He refused to acknowledge my ill humor. “Do you know who hit you or what was used?”
I shook my head and saw black circles swirl around. “No. He was hiding in the room. I was looking at my aunt, who was drunk.” I frowned. “No. I thought she was drunk, but it turned out she had been coshed. That’s right, I realized someone had hit her and that he might still be there and as I was jumping up to protect myself I got hit from behind.”
He nodded, like a professor at a promising pupil. “It’s very good that you have so much recall—very often the memory immediately before such an incident is blocked out by what we call protective amnesia.”
I rubbed the tender spot on the back of my head. “What I don’t remember is what happened afterwards. I know I was climbing a rope in an elevator shaft but I can’t remember how I got Elena up with me. And then we came out. The fire fighters had to bring my aunt, but I think I got out on my own….”
My voice trailed off as I tried to focus the blur of memory. Mallory had shown up along with Furey when I was in the emergency room, but someone had been in the crowd around the fire who didn’t belong there. I remembered a faint inflection of surprise mixed in with a sense of my imminent death as the paramedics carried me through the barricades. The face swam on the edge of my consciousness. Tears of frustration pricked my eyelids when my aching head refused to concentrate.
“I can’t remember,” I said helplessly.
“Do you have any idea of why this happened?”
His gray eves looked harmlessly genial behind their thick lenses but I stiffened at once. “Did Bobby—Lieutenant Mallory—tell you to ask that?”
There’d been quite a scene in the emergency room, with Bobby roaring at me like a bull elephant on a rampage. Dominic Assuevo and Roland Montgomery from the Bomb and Arson Squad had joined him, but it was only because I kept passing out that the resident on call finally threw them out of the examining area.
Homerin shook his head. “The police haven’t spoken to me at all. I’m just checking your ability to answer logical questions.”
In the intervals between sleeping and tossing in pain I’d been testing that skill myself, without any happy answer. Maybe someone arriving to torch the building had seen Elena come out. He followed her, heard her phone me, then when she went back inside he knocked her out and waited to get me, too, before setting the place on fire. It could have happened that way, but it seemed awfully elaborate: Why not just torch the place while she was out of the way? Maybe she’d seen him clearly enough to recognize him again, so he felt she had to die. But then why go for me too? My head was starting to disintegrate. I couldn’t figure it all out. I wanted to go home and I was starting to feel too helpless even to get out of bed again.
Seeing my fatigue and frustration, Homerin switched to a general interrogation—did I know who the President was, the mayor, people like that? I wished I didn’t but rattled off the names. After that we went through the pins-in-the-feet routine and he banged on my knees and elbows and felt my head—all the usual medical stuff that lets the doctor know all your pieces are still attached to your aching body.
When he finished looking at my eyes and rotating my head around a few times, he sat back in the visitor’s chair. “I know you want to leave, Miss Warshawski, but it would be better if you stayed another day.”
“I don’t want to.” I was close to breaking down and sobbing.
“You live alone, don’t you? I just don’t think you’re up to looking after yourself right now. There’s nothing wrong with you that I can see, barring the side effects of concussion. They did a CAT scan of your head in the emergency room Wednesday morning and nothing alarming showed up. But you’ll manage better if you let us look after you another day.”
“I hate being looked after, I can’t stand it.” I didn’t want to be like Tony, reduced to such helplessness he couldn’t even breathe on his own at the end. The sound of his harsh wheezing breathing cut through my brain and against my will I found myself crying.
Homerin waited patiently for me to dry my eyes and blow my nose. He asked if there was something specific I wanted to talk about, but the memories of my dying parents were too painful to mention to a stranger.
Instead I blurted out, “Is Lotty right? Am I going to get Alzheimer’s disease?”
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “She’s worried about you-that’s why she dragged me down here and got the house staff to agree to let me see you. I’m not a prophet, but three blows in seven years—it’s more than you need, but you’re not taking the regular pounding that a boxer does. I’d worry more about feeling better now. And give me a call if you have any unusual symptoms.”