“I know you miss your dogs,” I said, not mentioning the cat, because cats and I didn’t get along. “One of these days I’m going to get a greyhound. My problem is I would want to save all of them.”
I remembered hers. The poor dogs would not let you stroke their ears because they had been yanked by trainers, one of the many cruelties they suffered at dog tracks. Rose’s eyes got bright with tears, and she turned her face from me and rubbed her knees.
“This cold is hard on my joints,” she commented, clearing her throat. “They were getting so old. It’s just as well Laurel has them now. I couldn’t bear another thing dying on me. I wish you would get one. If every nice person would just get one.”
The dogs were put to death by the hundreds every year when they could no longer perform up to speed. I shifted on the couch. There was so much in life that angered me.
“Can I get you hot ginseng tea that dear Simon gets for me?” She mentioned the hairstylist she adored. “Maybe something a little stronger? I’ve been meaning to stop and pick up shortbread cookies.”
“I can’t stay long,” I said. “But I just wanted to drop by and make certain you’re all right.”
“Why, of course,” she replied as if there were no reason in the world she wouldn’t be.
I paused, and Rose looked at me, waiting for me to explain why I really had dropped by.
“I talked to Ruth,” I began. “We’re following a couple of leads and have our suspicions . . .”
“Which I’m sure lead right to Chuck,” she announced, nodding her head. “I’ve always thought he’s a bad apple. And he avoids me like the plague because he knows I see right through him. It will be a cold day in hell before the likes of him will charm me.”
“No one could charm you,” I said. Handel’s Messiah began, and intense sadness tucked itself into my heart.
Her eyes searched my face. She knew how hard last Christmas had been for me. I had spent it in Miami, where I could avoid it as much as I could. But it wasn’t possible for me to get away from music and lights, not even if I fled to Cuba.
“What are you going to do this year?” she asked.
“Maybe go out west,” I replied. “If it would snow here, that would be easier, but I can’t stand gray skies. Rain and ice storms, Richmond weather. You know, when I first moved here, we always got at least one or two good snows every winter.”
I envisioned snow piled on tree branches and blowing against my windshield, the world whited out as I drove to work even though all state offices were closed. Snow and tropical sunshine were antidepressants for me.
“It was very nice of you to check on me,” my secretary said, getting up from the deep blue wing chair. “You’ve always worried too much about me, though.”
She went into the kitchen and I heard her digging around in the freezer. When she returned to the living room, she handed me a Tupperware container with something frozen inside it.
“My vegetable soup,” she said. “Just what you need tonight.”
“You can’t know how much,” I told her with heartfelt appreciation. “I’ll go home and warm it up now.”
“Now, what will you do about Chuck?” she asked with a very serious expression on her face.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to ask her this.
“Rose, he says you’re my office snitch.”
“Well, I am.”
“I need you to be,” I went on. “I’d like you to do whatever it takes to find out what he’s up to.”
“What the little son of a bitch is up to is sabotage,” said Rose, who almost never swore.
“We’ve got to get the evidence,” I said. “You know how the state is. It’s harder to fire somebody than walk on water. But he’s not going to win.”
She didn’t respond right away. Then she said, “To start with, we mustn’t underestimate him. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s clever. And he has too much time to think and move about unnoticed. What’s unfortunate is he knows your patterns better than anyone, better even than me, because I don’t help you in the morgue—for which I’m grateful. And that’s your center stage. That’s where he could really ruin you.”
She was right, although I couldn’t bear to admit the power he had. He could swap labels or toe tags or contaminate something. He could leak lies to reporters who would forever protect his identity. I could scarcely imagine the breadth of what he could do.
“By the way,” I said, getting up from the couch, “I’m fairly sure he has a computer at home, so he lied about that.”
She walked me to the door, and I remembered the car parked near mine.
“Do you know anybody in the building who drives a dark Taurus?” I asked.
She frowned, perplexed. “Well, they’re rather much all over the place. But no, I can’t think of anyone around me who drives one.”
“Possibly there’s a police officer who lives in your building and might drive such a car home now and then?”
“I know nothing about it if there is. Don’t get too carried away by all those little goblins that will rise up in your head if you let them. I have a firm belief about not giving a life to things, you know. The old bit about a self-fulfilled prophecy.”
“Well, it’s probably nothing, but I just had an odd feeling when I saw this person sitting inside a dark car, engine off, lights off,” I said. “I got the tag number.”
“Good for you.” Rose patted my back. “Why am I not surprised?”
16
My shoes seemed loud on the stairs as I left Rose’s apartment, and I was conscious of my handgun when I went out the door into the cold night. The car was gone. I looked around for it as I approached mine.
The parking lot was not well lit. Bare trees made slight sounds that turned ominous in my mind, and shadows seemed to hide fearful things. I quickly locked my doors, looking around some more, and called Marino’s pager as I drove off. He called back right away because, of course, he was in uniform on the street without a damn thing to do.
“Can you run a tag?” I said right off when he answered.
“Lay it on me.”
I recited it to him.
“I’m just leaving Rose’s apartment,” I said, “and I have a weird feeling about this car parked out there.”
Marino almost always took my weird feelings seriously. I was not one to have them often without justification. I was a lawyer and a physician. If anything, I was more inclined to stay inside my clinical, fact-only lawyer’s mind and was not given to overreactions and emotional projections.
“There are other things,” I went on.
“You want me to drop by?”
“I sure would.”
He was waiting in my driveway when I got there, and he awkwardly climbed out of his car because his duty belt got in his way and the shoulder harness he never wore tended to snag him somewhere.
“Goddamn it!” he said, yanking his belt free. “I don’t know how much more I can stand this.” He kicked the door shut. “Piece-of-shit car.”
“How’d you get here first if it’s such a piece-of-shit car?” I asked.
“I was closer than you. My back’s killing me.”
He continued to complain as we went up the steps and I unlocked the front door. I was startled by silence. The alarm light was green.
“Now that ain’t good,” Marino said.
“I know I set it this morning,” I said.
“The housekeeper come?” he asked, looking, listening.
“She always sets it,” I said. “I’ve never known her to forget, not once in the two years she’s worked for me.”
“You stay here,” he said.
“I most certainly will not,” I replied, because the last thing I wanted was to wait here alone, and it was never a good idea for two armed people to be nervous and on guard in different areas of the same space.
I reset the alarm and followed him from room to room, watching him open every closet and look behind every shower curtain,
drapery and door. We searched both floors and nothing was the least bit amiss until we went back downstairs, where I noticed the runner in the hallway. Half of it was vacuumed, while the other wasn’t, and in the guest bath right off it, Marie, my housekeeper, had neglected to replace soiled hand towels with fresh ones.
“She’s not absentminded like that,” I said. “She and her husband are supporting young children on very little and she works harder than anyone I know.”
“I hope nobody calls me out,” Marino complained. “You got any coffee in this joint?”
I made a strong pot with the Pilon espresso that Lucy sent me from Miami, and the bright red and yellow bag made me feel hurt again. Marino and I carried our cups into my office. I logged onto AOL using Ruffin’s address and password and was extremely relieved when I didn’t get bumped off.
“Coast is clear,” I announced.
Marino pulled up a chair and looked over my shoulder. Ruffin had mail.
There were eight messages, and I didn’t recognize who any of them were from.
“What happens if you open them?” Marino wanted to know.
“They’ll still be in the box as long as you save them as new,” I replied.
“I mean, can he tell you opened them?”
“No. But the sender can. The sender can check the status of the mail he sent and see what time it was opened.”
“Huh,” Marino said with a shrug in his voice. “So what? How many people are gonna check what friggin’ time their mail was opened?”
I didn’t answer him as I began to go into Chuck’s mail. Maybe I should have felt frightened by what I was doing, but I was too angry. Four of the e-mails were from his wife, who had many instructions for him about domestic matters that made Marino laugh.
“She’s got his balls in a box on top of the fireplace,” he gleefully said.
The address of the fifth message was MAYFLR, who simply said, “Need to talk.”
“That’s interesting,” I commented to Marino. “Let’s check out mail he might have sent to whoever this Mayflower is.”
I went into the mail-sent menu and discovered Chuck had been sending e-mail to this person almost daily for the past two weeks. I quickly scanned through the notes, Marino looking on, and it became obvious in no time that my morgue supervisor was having rendezvous with this person, possibly an affair.
“I wonder who the hell she is?” Marino said. “That’d be a nice little bit of leverage to hold over the son of a bitch.”
“Not going to be easy to find out,” I said.
I quickly signed off, feeling as if I were escaping from a house I’d just burglarized.
“Let’s try Chatplanet,” I said.
The only reason I was familiar with chat rooms was that on occasion colleagues of mine from around the world used them to meet and ask for help in particularly difficult cases or share information that we might find useful. I signed on and downloaded the program and selected a box that made it possible for me to be in the chat room without anybody’s seeing me.
I scanned the list of chat rooms and clicked on one called Dear Chief Kay. Dr. Kay herself was in the midst of moderating a chat session with sixty-three people.
“Oh, shit. Give me a cigarette, Marino,” I tensely said.
He shook one out of the pack and pulled up a chair, sitting next to me while we eavesdropped.
Dear Chief Kay, is it true Elvis died on the toilet and that many people die on the toilet? I’m a plumber, so you can see why I’m wondering. Thanks, Interested in Illinois
Dear Interested in Illinois, yes, I’m sorry to say that Elvis did die on the toilet and that this isn’t uncommon because people strain and strain and their heart can’t take it. Elvis’s many years of bad eating and pills, I’m sorry to say, finally caught up with him, and he died of cardiac arrest in his luxurious bathroom in Graceland. And this should be a lesson to all of us.
Dear Chief Kay, why did you decide you’d rather work with dead patients instead of living ones? Morbid in Montana
Dear Morbid in Montana, I don’t have much of a bedside manner and don’t have to worry how my patient is feeling. I found out during my medical school days that living patients are a pain in the ass.
“Holy motherfucking shit,” Marino said.
I was incensed and there was nothing I could do about it.
“You know,” Marino said with indignation, “I wish people would leave Elvis alone. I’m tired of hearing about him dying on the toilet.”
“Be quiet, Marino,” I said. “Please. I’m trying to think.”
The session went on and on, all of it awful. I was tempted to butt into the conversations to tell everyone Dear Chief Kay wasn’t me.
“Any way to find out who Dear Chief Kay really is?” Marino asked.
“If this person is the moderator of the chat room, the answer’s no. He or she can know who everybody else is but not the other way around.”
Dear Chief Kay, since you know everything there is about anatomy, does that make you more aware of pleasure points, if you know what I mean? My boyfriend seems bored in bed and sometimes he even falls asleep in the middle of it! Wanna Be Sexy
Dear Wanna Be Sexy, is he on any kind of medications that might make him sleepy? If not, sexy lingerie’s not a bad idea. Women don’t do enough anymore to make their men feel important and in charge.
“That’s it!” I announced. “I’m going to kill him . . . or her . . . whoever the hell this Chief Kay is!”
I jumped out of my chair, so frustrated I didn’t know what to do.
“You don’t fuck with my credibility!”
Fists clenched, I practically racewalked to the great room, where I suddenly stopped and looked around as if I were in some place that I’d never been before.
“Two can play this game,” I said as I returned to my study.
“But how can two play when you don’t even know who Chief Kay number two is?” Marino asked.
“Maybe I can’t do anything about that goddamn chat room, but there’s always e-mail.”
“What kind of e-mail?” Marino warily asked.
“Two can play this game. Just wait and see. Now. How about we check on our suspicious car.”
Marino slipped his portable radio off his belt and switched to the service channel.
“What’d you say it was again?” he asked.
“RGG-7112,” I recited it from memory.
“Virginia tags?”
“Sorry,” I replied. “I didn’t get that good of a look.”
“Well, we’ll start there.”
He relayed the tag number to the Virginia Criminal Information Network, or VCIN, and asked for a 10-29. By now it was after ten o’clock.
“Any way you could make me a sandwich or something before I leave?” Marino asked. “I’m about to die of hunger. VCIN’s been a little slow tonight. I hate that.”
He requested bacon, lettuce and tomato with Russian dressing and thick slices of onion, and I cooked the bacon well in the microwave instead of frying it.
“Ah gee, Doc, why’d you have to do that?” he said, holding up a crispy, non-greasy strip of bacon. “It ain’t good unless it’s chewy and got some flavor left that wasn’t soaked up in all those paper towels.”
“It will have plenty of flavor,” I said. “And the rest is up to you. I’m not going to be blamed for clogging up your arteries any worse than they probably already are.”
Marino toasted rye bread and slathered it with butter and Russian dressing he conjured up from Miracle Whip, ketchup and chopped butter pickles. He topped this with lettuce, tomato liberally dashed with salt and thick slices of raw sweet onion.
He made two of these healthy creations and wrapped them in aluminum foil as the radio got back to him. The car was not a Ford Taurus, but a 1998 Ford Contour. It was dark blue and registered to Avis Leasing Corporation.
“That’s kinda interesting,??
? Marino said. “Usually in Richmond all rental cars begin with an R, and you have to request a plate that doesn’t. They started doing that so it wasn’t so obvious to carjackers that someone was from out of town.”
There were no outstanding warrants and the car wasn’t listed as stolen.
17
At eight o’clock the next morning, Wednesday, I squeezed into a metered space. Across the street, the eighteenth-century capitol of the Commonwealth was pristine behind wrought iron and fountains in the fog.
Dr. Wagner, other cabinet members and the attorney general worked in the Ninth Street Executive Office Building, and security had gotten so extreme that I’d begun to feel like a criminal when I came here. Just inside the door was a table, where a capitol police officer checked my satchel.
“If you find anything in there,” I said, “let me know, because I can’t.”
The smiling officer looked very familiar, a short, fleshy man I guessed to be in his mid-thirties. He had thinning brown hair and the face of one who had been boyishly cute before advancing years and added weight had begun to have their way with him.
I held out my credentials and he barely gave them a glance.
“Don’t need those,” he cheerfully said. “You remember me? I had to respond to your building a couple times when you used to be over there.”
He pointed in the direction of my old building on Fourteenth Street, which was only five short blocks east.
“Rick Hodges,” he said. “That time they had the uranium scare. ’Member that?”
“How could I not?” I said. “Not one of our finer moments.”
“And me and Wingo used to hang out sometimes. During lunch I’d come down when nothing much was going on.”
A shadow crossed his face. Wingo was the best, most sensitive morgue supervisor I’d ever had. Several years ago he died of smallpox. I squeezed Hodges’s shoulder.
“I still miss him,” I said. “You have no idea how much.”