Bleeding Hearts(36)

2


Fred Scherrer was in his second hour of listening to the woman with the black eye when the phone call came. He would have put the caller off with an excuse if it had been anyone on earth except who it was. The woman with the black eye had no name she could remember. She had been sitting in Fred’s Park Avenue living room since four o’clock that morning, when she had been released into Fred’s custody by St. Dominic Hospital. She was five foot three, one hundred pounds, and reasonably young. Fred guessed she was in her early thirties. Her hair was dyed ash blond. She wore a pair of clean blue jeans that were a little too long for her and a flannel shirt that was much too big for her in the shoulders. The clothes belonged to a paralegal in Fred’s firm named Mary Ann. This woman had no clothes of her own because they had all been torn off. When she was found, she was lying curled up on a bench in Bryant Park, wearing nothing but a bra. According to the hospital, she had been subjected to multiple rapes. According to the hospital, she was suffering from shock. According to the hospital, there was nothing anybody could do for her except give her food and wait. They had been perfectly happy to release her into Fred Scherrer’s custody. If they had still been a Catholic hospital, they wouldn’t have been allowed to. The rules set down by the archdiocesan office of Catholic Charities would have forbidden it. But St. Dominic had not been a Catholic hospital for some five years now. It had been taken over by the city, and by the city’s bureaucrats. This woman was unidentified, uninsured, and black. She was not their problem.

She was, Fred thought, one of the most gracious women he had ever seen. She moved with such precise politeness, she might have been an instructor in a school of etiquette. The nurses had taken one look at the color of her skin and said: welfare. Fred didn’t think so. She’d been found in the wrong part of town. Bryant Park did not normally cater to a welfare population. Manners like these had to be learned. Sitting with your hands folded and unmoving in your lap and your legs pressed together at the ankles was not a skill routinely taught at P.S. 37. Maybe Mary Ann had noticed the discrepancies too. Mary Ann was how the woman with the black eye had come to be sitting in Fred Scherrer’s living room. Mary Ann had been waiting for a friend of hers in the emergency room of St. Dominic Hospital when the woman with the black eye had been brought in. Mary Ann’s friend had cracked her wrist trying to do a handstand in the Crystal Channel Saloon.

Sid came into the living room from the kitchen and mouthed “Candida DeWitt” as obviously as he could into the air behind the woman with the black eye’s head. Fred looked at Mary Ann, nodded slightly, and got up. Mary Ann was sitting on the floor at the other woman’s feet. She was listening intently as the woman with the black eye went on and on in a pleasant uninflected voice about how affecting the Monet exhibit had been at the Guggenheim, or maybe it wasn’t the Guggenheim, she got these museums all mixed up sometimes, she could never remember what they were called.

Fred reminded himself that it was time for him to give Mary Ann another lecture about how she ought to go to law school. She would make a very decent lawyer and a very committed one. Then he followed Sid out to the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

“She hasn’t budged. She doesn’t seem sleepy either. Candida DeWitt is on the phone?”

“That’s right. I know you said not to bother you, but I thought—”

“No, that’s all right. Did you get in touch with anybody else? Who’d be the D.A. on this if they ever caught the perpetrators?”

“Raymond Barsi. I talked to him half an hour ago. He’s lighting a fire under the police department.”

“I’ll light a fire under the police department if he doesn’t,” Fred said. “You talk to our people at the Daily News?”

“Yeah. At the Post too. I didn’t have any luck at the Times.”

“We’ll get the Times,” Fred said. “Don’t worry. I’ll turn this into the black version of the Central Park jogger case. This is the black version of the Central Park jogger case. They just don’t know it yet. Could you believe that hospital?”

“Yes,” Sid said.

Actually, Fred could too. He could believe a lot of things. Even Chuckie Bickerson hadn’t made him feel like he’d gotten lost in one of Franz Kafka’s nightmares, and Chuckie Bickerson made practically everybody feel like that. Fred stretched and scratched his head. “All right. Let me talk to Candida. Have you found a rental nurse yet?”

“Not rental nurse, for God’s sake, Fred. Private duty nurse. Yes. She’ll be here at ten.”