Swan Dive - Jeremiah Healy (7 page)

I settled deep into the
burlappy couch that is so unexpectedly cushiony and enveloping, it
seems to eat people. If I were Roy, and I were going to visit Hanna
in retaliation, I’d wait until the nurse was off duty so she could
give me another alibi. That left me about six hours, plenty of time
for a nap and a drive to Samaritan Hospital.

* * *

Samaritan is located in a North Shore community and
treads a tough line. Not supported by state, city, or church, it is
always in need of the kind of funding that has no strings attached.
It doesn’t usually get what it needs, as is made clear by its
fissured parking lot, kiltered sidewalks, and warped linoleum. Having
passed the security desk with the last surge of patients’ visitors,
I spotted Sheilah Kelley a few minutes later as she pushed a medicine
cart toward the children’s ward.

“
Excuse me, Nurse Kelley?"

She lurched around, flagging already at the
three-quarter point of her shift. Up close, I saw she had brown eyes
and more freckles than pale skin around them.

"Can I help you with something?"

"My name’s John Cuddy."

She stiffened and pursed her lips.

"Miss, you know who I am and why I’m here. Is
there someplace we can talk privately?"

"Lemme see your badge."

"We’re not allowed to carry one."

"What?"

"In Massachusetts, all we can carry is
identification, no badge. Here."

"
She looked at it, buying time more than
reading or checking anything. Then she turned away, shuttling the
cart forward again. As I was about to speak, she said over her
shoulder, "End of the corridor. There’s a small playroom. I’ll
be with you in ten minutes."

I found it and went inside. The walls were done in
early Bozo the Clown. Even stepping carefully, my shoes crunched the
innumerable pieces of unnamable board games that lay scattered near a
short-legged table. I gently swept a Barbie doll and a G.I. Joe from
a Sesame Street floor cushion. Sitting down, I tried not to feel too
foolish as I wondered whether Sheilah Kelley was calling Roy Marsh
for guidance.

She came in just as I was about to get up to search
for her. She leaned against the wall, staying near the door. "Five
minutes."

"Why don’t we skip the preliminaries, then.
Tell me, did Roy actually have you hold the kitten down, or were you
just the wheelman?"

She swallowed hard and tried not to blink. "Roy
was with me all afternoon."

"In Swampscott."

"Right."

"In nursing school they must have made you cut
into animals, anatomy class and all. Were the animals usually dead
first, because Cottontail sure—"

"Stop it!"

She couldn’t stop blinking now, and the tears came
even as she brushed them away angrily.I

I spoke more softly. "You work with kids. It’s
your job. How could you cover for the guy after what he did?"

She shivered and sank a little, then slid down the
wall until her rump hit the floor. She used her arms to hug her
knees, lowering her face into them like a sleeping sentry. "He
was with me."

Time for a different tack. "How did you meet
Marsh?"

She raised her head. "Why do you want to know?"

"Look, I’m not after you. You want to be loyal
to Marsh, fine. The truth isn’t going to bring back the cat or make
Vickie feel any better. I just want to understand what happened so it
won’t happen again."

She said, "It won’t," a little too
quickly, then put her head back down.

I said as gently as I could, "You may love him,
but you can’t change him."

"Change him." She took a breath, then said,
"I met him a few months ago. He drove himself in here, all beat
up. I was covering in Emergency, and he was nice to me, sent me
flowers for helping him. Then lunch, a drive to the beach. He . . ."

When she didn’t continue, I said, "Ms.
Kelley?"

She shook herself all over, like a dog just out of
the water. "Look, Mr. Cuddy. I can’t keep you from thinking
what you want to think."

“
No more than you can keep Roy from doing what he
wants to do?"

"I said, nothing more’s going to happen."

"How do you know? What if next time it’s the
wife?"

"Look, do you know . . . ? I’m twenty-nine
years old, and I feel like ninety-nine. I work myself to sleep five
nights a week here. Six years at this place, and I still get Mondays
and Tuesdays off How are you supposed to meet people that way? I know
Roy has other girls. Plus, my father hates him, hates him for what
he’s doing to me. ‘A married man, Sheilah, your mother, God rest
her, we never taught you any better than that?' "

"What if next time it’s the child, Sheilah?"

She scrunched her face, like a grotesquely older
version of what Vickie had looked like at the vet’s. "There’s
nothing I can do! I love him, can’t you see that?"

Unfortunately, she looked so hopeless that I could. I
got up and left her, head bobbing slightly as she cried.

I found a pay phone in the lobby and told the Bonham
cop who answered that I wouldn’t be at their firing range the next
day. The scarecrow at the hospital security desk told me to forget
the cafeteria and gave me directions to the nearest diner, where I
bought eight Styrofoam cups of tea. I set the bag of cups on the
passenger-side floor of the Fiat and drove to Peabody.

At the police station, I spoke briefly with the
detective who had responded to the break-in earlier that evening. He
said there wasn’t much hope of anything official happening. Not
exactly news.

I told him what I’d be doing that night, and he
said, "It’s your time, pal." Then he cleared me with the
patrol supervisor in case anybody reported my car.

In the darkness, it took a while to find Hanna’s
house.
 

SEVEN
-♦-

One thing that must be said for tea: When you’re
not used to drinking the stuff, the caffeine really keeps you awake.
It also gives you the shakes and urges you to relieve yourself.
Often. For the last symptom, the Styrofoam cups are reusable.

I sat and watched Hanna’s place until my eyes
glazed over. I perked up when somebody else’s cat scooted into the
shrubbery and came out a few seconds later, thrashing something in
its mouth and proudly prancing in that successful stalker way. I lost
track of him, but thirty minutes later he was back, nosing around the
bushes again.

At fifteen past midnight, a car wandered down the
street and jumped the curb at a driveway four houses away. A woman
stumbled out, obviously drunk. She wore a dark dress that flashed
purple in the car’s courtesy light. A guy got out from behind the
wheel, playfully fighting her for the front door key and almost
forgetting to come back and close the driver-side door. They laughed
and groped each other a little too frantically as they finally
crossed the threshold.

A few hours later, I jumped when two birds zoomed by
the windshield, so fast and so close they could have been a 3-D
special effect. I couldn’t remember anything but owls flying at
night. Maybe the questing cat had spooked them.

An elderly lady in a bathrobe watched me from a
third-floor window across the street. She was peering around a shade,
but she had a hall light on somewhere behind her, producing a stark,
clear silhouette. When I waved to her, she abruptly let the shade
fall back. I expect she went to call the police.

At 3:10, the man who drove the purple dress home came
hustling out of her house, trying to knot his tie, put on his jacket,
and check his watch all at once. He hopped in, fishtailed out, and
took off the way Sheilah Kelley had earlier that afternoon in
Swampscott.

Perhaps with equal reason for feeling guilty.

The rain began at 4:15, drops the size of dimes
pelting the bugs on the windshield. I tried the wipers once, but I
would have had to use them continuously to do much good, which would
have been a bit conspicuous. I did my best to peer between the veins
of water pulsing down the glass.

At 5:30, the showers
abated, and the sky started to lighten. At 6:00 I saw a light go on
in Hanna’s apartment. Leaving the car, I disposed of the reused
cups in a storm drain and creaked stiffly around the puddles to her
door.

* * *

“
You should not have stayed in a car all the
night."

"I was afraid Roy might be back."

"On the telephone, you tell me he would not."

"I didn’t want to chance being wrong."

Hanna set a glass of milk next to me: She reached
over the counter and absently pulled a box of dry cat food from a
cabinet. Shaking it like a dinner bell, she caught herself, said,
"Oh," and put it in the trash.

She said, "At least you could knock on the door
and come inside here."

"Roy was mad enough at you already. I didn’t
want him to think there was something else he should get even about."

She added milk to her coffee and joined me at the
table. "Vickie is still asleep. From the doctor’s pills."

When Hanna raised her eyes to me, I thought I saw a
glimmer marked "invitation." I thought of the guy with the
woman in the purple dress. I said, "How is Vickie doing?"

She sighed. "The same. She wakes up and she
cries. A little less each time, maybe."

"Time will heal it."

"Yes. Time." She stirred her coffee
unnecessarily.

"Can I ask a question?"

"Sure."

"Chris said he would help me without any money."

"That doesn’t sound like a question."

"I called two lawyers in Swampscott before I . .
. left. They both say they would not talk to me without money."

"A retainer?"

"Yes. A retainer which I don’t get back if I
don’t have them as my lawyer."

"And?"

"I don’t want to be . . . She stopped
stirring, fixing me with an unhappy look. "John, do you think
Chris is a good lawyer for me? And Vickie."

Uh—oh. "Why?"

"Yesterday. In the office with Roy and his
lawyer. I got . . . I think maybe Chris was not so willing to fight
for me. Us."

"Hanna, I’m pretty ignorant about divorce. It
does seem to me you ought to get a lot from Roy, but how much is
right, or enough, I don’t know."

"Yes." She went back to the coffee. "I’m
sorry."

"There’s nothing to be sorry about."

"Chris tries to help me for no money, and I
worry he’s no good. You try to help me for no money, and I try to
make you tell me about Chris." She got up and ran tap water into
her mug. "I’m sorry."

I floated out a change of subject. "Hanna, I
think I know a faster way than time to cheer Vickie up."

She turned around, canting
her head to the side.

* * *

"Oh, Mommie, she’s so cute!"

Vickie was sitting on an aluminum folding chair, next
to a honeycomb of cages, each one containing three or four kittens.
The one on her lap had rolled over onto its back, writhing and
purring in ecstasy as Vickie stroked its belly. Long hair of half a
dozen colors, gene pool courtesy of Cuisinart. It was about as unlike
Cottontail as it could be and still be called a cat.

Hanna kneeled down to scratch between its ears.
Remembering Nancy’s comment about an animal shelter in Salem, I had
called the vet who’d helped us yesterday, and she’d given me the
name and address. The shelter volunteer we’d met at the door came
over to us and said, "You’re welcome to take any of the other
kitties out of their cages, too."

Vickie lowered her torso protectively over the tiny
animal. "No, no! This is the one."

The volunteer smiled. I said, "Looks like we’ve
got a sale."

"The IRS says we have to call it a ‘donation.'
Why don’t you stay here while I finish with someone else at the
desk? I’ll just be a minute."

As she walked away, my eye was caught by a dog in one
of the larger cages. He was some kind of terrier cross, maybe with a
pointer. His legs were too long, his body too short, and he had a
coarse, off-white coat with uneven orange blotches and scraggly
whiskers. It was the look on his face that got me, though. A look
that implied he knew he was an orphan, but not cute and cuddly, and
therefore doomed to remain one. I turned away and hoped the volunteer
would hurry.

I drove Hanna, Vickie, and replacement cat "Rocky"
(don’t even ask) home. Hanna insisted I stay for dinner, and
through the kitchen window I watched Vickie play with her new pet in
the small backyard. Nerida, Chris’s former client who owned the
building, came out and cooed and dangled a length of yarn that Rocky
batted incessantly. Vickie was delighted.

"Thank you," said Hanna, cutting some
vegetables into a steaming pot behind me.

"She’s going to be all right."