'Sounds pretty awful,' Lucas said, grinning.
'It could have been, but I just came out with it. I also told him O'Dell was there part of the time. John will back that up.'
A few minutes later, Kennett and Fell arrived together, and Lily blew up: 'For Christ's sakes, Dick, what're you doing here? Did you walk all the way in?' Hands on hips, she turned to Fell, angry. 'Barbara, did you let him…?'
'Shut up, Lily,' Kennett said. He touched her cheek with an index finger. To Lucas, he said, 'Well, you look like shit.'
'What do you think, Barb?' Lucas asked.
Fell had taken cover behind Kennett, and she peered out and said, 'He's right. You look like shit.'
'Then it's unanimous,' Lucas said. 'That's what Lily said when she came in. The only one who didn't was a twenty-four-year-old Times reporter with a great ass, who thought I looked pretty good and would probably like to hear more about this case from the hero of it…'
'Gotta be a concussion,' Fell said to Lily.
'He's always been like this,' Lily said. 'I think it's native stupidity.'
Kennett, shaking his head, said, 'Goddamn women, they're always impressed by a beat-up face. I used to get beat up whenever I needed to get laid. Worked like a charm…' He stopped, and frowned at Lucas: 'Are you trying to get laid?' and his eyes flicked sideways at Lily.
Fell said, 'Not very hard.'
Lucas and Kennett laughed; Lily didn't.
Kennett said, 'Listen, I wanted to tell you. Go ahead with those names you got. Barb's run them down…'
'One good address and one probable,' Fell said.
'Junkies?'
'Nope. Neither one of them. Not the last anybody heard, anyway.'
'All right.' Lucas eased down from the hospital bed. 'Let's go down to the nursing station. Maybe I can talk my way out before lunch.'
The charge nurse said the attending physician wanted another look at him: she'd send him down as soon as he arrived, which should be within the next few minutes. 'We'll see you first,' she said.
'All right, but pretty quick?'
'Soon as he gets here.'
Lily said, 'I've gotta go. Take it easy today.'
'Yeah.'
He walked gingerly back to the room with Fell, trying not to move his head too quickly. At the door, he looked back toward the elevators. Kennett and Lily were waiting, looking up at the numbers above the door, then Kennett leaned toward Lily, and she went up on her toes, a kiss that wasn't taken lightly by either of them. Lucas turned away, and caught Fell watching him watch Lily and Kennett.
'True love,' he said wryly.
The hot, hazy sun left him feeling faintly nauseous, and the headache lurked at the back of his skull.
'You look pale and wan,' Fell said.
'I'm all right.' He looked up at the storefront: Arnold's TV and Appliance, Parts amp; Repair. 'C'mon, let's do her.'
A bell tingled when they went through the door; a heavyset woman looked up from a ledger, slapped it shut, and moved ponderously to the counter. 'Can I help ya?' She had a cheerfully yellow smile and an improbable West Virginia hills accent. To Lucas: 'Whoa, you look like you've been in a dustup.'
'We're police officers,' Fell said. She lifted the flap of her purse, flashed the badge. 'Are you Rose Arnold?'
The woman's smile sagged into a frown. 'Yeah. What'd you want?'
'We're looking for a guy,' Lucas said. 'We thought you could help.'
'I ain't been here all that long…'
Lucas dug in his pocket, took out his money clip, freed his driver's license and handed it to Arnold. 'Barbara here'-he nodded at Fell-'is a New York cop. I'm not. I'm from Minneapolis. They brought me in to help look for this Bekker dude who's chopping people up.'
'Yeh?' Arnold was giving nothing away, watching him with her small wandering eyes like a pullet who suspects the axe.
'Yeah. He killed my woman out there. Maybe you read about it. I'm gonna catch him and I'm gonna do him.'
Arnold nodded and asked, 'So what's that got to do with me?'
'We think he's getting stuff-drugs and medical equipment-from Bellevue. We know that you handle stuff out of Bellevue.'
'That's bullshit, I never touch nothing…'
'You moved five hundred cases of white Hammermill Bond copy paper out of there two weeks ago, paid a dollar a case, and sold it to a computer supply place for three dollars a case,' Fell said. 'We could bust you if we wanted to, but we don't want to. We just want some help.'
She looked at them, quietly, a gleam of strong intelligence in her eyes. Calculating. Lucas had a quick vision of her jerking some crappy piece of hillbilly iron out of a drawer, something like a rusty Iver Johnson.32, and popping him in the chest. But nothing happened, except the sound of flies bumping against the front window.
'Killed your woman?' she asked. She tipped her head, looking at him from the corner of her eyes.
'Yeah,' he said. 'It's real personal.'
She mulled it over for another few seconds, then asked, 'What do you want?'
'I need the name of a guy who rips stuff out of there on a regular basis.'
'Will this come back on me?'
'No way.'
She thought about it, then mumbled: 'Lew Whitechurch.'
'Lew…'
'Whitechurch,' she said.
'Who else?'
'He's the only one, right out of Bellevue…'
'Any chance he might be peddling pills, too?'
'I think he might. I never touch them, but Lew… he's got a problem. He takes a little nose.'
'Thanks,' Lucas said. He took a personal business card from his pocket, turned it over, wrote his hotel phone number on it. 'Have you handled, or know anybody who has handled, a load of emergency-room monitoring equipment?'
'No.' Her voice was positive.
'Ask around. If you find somebody, have them call me. It'll never get past us, I swear it on a Bible. I'm only in this because Bekker cut my woman's throat.'
'Cut her throat?' The fat woman touched her neck.
'With a bread knife,' Lucas said. He let the bitterness flow into his voice. 'Listen: anybody dealing with Bekker is liable to find himself strapped to an operating table, eyelids cut off, getting his heart sliced out while he's still alive… You read the papers.'
'Watch TV.' She nodded.
'Then you know.'
'Fuckin' lunatic, is what he is,' Arnold said.
'So ask around. Call me.'
Outside, Fell said, 'You're a scary sonofabitch sometimes. You sorta used your friend…'
'My friend's dead, she doesn't care,' he said. And he shrugged. 'But hillbillies understand that revenge shit.'
