Taking the Fifth(17)

I sat down and took a deep breath. Sitting there I’m always tempted to wave at the people on the Space Needle observation deck who, no doubt, peer at me through the pay-to-peek telescopes and the huge panes of floor-to-ceiling glass that form the northern wall of my apartment.

Settling gratefully into the old chair’s comfortable contours, I let my eyes go shut. I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I knew, the phone at my elbow was jangling me awake. When I reached to pick it up, I noticed that the answering machine underneath it was blinking vigorously, telling me I had messages.

“Hello,” I mumbled.

“Hello,” a woman answered. “Detective Beaumont?”

“Yes.”

“This is Amy again. Amy Fitzgerald. Did you get my message?”

I glanced guiltily at the blinking light. I hadn’t liked the machine at the time my attorney, Ralph Ames, gave it to me. Months later, I still wasn’t very good about checking it as soon as I came in.

“No,” I mumbled. “I just got home. I haven’t taken the messages off the machine.” The blinking light told me there were three of them. Not only had I not gotten Amy Fitzgerald’s message, I didn’t have the vaguest idea who she could be. It was a name I recognized but couldn’t place.

“It’s about Ron Peters,” she added.

That joggled my memory. Amy Fitzgerald was someone from the hospital, someone I had met. “What about him? There’s nothing wrong, is there?” I demanded.

“No, but he wants to see you. Right away.”

“Do you know what about?”

“Something about Jasmine. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “He wants to talk to me about a flower?”

“I don’t know, Detective Beaumont. He didn’t say, but he begged me to call you. If you could just come over…”

“Sure,” I told her. “I have to shower first, but I can be there in half an hour.”

“Thanks so much, Detective Beaumont. I’ll tell him you’re on your way.”

I hung up the phone and pushed the play-back button on my answering machine. One message was from Peters’s head nurse, one was from a hospital volunteer, and the third was from Amy Fitzgerald, all of them calling with increasingly urgent messages that Peters wanted to see me right away.

Punching the reset button on the machine, I hauled my aching bones out of the chair. I needed sleep. I was dying to sleep. It was easy for Peters to order me over there on the double. He could sleep any goddamned time he wanted to.

No sooner had the thought washed through my head than I was beating myself up for it. He could sleep, all right, but he couldn’t do anything else. He couldn’t move his arms enough to hold a telephone or feed himself. He was totally powerless, totally dependent on other people for his every need. The least I could do was go to the hospital when he called.

And I’d better not complain about it either.

So I showered and dressed and dragged my weary butt back into the elevator. When I got out my car keys, I realized I had neglected to replace Peters’s postcards from Heather and Tracie in my pocket. I didn’t go upstairs to get them.

It was two o’clock straight up and down when I pulled into the parking lot down the street from Harborview Hospital. And it was five minutes after that when I walked into Peters’s room on the fourth floor.

“What the hell took you so long?” he grumbled when he saw me.

The physical therapist was standing beside his bed, leaning against the wall with one hand casually in the pocket of her long, white jacket and her medium-length light brown hair swinging freely around a slender face. Amy Fitzgerald. That’s who she was.

“Come on, Ron. I told you he said he hadn’t showered. It took him less time to get here than he said it would.”

She came over and took my hand, shaking it in greeting as she smiled up at me. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s a bit cantankerous at the moment. We’re all used to it around here.”

Glancing back in Peters’s direction, she gave him a small wave. “I’ll be back later,” she said and walked out of the room.

I turned to Peters. He looked pained. “I guess I’m pretty much of an asshole,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “Everybody is on occasion. What do you want?”

“They’re only here for two nights. I thought you’d want to follow up on it right away.”

“Who’s here? Follow up on what?” I asked. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“On Jasmine,” he replied.

“What’s that?”