Linda Fairstein - Entombed

"Right here, Alex," he said, walking beside me and taking my hand in his. "You know Mike isn't really a heartless son of a bitch. He's just not a first-grader like I am. Might need to send him back to the Academy for a refresher course in detection. Nobody was going to leave that park on my watch."

"What's the room number, Pops?" Mike asked.

"Six-thirty. Elevator straight ahead."

"I want a drink."

"Not yet, kid. Doesn't mix with those painkillers the doc's got you on."

"Why can't I just take the medications and go home?"

"'Cause whoever tried to put a hole in that thick skull," Mike said, "left a sizable little lump that might have to be coated with peroxide if it sticks out any farther on your scalp. I just knew we'd get to play doctor together eventually."

I looked up at Mercer. "I'm not kidding. I really don't want him in my face all night. I don't want him anywhere near me. He's bad for my blood pressure."

"You want an apology, blondie? That's what you want?"

"I want to be alone," I said, Garbo accent and all.

We got on the elevator and rode it up to six while Mike chattered. "You want me to flog myself and put on a hair shirt for not having had the good sense to think you were walled up behind a door or buried alive with a black cat. Right? It just goes to prove my theory that this would never have happened if you put on a little weight."

"Shut him up, Mercer."

"Fat people are harder to kidnap. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Wallace? You never read in the paper that the victim of an abduction weighed in at three-fifty. They're always skinny broads like you who get carted away. It's simply a fact, and you can do something about it for the future, young lady."

We wheeled in front of the nurses' station and Mike put the brakes on the chair. He lifted a bouquet of flowers from the top of the desk and dropped to his knees in front of several doctors, nurses, and visitors who were passing by.

"Coop, as long as I live I swear I'll never walk out on you again. I'll never criticize your perfume or your heels or your hair color or your temper or-"

I unhitched the brake and pushed myself away from the onlookers toward the wing that corresponded to the room number I had been assigned.

"I'll stop to look under the bed and inside the closet and even rip up the floorboards next time I can't find you."

"So much for my anonymity," I said to Mercer, who had taken charge of pushing me. "If they didn't know who I was before I got up here, I guess they'll figure it out."

A nurse followed us into the room. "Need any help getting into the bed?" she asked, taking my chart from the bewildered escort. "Stanley Schrem called. He'll be by for rounds later this evening."

She waited until I settled back against the pillow and raised the bed's metal railing before she and the escort left the room.

"Feel good?" Mercer asked.

"Safe and soft and clean and better. I would not say that 'good' is a word that comes to mind tonight."

Mike was in the doorway. He must have stopped in every room along the way and cajoled patients out of their flowers. His arms were loaded with assortments-ten or twelve of them in a wild variety of colors-pulled from their vases and dripping water down the front of his clothes and onto the floor.

"I'm just a fool whose intentions are good," he sang to me, crossing the room and laying the dozens of wet flowers across the crisp white sheets that covered my legs. "Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

"Misbegotten, misguided, misogynistic, misinformed," I said. "Just add misunderstood to your long list of 'mis'es."

I looked over at Mercer, who was leaning against the windowsill. "So, the only person who knew we were going to be at the cottage was Zeldin. And I guess Phelps, the groundskeeper, must have heard him suggest it. And Gino Guidi. Maybe three people in the world. Doesn't that give you a head start?"

"Don't make yourself crazy tonight, Alex. We're working on it."

"I've been inside that torture chamber, with clanging noises pounding at my aching head, pinched and prodded and observed by the entire ER staff. What else have I got to think about but who clobbered me and why? And what they were going to do when they came back for round two?"

"Zeldin and Phelps were in a meeting with a dozen other staffers from the time we left the gardens. Guidi's secretary is the one who dispatched Kathleen Bailey to be our guide. He was downtown all morning. She's not even sure she told him about it when he called in."

"Well, is anybody going to tell me what happened to me?" I asked. "And would you please take these back to the other patients, Mike? It smells like a funeral parlor in here."

"I got a pizza on the way. Extra pepperoni, extra mushrooms, no anchovies. No worms, either. Special delivery. You'll be like new in no time," he said, scooping the flowers off my legs and walking to the hallway.

"Soup," I said to Mercer. "A hot bowl of soup is all I want. And a drink."

NYU Hospital was next door to the medical examiner's office. We had tested every deli and restaurant within sight of the morgue and I knew where the best chicken soup and the closest Dewar's could be found.

"The soup we can do. I think you're grounded on the alcohol."

"I suppose they have to put a cop on my door, too?"

Mercer laughed. "We're camping out with you."

"You can't do that. It's ridiculous. I understand they have to station someone outside the room, but you guys can go home and get a good night's sleep."

"Hush, Miss Cooper."

"Now you'll make me feel guilty on top of feeling stupid."

"Battaglia made a few calls. The room next door is empty. One of us will snooze in this chair and the other can stretch out in the bed. We'll take turns. Better us than some guy from the Thirteenth who doesn't know your favorite lullabies like we do."

"Yeah, we get demerits when bad things happen on our shift," Mike said, as he came back into the room. "I'm already down points 'cause of your antics today."

"I'm going to ask you again. What happened?"

Mike and Mercer looked at each other.

Mercer spoke first. "The cops in the precinct think it was a prank. They-"

"A prank? Are they nuts? Haven't they ever read Poe?"

"Hear me out." He stood up and walked to my bed, lowered the rail and sat beside me. "There was a mugging down at the end of the park, in the playground behind the bandshell. A fifteen-yearold girl was watching over her kid brother and she got roughed up by some homies. Threw her down, snatched her wallet, touched some body parts they shouldn't have."

"I heard the screams. I remember that much."

"It was three guys, part of a gang. Wannabe baby Bloods. Punks from the 'hood who were just running around roughing folks up."

"Were they caught?"

"Not yet. They scattered in different directions."

"I saw one run across the street."

"Yeah," Mike said. "He's the one I figured maybe you tried to follow."

"The girl who was mugged-she knows who they are?"

Mercer smoothed the bedcover. "She's not saying yet. She's got to live there on One Hundred Ninety-second Street without any protection-and she's smart enough to know that."

"And what does that have to do with me?"

"The cops figure the gang was just wilding. While a few of them were causing trouble at the south end of the park, a couple of them saw you standing alone and-"

"I was alone for maybe sixty seconds."

"It only took two to smack you over the head with a two-by-four."

"Is that what it was?"

"There was one at the bottom of the front steps. It's at the lab now, being tested for blood and hair," Mercer said. "Then they carried you into the root cellar, tied your hands with your own scarf, gagged you, and tucked you under the boards."