Doc in the Box (15 page)

Georgia was sleeping when I parked the car at the pharmacy, and I didn’t wake her. I went into the vast, empty drugstore. It was one of those places that sold ice cream and lawn furniture, cameras and clothes and cosmetics. The pharmacy was way in the back. The pharmacist was a young Hispanic woman with long dark hair and creamy skin and a name tag that said Rosie.

“That will be fourteen seventy-five,” she said, as
she handed me Georgia’s prescription. I handed her a twenty.

With that, the lights went out. The big store turned into a black cave. Then the emergency lights flickered on, providing an almost useless brownish light. The bright counter displays and seductive products were now threatening obstructions, dark with shadows.

I would have to pick my way carefully to the parking lot. I had to get out to Georgia. What would she think, waking up alone in a pitch-black parking lot? Where would she go for help? There was a Chinese restaurant on one side and a bagel shop on the other, both closed for the night. We were surrounded by a vast empty parking lot. We were absolutely isolated. I understood at last those news stories about how five or six people in a store were shot by a single gunman. That’s when I heard the angry voices up front.

“It’s a holdup!” Rosie the pharmacist said fiercely. I froze. She grabbed my arm and pulled me into a storeroom. Rosie bolted the door from the inside and whispered urgently, “Get over there in the corner, behind those boxes. If he shoots through the door, you have a better chance of surviving.” I wondered if the last thing I’d see on earth would be a giant carton of Charmin bathroom tissue.

We could hear a man talking and the sound of a struggle. It was hard to tell, but he seemed to be dragging the manager through the store to the back. He was coming our way. No. Please god, no.

“Where’s the tall one?” he kept asking. “I want the tall one.” The manager kept protesting there was no one tall here. She was telling the truth. The pharmacist was about five-two. The manager was even shorter. The only tall one in the store was … me.

Was the gunman after me? Why? That made no sense. There must be another store employee.

Rosie and I heard the holdup man demanding once more, “Where is the tall one? I said I want her,” then the cracking sound of a hard slap.

I made a move, but Rosie pushed me back down behind the Charmin boxes with surprising strength and whispered, “You cannot help her. You can only get yourself killed.”

I waited for the gunshot. Instead, there was the blessed sound of sirens, then footsteps running out the back door. The gunman was gone.

“It’s okay,” the manager said, knocking on the storeroom door. “The police are here.”

Rosie cautiously opened the door. I followed her out, weak-kneed and wobbly. Red-and-white police lights were strobing through the semidarkness. I could see Anitra, the manager, rubbing her face where the gunman had hit her. She was a small dark woman with high cheekbones and beautiful bronze braids pulled into a chignon. Her cheek looked swollen, but she didn’t seem to be hurt otherwise. Rosie wrapped Anitra in a blanket and gave her hot coffee, but Anitra couldn’t stop shivering. Rosie took her shaking hands. She said they were cold and clammy. The coffee cup didn’t seem to warm them up.

Anitra could tell the police nothing except that her assailant was a white male, “kinda tall,” but compared to Anitra, everyone was. He wore a navy knit ski mask with red trim, so she couldn’t see his face and neck. But she knew he was white because she saw his hands. She didn’t know how old he was. Maybe twenty. Or thirty. Even forty or fifty. He had on jeans and some kind of long-sleeved shirt but she
was too scared to notice what color and the store was so dark she couldn’t see it, anyway.

She knew one thing for sure. “He had a big gun and he shoved it right in my face, but he never asked for the money in the register. He kept asking for the tall one, and when I said there weren’t any tall people here he hit me. He said I was lying and started dragging me toward the back. I thought I was dead.”

Anitra had one more comment before she started shaking again and the paramedics arrived to treat her for shock. “He was weird,” she said firmly. That really narrowed down the suspects, especially when you’re talking about people out at three
A.M.

I was worried about Georgia, sitting alone on the parking lot. I found a police officer named Mullanphy and he went out there with me. Georgia was sound asleep. We woke her up.

She was the one who’d called the police. “I woke up when the store lights suddenly went off and used my cell phone to call 911. Then I dropped off again. Chemo does that,” she said. “Sorry.”

Sorry? She’d saved us all.

The police asked if I thought the gunman was after me. I didn’t know. I didn’t think so. If he wanted me, wouldn’t he say, “Where’s Francesca?” I was a columnist, a local celebrity. He was probably one of those looneys you encounter in any big city.

The cops weren’t so sure. They thought I could be the tall one. They asked me who I’d offended recently. No one except Charlie, and he’d rather kill my column than me. Had I been working on any controversial stories? Well, there was the missing stripper and my Doc in the Box inquiries. But Leo D. Nardo was
still missing, and the killer was still loose, so I was hardly a threat.

The police weren’t so sure. They were concerned about my safety. Did I live alone? they asked. Was there anyone I could stay with tonight? No, I said. I wanted to go home, to my own bed. I was perfectly safe. If the gunman knew where I lived, he wouldn’t be following me into all-night drugstores—if it was even me he was following. The police cautioned me to take extra care. They asked again if I was sure I didn’t want to stay with someone.

I wasn’t going to do that, but I was still shaken. Officer Mullanphy offered to radio ahead and have someone check out my flat, but I said I’d be fine. Besides, I had to take Georgia home. She said I could spend the night with her, what was left of it, anyway. But I wanted to go home. How could staying at Georgia’s provide any safety, when she was so weak and sick? If the guy really was after me, I’d just be a danger to her. I’d stay with her if I thought I could help her, but she only wanted to sleep. I could go to a hotel, but I’d written too many stories about hotel rapes and break-ins to feel safe there.

I told the police I was better off in my own place, in my own neighborhood, where everyone knew me. I said the ever vigilant South Siders were better than any security service. The neighbors would watch my flat and call the police if they saw anything out of line.

I couldn’t tell the police the real reason I wanted to go home. I had nowhere else to go. My family was dead. Tina was my closest friend at work, but I didn’t feel I could turn up on her doorstep at four-thirty in
the morning. My other choice was to ask Lyle for help. I’d rather die.

It was after five by the time I got Georgia in her bed and headed for mine. I parked under a streetlight. The moon was still bright, the sky was blue-black, and the zoysia grass was wet with dew. I wished I hadn’t refused the cop’s help to look around my flat for me. But then I saw my neighbors two doors down had their kitchen light on. The warm, gold glow in their curtained window was reassuring. Cindy and Joe left for work at six-thirty. If anything went wrong, they were within shouting distance.

Still, I spent extra time checking my front and back doors before I went in. There was no sign anyone had disturbed them. I carefully opened the front door, flipped on the light, and climbed the long, narrow inside stairs, wishing I’d used a brighter bulb. I stood cautiously at the top and looked around the living room, then walked through the kitchen, bedroom, and dining room. I checked all the closets and the bathroom and opened the shower door.

Next I checked all the windows to make sure they were locked. Then I found the canister of pepper spray and put it on my bedside table next to the phone.

For good measure, I stacked my grandmother’s noisiest pots and pie pans in front of the doors—the South Side burglar alarm—and put a kitchen chair on its side at the top of the steps. If I needed to leave in a hurry, I’d probably fall over it and kill myself, but I felt safer.

The phone was ringing.

I reached for it, knocking off the pepper spray and overturning my bedside clock. I felt like I’d been asleep for about two minutes. Who was calling at this hour?

It was the day-shift pharmacist. Rosie had left instructions to call me about the five dollars and twenty-five cents change from my twenty I’d left behind last night. Too bad Rosie didn’t tell him to call at a decent hour on a Saturday morning.

“What should I do with your money?” he asked in a whiny voice. Nobody should hand me a straight line like that. Especially not a whiny man. So I told him exactly where he could stick the five dollars and twenty-five cents.

“And change it to quarters first,” I added, as I slammed down the phone. I’d feel guilty about this later. It felt good now.

I crawled under the bed to find the pepper spray, then righted the bedside clock. It was seven thirty-six. Then I went back to bed and tried to go back to sleep. It didn’t work. I kept replaying the events of last night
in my head. Was someone really after me? Why? Because of my search for Leo, or the Doc in the Box story? I couldn’t tell which one was going nowhere faster. The whole thing had to be a mistake, but that wasn’t any comfort. People get killed for mistakes, too.

After half an hour of useless speculation, I gave up, got up and got dressed. I went out on the back balcony, a grand name for a slightly sagging porch with no exit. It was a brilliant spring morning, and the new leaves on my maple tree were a heartbreaking lime green. A squirrel skittered in the branches. I could see a neighbor’s big old lilac bush in bloom by her back fence, heavy with sweet-smelling purple flowers. She’d also planted her ash pit with purple and yellow pansies. Years ago, South Siders burned trash in concrete ash pits back by the garage, until the city outlawed it. But we can turn anything into a decorative planter, from an old truck tire to a toilet.

These homey scenes didn’t reassure me. I still felt jittery. The police thought someone with a gun was after me and I didn’t know why. I hated guns and would never use one, but I needed protection, and I wasn’t about to hire a bodyguard. What was I going to do?

Get a grip, that’s what.

I went back inside and hauled the chair away from the top of the stairs, feeling pretty silly. What kind of protection was a chair? Then I started carrying the pots and pans I’d stacked in front of the doors back upstairs and put them away. I had a Dutch oven, three dented aluminum sauce pans, and a cast-iron skillet, and I still had to go back for a stack of muffin tins and pie plates. Did I really carry all this stuff
downstairs at five-thirty
A.M
.? This had to stop. I refused to be spooked. There was no way that guy in the drugstore was looking for me. I wasn’t the only tall person in St. Louis. Probably just another city crazy. I wasn’t going to hang around the house and worry about it. Even if it was a Saturday, I was going to do some work. It was the only way to handle this. I grabbed my briefcase, took the pepper spray off my bedside table, and carried it in one hand. It wouldn’t hurt to be a little careful.

I opened the front door cautiously and heard an odd scraping sound. There on my doormat was a pile of needles and clear plastic tubing, a surrealistic pincushion trimmed in red. The pile was about three feet across and a foot high. I bent down for a closer look, careful not to touch it. That’s when I saw what the red trim was, and felt my stomach lurch. The tubing had blood in it, dark red and unreal. That meant it was used, and so, I guessed, were the needles. Someone had left a pile of dangerous medical waste on my doorstep, and I’d nearly stepped on it. A slip of plain white paper was stuck on one needle. Printed in blue ballpoint were four words, “Quit asking stupid questions.”

Hands shaking, I shut and locked the door, and called 911. Then I sat on the couch and waited for the police, pepper spray clutched in my hand.

After the strange gunman last night, the police officers took this doorstep surprise seriously. They sent for an evidence van, and the tech gingerly removed the bloody pincushion present and my doormat. I’d be really embarrassed if that worn-out thing was ever used in a courtroom. Exhibit A: Francesca doesn’t have time to go to Kmart for a new mat. The tech
fingerprinted my front door, and took my fingerprints to exclude them. He said they’d also try to get fingerprints off the needles and tubes.

The police beeped Mayhew, and he showed up. He wanted to know what stupid questions I’d been asking, but I didn’t know. Too stupid, I guess.

I told him I’d been working on the stripper story and he guessed I’d been poking around in the Doc in the Box matter, but I said I’d had no success with either. He said I must be more successful than I thought—I’d upset someone. He wanted the names of the last four or five people I’d interviewed. I refused. Officer Friendly had enough problems without a real police officer bothering him. I didn’t want Mayhew talking to my other interviews, either. I wasn’t going to upset my sources by siccing the cops on them.