Колин Маккалоу – On, Off (страница 10)
“Hi, honey,” he said, one arm about her, and leaning across the top of her head to peck his mother on the cheek. “Hi, Mom, what’s for dinner? Is that your pork chops I smell?”
“Sure is, son. Sit down while I get your plate.”
So they sat around three sides of the small square table in the kitchen, Keith and Ruth devouring the greasy, rather ersatz meal with gusto, Hilda picking at it.
“We had a murder today,” Hilda said, sawing at a chop.
Keith looked up, too busy to comment; Ruth put down her fork and stared.
“Criminy!” she said. “An honest-to-God murder?”
“Well, a body, at any rate. That’s why I was so late home. The police were all over the place and wouldn’t let any of us leave, even for lunch. For some reason they left the fourth floor until last, though how would anybody on the fourth floor know anything about a body in animal care on the first floor?” Hilda huffed indignantly and succeeded in de-fatting her chop.
“It’s all around the hospital and medical school,” Keith said, pausing to help himself to two more chops. “I’ve been in the O.R. all day, but even in there the anesthetist and the instrument nurse were full of it. As if a bifurcated aneurysm on the middle cerebral artery weren’t enough! Then the radiologist came in with the news that there’s another aneurysm on the basilar artery, so all our work will probably go for nothing.”
“Surely the angiogram showed that before you started?”
“Basilar didn’t fill properly and Missingham didn’t see the films until we were almost done—he’d been in Boston. His deputy couldn’t find his ass with both hands inside his shorts, let alone an aneurysm on a poorly filled basilar artery! Sorry, Mom, but it was a frustrating day. Nothing went right.”
Eyes soft, Hilda gazed at him adoringly. How had she ever managed to capture Keith Kyneton’s attention? A mystery, but one she was permanently grateful for. He was all her dreams rolled in one, from his height to his curly fair hair, his beautiful grey eyes, his chiseled facial bones, his muscular body. And he was so charming, so well spoken, so eminently likeable! Not to mention a highly able neurosurgeon who’d chosen a good speciality, cerebral aneurysms. Until recently they had been inoperable death sentences, but now that neurosurgery had body-freezing techniques and the heart could be stopped for a few precious minutes while an aneurysm was clipped off, Keith’s future was assured.
“Go on, give us the details,” said Ruth, eyes glistening.
“I can’t, Ruth, because I don’t have any. The police were very close-mouthed about it, and the lieutenant who talked to me could have given lessons in discretion to a Catholic priest. Sonia told me he impressed her as a very intelligent and quite well educated man, and I saw what she meant.”
“What was his name?”
“Something Italian.”
“Aren’t they all?” Keith asked, and laughed.
Professor Bob Smith, home with his wife, Eliza, after dinner was finished and the boys sent to do homework.
“It’s going to make life difficult.”
“The Board, you mean?” she asked, pouring him more coffee.
“Yes, the Board, but more the work, dear. You know just how temperamental they can be! The only one who doesn’t bug me is Addison. He’s grateful to be alive, his ideas on anticonvulsants are as pleasing to him as they are to me, and provided none of his equipment breaks down, he’s content. Though how anybody can jog five miles a day and be content, I don’t know. Lazarus complex.” He grinned, which did wonders for his already striking face. “Oh, how upset he was when I told him jogging to work in the mornings was not going to happen! But he managed to sit on his rage.”
She giggled, an attractive sound. “You’d think it would occur to the jogger that having to smell his B.O. after he jogs doesn’t make him an ideal work companion.” She sobered. “It’s his poor wife I feel sorriest for.”
“Robin? That nonentity? Why?”
“Because Addison Forbes treats her like a servant, Bob. Yes, he does! The lengths she has to go to to find food he’ll eat! And washing smelly clothes—she has no kind of life.”
“That sounds rather petty to me, dear.”
“Yes, I suppose it does, but she’s—well, not the world’s brightest person, and Addison makes her feel it. Sometimes I’ve caught him looking sideways at her and had the heeby-jeebies—I swear he hates her, really hates her!”
“It can happen when a medical student has to marry a nurse to get through,” Smith said rather dryly. “There’s no intellectual equality, and after he makes his mark, she’s an embarrassment.”
“You’re such a snob.”
“No, a pragmatist. I’m right.”
“So okay, maybe you do have a point, but it’s a pitiless attitude just the same,” Eliza said valiantly. “I mean, even in their own home he locks her out! There they have this gorgeous turret with a widow’s walk overlooking the harbor, and he won’t let her up there! What is it, Bluebeard’s chamber?”
“Evidence of her untidiness, and his obsession with order. I lock you out of the basement, don’t forget.”
“You’ll get no complaints from me about that, but I do think you’re too hard on the boys. They’re way past the destructive age now. Why not let them go down?”
His jaws clamped, hardening his face. “The boys are barred from the basement permanently, Eliza.”
“Then it isn’t fair, because you spend every free second you have down there. You ought to spend more time with the boys, so let them share your folly.”
“I wish you wouldn’t refer to it as a folly!”
She changed the subject; he had that obdurate look now, he wasn’t about to listen. “Is this murder really such a problem, Bob? I mean, it can’t possibly have anything to do with the Hug.”
“I agree, dear, but the police think otherwise,” said Smith mournfully. “Would you believe that we’ve been fingerprinted? Lucky we’re a research lab. The ink came off in xylene.”
Walt Polonowski, to his wife, his tone ungracious.
“Have you seen my red checkered jacket?”
She paused in her rounds of the kitchen, Mikey straddling her hip, Esther clinging to her skirt, and looked at him in mingled scorn and exasperation. “Christ almighty, Walt, it can’t be the hunting season yet!” she snapped.
“Just around the corner. I’m going up to the cabin this weekend to get it ready—and that means I need my jacket—and I can’t find it because it isn’t where it ought to be.”
“Nor are you.” She put Mikey in his high chair and Esther on a chair with a fat cushion, then hollered for Stanley and Bella. “Dinner’s ready!”
A boy and a girl galloped into the room, whooping that they were starving. Mom was a great cook who never made them eat things they didn’t like—no spinach, no carrots, no cabbage unless she’d made it into coleslaw.
Walter sat at one end of the long table, Paola at its other end where she could spoon slop into Mikey’s mouth, open like a bird’s, and correct Esther’s table manners, still far from perfect. “The other thing I can’t stand,” she said as soon as everyone was eating, “is your selfishness. It would be great to have somewhere to take the kids on a weekend, but no! It’s
“You’re right when you say the cabin is mine,” he said coldly, cutting his very good lasagna with a fork. “My grandfather left me the cabin, Paola—to me, and me alone. It’s the one place where I can get away from all this mayhem!”
“Your wife and four children, you mean.”
“Yes, I do.”
“If you didn’t want four children, Walt, why didn’t you tie a knot in the goddam thing? It takes two to tango.”
“Tango? What’s that?” asked Stanley.
“A sexy dance,” said his mother curtly.
An answer that for some reason inexplicable to Stanley caused Dad to roar with laughter.
“Shut up!” Paola growled. “Shut up, Walt!”
He wiped his eyes, put another piece of lasagna on Stanley’s empty plate and then replenished his own plate. “I am going up to the cabin on Friday night, Paola, and I won’t be home until dawn on Monday. I have a mountain of reading to do, and as God is my witness, I cannot read in this house!”
“If you’d only give up this stupid research and go into a good private practice, Walt, we could live in a house big enough for
His hand came down on the table violently; the children went still, shivered. “Just how do you know I’ve had offers, Paola?” he asked dangerously.
Her face paled, but she defied him. “You leave the letters lying around, I find them everywhere.”
“And read them. Yet you wonder why I have to get away? My mail is private, do you hear me?
Walt threw his fork down, shoved his chair away from the table and stalked from the kitchen. His wife and children stared after him, then Paola wiped Mikey’s slimed face and rose to get the ice cream and Jell-o.