctor looked up from his notes. I could see him making a decision that this wasn’t his problem.
“I’ll be ten minutes,” I told him. “And then I’m going to want to talk to my wife.”
When I got back out to the waiting area the guy was already trying to escape. The corner where he’d been sitting was empty. I saw the back of someone heading fast down the corridor toward the bank of elevators.
“Hey,” I shouted.
He started to hurry. I ran faster.
I got to him as he was jumping into the elevator. I shoved him in ahead, turned, and stabbed the button for the basement. He started to say something. I grabbed him by the neck and smacked his face into the wall of the elevator. I’d never done anything like that before, but it came easy and it felt good. His head bounced off the paneling and snapped back hard.
I put my face up close. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Nobody,” he stammered.
I threw him back into the corner. “Are you with them? Are you with that woman? Jane Doe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked scared now—but more than that. Wary, on alert, as if I was the guy in the wrong.
“Look . . . ,” he said, but he had guilty written all over his face, and he didn’t know where to take it from there. I smacked his head into the wall again. There was a loud ping and the elevator doors opened behind me.
I hauled the guy out into a subterranean corridor that was hot and semidark and smelled of chemicals, and shoved him backward, pinning him against the wall.
“Tell me,” I said. “And make it the truth, or I’m going to hurt you as badly as I can.”
“I brought her in. That’s all.”
“Bullshit.”
I pulled my fist back. I hadn’t punched anyone in a long, long time—there’s not a lot of call for it in professional realty—but I figured I could remember the basics if I had to.
He jerked up his hands, started to stammer.
“I don’t know what happened to her. We were at my apartment. We were . . . just talking. Hanging out.”
Suddenly something clicked. “You’re . . . Nick,” I said. “New guy at the magazine, art department. Golson, right? I met you at a party about a month ago.”
“Right. I’m Nick. Exactly.”
He nodded enthusiastically, as if saying his name to the best of his ability was going to get him out of this situation. I smacked him back against the wall again to let him know how wrong he was.
“What the fuck was my wife doing at your apartment?”
“It was, look, seriously, it was nothing. They had this meeting in the morning. Her and Sukey, they went out afterward, celebrating. I ran into them downtown, after work. They were pretty . . . you know, they’d been in the bar quite a while by then. Sukey got a cab. Steph, uh, Stephanie, your wife, she . . . shit, I don’t know. We had another drink. We wound up back at my place. I’ve got a studio in town. It was close.”
“And?”
“We were just talking. Magazine, work stuff. Had a couple more beers. Actually, she was drinking wine, but I only had beers. She brought the wine with her.”
“From the bar?”
“No. It was in her bag.”
“She was carrying a bottle of wine around with her? Are you making this shit up?”
“No! I don’t know why she had it. But she, she got the bottle out as soon as we got to my apartment, seemed psyched about having it. Like it was ‘score to her’ or something. Wanted me to have some, too, but I don’t like wine. And so she just kept knocking it back, and then after a while she started getting sick. I assumed it was because she was so bombed, but then she’s, like, ‘I need a paramedic.’ I figured she’d plane out of it, but after a couple hours . . . fuck, dude, I didn’t know what to do.”
The back of my neck felt cold. “What wine was it?”
He looked at me like I was insane. “I don’t know—I know shit about wine. Like I said, I don’t drink it. It had a fucked-up label. It looked old, I guess.”
“Where is it now?”
“My apartment. But it’s empty. She finished it.”
“This ever happened before?”
He looked confused. “Has what?”
“Have you two had a drink together before? You guys ever ‘hung out’ before? How often? Just how far does the ‘just talking’ go?”
He was absolutely still, and silent, and did not say “dude” or fluster or try to deny anything. It could be a lot of prior hanging out and just talking had happened, it could be not. Either way he evidently realized that the next thing he said had to be right, and phrased carefully, and that was enough for me. I got my face up really close to his. I suspected this guy was too stupid and scared to tell me anything that was worth me knowing, but I didn’t have time to prove that to myself. Maybe he was my wife’s lover, maybe not. I could determine that from her. Right now I had a bigger problem.
“I’ll be back for you,” I said. Then I hit him in the stomach, as hard as I could, and left him sagging down toward the floor as I got back in the elevator. “Go home, get the bottle out of the trash, bring it here, and give it to the doctors,” I told him, as he crashed down onto the floor. “Do it right now, or I’ll come find you. Do you believe me?”
I saw him nod as the elevator doors closed. I stood, hands shaking, as the elevator shot back up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The doctor didn’t want me to go in. He made that clear. I made it equally clear that this wasn’t an answer that worked for me, and in the end he said fine, but stay back from the bed and you’ve got five minutes max. He wanted to come in with me, but I dissuaded him. I could tell I was one step from having security called, but I didn’t care. In the end the doctor stepped back, hands up, and reminded me about not getting too close.