Jan Burke - Goodnight, Irene

As I opened the door, I saw the room was full of flowers and cards from well-wishers. Frank was sleeping. In some ways, he looked worse than the night before. His bruises were quite dramatic, even on his sleeping face. He had two terrific shiners from the broken nose, which was still very swollen. His forehead was swollen, too, and much more discolored than my own. The swelling on his lip had gone down a little. I noticed he wasn’t so pale today.

He opened his eyes and took a while to wake up completely. His face suddenly went ashen, reflecting a wave of pain that was hard to watch. I found myself remembering visits to my father during his last illness, and how he had told me that he always hurt the most when he first woke up. I wondered if it was the same for Frank. He saw me and smiled a little. “Hi,” he said. He tried to bring himself around.

“Hi yourself. How’s the head?” I asked. Damn silly question.

He didn’t answer right away. “Truth?”

“Truth.”

“Hurts. A lot.”

He was talking slowly, with difficulty.

“Do you want me to come back later?”

“No, stay awhile. Okay?”

“Sure. But you don’t have to talk.”

“I know,” he said. He reached for my hand and held it. His was a rough hand, with calluses here and there, but it felt good to hold it. A little scary, but good. He closed his eyes and soon fell back to sleep.

I sat there with him like that for about an hour. Throughout that time, I fought down the panic welling up within me, a rising desire to leave. During the eternity spent sitting in that wreck the day before, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I had tried not to focus on my fears about the seriousness of his injuries. Now I had to admit to myself that even knowing that they were not life-threatening, I was still uneasy. Too much experience with hospitals as places where people were lost to you forever. Too many good-byes to people dressed just as Frank was now, in rooms like this, with rolling trays and curtains and bedrails.

I argued with myself that Frank was not critically injured, did not have cancer like my father had, would only be here for a few days. I didn’t let go of his hand.

As I sat and listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing, I realized that I had naively expected to be able to come in and chatter away with him, as if a good night’s sleep would get him over the concussion. I also realized that I missed having him to talk to about the case. I would have to do what I could on my own until he was up and around.

As if he could hear my thoughts, he woke up again. He seemed a little more alert this time. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s just that…well, I just feel bad that you got hurt like this.”

“Don’t be scared.”

“It’s not a matter of being scared.”

He grinned that half-grin. “I’ll be okay soon.”

He didn’t look as if he’d be okay soon, but I smiled back anyway.

He started to move his head, then seemed to get dizzy for a minute. He blanched and drew in a breath, closing his eyes. He never increased the pressure on my hand, but I saw him clench the sheets in his other hand.

I waited for it to pass, then said, “I’m going to go now. You need to rest. I’ll try to come back later today, after work.”

“Irene, wait,” he said, just above a whisper.

I waited.

“Talk to Pete about everything. No secrets, okay? You can trust him.”

I gave his hand a parting squeeze and said, “Get better, Frank. I’ll come back to see you tonight.”

He held on. “Promise-no secrets from Pete.”

“If Wrigley has this room wiretapped, I’m a dead woman. I’m in here holding hands with a cop, for Christ’s sakes.” I looked at his battered face, then added, “But being as you have saved my life twice in about as many days, okay, I promise.”

He relaxed and let go of my hand. “Thanks. Come back, okay?”

He was asleep again before I was out of the room.

ON MY WAY OUT, I decided I would stop by a burger stand I had passed on the way to the hospital. As I exited the double doors of St. Anne’s, I glanced up at the tall monolith of dark mirrored glass across the street and froze on the sidewalk. At the top of the building were the initials BLP.

BLP. Bank of Las Piernas. The fact that I had failed to think of this when reading a reference to money in O’Connor’s notes made me feel like I was losing my edge. I tried to remember the computer phrases. Something about AM. I crossed the street and went into the bank.

The Bank of Las Piernas’s downtown branch was done up in a modern style. Contemporary art sculptures with intriguing but unidentifiable shapes bedecked the interior courtyard entrance. Inside the building itself, the tellers and other branch officers worked in a room that was cavernous and marbled, so that those who applied for loans felt akin to Dorothy stepping up to meet the Great Oz. It was fairly busy for a Wednesday afternoon.

I walked past the dozen or so people corralled in the stanchions and ropes waiting for tellers, and started reading name badges. This behavior was frowned on by the customers in line, who thought I was trying to butt in front of them, and by the tellers, who were wary of the strange bruised woman wandering outside the cattle chute.

Soon a pencil of a woman came striding toward me, purpose in every step. She was tall and thin; there was absolutely no shape on her that couldn’t be drawn with a ruler. She had a gold-plated name tag that said her name was Miss Ramona Ralston. “Can I help you?” she asked, but help didn’t seem to be what she had in mind.

“No, thanks,” I said, stepping around her and continuing my walk past the teller windows. She seemed not to know what to do about it for a minute, but only a minute.

“Excuse me, miss?”

I turned around and looked at her as if she were interrupting a Nobel Prize-winning effort, and said, “Yes?”

“What you need to do is talk to the branch manager.”

“How can you possibly know what I need when you don’t even know why I’m here?”

“Well, if you want to see a teller you need to go over where it says, ‘Please Enter Line Here.’ But if you aren’t willing to abide by the rules of common courtesy, then you need to see the branch manager.”

“Look, Miss Ralston, I am not trying to cut in front of everyone in line. I won’t stop at a teller’s window. I don’t need to talk to you or to the branch manager. You may go back to whatever you were doing before I came in.”

She decided to shadow me, following a few paces behind me. I passed about ten windows, reading the name plates on the desks in the operations area behind the tellers. I stopped abruptly when I saw “Ann Marchenko” on one of them. Miss Ralston plowed into my back, hard enough so that it ended up being a tackle. Before I knew it, I was sprawled on the floor, with Miss Ralston right on top of me.

Unfortunately, my stiff muscles made getting to my feet a slow process. While I listened to a constant stream of flustered apologies from Miss Ralston, I tried to force myself back up to my feet. Soon a small crowd had formed around us, and a tall man with an athletic build came striding over to us.

“Give her some room, everybody,” he commanded. “Give her some room.” He put a burly hand down and I grabbed on, and he lifted me up effortlessly. “Are you all right, miss?”

“Yes, I think so,” I said. He was a handsome man, with dark hair graying at the temples and almost jet-black eyes. He spoke with a slight French accent. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.

“Miss Ralston, what is the meaning of this?” he asked.