Chapter 17

Beto’s sons, Carlos and Trips, were in chairs on either side of their grandfather’s bed, stockinged feet up on the bed, playing video games or texting or watching movies or whatever teenagers do on their cell phones. Bart was snoring like a hibernating bear. Both boys put their feet down guiltily and stood when I came in.

I whispered, “How is he?”

Trips, who was closest to me, came over and whispered back, “After all the tests he had today, he’s out for the count. If the nurses would leave him alone, he’d sleep through the night.”

“Auntie said to tell you to go home, shower, and get to the Marina,” I said.

He checked his watch. “What time is Dad getting here?”

“As soon as he closes the store,” I said. “I’ll wait for him.”

“Thanks,” Trips said, pulling on his shoes. “Grandpa gets a little crazy when he wakes up alone in a strange place.”

After they left, I unpacked Bart’s bag, put his book and glasses where he could reach them and the pastry box where he could see it. The slippers went on the floor beside the bed, and the robe I draped over the back of one of the chairs next to the bed. Socks and toiletries went into a night table drawer, and the bag went into the small wardrobe.

The room was dimly lit and quiet. The only sounds were people out in the hall and the steady beeping of the heart monitor. I sat down in the chair with the robe over the back and took out my phone. Jean-Paul had left a message earlier in the day, before I recharged the phone, telling me his flight plans. I checked my watch. If his plane left on time, he should be in the air at the moment. And because there wasn’t a second message telling me there was a delay, he most likely was in the air. He also told me that Rafael was picking him up at the airport. I left a text message asking him to have Rafael drop him at the hospital if his plane landed on schedule. I waited a few minutes for a response. When there wasn’t one, I knew his phone was turned off, so I texted Kevin. I told him where I was and asked if he could come right over; we needed to talk.

A nurse bustled in to take Bart’s vital signs. When she put the digital thermometer in his ear, he stirred, opened his eyes and looked around. Seeming confused, he looked from the nurse, who was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his arm, to me, and then around the room. His eyes lit on the things on the night table, and then on the robe behind me.

“Is my wife still here?” he asked, his voice a low rasp.

I exchanged glances with the nurse.

“Your wife just stepped out for a minute,” the nurse said, taking off the pressure cuff. “She wants you to go back to sleep.”

“Okay,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

I followed the nurse out to the corridor. “How’s he doing?” I asked.

“Are you family?”

“Friend,” I said.

She smiled. “He’s stable, but he’s still pretty confused. And he can get volatile. Whatever he says, just go along with it to keep him quiet.”

“Okay.” I glanced back into the room; Bart was snoring again.

After checking for messages, I turned the phone to silent ring, sat back down in the chair beside Bart’s bed and watched the heart monitor—it was hypnotic. I don’t know how long I sat there, probably half an hour, before Kevin came into the room. He made sure Bart was sleeping before he gestured for me to follow him out into the corridor. We left the door open so we could see Bart, but we stood on the far side of the wide passageway so he couldn’t hear us if he wakened.

“Why am I here?” Kevin asked, nervous, looking down the corridor toward the nurses’ station.

“Because no one will question you coming to see Bart at the hospital,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I need to know whether you’re seriously looking into Mrs. B’s case, or you’re just saying you are to humor Beto.”

His eyes flashed with anger. “Did Beto put you up to this?”

“No,” I said. “Why do you think he would?”

“He asked me the same damn question.”

“What did you tell him?”

He glanced toward Bart. “I told him that of course I’m performing a serious investigation.”

“Is that the truth, though?”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “But I wish it weren’t. Honest to God, Maggie, the further I get into the case, the more I have to ask, what good is it going to do anyone to drag all that up again? You told me yourself that you could have gone your whole life without knowing the truth about your parentage or seeing that crime scene shot of Mrs. B. Now you tell me that Mrs. B was sleeping with some guy. Beto worships his mother. Does he need to know that? Does Bart?”

He braced a hand on the wall next to my head and put his face close to mine. “And Bart, jeez, look at Bart. I’m at the point in this that I need to ask him the hardball questions no one asked the first time around or I’m stuck. But who is that going to help, Maggie?”

“I think the real question is, who benefits most if you bury the investigation?”

Still standing uncomfortably close to me, he said, “I’m sure you have an opinion about that.”

“A few,” I said. “Has Chuck Riley asked you to walk away?”

“My father-in-law? No.” He moved back half a step. “Why would he?”

“He was the original detective assigned to the case,” I said. “He’s the cop who neglected to ask Bart those hardball questions, among other things, when he should have. I didn’t see a record in the murder book that Chuck ever roused himself to look into Bart’s bedroom, sent carpet samples to the crime analyst, looked for blood or bullet hits. Why do you think that was?”

“Chalk it up to inexperience.”

“Bullshit,” I said, leaning in toward him, forcing him back a bit, and looked right up into his face. “Your department is small, but they’ve always been damn good at what they do.”

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess.”

“Have you talked about the case with your father-in-law?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he said. “You said it yourself, this was his case in the beginning.”

“I guess that’s the part I keep going back to,” I said. “You told me you took Lacy over to her parents after her meltdown at my house the other night because you didn’t want your kids to see her in that state again.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you explain to Chuck when you took Lacy to him why I had asked you to come to the house earlier that day?”

He lifted a shoulder, dismissing the issue as inconsequential. “No reason not to.”

“Tell me, what experienced cop, tasked with watching over his highly agitated, pathologically jealous, not very sober daughter would leave a loaded gun where she could easily get her hands on it?”

“You can’t think Chuck put Lacy up to taking shots at you,” he said.

“At you, you mean. I don’t think she was gunning for me on the freeway, and neither do you—you said so. Who planted the idea with her that you were at my house on Saturday?”

“Oh for cryin’ out loud.” He turned away from me and pressed his back against the wall, arms folded defensively across his chest.

“You can still pass the case to someone else if you don’t have the stomach for it,” I said. “Conflict of interest alone should have kept you from taking it on at all.”

After he fumed to himself for a few moments, he looked down at me. “You got anything more you want to throw at me?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” I said. “Have you done anything with the shirt Mrs. B was wearing when she was shot?”

“I gave it to our crime analyst,” he said. “To our department’s licensed, certified, professional analyst, in case you’re wondering. And so far, he’s told me that the shirt has DNA from more than two people on it, but the DNA profiles won’t be ready for a while. And, FYI, the shirt’s a size fourteen and a half.”

“I doubt Bart has worn a fourteen and a half since his first communion,” I said. “If then.”

“You want me to say the shirt belonged to this guy, this lover, you say Mrs. B was fooling around with?”

“I don’t want you to say anything you can’t substantiate, Kev. But think about this: When I saw Mrs. B the morning she died, she was wearing a blue shirtwaist dress. She looked like she was ready to go to work at the deli.”

‘You told me that before,” he said.

“I saw that blue dress hanging in Bart’s bedroom closet this afternoon.”

He said, “I...” and got no further. We stood there, side by side for a moment, watching Bart sleep.

The elevator doors down the corridor opened and a dietary tech came out pushing a tall cart full of dinner trays, making a great racket of it. Bart stirred. He began kicking off his blankets as if he were trapped by them, waving his arms against unseen foes. I rushed to him, afraid he would pull out his IV line. The blips on the heart monitor spiked crazily. I caught his hands and held them.

“Bart, it’s okay,” I said. “Look at me. Bart.”

With effort, he focused his eyes on me and stopped thrashing about, but he still seemed confused, frightened. He saw Kevin standing at the end of the bed and dropped his head back on his pillows and lay quiet, seemed dazed. After a minute, he looked at me and said, “How are ya?” And then he paused, as if he couldn’t dredge up my name.

“I’m fine,” I said, watching the heart monitor settle back into normal rhythms. “And how are you?”

He raised the arm with the IV and managed a smile. “Guess you should ask the doc that.”

The dietary tech came in with Bart’s dinner tray.

“Good evening, Mr. Bartolini,” he said, awfully damned cheerful, setting the tray on a wheeled table and moving it into position over the bed so that Bart could eat sitting up. “We have something really yummy for you tonight.”

“A nice veal scaloppini with marinara sauce and a side of fettuccini aioli?” Bart said, scooting further up on his pillow as he searched for the controls to raise the head of his bed.

“Close,” the tech said, lifting the cover off Bart’s tray. “How about vegetable soup, mashed carrots and a ground turkey patty?”

Bart took a look at the food and pushed the table aside. He glanced at the robe on the back of the chair and said, “My wife was here a minute ago, I was just talking to her. Where’d she get to?”

Kevin paled. I said, “She’ll be right back, Bart.”

The tech caught my eye on the way out, gave a little shrug. “I’ll leave the tray; he might get hungry.”

“Go ahead and take it,” Bart said. “Tina will bring me in something nice for dinner.”

As a distraction, I opened the drawer in the bedside table and pointed. “You asked for some things from home, Bart. They’re here.”

He looked over, smiled. “My Tina takes good care of me.”

There was a tap on the door and I turned. Jean-Paul came in carrying a muslin shopping bag from a local market. We exchanged les bises and he shook Kevin’s hand before I introduced him to Bart as if it were the first time; Bart seemed to have lost complete track of Saturday night.

After a few minutes of stilted conversation, Kevin asked, “Who’s spelling you here, Maggie?”

“Beto, after he closes the store.”

Kevin checked his watch. “He’ll be here pretty soon, then. Why don’t you two go on ahead? I need to talk to Beto.”

When I said, “Thanks, we will,” Jean-Paul seemed relieved.

I went over to the bed and kissed Bart’s cheek. “We’ll see you later.”

“Thanks for coming by.” He still hadn’t called me by name. “I was real sorry to hear about your mom. Real sorry. She was always so good to Tina.”

Kevin walked us to the elevator and pushed the down button. In a sardonic tone, he asked, “You think Bart can handle those hardball questions now, Maggie?”

I shook my head. “We both know it’s too late.”

The elevator came and we said good-bye to Kevin as we stepped inside. He turned to go back to Bart.

Happy to be alone with Jean-Paul, I asked him, “What’s in the shopping bag?”

“Dinner,” he said, pushing the button for the lobby. “I was hoping you might agree to a quiet evening in.”

“That would be so nice.”

“I have some interesting news for you,” he said as the doors began to close. “Something we should discuss.”

A hand shot into the opening and triggered the door to open again. We both looked up, surprised by the suddenness of the move, curious. I was also disappointed that there would be another passenger.

It was Kevin, but he didn’t get in. Staying in the corridor, he held his hand against the door’s sensor to keep it from closing.

“Sorry I got a little frosty there, Maggie,” he said. “I don’t want you to go away thinking that I’m not taking what you said seriously, because I am. It’s just that this whole thing has been...”

He dropped his head, searched for the right words. When he looked up again and met my eyes he said, “It’s been hard. Real hard.”

“I understand that,” I said. “And it isn’t over yet. But you’ll get through it.”

“Says you.” He removed his hand and let the door close.

Alone, I wrapped my arms around Jean-Paul, pressed my lips to his, and held him in that clutch until the doors began to open again in the lobby. Jean-Paul was thoroughly cooperative, as he always was; a quality I appreciated.

“Lovely,” he said, offering me his arm. “I missed you, too. What’s new?”

“How much time do you have?” I slipped my hand through the crook in his elbow.

“All the time in the world.” He covered my hand with his. “All the time in the world.”

We ran into Beto as he came out of the parking garage carrying a big bag from the deli.

“That better be veal scaloppini,” I said.

He laughed. “Is that what Papa’s asking for now? This morning it was a meatball sandwich. He’ll have to make do with wedding soup and lasagne.”

“He seems to think your mom has been to see him,” I said as ­warning.

Beto’s smile was rueful. “He’s been talking to her for a while now. I have a feeling that she’s coming to get him soon.”

“What do the doctors say?” I asked.

“He has a leaky aneurysm in his brain. It’s a race between a blood clot and a blowout.”

“Oh, Beto.” I reached for his hand.

“It’s okay,” he said, squeezing my hand and working up a game smile. “I think Papa’s ready to go with Mom. I think he’s been ready for a long time.”