When he walked out of there he left her sprawled on her living-room floor with her blood soaking into the white rug. It's possible he thought she was already dead. She would have been in shock, with her breathing imperceptibly shallow and all her vital signs muted. She was still breathing, though, and her heart was still beating, but she would have died there on the floor if it hadn't been for the doorman.
He was a Brazilian, tall and heavyset, with a headful of glossy black hair and a belly that strained the buttons of his uniform. His name was Emilio Lopes. Something began bothering Lopes an hour or so after he showed Motley to the elevator. Finally he picked up the intercom and called upstairs to make sure everything was all right.
He rang a few times and no one picked up. The ringing of the intercom may have prompted Motley to hurry his work and get out of there. When he did leave, striding hurriedly through the lobby around seven o'clock, something in his manner set off Lopes's internal alarm. He rang through on the intercom again, and of course there was no answer. Then he remembered the sketch he'd been shown, the portrait of the one man who most emphatically was not to be given access to Miss Mardell's apartment, and it struck him that the police uniform might have covered that very man. The more he thought about it, the surer he was.
He abandoned his post and went upstairs. He rang the bell and pounded on the door. He tried the door, and it was locked; Motley had pulled it shut. The police locks were unengaged, as was the deadbolt, but the spring lock was enough to secure the door and it engaged automatically when you closed the door.
He turned away, intending to go back downstairs and root around for a passkey. Failing to find one, perhaps he would phone the local precinct. But then something made him turn back again and do what not one doorman in twenty would have done.
He drew back his foot and kicked the door. He kicked a second time, hard, and he was a big man and his legs were strong from carrying his bulk around all day long. They'd always been strong; when he was younger and lighter his legs had been strong from soccer.
The spring lock gave and the door flew open. He saw her on the rug and ran across the room to kneel at her side. Then he got up and crossed himself and picked up the phone and called 911. He knew it was too late but he did it anyway.
And that's what must have happened while I was drinking coffee at the Flame and walking uptown to Mother Goose, while I sat there listening to quiet jazz, while I paid out money to Brian and to Danny Boy. While I traded stories with Mick Ballou, and scared the rats away from their garbage feast, and breakfasted on scrapple in view of the Hudson. While I sat in a car on the other side of that river and watched the sun come up over the city.
I may have some of the details wrong, and I'm sure there are things that happened that I don't know about, and never will. But I think that's pretty close to the way it went down. In any case, I'm sure of one thing. It happened just the way it was supposed to happen. Andy Echevarria might argue the point, and so might Elaine, but just check with Marcus Aurelius. He'll explain the whole thing to you.
New York Hospital is at York and Sixty-eighth. My cab dropped me at the emergency-room entrance and the woman behind the desk determined that Elaine Mardell had come down from surgery and was in the intensive-care unit. She pointed to a floor plan of the building and showed me how to get to the ICU.
A nurse there told me they only allowed immediate family in the ICU. I said the patient didn't have any family, that I was probably as close to family as she had. She asked the nature of our relationship, and I said we were friends. She asked if we were intimate friends. Yes, I said. Intimate friends. She wrote my name on a card, and made a notation.
She showed me to a waiting room. There were several other people there, smoking, reading magazines, waiting for their loved ones to die. I leafed through a copy of Sports Illustrated, but none of the words registered. Every once in a while I turned the page out of force of habit.
After a while a doctor came into the waiting room and looked around and asked for me by name. I stood up and he motioned me into the hallway. He had a very young face and a head of hair already thickly shot with gray.
He said, "This is a rough one. I don't know what to tell you."
"Is she going to live?"
"She was in surgery for almost four hours. I forget how many units of blood we gave her. She'd lost a lot of blood by the time we got her and there was a lot of internal bleeding. She's still bleeding now and still receiving transfusions." He had his hands clasped in front of his lab coat, and he was wringing them together. I don't think he was aware that he was doing it.
He said, "We had to remove her spleen. You can live without a spleen, there are thousands of people who manage. But she sustained considerable trauma to her entire system. Her renal function's off, her liver's damaged-"
He went on, cataloguing her injuries. I only caught about half of what he said and only understood a fraction of that. "She's intubated," he said, "and we've got her on a respirator. Her lungs failed. That happens sometimes, it's what they call Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome. You see it sometimes in accident victims. Traffic accidents, I mean. The lungs quit."
There was more, too technical for me to understand. I asked how bad it was.
"Well, it's bad," he said, and he told me all the things that could go wrong.
I asked if I could see her.
"For a few minutes," he said. "She's completely sedated, and as I said we've got her hooked up to a respirator. It's doing the breathing for her." He led me toward a door at the far side of the ICU. "It may be a shock for you to see her like this," he said.
There were machines everywhere, and tubes strung all over the place. Dials flashed numbers, machines beeped and whirred, needles jumped. In the midst of it all she lay still as death, her skin waxy, her color awful.
I asked my first question again. "Is she going to live?"
He didn't answer, and when I looked up he was gone and I was alone with her. I wanted to reach out and touch her hand but I didn't know if that was allowed. I went on standing there, a nurse came into the room and began doing something to one of the machines. She told me I could stay for a few more minutes. "You can talk to her," she said.
"Can she hear me?"
"I think there's a part of them that hears everything, even when they're deep in coma."
She went out, and I stayed for five or ten minutes. I talked some. I don't remember what I said.
The same nurse came in a second time to tell me she'd have to ask me to leave. I could wait in the waiting room and they would call me if there was any change in the patient's condition.
I asked what kind of change she expected.
She didn't answer either, not exactly. "There are just so many things that can go wrong," she said. "In a case like this. He hurt her so badly in so many ways. I'm telling you, this city we live in-"
It wasn't the city. The city didn't do it to her. It was one man, and he could have turned up anywhere.
Joe Durkin was in the waiting room. He got to his feet when I walked in. He hadn't shaved that morning, and he looked as though he'd slept in his clothes.
He asked how she was.