Hardware (25 page)

“Hi,” I said. Hardly revolutionary, but an opening. Better than a question. Paolina hates questions. That is, she hates questions she's expected to answer. She doesn't mind dishing them out.

“Where've you been?” she demanded, standing because it was too late to flee. She must have remembered that she was angry at me. She clamped her lips shut in silent-treatment mode.

“
¿Dónde estás?
” I translated hesitantly, wanting to grab her and squeeze, the way I used to when she was seven and smelled of cherry Life Savers. Holding the impulse in check because Paolina's twelve-year-old hugs are grudging gifts at best.

“
¿Dónde usted a estado?
” she corrected. “You never get it right.”

“I try,” I said. “
Yo trato
. Past tense kills me.”

Her eyes were a window on a private war. Should she speak to the enemy? Her defiant glare wavered. The enemy might have a vital battlefront update.

“We're meeting at too many hospitals,” I said gently.

“They won't let me see him,” she said, trying not to sound frantic. “I've been waiting and waiting, ever since I heard on the news.…”

“They won't let me see him either.”

Oglesby hovered, so I grasped her firmly by the hand and led her into the broad corridor. He shot an agonized glance through the glass doors, but I knew he wouldn't abandon a genuine Gianelli brother to follow me.

“How long have you been waiting, Paolina?” Dammit. When I question her, I sound like a cop. Worse. An inquisitor. A fourteenth-century Spanish monk.

At least I hadn't demanded to know why she was skipping school.

“I didn't know where you were,” she said. “I didn't have any idea. You weren't home. You weren't here. You could have been at G and W too. You could have been killed. Burned alive. Did you call me? Did you even try to call? You're not my sister. No way. Sisters don't behave like you. All you do is make promises. That's all. Dumb, stupid promises.”

I tried to hold her, but she broke my grip with a downward slash of her hands, and kept talking. “You're walking fine. You don't even limp. You could have played volleyball with me. You just didn't want to.”

A hundred responses flashed through my brain: Yeah, my foot is better now, but it wasn't okay for your game. I was going to call. We can play next week. A hundred excuses: I've been thinking about you. I've been trying to find a way to make you financially secure without winding up in jail. I've been busy, so goddamned busy.…

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Honest-to-God sorry.”

She stared at the floor, refusing to meet my eyes.

“How long have you been waiting, Paolina?” Interrogation time again.

She ignored my words, as if their tone rendered them inaudible. “I told him I wished he was my father,” she blurted instead. “I wish Sam was my father.”

It's unlike her to mention fathers. They never come up in conversation.

“When was that?” I carefully made my voice less inquisitorial.
Why
was what I wanted to know, but I'd settle for
when
as an opener.

“At the gym. He sat down next to me. You know, the time I went to get you in the locker room. Will he walk again? He's not going to—you know—die or anything, is he?”

“He's not going to die,” I said. She stared up at me, seeking further assurances. With none to give, I waited while she scuffed the toe of her sneaker across the gray carpet.

“The last time I saw him, at the gym, he talked to me a long time. It was … I don't know. Strange.”

“How?” I urged, to keep her talking.

“I don't know.… He said … he asked me, like, if I thought I could ever forgive my, uh, my father. For, you know, leaving me.”

Casual courtside repartee.

“Had he ever asked about Carlos before?” On the rare occasions when Paolina and I spoke about the absentee Colombian, we called him Carlos, not “father.”

“Never.”

I was hoping she'd ramble on so I could avoid the inevitable question. She didn't.

“What did you say?” I asked.

She shrugged, perplexed. “I guess, that I didn't really have a father. Not like a father I grew up with, who spent time with me, or played with me and stuff. So how could I forgive him when I never even met him? And then Sam said …”

“What?”

Her voice was very low. I had to lean forward to catch the words. “He said something like: ‘Well, what if your father came back?'”

I hadn't told Sam about the money. I never would have told him. Had Roz said anything?

Paolina squirmed uncomfortably, which meant she hadn't finished unburdening herself. I reached over and tucked a strand of silky hair behind her ear. My touch broke the dam.

“Sam said it was different with me, because I hadn't ever known my father. But that families should always forgive each other. Even if it's been years and years. They're family, so they should forgive. Carlotta?”

“I'm here.”

“Did Sam have a fight with his father?”

A running war. A twenty-year battle. Had Papa won? Was the new business Mitch had hinted at Mob business?

Paolina averted her eyes. There wasn't much to see in the empty hallway, so she fixed them on a framed poster extolling the virtues of donating blood. She hates to cry in front of me.

“It's okay,” I murmured. “It's gonna be okay.”

“What if he never gets to tell his father the stuff he told me? About forgiving and everything?”

“Sam's not going to die.”

“You're no doctor,” she said defiantly. “What do you know?”

“Come on,” I said softly, taking her hand. “I know Sam's going to be in surgery for hours. Maybe we can see Gloria. Have you seen Gloria yet?”

She started guiltily. “No,” she said. “I wanted to be there when Sam woke up.”

“They won't let you, Paolina. You're not family.”

Her mouth worked. “I guess I wanted to pretend I was—that I was his kid.”

Her words felt like stones pressing against my rib cage. A grim and terrible burden. Married women in rotten marriages must feel this way every time they hear the classic bromide: Stay together for the sake of the children.

Was I required to stick with a lover because my Little Sister adored him? Hell, couldn't we all be friends?

Talk about bromides.

We walked down silent corridors. Carpeting gave way to linoleum and the squeak of rubber soles.

A congregation had gathered outside Gloria's room. Keith Donovan looked pasty and fragile next to Geoffrey and Leroy. Roz resembled a dwarf. An odd dwarf. She'd removed her hat. What the hell, with Leroy and Geoffrey keeping her company, nobody was going to criticize her hairdo. They chewed sandwiches, except for Donovan, who was talking desperately, as if he might be next on the menu. His look of relief when we came down the hall was almost comical.

I returned his glance searchingly, swallowing a sudden ache, wondering why I continually expect the opening of some extrasensory channel of communication with a new lover, the ability to read thoughts. I always think I'll grow out of it, but I don't. I can't read minds. I've known Paolina since she was a child, and I can't read hers. On the whole I accept that others are others. Separate. That we are each in the business of living alone.

But sometimes, despite reason, despite my insistence on the unromantic nitty-gritty here and now, between rumpled sheets, when a man moves inside me, I think he might be able to hear my soul.

“Your sister,” Keith was saying, “has remarkable coping skills. She is not, in any sense of the word, ‘crazy.' But nothing in her experience seems useful to her now. Her paralysis was accidental. She saw no reason to wrestle with issues of fault or blame. She's having trouble accepting that a person did this deliberately, that in trying to destroy her business, someone wound up destroying her brother.”

“We don't like it much either,” Geoffrey said vehemently. “If it turns out it wasn't that punk the cops say, the one got killed, we'll nail whoever did it.”

“I don't think revenge has crossed your sister's mind. She's having a hard time wrapping herself around the idea that Marvin won't be walking through the door.”

“Me too,” Leroy admitted. “That make me crazy?”

“Human,” Donovan said. “That's all.”

I let out my breath. He was doing fine.

THIRTY-TWO

Dr. Donovan, his manner briskly professional, granted Paolina and me a brief visit with Gloria. I couldn't tell if he'd donned a bit of arrogance along with his hospital badge or if he was playing tough-guy-in-charge to counter a gut fear of Geoffrey and Leroy. At any rate, he didn't welcome me with a kiss, which, considering Paolina and her feelings for Sam, was a good thing.

No time to think about it.

No time.

Gloria's eyes were teary and bloodshot. She looked—hell,
wan
is as good a word as any, and it's tricky, describing a three-hundred-pound black woman as wan. Her thoughts elsewhere, she tried to summon a smile and a quip for Paolina.

“Can't feel much,” she said. “Part that's burned. Guess I found the positive side of paralysis.” Her massive legs hung in midair. Suspended by pulleys, swathed in white gauze, they glittered with a petrochemical glaze.

“Can't go to any more ‘Eat Right' seminars,” she went on. “My brothers'll definitely get a refund from that diet dump now.”

Her heart wasn't in the banter. It fell flat.

“My brothers Geoffrey and Leroy,” she said softly.

Paolina squeezed Gloria's right hand, the one unencumbered by IV lines, and we were silent.

The knock at the door was a welcome interruption. Until Mooney marched in.

“Hi, Glory. How're you doing?” His greeting was so perfunctory she didn't even try to answer. “Doctors gave me permission to snatch one of your visitors. Carlotta? Paolina, you can stay two more minutes and don't tire the lady out.” He pecked Gloria quickly on the cheek.

“Wait a minute, Moon,” I said. “How's Paolina supposed to get home? I'm not leaving her here.”

“Roz can drive her.”

“Hey …” I said as he seized my hand and tugged me toward the door. I didn't want to make a scene in front of Paolina. He must have counted on that.

“Roz.” I regained my voice as soon as we were out in the hall.

“Keep walking,” Mooney warned.

“I need to give her the damn car keys, Mooney, or she'll be stuck here with Paolina.”

I thought I'd slip Roz the computer diskettes I'd lifted from Sam's place, but I couldn't bring it off. Mooney never took his eyes off me even as he commiserated with the brothers. Donovan had done a disappearing act, which was just as well. Mooney'd met him once, on a recent case. Donovan had dared to offer a possible psychiatric defense. They'd clashed immediately. Mooney hates shrinks.

“Roz,” I said quickly, handing over the keys. “When you take Paolina home, make sure her mother's actually in the apartment. If she's hungry, stop at McDonald's first. And tell her I'll call the minute I hear any news about Sam.”

“Let's go,” Mooney said.

“Is this a kidnapping?” I murmured on our way past the nurses' station. “If I yell, Leroy will—”

“Leroy will do squat unless he wants a traffic ticket every time he forgets to fasten his seat belt.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“It can be arranged.”

“Moon, if you're going to hold this assault shit over me for the rest of my life, I'd rather fight it now. I'll call my lawyer while you soak your head.”

A unit, with driver, was poised at the front door. Mooney dismissed the chauffeur, stared at me dourly while I worked the passenger-door handle. He made sure my door was locked before he slid behind the wheel.

As if I couldn't unlock a door and run.

Run where?

“Oh, Mooney.” I sighed, shaking my head.

“What?” His voice was sharp, defensive.

“You have that look about you.”

“What look?”

“Righteous renegade. That's what the department brass called it. I prefer Caped Crusader.”

“Dammit to hell.”

Mooney rarely swears in the presence of women. Good Catholic upbringing.

“Did you happen to notice that Gloria didn't ask you a thing, Mooney?” I said.

“I know.”

“Is that because you already filled her in?”

“Partially,” Mooney said. “She knows we identified Zachariah Robertson's body.”

“She didn't ask how Zach got ahold of whatever he used to blow the place? Dynamite? Plastic?”

“Not a peep.”

“She didn't yell? Demand that you find out who's behind it? Didn't point out that the police would be out chasing down leads if it was a white man who got killed?”

“Didn't say a single word, Carlotta,” Mooney stated with deliberate emphasis. “You saw how she is.”

I'd seen. It scared me silly, Gloria's passive acceptance.

“Where are we going?” I demanded.

“Do you have money?”

Did I ever. Mattresses of money. Litter boxes of money.

“On me?” I asked.

“Credit card?”

“One.”

“Visa? Master?”

“Visa.”

“Fine.”

He wasn't driving in the direction of the airport. I'd be spared that Western sheriff classic: “Catch the next stagecoach out of Dodge.”

“I had to close the case,” he said, changing lanes abruptly, provoking a VW into an outraged honk.

My sympathies were with the VW's driver. I said nothing.

“It sucks, this case,” he went on. “It's got teeny little bows on it, it's so neat.”

“We think alike, Moon.”

“First off,” he said, “the drive-by stinks.”