CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (57 page)

The day after Christmas I began looking for another job. Stewart's was too far to walk and too close to Jerry. Across the street from my apartment house stood Louisville General Hospital. The building was a solid piece of craftsmanship, the best looking architecture within four blocks. My apartment house, a sleaze bag resort for the poor and semi-stupid nineteen-year-old like myself, was a red brick dwarf compared to the soaring many-storied structure of Louisville General.

If I found a job at the hospital I could come home for lunch, save a dollar or two. That was my main interest, saving money. I had big plans Jerry knew nothing about. I was headed for the golden west, for San Francisco and the famous Haight-Ashbury district where flower children danced through one long carnival night. I knew I was missing something, maybe even a part of history, and I just had to go there no matter what. But I could never get there if I didn't save traveling money and a stake to sustain me when I arrived.

My first interview with the personnel director of Louisville General went poorly.

"How old are you?" he asked, looking over the rims of his glasses.

He had to be forty if he was a day. I could usually charm old farts.

"Nineteen."

"Where are your parents, your family?"

"They live in upstate New York."

"Why don't
you
live in upstate New York then?"

"Why should I? I'm nineteen."

"Hmmm." He pondered this winsome bit of logic a moment. "Aren't you afraid to live on your own."

"No!" It was true; I wasn't afraid at all, of anything. If my imagination could have been measured it was at about an inch and a half. If my fear quotient was taken, it was at a Two, tops--and the worst thing I feared was not getting a job that could pay my way to California. At that point in my short existence I had not run into horror or chaos. I didn't even yet know it existed.

"Where do you live?"

"Across the street. I have an apartment. I could be here anytime you needed me. It's quite convenient."

He pushed the glasses up his nose and sniffed as if he could actually smell the stained linoleum covering of the apartment lobby floor, the dust coating the plastic potted plants, the mustiness of the worn red diamond-patterned hall runner. "Don't you think that's a dangerous place for a young girl to live alone?"

"It's fine. It's cheap. No one bothers me. I play gin rummy with a couple down the hall." It didn't feel good being taken for a youngster who shouldn't be allowed on my own.

"Umm hmmm. What do you know about hospital work?"

I sat forward eagerly and put forth my most earnest face. "I don't know anything but I'm willing to learn. I thought I'd do well in the admitting department. I can type and file and do anything I'm trained to do. I know I don't have work experience, but I'm quick; I catch on fast."

I paused when I saw a ghost of a smile creeping onto his lips. He was not taking me seriously and that was unfair. "Besides," I concluded, "I live right across the street and I can come work anytime you need me."

I thought I'd convinced him despite the smug little smile, but finally he shook his head and said, "You shouldn't be in this city alone, a girl young as you. You've no experience..."

I stood, realizing I had been dismissed. But I had not given up. I knew what I wanted--out of the candy department and away from Jerry's lovesick gaze--and I was determined to have this job. The director was vastly underestimating my ability to suffer patronizing attitudes. I could take it until the cows came home if that's what he wanted. He had not seen the last of me.

I waited two days. In preparation I quit my job at Stewart's much to Jerry's chagrin. (What are you doing? How can you leave me this way?) I camped in the secretary's office until she let me see the personnel director a second time.

"You again."

"Oh yes. I'm free now. I quit my job and I can start here anytime you like." Audacious of me, but what the hell.

He sighed, propped his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. "Young lady..."

"I know I don't have any qualifications, but you won't find a more eager and able learner. I've had two years of college; I know how to learn."

"We really don't..."

"I'll take the scummiest job you have open. If you want, I'll make beds, scrub floors, clean toilets, anything. You have to give me a chance. And I live right across the street, I can..."

"Come anytime we call. Yes, you've mentioned that."

I smiled. I was honest and young and winning. How could I miss? Still it took two more trips into the director's office to convince him he couldn't do without my services in Louisville General. I imagine I simply wore the man down, but that is youth's prerogative. Older people cannot fly in the face of unabashed enthusiasm and energy. It tires them.

I had not been working in the admitting department two weeks before I met the pretty boy. The admitting supervisor had me go into the wards to verify insurance information. Most of the patients had no insurance to verify. Seven out of every eight hour stint I spent interviewing welfare mothers with new babies. I don't know why the hospital thought these women had changed their ways, succumbed to middle-class values, and carried hospitalization now when most of them had been in these wards delivering babies only the year before. But I was not to question procedure. I was to ask my silly questions about income and insurance and write down the answers on a clipboard.

In my second week on the job I entered the men's ward for the first time. A patient had come in the night before through emergency and I was to verify the insurance on him. My papers said he was twenty years old and he had been shot in the leg.

Shot? Now wasn't that an interesting injury? It beat gallstones and the maternity ward all to hell.

I wandered through the big open ward blushing at the whistles and hoots coming from the beds. Men of all ages sat up on their pillows, swiveled their bodies at my passing, and generally had a good time making me feel uncomfortable. "Bobby Tremain?" I called out above the din. "Where is Bobby Tremain?"

"I'm right here," came a deep male voice behind me. "I'm Bobby."

I turned and was at once awestruck by his beauty. Blond, curly haired, features chiseled fine and noble as the face of Jesus in the Pieta I had seen in the New York World's Fair. From what I could see beneath the sheet he also possessed the physique of Michelangelo's David. I must have appeared dumbfounded because Bobby cocked his beautiful head and said, "Well? Did you want me?"

The way he said
want me
sent shivers running. Did I want him? Oh yes, I wanted him, absolutely, I wanted him clothed or unclothed, bedridden or healthy, in his hospital bed in full view of thirty men or alone on a deserted mountain top before the eyes of heaven. A terrible thing for him to ask, did I want him.

I managed to move to his bedside. "Hi...I'm supposed to...uh...ask you some questions."

"Ask away." He punched the pillow behind his neck. Overhead pulleys held his right leg in traction, the massive cast covering it from groin to toe. He winced when he moved and even his grimace was an appealing sight. For the first time in my life the maternal instinct flared. I wanted to mother and protect, take a stranger into my arms and soothe away the pain. That emotion should have alerted me. You don't mix mothering with sexual attraction. Not if you have two years college under your belt, something you'd think would make you immune to psychological transgression.

"Oh, this?" he asked, noticing my stare. He lightly slapped the long white cast on his thigh. "It looks like I'll have to wear this for months. I guess I'd better get used to it."

"Who shot you?" This was not on the questionnaire, but it was of the uppermost importance to me. I already felt my anger building at whoever committed the desecration of a perfectly Adonis-like creature.

"Cop. Cop did it."

"No."

"Yep. But I guess I deserved it. I was running away!"

"Why?"

"I was scared."

I nodded my head. Of course he had been scared, poor baby, who wouldn't be scared of a cop? Everyone trembled when confronted with people who carried guns. "What had you done?"

He smiled, casting a silver net of shivers over me again. There was something menacing in his smile, though, just enough menace to make it fascinating, mesmerizing. "I didn't do anything," he said. "I swear it was all a mistake."

To anyone else, to someone older and less naive, to someone more worldly wise and cynical, his words would have condemned him from the outset. Criminals always swear innocence. It's to be expected. But I was not fully mature or wise to the ways of the world. I was a girl on the lam from parental authority, heading for the hippie revolution that had bypassed middle America, and I believed when people spoke, they spoke the truth. What profit a lie? To a stranger? A girl come to verify insurance? What profit that?

"You see I was driving with an expired license. A cop car pulled up behind me with his lights on and I panicked. He said later I was speeding, but I don't think I was. I knew, though, I'd get in trouble about the license so I did something dumb. I tried to get away."

"You shouldn't have."

"Don't I know it! It was the most moronic move in my life. I got it into my head that I'd outrun him and get home. I turned down streets and took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost."

"You could have stopped."

"Not by then. You don't know cops. You run from the bastards and you're in deep shit. Well, this wrong turn led to a dead-end. I did have to stop then. I was cut off. I got out of the car and in the glare of the headlights, I ran up a hill to a high fence. I was climbing over when he shot me." He shrugged as if to say that's life, you win a few, you lose a lot, big damn deal, it happens all the time.

My outrage boiled over. "Just for climbing on a fence? Didn't he say 'halt' first or anything?" They always said "halt" first in the movies.

Bobby, having enlisted my sympathy, shook his head.

"He just started shooting without even warning you first?" I was outraged.

Bobby nodded, eyes shyly downcast.

"Oh, you should get a lawyer and put that cop in jail. He had no right to shoot like that. He might have killed you." The thought of Bobby Tremain dying, hanging from a fence in the dark with bullet holes in his back made me sick with fury. How dare a trigger happy cop shoot down such a pretty boy just because he panicked over an expired driver's license. It was obscene. It was the establishment bulldozing down the youth of America. You couldn't do anything you believed in, you couldn't change the system, you couldn't save yourself and the future from the bloodsuckers. It was a travesty.

It was also love. Now I had an inkling of what Jerry felt for me. I lived, breathed, dreamed Bobby Tremain. Every day at the hospital I used my ward-hopping privilege to look in on him. I brought him magazines and candy bars from the hospital gift shop. I plumped his pillow and held the water glass to his fine lips. I told him how I had never been farther west than Texas and how I yearned to see the Pacific ocean. How it was like a narcotic and I was a junkie, I just had to make it out West before I died from the cold sweats and the hot tremors. I wanted to see the hippies, I wanted to be a part of everything I was missing. There was a revolution going on and I wasn't a part of it. Yet.

"How will you get there?" he asked.

"I'm saving my money. I have a hundred and twenty dollars saved so far."

"That's not a bad sum," he said. "That would buy gas."

"Oh, I'm going by bus. I want to see Salt Lake City and Reno. Besides, I don't have a car."

"I do," he said and my head went faint. Was this a proposal we travel together? If I supplied expenses would he take me in his car?

I feared to hope. Bobby was too beautiful for me. Angels do not consort with fragile, flawed earthlings.

Bobby remained in Louisville General six weeks. He confided he must go to court and face charges the day he was to be released. "They're going to hang me--not literally, but you know," he said. "That cop'll make sure of it."

"What about your parents, didn't they hire a good attorney?"

He laughed and turned away his head. "I don't have parents. Not so you'd notice. I left home when I was fifteen. I haven't seen them since so I'm on my own in this deal. They'll railroad me into prison where I'll never see daylight again."

"You can't let that happen, Bobby."

He turned back to me, eyes brimming, the sky blue of the irises thunderhead dark and troubled. "I have a car," he said. "It was impounded, but a friend of mine got it out for me. I've always wanted to see the land west of the Mississippi."

I trembled in ecstasy at the thought of having Bobby all to myself even though I was not ready to abandon Louisville and my good job yet. What would Jerry say? What would my supervisor and the personnel director say? Then there was the fact I would be abetting a felon or something along those lines. All I knew about cops and the law came from television. I did know that what Bobby proposed meant flight from justice and without me and the money I had saved, he couldn't do it. I had almost three hundred dollars now and it was plenty to make the trip.

"I don't know, Bobby..."

He caught my hand where I stood next to him and drew me down toward the bed. In front of God and the whole men's ward he kissed me to the accompaniment of catcalls and shrill whistles. I was signed, sealed, stamped, and delivered. Just exactly what Bobby wanted.

"Meet me here at six in the morning," he whispered. "A court appointed officer is coming for me at ten. I have to get out before then. We'll have to be very quiet about it."

"But your hospital bill..."

"Let the state pay it. That's what they're good for."

You don't listen to pretty boys, that's what my grandmother told me. You don't listen to silky promises from the cunning lips of an angel in disguise. Even Lucifer was pretty. The prettiest. And look what he is responsible for, she said.