Nevertheless, I was still much better off than Alex, who drifted in and out of consciousness, the result of a bad concussion. His condition was described as “guarded,” whatever that means. I knew what they were worried about. I’d overheard the nurses talking about him: swelling of the brain.
I kept seeing him in the ambulance, the mask over his face, and tubes running from his arms. He was so still, his face the color of chalk: the man who’d befriended me after my divorce, a kind of second father to me, who’d made me feel at home in a new neighborhood, looked after my house while I traveled, who was indispensable now, in the shop, and who, more than anything else, was my friend, in such distress.
And that other fellow, who was he? What was he doing there? Was this a robbery gone wrong? Who had done what to whom? Had the man in the storage room hit Alex? It could not possibly, knowing Alex, have been the other way around. And if he had hit Alex, what then had happened to him? He hadn’t tied his own hands behind his back. My head hurt thinking about it, and none of it made any sense.
I was allowed to leave the hospital late the next morning. I asked to see Alex before I left, but they wouldn’t let me. He was in intensive care, and only relatives were allowed in. I pointed out that I was the closest thing to a relative he had, but even then they suggested I come back the following day and they’d consider my request. PC Chu drove me home, where Moira was waiting for me. She bustled around very efficiently, getting me settled in my favorite armchair, bringing me lunch, and trying to make me laugh.
“In case you’re too traumatized to figure it out,” she said, “the tempura shrimp, the California rolls, and the yellow fin tuna sushi are for you. The yuppie deluxe, organic, gourmet cat food in this lovely jar with the darling little hat on it is for Diesel. You may share the single malt scotch.”
I tried to smile to please her, I really did, but gave it up. I felt close to tears most of the time, and anyway my face, like every other part of my body, hurt. And there was much to be done.
“I’ve got to get up,” I said. “I have to clean up the shop: I can’t leave it all to Sarah, and we’ve got to get back in business. We can’t afford to be closed for long.” I tried to stand up.
“No. Listen,” Moira said, pushing me back. “Your friends are on this. You can’t get into the building, anyway. The police won’t let you. As soon as they do, we’ll get a group together and do whatever needs doing. Sarah will be back soon. Until she gets here, the rest of us will pitch in.”
I thought about that. “What do you mean, the police won’t let me in? Why not?” I demanded. “It’s my shop!”
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I expect they have to investigate things, and don’t want a lot of people getting in the way. I’m sure that’s it.”
Moira tried very hard to get me to rest, but I couldn’t. I decided that I would call my insurance adjuster and arrange to have him meet me at the store the next morning, by which time, I was sure, I’d be up and around. I’d been dealing with the same insurance company for years, had never had a claim, and did not expect any problems.
The person I usually dealt with was not in, but I was referred to an agent by the name of Rod McGarrigle. Rod and I did not hit it off. In the first place, he had a rather distracted air about him. I had the impression that he was doing something else while talking on the phone to me, because from time to time I could tell that he put his hand over the mouthpiece while I was talking to him. His answers to my questions about coverage, the possibility of payment for lost business, and so on were discouragingly vague.
Finally, in exasperation, I asked him bluntly, “Am I or am I not covered for this?”‘
“You are covered for this, Ms. McClintoch,” he replied, “unless, of course, you, your partner, or anyone in your employ is found to be guilty of a felony.”
A felony. How nice. “Then I will expect payment promptly,” I said tartly before hanging up in his ear.
I told Moira what he’d said, and she made sympathetic noises, but she changed the subject immediately and began to tell me droll little stories about how Brian had been traumatized by meeting her friends the previous day. I gathered the relationship had not survived drinks with her friends, but she didn’t seem perturbed about it. Even in my painkiller-induced grogginess, I was beginning to wonder what exactly was going on that I was missing. It did not take long to find out.
PC Chu went off duty soon after that but was immediately replaced by PC Mancino, a fresh-faced young man who insisted upon calling me ma’am, and who told me several times how proud he was to have worn blue, to use his expression, for seven years now. I took this to be his way of telling me that he was older and more experienced than he looked.
Shortly thereafter he was joined by his sergeant, Lewis he said his name was, and if he had a first name, he didn’t reveal it. He struck me as a man who had no perceptible imagination or sense of humor, and who was on top of that a stickler for detail. He began by asking Moira to leave, which she did, reluctantly, telling him she would return in forty-five minutes, implying by her tone and her glance that he should be gone by the time she got back. Moira is not to be messed with, I’ve learned, and as Sergeant Lewis seemed in imminent danger of finding out for himself.
Lewis talked in phrases punctuated by emphasis rather than sentences, almost as if he thought he was restricted to a finite number of words in his lifetime and didn’t want to run out before his final exit. He also had a disconcerting habit, whether by design or just because his mind worked that way, of asking questions in what appeared to be an entirely random order. He asked, in my opinion, an inordinate number of questions about where I’d been from 7:35 on, and with whom, and what I had done from the time I’d left the bar in the Four Seasons until the police and fire truck had arrived at the shop. None of my answers seemed precise enough to satisfy him. PC Mancino took laborious notes.
I told him in great detail about drinks in the bar, who had been there, when people had arrived, and then added, “I’m sure my friends can confirm all of this for you.”
“Taken their statements already,” he replied noncommittally.
“All right, then,” I said. Why exactly would he need to do that? I wondered. Only minutes into the interview and I was beginning to realize that Lewis and I were not going to get along. Here one of my dearest friends has been badly hurt, I said to myself, some stranger has ended up dead in my store, which just happens to be in flames at the time, and this fellow wants to know how many drops of vermouth there were in my martini and where I parked my car.
“Southwest corner Yorkville and Avenue Road. Then what?”
“I realized I’d forgotten my keys, left them at the shop, so I went back hoping to catch Alex before he left. As I’ve already told you,” I added. This was the third time he’d asked for some clarification on a matter I considered perfectly straightforward.
“These your keys!” Lewis asked, oblivious to my dislike, pulling a black-and-white photo of a key ring from his briefcase.
I nodded.
“Sure?”
“I can’t imagine they would be anyone else’s. The key ring’s a gift from a friend in Mexico. It’s silver, and an unusual design—the Chac Mool from Chichen Itza.”
I looked over at the puzzled PC Mancino. In seven years of wearing blue, he had not encountered the Maya/Toltec city of Chichen Itza, nor the angry god that guards one of the temples. I spelled both for him. He blushed.
“Keys all there?”
“I think so: house, Alex’s place, Moira’s, car, shop door—same key opens the back and the front doors— warehouse, storage room. That’s it. Yes, all there.”