"Sympathy Between Humans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Compton Jodi)

6

Two days later, the pain in my ear was worse, but I kept it in abeyance with aspirin. The cold had passed, I told myself, so this would pass too. I tried to ignore the fact that Cisco had suggested otherwise, warning that I might need an antibiotic prescription.

Stop worrying about his goddamned advice, I thought. This will go away on its own, most things do. Doctors can’t admit that, because if they did, they’d be out of a job.

But the day after that, my ear was refusing to be ignored. The aspirin I’d taken had worn off in the night, and when I woke, my eardrum pulsed like a second, painful heartbeat. I lifted myself to a sitting position very slowly. I didn’t want to cause even the smallest rise in blood pressure that might make the throbbing worse.

When I was ready, I went to the bathroom. My face was a study in contrast, pale with spots of high, febrile color. I swallowed the last three aspirin and pitched the bottle into the trash. Come on, this is probably the worst of it. One more day and you’ll turn a corner, I told myself.

I took a fifteen-minute shower with the door and window tightly closed, inhaling steam. After that, and a cup of tea and two slices of toast, the aspirin started to kick in. I felt marginally better, good enough to get dressed and go out.

I suppose some people would think it strange that someone with a blistering earache and a fever wouldn’t call in sick, but in fact, I went in early. I didn’t want to sit around the house with nothing to think about but how much my ear hurt and how long it might take to heal if I kept refusing to see a doctor. I wanted the distraction of work, and if my shift was still hours away, then Hugh Hennessy could easily fill those hours.

“Sarah.” Tyesha looked up in mild surprise from her desk. “I was just about to call you. Prewitt wanted you to come in a little early today. Not this early, though. Around three-thirty, he said.”

“That’s fine.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my good ear. “Did he say why?”

Tyesha shook her head. “Sorry, he didn’t.”

No one else commented on my presence downtown at midday. I didn’t socialize, just drank tea and looked at the official data on Hugh Hennessy. He had never been arrested locally, nor sued. He did have a moving violation from two years ago, an illegal U-turn, and had mailed in the fine without incident. Nothing there.

911 Recap, where they can look up calls dating back for years, was my last stop, and required an in-person visit.

The Hennessys lived in the western reaches of Hennepin County, on the shore of the big lake, Minnetonka. Nice work if you can get it, as Deputy Begans would have said. Much of outlying Hennepin County had become built up and suburban, but there was still quiet, privacy, land, and history to be bought on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. Some of the county’s richest citizens lived on its inlets and bays.

Even as I gave the clerk the Hennessys’ address, I was thinking it wouldn’t yield anything. I believed there was probably something wrong at the Hennessy home, but I doubted it was the kind of wrong that sent the police out to their quiet lakeside address. It would be, instead, a quiet, simmering distress that even the neighbors didn’t know about.

“We sent an ambulance out there three weeks ago,” the young clerk told me.

“You did?” I said, startled. It never pays to assume. “What for?”

He read from the brief narrative. “Possible brain attack, male 43 years old, collapsed and nonresponsive,” he read. “He went to HCMC.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“That’s all I know,” he said.

“Did you find any other calls to that address?”

“No,” he said. “Just the one.”

“Thanks for your help,” I said. Then I added, “Brain attack?” The terminology wasn’t familiar.

“In other words, stroke.”

At Hennepin County Medical Center, a white-haired man was at the patient-information desk. I gave him Hugh Hennessy’s name, and he tapped at his computer keyboard.

“Not here,” the man said.

“Was he discharged, or…” I didn’t want to use the word died. “What was the resolution of his treatment here?”

“I don’t have that information,” he said. “You’d need to go to Medical Records.”

The elevator I rode down in was outsized, made to handle wheelchairs and stretchers. At the records office, a young red-haired woman was behind the computer. I laid my shield on the counter for her to see. “I need to know where a patient named Hugh Hennessy went from here,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Badge or no badge, I can’t give out patient information without a subpoena.”

“They brought him in on a stroke,” I said. “If he died here, I need to know that.”

She shook her head, wordlessly apologizing.

I sighed, or tried to. My lungs felt as though they’d shrunk to a child’s size, and I couldn’t get a full breath.

Maybe I sounded more exasperated than I realized, or looked more pathetic. The clerk’s hands tapped against her keyboard. I took it for a dismissal- she was getting back to work, from what I could see- but she said, “You know, Park Christian is an excellent rehab facility for stroke patients.” Her smile was guileless.

“Is it?” I said, realizing what she was really telling me. “Thank you very much.”

Park Christian Hospital was outside Minneapolis proper, in a pleasantly verdant setting that must have been comforting to the relatives of the frail and stricken. Behind a set of automatic double doors, a rush of cold, conditioned air greeted me. Instantly, after the heat of the summer day and a long ride out there, I felt chills begin. But the pain in my ear was under control, held down by aspirin, and that was what mattered.

“Can I help you?” the receptionist said.

“I’d like to see Hugh Hennessy,” I said. Too late I realized I should have brought some sort of prop with me: flowers, a card. “I’m a friend of the family.”

I expected a runaround. You’re not on the visitors’ list, or some similar refusal. Instead the woman said, “I’ll have Freddy take you back.”

I almost said, You will? I’d just wanted to confirm where Hugh Hennessy was; now I actually had to face the man, with no excuse for being there. “Are you sure I won’t be disrupting a routine, or anything? I could come later,” I offered.

A door beside the desk swung open and a man appeared.

He was young, but with an older man’s mien. His face was soft and pouchy, his blond hair cut in a short, square style that few guys in their twenties would have chosen. His name tag read, Freddy. He looked at me. “Are you here to see Hugh Hennessy?”

“That’d be me,” I admitted.

He gestured to the door, for me to follow him.

“It’s too bad you didn’t get here a little earlier,” Freddy said. “You just missed his daughter.”

“Marlinchen was here?”

“A very pretty girl,” he commented, and I heard no lechery in it. “She’s been here quite often.”

We walked back through a hallway, then through a glassed-in breezeway to another wing. Outside the glass I could see open space, lawn and pathways, and beyond that a deep pond.

“Is Mr. Hennessy alert?” I asked. “Is he verbal?”

“Alert? I think he’s aware,” Freddy said. “Verbal, no. He has expressive aphasia. That means that we think he understands a lot of what’s going on around him, but when he tries to speak, it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Is that the extent of the damage?” I asked.

Freddy shook his head. “He’s in a wheelchair right now, for weakness on the right side of his body, but we’re working on that. And some neglect.”

“Neglect?”

“Where someone loses awareness of one side of the body, and one side of their surroundings.”

“I see.” For a moment I’d thought Freddy was telling me Hugh had been improperly cared for, elsewhere.

We stopped outside a door. “This is his room,” Freddy said.

Inside, the air was still and quiet. The room held two low beds, but Hugh Hennessy wasn’t in either of them. He sat in a wheelchair by the window, chin on chest, eyes closed.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, worried.

Freddy smiled at my alarm. “It’s all right. He’s just fallen asleep.”

He was slender of build, his hair light brown, cut sharply across the forehead in the style of a man who doesn’t put much stock in his looks. I wasn’t prepared for him to look so young, even in the ravages of poor health. The air-conditioning gave me another chill, and I wondered why they kept it so cold where old and infirm people were.

Freddy tipped his head to one side. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Why?”

“You look a little off-color,” he said.

“It was hot outside,” I said, as if that explained everything.

Hugh Hennessy’s eyelids fluttered, and his pale eyes half opened. I couldn’t tell if he was awake, or saw me, but guilt stabbed me, as though he’d caught me in his room under false pretenses.

“Actually,” I told Freddy, “I’m not feeling so great. I’m going to get some air.”

“That’s fine,” he said gently. “Come back when you’re feeling better.”

The hospital’s parking lot had an Entry Only arrow at one end and an Exit Only arrow at the other. Following the prescribed direction, I had to make a right turn onto a side street to get back to the road I’d taken to the hospital. That’s why I saw the slight form of Marlinchen Hennessy, waiting on a bus bench.

I stopped the Nova and called from the window.

“Remember me?” I said.

She looked up, startled.

“I was just driving by and I recognized you,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” she said.

“Want a lift?”

“My house is a ways from here,” she said, still wary.

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s a nice day for a drive.”

A criminal, someone with experience of the cops, would have known it was too coincidental to be true, a detective driving by and innocently offering a ride. But Marlinchen was young, and when I looked over my shoulder, feigning worry about another car approaching, she felt guilty.

“Come on if you’re coming,” I urged.

Marlinchen picked up her backpack and ran out to me. She jumped into the passenger side and slammed the door. I accelerated and we were on our way. Gotcha, I thought. She wasn’t going to be fleeing this interview, not at 65 miles an hour.

It was a sad day that I had to take pleasure in cornering a teenage girl as though she were a hardened perp, but you take your victories where you can get them.

“Roll down the window if you want,” I said. I was still alternating between too hot and too cold; it wouldn’t make much difference to me. Marlinchen rolled her window halfway down.

“Were you coming from school?” I said. “I didn’t think there were any out in this area.”

“No, I get out of school at noon,” she said. “I’m a senior, and all my graduation requirements were satisfied, so I took an abbreviated schedule.”

“That must be nice,” I said.

“I’m enjoying it.” Her tone sounded a little more relaxed and confident.

“So what brought you out to this area?”

“I was at the hospital,” Marlinchen said briefly.

“Really? Why?” I’m giving you a chance here. Tell me the truth.

“I volunteer there, when I can,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me.

Too bad, Marlinchen. There goes your no-hitter. “That’s nice of you,” I said. “Convenient, too. Gives you a chance to visit your father.”

For a moment, the only sound was the Nova’s rumbling engine. Then I heard Marlinchen sniffling. She laid her head against the door frame of the Nova, and her shoulders shook.

Suddenly it didn’t seem so funny to me that I’d been reduced to entrapping a teenage girl with her own evasions. I had pursued Hugh’s whereabouts as though it were just an intellectual exercise, not thinking of the human feelings underneath.

I spoke as gently as possible. “Your father’s had a stroke, your mother’s dead, you’re the oldest in the family, and your twin brother’s whereabouts are unknown,” I said. “That’s a lot of trouble to deal with, and usually the last thing I’d do is pile on, but I can’t help you if you keep lying to me.”

Marlinchen didn’t answer. She cried for a while as we got off the 394 and onto the secondary roads that threaded the wetlands around the big lake, where bait stores and diners ceded to houses set back from the road. I began to realize just how far Marlinchen had ridden on a bus to see me down at the detective division.

“I’m going to need specific directions pretty soon,” I said, relieved to have something normal to say.

“Oh,” Marlinchen said. Her voice was wet, but she seemed more composed as she straightened in her seat and began to direct me.

The Hennessys lived on a little peninsula that ran out into the lake, at the end of an unmarked dirt road. I’d expected a writer to live in something opulent, but the Hennessy house, while big, was unpretentious. It was two stories, with an exterior of weather-beaten wood. Tall lilac trees, still in bloom, crowded the front door, and dark purple irises irregularly cropped up around a crooked stone path. The grass in front clearly hadn’t been mowed recently. A smaller building stood off to the side, perhaps a carriage house in the home’s early-twentieth-century life. A willow fountained over its far side.

The dirt driveway ran alongside the house, and as I pulled up in the Nova, I realized the back of the house, facing the lake, was its true “front.” Here was a broad, covered back porch, with French double doors. A high window on the second story looked out over the lake, with a trellis of ornamental grapevines crawling up alongside it. A wide, grassy slope led down to the lake, where an apron of rocks ran along the water’s edge, holding off the erosion process. A single tree stood halfway to the water’s edge, several creamy blossoms among its dark, glossy leaves.

I killed the Nova’s engine. I could leave now, but it would undermine everything I’d done since calling Marlinchen over to get in my car. Her willingness to lie was well established. If I put off this conversation until tomorrow, she’d have time to massage the facts to her liking, in readiness for our next meeting.

“So,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Where should I start?”

“With your father’s stroke,” I said. “That was three weeks ago, is that right?”

She nodded.

“Why cover it up?” I asked.

“Dad’s a writer,” she said. “He’s famous. It would have gotten into the news.”

“Is that a problem?” I said. “He’s sick. It’s not a scandal.”

Marlinchen pressed her lips together, thinking. “I wanted to protect his privacy,” she said.

“You told me he was up north finishing a novel, Marlinchen,” I pointed out. “I’m not a member of the media, and you were asking for my help, and you still lied to me. That’s a little more than protecting your dad’s privacy.”

She dropped her head. “I don’t want my brothers to go to foster homes,” she said softly. “In a few weeks I’ll be 18, and then I can be their guardian. But if Family Services finds out about Dad before then, they’d split us up.”

“That’s a pretty drastic expectation,” I told her. “Social workers don’t go around looking for families to break up. They take the whole situation into account. It’s very possible that if you’re getting along okay with the younger kids, they’d probably just want you to have a temporary guardian until you turn 18.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I assured her. “You’ll call on an adult relative to step in until your dad’s better.”

“There isn’t anyone,” she said. Reading the skepticism on my face, she went on. “My mother had a sister, but she’s dead. All my grandparents are dead except for my grandmother on my mother’s side. She’s in an assisted-living facility in Berlin. She speaks mostly German.”

“Okay, I’d rule her out,” I agreed, pausing to think. “Listen, can I come in?”

Marlinchen led me up the back steps, onto the porch, and in through a pair of French doors. The Hennessy home was as graceful inside as out: good pine wood, a rough-beamed ceiling, and eclectic touches everywhere. We were in a family room, the modernity of a wide-screen TV offsetting the shabby-elegant furniture, a nubby throw blanket thrown over a velvety couch. Beyond, I could see the kitchen. There was plenty of space to work; pots and pans overhung a center-island butcher block.

“Would you like something to drink?” Marlinchen led me toward the kitchen, moving with the assurance people have in their longtime homes.

“Ice water is fine.”

Marlinchen fixed me a tall glass, and iced tea for herself. I wandered into the kitchen behind her and looked around. My request to come inside hadn’t been an idle one; as a social worker would have, I’d wanted to see evidence of how the kids were living, whether the house was clean, what they were eating. From my perspective, they were keeping better house than a lot of bachelor cops I knew. The kitchen was as clean as the family room we’d come through. A faint smell of cooking hung in the air, and there were vegetable peelings in the drain trap, suggesting a healthy diet. The houseplants I’d seen were green and healthy; they were being watered.

Marlinchen said, “Detective Pribek, can we talk about Aidan?”

“Sure,” I said. “But Aidan’s nearly 18, and on the road by choice. When he does turn 18, which you’ve said is a few weeks away, it’ll be no one’s business but his own where he is. If he doesn’t want his family to know his whereabouts, well, you may not like it, but that’s his choice.”

Marlinchen slipped into one of the chairs against the kitchen counter. “He’s my brother,” she said. “I have to know that he’s all right.”

I remained standing; I didn’t want to get mired in this situation. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I understand that you’re afraid for him. But with a runaway who’s been gone as long as Aidan has, there’s just not much the police can do. You’re solidly in private-investigator territory here. I can recommend several to you, competent people who, for a fee, will make finding your brother their job.”

“What kind of a fee?” she asked.

“Depends,” I said. “Somebody good will charge you at least a hundred dollars an hour.”

She winced.

“I know it sounds like a lot,” I said. “But I wouldn’t bargain-hunt in this case. If you don’t get somebody good, it’ll take longer to find Aidan. You’ll end up paying one way or another. And,” I added, “it’s not unheard-of for unethical investigators to set their rates low to get people in the door, then drag their heels and pad their hours. You don’t end up saving money at all.”

“I see.” Marlinchen was starting to look lost. “How many hours do you think it would take for them to find him?”

“I really wouldn’t feel comfortable estimating,” I said. “They could find him with three phone calls. Or it could take weeks.”

“I see,” she said again. Obviously, she wasn’t feeling any better about the situation, and it wasn’t hard to guess why.

“It’s money, isn’t it?” I said.

The Hennessys lived in a wealthy enclave on the lake; I’d assumed that not only was Marlinchen capably handling the household affairs but that, in doing so, she was drawing on a comfortable sum of her father’s savings. At least, I had until just now.

“I know we look in good shape financially,” Marlinchen said. “But I only have access to Dad’s checking account; he gave me his ATM number. But for everything else, I need to be his conservator, and I can’t do that until I turn 18. Even then, there might be some delays. He has aphasia; it’s a speech and comprehension disorder. Dad needs to recover enough that an officer of the court can see that he understands what’s being said to him, and that the mark he’s making really represents his desire to make me a conservator.”

She sounded surprisingly knowledgeable. “Does your father have a lawyer who’s helping you with this?” I asked.

Marlinchen nodded. “I don’t know that I’d call Mr. DeRose ‘Dad’s lawyer,’ but he helped with some things when Mother died, and when I called him, he was willing to do the conservatorship work on contingency. I can pay him once I get access to the accounts.”

I hoped DeRose was someone ethical; this slender, tentative 17-year-old with a wealthy father would look like a slot machine on two feet to a lawyer who wasn’t.

But with Marlinchen’s very next words, I had to reconsider the wealthy father part.

“Even then,” Marlinchen went on, “there’s just Dad’s passbook savings to tap, and each of us has a college-savings trust. But that’s not a lot of money. A lot of what Dad earned went to paying off this house. Which is fine, but we can’t eat the house and the great view,” she said, gesturing toward the lake. Then she amended her words. “Things aren’t that bad, yet, but there’s certainly not money for a hundred-dollar-an-hour investigator for an open-ended period of time. That’s why I was hoping that someone on the police here would find Aidan’s case had enough merit to take it on.”

I was starting to feel like those old-time aviators who took off from New York for the West Coast on a cloudy day, got turned around in a fog bank, and ended up committed to a trip to Europe. I’d wanted to help Marlinchen, but I’d also wanted it to be short and simple. And for a moment, it had seemed like it was going to be: I’d found Hugh Hennessy and determined that his daughter’s reasons for covering up his absence, while misguided, weren’t criminal. I’d thought, then, that I could simply reassure Marlinchen that Aidan was probably okay, recommend a competent private investigator, and forget the whole thing. I’d thought I could sum up the Hennessy affair in three words: Not My Problem.

Instead I found that Marlinchen was alone with a houseful of younger siblings with no adult relatives to call on, and despite her father’s literary successes, without a comfortable supply of money. Now I was summing up the Hennessys in four words: No End in Sight.

And my goddamn ear was starting to hurt again. The aspirin was wearing off, and the pain was beginning to ramp up from its dull, medicated ache toward the sharp throb I’d woken up with the last two mornings. It was driving nobler feelings from my mind.

“I wish it were just a matter of merit,” I said. “But Hennepin County pays me to investigate cases where the law has been broken within its borders. That’s not the situation here. Look, I’ll talk to the PIs I know, see if one of them won’t take you pro bono. Maybe-”

A rustling from beyond us, the front of the house, made Marlinchen look up. Three boys, loaded down with backpacks, trooped into the kitchen. Their idle conversation stopped short when they saw me with their sister.

None was blond like Marlinchen; they had Hugh’s brown hair. The youngest boy’s was quite shaggy, but other than that, they looked well groomed and clean, and obviously healthy.

Marlinchen slid from the stool. “Guys, this is Detective Sarah Pribek,” she said. “I spoke to her the other day, about Aidan. You remember I said I was going into the city to do that.”

One of the boys, a muscular kid in a sleeveless T-shirt, spoke. “I thought that-”

“We can talk about it later,” Marlinchen said. She carried on with introductions. “Sarah, this is Liam, he’s 16,” the tallest boy, thin, with longish, slightly darker hair and wire-rim glasses, “and Colm, he’s 14,” the well-built boy who’d spoken, “and the little guy is Donal, 11.” Donal was the shaggy-haired one; underneath the mop his face was unformed, like children’s often are.

“It’s nice to meet you all,” I said, “but I really should get going. I’ve got to be at work.” To Marlinchen I said, “I’ll make those phone calls I mentioned, tonight or tomorrow, and get back to you with a referral.”

It wasn’t going to be an easy sell, I thought, but maybe I could catch one of the PIs I knew in a generous mood.

Marlinchen nodded. “Let me walk you out,” she said.

Outside on the deck, she turned earnest again. “Detective Pribek, you’re not going to report us, right?” she asked. “To Family Services?”

“I’m legally required to, Marlinchen,” I said.

Her shoulders dropped infinitesimally, and she looked away from me, toward the lake.

I didn’t know why she felt the way she did, as if she and her brothers were being sentenced to an orphanage of times past, with high Gothic gates and meals of thin gruel. But suddenly I saw myself through her eyes and didn’t like what I saw. I’d come in here and seen evidence of her careful housekeeping and her cooking and the obvious love she had for her younger brothers, and sorry, it wasn’t good enough and I’m reporting you to the county and by the way, I don’t care where your brother is. You want to find him, pay up.

“Look,” I said, relenting, “maybe I could help you out a little with Aidan.”

“Really?” she said.

“You said you’ve only got school until noon, right? Why don’t I come out tomorrow around one, and we can talk about this some more.”

To say that Marlinchen Hennessy smiled didn’t quite do it justice. Throughout our short acquaintance, she’d never made more than a small smile of greeting. I wasn’t prepared for the sight of her natural happiness; it was brilliant as the first fire-blossom of a lit match. The thought of getting more involved with the Hennessys wasn’t entirely appealing, but it was touching to see how much an offer of help meant to Marlinchen.

I gave her my card. “Both cell and pager are on there,” I said. “In case you have a schedule conflict, or something.”

“I won’t,” she said.

As soon as I was back in the car, I groped in my shoulder bag for the aspirin bottle. It wasn’t there.

It’s in the trash can in your bathroom, genius, where you threw it this morning after taking the last of the aspirin. You were going to pick up some more, remember?

The readout on my cell phone said it was 3:45. Even without a stop at a convenience store, I’d be late for work.

I backed the Nova around in a three-quarter circle and accelerated down the Hennessys’ long driveway. Someone at work would have a couple of painkillers I could score.