The Chinese Beverly Hills (31 page)

“All I really know about life came from my mom,” Paula said vaguely. “She said it’s bad news to whip the slaves.”

Gloria laughed.

“Elevators over there.” They hunted up Five-West, and Paula barked into the intercom beside the locked doors until it buzzed, and they were into Cardiac Intensive Care.

A semicircle of ten glass cubicles faced a nurse station. Inside the nearest one was a six-foot-long inert object on a bed. The object looked a lot like Jack Liffey, though it was the focus of a small universe of apparatuses, with wires and tubes leading to monitors and wheezing machinery. Two women were glaring at one another across the recumbent object—one young, fairly tall, and Maeve. The other was older, petite, and Asian.

“That be her,” Paula said grimly.

“Uh-huh.” Gloria hip-thrust Paula aside, dug out her own badge, and showed it to the nurse sitting at the
Star Trek
controls.

“Room one. What’s the story?” A voice that was not to be delayed or denied.

“Came in with near total coronary blockage. Circling the drain. They did an emergency triple bypass. Unusual case—he only has three coronary arteries. Lucky he lived this far.”

The nurse had obviously been through police situations before—County was the biggest trauma unit in the U.S., famous for its weekend knife-and-gun club in the ER—and she summarized fast and well.

“His body came through it, but we have no idea how long his brain may have gone without oxygen. They think he had several myocardial infarctions over a couple of hours, but a massive one toward the end. He must be one tough cookie. Officially, his condition is guarded.”

“Those visitors,” Gloria snapped.

“We only allow one, if any. The Asian woman said she was his wife. The girl forced her way in a few minutes ago and said she was his daughter. Security is on its way to deal with them.”

“Call off the dogs.”

Gloria was manifestly in charge now. She used her cane to hobble around the big dashboard to the cubicle, and Paula held back. Tien and Maeve glanced up from their mad-dog glaring.

“You,” Gloria said, pointing at Tien. “Outside now to talk. Maeve, stay with Paula.”

The Asian woman nodded at Gloria’s command. She seemed to know who Gloria was, but Gloria didn’t care. All she knew was she needed to win this fight. She slapped the big square switch that opened the doors and led this man-stealer out to the snack room.

*

Ellen Chen lay on her own bed, in her own room in her parents’ home, her infant daughter breathing softly in the bassinet. The night before she had hiked down the hill after the worst was over and given herself over to a fire crew. Strangely, no cops had shown up at her home, though she’d told a sympathetic fireman everything, the kidnap and the handcuffing. She’d told them everyone she thought had been in the cabin, then she’d refused a hospital checkup and insisted on being taken home.

“I’m just wet and cold, man.”

Ellen plucked out her journal, untouched for weeks. She read her last entry:

We’re told “meaning well” is all that matters, that it excuses any consequences. That’s the problem with individualism. We are responsible, even if we can’t know what will happen. I accept it.

How grandiose I felt only a few weeks before. She pondered for a while. So strong and pure. She found a pen and added:

I must talk to that troubled old man. I bet he knows things I don’t.

*

Tien and Gloria squared off in the snack room.

“You the pain-in-ass in Jack’s life,” Tien snapped. “Another hairy American girl who can’t never be nice to her man.”

“You got it,” Gloria said. “And you’re the short time that opened her crack for GIs with five bucks.”

The Asian woman paused and seemed to deflate a little. “I start this nuclear missile war, okay. Sorry, sorry. I’m from good family, plenty college, not street trash. There some way to stop this? We both breathe deep. Both two care about Jack.”

“That remains to be seen—” Gloria had been about to hit her with a blast of ranting, but she stopped herself. This face-off might be the toughest war she’d ever had—a war for the rest of her life. And winning might not be simply a matter of overpowering the opponent. Who could tell where Jack’s head was? She’d certainly given him reason to walk out. “Let’s de-escalate. Say your piece, woman.”

They stared at one another for a while, breathing deeply. A man in a smock looked in, took fright at the tension in the room, and fled.

“I want to make Jackie happy in his last years. Give him big boat, nice Porsche, Italian suit, Rolex, fine shoe, and make his daughter rich, too. I give her scholarship all her life. What
you
gonna do? Close your knees to him? Get boyfriend?”

“Say
what
?”

“Don’t think this come from Jack complain. He never. I got source.”

It didn’t seem like finicky Jack to grumble to a mistress. “Slow down, woman. I hear you’re filthy rich and you want to make Jack rich, too, and all his family for three generations.”

“I always want everybody happy. Win-win-win. You go away right now, I give you ten million dollar. Company stock. You want cash money in paper bag, I get it. You want something else, you say.”

Gloria was struck dumb. Ten million dollars! Plus leaving Jack and Maeve rich and pampered the rest of their lives. How dare she turn that down on their behalf? Particularly after all the grief she’d given him. And the money for herself—Jesus. More zeroes than she’d ever thought about. She could be the benefactor of the tiny Paiute reservation outside Lone Pine, replace every shabby trailer with a ranch house.

*

He lay with his eyes closed and his arms wrapped around a small pillow on his chest. Paula Green had been in enough ICUs to know that the glowing numbers seemed fine. Pulse around ninety. No weird spikes in the EKG. Blood pressure was normal. The rest of the equipment was from Mars.

Paula asked Maeve for an account of Jack’s condition.

“The nurses say it was lucky you guys got him to the ER when you did.”

What Maeve didn’t tell Paula was that some fire official had come by in the tiny hours and asked her to pass on a simple message to her dad:
The guy who killed your girl is history
. It had to mean the girl her dad had been looking for. Killed. He would see it as another failure.

“They did a bypass last night. The doctor said he had so much plaque in his arteries he was ready to keel over at any moment.”

Gloria came striding back into the cubicle alone, looking like she’d been falling a mile and hadn’t quite hit yet.

“What it is?” Paula asked.

It took a few moments for Gloria to shake herself free from some train of thought. “How’s Jack?” she snapped.

Paula let Maeve explain what she knew, and Gloria nodded at several points, a little more heartily than she should have. Paula chased away a nurse who looked in to try to shoo them.

“Glor, don’t keep us in suspense,” Maeve said. “You had it out with that woman.”

Gloria’s eyes were burning and confused. “She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she said evenly.

An even more insistent nurse looked in. “I’m sorry, but you all
really
have to leave.”

“Tell us,” Maeve said to Gloria.

Gloria’s eyes settled into their accustomed fierceness. “I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse neither.”

*

Jack Liffey lay with the world’s heaviest brick on his chest, afraid to move at all lest he stir the pain in his chest into something worse. He heard voices nearby, but his eyelids were far too heavy to open. The voices were comforting nonetheless. He’d taken in that he’d had serious heart surgery—serious enough so he really should have been walking down that glowing tunnel to meet a beloved uncle, but none of that had showed up.

He wondered what had become of the lost young man he’d given the John Berger book to. Zook. Bad companions, as everybody’s mom used to say.

Hate the other, the outsider; hate non-whites, hate gays, hate people from the next neighborhood over. These days it seemed to be your range of hatreds that defined who you were.

And it was so often the comfortable who hated. People who had plenty to eat, warm shelter every night, all the toys. He wondered if there was some toxic gas venting from deep in the American psyche.

*

“Hold on, girl!” Gloria yelped into her cell phone. “An eye’s opened up!”

She was hovering over Jack Liffey in an instant. It was an ugly room in a nursing home now.

“Jack, are you with us?”

He winked.

“I’ll get back to you, Paula. Can you speak, Jack?” She rested her hand on his forehead. Both eyes were open now, squinting. “Make me a sign.”

The eyes blinked twice. Then she suggested one blink for yes and two for no and found out that he was genuinely present.

“You been away, my love. It’s six weeks you been in a coma.” She didn’t tell him he’d had a stroke after the heart surgery. And she didn’t say she’d refused the Vietnamese woman’s entreaty to fly him to Zurich for some super-duper neurologists. She knew absolutely that Jack Liffey wouldn’t have wanted anything that an ordinary man couldn’t have.

“Maeve’s been coming to talk to you all the time, Jack, and a fireman named Roski, and a Chinese girl named Ellen, too. A whole lot of grown-up bad boys from the hood that say you helped them out years ago.”

One blink. Maybe an acknowledgment.

“What do you need, my love? Want me to suggest things?”

He closed his eyes and stayed that way for another week.

Maeve was at his bedside when he surfaced again, and she squealed to see his eyes. He coughed to clear his throat.

“Give me eat,” Jack Liffey said.