The gun had dug a deep bruise into my side when I tumbled from the boxcar. I’d be sore for four or five days, but if I was careful I’d be okay. Ditto for my left hip. The bruising there went down to the bone, so it would take longer to heal, but nothing was broken and none of the glass cuts in my arms needed stitches. Lotty dispensed that verdict at her clinic Sunday afternoon, her lips flat, her black eyes large with a misery that hurt me more than anger.
“Of course, being careful, taking it easy, those are concepts beyond you, as I know to my sorrow. Still, I understand what these glib radio psychologists mean when they talk about enablers.” She put her ophthalmoscope away with a snap and turned to wash her hands. “If I would have the courage to stop patching you up, perhaps you would stop breaking yourself into pieces. You are foolhardy, which, in case you didn’t know, means to be daring without judgment: I looked it up this morning. How long do you think you can go on this way? A cat has nine lives, but you have only the one, Victoria.”
“You don’t have to tell me; my body’s doing it for you.” I found myself shouting. “My arms are sore. My hamstrings ache. I can hardly walk across the room. I’m getting old. I hate it. I hate not being able to count on my body.”
“So you are going to follow Joan of Arc into the flames before your body fails you and you have to admit you’re mortal?” Lotty gave a twisted smile. “How old was your mother when she died?”
I stared, startled by the unrelated question, and subtracted dates in my head. “Forty–six.”
“And she was ill for two years? It’s a hard feeling, to know you will live longer than a mother who died young, but it is not a crime to do so,” Lotty said. “You’ll turn forty–four next month, won’t you? You don’t need to push yourself past the brink so that you burn up in the next two years. You could have found a dozen ways to learn whether Mr. Frenada was inside his building last night. Make that the intelligent use of your energy, figuring out how to conserve your strength for those times when using your body is your last resort, not your first one. Don’t you think that’s what your mother would want for you?”
Oh, yes, probably. Surely. My mother’s intensity had a blast–furnace quality, but she didn’t prize brute strength above finesse. She’d died of a metastasis from the uterus that became apparent after a miscarriage, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop and I’d brought her pads and changed my own in terror each month for years, wondering when it would happen to me, when I would drain away from the inside. Perhaps Lotty was right. Perhaps I was draining myself from the inside out of some survivor’s guilt. If that was the case, my mother most surely did not want that from me, but life.
Lotty insisted on taking me home with her. I wanted to make phone calls, see if Lacey Dowell knew where Lucian Frenada was: I hadn’t been able to raise him at his home or shop when I tried before coming to Lotty’s clinic. I wanted to talk to Murray about how he’d gotten word that Frenada was running cocaine. I even had a manic idea about calling Baladine and accusing him of engineering the dope stashes.
Lotty refused to listen to my impassioned plea for a phone—she pushed me to her guest room and pulled the jack out of the wall. I fumed for around thirty seconds, but the next thing I knew it was ten o’clock Monday morning and I was more hungry than angry.
Lotty had left a note for me: the doorman knew I was staying and had orders to let me back into the building if I went out for a walk. I should take it easy for a few days. The building had a sauna and a gym on the third floor—the spare key to her front door tucked into the envelope would open the gym. Help yourself to fruit and bread. And Victoria, for my sake if not yours, don’t leap again without looking very carefully.
After an orange and a piece of toast I went down to the gym. It was really only a small workout room, with weights and an exercise bike, but I was able to work off some of my stiffness. A half hour in the sauna sent me back to bed. When I got up again, around one, I made a hot meal out of eggs and fresh tomatoes. The calls I’d wanted to make yesterday didn’t feel so urgent today, but I took the phone out onto Lotty’s balcony and started with Mary Louise.
When I finished describing Saturday’s debacle at my office, she said, “So you really did find drugs there. And if Lemour planted them, then you can’t call the cops.”
“I do have a videotape of Lemour in the act, which I guess I could take to the State’s Attorney. Trouble is, I don’t know anyone there personally these days, and anyway, I’m afraid Lemour might be able to make even that evidence disappear. If I thought Murray would or could do anything, I’d give it to him, but these days I’m not sure I can count on him. How about showing it to Terry Finchley?”
She hesitated. “I’ve got these children I’m responsible for. I can’t put my life on the line for some case you’re inventing.”