Deadly Beloved(36)

The pediatrics unit had a wing of its own with twenty-six rooms in it and over sixty beds. The nurses’ station was a curved counter that was always supposed to have somebody standing behind it. There was nobody there. Liza walked around the counter to the door at the back and stuck her head inside. Sharon Birch and Mia Zhiransky were sitting side by side on the office couch, watching something on television.

“Don’t you think you ought to be doing something sensible,” Liza asked them, “like listening for patients?”

“We’ve got the warning system on in here,” Mia said. “We were just discussing politics.”

“Hospital or government?” Liza asked.

“Race.” Sharon Birch was tall and thin and black. If she hadn’t had bags under her eyes big enough to pack the Rolling Stones into, she might have been beautiful. “We were talking about the news reports. How did it go with the accident?”

“Awful,” Liza said.

“Anyone dead?” Mia asked.

Liza nodded. “At least three people. There’s probably going to end up being six or more.”

“All black people?” Sharon asked.

Liza had to think. It was honestly not the kind of thing she noticed in the middle of an emergency. “Yes,” she said finally, having gone over all the patients in her head. “I think so.”

“There,” Sharon Birch said.

“I still don’t think it’s race.” Mia Zhiransky was small and blond and perfect, their own hospital china doll. “I think it’s money. It’s always more exciting when something happens to people with money.”

“Why?” Sharon asked.

Liza got a plastic coffee cup from the stack next to the coffee machine and poured herself some coffee. “What are you two talking about? What happened to somebody with money?”

Sharon waved her hand dismissively in the air. “It wasn’t somebody with real money, like a rock star or anything. It was one of those people who lives at Fox Run Hill. You know the place I mean.”

“I’d call ten thousand square feet of house money,” Mia said. “It costs a lot more money than I’m ever going to have.”

“Maybe you’ll win the lottery,” Sharon said.

Liza swallowed half the coffee in the cup at once. “What’s this all about?” she asked again. “What happened to somebody at Fox Run Hill? Mugger get in past those security guards or what?”

“This woman killed her husband,” Sharon said.

“That’s it?” Liza was surprised.

“She had some kind of fancy gun,” Mia said, “and then she drove her car into a parking garage in West Philly and blew it up.”

“She blew up her car?”

“She wasn’t inside it,” Sharon explained. “She left some kind of time bomb in it and disappeared.”

“A time bomb,” Liza repeated. “In a parking garage. Was anybody hurt?”

“There were a few people injured,” Sharon said, “but nobody was killed. That’s why I was saying what I was saying. That it’s race. If it was black people who did all that, nobody would have paid any attention.”

“It’s been all over the news since last night,” Mia explained.

“And what hasn’t been all over the news is that accident,” Sharon said. “I mean, there’ve been some reports on it, you know, here and there, but no real fuss, and all the while they’re going on and on and on about this little murder out in Fox Run Hill. Because the people involved in it are white.”

“Because the people involved in it are rich,” Mia said.

“Maybe it’s both,” Liza told them, finishing the rest of her coffee and pouring some more. “What happened to the wife who committed the murder?”

“No one knows,” Mia said solemnly.

“The problem with these people in the media,” Sharon said, “is they think all black people are animals with nothing on their minds but sex and violence. So a few black people get killed, so who cares? So some black guy takes out a pistol and starts shooting up the landscape, what can you expect? It’s race, pure and simple.”

“I’m not saying it’s not race a lot of the time,” Mia said. “I’m just saying that this time the deciding factor was money. That’s all.”

“Look at O. J. Simpson,” Sharon said. “What was the point of all that fuss except to make it clear to every single American of the white persuasion that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what a black person accomplishes in his life, he’s still just a hair trigger away from being a thug?”