The Face

bright with repressed tears.
        When Ethan got off at the seventh floor, the young couple rode farther up to higher misery.
        Duncan “Dunny” Whistler had been abed here on the seventh floor for three months. Between confinements to the intensive care unit-also on this floor-he was assigned to different rooms. During the five weeks since his most recent crisis, he’d been in Room 742.
        A nun with a kind Irish face made eye contact with Ethan, smiled, and passed by with nary a swish of her voluminous habit.
        The order of sisters that operated Our Lady of Angels rejected the modern garb of many nuns, which resembled the uniforms of airline flight attendants. They favored instead the traditional floor-length habits with commodious sleeves, guimpes, and winged wimples.
        Their habits were radiant white, rather than white and black. When Ethan saw them gliding ethereally along these halls, seeming less to walk than to drift like spirits, he could almost believe that the hospital did not occupy only Los Angeles real estate, but bridged this world and the next.
        Dunny had existed in a limbo of sorts, between worlds, ever since four angry men shoved his head in a toilet bowl once too often and held him under too long. The paramedics had pumped the water out of his lungs, but the doctors hadn’t been able to stir him from his coma.
        [46] When Ethan arrived at Room 742, he found it in deep shadow. An old man rested in the bed nearest the door: unconscious, hooked to a ventilator that pumped air into him with a rhythmic wheeze.
        The bed nearest the window, where Dunny had spent the past five weeks, stood unoccupied. The sheets were crisp, fresh, luminous in the gloom.
        Drowned daylight projected vague gray images of ameboid rain tracks from the window glass onto the bed. The sheets appeared to be acrawl with transparent spiders.
        When he saw that the patient’s chart was missing, Ethan figured that Dunny had been moved to another room or transferred to the ICU yet again.
        At the seventh-floor nurses’ station, when he inquired as to where he might find Duncan Whistler, a young nurse asked him to wait for the shift supervisor, whom she paged.
        Ethan knew the supervisor, Nurse Jordan, from previous visits. A black woman with a drill sergeant’s purposeful carriage and the soft smoky voice of a chanteuse, she arrived at the nurses’ station with the news that Dunny had passed away that morning.
        “I’m so sorry, Mr. Truman, but I called both numbers you gave us and left voice-mail messages.”
        “When would this have been?” he asked.
        “He passed away at ten-twenty this morning. I phoned you about fifteen or twenty minutes later.”
        At approximately ten-forty, Ethan had been at Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door, trembling with the memory of his foreseen death, pretending to be looking for the nonexistent Jim Briscoe. He’d left his cell phone in the Expedition.
        “I know you weren’t that close to Mr. Whistler,” said Nurse Jordan, “but it’s still something of a shock, I’m sure. Sorry you had to learn this way-the empty bed.”
        “Was the body taken down to the hospital garden room?” Ethan asked.
        [47] Nurse Jordan regarded him with new respect. “I didn’t realize you were a police officer, Mr. Truman.”
         Garden room was cop lingo for morgue . All those corpses waiting to be planted.
        “Robbery/Homicide,” he replied, not bothering to explain that he had left the force, or why.
        “My husband’s worn out enough uniforms to retire in March. I’m workin’ overtime so I don’t go crazy.”
        Ethan understood. Cops often went through long law-enforcement careers without worrying much about the dust-to-dust-ashes-to-ashes business, only to tighten with tension so much in the last months before retirement that they needed to eat Metamucil by the pound to stop retaining. The worry could be even worse for spouses.
        “The doctor signed a certification of death,” Nurse Jordan said, “and Mr. Whistler went down to cold holding pending mortuary pickup. Oh… actually, it won’t be a mortuary, will it?”
        “It’s a murder now,” Ethan said. “The medical examiner’s office will want him for an autopsy.”
        “Then they’ll have been called. We’ve got a foolproof system.” Checking her watch, she said, “But they probably haven’t had time to