Two Time

TWENTY-FOUR

I FELT LIKE Appolonia Eldridge when Jackie and I first rolled into Nassau County. It was only the second time in five years I’d been out of the East End and I was unprepared for the crush of traffic, chaotic zoning and neon sprawl. It was getting hot, so I also had to endure Jackie’s comments on the air-conditioning inside the Grand Prix, centering on the fact that there was none. It did have some pretty big windows, which let in a lot of hot, wet and noisy Nassau County air, forcing her to pull her thickets of insubordinate hair into a ponytail again. The only compensation was our destination—the Long Island headquarters of the FBI, Web Ig’s home base.

There was little chance he’d give us any more information. I only wanted to give Jackie another glimpse of him before she went back into surgery. As we closed in she gave him a ring.

“He’s going to meet us for lunch,” she said, snapping her cell phone closed. “He said his boss doesn’t like civilians in the office unless they’re in the interrogation rooms.”

“I’ll pay. Haven’t filed a 1040 in a few years. Least I can do for my country.”

“Tax shelters?”

“Yeah, the ultimate. No income. Not enough to pay taxes, anyway.”

Now that we were back to civil discourse, she reopened our favorite subject.

“Are you going to give me an opinion?”

“On tax policy?”

“On Lillian Eldridge.”

“She’s nuts.”

“That’s the kind of sensitivity I was hoping for.”

“Depersonalization disorder. Marked by loss, distortion or fragmentation of the identity. Pretty rare, hard to diagnose, harder to treat, wreaks hell on people and their families. Probably, maybe, triggered in the susceptible by some traumatic event. Usually in childhood or adolescence, but not exclusively.”

“You knew that?”

“I just thought about Psych 101 before going to sleep last night.”

“Come on.”

“Maryanne told me. At least something that sounded like that.”

“How traumatic an event?”

“Usually natural disasters, war, sexual abuse—though trauma is in the mind of the traumatized. Kids kill themselves over being cut from the cheerleading squad.”

“The divorce. Lost her husband and one of her kids in one fell swoop.”

“Would all be in her medical records. Good luck with that. Make the FBI look like a bunch of blabbermouths. And I don’t think Maryanne would be into a game of hot and cold.”

I made a turn off a four-lane boulevard that ran through what I thought was an overdeveloped retail district, only to plunge into a six-lane version of the same thing that stretched before me in a straight line all the way to the horizon. Maybe beyond. Maybe it was endless, and they’d managed to warp space-time into an infinite series of branded restaurants, home centers, bathroom fixture emporiums, dry cleaners, banks, hardware stores, self-storage units, gas stations and single-story asbestos-shingled houses with low-pitch roofs and bright red pickup trucks, decorated with scrub oak and cedars planted along chainlink fences by the random hand of the wind.

I reminded myself that inside the grids drawn by these monstrous Gomorrahs were large tracks of blessed Long Island landscape filled with serene homes settled within verdant gardens, in which kind and intelligent people raised joyful children and lived lives of thoughtfulness and reflection. Who barely noticed the vulgarity through which they traveled on the way to meaningful vocations, as doctors, engineers, professors of abnormal psychology.

“Don’t underestimate me,” said Jackie.

“Only an opinion. What’s yours?”

“She’s nuts. But not crazy. Or stupid. I think she’s happy being where she is. Getting cared for, fussed over even, finding safe haven from a world that didn’t work out the way she wanted. Three squares a day and all the drugs her liver can withstand. What the hell. Doesn’t sound that bad.”

“Maryanne thought she was lonely.”

“Lillian might be lonely. The woman we talked to is all set.”

“And what else?” I asked her, rhetorically. “The big news.”

“It looks like Butch is the only one who paid either of them any attention. I thought he was the family brat and Jonathan Mr. Responsible.”

“So did Sam,” I said. “Dashiell is not surprised.”

“Well, have him tell Sam to find a place where I can pee and fix up my face. I want to do it before we get there.”

Agent Ig’s invisible gray Ford was parked in a corner of a nearly empty parking lot surrounding a franchise restaurant called something like The Olde Mill Tavern, the name written out in eighteenth-century script in ten-foot-high neon letters, just like they did in the time of Alexander Hamilton. The facade was mostly made of fieldstone, marred only by the random placement of actual barrelheads, protruding from the walls as if they’d been shot there by a cannon.

Web met us in the foyer. He kissed Jackie and shook my hand with both of his, which I took to be an outpouring of nearly untamable emotion.

“Hey Web. What’s up?”

“I’ve secured us a table in the back so we can have a little privacy,” he said. It occurred to me that the Olde Mill Tavern chain must be a big front for the FBI. Put them all over the country. Pick a decor all the troops could agree on. Place to have meetings, have a little lunch and stay camouflaged. Probably turned a profit. Helped defray Bureau expenses for things like plain gray Fords and in-ear communication devices.

“Awfully nice to see you both.”

Jackie let him hold her arm so she could glide across the floor from the foyer to the far end of the main room. There might have been a hundred tables there, at which only a handful of people were eating. It was after one. All the early birds had flown the coop. Webster Ig’s white shirt looked like it just came out of the laundry box, the sleeves billowing and buttoned tight at the wrists. I always wondered how certain guys could pull that off. If I didn’t roll up my sleeves the second I took off my jacket I’d start to sweat and lose concentration.

“How’s the Pequot?” he asked us when we settled in our seats. “Mr. Hodges is quite the chef.”

“Hasn’t killed anybody yet. Far as we know,” I told him.

“I’ve tried to describe his special whitefish.”

“Indescribable is fair enough.”

He nodded enthusiastically. It occurred to me that for a stitched-up guy like Web, confined most days within a parched office cubicle, relieved only by forays into the shop-worn municipal grime of courtrooms and record repositories, spending long hours on the phone or with US Attorneys, or more likely their legal assistants, a simple lunch with a lavish oddball like Jackie Swaitkowski must seem like an epic adventure. Jackie, meanwhile, had managed to transform herself into a softer, sweeter and more accommodating version of the woman I’d been driving around all day. Made me ponder whatever Darwinian imperative underlies the aphorism that opposites attract. But only until I was attracted by the specials of the day.

“So,” said Jackie, after her plain chicken and deviled egg salad arrived, “aren’t you going to ask us how the investigation is going?”

“I would if I hadn’t already urged, actually begged, you to abandon it,” said Web. “And if even saying the name Jonathan Eldridge out loud wouldn’t cost me my job and any future employment with the federal government.”

“Are you completely off the case?” she asked. “You can tell us that, can’t you.”

“I can tell you my name and that I live in an apartment with a cat. And that’s about it.”

“Okay,” she said, content to focus on her salad.

“Say, Web, this is not about the case, but just a general question,” I said to him, probably unconvincingly “Does the government actually keep gigantic databases on everybody, some kind of central Big Brother thing like everybody thinks they do?”

“No. Sorry to disappoint you. And all the conspiracy theorists out there. Fact is, I think they would if they could. There’s just too much in the way. Inter-agency rivalries, mostly. Some of which were put there intentionally as a protection against a real Big Brother taking root. That’ll probably change now, given the situation, but it’ll be a long time coming, right or wrong.”

“That’s all irrelevant,” said Jackie to me, trying to delicately shove an uncut piece of lettuce in her mouth. “I can find anything you want on the Internet.”

“Anything?”

“Yeah. I can’t help it if you’ve been living in a cave for the last five years. Tell me what you want to know, about anything, anywhere. I can dig it out.”

“Jackie’s maybe exaggerating a little, but you’d be surprised.”

If he only knew.

“Let me ask you something else,” I said to Web. “When everybody can find out anything they want about anybody and everything, will we be closer to or farther away from achieving the ultimate in human understanding?”

He sat back in his chair and folded his arms to buy a little time to think. Then he shook his head.

“Nah. It’s all the same shit, just recycled,” he said, smiling at his own wisdom and digging into his three-quarter-pound mound of chopped sirloin with cheddar, bacon, lettuce and tomato.

—

It once made me nervous to drive the Grand Prix into New York City, especially in the warm weather, but that was before I’d changed out the thermostat for a new aftermarket model that improved on the original in that it actually functioned as advertised. Having to keep the windows down to avoid suffocation was a new challenge as we emerged from the tunnel and slid into the cacophonous, malodorous atmosphere of midtown Manhattan. I told Jackie it made for a much more authentic street-level experience. Still afloat from her lunch with Web, she let that stand.

We turned south and headed for downtown, where we had one more stop to make before I dropped Jackie off at NYU Medical Center. The Eagle Exchange was almost on Wall Street, almost in the financial district, slightly out of the mainstream, which basically delineated its status within the hierarchy of American securities brokers. It was notable, though irrelevant to our pursuit, that Eagle was still an independent company, neither beholden to nor subsumed into some mega-conglomeration of competing financial services.

Alena had given us two names, one she marked with a star as her main man. Brad Maplewhite. Jackie had pinned him down with a cell call on the way in, so we had a clear shot at catching him at his desk. We just had to pilot the Grand Prix down the East Side, through Chinatown and into the backside of downtown where Eagle had its thirty-two-story office tower. Easier said than done.

“First time I ever saw New York cabbies afraid of another car,” said Jackie.

“Nothing to worry about. All bark and no bite.”

We found a parking garage within a block of our destination, though it took three tries before they came up with a guy who thought he could drive a full-sized car with a stick shift.

“I’ll park it myself,” I offered.

“No, no. Insurance. No good. We do it. No problem.”

“You can ride the clutch all the way to LA,” I told the nervous Middle Eastern kid who drew the straw. “Just be careful if you’re backing her in. Can’t see the end of the trunk. Too far away.”

It seem to take more effort to get into the Eagle Exchange being what I thought were bona fide, legal, totally forthright visitors than it took to lie our way into the Sisters of Mercy home in Riverhead. A phalanx of very serious guys in dark blue uniforms and baseball hats, packing heavy ordnance inside bulging leather holsters, stood to either side of the reception desk and in front of a bank of elevators. All I could do, all I wanted to do, was repeat the name of the guy who’d agreed to see us and stand ready to be jacked up against the nearest wall and strip searched.

After we waited half an hour, the lead guard called us over and handed us ID badges, then told us to wait again until a person from up above came down to escort us to our destination, which she did soon after—a tall woman in a form-fitting blue skirt, pumps and blue blouse, very reminiscent of a stewardess outfit circa 1975. We followed the click of her heels across the marble floor to a bank of elevators with tall brass doors embossed with an Art Deco rendering of heroic-looking people gazing off toward a brilliant sun, presumably meant to represent the brokers upstairs spotting a hot stock pick. I didn’t bother chatting it up with the woman in the blue dress as we ascended in the elevator. Way too scary.

She opened a pair of glass doors by swiping a pass card she wore around her neck, then left us without a word at an enormous curved reception desk—more like a hardwood fortress—behind which a stringy little woman sat on duty. She was very thin, African-American, about sixty, her jet-black hair straightened and formed into large waves that accentuated her narrow, finely featured face. As we approached she dropped both hands on the surface of the desk in front of her, palms up.

“Badges,” she said.

We gave them up, Jackie to the right hand, me to the left. The woman, Eugenia Wilde according to the nameplate, pulled out the white inserts and wrote in the time, and her initials, EW, then handed them back for us to reassemble. She pointed to the one tiny couch a mile or two away at the far end of reception area.

“Someone will be out to get you,” she said.

We took the trip to the couch and sat there for a few minutes in the pale utter silence of the room. The couch had side tables at either end, but no magazines or phones or pinball machines or anything else to keep you occupied, so I spent the time humming the chorus to Night on Bald Mountain until Jackie asked me to stop. Right about then, as predicted, someone came out to get us.

He was about my height—an inch under six feet—but shaped more like a cylinder, with narrow shoulders and broad hips. He wore a blue-and-white-striped dress shirt with starched white collar and French cuffs, and a deep burgundy-colored tie sprinkled with tiny fleurs-de-lis. His dark brown hair had receded to about the peak of his round head, though it fit well with his heavy horn-rimmed glasses and look of serious intent.

“Brad Maplewhite,” he said, shaking our hands. “How was your trip in?”

He was probably somewhere in his mid-to late thirties, though with guys like Brad chronological age was irrelevant. He repeated our names as we introduced ourselves while studying our faces, as if to prepare himself for the inevitable police sketch. He had a very small mouth, and when he smiled it was the only thing that moved.

“Not bad, considering we came all the way from the other end of Long Island,” I said.

“It was fine,” said Jackie, cutting me off. “We appreciate your seeing us. Hope it’s not a bad time.”

“Not at all,” said Brad. “Let’s go find a place to sit.”

The office was an open plan honeycombed with cubicles furnished with walnut desk sets and divided by panels upholstered in a cushioned black-and-silver herringbone fabric ideal for sticking full of pushpins. Brad took us into a small conference room with a window, whiteboard and computer workstation, which he immediately sat in front of and fired up.

The building across the street had the unsettling proximity typical of downtown. The facade was ornately decorated, with moldings in Roman ogee, filigrees and pediments over the windows in alternating curved and triangular patterns. The summer sunlight was just bright enough to penetrate the canyon and cast a glare on the glass, providing some privacy for the Brads next door tapping away at their own computers.

“I’ll just get all the relevant account history ready before we talk.”

“I really appreciate it,” said Jackie.

“Well,” said Brad, “when the FBI is on the phone, you take notice.”

I couldn’t help an involuntary glance in Jackie’s direction, which she returned with a quick twitch of her head.

“How’s Alena?” asked Brad while waiting for the computer to respond.

“Fine,” said Jackie. “She’s back in town now.” She told him the name of her new brokerage house. “Getting on with the next phase.”

“Good. I liked working with her. Very colorful.”

“More than you know,” I said.

He tapped a few more times on the keyboard, then, satisfied, spun the screen around so we could see what he’d brought up.

“As I explained on the phone, I looked after the Eldridge Consultants account, which is fundamentally one account split into about twenty-three sub-accounts, designated by these numbers here at the back of the string—101, 102, 103, etc. Some have been dormant for a while, but they’d all show up here as long as the principal account is still open. I’d only send Alena statements on the active subs, suppressing the rest, so I wouldn’t load her up with a lot of paperwork. Of course, now there’s only the one main account, the original, plus the ECM.”

“ECM?”

“Eagle Cash Manager. A place for cash to flow in and out as clients make deposits, securities are sold off, portfolios rebalanced, all of that. Plus you can use it like a normal bank account, write checks, have a debit card. Quite handy for everybody.”

“Did you only deal with Alena?”

“Usually, but I spoke to Mr. Eldridge occasionally. Sometimes he’d ask me to make a trade, buy or sell, move things around, or perform some other task. All very routine stuff. But he always asked me to double back with Alena so she could keep her records up to date. He was very respectful of her capabilities.”

“But you never met him.”

“Face to face? No, never met either one of them face to face. Not unusual. No need. Especially with professional people like that. A dream account. Very large pool of assets, fair number of trades, though not too many, low maintenance, utterly fluent with the process. Knew what they wanted, but would listen to advice, not that they needed much.”

“You’re gonna miss them,” said Jackie.

I think Brad raised his eyebrows a tiny bit at that, but I can’t be sure.

“Once you folks unfroze the assets the sub-accounts were vacated by the consultancy.” He used a ballpoint pen to tap down a column of numbers that coincided with the sub-accounts, all showing zero balances. “Though Mrs. Eldridge has opted to maintain the core account as it stands for now. Her attorney, Mr. Szwit, seems quite capable of carrying on with the management on her behalf, with my assistance, of course.”

Appolonia’s balance was anything but zero. I felt an uncomfortable surge of protectiveness toward her for no other reason than the scale of loss should she fall prey to incompetence or evil.

“I guess old Jonathan was pretty good with investments.”

“Indeed he was. Played the tech thing like he had a time machine. Not a lot of frantic trading, just steady, even brilliant. Especially in retrospect. I’m an S&P type myself, like to stay away from big peaks and valleys. I’ve done okay for myself and my clients, but I wish I’d just followed this guy around. When I did, I was always happy.”

Jackie had her manila envelope on her lap. She pulled out a Xeroxed page.

“Do me a favor, Brad, and look up the history on 115 and 123.”

This time I was sure I saw his eyes brighten. Or maybe it was just a reflection off his glasses.

“I think I know what you’re getting at,” he said, spinning the monitor around and tapping at the keyboard. “Jonathan’s players.”

“Players?”

“That’s my word. Every broker has them. Just can’t stop messing with the portfolio. Day trader mentality. No patience, no adherence to a sound investment plan. No sense of diversification or dispersal of risk. Absolutely the wrong type of investor for an elegant adviser like Jonathan Eldridge. Here we are. Oh yes, I remember now. Some very unfortunate moves.”

He spun the monitor back around for us.

“There’re a lot of numbers here, but look at this column, then this one here. Note the red brackets.”

“Ouch,” said Jackie.

“You can lead em to water,” said Brad.

“Do you know who these people are?” I asked.

He put his hands over his ears.

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I can’t tell you how unhappy our compliance people were when this whole thing erupted. There’s nothing improper or illegal about this approach. But our liability extends only to Jonathan Eldridge Consultants, since technically, everything in this account belongs to them. It gets grayer when you have knowledge of his client relationships upstream. I just don’t want to know.”

I remembered Alena saying that Jonathan worked hard to calibrate his level of stress to just the right pitch. It looked like he’d found in Brad Maplewhite the ideal partner for the downstream portion of the calibration.

I reached over and took the Xeroxed sheet from Jackie.

“What about the other side of the equation. Any luckiest of the lucky?”

Brad worked at the screen for a while, occasionally cocking his head from side to side as he typed like a concert pianist. The chatter of keys was fleet enough to betray a true virtuoso. Something you wouldn’t see much with men my age, most of whom had barely mastered the technological intricacies of IBM Selectrics before typewriters turned into television sets.

“Well, 102 and 105 have faired very well over the years. Especially in the months preceding the, ah, event. Quite a burst of activity, mostly funded out of the ECM.”

“The cash pool.”

“That’s right. It’s just a total figure here. You’ll have to see Alena for the backup.”

Jackie tried to read the sheet, squinting her good eye.

“Who are they?” she asked.

“Hey Brad, stick your fingers in your ears,” I said, which he did with eyes shut and elbows held high. I leaned over to whisper in Jackie’s ear just to be sure. A distant part of me hoped someone from his office would pick that moment to poke his head in the conference room.

“Neville St. Clair and Hugh Boone.”

“All the sub-accounts have been emptied out,” said Jackie. “Including 102 and 105?”

“At Alenas instructions,” said Brad, unblocking his ears again. “You saw the columns.”

If Brad was an S&P type, I was a passbook savings type. I hated everything relating to investments and money management, and all that crap. Abby had tried to take it over, probably alarmed by my irritability over the subject, but I hadn’t let her. I knew a guy who ran an investment desk for a bank in Stamford who was honest and easygoing enough to put whatever I came up with for retirement into the most conservative instruments he could find. Without argument or reproach. I think in this way Abby was right about my working-class upbringing, where the distrust of banks and brokers, and anyone else who used the word “finance” when he meant “money” ran deep. Money we knew about. You got it when you worked your ass off and then spent every dime of it just getting by. All that talk about investments and portfolios was just a dangerous abstraction.

“How did it work?” I asked him. “You wrote a bunch of checks?”

“More or less. Alena did. We could have transferred each bundle of assets to another account or brokerage house if they’d been in the clients’ names, but as you know, they weren’t. So we sold everything and deposited the proceeds into the ECM, from which Alena drew the appropriate disbursements. Probably had some unpleasant tax implications for some, but given that their adviser had been blown to Kingdom Come, it wouldn’t seem politic to carp.”

“So you could identify individual investors by the names on the checks drawn against the ECM.”

Brad thought about it a moment.

“I suppose you could. Of course. Not that I would. But somewhere here there’s a scan of every one of those checks. Lord knows how you’d find it. You don’t know the word labyrinthine’ until you’ve dealt with our internal administration.”

Jackie started to say something, but I put my hand on her leg to stop her. I needed a second of quiet. I closed my eyes and saw a miniature version of a bank check, a smudged-looking photostat, festooned with stamps and inked-in notations. I’d seen one once when someone had stolen my checkbook and used it to buy a set of tires. They’d copied the front and back, so you could see the endorsement was clearly a fake, not even an attempt at forgery.

“Do you have the addresses and phone numbers for all these clients?” I asked Jackie, holding up the sheet.

“Not here. In my computer with the stuff Alena gave me. But I’m sure she still has all that. I could give her a call. Nobody’s given much thought to the non-hostiles. Actually none. Why are we now?”

“I feel like I know those guys. Neville and Hugh.”

“You must have played darts with them at the pub.”

“Yeah. Sound like Brits.”

“The Oppressors.”

“Don’t start getting tribal.”

“I’ll confirm with Alena.”

Brad looked like he was about to put his fingers back in his ears, so I got him back in our conversation.

“So Gabe Szwit’s doing okay for Appolonia. Jonathan’s wife. Far as you know.”

“Yes, seems quite competent. We did some rebalancing last month. He had a plan, but was interested in what I had to say. Asked some very insightful questions. Felt like old times, though without Miss Zapatas charm. That I’ll miss.”

I looked for the first time to see if he had a wedding ring, which he did. Too bad. Would be another excellent test of the theorem that opposites attract.

It looked like Jackie had learned enough to start feeling paranoid again, so I took the hint and stood up, reaching out my hand to Brad. Jackie joined me.

“Thanks for all your time and information,” she said “Very good of you.”

The faintest suggestion of pleasure flickered across his face.

“Not at all. I like to be of help. We’re basically a service organization here, so I guess it’s in the DNA,” he said, warmly, and I believed him.

It was pleasant to have him walk us all the way down to the lobby and help Eugenia sign us out. He paid her a crisp little compliment, something like, “Don’t you look put together today, Eugenia,” which caused her to toss back a bountiful smile. I thought to myself, there isn’t enough genius in the world to fully divine the social subtexts of a modern American corporation. Lord knows I never could.

It was still summer when we got out to the street, only now the air was palpable, a fine concoction of heat, humidity and fetid reek of a style available exclusively on the midsummer streets of New York City.

“This clinches it,” I said. “I’m spending the rest of the summer in the Hamptons.”

“Pretty cruel, given where I’m going.”

“Not at all. NYU’s like a resort.”

“That’s why I picked it.”

“Oh, not because they have special deals for FBI agents? Or lawyers following their disbarment for impersonating FBI agents?”

She grimaced.

“I called Brad on my cell phone last week when I was alone in Web’s office. Told him to call me back on Web’s land line, so he heard ‘Welcome to the Nassau County office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If you know your party’s extension, dial it now, yadda, yadda.’ So technically, I never said I was with the FBI. I was going to straighten him out today, but it didn’t actually quite come up, not directly, and it was going so well, I never got around to it.”

“Just hope Brad and Maryanne never end up sitting together on an airplane.”

It was a relatively short drive from the parking garage back up the East Side and over to First Avenue. Jackie didn’t seem in the mood to talk, and that was okay with me. I needed a chance to think, something a lot of chatter wouldn’t have helped. I offered to park and walk her in, but she wouldn’t let me.

“Don’t try babying me,” she said, opening the car door and dragging her bags out of the backseat. “You won’t be any good at it.”

“Say Jackie, what’re the chances you can get on a computer before they operate on you?”

She closed the door and leaned in the open window.

“I don’t know. Given what I’ve done today, I might as well just steal one.”

“Don’t move for a second,” I said, though I made her wait for almost five minutes while I wrote out some stuff on a piece of notepaper and handed it to her. “You said you could find out anything on the Internet. See if you can answer those questions.”

After reading it, she folded the paper and stuck it in her shirt pocket.

“Census data is all online. You can actually look at scans of the forms the census workers fill out. Yearbooks, I don’t know. Depends on the school, but I’m guessing they only started putting that stuff online in the last five years or so. Most colleges have alumni sites. I could try that. I was already going to check into Neville and Hugh. It would help if I knew what you were getting at,” she said, “though if past experience is any guide, you aren’t about to tell me.”

“Just see what you can find out.”

“Right, and then what. You’re the last person on the planet who doesn’t have a computer, cell phone or answering machine. If I don’t catch you at home, that’s it.”

“Give me the paper back.”

I wrote down a phone number and email address.

“This is my daughter. Call her and ask her if you can email everything you get—I’d like to see any original documents—and have her print it out and overnight it to my house.”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

“She’ll do it as a favor to you. Better than me asking directly.”

“I can’t believe I’m going into the hospital for life-defining surgery and you give me a ridiculous assignment.”

“You said not to baby you.”

She shook her head, stuffed the paper back in her pocket and collected her bags off the sidewalk. I committed myself to at least watching her till she got through the entrance, so I saw her when she turned around and looked back. I was too far away to clearly see her expression, which had something sadly complicated going on, but I heard her say, “You do the best you can, Sam,” and then something else, but by now she was too far away and I missed it as she disappeared through the entrance to the hospital.