With the siren full on we went through Copley Square, and out Huntington Avenue.
'What hospital?' I said.
'Brigham,' Quirk said.
'Any suspects?'
'No.'
We went out Huntington, turned down Francis and pulled in under the portico at the main hospital entrance, and parked. A fat black woman in a hospital security uniform came toward us as we got out, waving us away. Malone flashed his badge and she stopped and nodded and walked away.
Belson was in the intensive care unit, a sheet pulled up to the middle of his chest. There was an IV into a vein on the back of his right hand. His left arm was in a cast. Lee Farrell was there, with his hips on a windowsill. There was another Homicide cop I didn't know sitting in a chair by Belson's bedside with a tape recorder. The recorder wasn't picking anything up. Belson appeared to be sleeping. I nodded at Farrell.
The cop with the tape recorder said, 'He's coked to the eyeballs, Lieutenant. He hasn't said a word.'
Quirk nodded.
'Frank,' he said. 'Spenser's here.'
Belson made no movement for maybe twenty seconds, then his eyes opened. He shifted his eyeballs slowly toward Quirk's voice and slowly past Quirk and looked at me. The cop beside the bed turned on the tape recorder.
'Talk… to… Spenser,' he said slowly in a very soft voice. Everything he did was slow, as if the circuits weren't connected very well.
I moved a little closer to the bed and bent over.
'What do you need?' I said.
His eyes remained fixed for a moment at the spot where I had been, then slowly they moved and, even more slowly, they refocused on me.
'You… find… her,' he said.
'Lisa,' I said.
'Can't… look… now. You… look.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'I'll find her.'
Belson was silent for a while. His eyes were on me, but they didn't seem to be seeing me. Then he moved his lips carefully. For a moment no sound came.
Then he said, 'Good.'
Everyone was quiet in the room. Belson kept his blank eyes on me. Then he nodded faintly and let his eyes close and didn't move. The cop with the tape recorder turned it off.
In the corridor, Quirk said, 'You chase the wife, we'll chase the shooter. They turn out to be connected, we'll cooperate in our common endeavor.'
'He say anything I can use?'
'He hasn't said anything anybody can use. Even if he was lucid, I don't think he knows what hit him. He got it in the back and he never cleared his piece.'
'A real pro,' I said, 'would have made sure it was finished.'
'A real amateur wouldn't have hit all three shots,' Quirk said. 'Maybe something scared him off.'
'If something did, be nice to find out what it was and talk to it.'
'We're looking,' Quirk said.
'Doctors give you any idea how long before he can talk more than he's doing now?'
'No. They've shot him full of hop right now, and they say he'll need it for a while.'
'So I'm on my own,' I said.
'Aren't you always?' Quirk said.
We walked slowly through the hospital corridors to the elevator.
'You want to look through Frank's house?' Quirk said.
He handed me a new key with a little tag hanging from it on a string. On the tag 'Belson, FD' was written in blue ink.
'I suppose I got to,' I said.
'Don't get delicate,' Quirk said. 'It's a case now.'
Chapter 6
Belson and his bride had a condominium on Perkins Street in Jamaica Plain right next to Brookline. It was a good-looking collection of gray and white Cape Cod-style semihouses attached in angular ways and scattered in a seemingly random pattern like an actual neighborhood that had evolved naturally. Across the street and down a slope behind me was Jamaica Pond, gleaming in the late March afternoon as if it were still a place where Wampanoags gathered. Across the pond, cars went too fast along the Jamaica Way, and in the distance the downtown city rose clean and pleasant looking against a pale sky in the very early spring.
