A blur of white figures hovered over me. The light stabbed my eyes. I shut them.
“Turn off the overhead lights.” That was a woman’s voice. I knew it and struggled to open my eyes again.
“Lotty?”
She leaned over me. “So, Liebchen. You gave us a few bad hours but you’re all right now.”
“What happened?” I could hardly talk; the words choked in my throat.
“Soon I’ll tell you. Now I want you to sleep. You are in Billings Hospital.
The University of Chicago. I felt a small sting in my side and slept.
When I woke up again the room was empty. The pain in my head was still there but small and manageable. I tried to sit up. As I moved, the pain swept over me full force. I felt vilely ill and lay back down, panting. After an interval I opened my eyes again. My left arm was attached to the ceiling by a pulley. I stared at it dreamily. I moved my right fingers up the arm, encountering thick tape, then a cast. I poked the shoulder around the edges of the cast and gave a cry of unanticipated pain. My shoulder was either dislocated or broken.
What had I done to my shoulder? I frowned in concentration, making my headache worse. But I remembered. My car. The brakes failing. A sedan turning over in front of me? Yes. I couldn’t remember the rest. I must have plowed right into it, though. Lucky to have my shoulder belt on. Could anyone in the sedan have lived through that?
I started feeling very angry. I needed to see the police. I needed to talk to everyone. Phillips, Bledsoe, Bemis, the guard at the Tri-State elevator.
A nurse came crisply into the room. “Oh, you’re awake now. That’s good. We’ll take your temperature.”
“I don’t want my temperature taken. I want to see the police.”
She smiled brightly and ignored me. “Just stick this under your tongue.” She was poking a plastic-wrapped thermometer into my mouth.
My fury was mounting, fueled by the helplessness of lying there attached to the ceiling while being ignored.
“I can tell you what my temperature is: it’s rising by the second. Will you kindly get someone to call the police for me?”
“Now let’s calm down. You don’t want to get excited: you’ve had some concussion.” She forced the thermometer into my mouth and started counting my pulse. “Dr. Herschel will be by later and if she feels it’s wise for you to start talking to people she’ll let us know.”
“Were there any other survivors?” I asked her over the thermometer.
“Dr. Herschel will tell you what you need to know.”
I shut my eyes while she solemnly wrote my vital statistics into the chart. Patient continues to breathe. Heart operates. “What’s my temperature?”
She ignored me.
I opened my eyes.
“What’s my pulse?” No answer. “Come on, damn it, it’s my body-tell me what it’s doing.”
She left to spread the good news that the patient was alive and disagreeable. I shut my eyes and fumed. My body was still weak. I went back to sleep.
When I woke up the third time my mind had cleared. I sat up in bed, slowly and still painfully, and surveyed my body. One problem shoulder. Knees covered with gauze-doubtless badly scraped. Bruises on the right arm. There was a table at the bedside with a mirror on it. Also a telephone. If I’d been thinking instead of yapping earlier I would have realized that. I looked at my face in the mirror. An impressive bandage covered my hair. Scalp wound: that accounted for the headache, though I didn’t remember hitting my head. My eyes were bloodshot but my face wasn’t damaged, thank the Lord-I’d still be beautiful at forty.
I picked up the telephone and stuck it under my chin. I had to raise the bed to use it, since I couldn’t prop the phone against my right shoulder while lying down as long as the left one was attached to the ceiling. Pain shot through my left shoulder as I moved but I ignored it. I dialed Mallory’s office number. I had no idea what time it was, but my luck was in: the lieutenant was there.
“Vicki, you’d better not be calling to sweet-talk me. McGonnigal told me about you horning in on the Kelvin investigation. I want you out. O-U-T. It’s just my bad luck it happened in Boom Boom’s apartment.”
Ah, Bobby. It did me good to hear him ranting. “Bobby, you’ll never believe this, but I’m in the hospital.”
There was silence on the other end as Mallory collected his thoughts.
“Yup. Down at Billings… Someone else wanted me out of this case, too, and they took out my brakes and steering while I was at the Port yesterday. If it was yesterday. What day is today?”
Bobby ignored the question. “Come on, Vicki-don’t fool around with me. What happened?”
“That’s why I’m calling you-I hope you can find out. I was coming home around ten-thirty, eleven, when the steering went and then the brakes, and I ended up running into a sedan. I think a Mack truck had hit it and knocked it into my lane.”
“Oh, nuts, Vicki. Why can’t you stay home and raise a family and just stay the heck out of this kind of mess?” Bobby doesn’t believe in using bad language in front of women and children. And even though I refuse to do woman’s work I count as a woman with him.
“I can’t help it, Bobby; trouble follows me.”
There was a snort at the other end.
“I’m lying here with a dislocated shoulder and a concussion,” I said plaintively. “I can’t do anything-get involved in a mess or raise a family-for a while, anyway. But I would like to know what happened to my car. Can you find out who scooped me off the Dan Ryan and see if they examined my car?”
Bobby breathed heavily for a few minutes. “Yeah, I guess I could do that. Billings, you say? What’s the number?”
I looked at the phone and read him the number. I asked him again for the day. It was Friday, 6:00 P.M.
Lotty must have gone back to her clinic on the North side. She’s the person I list to call in case of emergencies and I guess she’s my doctor, too. I wondered if I could persuade her to release me-I needed to get going.
A middle-aged nurse popped her head through the door. “How are we doing?”
“Some of us are doing better than others. Do you know when Dr. Herschel is coming back?”
“Probably around seven.” The nurse came in to feel my pulse. If there isn’t anything else to do, make sure the patient’s heart is still beating. Gray eyes twinkled with meaningless jollity in her red face. “Well, we’re certainly a lot stronger than we were a few hours ago. Is the shoulder giving us any pain?”
I looked at her sourly. “Well, it isn’t giving me any-I don’t know about you.” I didn’t want anyone throwing codeine or Darvon at me. Actually it was throbbing rather badly.
When she left I used the phone again to call Pole Star and ask for Bledsoe. The helpful woman in his office told me he was over at the Lucella, which had a ship-to-shore line. She gave me the number and told me how to get an operator to connect me. This was going to be complicated-I’d have to bill it to my office phone.
I was in the middle of giving the operator the dialing and billing instructions when my middle-aged nurse came back. “Now, we’re not to do anything like this until Doctor says we’re up to it.”
I ignored her.
“I’m sorry, Miss Warshawski: we can’t have you doing anything to excite yourself.” She pulled the phone from my outraged grasp. “Hello? This is Billings Hospital. Your party is not going to be able to complete the call at this time.”
“How dare you? How dare you decide for me whether I can talk on the phone or not? I’m a person, not a sack of hospital clothes lying here.”
She looked at me sternly. “The hospital has certain rules. One of them is to keep concussion and accident victims quiet. Dr. Herschel will let us know if you’re ready to start phoning people yet.”
I was wild with rage. I started to get out of bed to wrestle the phone from her, but the damned pulley kept me attached. “Quiet!” I shouted. “Who’s getting me excited? You are, pulling that phone away!”