Pressure Drop (14 page)

“Then find out where they take them and go search every goddamn one.”

“And wear thick gloves. There's all kinds of medical shit in those fucking things.”

“Jesus Christ, what a day.”

“Take me to the basement,” Nina said, trying to rise. Her legs failed her. “I want my baby.” The drug prevailed and her eyes closed.

NINA

14

Detective Delgado of the NYPD was tired. She wore a lot of makeup and her hair had been freshly frosted and permed, but nothing could hide the red veins in her eyes or the blue bruises under' them. She pulled a chair up to Nina's bed and said: “How are you doing?”

“I don't know,” Nina replied. “Fine. Physically.” Nina tried to sit up, couldn't; she tried again and did. “Are you handling the search?”

“The investigation. The search, at least the search of the hospital, is over. We've been through it from top to bottom.”

“And?”

Detective Delgado shook her head.

“What about …?” Nina couldn't get the word out.

“What about what?”

“The dumpsters.”

“They've all been checked, including the ones removed by Sanitation.
Nada
.” For a moment, Nina thought that Detective Delgado was suppressing a yawn. The detective covered her face with her hands and rubbed hard.

“What about the basement?” Nina asked.

“Yes. The basement.” Detective Delgado leaned back in the chair and stretched her legs. Nina smelled her smell: a strong orange blossom cologne mixed with cigarette smoke. “Apparently you referred to the basement several times, Ms. Kitchener. Any reason for that?”

“Not that I can think of.”

The detective nodded. “Are you aware that there are five basement levels in this building, six if you include the parking garage?”

“No.”

Detective Delgado nodded again. Nina had the feeling that she had just been bested in some contest, but what kind of contest or why she didn't know.

“I'm not clear about what's happening,” Nina said. She could feel the power of some drug waning inside her; its departure allowed patches of unease to blossom in her mind. They coalesced rapidly into dread—everything hit her again, like the back side of a hurricane after the eye has passed. “About what you're doing,” Nina added.

“What we're doing,” said Detective Delgado, “is treating this as a kidnapping.” The uttering of the word made Nina's blood pound. She felt pain between her legs. Detective Delgado reached into her pocket and took out a notebook and a pack of cigarettes. “Can I smoke in here?”

“I don't think so.”

Detective Delgado sighed and put the cigarettes away. She opened her notebook, moistened her finger with her tongue, a tongue that looked yellow and dry, and turned the pages. “Correct me if I go wrong,” she said. The detective's tone flattened to those of a reader making no attempt to render the material interesting. “At four thirty-five
P.M.
yesterday, you were informed you had a phone call at the nurse's station. You gave your baby to a nurse. The nurse delivered the baby to Verna Rountree, who was in charge of the nursery. You then went to the nurse's station, received a message and proceeded to the fifth-floor pay phone to make your call. Right so far?”

“Yes.”

Detective Delgado moistened her finger again and flipped a page. “At about four-forty, a hospital volunteer entered the nursery and told Verna Rountree that her husband was in the cafeteria and urgently wanted to speak to her. Verna Rountree is separated from her husband. He left her a few months ago to live with another woman. This, says Verna Rountree”—the detective turned the page—“broke my heart. Quote unquote. Verna was desperate, quote unquote, to go see him, but she couldn't leave her post and was afraid to ask the head nurse for a replacement because she knew the head nurse disapproved of personal visits during the shift and she thought, rightly, it turns out, that the head nurse didn't like her anyway.”

“So the volunteer offered to stay in the nursery till she got back.”

Detective Delgado glanced up sharply. “That's right.” Her reddened eyes focused on Nina for a moment; she wrote a few words on a fresh page of the notebook. “Taking the stairs so she wouldn't have to go past the nurses' station,” the detective continued, “Verna went as fast as she could to the cafeteria, failed to find her husband and hurried back to the fourth floor. When she reached the nursery, she found that the volunteer was gone and that the four infants in her charge were all sleeping quietly. She says. But—she didn't bother to check each one up close. What she did was amble to the middle of the nursery and look around from there. They were all wrapped up in their blankets, three pink and one blue. Then she returned to her chair at the back, where she found a Hershey Bar, which she assumed the volunteer had left for her. She checked the time—it was four-fifty—realized she'd been gone ten minutes at the most, and that no one had noticed. She ate the Hershey Bar and threw the wrapper in the wastebasket. It's been recovered and is now being checked for fingerprints.

“A few minutes later, just after she had finished with the candy bar, you returned for your baby. At that point Verna Rountree went to his bassinet and discovered what she discovered.”

Nina sat up a little higher. She was beginning to feel stronger. Her mind filled with questions. For no reason that she could explain, the first one that came out was: “What's happened to Verna Rountree?”

“Suspended without pay,” said Detective Delgado. “Pending investigation. Of course, if her story doesn't hold up, it'll be much worse than that.”

“Why wouldn't her story hold up?”

“For one thing, no one else on the ward saw a volunteer during the relevant time period. No volunteer was scheduled to be on the ward at that time, and all the volunteers who were in the hospital have been questioned and been able to show they were elsewhere. In addition, Verna's description of the volunteer is very sketchy.”

“I saw her,” Nina said.

“You saw who?”

“The volunteer.”

Detective Delgado leaned forward in her chair. She still had the red veins in her eyes and the puffiness under them, but she didn't look as tired. “Where? When?”

“In the hall, past the nursery on my way to the stairs. Just after I—just after I gave the—my—baby to the nurse.”

“You took the stairs?”

“Yes.”

“Why not the elevator?”

The reason was because she had wanted to pass by the nursery to see the baby, although, by that point, according to Detective Delgado's calculations, they had only been separated for about two minutes. So Nina toyed with saying, “Because I felt like walking,” or “I don't like elevators,” or “I don't know.” She said: “Because I wanted to see the baby on the way by.”

Detective Delgado wrote in her notebook.

“Do you have any children, Detective Delgado?” The question just popped out.

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“I don't have children,” Detective Delgado said. She gazed down at her notebook, but wrote nothing and didn't appear to be reading either. “I have a nephew I'm close to,” she said. Fatigue struck her again; Nina could see it whiten her face. Detective Delgado pinched the bridge of her nose, hard, and asked: “Did you get a good look at the volunteer?”

“I got a look at her. I wouldn't say a good look.”

“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

“I might.”

Detective Delgado got on the phone. In a few minutes, a uniformed policeman entered the room and handed her a manila envelope. “Sergeant Shapiro wants you to call him,” the policeman said. “And Ezekial made bail last night.”

“Christ Almighty,” Detective Delgado said. She handed Nina the envelope.

Inside were laminated ID photographs of every volunteer associated with the hospital. Nina examined them all.

“No,” she said.

“Any of them close?” asked Detective Delgado.

“No.”

Detective Delgado sighed. “Describe the woman you saw.”

Nina closed her eyes. She saw a blurred image, a face without eyes, nose, mouth. “She was between fifty and sixty, I guess. Wispy hair.”

“How do you mean, ‘wispy'?”

“Thin. Not neatly combed or brushed.”

“What color was the hair?”

“Grayish.” The vague image she had was fading entirely. Nina opened her eyes. “I remember thinking she had spent a lot of time in the sun.”

“She had a dark tan?”

“Not really.”

“She was a white woman, right?”

“Yes.”

“But not tanned?”

“No.”

“So why did you think she had spent a lot of time in the sun?”

“Her skin, I guess. It was all wrinkled and leathery. Like a farm woman in the Depression, or something.”

“Did you see her hands?”

“Not that I recall.”

Detective Delgado wrote in her notebook. She filled about a page and a half. “Anything else you can remember?”

“She had a kind of accent.”

“You spoke to her?”

“She spoke to me.”

“What did she say?”

“I don't remember the exact words. She asked if I wanted a chocolate bar, I think. She called me ‘dear.'”

“‘Dear.'”

“Yes.”

“Think hard. Had you ever seen this woman before?”

“No.”

“Did she seem to recognize you?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“What kind of accent did she have?”

“Sort of English.”

“Sort of?”

“It's hard to explain.”

“Like Princess Di?”

“Nothing like that.”

“The Beatles?”

“No. It was more old-fashioned. Old-fashioned and … genteel.”

“Genteel.”

“Yes.”

“Double-ee-el?”

“Yes.”

“So you do mean upper-class.”

“No. More like Blanche Du Bois. Only English.”

“Okay,” said Detective Delgado, her voice suddenly more lively, as though things were starting to make sense. “Is there anyone in your life who might consider you an enemy?”

Nina thought. She had business competitors, but not many, and had been involved in some difficult negotiations where harsh words had been exchanged, but afterwards everyone made a point of saying it was nothing personal. So she answered, “No.”

“You're not estranged from your husband?”

“There is no husband.”

“You're divorced?”

“I've never been married.”

“What is your current relationship with the father of the child?”

“There is no father,” Nina said. Detective Delgado's eyes narrowed, and Nina saw the toughness, even meanness, that was in her. “I used artificial insemination,” Nina explained, “and the donor was anonymous.”

Detective Delgado relaxed. “So this isn't one of those custody affairs.”

“It couldn't be,” Nina said. “But what is it?”

Detective Delgado made a few more notes in her book, then sat back, crossing her legs, heavy legs that stretched the seams of her trousers. “It's too early to tell. But my hunch is—and I've been involved in a number of these now—that we're dealing with an unstable, very screwed-up woman who gets it into her head that she wants a baby and just walks into a hospital and takes one. There was a case at Bellevue just last month.”

“And what happened?”

“There was an anonymous phone call a couple days later, probably from a neighbor of the woman, and we went in and got the baby. He was fine. Sometimes it's a psychotic episode that passes and the woman strolls back into the hospital, leaves the baby in the lobby and strolls out. We even had a case where a baby was delivered right to the nursery.”

“Do you always get them back?”

Detective Delgado yawned; this time she couldn't stifle it. “There's no ‘always' in my line of work.”

Nina pushed back the covers; she couldn't think straight, lying there like an invalid. She sat on the edge of the bed, put her feet on the floor, took a deep breath and stood up.

“What are you doing?” asked the detective.

Nina was too busy fighting off dizziness to answer. She walked to the window and opened the curtains. Hazy daylight glared through the dirty window. “What floor am I on?”

“Twelfth. General surgery.”

“What time is it?”

“Nine-oh-five.”

“Tuesday?”

“Yeah.”

Her baby was two days old. Nina gazed down at brightly colored dashes far below, going nowhere in heavy traffic. “Do these women you're talking about usually do a lot of planning?”

“Planning?”

“Like getting hold of a volunteer badge and a cart of magazines and candy. And finding out about Verna Rountree and her husband.”

Nina turned from the window in time to see Detective Delgado shrug. “That's not much planning, really. She could have grabbed someone's badge in the volunteer supply room on the ground floor and dropped it off on the way out—that's where the cart probably came from too. As for Verna, our volunteer probably didn't know she was having trouble with her husband, but Verna wears a wedding ring, so—” Detective Delgado shrugged again. “She was improvising, role-playing. It fits—like the way she offered you chocolate. That's typical psycho behavior. She played volunteer for a while, now she's going to play mom.”

Nina turned and looked down at Detective Delgado, stretched out in the chair. “But why my baby? Why did—” She cut herself off, afraid of the tears she felt building inside her. She didn't want to cry in front of Detective Delgado.

Detective Delgado rose to her feet. She was taller than Nina, and much broader. A gun butt stuck out past the lapel of her suit jacket. “That's just bad luck,” she said. “And wasn't he the only boy in the nursery?” Nina nodded. “Well, there you go,” said Detective Delgado. “We're checking out all the women with a history of this sort of thing. We'll keep you informed.” The detective turned to go.