Derek Wenner was sitting in a visitors’ lounge just outside a set of double doors that had small windows embedded with chicken wire and a sign reading PLEASE RING FOR ADMITTANCE with a buzzer underneath.
He was smoking a cigarette, an issue of National Geographic open on his lap. He glanced at me blankly when I sat down next to him.
“How’s Kitty?” I said.
He started slightly. “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t recognize you when you came around the corner. She’s better. They just brought her up and they’re getting her settled. I’ll have a chance to see her in a bit.” His glance strayed toward the elevators. “Glen didn’t come down with you by any chance, did she?”
I shook my head, watching a mixture of relief and momentary hope fade out of his face.
“Don’t tell her you caught me with a cigarette,” he said, sheepishly. “She made me quit last March. I’ll toss these out before I go home tonight. It’s just with Kitty so sick and then all this stuff-” He broke off with a shrug.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him he reeked of tobacco. Glen would have to be comatose not to notice it.
“What brings you down here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Bobby went off to bed and I talked to Glen for a while. I just thought I’d stop by and see what was happening with Kitty.”
He smiled, not quite sure what to make of it. “I was just sitting here thinking how much this felt like the night she was born. Waiting out in the lounge for hours, wondering how it was all going to come out. They didn’t let fathers in the delivery room in those days, you know. Now, I understand, they practically insist.”
“What happened to her mother?”
“She drank herself to death when Kitty was five.”
He lapsed into silence. I couldn’t think of a comment that didn’t seem either trivial or beside the point. I watched him put out his cigarette. He worked the hot ember loose, leaving an empty socket like a pulled tooth.
Finally, I said, “Is she being admitted to Detox?”
“Actually, this is the psychiatric ward. I think the detoxification unit is separate. Leo wants to get her stabilized and then do an evaluation before he does anything. Right now, she’s a little bit out of control.”
He shook his head, pulling at his double chin. “God, I don’t know what to do with her. Glen’s probably told you what a source of friction it’s been.”
“Her drug use?”
“Oh, that and her grades, her hours, the drop in her weight. That’s been a nightmare. I think she’s down to ninety-seven pounds at this point.”
“So maybe this is where she needs to be,” I said.
One of the double doors opened and a nurse peered out. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. No cap, but she did wear a nursing pin and a name tag that I couldn’t read from where I sat. Her hair was ill-dyed, a shade of orange I’d only seen before in marigolds, but her smile was quick and pleasant.
“Mr. Wenner? Would you like to follow me, please?”
Derek got up with a glance at me. “You want to wait? It won’t be long. Leo said five minutes was all he’d permit, given the shape she’s in. I could buy you a cup of coffee or a drink as soon as I’m done.”
“All right. That’s nice. I’ll be out here.”
He nodded and moved off with the nurse. For one brief moment, as they passed into the ward, I could hear Kitty delivering some high-decibel curses of a quite imaginative sort. Then the door closed and the key turned resoundingly in the lock. No one on 3 South was going to sleep tonight. I picked up the National Geographic magazine and stared at a series of time-lapse photographs of a blowhole in Yosemite.
Fifteen minutes later, Derek and I were seated in a motel bar half a block away from the hospital. The Plantacion is a rogue of a drinking establishment that looks as if it’s crept to its present location from some other part of town. The motel itself was apparently built with an eye to sheltering the relatives of the ill and infirm who come to St. Terry’s for treatment from small towns nearby. The bar was added as an afterthought, in violation of God knows what city codes, as it is smack in the middle of the residential neighborhood. Of course, the area by now has been infiltrated by medical buildings, clinics, convalescent homes, pharmacies, and various other suppliers to the health-care industry, including a mortuary two blocks away to service folk when all else fails. Maybe the city planning commission decided, at some point, to help ease the pain by making eighty-six-proof alcohol available along with the other kind.
The interior is narrow and dark, with a diorama of a banana plantation that extends behind the bar in the space that usually supports a long mirror, liquor bottles, and a neon beer sign. Instead, arranged as though on a small lighted stage, scale-model banana palms are laid out in orderly rows and tiny mechanized laborers go about the business of harvesting fruit in a series of vignettes. All of the workers appear to be Mexican, including the tiny carved woman who arrives with a water barrel and a dipper just as the noon whistle blows. One man waves from a treetop while a wee wooden dog barks and wags its tail.
Derek and I sat at the bar for a while, scarcely speaking, we were so taken by the scene. Even the bartender, who must have seen it hundreds of times, paused to watch while the mechanical mule pulled a load of bananas around the bend and another cart took its place. Not surprisingly, the house specialties run to cuba libres and banana daiquiris, but no one cares if you order something adult. Derek had a Beefeater martini and I had a glass of white wine that made my lips pull together like a drawstring purse. I’d watched the bartender pour it from a gallon jug that ran about three bucks at any Stop N’ Go. The label was from one of those wineries the grape pickers are always striking and I pondered the possibility that they’d peed on the crop to retaliate for unfair labor practices.
“What do you think about this business with Bobby?” I said to Derek when I finally got my mouth unpuckered.
“His claim about a murder attempt? God, I don’t know. It sounds pretty farfetched to me. He and his mother seem to believe it, but I can’t figure out why anybody’d do such a thing.”
“What about money?”
“Money?”
“I’ve been wondering who benefits financially if Bobby dies. I asked Glen the same thing.”
Derek began to stroke his double chin. The excess weight made him Jook as if he had one normal-sized face superimposed on a much larger one. The jowls were just leftover flesh hanging out the sides. “It’d be a fairly conspicuous motive, I should think,” he said. He wore the skeptical look of a man in a stage play: an exaggerated effect for the audience twenty-five rows back.
“Yeah, well forcing him off the bridge was conspicuous7 too. Of course, if he’d died in the wreck, nobody would have known the difference,” I said. “Cars go off the pass every six months or so anyway because people take the curves too fast, so it could have been passed off as a single-car accident. There might have been some damage to the rear bumper where the other driver made contact, but by the time they’d hauled Bobby’s car up the mountain, I don’t think anybody would have suspected what really occurred. I take it there weren’t any witnesses.”
“No, and I’m not sure you can count on what Bobby says.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, he obviously has a vested interest in having someone else to blame. The kid doesn’t want to own up to the fact that he’d been drinking. He always drove too fast anyway. His best friend gets killed. Rick was Kitty’s boyfriend, you know, and his death threw her for a loop. I don’t mean to cast doubt on Bobby’s version of the story, but it’s always struck me as self-serving to some extent.”
I studied Derek’s face, wondering at the change in his tone of voice. It was an interesting theory and I got the impression that he’d been thinking about it for some time. He seemed uncomfortable, though, pretending to be casual and objective when, in fact, he was undermining Bobby’s credibility. I was sure he hadn’t dared mention his idea to Glen. “You’re saying Bobby made it up?”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied evasively. “I think he believes it, but then it gets him off the hook, doesn’t it?” His eyes slid away from mine and he signaled to the bartender for a repeat, then glanced back at me. “You ready for another one?”