Wanting Sheila Dead(41)

Just looking around this lobby made him think that he ought to be nervous. This was the front lobby, not the emergency room. Nobody was standing around bleeding on the carpets. Even so, there were people in wheelchairs, and people looking strained, and one small woman sitting in a corner with her face in her hands, crying silently and unceasingly.

“I know,” Billie said. “I hate hospitals. It’s like they’re the one place you can go where you can’t get away from the fact that we all die. Even funeral parlors aren’t that bad. Or cemeteries. In funeral parlors and cemeteries, it’s like it’s all happening to other people. It’s like it has nothing to do with you.”

“Well, it’s all happening to other people here,” Gregor said.

“Only for the moment,” Billie said.

She waved him toward the long bank of elevators, and Gregor followed. She was, he thought, right. Maybe it was a function of the fact that everybody had been in a hospital once or twice by the time they were middle aged. Children were in to get their tonsils out. Women were in to have children. Men landed in the emergency room because of accidents at work or at home. It was easy to think that a funeral parlor or a cemetery was just somewhere you would visit as a guest, and not as the center of attention. With hospitals, it wasn’t so easy.

The elevator was very wide and very deep and very tall and had doors on two sides, although only the ones on their side opened. It was spotlessly clean, too, but it wasn’t empty. Right after they got in, a woman got in whom Gregor only noticed on second glance was a nun. He liked his nuns traditional, in long habits and veils. This one was wearing a pants suit with a gold cross pinned to the lapel and a little half veil attached to the top of her head. It made her look like one of the help in an old British movie about the aristocracy.

“Right along here,” Billie said, when they reached the third floor. “She’s in the wing. It’s kind of a trek. I’ve asked Dr. Halevy to meet us there in about three minutes. She’s usually pretty prompt.”

Gregor threaded his way through what felt like empty hallways, wide corridors with deep carpeting and doors, but no people that he could see. St. Mary’s was not one of the expensive hospitals in the city. It was, in fact, the one that took in the vast majority of the uninsured, since it was subsidized by the Archdiocese. Gregor had a sudden vision of the present Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, and then another of those nuns in the pants suit.

“Here we are,” Billie said.

She opened a heavy swinging door, and behind it Gregor found the people he had been missing up to now. There was a wide curved desk that was the main anchor for the nurse’s station. Behind it stood another nun in a pants suit, except hers was a standard nursing uniform and she wasn’t wearing a veil of any kind. There were also two more women, also in uniforms, probably not nuns.

“It’s too bad about the nuns,” Billie said suddenly. “They used to be able to staff this entire hospital with Sisters of Mercy—well, almost the entire hospital. Nursing staff. Even some of the doctors, lots of the clerical people. The nuns worked for ten dollars a month and the medical bills were low or nonexistent to anybody who came through the doors and couldn’t pay for it. And then suddenly there were no more nuns.”

“I know somebody who can spend a fair amount of time talking about that,” Gregor said. “She’s an—extern sister, I think it’s called. For a Carmelite monastery out on Hardscrabble Road.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Billie said. “I’ve seen them. It’s like watching an old movie.”

The nun at the nurse’s station looked up and saw them. She came out from around the desk. “Officer Ormonds,” she said. “This must be Gregor Demarkian.”

“That’s him,” Billie said.

The nun had no sense of humor, and she wasn’t interested in introducing herself. “Dr. Halevy is in with the patient. I’ve asked her to take this meeting into a conference room. There’s one at the far end of the hall. Mrs. Mgrdchian is stable, but there’s always the problem with comatose patients that you don’t know what they’re able to hear. We like to think that they’re just dead to the world, so to speak, without actually being dead, but many of them can hear everything that goes on around them.”

The nun was pumping down the hall as she talked, and Gregor and Billie were following her. Gregor was getting a little breathless. The nun stopped.

“Here is is,” she said. “We’ve got her alone down here until we’re sure of what the situation is. We don’t want to upset other patients if there needs to be a police presence. Please don’t stay too long in the room, and please don’t discuss the particulars of the case—the police case or the medical case—where she can possibly hear you. Even if you think she can’t hear you. Is that clear?”