Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“What a time you’ve had of it, Mister—?”

“Randolph. Larry’s last name is Podesta. I don’t know the room number—”

“You just missed Larry. He’s such a regular. Most people would give up after a couple years. Not Larry. The room is in the left wing. Follow the green stripe in the tiles. She’s in room six.”

“Thank you,” Max said. “I’ll, uh, catch up with Larry later.”

He began hustling down the hall, his mind going faster than his legs. She? A couple years? An ailing mother with Alzheimer’s? He did not want to feel sorry for the man or feel like a creep for faking his way in here.

“Mister Randolph,” the receptionist called sharply.

What the hell? He turned. Had Podesta come back for some reason?

She was still alone at the desk and smiling at him. “Do you need a cane? We have plenty.”

“Ah, no. Thank you. You’re very kind and perceptive, but I need to learn to do without.”

She nodded. “You don’t need very long with Teresa, just to feel better that you’ve seen her and can tell your cousin so.”

Max moved on toward room six.

Creep, he berated himself. He was glad he couldn’t recall what ruses he’d used in his previous life of counterterrorism. Sleeping with the enemy had probably been one; Molina had been right. Certainly he’d done just that accidentally his first time out, with Kathleen O’Connor. And maybe again, with his partner in escape, Revienne.

This was a top facility. Spotless. No usual urine smell—and he had empathy for that now. Only Febreze, as in a modern morgue. Cheery decor and colors, an air of attendants near but not hovering. Just the kind of place he’d put Garry in rehabilitation if … he’d survived.

Max slowed to approach the door numbered six. It was always hard to seem normal around the gravely ill, but he guessed this lady’s comprehension was pretty nil, and his visit wouldn’t alarm her. Old people can be as trusting as children if their minds have decamped.

In fact, he almost jumped a little when he spotted some stuffed animals inside—a pink tiger and a blue whale. Could this be a child?

He paused in the open doorway, aware that a nurse would be doing a bed check soon. Any minute. He’d have to do some fact-checking himself, on the patient’s relationship to Dirty Larry Podesta, for instance. The sly nickname seemed obscene in this pleasant place, with its very serious reason for being.

He let his eyes pan up from the foot of the bed to the frail patient in it, her thin hair still showing the morning’s brush marks, her face funeral-parlor composed, only her arms visible under the flowered hospital gown, as thin and angular as a high-fashion model’s.

He recalled Revienne’s anorexic sister, the suicide.

For this girl was not a child, but she was wrenchingly young, maybe in her late teens.

And cradled in her left scarecrow arm, wearing something sassy, shiny, purple, and Lady Gaga, lay a late-edition Barbie doll.

*

Max Kinsella could have used that cane now. He sank onto the visitor’s chair. And just looked.

“I tried to prepare you, Mister Randolph,” a voice said behind him.

He turned to find the receptionist in the doorway. Those rubber-soled white nurses’ shoes had come up behind him as silently as an assassin’s. Did she suspect something?

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the desk?” he asked.

“I had someone watch it. Not everyone who visits can deal with patients in a coma. Did you know her?”

“Not since she was a child.” Liar.

“I was worried,” she said, “the shock might impact your injuries.”

“Now I see,” Max said, realizing she considered him a sort of patient, too. “The cane.”

She eyed his legs. “Was it an accident?”

“Ye-es.” Not quite true either, but “murder attempt” was not a useful conversational gambit.

“Both legs?”

“Yes.” What a relief to be honest with this damn saintly woman. “A couple months ago. I was, ah, in a coma for several weeks. In … in Europe.”

“You came out all right?”

“Memory issues.” Another honest answer. Wait! He could use that to pump her.

“I don’t even remember Teresa’s full name. Just saw her as child. Playing. Running.” Scum.

“Oh, such a shame. Teresa Paddock. She only has a disabled grandmother and her stepbrother left. Horrible case.”

“Accident?”

The nurse’s eyes avoided his.

Max knew just what to say. “Larry’s not aware of the extent of my injuries. Coma. The memory loss. I don’t want to ask too many questions, make it worse for him. I’ve been overseas on a job, for, oh, before Teresa was struck down. What is it now, how long?”

“More than five years. She’s been here two years.”

He joined her in regarding the girl, shaking his head. “Somebody … did this, didn’t they?”

“It was in all the papers. Horrible. In the west shopping-mall parking lot. Attempted strangulation. Someone came by. She lived. Just.”

Max’s recent memory dominated mind trolled for his former deductive processes. Eureka! He visualized puzzle pieces dropping like manna from the heavens above, assembling visually above his head. Dirty Larry. His stepsister. Attack. Mall parking lot. Barbie doll.

Dirty thoughts assembling. Beautiful young starstruck stepsister. Hanky-panky. She had to be shut up. Had to hide a motivated murder inside a storm flurry of mystifying ones. D. L. went into undercover police work, could go anywhere, unwatched … unlike an ordinary partnered cop. Oh, my God. Looking at this … broken doll of a young woman in her pink-and-blue nursing-home bed and thinking these things brought a fog of pollution into the room.

“Mister Randolph? Maybe the facts are too much for your own condition.”

“No.” He shook his head, violently. “The facts are never too much. Has the attempted killer not been caught?”

“Never,” she said, sighing deeply. “And there’ve been more deaths. The papers call them the Barbie Doll Killer’s work.” She nodded at the doll in Teresa’s arms. “She had a big Barbie collection. Dreamed of stardom the way kids do these days. American Idol. Anybody can be rich and famous in an instant. It’s so innocent and tragic. Young girls today have no notion of the dangers in the world. They go from Barbie dolls to Pussycat Dolls.”

“So her parents were absent?”

“I don’t know the particulars.”

I will, Max thought. He checked his watch.

“I need to go,” he told her.

“I give you a lot of credit for having the will to see her when your own strength has been so compromised.”

He stood, stumbling a little. His limbs liked to “fall asleep” on him still.

She offered a shoulder.

What a woman!

“If I felt twenty years younger, I’d ask you for a date,” he said.

She chuckled, being the one with twenty years on him. “I don’t date younger men.”

They walked out together, the clock above the reception desk showing the big hand on twelve and the small one on ten.

Max pulled out the Prius Smart key with the car-rental logo on it.

He had a feeling this was an occasion when his old self would amp up the charm, leave the lady with a false sense of almost flirtation. Charm was a tawdry bauble compared to compassion.

“Thank you, Nurse Barbara,” he said. “My friend … in my accident … died. On the spot. Head trauma. If he’d lived to recuperate, this is the kind of place I’d have hoped he could have come to.”

“What a lovely vote of confidence, Mister Randolph. I do hope I’ve been of help to you tonight.”

“More than you’ll ever know,” Max said.

*

And than I deserve …

Max sat outside in the car, brooding. Gandolph had teased him during their journeys about Irish dark nights of the soul.