Chapter 15

The next day and a half went by more or less uneventfully, at least so far as my life went. I continued to telecommute from the hotel, spending most of the daylight hours working in my room. The first day I went to lunch in the hotel's secondary restaurant—the better one only opened in the evenings—to let housekeeping do its thing; the second I decided to hell with it and just told them to come in and work around me as I sat at the desk.

I was actually able to get some fairly productive hours in without the usual interruptions and distractions of the office. Susan stayed with me, but left me alone to work; it was only when I took breaks that we'd talk. I kept track of her condition at the hospital by phone—it was unchanged, they said—and stayed physically away as Brodine had asked. And apparently I'd escaped Walter Quiller's notice for the moment; at least I never got a sniff of him.

Pretty obviously, though, this wasn't a situation that could go on indefinitely. To start with, the hotel bill was growing daily and would ultimately eat away my fairly substantial but still limited savings. In addition, my chicken pox story had been weak to start with and wouldn't cover me beyond this week, which was drawing to an end. By the next Monday, now just four days away, I'd have to get myself back into the office, which would expose me.

Susan and I were discussing this problem in the early evening of the second day with the same futility that our previous talks had produced when all hell suddenly broke loose. Well, not quite, but close enough. It came in the form of the local TV news, which I'd had on in the background. I hadn't been paying it much attention, but I jerked my head quickly around as soon as the name was mentioned.

"Channel Eight has learned that Ariel Shaughnessy has been hospitalized locally," the anchor was saying. "Ms. Shaughnessy, you may remember, had some brief notoriety when she was arrested last summer with well-known Senator Robert M. Golden in a hotel in Washington, D.C., while they were both, well, rather lightly dressed."

Susan giggled at that one. "They can't say 'bare-assed' on family TV, I guess," she said. I shushed her; the TV guy was going on.

"It seems that Ms. Shaughnessy has been living here under the name of Susan Malone, and three days ago was involved in a bad automobile accident. She continues to cling to life at Mother of Mercy Hospital, but hospital sources tell us she's not expected to pull through."

He kept talking, but that last bit sent me bolting for the phone. Before I could get there, though, Susan was telling me "Stop, Larry, stop!" Confused, I did while the TV guy went on.

"It appears that Ms. Shaughnessy was jaywalking late in the evening when she was struck by a passing car. We're told that the driver, perhaps unaware that he or she had hit a pedestrian, didn't stop, and her body was discovered by another pedestrian who called nine-one-one. The response was immediate, but according to our sources at Mother of Mercy her injuries were very severe."

The anchor went on to remind the viewers that "Ms. Shaughnessy was reported at the time of her arrest to have been working as a professional escort," which led his blonde co-anchor to offer some quasi-lascivious speculation about where she might have been going so late that she was out on the street at all. The two of them seemed to find this quite amusing.

"Smarmy assholes," Susan said in an irritated tone. "OK, dear, you can turn it off now. But don't bother to phone."

"Why?" I demanded as I clicked the remote. "Honey, if there's been some kind of a major change in the past couple of hours—" It had been that long since my last call to the hospital.

"There hasn't," she told me unequivocally. "Jim and his friends are trailing their coat."

"Huh?" I didn't understand her at all.

"Sugar, the whole story is a plant," she explained. "In this town there are only two sets of people who have the slightest idea that Susan was Ariel. Well, three if you include you and me, but it wasn't us. So they got this from either the Feds or Bobby and Walter. It sure doesn't help Bobby to give more exposure to this, which leaves Jim and company. And from their standpoint—"

I got it now. "They'd like it spread around that you're on death's doorstep," I cut her off. "I get it. They're trying to discourage this guy Walter from taking another shot while you recover enough that they can move you. If he thinks you're not going to make it, he won't think he needs to."

"Yeah," she agreed. "Stupid. Typical bureaucratic thinking, and dumber than dirt."

"Well, it seems like a good idea to me," I said cautiously.

"Oh, come on, darling, use your head," she snapped. "If I can figure it out this quick, don't you think Bobby can? Well, maybe not Bobby, but I'm sure Walter's sharp enough for that. They're just spinning their wheels, and probably worse, like waving a red flag at a bull."

"How so?" I asked.