A nurse bustled in to take Bart’s vital signs. When she put the digital thermometer in his ear, he stirred, opened his eyes and looked around. Seeming confused, he looked from the nurse, who was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his arm, to me, and then around the room. His eyes lit on the things on the night table, and then on the robe behind me.
“Is my wife still here?” he asked, his voice a low rasp.
I exchanged glances with the nurse.
“Your wife just stepped out for a minute,” the nurse said, taking off the pressure cuff. “She wants you to go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” he said, and closed his eyes again.
I followed the nurse out to the corridor. “How’s he doing?” I asked.
“Are you family?”
“Friend,” I said.
She smiled. “He’s stable, but he’s still pretty confused. And he can get volatile. Whatever he says, just go along with it to keep him quiet.”
“Okay.” I glanced back into the room; Bart was snoring again.
After checking for messages, I turned the phone to silent ring, sat back down in the chair beside Bart’s bed and watched the heart monitor-it was hypnotic. I don’t know how long I sat there, probably half an hour, before Kevin came into the room. He made sure Bart was sleeping before he gestured for me to follow him out into the corridor. We left the door open so we could see Bart, but we stood on the far side of the wide passageway so he couldn’t hear us if he wakened.
“Why am I here?” Kevin asked, nervous, looking down the corridor toward the nurses’ station.
“Because no one will question you coming to see Bart at the hospital,” I said.
“Fair enough,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”
“I need to know whether you’re seriously looking into Mrs. B’s case, or you’re just saying you are to humor Beto.”
His eyes flashed with anger. “Did Beto put you up to this?”
“No,” I said. “Why do you think he would?”
“He asked me the same damn question.”
“What did you tell him?”
He glanced toward Bart. “I told him that of course I’m performing a serious investigation.”
“Is that the truth, though?”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “But I wish it weren’t. Honest to God, Maggie, the further I get into the case, the more I have to ask, what good is it going to do anyone to drag all that up again? You told me yourself that you could have gone your whole life without knowing the truth about your parentage or seeing that crime scene shot of Mrs. B. Now you tell me that Mrs. B was sleeping with some guy. Beto worships his mother. Does he need to know that? Does Bart?”
He braced a hand on the wall next to my head and put his face close to mine. “And Bart, jeez, look at Bart. I’m at the point in this that I need to ask him the hardball questions no one asked the first time around or I’m stuck. But who is that going to help, Maggie?”
“I think the real question is, who benefits most if you bury the investigation?”
Still standing uncomfortably close to me, he said, “I’m sure you have an opinion about that.”
“A few,” I said. “Has Chuck Riley asked you to walk away?”
“My father-in-law? No.” He moved back half a step. “Why would he?”
“He was the original detective assigned to the case,” I said. “He’s the cop who neglected to ask Bart those hardball questions, among other things, when he should have. I didn’t see a record in the murder book that Chuck ever roused himself to look into Bart’s bedroom, sent carpet samples to the crime analyst, looked for blood or bullet hits. Why do you think that was?”
“Chalk it up to inexperience.”
“Bullshit,” I said, leaning in toward him, forcing him back a bit, and looked right up into his face. “Your department is small, but they’ve always been damn good at what they do.”
“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess.”
“Have you talked about the case with your father-in-law?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” he said. “You said it yourself, this was his case in the beginning.”
“I guess that’s the part I keep going back to,” I said. “You told me you took Lacy over to her parents after her meltdown at my house the other night because you didn’t want your kids to see her in that state again.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you explain to Chuck when you took Lacy to him why I had asked you to come to the house earlier that day?”
He lifted a shoulder, dismissing the issue as inconsequential. “No reason not to.”
“Tell me, what experienced cop, tasked with watching over his highly agitated, pathologically jealous, not very sober daughter would leave a loaded gun where she could easily get her hands on it?”
“You can’t think Chuck put Lacy up to taking shots at you,” he said.
“At you, you mean. I don’t think she was gunning for me on the freeway, and neither do you-you said so. Who planted the idea with her that you were at my house on Saturday?”
“Oh for cryin’ out loud.” He turned away from me and pressed his back against the wall, arms folded defensively across his chest.
“You can still pass the case to someone else if you don’t have the stomach for it,” I said. “Conflict of interest alone should have kept you from taking it on at all.”
After he fumed to himself for a few moments, he looked down at me. “You got anything more you want to throw at me?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” I said. “Have you done anything with the shirt Mrs. B was wearing when she was shot?”
“I gave it to our crime analyst,” he said. “To our department’s licensed, certified, professional analyst, in case you’re wondering. And so far, he’s told me that the shirt has DNA from more than two people on it, but the DNA profiles won’t be ready for a while. And, FYI, the shirt’s a size fourteen and a half.”
“I doubt Bart has worn a fourteen and a half since his first communion,” I said. “If then.”
“You want me to say the shirt belonged to this guy, this lover, you say Mrs. B was fooling around with?”
“I don’t want you to say anything you can’t substantiate, Kev. But think about this: When I saw Mrs. B the morning she died, she was wearing a blue shirtwaist dress. She looked like she was ready to go to work at the deli.”
‘You told me that before,” he said.
“I saw that blue dress hanging in Bart’s bedroom closet this afternoon.”
He said, “I…” and got no further. We stood there, side by side for a moment, watching Bart sleep.
The elevator doors down the corridor opened and a dietary tech came out pushing a tall cart full of dinner trays, making a great racket of it. Bart stirred. He began kicking off his blankets as if he were trapped by them, waving his arms against unseen foes. I rushed to him, afraid he would pull out his IV line. The blips on the heart monitor spiked crazily. I caught his hands and held them.
“Bart, it’s okay,” I said. “Look at me. Bart.”
With effort, he focused his eyes on me and stopped thrashing about, but he still seemed confused, frightened. He saw Kevin standing at the end of the bed and dropped his head back on his pillows and lay quiet, seemed dazed. After a minute, he looked at me and said, “How are ya?” And then he paused, as if he couldn’t dredge up my name.
“I’m fine,” I said, watching the heart monitor settle back into normal rhythms. “And how are you?”
He raised the arm with the IV and managed a smile. “Guess you should ask the doc that.”
The dietary tech came in with Bart’s dinner tray.