(Note from the author:  I apologize for the different format and the lack of navigation aids on this page.  This is a stop-gap measure to post this page on the Web as quickly as possible.  I will make it prettier soon.  In the meantime, please use the back and forward buttons on your browser to navigate from this page.  –G.)

 

 

The Glory of Man

 

by

 

George Clayton Upper III

 

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

            My head hurt, and the phone was ringing.  I came to both realizations more or less simultaneously, or at least it seems I did.  I think the next thing I noticed was how bright it was.  A lot of that morning is still hazy in my memory, but only around the edges.  The center is crystal clear, vivid, and bright.  It doesn’t dull with age—just the opposite, in fact.  I seem to remember it better each day than I did the day before.

            On the other hand, I rarely remember yesterday that well; perhaps it’s merely a matter of perspective.

            The phone kept ringing.  On and on, over and over.  Twenty times, thirty times, it didn’t stop.  I wondered why Rachel didn’t pick it up.  Maybe she wasn’t home.  Or maybe I wasn’t.  Where was I, anyway?

            I opened my eyes only far enough and long enough to confirm that I had fallen asleep on the loveseat in the sunroom.  It wasn’t a comfortable piece of furniture to begin with, even for one who could fit on it, which I couldn’t.  If my headache hadn’t commanded such attention, the muscles in my back would have taken up the slack.  At six-foot-two, I had slept in nearly a fetal position to stay off the cement floor.  The cheap and dirty throw rug which would have been the only comfort against the cold cement slab managed to do the impossible by making the uncomfortable loveseat desirable, if only by comparison.  I suppose an optimist would have called the liter bottle of rum on the floor beside me ten percent full, but I’ve never been very skillful at predicting what an optimist might say.  There was an empty glass as well, and an open can of Diet Pepsi.  I reached for the can with eyes closed, accidentally knocked it over, left it there.  There wasn’t enough liquid remaining in the can to warrant further effort.

            I moved no more until the phone had stopped ringing.  Then I opened my eyes again and surveyed the room briefly.  There was a book on the floor, a collection of classic American short stories that I had picked up at Edward McKay’s Used Books on Lawndale Avenue for a quarter.  I vaguely remembered having read some of The Fall of the House of Usher while sipping at my rum and Diet Pepsi, which is as unpalatable a drink as it sounds, but I had neither discovered bourbon at that point in my life, nor acquired the ability to drink straight liquor.  I had become professional at being drunk, but I still got there like an amateur.

Had I finished the Poe story?  I couldn’t remember.  I’d read it before, in a freshman English class before I’d dropped out and become a cop to pay the bills that came with marriage and family.  So I knew how it ended, and I couldn’t decide whether I remembered the ending from last night or from the class.  It didn’t take me long to decide not to care.

I was in civilian clothes, an undershirt and an old pair of jeans, which meant I’d changed after coming home.  My shift had ended at eight.  I didn’t remember changing, and I couldn’t remember whether Alexander had still been up when I came home, or whether I had kissed him goodnight.  I usually kissed him, even if he was already asleep.  But I couldn’t be certain, and I didn’t like not knowing that.  I wasn’t going to ask Rachel.  She didn’t know how poor my memory was becoming, and I intended to keep it that way for as long as I could.

I checked my watch.  Ten-fifteen.  I had to be at work at noon.  I had made a good bust several days earlier—had basically stumbled into the middle of a major-league drug transaction while writing parking tickets and otherwise trying to improve the visible police presence on downtown Church Street, and there was still a lot of follow-up to do.  I didn’t mind; I liked the routine aspects of police work, had an eye for detail, and knew that a collar of this magnitude virtually assured early promotion to Detective Third if I didn’t screw up too badly somewhere else.  Alexander would be at school; Rachel was probably wondering whether to wake me or not.  Probably mad at me for sleeping out in my “office” again.  She didn’t like it when I didn’t sleep in our bed.  She had married me to be with me, she often said.

I reached down and righted the now empty Pepsi can.  Then I unfolded my stiff legs, swung them around, and sat up.

            Too quickly.  A mistake.  I was going to be sick.  There were three doors from the sunroom, one leading to the backyard, one to the front, and one leading into the house.  I tried the interior door first, but it was locked.  I knew there was a key hanging on the wall behind the fake-antique pressboard-and-veneer roll-top desk next to the door, but I didn’t have time for that.  I lunged against one of the other doors, stumbled onto the small porch, leaned over the railing, and threw up behind a blooming forsythia in my backyard.

            I felt a little better after that, although my headache seemed somehow more intense and my calf muscles were inexplicably so tight that they hurt.  The sun was bright and hot on the back of my neck, the sky a brilliant Carolina blue, the late September morning warm with the wet, cloying heat of the dying summer.  I wasn’t sure yet that I was done throwing up, but I thought I could at least make it into the house before I had to again.  I pushed myself away from the railing, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and stepped back into the sunroom.

            Rachel didn’t answer the first time I knocked on the door, or the second time.  The third time I tapped my wedding ring against one of the three dirty glass panes in the door.  From where I was, I could see Rachel’s car in our driveway, and mine in the street in front of the house.  She could have walked across the street to see Jim or Billie, our neighbors.  Or she could just be ignoring me, angry with me for sleeping out here again.  Then I remembered the key again.

            It was easy to see that the sunroom had been built later than the rest of the house, because the one interior wall was covered with peeling clapboard siding.  In one of the spaces created by the imperfect fit of my desk against the siding, I had screwed a little brass hook from which to hang a key to the interior door, in case Rachel or I had ever locked ourselves out of the house.  (We kept a key to the exterior doors under a rock in Jim and Billie’s yard across the street; they, in turn, hid their key under a loose chunk of concrete in our driveway.)

            The key was missing from the hook, and somehow I sensed immediately that something was wrong.  My head cleared almost instantly, and the pain in my calves dissolved.  I reached back behind the desk to feel the floor, to see if the key had somehow fallen.  I knew how unlikely that was, but I checked anyway.  I have large hands, and I couldn’t get them behind the desk.  I grabbed the desk to pull it away from the wall, and yanked it about two feet from the wall.  The desk was cheap but heavy and loaded with paperwork and files, and I was surprised at my strength.  No key.

            There was something wrong.  Cop instincts aren’t any less fallible than anyone else’s, no matter what the dime novels say (I bought all my books at Edward MacKay’s back then, and still paid a dime each for some of the junk I read).  Nevertheless, I had learned to trust my gut in my six years on the force.  I knew that something wasn’t right, and I suddenly and irrationally feared what I would find in the house.  I didn’t want to go in, and I certainly didn’t want to go in first, or alone.  The phone started ringing again.

            I turned back to the loveseat and felt underneath it for my police-issue 9mm.  It was there, where I usually tucked it, out of harm’s way, when I sat down to drink.  I jacked a round up into the chamber, left the hammer back, and thumbed the safety on.  I pushed quickly through the door into the front yard, turned around the corner of my house, and took the three steps onto my front porch in one large stride.  I could see nothing through either of the windows looking onto my porch, except that there were no lights on in that part of the house.  Another bad sign; Rachel likes light, and always keeps as many lights burning during the day as she does at night.  Which is to say all of them.

            I jerked the screen door open.  The front door was locked and bolted.  I knew it was a solid door in a solid frame, but it, too, had windows.  I broke one of them with the butt of my pistol.  I would feel like a fool later, if everything turned out to be alright.  But I knew it wasn’t going to turn out that way this time.  I reached inside, turned the deadbolt, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open.

 

Chapter Two

 

            I watched the cold, implacable November raindrops trace their unpredictable paths down the glass of my office window.  I saw no lightning, but every few minutes thunder rumbled in the distance like the ancient, almost-forgotten remonstrations of God.  The wind was gusty, and the high gray clouds moved quickly.  There were no pedestrians on Elm Street, but there never were many in downtown Greensboro on weekdays, except at lunchtime when the lawyers and the bankers and the insurance people who didn’t eat at their desks ventured out for a cheeseburger or a Subway sandwich or a salad from O’Henry’s cafe.  Saturdays were different, when the streets awoke with antiquers and browsers and hunters of bargains straggling in groups of twos and threes from store to store.  My landlady’s used and rare bookshop occupied the first floor of my building, and the second floor served her for storage.  Most of my office furniture had been salvaged from her overstock, and all of it probably qualified as antique, but I was the only used and rare item still for sale on the third floor.

I had my feet on the credenza, my fedora on the hat stand beside the office door, my guns in their shoulder holsters under my arms, my soul in the bottle on the desk, and about three fingers of bourbon left in a water glass.  But the bottle was still less than half empty, and there was another in the filing cabinet.  I had just finished an insurance investigation, the first real work I’d done in several months, and saved the company enough money that they decided to pay me a bonus.  I wasn’t exactly bucks up, but the bills had all been paid, and I was off the macaroni-and-cheese diet to which I had resigned myself for so long that the steak I’d enjoyed in celebration of my bonus had actually made me ill.

The day’s first drink was already relaxing me, spreading through me, clearing my vision, dulling my memory, covering over, if only thinly, the hole in my life that kept me from living it for fear of falling through.  I savored the knowledge of where my next drink would come from, and though I wasn’t yet drunk, I had booze enough, and time.

            The phone rang.  It had been so long that I barely recognized the sound.  I stared at it, deciding whether to answer.  I shared six digits of my number with someone named Betty, and I got occasional calls asking for her.  If it wasn’t for Betty, it was probably a telemarketer.  But it could conceivably be a potential client.  Did I want to work?  Or would I rather take my retirement on the installment plan, a land-loving and thinner-wristed Travis McGee, living half of a salvaged double life?

            Whatever.

I picked up the phone.  “Locke Investigations,” I said.  Technically, I was Llewellyn Locke, licensed private investigator, doing business as Locke Investigations, but I couldn’t imagine anyone caring about the distinction outside of the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office.  In fact, it was hard to imagine anyone inside the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office caring much.  Regardless, I wasn’t expecting a call from them.

            “Lew, John Hites.”  Pause.  “How are you?”

I suppressed a sigh.  Hites was an evangelical pastor who spent considerable time on the head trauma wing of Wesley Long hospital praying and reading to patients.  My wife had been there in a coma for two years, and Hites and I bumped into each other there on occasion.  He had once asked my permission to read and pray with my wife, and I had granted it, mostly just to make him go away.

            “They say that coma patients can hear you, you know.”  Pause  “And God, of course.”  Pause.  “I think God created each of us for a purpose.”  Pause.  “To be loved by Him, of course, but something more, as well.”  Pause.  “I think God has a plan for each of us, but I don’t think there’s any way to know what it is without prayer.”  Pause.  “I think God hears our prayers, don’t you, Mr. Locke?”  He spoke with the Bible Belt assumption of my agreement, demonstrating his North Carolinian birth and ignoring, purposefully or not, southern church history.  I also wondered, but only briefly, why God would create Rachel to marry a drunk, suffer a brutal gang-rape because of her drunk husband, and lie in a coma for months.  I also wondered why my son had been created for the purpose of being murdered at the age of seven.  Hites seemed to be giving me the choice of disbelieving in God, or of hating Him.

            So I told him The Story.  I had resigned from the force almost immediately after the dealer I had arrested had sent the four guys to my house.  They had killed Alex and left my wife Rachel for dead, all while I had lain passed out in the sunroom, rum bottle on the floor next to me.  Mostly, I think, I left because of the looks I got from other cops, who knew that I had been in the house when it had happened.  I had told myself that I would devote my time to finding the men responsible, but actually I had devoted myself full time to drinking.  Without any help from me, one of the four was shot and killed a few days later in an unrelated incident.  Two of the others were tried and convicted—one was later knifed to death in some sort of gang-related prison violence, the other, the only one of voting age, was working his way through his appeals on death row.  Once in a while I wonder about the fourth.  But not often, and rarely for very long.

            “If God is up there,” I finished, “we don’t speak.”

            Hites called me once a month or so after that, usually at home, asking how I was doing and how Rachel was doing and whether I’d seen her lately.  I didn’t answer my phone much, and he mostly ended up speaking to my answering machine.  I felt like a pet project, but he was sincere and gracious enough, and less preachy than he could have been.  Less, in fact, than I probably deserved.  He spoke in short, staccato bursts, and paused between them.  His voice was unusually high, and it got higher and louder when he grew passionate about something.  I was waiting for the day that he preached me a sermon that only the dogs could hear.

            “Hello, Pastor Hites.”  He had told me to call him John, but something in me rebelled against the thought.  Original sin, no doubt.

            “How are you, Lew?”

            “Same, I guess.”

            “Sorry to hear that,” he said, but there was a small smile in his voice.  “And Rachel’s the same, I assume.”  Pause.  “I saw her a couple of days ago.”

            “Uh huh.”

            “Have you seen her recently?”

            “A couple of weeks ago, I guess.  I’ll probably go soon.”

            “I wish you would, for her sake.”  Pause.  “And for yours.”

            I didn’t know how going to see Rachel lying death-like in a hospital bed was supposed to be good for me, but I said “Uh huh” again.  If I argued with him, he’d keep me on the phone all day.

“Are you busy, Lew?”

            “Not really.  No more than usual.”

            “Good.”  Pause.  “I have a job for you.”  Pause.  “If you’re interested.”

            “What kind of job,” I said, imagining sweeping at the homeless shelter.

            “A friend has died.”  Pause.  “A member of my church.”  Pause.  “Murdered, actually.”

            “When?”

            “Three weeks ago.”  Pause  “He was a doctor.”  Pause.  “Doctor Abel Angelico.”  Pause.  “He was killed in his office.”  Pause.  “You might have read it in the, ah, News and Record.”

            “I must have missed the paper that day.”

And so forth.  Hites had spoken to a Detective Third-Grade Thom Keeler, who had given him the official line about the file remaining open without sounding very enthusiastic about the chances of successfully closing it anytime soon.  When I had been a cop, it was an unwritten rule that if you didn’t know who killed a guy within two days, you probably weren’t going to find out.  You might not be able to prove it that fast, but if there’s a good suspect, you usually find out about him right away.  Or her.

I took a sip of bourbon.  I wouldn’t have kept drinking if Hites had been in the office, but having him on the phone with me didn’t seem like a good enough reason to slow down.  “What do you want me to do, Pastor?”

            “The church elders and I got together and solicited a few, small, private donations.”  Pause.  “We have a thousand dollars with which to, ah, assist the investigation.”  Hites had almost no accent most of the time, and he sounded as much like a Top 40 radio deejay as a southern pastor.  But when he spoke of the church, his r’s disappeared, so that he said “a membah of my chuch” and “eldahs.”  I couldn’t remember how he said forgiveness, but he pronounced the r in dollars.

            “What’s your interest, Pastor?  You don’t normally hire P.I.’s to investigate crimes committed against your congregation, do you?”  I was immediately sorry I’d asked.  I was already sick of listening to his pauses, never mind the words that came between them.

            “No, of course not.”  Pause.  “I’m not certain I can adequately explain my interest, as you put it, Lew.”  Pause.  “Abel hadn’t been saved very long.”  Pause  “He had a lot of personal issues, marital problems, family problems, and so forth, that we were working on together.”  Pause  “We were in process, I suppose you could say.  I feel, ah, cheated isn’t really the right word.”  Pause.  “Unfulfilled, perhaps.”  Pause.  The lightning seemed to be getting closer, even as the thunder seemed paradoxically more distant.  “As a pastor, Lew, a lot of what I do goes unrewarded in this life.”  Pause.  “I know my reward awaits me.”  Pause.  “I’m not ungrateful.  But Abel was maturing quickly, and I thought he was destined to do great things.”  Pause.  “I sensed a great calling on his life, if you can understand that.”  While he paused, I told him I could.

“Abel had learned a little about his own sin,” Hites said, “and how it had robbed him of God’s blessings and kept him from doing all that God had in His plan for him.”  Pause.  “I was looking forward to watching him grow in Christ, and discovering, if you will forgive the corny phrase, his destiny.”  Pause, sigh.  “And someone has robbed me of that opportunity.”  Pause.  “I guess I’m just selfish.”  Pause.  “I mean, a man has died, and I’m thinking about my loss.”

            As if there were something else to do, I thought.

            “Why not offer a reward?” I said.  “Go to Greensboro Crime Stoppers or something?”

            “That was the original idea, actually.”  Pause.  “I convinced the elders that the money would be put to more effective use by hiring you, that the church would be better served by having one professional devoted to the case full time than a number of amateurs involved, oh, haphazardly, I suppose you could say.”  Pause.  “I have faith in you, Lew.”  He stopped speaking again, and I thought it was another pause.  I sipped my bourbon in silence until I realized that he was waiting for me to accept the case.

            I didn’t much want to work for a board of Baptist elders.  On the other hand, I never much wanted to work for anybody.  On the third hand, my choices appeared limited.  It was this, or I could make seven dollars an hour as a security guard.  I wasn’t above the work—there was an ex-cop who ran security for the News & Record building downtown who occasionally threw some my way, and I was happy enough to get it—but it wasn’t something I was guilty of coveting.  Nice to be innocent of something, I thought.

            “I’ll take it.  A hundred a day and I pay my own expenses.  Unless there’s something unusual, and then I’ll call you first.  I’ll need a retainer.”

            “Oh, sure, Lew, that’s fine.”  Pause.  “I mean, we expected that.”  Pause.  “You can have the whole thousand up front.”  Pause.  “We collected it specifically for this purpose, so if I didn’t give it to you I’d have to find a way to return pro-rated portions to the givers, some of whom were, as you can imagine, anonymous.”  Pause.  “I don’t think I’d be able to do that.”

            “Well, Pastor Hites, I’d hate to put you in that position, so I guess I’ll take the whole thousand.  To help you out.”

            There was silence on the line for a moment.  My bourbon glass was empty, and I decided, after brief consideration, against another drink.  Hites began to chuckle quietly.

            “Heaven above us, Lew,” he said.  “Was that a joke?”

            “Joke might be a little strong, Pastor.”

“Will miracles never cease,” he said.  “I’m only a few minutes from your office, and I don’t have an appointment until two.”  Pause.  “Why don’t I run this check to you?”

            I checked my watch—it was just after twelve.  Time for lunch.  “Fine,” I said.  “If I’m not here, leave it with Mrs. Exner downstairs.  She’ll get it to me.”

            Hites hesitated.  Or maybe it was just a pre-sentence pause.  “Okay, Lew.”  Pause.  “See you soon.”

            I hung up the phone and took the empty water glass across the hall to the bathroom to rinse it out.  I sipped some water out of the glass while I rinsed it.  The water was terrible, with a strong metallic taste.  No wonder I never drink water, I thought, if this is what it tastes like.  Then I returned to my office and put the bottle away in my desk drawer.  I’d buy another on the way home.  Maybe I’d buy a thousand dollars’ worth.  I wanted a paper towel to wipe away the ring my glass had left on my desk, but the bathroom dispenser was empty.  I couldn’t remember it ever having been less empty.  I put on my trench coat and grabbed my hat and walked down the two flights of dark, narrow, creaking stairs.

            I stopped by Ms. Exner’s shop on the first floor and told her there were no paper towels in my bathroom.  She wore a ponytail of long white hair and about seventy-five extra pounds.  After taking off her glasses and looking at me across the room like I’d just announced my senate candidacy, she said that I was responsible for the bathroom supplies according to the lease, but that she had some extra paper towels and I could stop for some later.

            “How did you come so suddenly to be worried ‘bout paper towels, honey?” she asked as I pulled open the door and set my hat on my head.  “Ain’t been none since you moved in, I believe.”

            I shrugged, pulled my collar up to ward off the cold, hard November rain, and stepped out into it.

 

Chapter Three

 

            Two years and two months later, it was raining the morning I parked my old Volvo wagon in the lot next to the government building on Eugene Street.  If the Mayans had designed their temples in 1972, they would look like the city government building.  From the back it resembled a huge stone pyramid, with numerous staircases running along the outside, connecting porches and patios and smoking areas and tiny, ugly little gardens of stunted bush and whatever else was out there.  The tinted glass windows looked like polished ebony.  The rainwater beaded up and ran down the windows, seeking a way inside but forced by gravity and its own inherent properties along the path of least resistance.  The glass seemed to be keeping it out effectively enough, but the rain didn’t stop trying.

            I through the main entrance and headed for the detective squad room, water dripping steadily from my hat and trench coat.  Thom Keeler was in charge of the Angelico file, but I didn’t know Keeler, so I was hoping for an introduction from someone I did know.  I knew Detective Audra Long, or I had known her.  She had been my partner.

            No one stopped me as I walked into the squad room to find her.  It didn’t take me long, because she was behind her desk talking on the telephone.  Audra had the loudest voice I had ever heard, and it carried.  She was not angry—she rarely got angry—but her voice was always loud anyway.  She was also the smartest person I had ever met, and always seemed to know not only whatever little piece of information she needed at the moment, but countless other pieces of trivia.  Her conversation was often filled with obscure references to everything from classical mythology to beer commercials.  It wasn’t, now that I thought of it, that she was so smart.  It was that she remembered everything—every detail of every book she had ever read, every movie she had ever seen, every song she had ever heard.  Talking to her was like interacting with The Waste Land.  I never knew what she was doing on the force.  I don’t think she ever knew either.

            I stood at her desk and looked at her.  She ignored me, telling someone that she didn’t need a warrant if she had probable cause.  If whoever she was talking to knew what probable cause was, they also probably knew that you didn’t need a warrant if you had it.  But I didn’t want to interrupt.  Eventually, she said “Fine, you tell him,” and hung up.

            She looked at me with that bored, disinterested cop look you learn at the academy.  I tried to smile pleasantly, but I’m not sure that I moved anything on my face other than my lips.  Her eyes widened when she recognized me, and she gave me the same smile, probably for the same reasons.

            “Been a while,” she said.

            I nodded.  “I need some help, Aud.”

            She smiled, warmer this time, but not much.  “Really?  I figured you just dropped by out of the blue after two years to talk about old times.  You know, reminisce with your old partner, because you’re such a social guy.  When you’re done oozing charm, maybe you’d like to take a seat.”

            I remembered Audra speaking with a light drawl, but it was gone now, if it had ever really existed.  She sounded northern now, almost New Yorkish.  I sat.

            “You’ve been watching too much N.Y.P.D. Blue or something,” I said.  “You don’t sound like a belle anymore.”

            “Oh, ah can still sound like one when ah wahnt to, suh,” she said.

“You look about the same, Aud.”

            It was true.  Her thick, wavy brown hair had some new red streaks in it, and it was tied behind her in a pony tail.  She had big brown eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, a sharp nose, dark maroon lipstick on full lips.  If she wore any other makeup, it was so artfully applied that I didn’t notice it.  She wore a white V-neck sweater with shoulder pads and jeans with a brown braided belt.  She had broad shoulders for a woman, and the shoulder pads looked like overkill to me.  Her brown blazer hung on the back of her chair.  I couldn’t see a gun, which meant it was probably stuffed in her waistband in back.  Some female detectives I had known carried their weapons in their purses, but the Audra I knew would have wanted the gun closer to her.  Of course, the Audra I knew had a southern accent, too.  Things change, I thought, and what did I care where she carried her gun, or even if?

            “You look like hell, Lew,” she said, but I don’t think she really meant it.  I had put on my suit for the occasion, and although I was ten pounds heavy and I had the top shirt button open, I thought that I looked more presentable than I had in recent memory.  My hair was too short to need combing, but it was clean, and I’d even shaved.  My eyes might have been a little red, and my shirt a bit wrinkled, but other than that I was a GQ cover model.  I nodded anyway, trying to be agreeable.

            “You know Thom Keeler?”

            “Sure, I know Thom,” she said.  She pronounced the Th derisively, as in Thursday, not like Thames.  “Councilman’s nephew.  Got a great career ahead of him.  What about him?”

            “I need an introduction.  The Angelico murder?”  She nodded.  “I’ve been hired to look into it.”

            “Who by?” she asked.

            “That’s confidential,” I said.  Her face started to shut down, and I needed her.  “But since it’s you asking, Angelico’s pastor hired me.”

            “His pastor?  You mean his church pastor?”    She was drinking black coffee.  She offered me none, but took a sip of hers and looked up at me over the rim of the cup.

            “Yeah, he talked to Keeler and wasn’t encouraged by whatever Keeler told him about the likelihood of solving this soon.”

            “What does he care whether it gets solved or not?”

            “I asked him, but I’m not sure I understood his answer.”

“There’s a surprise.  Did he use three syllable words?”

“I think he feels responsible for him.  He hadn’t been going to the church long, and they had been working through some things.  Counseling or whatever.  I think Pastor Hites felt Angelico was on his way to becoming a good Christian, and he wants to know who’s responsible for ending the process.”

“Probably a good giver, too, huh?  Doctors make money, maybe Hites misses his ten percent.  They tithe, don’t they, Lew?”

“Who does?”

“Good Christians.”

“How do I know what they do?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re not the church-going type, are you?  Alright, Hites has given you a couple hundred bucks, and you feel like you gotta go through the motions.  That it?”  Her eyes narrowed.  “You don’t think you’re going to solve a case the real cops haven’t, do you?”

I squelched the surprising stab of embarrassment and anger that welled up out of nowhere at her emphasis on the word real.   Letting the emotion drain out of my body—I could almost feel it, for some reason, flowing out of my fingertips and down toward the floor—I stared back at her narrow eyes with my own dead ones.  She held my stare for twenty seconds and then smiled.  “You still got the cop stare, Lew.  You always had a great look.  You haven’t lost it.”

“Nice to know.  Will you introduce me?”

“You know it’s against regulations to let a civilian see that file.”

“Did I ask you to show me a file?  I asked for an introduction.”  I stood.

“Calm down, Lew, calm down.  I’m just advising you of the regulations.  I’m a cop.  It’s what I do.”

I took a breath, blew it out.  “Yeah, alright.  So where’s Keeler?”

She stood.  “Come on,” she said.

She led me through the room.  There were maybe two-dozen desks crammed into a room designed to hold half that many.  Most of them had movable partition walls around them, creating workspaces larger than some phone booths.  Most of the cubicles that I could see were unoccupied, but there were a couple of detectives talking on phones, and one typing at a computer keyboard.  She typed with two fingers, and every third keystroke or so was the backspace.  Each time she hit it, she swore under her breath.

One of the cops on a phone was Keeler.  He was young and black, and looked younger.  He wore his hair trimmed close to his head.  He wore a crisply starched white shirt, navy slacks, a shiny black leather belt, and a bright red tie with yellow and blue cubes on it.  He had a shiny metallic nine-millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster under his left arm.  I couldn’t see his shoes, but I was willing to bet they gleamed with fresh polish.  His teeth, too.  He hung up as we neared his desk.

“Thom.” Audra pronounced it right when she was talking to his face. “Meet Special Agent Llewellyn Locke, with the FBI out of Raleigh.”  If I’d been chewing gum, I would have swallowed it.  “He’s working on a Medicare fraud case, thinks there may be some connection with the Angelico murder.”

“Pleasure, sir,” Keeler said as he stood up to shake my hand.  “Anything I can do for the FBI, you know.  Glad to help.  I hope there is a connection, we’re pretty much hitting brick walls.  I have the file right here.”  He picked it up from the corner of his desk and handed it to me.  There was an in-out box set on his desk, a round pencil holder with six perfectly sharpened pencils, a computer monitor, a keyboard, and a picture of a girl who looked to be about sixteen.  Tom wore a thick gold wedding band and a cheap digital watch with a plastic band.

“Thank you, Detective,” I said, taking the file.  “Where can I…?”

Keeler looked like he had swallowed my gum.

“Oh, geez, sure, I’m sorry.  Here, take my desk.  I’ll work over there at Brieaddy’s.  He’s off till Friday.”  I glanced at Audra, whose eyes glinted with what would have been merriment had it not been so tinged with evil.

“That’s okay.  I’ll sit at Brieaddy’s desk,” I said.  “How long have you been on the force?”

“Almost three years,” he replied.

“Keeler just made detective,” Audra said.  “Angelico’s your first murder, isn’t it, Thom?”

He nodded several times.  “Yes, sure is.”

“Leads?”

Keeler shook his head.  “No, sir, not really.  None we haven’t followed up, I mean.  Plenty of suspects.  Even thought it might be suicide.  There were five or six people with possible motives, some with opportunity, but no hard evidence against any of them.  Whenever we look at someone, nothing seems to go anywhere.”

I nodded.  “Who do you like for it?”

He shrugged.  “That’s the problem.  I don’t like anybody for it.  No one liked him, but no one hated him enough to want him dead, either.”

“Someone did,” Audra said.

I nodded, moving over to the desk of the absent Brieaddy.  “Well, let me see what you’ve got.”  I sat down, opened the file, and began to read.

There were photographs of the deceased as he had been found, in the chair in his office, slumped over his desk.  If his eyes hadn’t been open, he might have looked like he was napping.  And if I hadn’t known better.  Cause of death was listed as gunshot (other), which meant that the wound was not, apparently, self-inflicted, that the shooter was unknown, and that the weapon in question had not been found.  Three .22 caliber bullets had been recovered from the victim’s chest.  From the angle of the entry wounds, it appeared that Angelico had been in the process of standing, or had been standing behind his desk and leaning slightly forward, when the first bullet hit.  The second and third bullet appeared to have been fired from slightly closer range—two to three feet, as opposed to three to five for the initial shot—and in rapid succession.  He had died more or less immediately at his desk at approximately noon, three Saturdays ago.

The medical examiner, a thorough type, had noted Angelico’s size (five-eleven, one-ninety) in both English and metric measurements, for no reason I could fathom.  The investigating officer, Keeler, expressed the opinion in his report that the killer or killers were most likely known to the victim, as he was meeting them in his office on a Saturday at lunch time.  For a cop in an official report, that was as dramatic an example of going out on a limb as I’d ever seen.  He’d learn.

There was plenty of other information in the file, most of it useless.  I took notes on it anyway.  I wouldn’t know what was useless until I had read it, and maybe not then, so I read it all.  About halfway through, Keeler asked me deferentially if I wanted coffee.

“Thank you, Thom.  And you don’t need to tread softly around me.  I’m not an FBI agent.”

“But Detective Long said…”

“Yeah, I know.  I’m a private detective.  I’ve been hired to look into this murder.  I wanted to see the file, and Long didn’t have a problem with that, but she thought you might.”

“It’s against regulations to release files to civilians.”

“I know,” I said.  “I was a cop once.  Long was my partner.  That’s why she didn’t mind me seeing the file.  But this way, if there’s any flack, she won’t get in trouble, because you released it to me.”

His face was very red.  “But she told me you were an FBI agent.” 

“Did you ask for ID?”

He mumbled a curse and sat down heavily.  “No, of course not.”

“Relax, Thom.  There’s not going to be any trouble.  Long was covering her butt, but mostly she’s just enjoying putting one over on you.”

“Yeah, they all do.  I’m new, and everyone knows I got promoted because my uncle’s on the city council.”  He cursed again, but the word didn’t match his voice.  His voice was young, innocent, almost petulant.  If that didn’t change soon, it wouldn’t matter who his uncle was.

“Just let me finish reading the file.  I’m halfway through anyway.  After I leave, tell Long that I had her file pulled from personnel because I wanted to look it.  Tell her that personnel released it because you told them that I’m an FBI agent.”

A smile grew slowly on Thom’s face.  “Yeah, I can do that.  That’s a good idea, Mr. Locke.”

“Call me Lew, and no problem.”

“Okay.  Okay, I like it.  You won’t tell anyone I gave you the file?”

“No, of course not.”

He went back to his paperwork, humming something I didn’t recognize, occasionally chuckling.  “You know,” he said when I finished, “I think you’re going to request the chief’s personnel file, too.”

“Yes, I believe I am.”

Long was on the phone as I left.  I caught her eye and gave her a cavalier salute.  She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and said, “Buy me lunch sometime, you cheap bastard.”  It was just after eleven, and I’d picked up a check from my client that morning and cashed it, so I could have bought her lunch today.  But I had things to do, so I nodded and waved and walked out the door.

 

 

Chapter Four

 

After taking my leave of Thom Keeler, I made the ten minute drive directly to Dr. Angelico’s office on Yanceyville Street, in one of the new medical complexes that seemed to have sprung up along the East Wendover Avenue corridor in the wake of the merger of the Wesley Long and Moses Cone hospitals.  It occurred to me that I couldn’t really remember a time when there weren’t uniform shops and specialist’s clinics and the big, white Medical Arts building on this side of town.  I had gotten the address from Keeler’s file, and it wasn’t a difficult building to find.  It was finished in red brick and displayed all the daring architectural innovation of a Libby Hill Seafood, with less parking.

The rain still fell, and I walked quickly from my car to the heavy glass door of the office.  The door must have been a sort of triage; anyone healthy enough to pull the massive thing open couldn’t be all that desperate for medical attention.  I didn’t much like doctors and hospitals, and the offices of Doctors Angelico and McGiver weren’t likely to change my opinion.  I wondered when McGiver would have the sign changed.  Sam Spade would have had it done weeks ago, but if he’d been around the murderer would have been brought to justice at about the same speed.

In the office two young blonde women, one of whom looked perhaps old enough to drink and the other to consent, in North Carolina anyway, typed on computer keyboards behind a counter while an older brunette spoke into a cordless telephone.  They all wore white jackets over pastel jumpsuits.  Another phone rang repeatedly, but no one seemed to care.  Three women in the waiting room were reading, or pretending to.  I stood at the counter and waited to be noticed.

After about a minute, the older blonde girl looked up and said, “May I help you?”  Her name tag said “Melissa,” but I would’ve given odds that she preferred to be called Missy.  Her makeup matched her jewelry, which matched her jumpsuit.  I couldn’t see her shoes from where I was standing, but I was betting on a match there, too.  Her face looked hard to me, for no reason I could put my finger on.  She was almost pretty, but her makeup, while expertly color-coordinated, was inexpertly applied, and gave the impression of a background either living or working in a house that had been assembled on a factory line in Richfield.

I had taken a couple dozen business cards from my desk that morning and put them in my overcoat pocket to replace the few that had remained there, wrinkled and discolored, of the first couple dozen I had first put in that pocket two years earlier.  The cards said “Llewellyn Locke.  Private Investigator.  Security Consultant.”  They also listed my old telephone number and address.  I had crossed out the old telephone number and written in the new one above it.  Even though I’d resisted the urge to ink in a self-portrait beside my name, they weren’t the most professional looking cards I’d ever seen.  But they got the job done.  Which seemed somehow fitting.  I took one out now and handed it to her.

“I’m a private detective looking into Doctor Angelico’s murder.  I’d like to talk to someone about that.”

Melissa chewed her lower lip briefly before turning to the brunette.  “Mar?”

Mar, whose nametag said “Maria,” had overheard.  Without bothering to cover the mouthpiece, she said, “He’ll need to speak with Dr. McGiver,” and went back to listening to the phone.

Melissa turned back to me.  “You’ll need to speak with Dr. McGiver,” she said with a smile.  She was relieved that the decision would not be hers.  I suspected that she often felt that same relief in Maria’s presence.  “Please have a seat.  I’ll let him know you’re here.”

“Thank you.”  I sat and sifted briefly through the reading material.  It ran to dated People and In Style magazines, with an issue or two of Guideposts thrown in as some sort of afterthought.  I didn’t see anything that wouldn’t eventually lead to tooth decay, so I folded my arms and watched the three nurses or whatever they were behind the counter.  Melissa glanced at me occasionally, only to look nervously away when she saw me looking.  Maria didn’t appear to remember my presence in the waiting room, although I suspected that was an illusion.  The young one looked up only once, saw me looking, looked back, smiled, and returned unhurriedly to her data entry.  She was the most striking of the three.  For a little kid, I mean.

After about five minutes of my watching them watch me watching them, a short balding man with a substantial gut, wire-rimmed glasses and a gray goatee opened a door to the right of the counter and said “Mr. Locke?”  I stood, walked to him, and shook his outstretched hand.  “I’m Bob McGiver.  Come on back and we’ll talk.”

He led me through the door and down the corridor.  The forest green carpet and green walls made the hallway seem dark despite an abundance of fluorescent light.  The walls were hung with prints that appeared to be the unsigned work of children.  We passed the closed doors of two examination rooms.  McGiver walked slightly hunched over, and looked back at me several times, as if to make sure that I wasn’t getting ready to hit him from behind with something.  The third time he did it, I turned around too, but of course there was nothing behind me.  Nothing I could see, anyway.

When we got to his office, he offered me the patient’s chair.  A television and a VCR were built into the wall opposite the door.  There were two windows, which were wide and not very tall, like the good Doctor himself, and took up only the top couple of feet of the wall, like the windows in the basement of the house Rachel and I had rented just after we’d been married.  No one could look into McGiver’s office from the outside, and the combination of the smallish windows, the rich carpet, and the richly stained wood of his desk and shelves seemed oppressively dark for a healer’s inner sanctum.  Perfect for a has-been cop, though—I thought about taking some notes, but decided against it when I thought about what the desk alone must have cost.

A diploma from the Bowman Gray School of Medicine hung on the wall.  McGiver also had a BS in economics, of all things, from BYU.  The books on the shelves behind his desk all appeared to be related to the practice of medicine or the management of a medical office.  I would have had difficulty pronouncing some of the titles.  I wondered which of them he had read.

I looked at McGiver while he examined my business card.  As a trained detective, I deduced that Melissa must have given it to him.  Unless I had given him one and forgotten, which was not outside the realm of possibility, although I’d only had a few short pops from the bottle of Early Times in my glove compartment on the way over.  After reading the front, he turned it over and read the back.  There wasn’t anything written on the back, so it didn’t take long.  When he finished, he put it on his desk blotter and looked at me with his silent, fearful gray eyes.

I looked back without saying anything while he hoped I would begin the conversation.  The fear in the room was tangible, but since I wasn’t the one experiencing it, it didn’t bother me.  I also didn’t have anywhere else to be, so I figured I could wait him out.  I was right; he gave in shortly.

“Well, Mr. Locke, what can I tell you?”  He smiled at me, the indulgent, slightly condescending smile of a patient professional with a good bedside manner.  They much have workshops on that smile in medical school.

I wasn’t sure yet what he could tell me, so I said nothing.

“You wish to discuss Dr. Angelico’s unfortunate, uh, circumstances, I assume.”  I never knew a doctor who was comfortable with the word death.  And how did he know it was unfortunate?  Maybe Angelico considered it a favor.  It had turned into a thousand dollar favor for me.

“I think you know what I wish to discuss,” I said.  I didn’t know what I was talking about, but that was nothing new.  I said it along with the hard cop look I had used on Long earlier and McGiver wilted like a party hat in a sauna.

“I suppose I do,” he said.  “Actually, I’m somewhat relieved.  Ever since I spoke to Detective Keeler about Ginny, I’ve been waiting for someone to come.  Even while he was asking me all those questions, I thought, he must know.  How could he not know?  Why would he ask me about Ginny if he didn’t know?  The suspense has been murder.”  His hands kept moving to the business card on his blotter, adjusting it to the same parallels as the blotter, which I noticed lay at precisely in the center of his desk, its front side evenly paralleling the edge with perhaps a half-inch margin.  There was a photograph of a young woman and her husband set on the left hand corner at exactly a forty-five degree angle, and another of an older woman on the opposite corner, set at a symmetrical angle.  I knew from Keeler’s file that McGiver had one child, a daughter, and that she was married.  I also knew his wife was dead, but I knew that about a lot of people.

“Interesting choice of words, Doc,” I said.

“What, murder?  Well, I said it.  I won’t take it back.  Lord knows how often I thought about it.  Sometimes I wish I had done it.  Isn’t that horrible?”  He didn’t ask it as if he really believed it.  “I’m supposed to be a doctor, a healer.  I’m not supposed to think about killing.  Especially not a colleague.”

“Especially not them,” I said.  “Tell me about it.”

He sighed, adjusted my business card again without looking at it.  His eyes wandered around the room as he spoke, only occasionally lighting on my face, usually looking vaguely downward, as he played with my card on the desktop.  If he didn’t stop it soon, I was going to take it away from him.

“I’ve been seeing Ginny for a few months, since June or July, I guess.  She came to me after Abel started going to that church.  I assume you know about that?  The church, I mean?”  I nodded.  “Abel had been writing her Valium prescriptions, and she had developed a habit.  That’s not uncommon, you know, among doctors and their wives.  Not uncommon at all, although I’m sure as an ex-policeman you must find that horrible, too.  Ginny used some other prescription drugs also, but primarily Valium.  When Abel found religion, or whatever you want to call it, he cut her off.  He wouldn’t write her a prescription for ibuprofen.”

“I thought you could get that over the counter.”

“You can, it’s been legal for years.  It was a figure of speech.  Perhaps I should have said penicillin.  I just meant something harmless, something not addictive.”

I nodded.  I was sorry I’d opened my mouth.

“Anyway,” he said, “she came to me.  We’d known each other for years, of course.  Since Abel and I joined practices, which was in 1990, but of course you know that already, they came to our home for dinner occasionally, and we to their home, and so forth.  We weren’t friends, not exactly, but we were social.  Or we tried to be.”  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.  “She was desperate.  She cried.  Here, in the office.  Abel was delivering a baby.  I keep a bottle of Valium here, although I rarely use them, and I offered her the bottle.  She took them, and she was very…grateful.  Too grateful.  My wife died six years ago.  I flattered myself that Ginny found me attractive, but I think I always knew that I was being used.  I guess I didn’t much care.  I mean, you know what she looks like.”

“No, I don’t.”

“But you must, how else could you have known?  She must have told you.”  I shook my head.  “Did she…did she tell someone else?”  I kept shaking it, until something like a smile appeared on McGiver’s face.  “I’ll be,” he said.  “The guilty man flees where no man pursues, eh?  You didn’t know a thing about it, did you?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well, aren’t you horrible?”  He shook his head slowly, still smiling to himself.  “You know, I’m not sorry I told you, though I suppose this makes me a suspect.  Or more of a suspect, perhaps.  Is that the correct expression?  A stronger suspect, perhaps?”  He shrugged.  “No matter, I suppose.  Regardless, I’ve been waiting to tell someone.

“The thing is, shortly after the first time, Abel came to me and told me that he’d been, oh, skimming, I suppose you’d say.  He covered it very easily—just reimbursed himself for things out of our office accounts for things which he had either never purchased or purchased only for personal use.  Nothing huge, I never would have noticed—he did all the bookkeeping.  I don’t believe I’ve looked at the books more that twice since we started.  Regardless, he wanted to pay it back.  With interest.  He asked me what interest rate I thought was fair.”  He shook his head again.  “And I thought, here I am, sleeping with your wife two or three times a week.  How am I supposed to pay you back for that?”

“And now it doesn’t matter, because he’s dead.”  There had been nothing about either the affair or the embezzlement in Keeler’s file.

“Exactly,” he said.  He signed, took his hands off my business card—finally—and sat back in his chair.  “Funny, how relieved I feel.  I’m not Catholic, but maybe they have something with their confession.  Are you Catholic, Mr. Locke?”

“No, sir.  But they say that confession is good for the soul.”

“I’ve heard that, of course.  It seems to be good for mine.”

“A couple more questions, Doctor.”

“Sure.  I suppose I’ve nothing to hide now.”  He smiled.

“What was Angelico skimming for?  I mean, what did he need the money for?  Did he have a drug habit himself, anything like that?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.  Abel was a diabetic, you know.  He couldn’t afford to mess up his blood chemistry any further than it actually was.  I understand that he was quite a drinker in college, and some sort of complications related to it.  He wasn’t a teetotaler by any means, but I’ve never seen him have more than, perhaps, two or three drinks, and always with food.”

“Was he a gambler?  A womanizer?”

“I really don’t know.  As I said, Abel and I were not exactly friends.  If he had a, whatever, a girlfriend, I don’t think he would have come running to tell me anymore than I would run to tell him.”

“Yeah, well, if he had a girlfriend, it probably wasn’t your wife.”

“TouchJ,” he said.  “Although I don’t suppose that rules Caroline out, does it?  People will do the most horrible things.”  He shivered dramatically.  “But I don’t really see Abel as a necrophiliac, do you?  Of course, you didn’t know him, did you?  I know that his marriage wasn’t particularly happy.  I think his new-found piety actually made it worse.  But did he have a girlfriend?”  He raised his hands and shrugged elaborately, Jack Benny style.

“He was a diabetic.  Was he regular in his insulin shots or whatever?”

“Yes, very.  Doctors are often the worst patients, you know, but not Abel.  As I said, I think he had some close calls in college, or perhaps med school, and once he had learned that lesson he never seems to have forgotten in.  He followed a strict dietary regimen, and so forth, and he followed it to the letter.  He took two insulin injections per day, one in the late morning and another before retiring.  Regular as clockwork.”

“So it would have been relatively easy for someone who knew him to predict when he would be taking his next injection.”

“Absolutely.”

“The medical examiner said that the dose of atropine he got probably wouldn’t have killed another man his size, or wouldn’t have killed Angelico if he’d had his insulin.  Any thoughts on that?”

He shook his head.  “Not really.  Not my field, you know.  Abel had a sensitive system, though.  He would often react strongly to relatively small doses of medicine.  He never took more than one Tylenol, for instance.  He had little tolerance for drink—although that’s one that comes with experience, I think.  Reacted badly to vitamin C.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he suffered the effects of the atropine more than others might.”

“Alright, Doc, that’s all for now, I guess.  I need to talk with your staff.”

“Certainly, but please try to be brief.  We are still trying to rearrange Doctor Angelico’s patient schedule, and our phone has been ringing off the hook.  You will, I assume, be discreet?”  He looked at me hopefully.  I wondered briefly what he’d offer to keep me quiet if I pushed.

“Your secret is safe with me, Doc.”

 

Chapter Five

 

Maria Douglass had been the office manager at Angelico-McGiver since 1991, following a series of other managers who had each worked for a month or less since the office opened in 1990.  She was an LPN, but had realized early in her career that her talents lay more in administration.  I met with her in what had been Angelico’s office.  Sitting behind the desk seemed somehow disrespectful, so we both sat in patient’s chairs.  Her pink jumpsuit clashed with the crimson highlights in her dark hair.

“Who wanted him dead?” I asked her.

“I thought that’s what you were supposed to be finding out,” she said.  “Mind if I smoke?”

“You can smoke in here?”

“No.  But they can’t fire me and I’m dying of cancer anyway, so I’m a little past caring.”

I nodded.  “Cancer,” I said.

“Yeah.  Found out last week.  Started in the kidneys, but it’s metastasized.  That means it’s spread.”  She dug an almost pristine pack of Virginia Slims out of her purse, shook one out, and lit it.  It smelled like sulfur and brimstone.  Or how I had always imagined sulfur and brimstone smelled, anyway.

“I know what it means.”

She shrugged.  “So, I have tumors in my lungs, stomach, intestine.”

“How long have you got?”

“A week, maybe.  Maybe a year.  No one knows.  There are treatments, but most of them are worse than the cancer and none of them are going to cure me.  So I’ll work until the pain gets so bad that the drugs don’t work anymore and then I’ll check into the hospital and then I’ll gather my kids around me and I’ll lay there quietly and die.”  There was a tear in her eye, and she swore, briefly, as she wiped it away.  “Sorry,” she said.  “They say that attitude will be a significant factor in how long I have left, in which case I’ll probably die before I finish this cigarette.”  She inhaled on it deeply, no doubt seeking to cheat the reaper.  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.  What did you want to know?”

“Who would want to kill Angelico.”

“Yeah, well, there were a few.  I mean, he was a nice guy, always respectful, I always liked him.  A lot of doctors talk down to their staff, but not him.  He was always respectful.”

“But there were a few?”

“Sure, everybody’s got a few, right?  Doctor McGiver probably wanted to kill him after Doctor Angelico told him he’d been stealing.  He’d never do it, though.  Doctor McGiver thinks he’s a tough guy, been around, you know what I mean?  But he hasn’t.  He was probably the toughest guy at medical school, but the junior high kids where I grew up would eat him for lunch.  Half the time I think he’s gay, the way he talks and everything.”

“Doesn’t mean he can’t be tough.”

“No, I guess not.  When I first met him I figured he was just in the closet, you know?  I mean, he was married and all, and I just figured it was a front.  But after Mrs. McGiver died, he started hitting on Mrs. Angelico, I swear it was at the funeral.  I don’t think he even waited till she was in the ground yet.”

“Dr. McGiver had a thing for Mrs. Angelico?”

She shrugged.  “Still has, maybe.  I don’t pay that much attention.”

Yeah, right.  “So McGiver had at least two reasons to kill Angelico, then.”

Again the shrug.  “Sure.  But I’m not saying Dr. McGiver did it.  I don’t think he’s the type.  But you asked me who had reasons.”

“Yes, I did.  Okay, who else?”

She took a long drag and exhaled.  “His son, maybe.  He was never any good, dropped outta college.  I don’t know what happened, but they were never what you’d call close.  Doctor Angelico used to brag, like, about how much his son hated him.  He was at the funeral.  Outside, at the internment or whatever they call it, he stood there in his leather jacket and no tie and he smoked.  At the end, he flicked his cigarette butt into the grave.”  She shook her head.  “No class, you know?  I mean, his old man’s dead, he oughtta have some respect.  Between him and Doctor McGiver I almost left early.”

I nodded.  “Where you from, Maria?”

She smiled.  “New York.  I took some diction lessons in high school, lost most of the accent.  But it’s still there, isn’t it?”

“No, not really.  You sound like a northerner, maybe.  Pennsylvania or the Midwest.  You don’t have a strong accent.  It’s more in your speech patterns—oughtta, outta, that kind of thing.”

“Well, whatever.  My dad got transferred down here when I was sixteen.”

“So that was two years ago?”  Always the charmer.

She gave me a look.

“Yeah, right.  Try twelve.”  Actually, I would have tried fifteen or twenty.  She looked old and tired for twenty-eight.  Unless you judged her by my standard.  I was thirty-one, with enough salt mixed in with the pepper to give me a late thirties or early forties look.  By my standard, she looked, well, twenty-eight.

“Did Angelico often work on Saturdays?”

“Once a month, maybe, if that’s often.  I mean, he delivered babies, of course, if he was on call.  But he didn’t come in to the office.”

“Did he see patients?”

“On Saturdays?  Here?”  Maybe I hadn’t phrased the question clearly.  “No, not unless there was an emergency.  Or if it was a friend.  Sometimes he’d do physicals or insurance exams for friends.  And employees—we each got an annual physical from either Doctor Angelico or Doctor McGiver, and they were sometimes on Saturdays.”

“Did he have an appointment on the day he was murdered?”

“No.”

“Would he have made an appointment without letting you know?”

She snorted.  “No way.  Doctor Angelico checked with me every twenty minutes.  He was a very smart man, but he had no memory for schedules.  The only reason his wife ever got flowers was because I knew their anniversary and I ordered them.”

“Anything else you want to tell me?”

“No, but I’ve got a question.  I thought there was a chance he killed himself.  I mean, I don’t really see him committing suicide, but I thought it was a possibility.”

“I guess it still is,” I said.  “But I don’t think it’s likely.  He must have had access to other drugs.  Why atropine?  Why not write his wife a prescription for sleeping pills, fill it, and swallow the bottle?  Why put atropine in an insulin vial, and then shoot himself with it?”

“You know, as silly as it sounds, I don’t think he would have abused a prescription drug to kill himself.  When he joined that church, he got really sensitive about that kind of thing.  Prescription drug abuse and all that.  Really started reviewing what he was giving his patients, no more automatic refills.”

“Prescription drug abuse might be a sin,” I said.  “Same as drunkenness, I guess.  But I’m pretty sure suicide is too.”

She waved a dismissive hand at me.

“I know that, I went to Catholic school for twelve years, you don’t have to list the sins for me.  I could sit here all day listing sins and virtues.  But Doctor Angelico was funny that way.  He would latch on to a rule and stick with it no matter what.  Maybe he filled the insulin vial a while ago, and carried it around with him.  Maybe he didn’t want anyone wondering why he was carrying around atropine.”

“Would anyone have noticed if he were carrying around atropine?”

She shrugged.  “Probably not.  But who knows what he was thinking?  How straight could his thinking have been if he killed himself?”

Sometimes I thought that the suicides were the only ones thinking straight.  On the other hand, I often thought about suicide, and how straight was my own thinking?

“Okay, Maria, thanks.”  I gave her a card.  “Call if you think of anything else.”

She nodded.  “Who you want to see next?  There’s only Missy and Brandi here today.  Denise, our ultrasound tech, is off till Wednesday.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

She smiled a small conspiratorial smile.  “I’ll send Missy.  Have fun.”

Missy Little was twenty-one and so full of her own loveliness that there didn’t seem to be room for much else.  She wore her straight blonde hair long.  Her lips shone with gloss.  She wore sky blue eye shadow and glittery sky blue nail polish to match her sky blue jumpsuit, and sky blue plastic earrings in the shape of ribbon pasta hanging almost down to her shoulders.  She looked like a clown college dropout.  She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to murder Doctor Angelico.  She couldn’t imagine him wishing to kill himself.  She couldn’t imagine him being careless enough to make any sort of fatal error.

“Think he might’ve died of natural causes sooner or later?” I asked.

“Huh?”

Brandi was another matter.  She was eighteen, and beautiful, but not in front of a mirror.  Her beauty required another perspective, someone to look for the intellect and the passion and the promise hidden under the surface.  She seemed somehow to vibrate with the tension between the innocence of youth and the corruption of original sin.  I was too old to be attracted to her, so I decided after some consideration that I wouldn’t be.  Her hand was warm and small in mine, but her grip was surprisingly firm.

“Who would want to kill Doctor Angelico?” I asked her.  Once I find a good conversation starter, I like to stick with it.  Someone must know, and I figured if I asked enough people, someone would tell me.  There couldn’t be much more than a third of a million people in Guilford County, and a number of those were likely to be preschoolers and shut-ins who were very unlikely to know who would want to kill Doctor Angelico.  I could to ask them last.

“The usual suspects, I guess,” she said.  “Wife, mistress, business partner.”

“Did Angelico have a mistress?”

“I don’t know.  You’re the detective.”  She smiled at me, a little playfully.

“Thanks for reminding me.  Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

“Right.”  She was chewing gum, and she blew a big pink bubble at me.  “How do you get to be a detective, anyway?”

“How did you get to be a nurse?”

“I didn’t.  I just work in the office.  Just started last month.  I’m a freshman at UNCG.”

“What are you studying?”

“English and Deaf Ed.  I want to teach high school.  I just work here for spending money.  My parents pay tuition and all that.  But I like to have some cash around, not that I ever do.  So when my cousin said she could get me a job here, I took it.  Mostly data entry, but it helps me practice my typing, at least.  I thought I’d study when it was quiet, but it’s never quiet.”  Her short, streaked hair was pulled back away from her face and held in place with translucent blue clips in the shape of tiny butterflies.  Her ears were pierced, but the holes were empty.

“Don’t let Missy see those butterflies,” I said.

“My butterflies?”  She moved her hand to touch them, but stopped midway.  “Oh, because they’re blue?  Yeah, Missy always does that.  Has three different color jumpsuits, and always has eye shadow and nails to match.  Toenails, too—did you notice?  And earrings.”

“I don’t think I looked at her feet.”

She folded her arms and gave me a more penetrating look than I would have expected from a mere child.

“You looked,” she said.  “What kind of shoes was she wearing?”

“Light blue, short heel, open toe,” I said.  “Light blue polish on her toenails.”

“I knew you noticed.  You haven’t stopped looking at everything since you walked in the front door.”

“I was being modest.”

“Maybe you should give it up.  It doesn’t seem to suit you.”  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just looked at her.  She met my gaze steadily, her eyes thoughtful and animated.  She blew another bubble at me.  After a few seconds, while I was still trying to think of something to say, she winked at me.

I laughed out loud.  For the first time in a long, long time.

“Somewhere along the line,” I said, “I lost control of this interrogation.”

“Well, if I’d known it was supposed to be an interrogation, I would have taken it more seriously.  I thought we were just talking.  Maybe you’d better try again later.  Buy me dinner or something.  See if I’m more accommodating.”

“I’m too old for you.”

“You don’t really believe that,” she said, “or you would have said that I was too young for you.”

“I’m married.”  I took a deep breath and managed to get the smile off my face.  Brandi made a gesture with her head that didn’t seem to convey anything but an acknowledgement of the fact that I had spoken.   “I’m married,” I said again.  “We’re not together, exactly, but I’m married.  And you are too young for me.  Darn it.”

“Well, then,” she said.  She was still looking at me with some sort of appraisal.  “If that’s it, I’ll get back to work.  I’m leaving early today—I’m moving off campus in a couple of days with a girlfriend; I have to pack my stuff—and I need to do some things before I go.”  She stood.  “You know, you should laugh more.  It suits you better than modesty.”

I smiled a little and nodded.  “Call me if you think of anything.”

“You, too.”

“If I think of anything?”

“Right.  It’s Pignatellio.”

“What is?”

“My last name.” She spelled it for me.  “Got it?”

“I got it.”

“Good.  I’m in the book.”  She blew a final bubble at me as she left.  I heard it pop as she walked down the hall.

 

Chapter Six

 

I drove along what I still considered the new Bryan Boulevard, although it was two or three years old, and thought about what I knew.  It didn’t take long; I didn’t know very much.  I only had an AM radio in my car, and the listening choices ran to local talk shows and gospel music; I turned it off.  It was raining hard enough that my windshield wipers had trouble keeping up, and an occasional gust of wind blew my car toward the left side of the road.  The passenger side window leaked.  The steering wheel shook slightly in my hands, no doubt warning me about the tires or the alignment or something.  The North Carolina inspection sticker had expired in September, and I didn’t have air conditioning.  But the heat worked, and it was on full blast.

It was almost two when I turned off Bryan Boulevard at the Inman Road exit, and soon arrived in the Cardinal, one of the older of several Piedmont neighborhoods to have been built around golf courses.  The houses were large, the yards were not.  It had been built in the county to avoid city taxes, near the airport to prevent annexation.  So far the plan had worked, except that the airport was planning to add a third runway to accommodate Federal Express, which would involve condemning a section of the Cardinal and subjecting the rest of it to substantially increased airport noise.  There had been some debate in the News & Record, none of which I had read.  I was likely neither to move into the Cardinal nor to have need of Federal Express.  Or the airport for that matter.

I drove past the golf club.  They have a bar, but you have to be a member to drink there.  To become a member, another member has to recommend you.  The only person I knew who lived in the Cardinal was a CPA whose daughter I had arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in 1996.  I didn’t even know if he still lived there.  I took a couple of sips from the bottle I keep in the car.  It was quicker than waiting for membership, and cheaper.  Probably mixed myself a better drink, too.  Take that, Cardinal.

The Angelicos, or what was left of them, lived in a townhouse off of Cardinal Ridge Road, with a view of the seventeenth fairway.  The lawn was as green as the golf course, though a different shade, and lushly landscaped.  I didn’t know the names of any of the plants, except for a large magnolia tree just outside the door.  The walkway was covered with its thick, wet leaves.  I knew someone would be along before they began to decay.  The rain had slowed, but the wind remained strong.  It smelled clean, but carried the promise of more rain.  I held on to my hat.

The woman who opened the door when I rang the bell was not unattractive, but neither was she the stunner the Doctor McGiver had given me reason to expect.  She wore some make-up, which was neither heavy nor artfully applied.  Her hair was brown with some highlights and some streaks of gray.  It was not long, but it was disheveled.  She had it pulled up into a small bun on the back of her head.  Her eyes were dark brown, her lips too full.  There were deep lines between her eyebrows and at the corners of her mouth.  She wore small silver square earrings.  She was thin, but not conditioned.  More like malnourished.  I knew why.  She was a drunk.  I’d been one long enough to recognize it.

“Yes?”

            I handed her a card.  It took her a moment to focus on it.  “I’m investigating your husband’s death.”

            “Uh huh.  What about it?”

            “I’d like to know who killed him.  I assume you would also.  May I come in and ask you a few questions?”

            She turned to look behind her, as if wondering what there was in the house that would attract me inside, or perhaps what she didn’t want me to see.  Eventually she shrugged, opened the door wider, and backed up to allow me in.  She shut the door, turned, and walked down the hall into the kitchen without a word.  She had offered to take neither my hat nor my coat; I took them off and hung them on a brass coat rack behind the door, where they joined a single umbrella which appeared unused.

I followed her into the kitchen.  She was pouring vodka and orange juice in equal proportions into a tall glass.  She added two ice cubes, then swallowed about a fourth of the drink.

“So, who hired you to do this?” she asked me.  The drink seemed to add some force to her speech, although it couldn’t have hit her yet.  Nor did I have any reason to believe it was her first of the day.  “I thought the police still had the file open.”

“They do.  But they have a lot of other files open, too.  Pastor Hites hired me.”

“Oh, God,” she said.  “Those bastards.”

“Do you have any thoughts on who might have killed your husband?”

“I’m sick of them.  Every day, someone comes.  Two of them, usually.  They bring casseroles, big frozen lasagnas, flowers.  They ask if I need anything.  They ask if I’m eating, do I need some help around the house, how are the kids.”  She sat down on a stool near her drink.  She hadn’t bothered to put the orange juice away.

“Probably just trying to be helpful.”

“Helpful, my foot, honey.  Buncha nosy busybodies is what they are.  They’re my kids, not theirs.  Mine.  They have no right.”

I nodded.  “Any thoughts about who killed your husband?”

“Think they’re better than everyone.  ‘Cause they go to church and sing and whatever else it is they do.  Hypocrites.”

“I understand your husband had stopped prescribing Valium for you.”

“That’s right.  That’s absolutely right.  Hites told him to.  Abel did everything Hites told him to.  He’d do anything any of them told him to.”  Her drink was almost gone already.

“Uh huh.  I also understand that you were having an affair with Dr. McGiver.”  I said it neutrally, without accusation.  Just trying to confirm what everyone already knew.

“Holier than thou busybodies.  That’s what they are.  Holier than thou.”  She had hit upon a phrase she liked.  She chanted it softly, like a mantra, while she poured herself another drink.  She left the ice out this time, adding an ounce or so of orange juice to six ounces of vodka.  I considered warning her about the dangers of scurvy, but I refrained.

“Is your daughter here?”

She looked up at me with wide eyes, as if surprised to find me still there.  “Not my daughter anymore, no sir.  Ran off and left me.  Just like her…her…”

“Her brother?”

Her eyes began slowly to roll up into the back of her head.  I knew what was coming, and I moved quickly to catch her as she fell off the stool.  “Why would anyone want to leave a charmer like you?” I asked her.  I picked her up like a newlywed and crossed the threshold into the living room.  I saw a love seat and a pair of matching leather recliners, but nothing that looked very comfortable for sleeping.  Not that an uncomfortable sleeping surface was likely to wake her up in the near future.

I carried her up the narrow staircase and found her bedroom.  The bed was unmade.  I put her in it, pulled off her slippers, and pulled a comforter up over her.  Something made me brush the hair away from her face with my hand, and as I did so she mumbled something.  I leaned over to hear her.

“Holier than thou,” she muttered sleepily.

I don’t think she was talking to me.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth.  I searched the place.  I wasn’t as thorough as I could have been, but I gave it a pretty good toss.  I didn’t think that Virginia Angelico would notice that I’d been through her things, if she remembered me at all.  On the other hand, I didn’t care whether Virginia Angelico knew that I had gone through her things, so while I was not wantonly destructive, I didn’t take any great pains to put things back exactly as I had found them.

I found some Jack Daniels in a kitchen cabinet, and Diet Coke in the refrigerator.  I made myself a weak drink with lots of ice and sipped it as I looked.  I didn’t know what I was looking for, so I couldn’t know whether I found it.  I looked for a long time at a picture of the Angelico family that appeared about ten years old.  The two kids smiled into the camera, wearing their Sunday best for the photographer.  Ginny’s smile was blinding, and Angelico’s was confident and professional.  They looked happy.

I wondered what the hell had happened.  Maybe nothing had.  Maybe the happiness had never really been there.  Maybe the photographer had airbrushed it in.

I knew from the police file that Louis Angelico, the son, worked the midnight to eight shift at an adult book store on Bessemer Avenue.  It was just after two o’clock now.  I decided to go home for a real drink and a nap.

There was a message on my answering machine when I got to my apartment.  It was from Audra Long.  Most of it was swear words, only a handful of which were at all accurate.  In the background, I could hear Keeler laughing like a drunken farm boy.

 

Treasure Chest Video and News stayed open twenty-four seven three-sixty-five, and it was lit up like a department store Christmas tree when I  parked next to it twelve hours later.  There were four other cars in the lot—a rusted Pinto, a convertible Sebring, a Plymouth Volare station wagon, and a Lexus.  A bastion of egalitarianism, the Treasure Chest.  Jefferson would have been proud.

I’d had enough bourbon to put me to sleep and enough sleep to counteract the bourbon, or most of it.  My vision seemed a little fuzzy around the edges.  I got out of my car, locked it, and walked around the corner of the building to the front door, trying hard not to look like a customer.  As I opened the door, I was illuminated briefly by headlights pulling into the parking lot.  I had chosen two o’clock because I figured there would be little consumer traffic at that time, but it appeared that I had chosen their rush hour.  I should have guessed.

There were small bells on the door, which jingled as I opened and closed it.  Behind the raised counter a scrawny kid of about twenty looked up at me briefly.  He had greasy black bangs and a two-day growth of dark stubble highlighting his pale skin.  Both of his ears were pierced more than once.  He wore a torn Billy Idol tee shirt and grungy brown corduroys, and he smoked an unfiltered cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth, his head tilted back to keep the smoke out of his eyes.  The cigarette might have been laced, but I smelled only tobacco.

“Louis Angelico?” I said.

“Who wants to know?”

I turned around slowly.  There was no one else in the store.  There was door marked “bathroom” and, next to it, a hall with a sign above it that said “Private Viewing Booths—Five Dollar Minimum.  One Person Per Booth.”  The entrance to the hall was lined with multicolor flashing lights.  The lighting was dim beyond.

“That was a rhetorical question, right, Louis?  I mean, I’m the only one here.  You were just being tough, right?”

“Yeah, whatever, man.  What you want?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Okay, whatever.  Talk.”

“I’m a detective.  I’m trying to find out who killed your father.   You have any thoughts on that?”

“Thoughts?  Yeah, I got thoughts on that.  Don’t matter, thought.  Ain’t no one never gonna do nothing ‘bout it no ways.”

“Louis, cut the crap.  We both know you been to college, so stop acting like you can’t speak English, will you?  You just coined a quintuple negative, for crying out loud.  No one talks like that.  Not even in the movies.”

He smiled a little.  On the shelves behind him were hundreds of films catering to a variety of tastes, none of them mine.  Many of the titles were graphic themselves, and most of the rest were plays on the titles of popular films—as if the producer had wanted to squeeze in one more false act of creation.  The whole place smelled like stale cigarettes and sweat and frustrated, futile desire, and I already couldn’t wait to get out of there and take a shower.

“Okay,” he said, “so I get to choose whether I talk like College Boy or not.  What do you care how I talk?”

“I don’t care how you talk.  I just care that you do.”

“What about?”

“What have we been discussing here, Louis?  Someone murdered your father.  It appears that someone’s going to get away with it.  Where I grew up, you were supposed to take that kind of thing seriously.”

“You musta grew up a long way from here, then.”

You said it, kid.

A video monitor behind the counter showed the parking lot.  I could see my car, which would have made me feel more secure about leaving it out there except that even crack addicts recognized my car as a piece of junk.  I could also see that the car which had pulled in after me had parked directly behind me, lights off.  Its wipers swished the slowly accumulating rain off of the windshield intermittently.  The streetlights gave just enough illumination for me to see that there were two men in the car, and they didn’t appear to be getting out anytime soon.  I needed to hurry this up.

“I understand that there’s a silver lining here, Louis.”

“Huh?”

“Your dad had some insurance.”  I was making it up, but it seemed reasonable to assume that Angelico had had some coverage.

“Yeah, and a lot of good it does me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I wasn’t the beneficiary.  I have a half a million dollars.  In a trust fund.  I get it when I get my master’s degree.  If I don’t do that by the time I turn thirty, it goes to a scholarship fund.”  He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at me without the haze of smoke between us.  “You think I killed him, don’t you?”

“The thought had crossed my mind, Louis.  I mean, I can’t imagine you having any higher aspirations than working in this place, but anything’s possible.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not so bad.  Money’s good, believe it or not.  The owner, he can never get anyone to stay more than a month.  I told him I’d work third shift if he doubled my pay after ninety days.  He never thought I’d do it, so I’m making fourteen bucks an hour.”

“I could tell you’re in the money, Louis.”

“Yeah, the flashy wardrobe, right?  Gives me away every time.”

I handed him a card.  He said he’d call me if he thought of anything useful.  I didn’t expect to hear from him.  Ever.

I paused in the rain outside the door.  Both of the cars I was interested in—mine and the one parked behind it—were hidden by the corner of the building.  They had front-row seats from which to watch my car, but they couldn’t see the entrance to the building.  That bode poorly for their experience level, and well for my ability to outwit them.  If they were smart, they wouldn’t have left their windshield wipers on, either.  On the other hand, they weren’t walking out of a porn shop at two-thirty in the morning.

I heard footsteps, from the direction of the parking lot.  Belatedly I realized that when I opened the front door, it had thrown a rectangle of light onto the otherwise dark sidewalk.  And they might have heard the jingle bells.  Maybe these guys weren’t so dumb.  Maybe I was.

I heard only one set of footsteps.  There were other customers, and they couldn’t know who had just left.  One would stay with the car, one would come look.  I trotted as quietly as I could along the building and down the narrow alley that ran between it and an abandoned auto parts store.  The footing was uneven, but I made my way as quickly as I could in the dark.  The auto parts store was not as large as the porn shop, and I ducked behind it.  There was another small parking lot, and more light than in the alley.  I ducked behind a Dumpster and stopped to think.

I wanted to make it back to the cars before the first man did.  He’d look for me on the sidewalk, maybe take a few steps up the alley, maybe look on the other side of the auto parts store.  Then the rain would drive him back to his car.  At least, that’s how I would have done it.  I was running out of time.

I went for my guns, then realized that I was already holding them.  I didn’t remember pulling either from its holster, but I didn’t have time to ponder my automatic responses.  I ran past the mouth of the alley without looking down it—either way, there was nothing there I wanted to see.  I paused briefly at the other corner of the porn shop to look at the car, which was maybe twenty-five yards away.  There was a man behind the wheel, looking towards the front of the building, and no one else in sight.

I took a deep breath, pushed myself reluctantly off of the building, and shuffled awkwardly towards the car, trying to cover the driver and the front corner of the building with my forty-fives while simultaneously looking in every direction at once.  I wasn’t sure where the other guy was, and it made me nervous.  I had covered a little more than half the distance when the driver turned toward me and his companion rounded the corner of the building at the same time.

Everything slowed down.  I could hear my heart beating and my ragged, irregular breaths.  The fogginess was gone from my vision.  The rain had stopped, but there was some mist in the air, and if I hadn’t been distracted I could have counted the individual drops.  The streetlights reflected in dirty puddles.  I saw the dome light come on as the driver fumbled with the car door, trying to open it and step out and pull out his pistol.  I was still shuffling towards him when I saw him free his gun from his holster and I fired two shots which hit the upper right corner of his windshield, missing him by at least a foot.  I’d never been good with my left hand.  He ducked behind the car.

I heard more shots, but nothing hit me.  I squeezed off a round with my right hand without looking.  In my peripheral vision, I saw the man I shot at fall over backwards and stop moving.

I continued to advance towards the car.  I fired a couple more rounds with my left hand, poking holes in the car and keeping the driver’s head down.  When I was only a few yards away, he stood suddenly and, holding his gun in two hands like they do on TV, leaned the gun on the roof of the car for support.

I pulled two triggers, firing through the side windows and shattering the glass.  I don’t which hit him, maybe both, and he went down.  I walked slowly around the car, leveling one pistol at his chest while pointing my left hand vaguely in the direction of his fallen comrade.  He had blood all over the front of him.

“Shoulda kneeled behind the engine block,” I said.  “Better cover.”  His pistol, a nine millimeter, lay on the ground a few inches from his hand.  I kicked it away.  “Guess you’ll know next time.”

He smiled.  There was blood in his mouth.  “Ain’t gonna be a next time,” he said.  His expression turned to puzzlement.  “He said you were a drunk.”

I nodded.  “Who did?”

“Kitchens.  Bryan Kitchens.”

“I don’t know him.”

“He works for Joey Pignatellio.”

I nodded again, as if that cleared up matters any.

“When did he send you?”

He looked at me.  His eyes were glazing.

“What’s your name?” I said, trying to keep him with me.

His eyes focused a little.  “Jeff.  Clint Jefferies, but everyone calls me Jeff.”

“When did he send you?”

“You mean like, what time?”

“Right, what time.”

“Mister Kitchens called maybe eleven o’clock.  Told us to pick you up at the doc’s office.  But you’d left by the time we got there, so we went to your place and picked you up there.  We were only supposed to warn you.  To stay off the Angelico case.  We weren’t going to shoot you.”  His eyes glazed again.  “He said you were a drunk.”  Then he was gone.  There were sirens in the distance.

“I am a drunk,” I said.

 

            I spent a few hours in an interrogation room with two detectives, claiming self-defense.  I also claimed not to have talked to either of the two dead shooters, and not to know why they had made a run at me.  The cops didn’t believe any of it, or pretended not to.

A big burly detective named Peterson kept swearing at me and making subtle threats about being alone in a cell with me for a few minutes.  After the third or fourth, I told him I was married.  He didn’t get it at first, but his partner laughed.  Then Peterson understood, and his face started getting red.  I think he was ready to hit me when Audra Long showed up and listened to me tell my story again.  Then all three of them left the interrogation room.

            Audra came back alone in an hour or so.  She was carrying two cups of coffee, and she put one of them in front of me.

            “Videotape backs your story up.  Parts of the tape aren’t very clear, but what we can see matches what you’ve told us.  DA’s looking at it now.  I don’t think she’s going to press charges, but she told me to write you a citation for your expired registration and inspection sticker.”

            “You gonna write them?”

            “I look like a traffic cop to you?”

            I sipped my coffee.  “Who’s Joey Pignatellio, Aud?”

            “New York mob.  Came to town a few years back, when the DEA started cracking down on Fayetteville and the Florida-New York distribution got re-routed through Greensboro.  Why?  What’s Pignatellio got to do with this?”

“Nothing.  Just heard the name around.  Am I free to go?”

            “Yeah, I guess.  Don’t leave town, blah blah.  You know the deal.”

            “Yeah, Audra,” I said, watching her eyes for a reaction.  “I know the deal.”

            She held my stare for a few seconds before she looked away.  “Lew, I--”

            “Shut up.  You sent them after me.  They got the call at eleven.  I was still at the station looking at the file at eleven, Audra, and I was sitting next to Keeler.  You sent them after me.  You’re in Pignatellio’s pocket, Aud, and we both know it.”

            She looked at me, gaze no longer wavering, but silent.

            “You know what Internal Affairs will do with this, Aud?  How long do you think it’ll take them to find a connection between you and Pignatellio once I tell them to look?  They’ll hang you for this, and the rest of the force will supply the rope.  I may be an ex-cop, but I was your partner.”

            “Yeah, but you’re not gonna tell them, or you wouldn’t be talking to me.  So save me the speech, partner.”  She emphasized partner sarcastically.  “What do you want?”

            I stood up.

            “I’ll let you know when I decide,” I said, and walked out of the interrogation room.  I used the phone on Long’s desk to call a cab, then waited outside in the rain for it to pick me up and take me to my car.  The parking lot at the Treasure Chest was back to normal.  There might have been some new blood stains, but if there were they didn’t show on the wet pavement.

            I felt like road kill.  I needed a couple of drinks and at least one shower, several hours of sleep, some clean clothes, and a couple more drinks.  Instead, I drove back to McGiver’s office.

            I parked my car and walked to the door.  I opened it but didn’t step in.  Brandi and Missy were behind the counter.  I caught Brandi’s eye and waved her over to me.  She said something to Missy, pulled on an old-fashioned yellow slicker and joined me under the covered portico.

            “Isn’t that the same tie you wore yesterday?” she said.

            “Yeah, same everything.  I haven’t been to bed.  Some of your father’s friends came to visit them last night.  I shot them.”

            Her eyes widened.  She was wearing yellow butterflies in her hair today, and she looked younger, maybe because I felt so much older.

            “My father’s friends?”

            “Hired by a guy named Kitchens.  Works for Joey Pignatellio.”

            “Joey Pignatellio isn’t my dad.  He’s my uncle.”

            “Whatever.”

            “Why did they come visit you?  And why did you have to shoot them?”

            “There were two of them.  They both had guns.  It was a fair fight.  More than fair, actually.”

            “I never said it wasn’t.”

            “Oh, hell,” I said.  I rubbed my eyes.

            “What?”

            “Your cousin.  You said your cousin got you this job.”

            “Right, I did.  She did get me this job.  But what—”

            “Who’s your cousin?”

            “Mar.  Maria.  Maria Douglass.  You know, you met her.”

            “Is that her real name?”

            “What do you mean, is that her real name?  Of course it’s her real name.  I mean, it’s her married name, but she didn’t change it or anything.  She just never went back to using her maiden name after the divorce, I guess.”

            “What was her maiden name, Brandi?”

            She cocked her head and looked at me.  “It’s Pignatellio, of course.”

            “She’s Joey Pignatellio’s daughter.”

            “Yeah, but—”

            “Is she here?”

            “No, she’s got the day off.  More tests and things, I guess.”

            “Do you have access to employee records?”

            “What?  Yeah, sure.  I do all the data entry.  But what—”

            “Come on.”  I led her inside the building.

 

I was standing under an apartment complex stairwell, half-hidden from the blowing rain.  I knew who had killed Angelico, and I knew why, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it.  I was here to find out.

Maria Douglass pulled her car into the spot across from her apartment and turned off the engine.  She drove a Volvo, but a much newer one than mine.  That’s alright—mine had gotten me here, and it would take me away when I was done.  Her three kids got out of the car.  The two dark-haired boys, who I guessed were six and eight, each carried a bag of groceries.  The girl wasn’t much more than a toddler.  She followed her brothers, sipping purple juice from a spill-proof cup, wispy blonde hair blowing in the wet rain.  As I watched them make their way up the walkway through the gray afternoon, I realized that I knew what I was going to do, and that I had known it for a while.

I stepped out from under the steps as she approached.  She was holding two bags of groceries with her left hand while she fumbled for her keys with her right.  I walked towards her and took the bags from her before she knew I was there.  She jumped a little.

“Oh!  Mr. Locke.  You startled me.  I don’t know what you’re doing here, but thanks.”  She opened the door, and the boys ran inside.  Their sister followed, negotiating the transom carefully.  Douglass dropped her keys and her purse on a table next to the door and turned to take the groceries from me.  I ignored her, walked past her, and put the bags on the kitchen counter next to the ones the boys had placed there before running down the hall.  I could hear them talking, distantly.

“Well, come in,” she said, smiling a little.  “Thanks for the help.  Can I get you some coffee, or a soft drink?  Something?”

“You got any bourbon?”

“I don’t think so.  There might be some scotch, though.”

“That would be fine.”

I sat at a round table at one end of the L-shaped dining/living room combination.  I took off my hat and put it on the table.  There was an entertainment center on the other end, with a large TV and a VCR and a stereo.  There were several video cases on the floor in front of the TV.  Most of them were Disney.

She brought a bottle of scotch and a glass and put them on the table in front of me.  She asked if I wanted ice, and I told her no, this would be fine.  She smiled slightly and sat down across from me.

“Don’t mind if I don’t join you, do you?  It’s a little early in the day for me.  Oh, it feels good to sit down.  Ever try grocery shopping with three kids, Mr. Locke?”

“I can’t say as I have.”

“I don’t recommend it to anyone except tri-athletes.  And then only under the supervision of a physician.”

I poured a couple of fingers of scotch into the glass and drank it off.  “I know you killed Dr. Angelico,” I said.  “And I know why.”

The smile disappeared from her face, but wasn’t replaced by anything.  She just stared at me.

“It was the insurance money.  Angelico examined you and found out you had cancer.  I’m not sure when that happened, but it must have been shortly before he died.  You didn’t have a lot of life insurance—just the small policy that you got gratis as a benefit.  You probably hadn’t thought to change it after your divorce.”

She stood up, and I thought for a moment that she was either going to run or order me out of the house.  Instead, she went back into the kitchen and got another glass.  She picked up her cigarette on the way back.  After she sat down again, she poured herself a generous drink and lit a cigarette.

“You asked him to lose the test results, at least long enough for you to get additional coverage.  But he wouldn’t do it.  The old Angelico might have, but he’d recently found religion.  He wouldn’t lie about it.  Not even for you.”  I took a dramatic sip of scotch.  “So you killed him.”

“This is all an interesting theory, but I don’t see how you can prove any of it.”

“Maria, you’re not talking to Jessica Fletcher here.  This is real life.  I’ve only been looking for a couple of days, and look at all I’ve found out already.”

“You can’t prove any of it.”

“Maybe I can’t, Maria.  But the cops can.  Once I give them what I know, they’ll know where to look.  Your medical file is missing from the office, but they won’t need it.  They’ll find someone who saw you go into the office for an exam.  They’ll contact the labs your practice uses and find the record of your tests.  They’ll lock you in a room with a red-faced detective named Peterson who’ll threaten you and sweat on you until you talk.  It’s just a matter of time, Maria.”

The disembodied voices of her children carried through the thin apartment walls, sounding other-worldly.  I sipped my scotch and waited.  She took in a deep breath of air, blew it out her nose.  Her eyes were moist.

“It was for the kids,” she said.  “Their dad’s such a deadbeat.  I don’t even know where he is.  I couldn’t leave them, not to him.  I have a sister who’ll take them, but her husband teaches school and she works in a department store and they already have two kids.  They just don’t have the money.  I had to find a way to take care of them—they’re my babies.  They’re all I have.  I couldn’t just forget about them, I couldn’t just hope for the best.  Not while there was something I could do about it.”  She was crying full out now, the tears running down her face and dripping onto her blouse.  “Can you understand that?”

I nodded.  “I can understand that.  That’s why the police aren’t here.”

Suddenly, there was a new hope in her eyes.  I crushed it.

“In two days, I’m going to go to the cops and tell them everything I know,” I said.  “Unless I don’t have to.”

“I…don’t understand.”

“I’m giving you two days to confess.  Or to run, I suppose.”

“To confess?  Why would I confess?”

“Because you could change your motive, so your life insurance doesn’t get cancelled because you lied about a pre-existing condition when you increased your coverage.  You could tell him you killed him out of jealousy, anger, whatever.  Say he wouldn’t give you a raise you thought you deserved.  Whatever.  You’ve got some time to come up with something.  With luck, they’ll set a low bail.  I don’t think anyone’s likely to consider you much of a threat to society.  Your dad can post a bond, and get you a decent lawyer, who’ll postpone the trial for months.”

“And by the time the trial comes around, I’ll be dead,” she said.

I shrugged.  “Maybe.  Or maybe you’ll be so incapacitated by that you’ll be judged unfit to stand trial.  I don’t know.  But you’ll get some time with your kids, and, with a little luck, your insurance policy will stand.”

I stood.  I poured myself another drink, about the same size as the first, and drank it down.  I put on my hat as I walked to the door.  My hand was on the doorknob when she said, “Why?”

I didn’t turn around to look at her.  I just shrugged and said, “I like kids.”  Then I opened the door and went out to my car.  There was an unopened bottle of bourbon on the passenger seat which I had bought before coming to her apartment.  I could hear its siren song as I walked through the cold, hard rain.

 

            The rain stopped sometime overnight.  The next morning’s News & Record had some stills from the Treasure Chest videotape on the front page, and a ten year old copy of my police academy graduation photo, with a headline that read “Two-Gun Lew”.  I read the story, and was surprised to find that they got the important details of what they called “the early morning shoot-out” correct.  They spelled my name wrong.

            Later, Maria Douglass called me to tell me that she was going to turn herself in that afternoon and that she had worked out a new motive for herself.  Her lawyer was going to go with her.  Her sister was in town to watch the kids, but the lawyer said she’d spend only a night in jail, considering her medical condition.  She wanted to tell me the details of her new motive so that I could verify them.  She was going to tell the cops that my visit had prompted her confession, that I had figured it out and confronted her with it.  I told her she didn’t need to do that.  She said she wanted me to get the credit I deserved.  I figured I already had all the credit I deserved, but I told her that if she really wanted to do me a favor, she should tell the press what she had just told me.  They didn’t always get the story right when they got it from the cops.  She said she’d do that, and then said “Thank you” in a tearful voice.

            I hung up wishing she hadn’t said that.

            I called John Hites and reported in.  He’d seen the news coverage.  I told him he probably had a refund coming.  He told me to do what I thought was right.  I didn’t see why I should change now, but told him I’d get back to him on it.

            It was eleven o’clock.  I hadn’t had a drink yet.  In fact, I’d gone out for eggs and cheese and bacon and had cooked myself the first solid breakfast I could remember eating in months, maybe years.  I wasn’t sure at first that I was going to keep it down, but I did.

            I was trying to decide whether or not to put in a half-day at the office.  I was tired, but there was always the chance that all this publicity would lead to new business.  Prudence won out over desire, and I was tying my tie in the mirror when I heard a truck pull up outside.  I pushed the blinds out of the way and saw a bright purple Geo and a dirty U-Haul truck parked at the curb.  The other first-floor apartment had been empty for a few weeks, so I assumed this was the new tenant.

As I watched, two young women got out of the Geo and walked around to the back of the U-Haul, where they were joined by a tall young man who I assumed was a boyfriend or brother.  One of the girls was Brandi Pignatellio.  They undid the mechanism on the U-Haul and slid the door up.  They were struggling to lower the ramp when I let the blinds close.

            I looked at myself in the mirror for a moment.  Then I smoothed my hair back, pulled off my tie, and went out to help unpack.  The hell with prudence.  Brandi’s smile as she saw me step onto the large brick front porch was brilliant, and I remembered it for the rest of my life.