Double Shot (21 page)

A patient in Southwest Hospital would not necessarily have been a patient from the Aspen Meadow practice. The note written — pointedly, it seemed to me — hadn’t said “while I was a patient of his.” And even if the teenager had been one of John Richard’s patients, I knew I’d never get any records out of the doc who’d bought the Jerk’s practice. Nor was Southwest Hospital in the habit of being forthcoming about patient records. On the other hand, would a young woman who’d been raped want this kind of thing in her records?
I set the table and tried to think. Who else would have an inkling about this? John Richard had employed a number of nurses in the Aspen Meadow office he’d shared with his father, but none of them had stayed more than a year. Wait: the deliveries. There was one other person who’d known and worked with John Richard over the past decade and a half: the longtime head nurse of ob-gyn at Southwest Hospital. I was doing the retirement picnic for her the next day.
Would Nan Watkins remember the specifics of any wrongdoings on John Richard’s part? If she did, would she tell me about them? Maybe the cops would have already questioned her. Somehow, I doubted it.
I placed the risen rolls for the committee breakfast into the oven. Then I picked up the phone and punched the buttons to reach Nan Watkins, R.N.
She was not home. Would she talk to me about this allegation at her retirement picnic? I would just have to find out.
I set about cleaning up the kitchen. My stomach growled, so I allowed myself a few bites of Trudy’s Mediterranean Chicken. The meat was tender and juicy, the sauce a delectable mélange of garlic, onion, sherry, and tomato. Yum!
I stowed the chicken and took the hot, puffed citrus rolls out of the oven. They looked as light as clouds, and perfumed the kitchen with a heavenly scent. I turned on all the fans, which meant I almost didn’t hear the doorbell when Detective Blackridge rang. I invited him in and offered him a therapeutically sized piece of cream pie. He declined. I might be able to snow reporters, but cops were another thing altogether.
“I’ll just see the two notes, please.”
I’d put them into two zipped plastic bags. He read them both, his face impassive.
“And you just happened to receive these today?’
I bristled. “Here’s what they came in.” I handed him the manila envelope.
He squinted at me. “So did he?”
“Did who?”
“Did your ex-husband ever force himself on you?”
I exhaled. “Yes. I always just . . . went along with it. I mean, we were married.”
“It’s all very convenient for you, isn’t it?” Blackridge asked, a ghost of a smile curling his lips. “He’s killed, then an allegation of rape magically surfaces, and so it looks as if — “
“Why don’t you ask Cecelia Brisbane about it?” I retorted.
Detective Blackridge turned toward the door, clutching the plastic bags and the manila envelope. “We tried. She’s not at her office and not at her house. That’s convenient for you, too. Isn’t it?”
He shot a questioning look back at me. I said nothing. But I resolved that I would be damned before I gave him any more information on this case.
   
* * *
After the detective drove away, I went out on our front porch. In the Rocky Mountain summer, the sun seems to hover over the western horizon for hours before setting. The only hint that evening is coming is the gradual cooling and sweetening of the air, as Alpine roses and chokecherry release their perfumes into the coming night. I breathed in, looking up and down the street. The good news was that the reporters seemed to have dispersed. The bad news was that Tom’s sedan was nowhere in sight. Not only did I miss Tom and Arch, I was getting worried. And I needed to talk to Tom. The events and news of the day had been too complex for me to sort out on my own.
I returned to the kitchen, where the clock read 6:45. Could they possibly have decided to play an extra round of golf? Somehow, that did not seem likely. Then again, Arch had taken his hockey gear. If he’d wanted to skate the day after his father died, Tom probably would have indulged him. Although I wished they would let me know what was up, I resisted putting in a call to Tom’s cell. I could just imagine Arch rolling his eyes when the phone beeped.
Must be Mom, checking up on us!
I shuddered, then jumped when our own phone rang. The caller ID said it was my old pal Frances Markasian, pie-deprived reporter of the Mountain Journal. She was calling from home. I had to hand it to the woman, she was persistent.
“No comment,” I sang into the receiver.
“Very funny,” she groused. “The whole press corps is blaming
 
me for not grabbing that pie before you whacked Roger Mannis. The Mountain Journal is still working on the caption for the photo. I think they’re going with ‘Stressed-out Suspect Splats Inspector.’ I preferred ‘Caterer Creams Killjoy.’ “
“Frances, you all aren’t really going to run an article showering me hitting the district health inspector with strawberry-cream pie, are you?”
“Not if you can give me something more substantive.”
I groaned. “Such as?”
“Such as, Goldy, what the cops have on you. Such as, if they have anything substantive, why aren’t you under arrest? Such as, do you or Tom know if they have any other suspects besides . . . “ She paused, doing her best imitation of being tantalizing.
“Yeah, besides who? Don’t play games, Frances.”
“How about this game? Quid pro quo.”
“What’s your quid?”
“Let’s go with the quo first,” she said innocently. “What do the cops have on you, Goldy?”
I could act innocent, too. And smooth! Oh, baby, I could be silkier than that cream pie Frances never tasted. I cleared my throat and tried to adopt an appropriately rueful tone.
“At the end of the memorial lunch for Albert Kerr, witnesses saw me arguing with John Richard outside the Roundhouse. John Richard was trying to set up an appointment for me to take Arch over, and it wasn’t prearranged. When I finally agreed, he took off.”
“That’s no quo. It’s old news, Goldy.”
“When I took Arch over,” I went on, ignoring, her, “I found John Richard in his garage, in his car, dead. Arch was outside. I was alone, so it looks to the cops as if I set the whole thing up to protect my son.” That was as far as I was willing to go. With the phrase potential jury pool rocketing around in my head, there was no way I was spilling my guts to any newspaper about my missing thirty-eight, the errant mice, or the GSR test.
“I heard there was a problem with a firearm,” Frances said.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Was it a gun of yours that killed John Richard?”
“Good question. Now what’s your quid? I’ve got a lot of cooking to do.” This woman was tiring me out.
“How well do you know Ted and Ginger Vikarios?” she asked.
The question took me off guard. “I haven’t been in touch with them for a long time. Ted was — “
“Yeah, yeah. Co-department head of ob-gyn at Southwest with Kerr more than a decade and a half ago. Then the Kerrs and Vikarioses found religion at the same time and went their separate ways. The Kerrs sold their worldly goods and sailed for seminary in England. Ted Vikarios figured he didn’t need further study or ordination. All he needed was his message of morality and that mesmerizing voice of his. So he set up shop in Colorado Springs, where he constructed a multimillion-dollar tape-and-CD empire, selling Family Values and Victory over Sin for fifteen ninety-five a boxed set. Their own family wasn’t in such good shape, though. You know about this?”
“I know he went under, and that there was some kind of scandal. That’s it.”
“Okay, family values, right? Ted and Ginger insisted their family was a marvel, the gold standard. Their only daughter, Talitha, ostensibly virtuous, was off doing health-worker volunteer work in South America. Meanwhile, when the money began to roll in from the tapes empire, Ted and Ginger mortgaged themselves into the high life — four BMWs, a ranch a ski condo. That was until oops, one of our competitors in the newspaper biz got hold of the story that their daughter’s sole connection with missionaries was the missionary position.”
“Frances!” I remembered Talitha Vikarios’s shining face and innocent smile. She’d been wearing her candy-stripe uniform proudly. She’d loved little infant Arch so much, she’d become weepy when she doted on him.
“oh, so you were acquainted with Talitha?” Frances demanded.
“I was, but it’s been a long time. Back when she was a candy striper, she helped out at Southwest Hospital. She was great when Arch was a newborn.”
“Uh-huh. Fifteen years ago? Talitha was, oh, eighteen then? Well, by the time the tabloids unearthed Talitha at age twenty-two, she was living I a hippie commune in Utah. She had a boyfriend and a child without, shall we say, the benefit of marriage? Hello! For the oh-so-pompous Vikarioses, everything went south. They lost the tape empire, their loans were called in, they had to sell everything. We’re talking broke, broke, and very broke.”
“I don’t see how this pertains to John Richard.”
“Background, Goldy. Ted declared bankruptcy four years ago. He and Ginger had been living in a friend’s guest room until ten months ago. Then, what do you know! Guess who gives them cash to guy a country-club condo in Aspen Meadow? Their old friend Holly Kerr, who inherited big bucks, as it turned out, and can’t turn her back on her destitute friends. Christians sharing the wealth, you get the idea. Or is it?”
“Frances — “
“You heard about the Kerrs and Vikarioses having a falling-out, Goldy?”
“I have. I just don’t know what it was about.”
“Neither do I, because nobody from Southwest is talking. But my theory is that Holly is now making up for it with her land-sale money. Whatever it was, Ted and Ginger, according to one of their pals in the country club, are living on a small stipend from Holly. How did the falling-out get resolved, Goldy? Do you know?”
“I sure don’t,” I said. But I wish I did, I added mentally.
“Ted is too old to start a new practice,” Frances went on. “But he can collect on an old debt. So when his former subordinate, Dr. John Richard Korman, gets out of jail, and suddenly gets his picture in the local paper as appearing to have enough dough to start a bakery, well! Let’s say our Dr. Ted becomes curious. Here’s this convicted-felon doctor sponsoring a local golf tournament and driving an Audi and living with a floozy in the country-club area. So! Let’s also suppose Ted figures it’s time to collect.”
Outside, I heard Tom’s Chrysler crunching along the gravel toward our detached garage. Impatience raced up my spine.
“Frances,” I demanded, “what are you talking about?”
“Goldy,” she cooed, “did you ever wonder where John Richard got the fifty-thousand down payment for your little house? The same house you got in the divorce settlement?”
My entire body went cold. “He told me his parents gave it to him for graduating from medical school.”
“I don’t think so,” Frances replied. “They may have given him a cash sum, but he squirreled it away somewhere, or spent it on his girlfriends, or whatever. A little birdie told me that for the down payment on your house, Dr. John Richard Korman borrowed fifty Gs from his old friend Dr. Ted Vikarios.”
“I don’t believe it,” I snapped. “Who’s the little birdie?”
“Actually,” she said with the tiniest shade of uncertainly, “that particular factoid came from an anonymous tip on my voice mail.”
“From a man or a woman?”
“Couldn’t tell. So are you going to confirm or deny?”
“Deny. Emphatically.” But still, I felt as if I’d been punched. Fifty thousand dollars? John Richard might have incurred a debt I’d never even heard of? To some people who were now bankrupt? Was this before or after he supposedly raped a teenager? Outside, Tom and Arch called to each other and shuffled their equipment out of the car and toward the house. Another wave of chills enveloped my body. “Did Ted Vikarios keep some documentation of this loan?”
“Nope,” Frances replied. “At least, not according to Holly Kerr.”
“Did Holly Kerr confirm the fact of the loan, Frances?”
“Well, actually,” Frances admitted, “she just said if there was a loan, it was a gentleman’s agreement.”
“You’re telling me Holly Kerr agreed to be interviewed by you?”
“Not exactly. But my Jeep made mincemeat of that driveway of hers, and I can camp out on somebody else’s porch as easily as I can camp out on yours.” She chuckled.
I shook my head. If I hadn’t been afraid it would get into the papers, I would have said, Frances, sometimes you can be a first-class bitch.
“All right,” Frances went on blithely, “think about this. The Vikarioses’ financial woes began at about the same time that your ex-husband started downhill, moneywise. And then of course he had those bothersome trips to jail. But all of a sudden, his sentence was commuted. And he had a big argument with Ted Vikarios, or at least a heated discussion, right before you and Korman went at it. Sort of puts that last conflict with your ex into better perspective, doesn’t it? Him flying off the handle at you all of a sudden . . . seems a bit odd, doesn’t it?”
Tom and Arch were punched the numbers on the deck-door security box and peering in. “No, Frances,” I replied. “It wasn’t a bit odd. In fact, him flying off the handle at me all of a sudden was the entire problem of John Richard’s and my relationship. In a nutshell.”
“Of course,” she said slyly, “maybe you did know about the loan and its lack of documentation. Then you’d have had even more reason to shoot — “
“Look, I need to go,” I lied. “If I find out anything, I’ll call you.”
While she was still squawking, I hung up. Her quid, in addition to being unsettling, hadn’t made much sense. Besides implying that I would have had further motive to kill John Richard, was she saying it was possible that Ted Vikarios, unable to extract fifty Gs on the spot from John Richard — after not seeing him for nigh on fifteen year — had driven over to his house and shot him? Whatever chance Ted Vikarios would have had of extracting cash from the Jerk would have been extinguished with those shots in the garage.
When Tom and Arch traipsed through the door, I immediately knew that something was wrong. Tom’s look was hooded. Arch’s hair was matted to his head; his face was flushed, streaked, and glossy with sweat.
Arch nodded and acknowledged me with
 
“Hi, Mom! How’re you doing?” that was way, way too enthusiastic. “Check it out! Tom bought me a new hockey stick I’ve been wanting! And a jersey, too!” He bounced past, mumbling something about needing a shower.
Wait a minute. Stick? Jersey? I glanced after him, but he was gone.
“Couldn’t get a tee time?” I said lightly to Tom, who was washing his hands at the sink.