I pulled my Lario boots onto my bare feet and put on my torn and charred linen jacket. I looked in the little mirror in the bathroom. Between the costume, my clumpy hair, and the outsize glasses, I looked like I belonged on the Uptown streets outside the hospital, collecting cigarette butts. I made it down the hall on wobbly legs; two days in bed, with no food and a lot of shock, had atrophied my muscles. A hospital security guard at the nursing station looked at me curiously but didn’t try to stop me. I rode down to the first-floor lobby.
Hospitals have realized that the cash register chings louder if they install an espresso machine. They don’t study how to make it good, figuring a clientele under stress will drink anything. I wasn’t in a position to be picky, either. I ordered a triple espresso from an attendant who, taking in my costume and my mangy head, asked to be paid first.
While he pulled my shots, I looked across the lobby to the front of the building. The media circus had shut down most of its rings, with only one camera truck still there. As I squinted through my glasses, I could just make out a couple of people with picket signs—the immigrant rights activists, perhaps, or maybe a striking local or even abortion protestors. The lenses were too opaque for me to be able to read the signs themselves.
My hands were so thickly wrapped that I had to hold the cup with my fingertips, and I had trouble opening the sugar packets. I finally tore them with my teeth, spraying sugar over myself and the floor before managing to get some in my coffee. I was heading for the elevators when I spotted my old pal Murray Ryerson from the Herald-Star at the reception desk . He was collecting a visitor’s pass and grinning with satisfaction at the clerk. So much for the lockdown on reporters.
I felt vulnerable and exposed, with no underwear under a shabby hospital gown, only my smoky jacket keeping my breasts and buttocks from public view. I retreated into a chair behind a potted plant and watched until Murray was inside an elevator.
As I waited, Beth Blacksin from Global Entertainment went up to the reception desk and started gesticulating in indignation, pointing at the elevator. So Murray had scammed his way in. A hospital security guard joined Beth.
Hospitals have a million exits and stairwells. I left the coffee shop by the far end and went into the first stairwell I came to. One flight, and I felt as though I’d been sandbagged, my legs wobbling, my head dizzy. I leaned against the wall and drank some of my coffee. It was bitter—they hadn’t cleaned the machine heads anytime recently—but the caffeine steadied me.
A doctor came running down the stairs but paused when he saw me. “Do you belong here?”
I held out my wrist with my plastic patient tag looped above my gauze hands. “I got turned around when I went downstairs for coffee.”
He read my tag. “Your room is on the fifth floor. You’d better take an elevator. I’m not sure you should be up and about at all . . . Definitely not climbing five flights of stairs.”
He opened the door to the first floor and held it while I walked past him. “I can call for a wheelchair.”
“No, the nurses told me I needed to start walking. I’ll be okay.”
He was in a hurry and didn’t stay to argue with me. I looked at my tag. Sure enough, it had my room number on it. That was a mercy: I hadn’t bothered to check it when I left.
I found a secondary elevator bank and saw a sign for the hospital library. Carrying my coffee in my fingertips, I walked past the Orthopedic Outpatient Clinic and Respiratory Diseases and came to the library. To my relief, this was merely a room filled with donated books, mostly unread review copies with publicists’ letters still inside the front covers. No staff were present to question whether a person in heavy dark glasses and no underwear ought to be there.
I turned out the overhead lights and curled up in an armchair. Time to stop feeling sorry for myself and guilty about Sister Frankie. Time to think, to work.
The feds had been watching Sister Frances’s apartment and hadn’t intervened in the attack on her. Did that mean they wanted her dead or had they been out getting pizza and not noticed whoever threw the Molotov cocktails?
The coffee helped, but not enough to get my muzzy brain fully functioning. I uncoiled myself from the armchair and took some of the publicity letters out of the books. Scrabbling in the drawers of a little desk, I found an old pencil stub. It would have to do. I couldn’t see well enough to write, and the pencil stub was too blunt for cursive, so I used block letters.
1. FEDS WATCHING FRANKIE: WHY?
2. LAMONT GADSDEN = SNITCH: TRUE?
3. WHAT IN BOTTLES—PRO OR STREET-GRADE ACCELERANT?
Who would tell me any of these things? There was something else, too, another important question, nagging the back of my mind. I took off my boots, tucked my legs under me, and let my mind drift. I dozed and woke and dozed, but it was Lotty’s anger that kept coming to the surface. It couldn’t be about Lotty. It must be the law enforcement people she sent about their business yesterday. They had asked something odd.