“Not the same thing, Fred,” she told him, unimpressed by his calculated romantic drivel.
She was determined. He was sorry to see it, but he was buoyed by the fact that her spirit had returned full force even if her body was still ailing.
“I’ll talk to Dr. Galt,” he said. “We’ll see what he thinks of the idea.”
She nodded. “Fair enough.” She pried the lid off the little paper container and began to eat yogurt with a white plastic spoon. “You want some of this stuff?” She motioned toward what was left on the tray: part of the ersatz stew, most of the rust-colored Jell-O, and the brown bread, which she hadn’t touched.
“I’ll get something in the cafeteria,” he said, “after I tell the nurses to watch for our WASP friend, then make sure Lapella is on her way back up to your room.”
“She’s been here since seven-thirty this morning, Fred. She needs a break.”
“She’s getting paid to do a job,” Carver said, a little angry that Lapella, after all her big talk about being more effective and responsible than McGregor gave her credit for, was sitting down in the cafeteria while anyone could walk into Beth’s room.
“Go easy on her, Fred. She’s all right. Her only flaws are she needs to eat and sleep. I haven’t even noticed her leaving to go to the bathroom.”
“Two F’s and an A,” Carver said, irritated.
He could read the look in Beth’s eye. She saw how he was and had given up on trying to calm him. He was on his own and could live with the consequences. Sometimes she was too much like a mother to him.
Only sometimes.
He went to the bed and leaned over and kissed her lips, still cold from the last bite of frozen yogurt.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll make sure she comes back up to your room, though, so one of us is here. And I’ll try to find Dr. Galt and talk to him about you leaving. You might be safer back at the cottage anyway.”
“I can work there better, that’s for sure.”
“Don’t do anything without me,” he said, moving toward the door.
“Never, Xerxes.”
“Who’s that?”
“Damned fool that got rid of Queen Vashti, book of Esther.”
He nodded and left the room.
At the nurses’ station down the hall, he described the WASP to the head nurse and asked her to call security immediately if the man appeared on this floor. Then he walked toward the elevators at the other end of the hall.
“Mr. Carver.”
He stopped and turned. Officer Lapella was seated on an orange vinyl chair in a tiny alcove that served as a waiting area for radiology. She had half a sandwich in her hand and a crumpled potato chip bag in her lap.
“I thought you were down in the cafeteria,” Carver said.
“That’s where I told Beth I was going, but I bought some stuff from the vending machine and ate here, where I could see anyone coming or going into her room. I saw you enter about fifteen minutes ago, so I relaxed a little and enjoyed my sandwich.”
Carver smiled. His world made sense again; McGregor, as usual, had misjudged someone under his command.
“No one’s been by except the doctor,” Lapella said. “Nothing unusual’s happened.”
“How does Beth seem to you?”
“She’s a willful woman, Mr. Carver. That’s why I gave up and agreed with her that I had to have something to eat and was going to the cafeteria.”
“She’s a Jezebel,” Carver said.
“I hope not, Mr. Carver. Jezebel was willful, too, but cruel. She was eventually killed and her body was thrown to the dogs.”
Carver was astonished. “What is this? Is everyone but me an expert on the Bible?”
“That’s just Sunday school stuff,” Lapella said. “I used to teach it in my church over in Sarasota.” She raised her eyebrows. “But what did you mean about Beth being a Jezebel?”
He told her about the message on his answering machine.
“I’d say that sounds serious,” Lapella said when he’d finished. She automatically glanced toward the door to Beth’s room, halfway down the hall. “I’ll be here at the hospital the rest of the day.”
“What if McGregor orders otherwise?”
“Hell, Mr. Carver, McGregor’s probably forgotten I exist. I’m just another dumb broad-assed cop, not important to him. That’s why he gave me to you in the first place. It gets me out of the way.”
“He did me a favor.”
“And me,” she said with a slight smile. “I’m finished eating, so I’m going back to Beth’s room. You had lunch?”
“No.”
“So go on down to the cafeteria and eat, then maybe you should come back up and drop in on room three-eleven, talk to Delores Bravo.”
“The nurse who was hurt in the clinic explosion?”
“Right. The one who lost a foot and part of her leg. I talked to a nurse who spent some time with her. She told me about some things she said about the bombing. You go see Delores Bravo, she might be able to shed a little light.”
“You’ve shed more than a little light,” Carver told her, patting her shoulder.
And he did go down to the cafeteria and ate a salad and a roast beef sandwich. But he was preoccupied and ate in a hurry, hardly tasting his food.
Then he took an elevator to the third floor, wanting but not wanting to see what the bomb had left of Delores Bravo.
16
Delores Bravo was sitting up in bed the way Beth had been, only the hospital tray had been removed and there was a People magazine folded in her lap. She was a beautiful Latin woman in her twenties, though right now she looked old and drawn and had deep, shadowed circles beneath her eyes. Someone had combed her long, lush hair, and it lay in graceful dark waves over the white surface of her angled pillow. A thin white sheet covered her slender body; there was a tentlike contraption beneath the material where her foot had been amputated.
“Miss Bravo?”
She looked over at Carver with pained dark eyes. Don’t hurt me, they screamed. I’ve had all I can take.
Gently he told her who he was, and that he wanted to talk with her.
“The police have already asked me questions,” she said with a trace of accent, perhaps Cuban. “Lots of them.”
“Mine might be different,” Carver told her. “Besides, the police don’t always share their information with me.”
“The FBI was here, that man Wicker.”
“We know each other,” Carver said.
“But you don’t share confidences?”
He smiled and shook his head no.
She glanced down at his cane. “You get around okay with that?”
“Not bad. My knee’s locked so my leg’s bent at a thirty-degree angle. It’ll be that way for life.”
“You have an accident?”
“Shot. When I was a cop in Orlando.”
“That’s a shame.”
“What happened to you is a shame, too, Delores.”
“You gonna tell me there are worse things than losing your foot and part of your leg?”
“No. You know there are worse things. You’ll develop a new way of looking at yourself and other people. One day you won’t think about your artificial leg and your limp until somebody reminds you of them by glancing at you oddly as you walk past, but the look they give you won’t bother you much anymore. By then you’ll know who and what you are.”
“What if who I become isn’t okay with me?”
“It will be.”
She sighed and scrunched her head back into the pillow. Her black hair caught and held the light. “How’s your friend Beth Jackson?”
“She’s better.”
“The nurses told me about her. She lost her baby.”
“We both did.”
“Dr. Grimm was a fine doctor, a good man. The man who killed him and did this to me, I’ve been reading about him. He’s a religious person, yet he could do something like this and not think it wrong.”
“You believe Norton did it?”
She looked at him, surprised that he had any doubt. “Of course I believe he did.”
“I mean, on his own?” Carver amended.