Very ill. Very ill but not dead.
Agnes remembered the blood, the awful red flood. Excruciating pain and such fearsome crimson torrents. She'd thought her baby had entered the world stillborn on a tide of its own blood and hers.
'Is it a boy?' she asked.
'Yes, Senora. A fine boy.'
'Bartholomew,' Agnes said.
Maria frowned. 'What is this you say?'
'His name.' She tightened her hand on Maria's. 'I want to see him.'
'Muy enfermo. They have keeped him like the chicken egg.'
Like the chicken egg. As weary as she was, Agnes could not at once puzzle out the meaning of those four words. Then: 'Oh. He's in an incubator.'
'Such eyes,' Maria said.
Agnes said, 'Que?'
'Angels must to have eyes so beautiful.'
Letting go of Maria, lowering her hand to her heart, Agnes said, 'I want to see him.' After making the sign of the cross, Maria said, 'They must to have keeped him in the eggubator until he is not dangerous. When the nurse comes, I will make her to tell me when the baby is to be safe. But I can't be leave you. I watch. I watch over.'
Closing her eyes, Agnes whispered, 'Bartholomew,' in a reverent voice full of wonder, full of awe.
In spite of Agnes's qualified joy, she could not stay afloat on the river of sleep from which she had so recently risen. This time, however, she sank into its deeper currents with new hope and with this magical name, which scintillated in her mind on both sides of consciousness, Bartholomew, as the hospital room and Maria faded from her awareness, and also Bartholomew in her dreams. The name staved off nightmares.
Bartholomew. The name sustained her.
Chapter 17
As greasy with fear sweat as a pig on a slaughterhouse ramp, Junior woke from a nightmare that he could not remember. Something*is reaching for him-that's all he could recall, hands clutching at him out of the dark-and then he was awake, wheezing. Night still pressed at the glass beyond the venetian blind. The pharmacy lamp in the comer was aglow, but the chair that had been beside it was no longer there. It had been moved closer to Junior's bed.
Vanadium sat in the chair, watching. With the perfect control of a sleight-of-hand artist, he turned a quarter end-over-end across the knuckles of his right hand, palmed it with his thumb, caused it to reappear at his little finger, and rolled it across his knuckles again, ceaselessly.
The bedside clock read 4:37 A.M.
The detective seemed never to sleep.
'There's a fine George and Ira Gershwin song called 'Someone to Watch Over Me.'
You ever hear it, Enoch? I'm that someone for you, of course, in a romantic sense.'
'Who?who're you?' Junior rasped, still badly rattled by the nightmare and by Vanadium's presence, but quick- witted enough to stay within the clueless character that he had been playing.
Instead of answering the question, meaning to imply that he believed Junior already knew the facts, Thomas Vanadium said, 'I was able to get a warrant to search your house.' Junior thought this must be a trick. No hard evidence existed to indicate that Naomi had died at the hands of another rather than by accident.
Vanadium's hunch-more accurately, his sick obsession-was not sufficient reason for any court to issue a search warrant.
Unfortunately, some judges were pushovers in such matters, if not to say corrupt. And Vanadium, fancying himself an avenging angel, was surely capable of lying to the court to finesse a warrant where none was justified.
'I don't? don't understand.' Blinking sleepily, pretending to be still thickheaded from tranquilizers and whatever other drugs they were dripping into his veins, Junior was pleased by the note of perplexity in his hoarse voice, although he knew that even an Oscar-caliber performance would not win over this critic.
Knuckle over knuckle, snared in the web of thumb and forefinger, vanishing into the purse of the palm, secretly traversing the hand, reappearing, knuckle over knuckle, the coin glimmered as it turned.
'Do you have insurance?' asked Vanadium.
'Sure. Blue Shield,' Junior answered at once.
A dry laugh escaped the detective, but it had none of the warmth of most people's laughter. 'You're not bad, Enoch. You're just not as good as you think you are.'
'Excuse me?'
'I meant life insurance, as you well know.'
'Well? I have a small policy. It's a benefit that comes with my job at the rehab hospital. Why? What on earth is this about?'
'One of the things I was searching for in your house was a life insurance policy on your wife. I didn't find one. Didn't find any canceled checks for the premium, either.'
Hoping to play at befuddlement awhile longer, Junior wiped his face with one hand, as if pulling off cobwebs. 'Did you say you were in my house?'
'Did you know your wife kept a diary?'
'Yeah, sure. A new one every year. Since she was just ten years old.'
'Did you ever read it?'
'Of course not.' This was absolutely true, which allowed Junior to meet Vanadium's eyes forthrightly and to swell with righteousness as he answered the question. not?'
'That would be wrong. A diary's private.' He supposed that to a detective nothing was sacred, but he was nonetheless a little shocked that Vanadium needed to ask that question.
Rising from the chair and approaching the bed, the detective kept turning the quarter without hesitation. 'She was a very sweet girl. Very romantic. Her diary's full of rhapsodies about married life, about you. She thought you were the finest man she'd ever known and the perfect husband.'
Junior Cain felt as if his heart had been lanced by a needle so thin that the muscle still contracted rhythmically but painfully around it. She did? She? she wrote that?'
'Sometimes she wrote little paragraphs to God, very touching and humble notes of gratitude, thanking Him for bringing you into her life.'
Although Junior was free of the superstitions that Naomi, in her innocence and sentimentality, had embraced, he wept without pretense.
He was filled with bitter remorse for having suspected Naomi of poisoning his cheese sandwich or his apricots. She-had in fact adored him, as he had always believed. She would never have lifted a hand against him, never. Dear Naomi would have died for him. In fact, she had.
The coin stopped turning, pinched flat between the knuckles of the cops middle and ring fingers. He retrieved a box of Kleenex from the nightstand and offered it to his suspect. 'Here.'
Because Junior's right arm was encumbered by the bracing board and the intravenous needle, he tugged a mass of tissues from the box with his left hand.
After the detective returned the box to the nightstand, the coin began to turn again.
As Junior blew his nose and blotted his eyes, Vanadium said, 'I believe YOU actually loved her in some strange way.'
'Loved her? Of course I loved her. Naomi was beautiful and so kind? and funny. She was the best? the best thing that ever happened to me.'
Vanadium flipped the quarter into the air, caught it in his left hand, and proceeded to turn it across his knuckles as swiftly and smoothly as be bad with his right hand.
This ambidextrous display sent a chill through Junior for reasons that he could not entirely analyze. Any amateur magician-indeed, anyone willing to practice enough hours, magician or not-could master this trick. It was
