sections of her face left unbruised. She had only the smallest resemblance to the woman in the newspaper photograph.
'You brought company today,' said the nurse.
John Ransom spoke our names, Eliza Morgan, Tim Underhill, and we nodded at each other across the bed. The policeman walked to the back of the room and sat down beneath the row of windows. 'Tim is going to stay with me for a while, Eliza,' John said.
'It'll be nice for you to have some company,' said the nurse. She looked at me from the other side of the bed, letting me adjust to the sight of April Ransom.
Ransom said, 'You've heard me speak about Tim Underhill, April. He's here to visit you, too. Are you feeling any better today?' He moved a section of the sheet aside and closed his hand around hers. I saw a flash of white bandage pads and even whiter tape around her upper arm. 'Pretty soon you'll be strong enough to come home again.'
He looked up at me. 'She looked a lot worse last Wednesday, when they finally let me see her. I really thought she was going to die that day, but she pulled through, didn't she, Eliza?'
'She sure did,' the nurse said. 'Been fighting ever since.'
Ransom leaned over the bed and began speaking to his wife in a steady, comforting voice. I moved away from the bed. The policeman seated beneath the row of bright windows straightened up in his chair and looked at me brightly and aggressively. His left hand wandered toward the bulge of the notebook in his shirt pocket.
'The patients' lounge is usually empty around this time,' the nurse said, and smiled at me.
I walked down the curving hallway to the entrance of a large room lined with green couches and chairs, some of them arranged around plain polished wooden tables. Two overweight women in T-shirts that adhered to their bodies smoked and played cards in a litter of splayed magazines and paper bags at a table in the far corner. They had pulled one of the curtains across the nearest window. An elderly woman in a gray suit occupied a chair eight feet from them with her back to an uncovered window, reading a Barbara Pym novel as if her life depended on it. I moved toward the windows in the left-hand corner of the room, and the old woman glanced up from her book and stabbed me with a look fiercer than anything Officer Mangelotti could have produced.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to see April Ransom's private duty nurse carrying a pouchy black handbag into the lounge. The old woman glared at her, too. Eliza Morgan plopped her bag onto one of the tables near the entrance and motioned me toward her. She fished around in the big handbag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and looked at me apologetically. 'This is the only place in this whole wing of the hospital where smoking is allowed,' she said in a voice not far above a whisper. She lit the cigarette with a match, tossed the match into a blackened copper ashtray, blew out a white feather of smoke, and sat down. 'I know it's a filthy habit, but I'm cutting way down. I have one an hour during my shift here, and one after dinner, and that's it. Well, that's almost the truth. Right at the start of my shift, I sit in here and smoke three or four of the darned things; otherwise I'd never make it through the first hour.' She leaned forward and lowered her voice again. 'If Mrs. Rollins gave you a dirty look when you came in, it's because she was afraid you were going to start polluting the place. I distress her no end, because she doesn't think nurses should smoke at all— probably they shouldn't!'
I smiled at her—she was a nice looking woman a few years older than I was. Her short black hair looked clean and silky, and her brisk friendliness stopped far short of being intrusive.
'I suppose you've been here ever since Mrs. Ransom was put into the hospital,' I said.
She nodded, exhaling another vigorous plume of smoke. 'Mr. Ransom hired me as soon as he heard.'
She put her hand on her bag. 'You're staying with him?'
I nodded.
'Just get him to talk—he's an interesting man, but he doesn't know half of what's going on inside him. It'd be terrible if he started to fall apart.'
'Tell me,' I said. 'Does his wife have a chance? Do you think she'll come out of her coma?'
She leaned across the table. 'You just be there to help him, if you're a friend of his.' She made sure that I had heard this and then straightened her back and snubbed out the cigarette, having said all she intended to say.
'I guess that's an answer,' I said, and we both stood up.
'Who ever said there were answers?'
Then she came toward me, and her dark eyes looked huge in her small, competent face. She put the flat of her hand on my chest. 'I shouldn't be saying any of this, but if Mrs. Ransom dies, you should go through his medicine chest and hide any prescription tranquilizers. And you shouldn't let him drink too much. He's had a good marriage for a long time, and if he loses it, he's going to become someone he wouldn't even recognize now.'
She gave my chest a single, admonitory pat, dropped her hand, and turned around again without saying another word. I followed her back into April Ransom's room. John was leaning over the side of the bed, saying things too soft to be overheard. April looked like a white husk.
It was past five, and Tom Pasmore was probably out of bed. I asked Eliza where to find a pay telephone, and she sent me around the nurses' station and down a hallway to another bank of elevators. A row of six telephones hung opposite the elevators, none of them in use. Swinging doors opened to wide corridors on both sides. Green, red, and blue arrows streaked up and down the floor in lines, indicating the way to various departments.
Tom Pasmore answered after five or six rings. Yes, it would be fine if we came around seven-thirty. I could tell that he was disappointed—on the few occasions Tom welcomed company, he liked it to arrive late and stay until dawn. He seemed intrigued that we would be on foot.
'Does Ransom walk everywhere? Would he walk downtown, say, from Ely Place?'
'He drove me to his house from the airport,' I said.
'In his or his wife's car?'
'His. His wife has a Mercedes, I guess.'
'Is it parked in front of their house?'
'I didn't notice. Why?'
He laughed. 'He has two cars and he's marching you all over the east side.'
'I walk everywhere, too. I don't mind.'
'Well, I'll have some cold towels and iced lemonade ready for you when you trudge up the driveway at the break of dawn. In the meantime, see if you can find out what happened to his wife's car.'
I promised to try. Then I hung up and turned around to find myself facing a huge broad-shouldered guy with a gray ponytail and beard, the gold dot of an earring in one ear, and a four-button double-breasted Armani suit. He sneered at me as he moved toward the phone. I sneered back. I felt like Philip Marlowe.
At seven John Ransom and I walked out of the hospital and went down the hedge-lined path to Berlin Avenue. He moved quickly but heedlessly, as if he were all by himself in an empty landscape. The air could have been squeezed like a sponge, and the temperature had cooled off to something like eighty-five. There was still at least an hour and a half of sunlight. Ransom hesitated when we reached the sidewalk. For a second I thought he might wade out into the crowded avenue—I didn't think he could see anything but the room he had just left. Instead of stepping off the curb, he let his head drop so that his chin pressed into the layer of fat beneath it. He wiped his face with his hands. 'Okay,' he said, more to himself than to me. Then he looked at me. 'Well, now you've seen her. What do you think?'
'You must be doing her some good, coming every day,' I said.
'I hope so.' Ransom shoved his hands into his pockets. For a moment he looked like a balding, overweight version of the Brooks-Lowood student he had been. 'I think she's lost some weight in the past few days. And that big bruise seems to have stopped fading. Wouldn't you think that's a bad sign, when a bruise won't fade?'
I asked him what her doctor had said.
'As usual, nothing at all.'
'Well, Eliza Morgan will do everything possible for April,' I said. 'At least you know she's getting good care.'
He looked at me sharply. 'She sneaks away to smoke cigarettes in the lounge, did you notice? I don't think
