“I know you,” she said, propped up in bed, her body bulky under the blankets (due, the nurse explained, to a hip cast), her head bandaged. “I’m sure I do. But I can’t quite remember who you are.”
Lila said, “It’s Frank, Mother. Your Frank.”
“My Frank?” Her voice was weak, uncertain. “But we had a funeral, didn’t we? Though he does keep singing ‘Red Sails . . “
“Your son,” Lila said impatiently.
Frank chuckled a little. “It confuses everyone when you name a child after his father.”
His explanation had no effect whatsoever. His mother continued to blink puzzled eyes at him.
Lila sighed, pulled up a chair, and plumped herself down.
His mother looked at her. “Lila? What are you doing here? I thought you were in Los Angeles.”
Frank said, We’re all in Los Angeles, Mom. You moved from Agoura when Dad died. You live with Lila and me now. You’ll be getting better and coming home soon.”
“You’re married to Lila? My memory . . She closed her eyes and began to weep. “The car hit me. It’s terrible being old. So humiliating . . . a sandwich . . . not even a sandwich . . .”
Lila began to say something. Frank said, “That’s all right, Mom. Things will be different when you come home. You’ll see.”
She opened her eyes; her red, weak, streaming eyes. “I know you. I’m sure I know you.”
The nurse must have been right outside, because she stepped in and said they’d better leave. “Give her at last one full day before your next visit. She’ll remember much more then.”
When they reached the front desk, Frank said to the nurse, “Oh, forgot my sunglasses,” and turned back. He’d left them, deliberately, on the bedside table.
The nurse said, “I’ll have to go with you.”
Lila said she’d wait in the hall.
In his mother’s room, he got the glasses; then bent over the old lady and kissed her cheek, which he somehow hadn’t been able to do a moment ago with all the confusion, and with Lila present. “Love you, Mommy,” he whispered, as he had as a child.
“Frankie,” she said, and touched his face. “Of course, my little Frankie.”
He turned quickly away so as not to cry.
The nurse smiled. “There. Clearing up by the minute.”
He nodded and said, “I heard that the Negro who was shot last night is here.”
They were walking into the U-shaped room that was the nerve-center of this Intensive Care Unit. The open end of the U wasn’t open at all—a wall with a counter and a door, facing the hall where relatives waited to be admitted. Rooms opened off each of the three sides of the U; his mother’s was the second of four on the first side; the glass panels looked out on a nurses’ station dead center of the room.
“Yes,” the nurse said. “The woman with him died.” She pointed at the central section of the U, at the first door of three. “But he regained consciousness a short while ago.”
“Ah,” Frank said, and followed her, face averted from that one glass panel.
As he was opening the door to join Lila in the hall, he heard a man at the counter identify himself as a police lieutenant and ask to see Melvin Crane.
Frank thanked the nurse. She said, “Not at all,” and turned to listen as the nurse at the desk answered the officer:
“He can’t speak, Lieutenant. We haven’t allowed newspersons in . . .” She pointed down the hall to where a cluster of people, one wearing camera and harness, was just entering an elevator, “and we can’t allow you . . .”
Lila was waving her hand. “Frank!” she whispered.
He stepped through the door.
“I have to go grocery shopping,” she said, “and you have to get to work!”
He said, “Yes,” and they went to the elevators.
He parked his Chevy on the street in front of the house and went inside, ostensibly to use the bathroom. And stayed there until he heard her back her Plymouth down the driveway. Then he came out, in time to let her see him entering his car.
As soon as she turned the corner, he got out, carrying his briefcase, and hurried to the back yard.
Where with repeated glances around to make sure no one could see him, he put the plastic bag into the case and started for his car. He could go to the shore, to a pier, and dump it in the water. Or to one of the more remote canyons, like Latigo.
He turned into the house. He sat at the kitchen table and took the gun out of the bag. He held it, stroked it, marveled at the precision of it, the beauty of it. He sniffed it—smelled the oil, the gunpowder, the marvelous odor of a killing machine. He remembered what it could do.
And knew that risk or no, he couldn’t throw it away.
Not until it was empty.
Because without it, he was empty . . . of purpose, of pleasure, of power.
He put it in his case and carried it out to his car. He drove down the street.
He could find another hiding place for it, far from his home, his business. So that the connection would be severed as completely as if he’d tossed it into the sea. And he would wait before using it again. Wait and see what developed with that black animal.
He reached Sunset and stopped for a traffic light.
A young woman, nineteen or twenty, in tight blue jeans and tee shirt, strolled lazily across in front of him. At the corner behind her, two young men were laughing and making loud comments. Frank heard “. . . enough for both of us, man!”
The girl turned her head at that. But instead of being outraged, she was smiling.
The light changed. Frank began to move forward. The two youths ran out in front of him, following the girl. Frank slammed his brakes, and his horn. One boy stopped in front of the car and jerked his finger up and down obscenely, saying, “You got objections, step out here, turkey.”
Frank didn’t answer, but heard his breath rasping.
“Hal, c’mon!” the other youth called.
The one in front of the car sneered, and ran to join his friend, who was standing with the girl. Then all three strolled away together.
Frank was trembling and sweating. He had his hand on his briefcase, at the clasp.
A horn sounded behind him. He realized he was blocking traffic, and turned east on Sunset.
He put his hand back on the briefcase, and grew calmer. It was better than Valium. Even if he couldn’t use it, he had to keep it close by him. And he might have to use it. . . on the Negro.
Larry Admer finally got in to see the victim, but it was a real hassle. He’d kept his temper, and his smile, but inside he was seething. It was getting worse and worse, the way people looked at police in this town. Especially blacks and Hispanics. Even the Orientals were beginning to lose respect.
Just another sign of the disintegration of American society. Let them lose sufficient respect, and restraint, and the wise-guy liberal middle class, blacks and Hispanics included, would find out what it meant to have the shit of the world come down on them. Then they’d be yelling for the National Guard.
He said, “Thank you,” oh-so-sweetly to the nurse who’d given him such a tough time at the counter, and followed another nurse, Chicano and with a great ass, but with hard eyes for him, to the room.
“We