Maxwell Cole tackled me after the funeral and demanded to know why I had lied to him about Jasmine Day. I told him I hadn’t. Then he wanted to know why, if I hadn’t lied, was the lady in question staying in my apartment. I told him that was none of his business.
It was several days later before I got back up to Harborview to see Peters. Mrs. Edwards and the girls had just left, and Amy Fitzgerald was sitting close to the head of Peters’s bed. She wasn’t wearing her uniform.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Better,” he said. “Lots better.”
Feeling like I was intruding on a private conversation, I walked over to the washbasin. The mirror was plastered with Peters’s entire collection of gaudy postcards. The girls had given up on me and delivered them to him in person.
“Thanks for sending the girls to California, Beau,” Peters said. “I know they had a terrific time. It’s hard for me to think of other people having fun when I’m lying flat on my back.”
“And feeling sorry for yourself,” Amy Fitzgerald added.
“That too,” Peters said.
I looked first at her and then back at Peters. “She doesn’t exactly pull any punches,” I said.
“I noticed,” Peters replied, but he didn’t sound as though he minded.
Amy glanced at her watch and stood up. “I’d better get going. It’ll be late by the time I get home.” She leaned over and kissed Peters’s cheek. “See you in the morning,” she said.
Amy paused briefly in the doorway to wave and then disappeared down the hall.
“She’s something else, don’t you think?” Peters asked.
I nodded.
“You remember the other day, when I hung up on you?” Peters continued. “When you were telling me about that nurse, the one who worked with the AIDS patient for free?”
“I remember. What about it?”
“I was afraid that that was what was going on with her. I’d been watching Amy for weeks, but I was afraid she just felt sorry for me.”
“That didn’t look like a very sorry lady to me.”
For a time, Peters was quiet. Finally he said, “Captain Powell came by to see me this afternoon.”
“Oh?” I deliberately kept my tone noncommittal. Before, Peters had been downright crabby about departmental visitors. “What did he have to say?”
“Did you know Arlo Hamilton is thinking about retiring?”
“No.”
“Larry wanted to know if I’d be interested in working in the Media Relations Department.”
I thought about the newspapers Peters devoured daily, about his photographic memory and his phenomenal ability to put names with faces. Whoever had come up with that job possibility was a real genius. I wanted to turn handstands all around the hospital bed, but I didn’t. I played my cards close to my chest for a change.
“So are you interested?” I asked distantly.
“It’s a job I could do in a chair if I had to,” he answered. “Or on crutches.”
When I left Peters’s room a few minutes later, it was all I could do to keep from dancing a jig in the hall. I was surprised to find Amy Fitzgerald standing next to the elevator.
“I thought you left,” I said.
“I was waiting for you. Did he tell you?”
“Did he tell me what?”
“About the public-information job.”
I nodded.
“Do you think he’ll take it?” she asked.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On you.”
She looked up at me, her eyes serious under long thick lashes. “No,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “It depends on him. He’s got to want it for himself.”
The elevator came then, and I rode down to the lobby with her, worrying about what she meant by that answer. My brotherly protective instincts rose straight to the surface. I didn’t want Peters hurt any more than he had already been. Maybe his first instinct was right and she was leading him on, hoping to get him back on his feet physically so she could drop him like a hot potato.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are your intentions honorable?”
She regarded me silently for a moment before she answered. “I don’t know.”
“Why?” I asked, blundering on with questions I had no business asking. “Because he’s broken? Because he’s hurt?”
She frowned. “Of course not, Detective Beaumont,” she answered archly. “I’ve never dated someone with children before. I’m not sure I’m ready for instant motherhood.”
With that she turned and walked away. I don’t think I’ll ever figure women out. Maybe I should just give up and stop trying.