It was a relief to hear her speak. “Do you remember how the accident happened?”
She frowned impatiently. “It wasn’t an accident. I told you at the restaurant, someone hit me. Could you bring me some ice for my head, please?”
I sighed to myself as I went back to the kitchen. The accident was going to go into Lotty’s annals of traffic mishaps—someone had hit her. Just more forcefully than usual.
I wrapped the ice in a kitchen towel and placed it gently on the purple bump. “Did you report it to the police?”
“The police came. They tried to make me go to a hospital, but I knew I was late to meet you, and I had to see you, Victoria.”
I gently squeezed the fingers of her injured arm. She lay silent for a few minutes.
“I think they wanted you, you see.”
“The police want me?” I asked cautiously.
“No, Vic. The people who hit me.”
The ground shifted underfoot. “Lotty, darling Lotty, I know you’re in pain and maybe concussed besides, but can you please tell me what happened? I thought you were in a car accident. I know the Trans Am is bashed in.”
She nodded, then winced. The towel with the ice fell off her head onto the pillow with her movements. When I’d retrieved the cubes from the bed she marshaled her wits and told me her story. She’d come home from the clinic to shower and change. On her way out, just before she turned from Sheffield onto Addison, another car had come out of nowhere—as they always did with her—and ploughed into the front of the Trans Am.
She frowned. “I must have hit my head on the windshield then, but I don’t think that cracked it—I think they did that when they started hitting the car with their bats. Anyway, I was furious. I can’t stand these reckless drivers. They were never like that in London, and London traffic makes Chicago look like a cow town. So I got out of the car to tell them what I thought of them and to get their insurance information. That’s when they climbed out and started hitting me. I was too stunned to react. Besides, I’m not like you, I didn’t train under Muhammad Ali.
“I was yelling for help, but the rain was starting; no one was on the street. Any passing drivers were keeping strictly to themselves. The men were pounding on me and telling me to learn the hard way to mind my own business when a police car came by. As soon as they saw the police the men ran down the street. One of the policemen got out and tried chasing them, but of course they had a head start. They just abandoned their car right there. But as we were driving home I thought, they must have been confusing me with you. Because I was driving your car.”
She was right. I knew she was as soon as she told me the men leaped out of their car to attack her. How many men, and what did they look like, I wanted to ask, but she wasn’t in the mood for interrogation. And it explained why she’d been in such a peculiar state: not from shock, but anger with me for putting her at risk.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She kept her eyes shut, but her mouth twisted in the parody of a smile. “I am too. More than you, no doubt.”
“Is that why you came to the restaurant? To twist a knife into my side?”
She opened her eyes at that and looked at me from under the ice pack. “No, Victoria. I came to you because I’ve never been so scared in my life, at least not since coming to America. And it seemed like your business. Something you might perhaps fix, make right for me, so I’m not frightened every time I step outside my house into my car.”
I got down on my knees and put my arms around her. “I’ll do my best, chief.”
She shut her eyes again and lay there, breathing lightly, holding my hand, while we waited for Max and Art. I shivered to myself, picturing her under the assault, wishing I could remake the last few days and have it turn out that I’d kept the Trans Am, that I was the one they stopped. How far would they have gone if the police hadn’t shown up? Left her with some broken bones? Maybe lying unconscious in the street, brain-damaged, or dead?
I couldn’t keep my mind from its feverish circling. It was a relief when Max rang the bell, even though it was the prelude to a tough encounter with him. He hadn’t found Art Gioia, but he’d brought Audrey Jameson. She was one of Beth Israel’s more promising young house physicians; I knew her because she spent fifteen hours a week helping Lotty at the clinic.
Max went straight to Lotty, but Audrey stopped to talk to me before going to look at the patient. When I told her what had happened she clicked her tongue impatiently and followed Max into Lotty’s bedroom. I sat under the fire-red painting in Lotty’s living room and thumbed through a back issue of National Geographic. Max joined me a few minutes later.