“This is Mr. Rawlins, Nurse Brown,” Tina Monroe was saying. “He has permission from Dr. Dommer to visit Miss Landry at any time.”
“Why is Miss Landry awake?” was Brown’s answer. “Haven’t you given her her medicine?”
“Yes. But she was nervous so I’m sitting here with her for a while—until she relaxes a little more.”
“Give her another dose,” Brown said in an almost threatening tone.
“The charts don’t allow for that, Nurse Brown,” the serious black nurse replied.
“Excuse me,” I said then.
“What?” Nurse Brown said.
“I’m here on official police business. I have to speak to Miss Landry and Miss Monroe. So if you don’t mind, we need some privacy.”
The guard and the nurse didn’t want to obey but even they knew that it was a new world.
“Come on, Tommy,” Nurse Brown said. “Let’s go check Dr. Dommer’s instructions.”
They turned away slowly, looking for a way back in even as they exited.
“What are you doin’ here at this time’a night, Mr. Rawlins?” Geneva asked me. “Have you found that man?”
I perched myself at the foot of the high bed.
“I found out how I could find him,” I said. “But I can’t do anything about it until morning so I thought I’d drop by and make sure that you were fine. I just thought I’d look in and see you sleepin’. You know you do need your rest.”
“They give me pills that put me about halfway ’sleep. Then I start thinkin’ about Nola and I wake up. But Tina comes in and talks to me.”
“Everything’s going to be all right, Miss Landry,” the nurse said.
She was filled with the beauty of youth. Her light brown skin and luscious hair, her child’s hands and woman’s figure. Her lips were in the shape of a chubby heart and her eyes were always looking somewhere else to keep you from seeing the hunger they held. And even though everything about her was geared to making babies and a home she sat there night after night with Geneva Landry, listening to her grief and loss.
“You’re a godsend,” Geneva said and her eyes fluttered, filling with tears.
“In a day or two it will all be settled,” I said. “And I’ll make sure that Nola gets a nice service.”
“You will?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Mr. Rawlins?” Tina Monroe asked.
“Yes?”
“Are you going to stay here for a while?”
“Until mornin’ I guess.”
Tina stood up. “I have to make my rounds and I won’t feel so bad doing it if you stay here with Miss Landry.”
“No problem.”
I watched the young black woman in white move through the doorway.
“She’s beautiful,” Geneva Landry said.
“She sure is,” I added. And I meant it even though it wasn’t really true. Tina was handsome, she was well built, but not beautiful.
“It’s nice that she can come and sit with you,” I added.
“Oh yes. You know I think I might go crazy in here if it wasn’t for her. I start thinkin’ about Nola and my mind feels like there’s razor blades in it.”
“Don’t think about it,” I said. “Let it go.”
Geneva had lost weight in the few hours since I had seen her. Her face was drawn and her eyes drifted in her head even when she was talking to me.
“I cain’t help it, Mr. Rawlins. I should have told Nola to get away from that white man. I know what men like that can do to a woman or a girl.”
“Men like what?” I asked.
“White,” she said as if I were a fool. “White men. They rotten. I mean they smile and say nice things in company but when they get you alone it’s another story . . . another story altogether.”
She started to cry and I took her hands in mine.
“You don’t want to cry, Miss Landry,” I said. “Nola’s in heaven, you know. She’s in a better place. And the man who harmed her will pay the price. I promise you that.”
“Will he lose an eye like the one he took from my beautiful Scarlet?”
“More,” I said. “More.”
The promise of retribution seemed to calm Geneva. She kissed my forearm and then laid a cheek against it. I pulled one hand free and stroked her cheek. She sighed and shuddered and then drifted off into a deep sleep.
I sat there for over an hour stroking her face now and then. Whenever I touched her she started and then smiled.
Light filled the small window near her bed. The birds began their morning songs and Tina returned. When she saw me sitting so close to the sleeping woman she smiled.
“She’s a darling,” Tina said.
She leaned over the bed and kissed the older woman’s brow. At the time I thought that was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The feeling Tina had for her charge made my heart run hot.
When we went out into the hall she told me, “My shift’s over in fifteen minutes.”
I looked at my watch. It was five forty-five.
“Can we go get some coffee after?”
“Okay.”
19
Nip’s Coffee Shop on Olympic opened at six. We got there fifteen minutes later but there were already a dozen or more customers eating scrambled eggs and doughnuts, drinking reconstituted orange juice and coffee that tasted mostly like the urn it came from.
We sat in a window booth across from each other.
Tina didn’t have a beautiful face. It would have been plain if it weren’t for that inner light young people have. As it was she probably had her pick of the young men down in the riot area. I tried not to think about it and so I started talking.
“Marianne said that you two see each other in the morning,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Tina replied. “She usually comes in at about eight-fifteen and then we talk until she has to be on the job at nine.”
“But you get off at six.”
“I use the coffee room to study for my RN tests after work,” she said. “And when Marianne come in we talk about it. She’s real sweet. Don’t know nuthin’ but at least she willin’ to find out.”
“What can I get for ya?” a man asked.
It was the chef. He was skinny everywhere but his stomach, which was half the size of a volleyball. He wore white pants with a checkered T-shirt and a pale blue apron. If he shaved that morning it didn’t take. His chin was still gray. His eyebrows were so long that they resembled horns. There was even hair growing out of the man’s ears.
He’d come from behind the stove to take our orders. The waitress, a small strawberry-blond thing, was behind the counter, staring at us with a terrified expression on her face.
“I could use a couple’a scrambled eggs and ham with orange juice and some dark toast,” I said, smiling for the man. “And coffee for the both of us.”
“Juice and an English muffin,” Tina added.
He jotted down our order and strode back to the kitchen. On the way he threw the receipt pad at the waitress.
She took up two coffee cups and brought them to our table. She was so shaky that the saucers under our cups were filled with coffee.
I watched the waitress going back to the counter. Once she looked over her shoulder. When our eyes met she bumped into a customer sitting on his stool.
“Watch it there, Margie,” the jovial man said to the waitress. “My wife might have spies in the kitchen.”
Margie, I thought.
“She’s a good woman,” Tina said.
“Miss Landry?”
“Yes.”
“She seems nice,” I said, “but I guess she’s had a real hard time.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Tina said. “Miss Landry been through the wringer three times and now the Lord got her goin’ back again.”
“You mean Nola’s death.”
“Yes I do. Her niece gettin’ killed like that is gonna take years off that poor woman’s life. She’s getting weaker every day.”
“What did happen to her?” I asked.
“Nola?”
“No. What happened to Geneva? She told me that there were things that happened to her that she never told Nola, that if she had told her maybe she’d still be alive. What do you think she meant by that?”