“You could be right,” I agreed. “Was it a guard or a patient?”
Jurgens grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen table and started slashing at me. I flung the chair at his head and fled through the back door.
A cab pulled up just as I reached the street. Jana Shatka got out. She had changed for her appointment from the thin sundress and flip-flops to a tight-fitting navy skirt with hose, heels, and a white jacket.
“You! You have been breaking into my home while I was out? I’m calling the police!” It wasn’t an idle threat—she pulled her cell phone from the outsize blue handbag she was carrying.
“Xavier let me in.” I was gulping in air. “He ran into some chair legs, so he’s in a bit of pain. But he agreed you must have been off talking to the money pot who funded the Camaro.”
“What? You went into my house and attacked my man? You are a crazy person! You belong in that hospital with the other lunatics Xavier works with all day long. Get away from here!”
We had drawn a crowd, homebound commuters along with the people hanging out in the park.
“You told your donor I’d come around asking questions, didn’t you? What advice did you get back?”
“To put you in a straitjacket and take you to the locked ward at the hospital,” she snapped.
“Hey, she’s bleeding,” one of the spectators called. “What did Xavier do? Bite her?”
“No, man, he cut her—look, he’s there with the knife!”
I turned with the rest of the crowd to stare at Xavier, who was standing next to the Camaro, brandishing the butcher knife. It was pathetic, in a way: the car was perhaps the dearest thing he’d ever owned. I’d threatened it, and he was standing guard.
I hadn’t noticed until now, but blood was seeping through the front of my knit top. Xavier had managed to strike me, and I hadn’t even noticed. My shirt was sliced open at the shoulder. I craned my neck to squint at the wound. It didn’t seem very deep, but in the aftermath of the fight, the sight of my own blood suddenly made me weak in the knees.
“Better call the cops,” someone said. “He’s turned violent, cut this lady, who knows what he’ll do next.”
“She started it,” Jana growled.
“How do you know? You weren’t here—you were off on a date with your fancy-pants guy, weren’t you?” one of the women cawed.
“She admitted it out loud,” Jana said. “She hit him with a chair.”
“Maybe she hit some sense into him. A smart man would get rid of a lazy bitch like you, pretending to be on disability.”
“I am on disability,” Jana said. “It’s my lungs, the doctor agreed!”
I went over to the woman who’d said Jana was off on a date. “Have you seen Mr. Fancy Pants?” I asked. “I’m anxious to find him.”
She shook her head. “It’s just talk around the street. You know, she goes off like this, makeup, pantyhose, the whole bit, when most of the time she is wearing some old housedress.”
Another woman chimed in. “Of course she has a rich boyfriend. Why else would a whore like that who spends her day listening to Wade Lawlor make up lies about Mexicans—”
“What, that Mexicans are lazy vermin?” Jana interrupted.
The other woman lunged at Jana, calling her a cerdo ruso perezoso, a lazy Russian pig, but a man stepped between them. I decided I’d had enough excitement for one day and slipped off to my car while the crowd’s attention was on the new contestant.
A woman at the fringe of the group nodded at me as I was crossing the street. “Those two women, they’re always at each other’s throats. You should get to a doctor. Out of curiosity, why did you come to fight Xavier?”
“I didn’t come to fight him.” I leaned wearily against the Mustang. “But there are questions about where he got the money for the car. You wouldn’t know, I suppose.”
She shook her head regretfully: she longed to know. Everyone on the street longed to know. “Xavier works hard, you know. He’s not a lazy man, but he’s an unlucky man—especially to get tied up with a neryacha like that Jana. I’m from Eastern Europe, same as her, but I work for a living! But we all know what they pay over at the hospital and it’s not enough to buy a car like that.”
“You think that’s where money for the car came from—from Jana’s lover?”
“Who would pay a creature like her that much money? I’m thinking he maybe stole drugs from the hospital.”
Oh, the word on the street—it was like revisiting my childhood, all the local feuds, with each set of immigrants trying to push the other off the bottom rung of the ladder they were all trying to climb. What is it we fear in those who aren’t part of our tribe? Is it the old sibling rivalry—who gets the most love, or the last piece of chocolate cake?