Desperate Measures (28 page)

He endured a month of Sunday; he read
The New York Times
, all of it, and then went to bed. When he came awake enough to realize it was Monday, he rejoiced. Promptly at four he arrived at Fensterman's house. Ruma met him and ushered him to the Florida room again, where Fensterman was at a window with binoculars. He laughed when Frank joined him.

“Want to see? Pretty little pussies taking in the sun.”

“I guess not this time,” Frank said. “Is the copy of your novel ready?”

“Sure. One hundred bucks.”

“You said fifty. An oral contract,” Frank said coldly.

“You can prove it?” Fensterman tossed the binoculars down on a chair, and said, “A hundred smackers.”

Frank counted out five twenty-dollar bills and tossed them down by the binoculars. Fensterman pointed to a ream box on a table. “All yours. Enjoy. Best book sale I ever made.” He laughed.

Frank opened the box to check, and it was there. “Thanks,” he said; he turned and walked from the room. The black woman met him in the hallway.

“I called you a cab, sir,” she said softly. “It should be here in a few minutes. Do you want to wait inside?”

“You're very kind,” Frank said. “I'll just wait under a tree out there.” At the door, he said, “I hope he pays you well. Good-bye.”

As soon as he got back to his hotel, he called the airline and changed his flight. The only flight available was very early, with a layover of three hours in Chicago, a layover in Portland, then a small commuter plane from Portland to Eugene. He took it.

It was too hot to stay in his room and read. Too hot by day, and he froze at night; also, he was beginning to feel suffocated, breathing the same air day after day. He took the novel to the shaded terrace, ordered iced espresso, and settled in to read.

It was hard going. On page one people were shooting one another; the protagonist was a nameless, faceless first-person narrator who wouldn't have known a past perfect verb if it had kicked him in the butt. He was impervious to physical beatings, and he liked to slap women around. There was a millionaire involved, but involved in what, Frank couldn't say. He suspected there was a plot even if it eluded him. The millionaire was married to a pretty young thing who had been his nurse. He died in his sleep, and it seemed that someone had given him a drink with chloral hydrate, but it shouldn't have killed him, just knocked him out. He began to read slower.

She slipped into the room without a sound and she was wearing a pink peignoir that didn't hide a curve, like I knew she would. “Baby,” she crooned, “you didn't wait for me. Look at you, sound asleep.” She lifted my wrist and let it drop like a lead weight. Her breasts were falling out of the sheer peignoir, pink like it, ripe, ready for picking, and her golden hair cascaded over her face when she leaned over me. She smelled like Paris in spring, like violets, passionflowers. Then she pulled out doctor's gloves from her pocket and put them on, then took out a hypodermic needle and held it to the light. She touched my lips, and then forced my mouth open. “Baby, what a wonderful tongue! But it's in the way, sweetheart.” She had gauze or something in her hand, and used it to grab my tongue and raise it. “Ah, what magnificent veins!”

And I knew how the old man was killed. I grabbed her wrist and twisted. The crack of the bone was the loudest sound in the room until she screamed, and I twisted the hand holding the needle and jabbed her arm.

I held her in my arms, smelling her perfume as she fell into the final sleep.

Slowly, glacially cold, Frank returned the pages to the box. The storm had not come ashore yet, and for a long time he sat on the terrace and watched lightning flare in the cloud mountains.

25

When Barbara saw
her father walking toward her, she felt a stab of anxiety, if not fear; he looked drawn and exhausted. “No more Florida vacations for you,” she said when he drew near. They embraced and headed for the terminal exit. Outside, he stopped walking and took a deep breath, another.

“Want me to bring the car around?”

“No. No. I just want to breathe. Air smells and feels good; you miss it when it's not there.”

In no hurry they walked to the car a short distance away. There were few people around at that time of night; the commuter plane could carry sixteen passengers, and it had not been full. Neither spoke again until they were in the car heading home.

“Did you learn anything? Get the book?”

“I learned several things,” he said. “It's a state secret, but there's a shortage of air in Florida. They recycle it over and over. The water tastes like something you spray on the tomatoes. And they don't know what time it is, out of kilter with the rest of the world. Their days are twenty-eight hours long, all sunny.”

She nodded, understanding very well the real message—not now, not tonight—and she asked no more questions.

When they entered the house, the cats pretended not to see him. “Pouting,” he said. “They'll sulk awhile.” He pulled his roll-on to his bedroom, then returned a minute later with a ream box and put it on a table in the living room.

“Do you want something to eat? I have sandwich stuff, and today I picked two tomatoes. I ate one and saved one for you.”

“Nothing,” he said. “I want a bath. That water's so hard, it leaves a soap scum you have to break up with a hammer. I itch all over. You know how good our water is? You ever think about it?”

She shook her head. “Go on and take your bath.” She motioned toward the box. “That's the novel?”

“It is. Good night, Bobby. We'll talk tomorrow.”

This time when he walked out, both cats followed; he was already forgiven.

She read the book the way Frank had, skipping long passages and pages, losing track of the characters, losing count of the corpses littering the landscape. Then, exactly the way Frank had done, she read every word of the finale carefully. Afterward, she put the pages back in the box, and sat for a long time staring at nothing.

When she went downstairs the next morning, Frank was at the counter chopping spinach. “It's the last of it,” he said regretfully. “An omelette, filled with spinach, chopped tomato, scallions, and cheese. You up for some?”

“Are you kidding?” She poured coffee and took it to the dinette table. “Was the food awful?”

“No, of course not. It's one of those things. After a day or two of restaurant food, you just want something from your own kitchen.”

“Not me,” she said. “Your nose is sunburned.”

“I know that. You want toast?”

“I don't think there's any bread. I forgot it.”

“What were you planning in the way of a sandwich last night?” he asked with real curiosity.

“When I said sandwich, I remembered that I had forgotten to buy bread,” she said. “I would have gone out to get some.”

He shook his head. “Well, I don't want it for myself.”

She understood that they were not going to talk about the book while he was preparing breakfast, and they would not talk about it while they ate. She picked up the newspaper and scanned headlines, turned to the comics, and waited for the real day to start.

After the omelette was gone and they were having more coffee, Barbara said, “What are you going to do now?”

“Call Hoggarth. Get an exhumation order, open the case again.”

“What about Wrigley? You going to bring up his name?”

“No. I told you, I don't think he's the man. I'll give Hoggarth the fingerprints Bailey lifted, let him take it from there.” Then he scowled. “Damn, I forgot. Patsy's off.”

“We could meet in my office,” she said. She did not mention that he would not need Patsy when he talked to Hoggarth; it would do little good to say something like that. He believed that if he was in the office, Patsy should be there also.

She cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher as he made the call to the police lieutenant. The dishwasher was full. Then she remembered that she had not turned it on yesterday, or maybe for several days. She turned it on.

“Twelve-thirty, your office,” Frank said when he hung up the phone. “He's grouchy. He'll take a few minutes out of his lunch hour, if it's really important.”

“Well, I'll be there. Now I'm off. See you later.” Their meeting promised to be interesting, she thought as she headed out the door.

Milt Hoggarth arrived promptly at twelve-thirty. Barbara and Frank escorted him to her office, where they sat around the coffee table.

“This had better be good,” Hoggarth said. “We're shorthanded, people out fishing, taking vacations, and I don't have time for any tomfoolery. Your nose is sunburned,” he added.

“I know,” Frank snapped. “I have a story to tell you, Milt. Won't take long. I told you at the beginning that I didn't believe Hilde Franz overdosed accidentally, and I sure as hell didn't think she was a suicide.”

“Frank, that case is closed. Is that what you want to talk about? Forget it.”

“Sit still and listen,” Frank said. He turned to Barbara. “Tell him what you learned about those capsules.”

She told him, and watched as he did the arithmetic for himself.

He shrugged.

“You don't know how many she used up, how many she had left,” he said.

“If you ever pulled a muscle, you know you want something to relieve the pain for several days,” she said coldly. “Ask your doctor.”

“Is that it? You counted pills?”

“Shut up and listen,” Frank said. He told him how Bailey had photographed Hilde's house and lifted fingerprints.

It was interesting, Barbara thought, watching him, the difference it made where the red in the face came from. Frank's nose was red, and Hoggarth's face was reddening, but it was a different sort of coloration, coming from deep within, and not evenly. His red was blotched; Frank's nose was uniformly red.

“It could have been a doorknob rattler,” Frank said. “But later the guy came back and broke in. I got a video from Hilde's safe-deposit box, made for her homeowner's insurance, and we compared Bailey's shots with it. These are stills taken from the tapes and Bailey's pictures.” He handed Hoggarth the two sets of pictures of the books. “A book's missing.”

“He took a book. Is that it? What are you getting at? You want it back?”

“I have it,” Frank said. “We tracked down the author; I flew to Florida and bought a copy.” He opened the ream box on the table, took out the copyright page and the title page, and handed them to Hoggarth, who glanced at them and gave them back. Then Frank gave him a copy of the page of text with part of it highlighted. “It's a blueprint for murder,” he said icily. “Read it.”

No one spoke as Hoggarth read the highlighted section, then read it again. “Jesus Christ!” he said, flinging the paper down on the table. “She didn't have any knockout drops. It's a piece of a story!”

“Someone doctored those capsules, increased the amount of the drug in each one, and exchanged them that evening,” Frank said. “A double dose would have rendered her unconscious, incapable of being roused, possibly. That person returned later and opened her mouth, lifted her tongue, and injected a vein beneath the tongue with a paralyzing dose of the drug. Her breathing stopped very soon after that, a minute, two minutes, and she died. He restored the original capsules, and was done. I called Dr. Steiner, and he agreed that the only way we'll know for sure is through another examination. He didn't look under her tongue.”

“Fuck!” Hoggarth muttered. “You're not serious, Frank. You're talking exhumation.”

“If you don't call for it, I'll speak to the family, tell them what I've told you, and get them to do it. If I have to go that route, I'll have your hide before I'm done with this. Hilde Franz was my client and she was murdered.”

After Hoggarth left, Frank stood up. “It's in their hands now,” he said. Bailey would deliver a set of the fingerprints he had lifted; they would have copies made of the videotape and photos, and the novel; in the coming week Hilde Franz's body would be exhumed and reexamined.

Barbara had not said a word about the hospital committee, or about Wrigley. A mistake, she was thinking; she should have insisted on giving Hoggarth that also, and if the police cleared Wrigley, no harm done.

At the door Frank paused. “I have to say something else,” he said in a neutral tone. “That's a long flight from Florida back home. I had a lot of time to think. I tend to agree with Hoggarth, that the fact that Hilde had a lover is irrelevant. I believe she saw something the day Marchand was killed, and she came to accept that Alex Feldman killed him. I think his doctor friend killed her to protect Feldman.”

She stared at him, aghast. “No way,” she said. “It just won't work. He didn't know about the book.”

“She talked about it with someone,” Frank said in that same flat tone. “Further, I think you should be prepared to deal with this because eventually the police will come up with the same scenario.”

Later that afternoon she told Shelley and Bailey the whole story. Frank had always said not to hold out on Bailey; in order to do his job, he had to have whatever information was available. Although she did not tell him about X or
Xander
, she did not hold back anything else.

Shelley stared at her wide-eyed. “He can't really believe that Dr. Minick would do such a thing. And he said the guy who hit him had a key. Dr. Minick wouldn't have a key to her house.”

“He doesn't know Dr. Minick or Alex. He did know Hilde Franz, and he can't believe she had an affair with a younger married man with children. That's what it comes down to. And he'll probably come around to thinking he might have left the door unlocked. But what it means to us is that we need to get the dope on Wrigley, all the way down. Shelley, I think you're due a short vacation, maybe to visit your pals in the Monterey area, get in a little gossip. And, Bailey, canvass that neighborhood like a census taker. Hilde Franz's neighbors, the next block over, the medical complex. And I think it's time to go into some of those out-of-state trips. Were they together? Same hotel, separate rooms? What?”