In Big Trouble

Chapter 30

The emergency room at the county hospital was filled with the usual parade detritus. Children who had fallen on broken bottles, men who had fought over the stupid things that men fight over, pregnant women who had gone into premature labor. Guzman told Tess he could find her a quieter, more private place to wait, but she preferred to stay here, pressing a piece of gauze into her elbow, where a nurse had taken her blood at her insistence. She wasn't sure how these things worked, but Crow was going to need blood, lots of it, and she might as well make the first deposit into his account.

Guzman kept trying to get her to drink a soda, or eat a cookie, but she refused this offer, too. She couldn't imagine anything staying in her stomach, although she was achingly hungry. The last thing she had eaten must have been her breakfast of beans, cold from the can.

"You got a stab wound, this is the emergency room where you want to come," Guzman said. "They see a lot of stab wounds here."

"Humph," she said. Tell the Chamber of Commerce to put it in the brochure.

"Truth is, I've seen a lot of stab wounds, and your friend-well, if you're going to get a knife stuck in your belly, that's the way to go. If anything was hit, it was the appendix, and who needs that anyway? He did lose a lot of blood-"

"Tell me about it," said Tess. She had tried to wash, but the fingernails on her left hand looked as if they had rusted. "He was half-empty when they finally got him in here."

"Now if you were an optimist, you'd say he was half-full."

To her own surprise, she almost laughed, but it was a mirthless, barking sound that veered dangerously close to a sob. She bit her lip. Whatever happened, she didn't want to cry in front of Guzman.

"You know, I don't think I've ever heard you laugh," Guzman said.

"You still haven't."

Guzman scratched his head. "That's fair. Yeah, I guess that's fair. We haven't been having a lot of fun, have we?"

He walked away, toward a bank of phones at the end of the hall. He had been going back and forth to the pay phones since arriving here. Damage control, Tess assumed. The press was all over the story, they just didn't know what the story was. The paramedics had put the call out as an officer down, and every newsroom in town had jumped when that code went across. According to the television bolted high on the waiting room wall, four people were in custody for the stabbing death of an off-duty police officer. It was easier, Guzman had told her, not to try to set the record straight tonight. They'd atone on Sunday morning. Until then, let the city have another night of innocence, let B. B. King and Etta James sing, let the free barbecue flow. Perhaps no one would notice that Gus Sterne was not there to preside over his happy kingdom.

The one good thing about Guzman was that he had instantly grasped what really happened from the moment he arrived at the hospital. "Pilar Rodriguez was Steve. Villanueve's grandmother," Tess had said, and he had nodded sadly, with no need to have anything else explained to him. Then again, he didn't bother to admit she had been right about Gus Sterne, either.

He came back from the phones and settled next to her in one of the hard plastic chairs.

"Whose butt is shaped like these chairs, anyway? Not mine."

"It's not like you'd relax here under any circumstances. A comfortable chair would be a waste."

"Good point," Guzman said. "I never thought about it that way."

Oh shut up, Tess thought. Just shut up. And she heard Steve's voice in her head, saying the same thing.

"You know, Steve was a good cop," Guzman said, although he couldn't possibly know what she had been thinking. "Or so it seemed. Now I find myself wondering when he crossed that line. Did he become a cop to avenge his grandmother's death? Or did the opportunity present itself once he was on the force and began to hear about the information we had developed on Darden and Weeks? I guess we'll never know. But these things usually happen in degrees. A young man starts off trying to catch his grandmother's killer. Who could argue with that? Then one day, he's cutting a man's fingers off in a deserted restaurant, and setting up a deranged young woman to take the fall for everything he's done."

Tess thought Guzman might apologize now, but his voice trailed off and he stared at the beige walls.

"Why can't you admit I was right?" she asked fiercely. "I may have gotten parts of it wrong, but I handed you the solution. Gus Sterne hired Darden and Weeks. To kill Frank, not Lollie and Pilar. But I was close enough."

"You think if I had listened to you that night, this wouldn't have happened? Maybe you're right."

No maybe about it.

"So let's say I had. Only think back. You fingered Gus Sterne, but for the wrong reasons and for crimes he didn't commit. Remember, you thought he had killed Darden and Weeks, too."

"Still-"

"Bear with me. This is your wonderful life, Tess Monaghan. Just like the movie. If you're not here, we got an even sadder ending than we have right now. Let's say I arrest Gus Sterne-you think I was going to keep him overnight? No way. So the parade goes on, and everyone shows up to play their part. Except you're not there, because you didn't go search for Crow. Because you're not there, Clay's not there. Crow still gets stabbed, because Steve can't leave any witnesses. Emmie jumps, and Clay Sterne is shot, and Steve Villanueve gets promoted for responding so calmly in a crisis. Is that how you wanted this to end?"

Tess uncrooked her elbow, let the cotton gauze drop to the floor, put on the Band-Aid the nurse had given her. Donating blood usually made her queasy, but watching the syrupy blood slide into the tube had seemed fairly anticlimactic today.

"Still, you might have listened to me."

Guzman nodded, but he wasn't listening, not even now. His attention was focused on the automatic doors at the emergency room's entrance. Marianna Barrett Conyers stood on the threshold, not moving, the doors opening and closing, opening and closing, so she was revealed to them again and again. The effect was of a child playing peekaboo. Dolores stood at her side, still in her gray uniform, trying to urge her employer forward. Finally, Marianna crossed the threshold, but alone.

"Don't look now," Guzman said, "but the last piece of the puzzle just walked in."

Marianna's manner was stiff, her pallor ghostly. Tess couldn't help thinking of Boo Radley, lured out of his house to save the lives of the two children he had come to love.

Except Boo wasn't as creepy as Marianna.

"You wanted to see me, Sergeant Guzman?"

"What I really wanted was for you to come down here and thank someone."

"For saving Emmie's life? Yes, I am grateful-"

Guzman held up a hand. "No more bullshit. After twenty-one years, could we just stop with all your bullshit? I mean, sure, you can thank Tess for keeping your goddaughter from going airborne if you like. But I think you owe her a bigger debt for finally closing the case in which you were the number one suspect."

It was Tess who looked at Guzman in surprise, not Marianna. She merely sniffed the air and made a face, as if she had detected something distasteful.

"All those times I asked you over the years, and you always said you didn't know anything. Always said there was nothing going on, that it was just cheap gossip. You sat on the motive for your own husband's death for two decades. Why?"

"I had my…suspicions," Marianna said stiffly. "I am not one to repeat innuendoes and malicious stories."

"Well, here's my suspicion. You went to Espejo Verde that night. You were going to have it out with your husband and your best friend, for cheating on you. But they were beyond hearing anything when you got there, right?"

Marianna had refused to sit down, so she was still standing above them, hands folded primly over the purse she carried, her face determinedly blank.

"I went to see if something could be worked out. Lollie tired of men easily. She would have tired of Frank, too. There was no reason to take him, if she was going to end up throwing him over. If it was money she wanted, a chance to start a restaurant somewhere else, away from Gus, I could give her that. I just didn't want to give her my husband. But Lollie was already…gone when I arrived."

"She was fucking dead," Guzman said. "Could you, just once in your life, use the real words for things?"

Marianna didn't try to disguise her contempt for this man. She might speak in euphemisms, Tess thought, but deep down she was a mean and contemptuous bigot. For her, class distinctions were more important than racial ones. She hated the fact that a cop was speaking to her this way.

"It was dark, and I tripped over Lollie's body when I came through the door. Hers or Pilar's, I was never sure. I know I came up with blood on me-on my hands and knees, my suit. I went into the kitchen, and that's when I saw Frank."

Tears had started down her face, eroding the top layer of makeup. She didn't seem to notice she was crying. "Someone hurts you and you say to yourself, ‘I wish they were dead,' and then you see what dead is. And you feel guilty, as if your wishes made it so. I don't know how long I stood there before I realized Emmie was crying, in the little room off the kitchen. She was wet. I changed her diaper. That must have been when the blood got on her. She was scared and nervous-she clung to me, she was just a little girl, left alone in the dark, and no one had come as she cried and cried. I got her back to sleep and then I left. An hour later, after I had changed and was on my way to Gus's house for the party, I called the police from a pay phone and told them I could hear a baby crying at the restaurant."

Tess sat there, trying to absorb all this, Marianna had found the bodies, Marianna had left the blood on Emmie. The little girl had not seen anything, she had no hidden memories to recover. Everything Emmie thought she knew about blood and death had come straight from her own imagination.

"I could have used that information," Guzman said. "Twenty-one years ago, ten years ago, even last week-I could have done something with that."

"But I didn't really know anything. It never occurred to me Gus was behind the killings, I honestly thought it was a robbery. And if it had gotten out about Frank and Lollie…well."

"What?" Guzman asked.

"People would have talked."

Tess rubbed her eyes, wishing Marianna would be gone when she opened them again. She knew pride could make people do stupid things-it had kept her, for example, from doing anything when Crow's postcard had first arrived. A week had gone by from the day of that first veiled plea for help and her decision to pick up the phone and call his mother. If she had started looking for him sooner, would things have turned out any differently? Where would she be? Where would he be?

A doctor was walking toward them down the hall, still in surgical scrubs. Did Tess only imagine it, or was he shaking his head ever so slightly from side to side?

"Miss Monaghan?"

"Yeah," Guzman answered for her.

"He's conscious, but he's very weak. You can see him"-a warning look for Guzman-"but the officers aren't to speak to him, or try to get him to speak."

Tess jumped to her feet, then wished she hadn't. What with giving blood and boycotting Guzman's cookies, the sudden movement made her woozy. She was going to black out, and she was furious. Her next-to-last conscious thought was that Crow was conscious, and now she wasn't, and wasn't there some weird symmetry in that? She reeled backward, into Guzman's arms, just like that stupid touchy-feely trust exercise. She fell, insisting to herself that she wasn't so foolish as to trust anyone ever again. Except, perhaps, Crow. It was just gravity, she told herself. Just goddamn gravity, up to its usual tricks. She was falling, helpless, incapable of doing anything about it.

That was her last conscious thought.