spot she had touched. “You’ve got a goose egg there, but no blood.”
“What the hell did he hit me with?”
“Whatever it was, you were lucky you had that hood on,” Sigrid said.
She instructed one of the uniformed officers to take the Bryants to the nearest hospital and to wait until she was either released or kept overnight for observation. To her surprise, Deborah did not protest.
When they returned three hours later, patrol cars were still thick around the service entrance and a cop remained by the lobby door to check IDs.
“Mrs. Bryant!” the new elevator man exclaimed. “You’re okay? Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”
Deborah gave him a dazzling smile and looked at the shiny new brass name tag pinned to his neat brown jacket. “I thought you were going to be Jim here.”
“Yeah, I forgot to tell them, so go ahead and say it.”
She laughed. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!”
CHAPTER
28
From 1860 to 1880, steam and hydraulic elevators were in use, but it was not until about 1888 that electric elevators came into vogue…. With the coming of the elevator the eight-story buildings began to pay better in their top floors than in their middle or lower ones. “High livers,” so called, preferred the light and air up aloft. Everything began to rise with the elevator—buildings, prices, ambitions, expectations.
—The New New York, 1909
I’ve heard too many stories about stoics who insist they’re fine, just fine, after a blow on the head, then twelve hours later they’re dead from a blood clot or other complications.
Not me, baby. Life’s too good to risk losing it because I might feel silly for taking up a doctor’s time. I admit that I fought it the first time around when a crazy woman smacked me on the head last year, but the doctor who examined me then made me a believer when he described how one of my favorite actresses would still be making movies if she’d only seen a doctor after a minor skiing accident.
Dwight told me that I must have been wrapped up in those hot blankets motionless for about an hour, and that was serious enough for the doctor at the hospital to make me jump through several hoops, including a CT scan and a series of perception tests. My head was sore where I’d been hit, but I didn’t have a headache, my reaction times were within normal parameters, and I could perfectly remember everything up to the moment I was whacked. The doctor finally theorized that I’d been stunned just enough to let Sidney Jackson swaddle me in tape and hide me in the lower bunk by pushing the blankets over me to look like an unmade bed.
“Between your lack of sleep, the adrenaline rush you must have had after finding that body in a bag, and your oxygen deprivation, you probably just transitioned from a daze into an exhausted sleep.” He told me that I was a very lucky woman and discharged me with nothing more than a few samples of a mild pain reliever that he had on hand.
Once we were back in the apartment, Dwight wanted to coddle me. I myself wanted to go down to the basement and find out what was happening, but Sigrid had called him at the hospital while I was being examined and said she would be stopping by later, so Dwight convinced me I’d be in the way downstairs.
Just as well, because as we were getting off the elevator, James had handed me a small Tiffany Blue shopping bag. The handles had been tied together with a tag that had “For Apt. 6-A” crudely printed on it in black ink.
“It’s been so busy today, I didn’t see who stuck it there,” he said, gesturing to a small pile of UPS and FedEx parcels in the corner, waiting for people to come home from work.
As soon as I felt the heft, I knew it was that piece of bronze erotica that Mrs. Lattimore had sent up to Sigrid’s mother. I pulled the cords of the bag apart enough to peek inside and saw that it was swathed in white tissue.
“We’d better leave it for Sigrid’s people to open,” I told Dwight. “Though I’m willing to bet they won’t find a single fingerprint or a single smidgen of DNA.”
“None of Cameron Broughton’s anyhow,” Dwight agreed. Like me, he was convinced that it was Luna DiSimone’s decorator who had taken it.
“You’re probably right about Broughton,” Sigrid said when she got there a