Deadly Beloved(68)

“Good-bye,” Liza said breathlessly, feeling distinctly dizzy. “Go away.”

“I’m certainly going to go away before she gets here,” Shirley Bates said.

Shirley disappeared just as Leyla came up. Liza leaned across the table and pushed a chair out for Leyla to sit down in.

“I just had the most extraordinary conversation,” Liza said. “I can’t believe I really heard—”

“We’re all still a bunch of savages and we’d still be cannibals, too, except the police put a lid on it,” Leyla said equitably. “Haven’t you ever talked to Shirley before?”

“Somebody should have warned me.”

“Well, now you’re warned. Don’t worry about it too much. She won’t last long. She has an IQ of minus twelve and she’s a terrible nurse.”

“How did she get the job?”

“She’s the niece of the vice president of the board of directors.”

Liza giggled. “Affirmative action,” she said.

Leyla hooted. “Back when I got hired at this place, the only kind of affirmative action they had was the kind that said people who looked like me couldn’t work here. Did you know I got hired as a nurse’s aide?”

“You mean you came here before you did your training?”

“When I came here, I had an RN from Penn State and a master’s degree in nursing from the Women and Children’s Crisis Program at Columbia Presbyterian. Welcome to affirmative action and 1962. What about you? You can’t look that awful just because Shirley shocked the shit out of you.”

“What? Oh, no. It’s not that. I did a night detail last night and then I came back on shift. I haven’t had much sleep.”

“You shouldn’t do things like that. It’s no better for the patients than it is for you.”

Liza looked down at the table. She had a copy of that day’s Philadelphia Inquirer too, but it was still folded and unread next to her cafeteria tray. She looked at the black-and-white photograph of the wreckage of Julianne Corbett’s party and bit her lip.

“Have you ever, I don’t know how to put it, have you ever had information about something important except that the information didn’t make any sense?”

“Like what?”

“Well, you know that woman who’s supposed to have killed her husband and blown up her own car with a bomb?”

“Sure. Patricia Willis. Today they’re saying maybe she tried to blow up Congresswoman Corbett’s cocktail party with a bomb.”

“I know. The thing is, when I first heard the name—the whole name, Patricia MacLaren Willis—anyway, when I first heard the name I thought it was a coincidence, because I used to know a Patsy MacLaren. And then when I saw the picture, I realized that I did know this Patsy MacLaren. I mean, this Mrs. Willis. Except it’s kind of strange. It doesn’t really make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense how?”

“I don’t know how to put it. I look at the picture, and I definitely recognize it, but it doesn’t look the way it ought to. I shouldn’t be able to recognize it.”

“I think you need more sleep,” Leyla said solemnly.

“I know I need more sleep,” Liza admitted. “It’s just—well, what do you know about this Mr. Demarkian?”

“The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot? I know what I read in the papers. I think that if the Inquirer doesn’t let up on that joke, the man’s going to sue them.”

“Do you think he’d be, you know, patient about listening to what I had to say? In spite of the fact that it isn’t very coherent?”

“I don’t know. Do you really want to talk to him?”

“I think I do, yes. I mean, I really don’t want to talk to Julianne, I don’t know why but I don’t—”

“I forgot you knew Julianne Corbett. Vassar.”

“That’s right. Vassar. I don’t know, Leyla, maybe there’s too much rivalry there. Too much jealousy. For me. And I don’t want to go to the police. That doesn’t feel right to me at all. So I thought I’d talk to this Mr. Demarkian and explain what I had to explain and maybe he would listen to me.”

“I don’t see why not,” Leyla said. “Only you’d better be better at explaining it to him than you were at explaining it to me. I still don’t have the faintest idea of what you were talking about.”

“Maybe I don’t have the faintest idea either. It’s right there, you know what I’m saying. It’s right at the edge of my mind. I can’t seem to get ahold of it.”