The ambulance came a moment later, but the EMT crew shook their heads grimly; Kitty was already dead. I moved aside as they shifted her body onto the stretcher, but couldn’t find the strength to get to my feet. While I sat, head on my knees, I watched blood spool from under the bed. It took me a long instant to realize there was another body under there, but when I finally alerted the crew, they lifted the bed away from the wall.
A scarecrow of a woman lay there, her breath coming in shallow raspy bursts. Her dark curly hair was streaked with gray, her skin dry and flaking. Blood oozed from her abdomen. Judy Binder. Kitty had died protecting her daughter.
20
WHAT DID IT ALL MEAN?
A ROUGH HAND SHOOK my shoulder. “Doll, wake up! Sorry to bust in on you in bed, but here’s the doc, worried sick about you.”
I woke up slowly, from a great distance. I’d been deep in sleep, back in a scene from my early childhood, when my mother had made cocoa to comfort me after an attack by some neighborhood bullies. Mr. Contreras was staring down at me, his faded brown eyes anxious. When I turned my head on the pillow, I saw Lotty behind him. I shut my eyes, hoping to recapture my mother’s face, but it was gone.
I opened my leaden lids again and pushed myself up in the bed, pulling the covers up to my waist so I could sit cross-legged without embarrassing Mr. Contreras.
“Have you come to tell me you were right?” I spoke past Mr. Contreras’s shoulder to Lotty. “If I had called the Skokie police, Kitty Binder would still be alive.”
Lotty pushed past Mr. Contreras to stand next to me. “I came to make sure you were all right,” she said. “It was a long and painful night. I heard about it from Helen Langston at Glenbrook.”
“I don’t know her,” I said. “She must be the one person who didn’t interrogate me last night.”
I had spent hours with the Skokie police, and then Ferret Downey from the CPD had shown up, wanting his own rundown. Murray Ryerson had picked up the story on his scanner; he’d been waiting by my car when the cops finished with me. He went with me to Glenbrook Hospital to see if they would tell us anything about Judy Binder’s condition, but she was still in surgery. In the waiting room there, I recited my lines for the third time. The only good thing about going over my bad decision so often was it started to feel remote, as if I were just reporting a movie plot.
“Helen—Dr. Langston—is the surgeon who repaired Judy’s intestines,” Lotty said.
“She survived?”
“She had so many drugs in her that they protected her from shock. Cocaine, meth, but mostly oxycodone. The anesthesiologist had a tough job figuring out what he could safely administer.” Lotty’s mouth flattened in an angry line. “The police talked to Judy when she finally left the recovery room, but she could remember nothing, not who had been in the house, not why they shot her or bludgeoned her mother. All she could do was laugh like a little girl and say, ‘Duck and cover, she never believed in duck and cover, but it works, it’s the best.’”
“Duck and cover?” Mr. Contreras repeated, bewildered. “Is that a hunting slogan? Is this Judy saying someone was stalking her ma?”
“Judy’s conversation is so unfathomable that I’m afraid I stopped trying to understand it many years ago.” Lotty produced a bleak smile. “I need to talk to Victoria alone.”
I saw the hurt in my neighbor’s face and squeezed his hand. “It’s okay. It’s better if we’re alone when she gets what she has to say off her chest. Do you want to wait in the living room?”
“I’ll take the dogs out, doll.” Mr. Contreras made a gallant effort to maintain his equanimity. “The doc didn’t want me bringing ’em upstairs.”
When he’d left, Lotty and I stared gravely at each other.
“I should have listened to you,” I said. “Anything you want to say about my hotheadedness, or pigheadedness, go ahead: I deserve it.”
Lotty sat on the edge of the bed. There were lines in her face I had never noticed; she was getting old, another thing I was powerless to stop.
“After you left the Pottawattamie Club last night, I did call the Skokie police,” she said. “They promised to send a car by the house, but when I checked back, they said they hadn’t seen anything. Apparently because of Judy, neighbors have called them a number of times over the years, but the family never let them in. Last night, when the police rang the bell and no one answered, they assumed it was another false alarm. I don’t know if Judy’s life is worth the time and skill and money we’re investing in her, but she would be lying there dead next to her mother if you hadn’t acted with your usual rash—your usual spiritedness.”
“The end justifies my means?” I said, my voice cracking. “I don’t know, Lotty. Right now I feel as though I should retreat to a cave above Kabul and eat twigs until I die.”