"Van Lustbader, Eric - Dark Homecoming(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

"Sure I wanted better than what had been," he said. "But I didn't want to turn my back on it. That's what you set out to do, Matty."
She squeezed her eyes shut. Slowly, tears formed at the corners, welled, and dropped into her lap. "I wish I could make you understand."
"Try."
She shook her head from side to side. "That would mean..." Her eyes flew open and she glared hotly at him for a moment. "All right." But she couldn't sustain it, and she tilted her head back and stared up into the clattering fronds of the coconut palms. "See, for you it was different. You were a boy and the streets of Hell's Kitchen were made for boys."
"That's no reason-"
"Please be still," she said. "It's hard enough..." Her eyes squeezed shut again, and when she spoke her voice was as quiet as the breeze drifting through the palms. "Just let me tell it, okay?" She licked her lips as if they were dry, and he could see that she was terribly frightened. Of a memory? "There was this boy. Richie Paglia."
Croaker remembered him: dark hair, hot eyes-a hunk. He'd gone out with Matty for a while; then she dropped him cold and disappeared into the world beyond Hell's Kitchen. She'd turned her back on her neighborhood and her family. Not long after, she'd married Donald. It had pissed Croaker off, the way she'd tossed aside a local kid who'd cared for her, treating him like dirt. He had seen in that gesture an intimation of a larger betrayal to come. All for Donald and his glittering world. Croaker bit back an acid comment.
"Richie," Matty was saying. "He was so sweet on me." She put her fingertips to her lips, as if she had to flog herself to continue. "See, the thing of it was, Ritchie got me pregnant."
"What?"
Into the shinned silence, she forced more words: "He offered to marry me but I said no; I didn't love him and he didn't know what he wanted. There wasn't anything between us but sex. We'd had fun, that's all. It happens, Lew."
"Not to my sister."
"I knew you'd say that." She sighed. "But it did happen." Her voice trailed away. She put a hand up, pressed it against her forehead for a moment. "I couldn't go to you. I was, what, nineteen?
I'd finished college in three years, made dean's list. I wanted a career, but what did any of that matter to you? I knew you'd make us get married and we'd be miserable. Either that, or you'd beat the crap out of Richie, which he didn't deserve. Besides, Catholic that I am, I was ashamed. You remember how strict Mama was about religion."
She stared down at her hands. "I was in a panic. I felt I was inside a box that was closing in on me. Richie and I decided the best thing was for him to disappear from the neighborhood. That was the easy part. He'd gotten a job across the river in Hoboken and he said he'd move there. As for me..." Her restless gaze roved the treetops. "As for me, I had to find a place outside of Hell's Kitchen. A clinic, a doctor."
Croaker could scarcely catch his breath. How could his reading of their shared past have been so flawed? The truth had a cruel habit of surprising just about everyone, "So you had the abortion."
Matty nodded. "It was a decision that almost tore my heart out. For a long time I felt unclean, wrapped in a sinner's ashes. I couldn't bring myself to set foot in church. I felt I had turned my face away from God. But I had no other choice."
She buried her head in her hands, and he waited, his heart beating very fast.
"Afterward, I found that I couldn't go home. I couldn't face the inevitable interrogation you'd put me through. I knew you, Lew. You'd take one look at my face and know something was wrong."
"I tried to look for you."
She nodded. "But you couldn't find me. I had just enough graduation money to stay in a hotel for a couple of weeks. When the money ran out I got a job as a copywriter at an ad agency. And for the first time I was happy. I felt free."
"Free of us," Croaker said. "Your family."
Matty shook her head. "Free of that apartment. It was so dark and depressing. My God, Lew, how could you stand living there for so long?"
"Mom and Pop were there," he said. "It was home."
Matty turned her head away. "The agency is where I met Donald." Her tone turned wistful. "I worked long hours and didn't mind. I was trying to stare down my conscience in the mirror, but after a while I found I was so happy I was no longer racked by guilt." She ran her hand along the T-bird's chrome work. "Six months after I started work Donald bought the agency. I'd moved up by then. I had a group of midlevel accounts I was handling. Anyway, the day the papers were signed Donald fired all the high- priced executives, along with their triple-martini lunches, then put together a transition team from those remaining to evaluate the company and the staff for him. I was part of the team. I worked alongside him for three months. Every day. I never thought he noticed, but I was wrong. He told me later he'd been watching me from day one."
She turned to him, her face full of tears. "Without even knowing it, I'd slipped into a whole new life. So you see, after everything that had happened, everything I wanted to forget, I couldn't face the family-especially you, Lew. Mr. Detective, Even after months and months had gone by I was terrified you'd see the truth in my eyes every time I tried to lie."
Croaker, stunned and ashamed, heard Bennie's words coming back to haunt him: God hears me, women can find more ways to be cruel. But, you know what? Sometimes their brothers can be worse. Something hard and ugly broke apart inside him. "Matty-" Just the soft, conciliatory tone of his voice caused her to break down. She was sobbing as he reached for her, her shoulders shaking, her head pressed against the crook of his shoulder. He held her close to him, and wonder of wonders, his eyes were wet, as well. Bennie was right. No matter who she was, no matter what had gone on between them, they were blood. It was odd to realize that what he had mistaken for anger was simply mischance and misunderstanding.
"I couldn't face you," she whispered. "I couldn't bear the recriminations, the look on your face when you found out, your contempt for me for being so stupid, for doing all the wrong things. So I took the coward's way out; after I'd married Donald it was easier to cut the family out. But I swear it was your unwavering sense of morality that stared at me in the mirror every morning."
He held her closer, said, "What's done is done, Matty. It's all in the past. We can start over again."
"Really? Oh, my God, Lew, that would be so wonderful, a dream come true, but-"
She was rigid with tension, and he drew her gently away from him so he could see her face. "But what?"
Her eyes were wide and staring in mortal fear, and instinctively he knew that the stark terror he saw in her eyes was what had driven her to seek him out after all this time. "Matty, what is it?"
"Oh, dear God," she whispered through her sobs, "Rachel's dying. Lew, my little girl is slipping away and I don't know what to do."
DAY TWO
1
Royal Poinciana Hospital was a twelve-story pale gold brick edifice that rose at the east end of Eucalyptus Street. Though it was a stone's throw from the Flagler Memorial Bridge and within walking distance of Royal Poinciana Way and the Breakers Hotel on Palm Beach, its immediate surroundings were dark, bleak, and not a little dangerous.
Across the moat of the Intracoastal, women with big hair emerged from gleaming Rolls-Royces without a care in the world. Here, you were obliged to lock your car doors the moment you slid behind the wheel. It was more than symbolic that the hospital, facing the light-spangled Intracoastal, had turned its back on North Dixie Highway and, beyond, Broadway. That area, filled with broken-down cement-block houses and floodlit fifty-cent coin laundries, was the mean province of the black community that lapped precipitously at Palm Beach's outer edge. It was no wonder that the Palm Beach concierges urged their charges to avoid the immediate northwest territory.
Be that as it may, Matty seemed entirely unperturbed as she got out of her black Lexus. They hurried across the blacktop parking lot and up the stairs into the hospital. A faint smell of bandages and antiseptic floated in the close-to-freezing air. A security guard showed them where to check in and pick up day tags-Matty turned back to Croaker. This morning she looked exhausted, as if she had paced the floor all night, waiting for dawn to arrive. She'd tried to do something with the dark circles under her eyes, but when she took off her Donna Karan sunglasses Croaker could see she'd failed.
At the end of the hall on the sixth floor they went through the double doors marked dialysis unit. They entered an area that looked for all the world like the waiting room of hell. Old people, bent and haggard as last year's saw grass, were lined up in the hallway. They were supported by walkers, wheelchairs, and crutches. The occasional nurse marched down the line inspecting them like the guard outside a disco who decides which people will be allowed to enter. The place reeked of medication and resignation. As Croaker passed this rank of the infirm, he could hear thick and ragged breathing, tiny moans and disturbed grunts, as if he had come upon a watering hole in the African veld.
"Diabetics waiting for their dialysis," Matty murmured.
Beyond another set of doors was CCD, the Critical Care Dialysis. It was a warren of claustrophobic cubicles built around a central nurses' station. Surrounding patients in beds were crash carts, IV stands, monitors, arcane medical paraphernalia, and, in some cases, dialysis machines.
Of the eight people in the unit only Rachel was young. The rest seemed to have been plucked from those unfortunates who had been on the dialysis line too long.
Croaker approached Rachel tentatively, as though he might wake her with an incautious step. But she was beyond such concerns. According to what Matty had told him Rachel's condition was critical. She had been in a coma at the time she had been admitted to the hospital and had not come out of it. She was so pale it looked as if every drop of blood had been drained from her. Blue veins throbbed beneath the thin skin of her temples- A tangled mass of hair spread lankly on the pillowcase. A gold nose ring had been pushed aside by a plastic tube. Croaker tried to imagine her as the child she had been at her christening, when he'd held her in his arms, but the memory eluded him. All he saw was the fifteen-year-old who lay before him. His heart was caught in a viselike grip. He was struck all over again by how beautiful she was, but her face looked like a death mask.
She was catheterized and tubed, hooked up to monitors that showed her pulse, heart rate, and blood pressure. IV drips punctured her veins. A computerized dialysis machine, perhaps four-and-a-half feet high, clad in beige plastic, pumped dutifully at her side, cleansing her blood, doing the work her damaged kidneys apparently could not.
At last, his heart broke and he turned back to Matty. "What's going on? What the hell happened to her?" There was more than a little anger inside him.
Matty stood mutely, staring dully at the dialysis machine, which had taken on an odd and vaguely unsettling presence, as if it were a large and loyal dog that would not leave its master's side.
"Simply put, she's suffering from nephro-toxic poisoning brought on by an overdose of cocaine and amphetamines."
Croaker turned to see a female doctor in her midthirties, fit as an amateur athlete, pretty in a tough, no-nonsense way. Her reddish hair was pulled back from her catlike face.
She stuck out her hand and Croaker took it. "I'm Dr. Marsh. Jenny Marsh." She cocked an eyebrow. "And you are?"
"Lew Croaker. I'm Matty's-
"Ah, the prodigal brother returneth." Dr. Marsh smiled. "From all Mrs. Duke has told me, I'm glad she was able to locate you. Excuse me a moment." She turned to Matty. "We'd like to take some more blood and urine, Mrs. Duke, if that's all right."