Cross Current (12 page)

She shook her head and still did not lift her head to look at me.

“Who put you on the boat to America?”

“The bad man.” Her voice was barely audible.

“The bad man who killed Erzulie?”

She nodded.

“How did you meet him?”

“Water. I bring water to house. Bad man talk to Madame Maillot.”

“Who is she?”

“I work in Madame house.”

“Had you ever seen this man there before?”

“No.”

“So you came back with the water and he was there talking to Madame Mayo. Then what happened?”

“I wash baby Christophe. Madame say no. She send me away with the bad man.”

“He took you to the boat?”

Her head bobbed once. “Erzulie was there,” she said. 

“Anyone else?”

“Bad man.
Le Capitaine
.”

“The bad man, he was the captain of the big boat?”

Her beads bounced as her head bobbed up and down.

I picked my shoulder bag off the table and reached inside to retrieve the sunglasses I’d found on the
Miss Agnes
. “Have you ever seen these glasses before?” I knew before I’d finished speaking that she recognized the glasses from the look in her eyes. “Solange?” She continued to stare at the little white skulls.

“
Capitaine bawon samdi
." She scrambled to the head of her bed, up on her pillows, trying to distance herself from the sunglasses and began making little squeaky, whining noises. She grabbed one of the pillows and tried to hide under it.

I put the glasses back in my shoulder bag. “Shhh. It’s okay. I don’t understand when you speak Creole, Solange. Did these belong to the captain of the big boat you were on with Erzulie?”

The curved black lashes fluttered several times and a fat tear slid from the corner of her eye, coursing a wet trail down her cheek. She nodded. “He say he take me to Papa, he say Papa want me—” Her rounded shoulders hitched up as she sucked in a quick breath. Her body looked like it was trying to curl into itself.

I slid up the bed, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, pressed her head against the curve of my neck, and rested my chin on her head. Her tiny body trembled with tight, convulsive sobs. As quickly as it had started, it stopped, and her breathing quieted back to a regular rhythm.

“Solange, I promise you, I will find your papa,” I whispered into the dark braids, knowing full well that in order to find her father, I would have to find a murderer first.

IX

When Jeannie returned, she opened her mouth to speak, but I raised my finger to my lips. I’d just finished tucking the sheet under Solange’s chin, and I was standing there admiring her eyelashes, so long that each one formed a perfect letter C. I motioned Jeannie to go out into the corridor, and it wasn’t until we were both outside the door that I saw what she had been about to tell me. She had a federal escort.

“Nice to see you again, Seychelle,” Rusty said, smiling so broadly that the creases at the corners of his eyes looked like the spokes of a wire wheel.

“Can’t really say the same, Rusty.” He was in civilian clothes today, faded jeans and black T-shirt, sockless, raggedy-looking boat shoes. It was difficult not to notice the way the T-shirt tapered down from those broad shoulders to his trim waist and how those weathered jeans wrapped his hips neatly in denim. It could have been really nice to see him if he wasn’t employed by U.S. Immigration.

“How’s our patient?” he asked, inclining his shaggy head toward the door to Solange’s room.

“Our patient? No, no, no, my friend. You have no claim on her.” I turned to Jeannie. “Were you able to find a doctor?”

“Finally, yes, after walking through miles of hospital corridors and continually getting directions that had me following yellow lines and blue lines all over this friggin’ hospital. But yes, eventually I found this lovely woman doctor, a little bit of a thing. She said the kid is doing great. Much better than should be expected, the doc said, because Solange was malnourished long before this whole boat trip even started. But there’s no need to keep her in the hospital, as long as she is eating and drinking on her own. Doc said she’d be willing to cut her loose this evening.”

“Good,” Rusty said. “We’ll take her into custody. Cases like this we usually send down to Miami to the Girls and Boys Town facility there.”

“No way.” I turned to Jeannie, my mouth open, but she was talking before I could even ask.

“Listen, Elliot, I am both a court-approved guardian ad litem and a registered foster parent. She can stay in my home. Any judge would see that it would be in the best interests of a child who has been through this kind of trauma to be in a single-family home environment instead of some group home.”

Rusty shook his head. “I don’t know about that. The police will want to talk to her.”

“Exactly. They can talk to her at my home if they need to—and she’ll be closer. Don’t block this just to be pissy, Elliot. Think of the child.”

Rusty raised his hands in submission. “Okay, okay,
I
don’t have a problem with it, as long as she stays where we can see her, and”—he turned and looked straight at me—“you work with me on this. I’m not your enemy, so don’t try anything stupid.”

I tried my hardest to look innocent, to give him a “Who me?” look, but as usual, I felt guilty already. Whenever someone suspected me of something, even if I hadn’t even thought of it yet, I felt guilty.

“Also,” he continued, “I need to interview her officially, and I’d like your cooperation with that. I can’t get her to talk to me.”

Now I knew why I’d felt guilty. “It’s possible I could help you out there.”

“Go on,” Rusty said.

“It’s just possible she has talked a little bit to me.”

Jeannie looked at her watch. “Listen, Sey, I need to take care of some paperwork and buy a few extra things if I’m inheriting a little girl this afternoon. I don’t think she’d be thrilled with Spider-Man jockey shorts. You okay here?” 

“Not a problem, Jeannie. You go on. I’ll see you later.” After Jeannie collected her things and left, I turned to go back into the girl’s hospital room. 

Rusty touched my arm. “You hungry?”

Fifteen minutes later, Rusty returned with burgers, fries, and Cokes. I had been watching Solange sleep and wondering how I was going to keep this promise to find her father, wondering what my next step would be. I forgot about all of it when the room filled with the odor of french fries.

“Lunch is served,” he announced.

I held my finger to my lips and pointed at the sleeping child, then said in a whisper, “You’re going to drive the rest of the inmates mad with that smell. All they ever get is sugar-free Jell-O and low-fat mystery meat.”

Rusty dropped the paper bags onto the vacant bed close to the door, and he motioned for me to climb onto it. “I’ll take care of that.”

I kicked off my sneakers and snuggled my butt into the covers near the head of the bed as he grabbed the edge of the privacy curtain and drew it closed around us. He smiled and climbed onto the foot of the bed and settled himself, sitting Indian style, not looking nearly as comfortable in that position as B.J. did.

“They’ll never know we’re here,” he whispered as he emptied a mountain of fries onto a paper bag.

I attempted to raise one eyebrow, to give him a look that said “Yeah, right.” With the scent of french fries wafting down the hall? I said, “I can’t quite figure you out, Elliot. One minute you’re ‘the man,’ and the next minute you’re acting like a kid hiding from the nurses.”

From another bag, Rusty poured out some two dozen little pouches of catsup. “I like that. I like being complex.” He started ripping the catsup pouches open with his teeth and emptying them into a puddle on a waxy burger wrapper. “I hope you don’t like catsup. I need every one of these.”

When I ventured to dip a fry in his catsup lake, we ended up in a french fry sword fight.

Too bad he was the enemy. He was kind of fun.

After we’d finished off all but the little burnt stubs of fries, I leaned back against the headboard and laced my fingers behind my head. A feeling of contentment settled into my shoulders, relaxing muscles that had been tense for over twenty-four hours.

“How long you been running that tug?” he whispered. 

“Full-time for a little more than two years. As a part-timer, all my life.”

“Must be nice, working on the water.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Looking at you, I’d say fisherman, light tackle, fresh and marine, got about an eighteen-foot Dusky on a trailer you don’t get to take out often enough.” 

He smiled. “You’ve sure got me pegged. Only the boat isn’t on a trailer at the moment, and it’s not a Dusky.”

I raised both brows this time. “Go on.”

“She’s in the water at a place I’ve got in Hollywood on the Intracoastal, and she’s a twenty-five-foot Anacapri, built in 1976. Still got the original engines. A classic.”

“That boat’s not a classic,” I said. “It’s just old. What do you tow it with?”

“Another classic: a 1971 Datsun pickup.”

“Geez, how many miles?”

“Over three hundred thousand. ‘Course it’s not the original engine.”

“Now that’s just ancient.” I giggled. “And ugly.”

He didn’t laugh back. He had this deadly serious look on his face. “So what’s the difference? Between old and classic. To you,” he said.

I couldn’t help it. The look on his face. The more I tried to stop, the harder I laughed. Then I began to snort. I hate when that happens.

He was examining the detail in the acoustical ceiling tile. I was about ready to regurgitate french fries through my nose. That was when we heard Solange cry out as though she had been struck.

Rusty was the first one off the bed. He couldn’t find the edge of the curtain at first, and he pulled at the fabric and got tangled in it when it didn’t slide open as he expected. I saw a pair of sneakers run past beneath the hem of the curtain as Rusty struggled. Once he finally drew the curtain aside, we saw Solange, sitting up in bed, her eyes wide open, staring straight ahead.

“She okay?” I hollered as I slid off the bed and under the curtain on the door side of the room.

“Think so,” I heard Rusty say as I went out into the hall. I swung my head, checking both directions. There were several possibilities. To my right, there was a tall black male orderly pushing an empty wheelchair. To my left, a black female nurse and a white male orderly were leaning on the nurses’ station, talking. There were patients and visitors walking everywhere. The corridor was crowded with people wearing white sneakers. I jogged right and caught up to the man with the wheelchair just as he turned into a room.

“Good morning, Mrs. Johnson,” he said to the large lady in the bed. His Haitian accent was unmistakable. He reached down to lock the wheels on the wheelchair. “Are you ready to go to radiology?”

“Excuse me,” I said.

He turned and looked at me expectantly. He was a large man, well over six feet tall, and somewhere in age between forty and fifty. He had a thin mustache and a small goatee.

“Were you just in room four twenty-five?”

“No. Not me. I came from Patient Relations. Must have been somebody else.” He smiled and walked over to Mrs. Johnson to help her into the chair. He was very relaxed, and he looked like he was accustomed to wearing green scrubs. “How are you feeling today, pretty lady?” he asked the white-haired woman as he pulled back the covers on her bed. I noticed he wore large silver rings on three of the five fingers of his right hand. I couldn’t make out the designs. “Let’s go, dear.”

He lifted the heavy-set woman from her bed as though she weighed next to nothing. His name tag said “Todd,” but he didn’t look like a Todd to me. As he swung the older woman around to the wheelchair, he saw I was still standing there. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” He settled the woman into the chair, then turned to look expectantly at me.

I backed out of the room. “No, thanks,” I said. I checked down the hall in the other direction, but the nurse and orderly were gone.

Rusty came charging out of room 425, and I headed back down the hall to hear what he had found. By the time I got there, he was standing nose to nose with the cop in front of the nurses’ station.

“What the hell do you mean, you didn’t see anything? Somebody was just in there.”

The female Haitian nurse who had been so kind yesterday hurried into Solange’s room.

“Is she all right?” I asked.

“She seems to be okay,” Rusty said, not taking his eyes off the other cop.

“I mean I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” the duty officer said.

“Maybe you were distracted by something else.” Rusty thrust his chin toward Jenna.

“People have been coming and going all day,” the officer said. “I’ve been watching. Hell, you were in there. Why didn’t you see anything?”

Rusty turned away without answering that question. No matter how he worded it, it wouldn’t sound good.

I left them arguing and tried to go into Solange’s room. The Haitian nurse waved me off, motioning me back outside. She had the blood pressure cuff on the child’s arm.

I crossed to the desk and slipped behind the counter. “Jenna, do you know a guy who works here named Todd?”

She rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth. “Yes. What did he say now?”

“Nothing really, I was just wondering, what does he look like?”

“Oh. He’s like really old, and he’s always telling people I’m his ‘honey.’ He’s too gross.”

The Todd I’d seen was no more than fifteen years older than me, but then again, that might qualify as “really old” to this girl. “Can you give me more of a description? Is he tall, short, white, black?”

“He’s like this little old retired white guy, and I think the only reason he volunteers here is to rub up against me every chance he gets. Old pervert.”

Definitely not my Todd. “Any other guys here with that name? How about an orderly, a tall Haitian guy about forty?” She shook her head so that her blond hair flew out in a golden arc, then smiled at the cop, who had turned his attention from Rusty back to Jenna. “No, nobody here like that unless he’s new,” she said to the cop, who nodded as though he understood what she’d just said.