Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [73]
“What’s that?” echoed the nurse, with a disdainful glance at the dream catcher.
He lifted the gauze, revealing dark purple bruises on Andrew’s lids.
“Don’t touch him!” Margaret shrieked.
“Drops,” said the nurse, showing her the bottle. “To keep his eyes from drying out?”
“Don’t hurt him!”
“I think we should go,” I said.
“Are you a relative?” he asked Margaret, over his shoulder, but she had retreated through the curtains to a chair and was drawing up her knees.
The nurse slapped the bottle down on a tray and went out of the cubicle and grabbed her wrist.
“No, dear, we are not getting comfortable, we are leaving.”
“Help him!” moaned Margaret, rocking back and forth.
“I don’t have to deal with this,” he sighed.
“Hang on,” I said and hustled outside, where Jaeger and one of the other detectives were still standing around, having snitched free coffee from the nurses’ lounge.
“We’ve got a situation.”
They looked up with alarm.
“Margaret Forrester,” I told them. “Flipping out.”
They caught the scene through the window: Margaret huddled on the chair. The nurse on the phone to security.
“We’ll take care of it,” Jaeger said, ditching the cup. “Thanks.”
As they headed into the ICU, I fled, through the warren of hallways and down three flights of stairs. I was impressed by their patience—how they had shouldered the thing without question, the way you would an offbeat family member with recurring difficulties, the causes of which you had long stopped trying to guess.
It was the third day, unbearable in its mind-numbing similarity to the last two. I had barely slept, worried about the gun. How would it fit into the robbery scenario? Where did my grandfather get it? Who’d he steal it from? Was it traceable? What about fingerprints?
Nothing happened. No second shoe dropped. Andrew’s condition remained unchanged. I was back in my pod looking a shade paler and more withdrawn, less able to imagine a successful resolution: I would get off but he would be a vegetable. He would be a vegetable and I would be convicted. He would recover but remain an invalid. He would recover and point the finger.
Jason, however, was all keyed up.
“Look at this! Look at this!” he kept saying, shaking a piece of paper in my face.
“I can’t see if it’s up my nose,” I snapped.
Jason had done his homework and discovered that Carl Vincent, the unemployed lab technician accused by the teenager, Roxy Santos, of beating her mom, owned a green 1989 Dodge van. The van was registered to the same Mar Vista address. Whether Carl Vincent could be Ray Brennan was an urgent question; even more pressing was the escalating anxiety to get out of the office.
I told Jason, “You passed,” and we left without telling Rick or giving a heads-up to Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch’s office, as Mike Donnato had advised. I did not want obstacles.
It was a quick drive to the Palms District, originally a grain-shipping center that had followed the Santa Monica railroad across flat agricultural fields. After World War II, those flatlands were developed into tracts of cheap single-family houses built for returning soldiers. Those were boom years, when the new lawns matched the crew cuts of the new dads who mowed them: young working-class vets could afford to raise a family, and every maple-lined avenue seemed to end at the utopian gates of MGM Studios.
The Santos girl and her mother lived in what used to be one of those tracts. It was still working class, but most of the 1940s standard-issue single-family cottages had been torched to make way for sixties apartment buildings on aqua stilts with carports. A Montessori school caught my eye, an oasis surrounded by tall pines. Bright plastic tugboats and picnic tables were placed around the courtyard of a graceful old Mission-style lodge. Across from the school stood one of those forties-era specimen cottages with a spindly porch and metal awnings, trash on the lawn and pigeons on the roof. It looked abandoned, and I wondered why the corner property had not sold. Something was not right: the windows had been boarded