With Friends Like These... by Gillian Roberts Page A

sensitive! Besides, am I wrong? Is a single thing I said wrong?”
    “All I can say,” a male voice proclaimed from the back of the bus. “All I can say is that only a fool lets his enemies get that close to him. Only a fool, or a man who doesn’t want to be any older than fifty, ever.”
    “Hear, hear,” the man behind me muttered.
    “I’m hungry,” his companion said.
    “You won’t be for long,” the man said darkly.
    “Why are we moving so slowly?” Janine’s whine again. Luckily, her complaint, whatever it was this time, was drowned out by the sirens of two patrol cars bracketing us.
    I finally had an authentic escort for the evening.
    The bus riders lapsed into heavy silence. We were like convicts being taken to the chain gang: sullen, grumpy, and lost in individual fears and self-pity. No one had any spare compassion or concern, and no one even mentioned Lyle Zacharias again. At a time when he should have been the center of events, he had become only a footnote.
    * * *
    The woman sitting at the emergency admitting desk was engrossed in a crossword puzzle. She glanced up, then squinted warily as we trooped in, spangled, beaded, high-heeled, and tux-edoed. She bent her head from side to side and applied X-ray vision to our intact forms, searching for the maimed one.
    “What is this? Some kind of treasure hunt?” she finally demanded.
    “It’s a poisoning!” Janine shrieked. “A mass murder! I feel it creeping through my veins!”
    “All of you? Poisoned?”
    Janine, clutching her midriff, nodded vigorously. I shook my head and shrugged. I appreciated Mackenzie’s caution and protectiveness, but the only signals my body was sending out were hungry S.O.S.’s. I was positive I hadn’t had any of whatever had felled Lyle, and I was not at all convinced that his collapse was necessarily the result of murder.
    My mother wrinkled her brow. “We think that maybe somebody else was definitely poisoned.”
    “Come again?” The name on the admissions woman’s plastic tag had less than the standard basic allotment of vowels. African, perhaps. “Ma’am” seemed easiest.
    “We were at a party, ma’am,” I said.
    “Didn’t think you were digging ditches in those duds.”
    You would think he had troubles enough of his own, but a man waiting for treatment, a bloody rag pressed to his head, guffawed at our fashion blunder. We were incorrectly dressed for the occasion.
    “Now Ralphie,” the woman said to him, “don’t you always be making fun of people.”
    I wondered how often a person had to stagger in here to become a known quantity and a regular. Ralphie’s face had zipperlike scars on the forehead and chin, not to mention whatever he was covering with the rag. I suspected that Ralphie had a revolving charge account with the E.R.
    “And a man collapsed—got really sick—”
    “Died!” the skinny ballerina said.
    “When he collapsed,” I continued, “he said he’d been poisoned, and we were all eating the same food, so the police thought we should be checked out.”
    She rolled her eyes ceilingward until they were nearly gone into some recess behind her brows. Then she counted us and opened a file drawer and counted again until she had a satisfactory number of forms.
    “Okay,” she said. “Everybody take one and fill it out.”
    “Fill it out?” Janine screamed. “We could die while we fill it out.”
    “And please have your insurance information ready when it’s your turn,” the woman said.
    We all, pretty much in unison, did a double take. If there was one person among us who had really tucked his Blue Cross card into his cummerbund, I thought we’d make the Guinness Book of Records.
    While Janine continued to whine, the emergency doors flew open and two attendants wheeling an elderly woman on a gurney raced by and through a second set of swinging doors.
    “Wait a minute!” Janine said. “We were here first! You aren’t making her wait!”
    “Uh-huh,” the admissions