Crazy for Cornelia (24 page)

“How badly is she hurt?” He felt a shivery pall settling over his soul. At every misstep in this horrible debacle, Chester
believed that he
could never be more afraid of what was to come next. But this was the coup de grâce, hitting his daughter with his car. Or
had he? Had his car hit her? Hadn’t the doorman appeared, seemed to whisk her away?

“Don’t worry, sir. We’ll take you to see her,” an officer said.

Odd sounds assaulted him as he stepped out of the broken limousine. He heard snorting. The horse, a sturdy beast, had got
up on all four legs, pawing the snow with his hooves. And he heard a female voice yelling. It was the woman in the black suit,
the driver of the carriage. She yelled at him in what sounded like a drill sergeant’s parade-ground snarl.

The overbearing woman must be insane. She’d carted his daughter the wrong way in a blizzard. Perhaps all female lunatics had
a secret understanding like Freemasons and helped one another, a subculture running on scrambled brains and estrogen. Thanks
to him, Cornelia had officially joined them. Chester felt a deep sucking wound in his stomach, and not a physical one.

The fault line between Chester and his daughter had stretched so far apart it had finally snapped, like his stupid Panda.
Now it would take more than words or good intentions to put her back together again.

Outside the emergency room entrance of Manhattan Hill Hospital, in the confusion of the ambulances and snow, Cornelia and
Kevin were gently extracted from the police car. Placed in wheelchairs, they were quickly rolled off to separate destinations.

A top-heavy team of doctors and a few nurses crowded around Cornelia Lord on her way to the Lord Pavilion. This special wing
of the hospital had been donated by Cornelia’s grandfather Chester II to treat VIP patients, who could recover in teak-paneled
rooms with sweeping views of the East River. Chester II was its very first patient.

Nurses gingerly removed Cornelia’s clothing. The highest-level staff doctors examined her closely for unseen wounds, internal
bleeding, hard-to-detect injuries. While the medical team scrambled, a woman with thin hair and a nervous rash who worked
as the hospital’s staff attorney monitored her treatment.

“Her leg is fine,” a doctor reported. “Basically a turned ankle. No head trauma. A few bruises, but nothing serious.”

“Keep testing her anyway,” the lawyer said.

Philip Grace hung back in the emergency room. He assumed, correctly, that he would be ignored as he hunkered down in a plastic
chair between a minor gunshot wound and an ulcer. Then he took off his coat and rolled up his sweater sleeves like a hospital
employee. Pressing as close as he could to the doors leading to the Lord Pavilion, he slipped out the Minox spy camera he
kept in his pocket for emergencies.

All he managed were a few candid shots of a dismayed Chester Lord and a stoic Tucker Fisk.

Chester and Tucker were escorted by police officers who pushed away other reporters yowling like mad dogs. A senior-looking
official met them at the doors to the belly of the hospital. Then two hefty security men stepped in front of Philip Grace,
preventing him from following them into the Lord Pavilion.

“You need some tests, Mr. Lord,” the head of emergency services insisted.

Chester waved him away. “No. Just a conference room, please.”

They led him to a mahogany-paneled, plum-carpeted staff room. The moment Tucker sat Chester down, Dr. Bushberg rushed through
the door. Cornelia’s psychiatrist fumbled in the pockets of his Burberry raincoat and Chester felt an odd twinge of satisfaction
to see that Bushberg had forgotten his pipe.

“Cornelia was riding in a horse carriage,” Chester icily told Tucker. “To get away from us, I imagine.”

A doctor with a short gray beard popped in the door without knocking. He shook Chester’s hand with a surgeon’s careful squeeze.

“Cornelia looks like she’s going to be fine, Mr. Lord. It doesn’t appear that the car even touched her. We’re running tests
to be on the safe side.”

Edgar Chase, Chester’s lawyer, bustled in after the doctor. Edgar’s intimidating presence always reassured him. Even when
Edgar had little to say, as was often the case. The tall, barrel-chested attorney wore a well-tailored dinner jacket and white
scarf as though he had been interrupted at a tête-à-tête of great splendor.

“How is she?” Edgar Chase’s baritone rumbled, as he peered over tortoiseshell half-glasses at Chester.

“So far, so good. No injuries, apparently,” Chester answered, his voice trembling. “A building employee saw the accident
coming and pulled her out of… harm’s way.”

Edgar settled into the conference table and took a legal pad from a slim leather portfolio. Chester saw the note he wrote.

Bldg. Emp. involved: Will he sue?

A shrill whistle tortured Kevin’s eardrum and he couldn’t remember the past few minutes clearly. Now some people were picking
him up and putting him on a gurney. A woman in white asked him about his blood type and whether he was allergic to any medications,
then put a Plexiglas mask over his face.

His gurney was being wheeled through swinging doors marked “Trauma Bay” that banged open at his feet, into a trauma unit where
several gunshot victims, a sad club, lay bleeding. He felt a little lightheaded. It was exciting to be in the middle of all
the life-saving activity—orders being shouted out in jargon and quickly followed. He admired the sense of life-or-death importance.

A stout nurse listened to his heart with a stethoscope. She took his fingers in her hands and turned them over, then poked
at his shoulder. “Can you feel this?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he told her through clenched teeth.

A young Asian doctor in designer glasses appeared. He started firing orders as he spread both Kevin’s eyelids wide and looked
into his pupils with a blinding penlight. “Hang a bag of Ringers… start a unit of O-packed negative cells… prepare to intubate…”

“Open your mouth wide, Mr. Ramirez,” the nurse told him.

“Huh?” Kevin said, as she began to probe his throat with a plastic tube that made him gag. His gurney was suddenly wrenched
into motion. The young doctor, looking down at his chart, walked along beside him.

“Okay, Mr. Ramirez, you lost some blood. We’re going to stabilize you, clean your wound, and get you into surgery to take
the bullet out. No problem.”

“What bullet?” Kevin yanked his head away. “My name’s Doyle.”

The doctor shuffled through his charts. “Oh.”

“Who’s Ramirez?” Kevin asked weakly.

“Ramirez is a chest wound,” the nurse explained. “You don’t want to be Ramirez.”

Kevin believed her. At the moment, he barely wanted to be himself.

“Edgar,” Tucker got down to business. “Cornelia had a severe nervous breakdown tonight at the office Christmas party. I asked
her psychiatrist, Dr. Bushberg, to meet us here. It seems she ran off through the blizzard without a coat and somehow got
one of the Central Park carriages to drive her up Fifth Avenue. A taxi hit them before Chester’s car… arrived on the scene.”

Chester noted the craft of Tucker’s phrasing. “Edgar, she’s taken a turn for the worse and it’s my own fault. I came within
inches of hitting her with my car.” He glowered at Tucker and Bushberg. “I let you people deal with her and now we’re all
to blame.”

Dr. Bushberg backed away.

“You,” Chester glared. “You were supposed to be treating her.”

The psychiatrist’s face drained. Nobody spoke while Chester shook, until Edgar Chase tried to fill the silence with nostalgia.

“I remember that night I saw Cornelia in her first party dress.”

And now she’s ready for her first straitjacket, Chester thought.

“She’s become a danger to herself, Edgar,” Tucker said with cool certainty. “Chester, we probably have no choice but to get
her into a hospital for treatment. Dr. Bushberg?”

When Tucker whipped his eyes at the psychiatrist, Bushberg jumped like one of Pavlov’s salivating dogs.

“In practical terms, she’s not living in the real world,” Bushberg said quickly. “She’s delusional and self-destructive. I
would recommend treatment at the Sanctuary in Westchester. It’s the best private psychiatric facility in the country. Don’t
fiddle while Rome burns, Mr. Lord.”

Chester’s shoulders jerked, but he said nothing.

Edgar Chase nodded. “I believe I’ve heard of the Sanctuary.”

Yes. Edgar’s wife had probably dried out there, more than once. Chester felt angry at all of them, a burning in the tips of
his ears.

“Dr. Bushberg can push some buttons,” Tucker said in his maddening
business voice, wiped free of all emotion. “He can get her admitted tomorrow. What if she resists, Edgar?”

“Well, it’s a bit more complicated,” the lawyer said. “There’s a very unwieldy legal procedure for involuntary treatment in
New York state.”

“Then get a judge on our side,” Tucker ordered, then hurried to add, “Her life is at stake, Edgar.”

“She’ll go voluntarily,” Chester said with finality. At least she’d be well looked after. Perhaps he would talk with the new
psychiatrists there himself, a fresh start, to begin behaving like a real father even at this late date.

Then the lights went out in the conference room.

Below the Lord Pavilion, Kevin Doyle underwent a CAT scan on his head that was pronounced normal, and X rays of his shoulder.

Then they gave him painkillers. The side of his head still pounded, but it no longer bothered him. He felt a remarkable sense
of well-being. He beamed while an intern sewed up the gash in his ear.

The doctor with the designer glasses nodded over a series of X rays of Kevin’s shoulder that he slid onto a wall-mounted lightbox.
He could see little white dots and dashes like Morse code on the X ray.

“Those are your stitches,” the doctor explained.

“I feel okay.”

“For man versus limousine, you did pretty well, Mr. Doyle. Your head looks fine. Your shoulder is not dislocated. You’ll hear
a noise in your ear for a few days, and we already gave you Percocets for pain.” He wrote two prescriptions on her pad. “Take
the antibiotic every twelve hours, two painkillers every six hours as needed, and stay out of traffic.”

Because Kevin had entered wrapped in the arms of VIP Cornelia Lord, formal hospital procedures had been slighted temporarily.
Now he was retrofitted into normal hospital policy, told to take a chair beside a small desk, twisting his body painfully
to talk to a bored clerk who stabbed away at her computer. Her nails fascinated him, little mini-murals, over two inches long
with glitter and rhinestone studs.

“How are you paying for this?”

In his painkiller euphoria, Kevin recalled his Brotherhood of Portal
Operators union health care benefits. He clumsily found the plastic card Eddie had given him in his wallet. The admissions
clerk punched its code on her computer. Then her tired eyes popped open like an astronomer finding a new planet.

She stared at him admiringly. “Your health plan gives you 100 percent coverage for everything. We never see plans like this
anymore. Where do you work?”

“Eight-forty Fifth. I’m a doorman.”

“Honey,” she handed him his card back, “you ever get a job opening there, you call me.”

Kevin heard a commotion.

“We lost our light in the ER waiting room,” somebody shouted.

He heard spurts of confusion from beyond the double doors.

“Generator’s on,” a voice yelled. “We’ve got lights again.”

Then he recognized a wail that could only be Philip Grace.

“Who the fuck took my new coat?”

Code Green

N
o comment,” Kevin told the feral-looking stalkarazzi waiting outside.

He left the hospital glowing from the painkillers, which acted to block the nerves. Real linebackers, these pills were. His
head began to congeal as if wet cement were pouring in and hardening. A ringing like a chorus of crickets began in his ears,
canceling out the yowl of the photographers and a rap version of “Silver Bells” playing somewhere on a boombox.

“Kevin, you sure you’re okay?” Marne had come to meet him. Now she pointed him toward the curb, and stuck her fingers in her
mouth to whistle for a cab.

Kevin stared out the window of the rattling taxi. New York at Christmas could be beautiful, like a fairy tale with sparkling
lights. Trust welled up inside him. Everything was good. Everyone was fine. He turned to his sister, that Joan of Arc in her
Fire Department Athletic League team jacket, who saved infants and old people from burning buildings. He gave Marne what he
imagined was a beatific smile. Her green eyes scanned his face in the half-light, while waves of neon darted across the inside
of the cab as they wormed through traffic, then reeled down Second Avenue.

“Dad came off work and waited in the ER for you as long as he
could. He had to go back, but I called him to say you’re fine. Helen, too. Kevin, what happened?”

“I helped a girl, that’s all.”

She sighed and looked past his face at the street. “A screwed-up deb. Kevin, she’s not somebody you ought to be doing for.
She’s got serious problems.”

“What? She’s got money, so she can’t have feelings?” He surprised himself, letting Marne push his buttons. Especially when
the Peres made him feel as charming as a game show host.

“It’s not money,” she told him. “It’s class. Like Dad says, Old Money comes from a different planet. I’ll give you an example,
you tell me if I’m wrong. I’m working a fire at the old Ivy Club, trying to get a guy out of his guest room. Sweet old man,
barefoot in his bathrobe, face full of soot with the eaves falling down around him. So I’m helping him through the burning
timbers and putting my coat down so he don’t burn his feet, and I yell to my partner, ‘He don’t have shoes.’ And the old guy
stops and looks me in the face and says, ‘He doesn’t.’ I say, ‘sir?’ He corrects me, ‘He doesn’t have shoes.’ He was looking
down his nose at me while I’m saving his life, Kevin. He doesn’t, he don’t. Two different worlds.”