The taxi took him to the hospital across town. He went into registration and was told Miss Macklin had been discharged two days earlier.
He took another long taxi ride out to Bethesda, staring at nothing as the car careened up the length of Wisconsin Avenue into the vulgar, expensive heart of the commercial district in Bethesda.
On a premonition, he asked the cab to wait at the apartment building.
He rang the bell a long time and then he rang all the bells in the entrance. A door buzzed open and he went into the inside hallway. Behind a chained door that opened a crack, a woman demanded to know what he wanted.
He told her.
She peered out and saw the cane and saw the way the man leaned on it. A cripple. She had an instinctive feeling of superiority and it supplanted her fear. There was nothing to fear from a cripple.
“She still isn’t back from the hospital.”
“They said they released her two days ago.”
“I’m here all the time.” She wore a housedress. She seldom changed her housedress, seldom went out, seldom did anything except watch television endlessly and drink Southern Comfort by the case, which was delivered every two weeks by the liquor store.
“If they released her, she didn’t come here,” the woman said. She smiled at the cripple. “You meet her in the hospital? You don’t look in such good shape yourself.”
“No,” Devereaux said.
“You wanna come in? You wanna drink? I got some Southern Comfort,” she said, thinking about it.
Devereaux said, “I’m sure you do.”
She slammed the door as he turned away.
Mac opened the door of his corner office and looked across the newsroom to the reception desk. He had never met this man who had meant so much to Rita Macklin for all these years. He felt a wave of resentment because of the pain Devereaux had caused Rita. Oh, hell. He felt jealous, too. He was nearly sixty years old and he felt protective of his reporter, but he also loved her in that part of a man’s conscience that can’t lie to himself.
Mac crossed the newsroom. It was a magazine newsroom and very modern, full of computer terminals and earnest young men and women in pastel-colored shirts and blouses, men and women alike: cool, dedicated, a bit distant, as silent as the screens they watched their words on, superior to the world around them because they were the Swarthmores and Yales and — by God — Harvards of the earth and they expected an inheritance any day now. Mac was the dinosaur sent among them to remind them of how it was in the old days when reporters wore hats indoors and shouted “Copy!” because words were put on mere paper then. Quaint. They sucked up to him because he still had power, they drank Perriers with him (though he drank martinis), they watched his hands to see if the power would slip at an opportune moment. Mac was old to them and power was in feeble hands.
Mac stood behind Velma at the reception desk.
“She asked about you every day.”
Devereaux said nothing. He had not eaten. He felt a peculiar weakness from the mere exertion of riding in taxicabs around a breathlessly alive city he was a stranger to.
“She wanted you and you never came and you could see her sink and sink,” Mac accused him.
Velma looked at the curious man with a cane who could cause pain to women. She wondered what it would be like, to be hurt by a man who looked like that. She wondered if she might enjoy it.
Mac said, “Why are you here now?”
“Where’s Rita?”
“You could have come to see her.”
“I did,” Devereaux said. “The night after she was attacked, the same man did it to me. I’ve been in the hospital. No telephones. No way in and no way out. Security.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mac said.
Devereaux said, “Tell me.”
“Christ, man, you look like you’re going to fall down. Come in. Take my office—”
Velma looked at Mac. “Do you want coffee?”
But the men were moving away from the reception desk through the carpeted newsroom, through the pastel-colored blouses and shirts fastened to terminals and keyboards that made click-click-click sounds to imitate the typewriter and provide some visceral satisfaction in the silence.
Mac closed the door. Devereaux sat in the chair in front of the desk. There was a view of L Street from the window, which did not commend itself. Mac went to the window and communed with it. He spoke to the glass: “Rita has mental problems.”
“There was a neurologist named Krueger…”
“Dr. Krueger suggested that she could be helped in a place, a sanitarium that—”
Devereaux said, “Where is she?”
“Dr. Krueger said you might ask, cause her more problems—”
“Look at me.”
Mac turned.
Devereaux was on his feet. His face was still ashen but his eyes glittered and there was something in his bearing at that moment that supplanted every weakness that might be in his body.
Mac said, “I didn’t know any of this. It was your fault, you and the damned agency or whatever it is that you work for, you abandoned her.”
“Yes.”
“Then you admit it.”
“I hurt her. I thought I should leave her so that she could live normally, that everything I was would cause her grief and death.”
“And that’s what happened, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Who shot her?”
“I know. The same man who tried to kill me. I want to make Rita well. Then I’m going to kill him.”
“What kind of a world do you live in? Are you insane?”
“No. Neither is Rita. You don’t believe she’s insane, do you?”
“She’s so sad. So broken down. I can’t stand to see her fading away, day by day. Jesus Christ, you, people like you, you’re really evil, you’re rotting meat…”
Devereaux said, “Dr. Krueger. He treats her.”
“She’s grown to depend on him.”
“He’s a druggist,” Devereaux said.
“There’s pain, there’s sedation, she needs—”
“Tell me where she is.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to hurt her.”
“She’s going to learn to get along without you.”
“No.”
Mac smiled. “Oh, the sadist returns. What do you do when you’re not pulling the wings off butterflies?”
Devereaux said nothing.
“You gonna threaten me? You ought to know that won’t work. I’ve been threatened. Even beaten up in a stinking Ankara jail. So don’t threaten me because I’m not afraid of things.”
“Not you,” Devereaux said. “She likes you.”
“How do you—”
“She told me more than once. She even loves you. You can tell me and save me time. I’m weeks behind the man who did that to her. To me. I’ll get him but he’s got a lot of time on me. But I won’t leave to get him until she’s well, if it takes the rest of my life.”
“You left her before.”
“But that was in my previous life,” Devereaux said.
“You’ve reformed.”
“I died,” Devereaux said.
Mac watched him.
Devereaux got up from the chair and went to the same window. Both men stared down the narrow length of L Street.
Devereaux said, “I can almost tell you the moment I died. I won’t tell her that, it might frighten her. I don’t mind telling you. I thought nothing mattered except a few things that I wanted to see and preserve in mind. I had three or four things that I wanted to see endlessly because they filled up everything. I couldn’t have those things. Then I met her and she began to show me how important it was, the old feeling I used to have for three or four things.”
“What things?”
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t explain it to you, but you can believe I had those things and they were enough. Then I couldn’t have them anymore. And I shut down. Until Rita Macklin reminded me.”