St Martins Hospital, morning and evening
Larry Benedict looked at his notes and carefully kept his irritation from showing.
"So, nothing new then," he said. "Nothing at all?"
The girl in the bed shook her head, her hair over her eyes, her arms around her knees. If it hadn't been for the monitors beeping away behind her she could have been sitting at home chatting, teasing a friend.
But of course Larry was the enemy, far more so than the shadowy figure who had put her here.
"You remember meeting Travis Raines," Larry said patiently, "and what he was wearing. And you remember what you were wearing and you remember sitting by the angel in the Square while you talked bout where you were going. And - then - just the man."
She nodded and Larry raised his eyebrows encouragingly. "Anything special about him?"
"I said," she said. "He smelled of peppermint."
"Peppermint," Larry said wondering if - please God - a search would discover someone with the right kind of background working in a peppermint factory.
Assuming there had been a peppermint factory in the City. Which there wasn't.
Since her brother had called the police on Sunday with the exciting news that Miss Orsini seemed to be getting some of her memory back, the police had been tag teaming with questioning. Almost everyone had had a go and had struck the stone wall of the kid's obstinacy.
No, she didn't remember her attacker. That could even be true but Larry, back and forth between her room, Andy Andrassi's room and his other duties, had the feeling that she was quite enjoying the attention and he was beginning to be thoroughly pissed off about it.
"You do realise," he said, "that he's still out there and that he tried to kill someone else the other day. If you could give us anything - any small thing - we might be able to identify him and make sure he doesn't hurt anyone else."
She looked up at him, her face sober suddenly. "I know that," she said. "Vinnie told me that. I sent a card to that lady and one to the girl in the shop. Don't know them very well. Don't know the girl at all, But didn't want them hurt." Her voice was tight by now. "I'd remember if I could, you know," she added accusingly.
"Yeah I know," Larry said soothingly. "I'm sorry, we're just all anxious that's all. So this peppermint guy - you were close enough to smell the mints?"
"Oh yeah," Amarie sighed putting her chin on the blanket that covered her knees. "Close enough."
###
Later that evening, Larry went into O'Malley's for a plate of stew and a beer before he went home and shared a table with a few old colleagues.
"You look like you lost a dollar and found a dime," one said.
"Been at the hospital again," Larry said with a sigh. "Thought we had a breakthrough today. She suddenly says the guy smelled of peppermint! Yeah that's what I thought, but it turns out the bouncer who carried her up the stairs was sucking breath mints. Sure that kid's beginning to remember, just the wrong stuff."
"Maybe she don't want to?" another suggested. "It had to have been the single most scary thing that ever happened to her. Jeez, I'd wanna forget it."
He jerked as one of the others kicked him under that table and they all carefully avoided looking at the other man at the table, who just sipped his beer in silence. He, they all knew, would probably prefer not to think of the terror of a young girl faced by a gunman.
"I'll go back again tomorrow," Larry said, feeling that anything was better than that edgy knowing silence. "Keep chipping away. We'll find something eventually - even if she is holding out on us."
Chipping away, asking questions, just going through the procedures, wearing people down, wasn't exciting or ambitious but Larry had found it often got you there in the end.
But it was time for a change of subject. "Hey," he said, "what about those Yankees?" and the conversation moved safely on to baseball.