Nothing but Gossip (18 page)

Mercedes stood in front of the podium, telling people to exit calmly and not panic.

Interestingly, the Russians talked in their small group as though nothing unusual had happened, and it occurred to me that this sort of thing was probably par for the course at Russian meetings.

I pushed through the swinging door into the wide corridor that led to the kitchens. One of the company security men, the one who looked as big and as dumb as a grand champion steer, was holding the gun.

“Put that down,” I said to him, but naturally, when he saw me marching toward him like the Red Death, like the Mummy, or Frankenstein’s monster covered in blood, like the bad movie that had given him nightmares his whole life, he pointed it at me. I held up my
badge. “U.S. Marshal,” I said. “Put down the weapon, now.”

And he dropped it. I mean, dropped it on the floor, where it discharged, blasting a chunk out of the wall and filling the tight space with plaster dust and the hall beyond with screams. I couldn’t even believe my eyes. I pulled my weapon.

“Get your hands in the air, you stupid son of a bitch.”

Suddenly the area swarmed with uniformed officers, sidearms drawn, the security guard trapped in the headlights of their barrels. His arms shot into the air in surrender, and his whaleskin-white John Candy belly shot through his shirt buttons and over his John Brown belt.

Jack Lewis’s boots made a hard, sharp, no-nonsense noise on the linoleum. He patted his hands on the air the way a speaker does to stop a crowd’s applause. He and I arrived in the guard’s face at the same time.

“I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,” the guard sputtered. “I came back here to catch him. I picked up the gun as a reflex. I didn’t mean to.”

“Back here to catch who?” Jack snapped.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

“Then how do you know it was a ‘him’? Cuff him,” Jack ordered a patrolman, then handed me his handkerchief. But I didn’t want it. I had on honest-to-God war paint. This would be personal. A blood grudge of the deepest order.

I knelt down by the weapon. It wasn’t a rocket launcher, or a bazooka, but it might as well have been. It was a .460 Weatherby Magnum, an elephant gun. There was only one elephant hunter in the audience as far as I knew, and he was one hell of a shot, the best in Africa according to his fans. Not someone who would miss, which made me wonder if it were possible that
Elias was actually the target? Or—oh, Jesus—was it me? I’d dropped on Mother just before the blast, and Elias had been unlucky enough to be right behind me. But did Kennedy McGee really have the passion to kill for the sake of the Siberian environment? Why? So he could go there and hunt rare, vanishing tigers?

“I think you’ll find this is Kennedy McGee’s gun,” I said to Jack. “He was here earlier. I saw him in the lobby arguing with Wade Gilhooly. Put out an APB for the road to Jackson and the airport.”

Jack spoke into his radio as I completed the description, but we all knew McGee was long gone. The airport was our only hope. I stared at the Weather by. Tantalizing smudges were visible on the long blue barrel, so maybe we’d get some prints. But why would Kennedy bring a gun from Africa? That made no sense. He wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t miss. He wouldn’t miss once, and he wouldn’t miss twice.

Nearby, the door of a supply closet stood open. I looked inside. Nothing much but shelves of clean table linens. The gunman might have waited there. I poked around for a couple of seconds and was about to rejoin Jack when I spotted a crumpled-up ball of white paper shoved way back between neat stacks of tablecloths. A ripped-open white envelope. There was the Gilhooly GMC logo in the upper-left-hand corner, and the name McGee was neatly printed in blue ink.

Why didn’t he just leave a trail of bread crumbs?

“Get on up to the hospital,” Jack said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

I slid the envelope into my pocket.

My father, dean of the School of the Stiff Upper Lip, was in the lobby telling people he was quite sure that
Elias was fine, nothing more than a flesh wound, but nevertheless he looked pale and uncertain. I put my arm through his. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He was silent as I bumped the Jeep up onto the curb and drove across the sidewalk to get around the fleet of squad cars and rescue vehicles.

I handed him the phone. “Call my office,” I said. “Tell Linda there’s been an accident and to get to Christ and St. Luke’s as soon as she can.”

Happy for an assignment, he explained to her what was going on as I careened up the street at about ninety miles an hour and skidded to a stop by the emergency-room door.

“You’ll get towed,” my father said. “You’d better let me move the car.”

“It’s okay, Daddy,” I said. “I’m authorized.”

“Oh, that’s right.” His smile was grateful and child-like.

A nurse was waiting for us. “Come with me, Mr. Bennett,” she said. “I’ll take you upstairs.”

“How is Elias?”

“He’s in surgery,” she answered, leading us briskly down a corridor and into a waiting elevator. On the third floor, we followed our escort into a sunny lounge, where my mother stood looking out the window. Richard stood next to her, his arm around her shoulders, comforting her with his own solid brand of authority. I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life. My parents fell into each other’s arms, and I fell into Richard’s with such relief that if I’d been a lady I would have swooned.

“What’s the word?” I asked.

Mother shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows and shook her head. She had pulled herself totally back together. Fixed her hair, put on her lipstick.
If her suit weren’t covered with blood, you’d think she was on her way to a luncheon. “Nothing. They’re working on him. But he’ll be fine.” She studied me. “I think it’s going to be a while. You might want to clean up a little. You have time.”

Richard nodded. “Come on, I’ll get you set up.”

I saw what they meant when I looked in the mirror. I was so thoroughly drenched with blood, I looked like I’d been in a fatal accident. But I hadn’t—and, if I had anything to say about it, neither had Elias.

A surgeon friend once told me a story about the different effects a patient and the patient’s family’s attitude have in surgery. He’s a urologist who specializes in long and complicated radical prostate operations, a procedure that typically takes four to five hours. I mean, I think it takes about an hour just to dig past all the bowels to find the prostate in the first place. Anyhow, he said he can tell the second he enters the operating room how everyone feels about the situation. “If the patient and his family have a positive attitude—even in the face of the most dire prognosis—if they are praying for his strength and healing, and sending him messages of hope and courage, I feel it, and there is no question that it makes a difference on the length and complication of the procedure, and definitely on the healing. On the other hand, if the family has said good-bye at the door and meant it, like ‘Good-bye, you’re dead,’ that comes through, too. I feel the dread, and sometimes there can be a lethargy that makes it a struggle for control. It seems endless. Blood loss is always greater, the risk increases. We all walk out totally exhausted, and the recovery is usually rife with complications.

“One time,” he told me, “I was operating on the
Dalai Lama’s number-two guy. He was wonderful, this man, and, as you can imagine, there was some serious praying going on all over the world during the surgery. The praying was so powerful, so positive, it was as though it had taken control of my hands. I finished in an hour and a half. It was one of the most incredible days of my life. If anyone ever tells you that prayer has no effect on medicine, they’re wrong. And if you get the two of them working together—if the person has a ghost of a chance—you’ve got the hardest part behind you. You’re just down to technique and healing.”

I’ve never forgotten that story. As I stood in the hospital shower and let the warm water wash Elias’s blood out of my hair and off my face and from beneath my fingernails, I thought about him every second. I sent my mind through the walls like a laser beam, into the operating room, into the surgeon’s hands, and into Elias’s heart and soul. “Don’t be afraid,” I said to him. “You’re going to be fine. Keep your eye on the ball.”

I also thought about the fact that it was all my fault. If I hadn’t been so greedy, so enticed by Wade’s double fee, so anxious to solve a juicy crime during my wedding week just so I could prove to everybody that I could still have and do it all, Elias wouldn’t be lying on that table and I wouldn’t be watching his blood go down the drain.

I pulled on a pair of borrowed green surgical scrubs, and applied fresh makeup with particular care. It is at times like these—times of danger and fear—which I know will require every ounce of my strength, all my intestinal fortitude, that I get and keep myself as squared away as possible. Today, more than any other in my life, called on me to suck it up. Totally. I looked in the mirror and decided I would have made a good-looking
doctor. I also wished I’d become something that involved wearing such comfortable clothes.

Richard was waiting for me. A worried grin crinkled his weatherbeaten face, grooving it deeply. His eyes were unreadable.

“What?” I said, frightened.

“Nothing bad. But an amazing sight nevertheless. Johnny Bourbon and Shanna showed up, and for the last ten minutes they’ve practically had a revival meeting going on. Come on.”

We could hear the noise all the way down the hall.

I
t was a hootenanny of serious proportions. The Holy Spirit in the form of some thigh-slapping, get-down, old-time religion had taken hold of Wade, his personal secretary Tiffany, Duke Fletcher, Linda, and my parents.

Shanna had her baby-blue guitar strapped around her neck and one of her white boots up on a coffee table and was going to town with one of her own compositions—“Jesus, Take Hold of This Situation and Heal Our Hearts”—making the fringe on her skirt and jacket swing so wildly she looked like a car wash. Everyone was clapping and singing. I prayed Elias could hear us through the vacuum-sealed doors to the operating suites and Jesus could hear us in heaven.

Richard and I stood outside in the hallway and clapped and sang along until the only other thing that could go wrong that day did.

“Oh, no,” I suddenly said.

“What?”

“It’s your parents.”

Sure enough, my future in-laws, both lean as sticks, were striding down the corridor.
American Gothic
in London Fog. Mrs. Jerome with a large Queen Elizabeth handbag over her arm and a furled umbrella in her fist, glided toward us. They were tall ships at sail in their no-nonsense New England raincoats and -hats. As best I recalled, the day was sunny and warm, but it might as well have been raining because, for me, it just kept getting worse and worse. First my brother gets shot, then Richard’s parents show up and I’m dressed in pearls, brown-suede high heels, and bright-green cotton pajamas. I swear to God, I know Richard’s mother was wondering if he could get his great-grandmother’s giant diamond ring back without a fuss.

“Don’t worry,” Richard said. “They’ll be fine.”

Sure they will, I thought.

The appearance of the Jeromes brought the rally to a rough, tumbling conclusion when my mother said—completely unselfconsciously I might say in her defense—“Oh, look, Dick and Alida Jerome are here.”

Richard and I watched as Mother graciously introduced his parents around as if they’d dropped in to her house for tea. The fact was, they looked as if they’d dropped in from another planet, Planet Veto, actually. But they greeted everyone nicely, even Tiffany, who growled at Richard’s father like a wolverine looking at lunch. Well, I thought, this is what we are, and in spite of the great time we all had last night, they are seeing we are nothing like them. This marriage is headed straight down the toilet. Except that Richard smiled and never took his arm from around my shoulders.

I followed the Jeromes with my eyes and as they stopped at each person—Wade, Tiffany, Johnny, Shanna, Duke—I tried to remember where that person
had been during the shooting. I had no idea. I couldn’t remember a single individual’s position. I wondered where Mercedes had been and if the police had apprehended Kennedy McGee.

An orderly rolled in a covered table that looked like a body on a gurney.

“Where do you want this, Mrs. Bennett?” he asked.

“Oh, just over there by the wall is fine, thank you.”

He removed the cover, and when I saw the luncheon spread—a mound of turkey, ham, and chicken-salad sandwiches, large baskets of Fritos and potato chips, a stacked-up pile of fudge, and squares of white cake with pink icing that looked as if they might have been left over from a reception on the pediatrics floor because they had little yellow icing ducks marching around the edge—I was suddenly so hungry I thought I would faint. Mother was chairman of the board of Christ & St. Luke’s and, thankfully, had flexed her muscles.

“They get so bored down there in the kitchen boiling all those briskets all the time,” she explained. “This gave them a little something fun to do.”

I’ll bet they loved it. I studied Mother carefully as she began offering sandwiches and coffee. She was so charming, so gracious, and I could see that she was scared to death. She was just brave as hell.

Halfway through our meal, a grim-faced doctor walked in and everything stopped. All the air simply evaporated. He paused in the doorway and looked from face to face, searching for a responsible party and finally settled on Wade.

“Can I see you a minute, please, Mr. Gilhooly?” he said.

“What?” Wade said quickly. He slapped his plate
down on the table so hard it sounded like a gunshot. “Is it Alma?”

“Let’s talk out here in the hall.”

“No, tell me.”

“We did everything we could.”

Oh, thank God. Thank God. Elias was still with us.

W
ade, Johnny, and Shanna stampeded after the doctor, practically elbowing each other to be the first out the door and down to the ICU, as though they expected to find a copy of Alma’s will taped to her chest.