Taking the Fifth(15)
“What about Richard Morris’s mother?”
Riley shrugged. “She came through Seattle a couple of times. I met her. She’s a nice enough lady, I guess. A little dingy at times, but with a son like that, who wouldn’t be?”
“Tell me about Richard Morris,” I said quietly.
“Strictly delusions of grandeur. When I first met him, he was hot to be a cop, an undercover cop. A few weeks later, he dropped that idea completely. It was just as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was running with the wrong crowd.”
“Druggies?”
Riley nodded. “He worked some as a stagehand, but mostly he partied. He dragged home all kinds of undesirable characters at all hours of the day and night.”
“Even after Jonathan got so sick?”
Riley nodded grimly. “You bet.”
“Drinking? Drugs?”
“Both. Come to think of it, I never actually saw him doing drugs, but there were drugs around.”
“And he had money?”
“Always.”
“Did he bring anyone home with him last night?”
“There was no one else at the house when I left.”
“And you left at eleven?”
“That’s right.”
“Were there women in the crowd he ran with?”
“A few,” Riley answered.
“Any fancy dressers?” I asked, thinking about the bloodstained blue high-heeled shoe.
“Not that I remember.”
“What about last night? Was there anything unusual in the way Morris behaved last night?”
“I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, except maybe…”
“Except what?”
“He seemed happy.”
“Happy?”
“More like smug. Like he’d pulled off a good one on somebody.”
“But you don’t know what.”
“No.”
“And what time did you go back there this morning?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“That makes for a pretty long day, from then until eleven at night,” I observed. “Were you Jonathan Thomas’s only nurse?”
“Yes.”
“Every day for five months?”
Tom Riley picked up his glass and drained it. “Every day,” he repeated. “Every single goddamned day.”
“That many hours?”
“I didn’t turn them all in. I reported the eight I was supposed to, the five days I was supposed to. The rest was on my own time.”
“For free?”
He gave me a sardonic grin. “I didn’t have anything else to do. Besides, it kept me off the streets.”
A short silence settled between us.
“Well,” he said at last. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I did it? Why I worked all those hours without pay?”
“All right. Why did you?”
He poured one more drink. “Because I have it too,” he replied quietly.
For a moment or two I didn’t catch on. Finally, I got the message. “AIDS? You mean you have AIDS?”
“Not the disease, at least not yet. I only test positive for the antibodies so far, but I figure it’s a death sentence just the same. I’ve known for a long time. For years. I found out during that initial panic back in ’82 and ’83 when doctors and nurses were afraid to work with AIDS patients in the hospitals. Remember that?”
It wasn’t all that long ago, I thought, recalling my conversation with Doc Baker in the medical examiner’s office that very morning. I said, “Yes, I remember.”
“It’s not so bad now. People are learning that if you take proper precautions, the disease isn’t all that contagious. But it changed my life, you know. I mean I couldn’t hang around in bars anymore, I couldn’t make that scene and not give a shit about what I might be doing to other people. So I moved here and hid out in work. And I asked to work with AIDS patients. Nothing but. I’ve worked with six of them so far.”
He paused and observed me steadily over the rim of his glass. “They’re all dead,” he added softly. “One hundred percent.”
Once more silence filled the room. The cat wandered in from the bedroom and jumped unbidden into Tom Riley’s lap. It circled a time or two before settling comfortably into a ball, purring so noisily I could hear it from where I sat.
Tom Riley glanced from the cat to me. “Any more questions?”
“None,” I said, getting up. “I can find my way out.”
I did too. I hurried out the door and back to my car.
As I barreled through the milling summertime traffic on Alki Avenue, I thought long and hard about Tom Riley.
From some corner of my random access memory came the words Miss Arnold had drilled into our heads during Senior English at Ballard High School, the words of Rudyard Kipling’s immortal poem. They seemed to apply to Tom Riley.