Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense (9 page)

I pulled the collar up on my coat, held it tight around my neck, and ran through the rain to the protection of the Pruitts' covered front porch. I rang the bell.

Vernon Pruitt opened the door immediately, giving me no chance at all to figure out what I was going to say. He was a big, barrel-chested man with a crew cut, wearing a two-tone bowling shirt and slacks.

"Mr. Pruitt?" I asked.

"Yeah?"

"I'm Dr. Mark Sloan." I offered him my hand. "I was on call in the ER at Community General when your daughter was brought in."

I figured I'd say as little as possible and let him fill in the missing information with assumptions of his own. It was easier than trying to come up with a convincing lie, though if I had thought of one, I'd have used it.

He nodded and let me in.

The house was not much larger than our apartment and decorated with contemporary furniture. I could see across the living room into the kitchen, where Mrs. Pruitt was ironing clothes, pausing every so often to wipe away tears. She wore a flowered apron over a skirt and a bright pink blouse.

"I'm deeply sorry for your loss," I said, loud enough for his wife to hear as well.

"It was my understanding that my daughter was already dead by the time she was brought to the hospital," Mr. Pruitt said. "That she had been dead for some time."

I heard Mrs. Pruitt sniffle and attack her ironing with renewed fervor. I stalled for a moment, trying to think of what to say.

"Yes," I said, "but at the time she was still unidentified, so we didn't have the necessary information to fill out her forms."

"You mean like her name, address, date of birth, the names of her nearest relatives," he replied.

"Exactly," I said. "That's why I'm here."

I realized how lame the lie was the instant it escaped from my mouth. And so did he.

"If you're here," Mr. Pruitt said, "you must already have that information."

I swallowed hard and felt myself flushing with guilt. I had no legitimate reason to be intruding on their grief except my own curiosity. And the more I tried to obfuscate the facts, the deeper trouble I was going to get into.

"The truth is, Mr. Pruitt, I wasn't convinced your daughter drowned in the river, so I started investigating and discovered that she didn't," I said. "Now I don't think I can stop."

"Stop what?" he asked.

"Thinking about her," I said. "I need to know what really happened to her and who is responsible for it. I won't be at peace until I do."

I surprised myself with that answer. I must have surprised him, too, because he finally motioned me to a seat.

"What would you like to know, Dr. Sloan?"

"Anything," I said. "Everything. I really don't know what I'm looking for."

"I'll tell you what I told the police," Mr. Pruitt said. "She didn't come home Thursday night. I wish I could say that was unusual, but it wasn't. She's a woman now. She has her own life and makes her own choices."

I noticed he was still using the present tense. I wondered how long it took after people died before they became part of the past.

"Did she tell you where she was going?"

He replied by shaking his head.

"How did she get around?" I asked. "Did she have a car?"

"She gets rides from friends or takes the bus," he said. "Sometimes I'll drop her off places if it's on my way."

"Did she have a boyfriend or anyone special she was seeing?"

"Sally and I don't talk about her love life," he said. "It only leads to arguments. I don't believe in sex before marriage."

"So if her lifestyle didn't meet with your approval, why was she still living at home?" I asked. "It couldn't have been easy for either one of you."

"She's saving up for nursing school," he said. "It costs five hundred dollars a semester, and with the paycheck I get working out at the GM plant, we can't afford it."

"What was she doing to earn money?"

"Waitressing, babysitting, doing some laundry and housecleaning around the neighborhood."

Mrs. Pruitt came out of the kitchen, carrying a basket full of freshly folded and ironed clothes. I loved the smell of warm linen.

"Sounds like she was working hard," I said.

"Every little bit helps," Mr. Pruitt said. "She was determined to get that degree. She didn't want to work an assembly line like her parents."

"Sally never crawled," Mrs. Pruitt said softly. "Not once."

I turned to look at her. She set the basket down on the coffee table and took a seat beside me.

"She went straight to walking," she said. "Of course she couldn't do it on her own right away, we had to hold her hand. She didn't like that. She'd fight for us to let go and then she'd fall. We'd pick her up, she'd take a few steps, then shake her hand free and fall all over again."

Her pain was palpable. Feeling uncomfortable, I shifted my gaze to her laundry basket. Mrs. Pruitt had fit an incredible amount of clothing into it. The blouses were folded in squares, the socks in rectangles, the bras into single cups. Everything was starched and ironed. And all of it was clothing for a young woman. All of it was Sally's.

"She was in such a hurry to grow up," Mrs. Pruitt said, tears running down her cheeks. She took a handkerchief from her apron pocket and dabbed at her face.

"Maybe you should put Sally's clothes away," Mr. Pruitt said. "Before they get wrinkled in that basket."

She rose to her feet and picked up the basket, pausing to look down at me.

"The pediatrician told us if she didn't crawl she'd have all kinds of physical and mental problems later in life," Mrs. Pruitt said. "Do you think that's true? That something was wrong with her?"

"No, ma'am," I said.

She nodded and walked slowly down the hall. Mr. Pruitt quickly swatted a tear off his cheek with his finger, as if it was a bug crawling on his face.

"Is there anything else, Dr. Sloan?" he asked, clearing his throat.

"She had a key in her pocket," I said. "It was attached to a rabbit's foot. Do you have any idea what the key was for?"

He shook his head. We sat for a moment in silence as I tried to think of something else to ask him. I couldn't think of anything, so I got up.

"Thank you, Mr. Pruitt, for taking the time to talk with me," I said. "I'm sorry if it was an intrusion."

Mr. Pruitt rose to his feet. "You mind if I ask you a question?"

"Of course not," I said.

"Are you going to find the man who did this to my daughter?"

"I'm going to try," I said.

Mr. Pruitt studied my face for a long time, then held his hand out to me. We shook, but he didn't let go, holding my hand in his firm grasp.

"You're a doctor, so you know how to save lives. But I'm sure you know how to take them, too." Mr. Pruitt looked into my eyes. "If you find the bastard who did this to my daughter, kill him."

"I can't do that," I said.

"Try," he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

We made it back home with barely enough time to get changed for Dr. Whittington's party. As I dressed, I thought about my conversation with Vernon and Joan Pruitt. I played back everything they said and everything I said, too. The only thing I'd really learned from them was about myself. It was the first time I admitted to myself, or anybody else, that I intended to solve Sally Pruitt's murder.

I had no right, no authority, and certainly no skill. My only connection to the victim was looking at her corpse. Perhaps that was enough.

There were a lot of obstacles to conducting my own investigation. For one thing, I wasn't a cop, so no one had any reason to talk to me. I was working thirty-six hours at a stretch at Community General, so finding the time to devote to the case wouldn't be easy. And eventually Harry Trumble was going to find out what I was doing and make it hard, if not impossible, for me to continue.

I was in the middle of putting on my tie when Katherine swatted my hands away, undid what I'd done, and retied it for me. She looked wonderful in a sleeveless black cocktail dress that stopped just above the knees of her slim dancer's legs, which she retained even though the only dancing she'd done lately was around baby toys on the floor.

Katherine hadn't asked me anything about my conversation with the Pruitts after she picked me up outside their house. We were quiet during the ride back to our apartment. It wasn't one of those uncomfortable or angry silences either. She was giving me time to sort out my thoughts, and I had.

"I'm going to find the man who killed Sally Pruitt," I said.

"I know," she said, straightening my tie.

"Is that okay with you?"

"As long as you don't get killed doing it."

I gently tipped her chin up towards my face and kissed her. "Don't you want to know why I'm doing it?"

"I already do," she said. "I've known it from the moment you told me what happened to her."

She kissed me back, then gave me a gentle shove. "Come on, Mark, let's go. You don't want to disappoint Dr. Whittington by being late."

"He's used to it," I said.

It was drizzling lightly outside when Katherine and I, carrying Steve in my arms, walked across the rain-slicked street to the Armacost Sands, the sixteen-unit apartment building where Bart and Mary Spicer lived. The name of their building was written diagonally across the front in plywood script and punctuated with a starburst lamp. The building was a rectangular stucco box much like our own, disguised with enormous wooden fins that made the tenants feel as if they were living in the trunk of a 1959 Cadillac.

Mary Spicer met us at the door of their ground-floor apartment to show off her brand-new bouffant hairdo. She wore a dark red wool bouclé dress and a matching single-breasted jacket with enormous buttons, doing her best to emulate the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.

Behind her, Bart looked more like John Cassavetes than John F. Kennedy, wearing pleated slacks, a blazer, and a narrow black tie, a thin cigarette dangling from his lips.

"You look beautiful," Katherine said to Mary. "Where did you get that wonderful dress?"

"The Back Room at Loehmann's," Mary said. "I've been waiting for months for the perfect opportunity to wear it. I was beginning to think it would never come."

I carried Steve into the apartment, setting him down on the floor to play beside the Spicers' daughter, Tina, who was a little over a year old. There were building blocks and big stuffed animals all around them, Steve grabbed the first block he could find and tried to cram it into his mouth.

"Mark, this is Joanna Pate," Bart said, leading over a perky young girl in her late teens. She had long black hair and a book bag over her shoulder. "She'll be keeping an eye on the kids while we're gone. Joanna, this is Dr. Sloan."

I offered her my hand. "Pleased to meet you, Joanna."

"Don't worry about Steve, Dr. Sloan," she said. "I'm the oldest of three kids, so I'm used to taking care of children. Is there anything special I should know about your son?"

"Whatever is within reach, he'll put in his mouth," I said, glancing at Steve, who was still gnawing on the block, covering it with drool.

"My brother is still like that," she said. "And he's fourteen."

She smiled and I liked her immediately. I was sure Steve would be in fine hands. Katherine needed a bit more convincing.

Katherine introduced herself to Joanna and handed her a handwritten list of dos and don'ts that was so long it should have come with an index. At the end of the manuscript, she'd included phone numbers for Dr. Whittington's home, Community General, the police, the fire department, my in-laws, and six or seven friends in the neighborhood. I was going to ask her why she'd left out the numbers for the FBI, the Pentagon, and the Civil Defense Authority, but I didn't think she'd see the humor.

As we walked across the street to my Chevy, Mary assured Katherine, who was still clearly nervous about leaving Steve behind, that Joanna had been babysitting for other doctors in the neighborhood and came highly recommended.

I reminded Katherine that we weren't going to be gone long and we weren't going far. Dr. Whittington lived in Brentwood, only about five miles north of us, along the southern slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Considering Dr. Whittington's proper Empire mentality, I fully expected his home to be an imposing, timbered English Tudor mansion surrounded by tall trees—his little bit of England in the Colonies. So I was surprised to discover that he lived in a free-flowing, ultra-contemporary home that epitomized the California lifestyle of sunlight, barbeques, and outdoor patio living. The front of the house was dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows, a slanted roof, and walls of thin, horizontally shaved stone.

There were already several cars parked out front, a field of sharp fins and rocket taillights that made it feel like I was parking on a landing strip instead of a driveway.

Dr. Whittington greeted us at the door. His house defied my expectations, but he didn't. He wore dark suit pants, a cashmere V-neck sweater over a white shirt, and a navy-colored jacket, all topped off with a gray silk cravat. He looked out of place in the doorway of his own house and I got the sense that he was aware of it, too.

"Dr. Sloan, I'm so pleased you could come," he said, smiling warmly, something I'd never seen him do before. "This must be your lovely wife, Katherine."

He took her hand and kissed it. I don't know what astonished me more, the fact that he knew her name or that he'd kissed her hand. Katherine blushed, flattered.

"Mark talks so much about you," she said. "He's a great admirer of yours, Dr. Whittington."

"Your husband has a bright future in medicine," Dr. Whittington said.

Did he really think that? I wondered. If so, he'd done an incredible job of hiding it. I wanted more details. Before I got a chance to ask, he shifted his attention to Bart and Mary Spicer and we slipped past him into the house.

"He doesn't seem so bad," Katherine whispered to me. There were a dozen or so couples there, all doctors from the hospital and their wives. I was among the youngest and most inexperienced of the doctors in the room, which was open and airy and offered a view of the immaculately manicured lawn. The backyard was rimmed by perfectly sculpted hedges and trees illuminated by lights placed strategically for dramatic effect.