Money To Burn (40 page)

“Casey! Shut the fuck up, Casey!” he was shouting. “I’m here. He’s dead. That was me grabbing your leg. I killed him. I’m all right.”

“What?” I stopped, hands gripping the safety bars, relief flooding my bloodstream with such force that I sank to the ground. “Burly?”

“I’m on the other side of the bed,” he called out in a muffled voice. “I’m jammed between the bed and the wall. I fell off as I was shooting. My wheelchair rolled against the wall, I think.”

“You’re alive?” I asked, still unsure.

“For godsakes, Casey, yes, I’m alive. I just blew away the bastard with my Colt .45. I’m as alive as I’ll ever be in my life.”

He let out a rebel yell that filled the bedroom. It was a savage, lingering whoop of triumph that could have single-handedly carried the day at Gettysburg. If that didn’t get the neighbors dialing their phones, nothing would.

“I can’t believe it,” I said, pulling open the curtains and crawling across the carpet, feeling my way in the dark until my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. I saw the outline of a slumped body in the doorway. I was heading toward it when Burly stopped me.

“Oh, shit,” he called out. “I think I’ve been shot.”

“What?” I stumbled to my feet. “Where?”

“In the leg. There’s something wet running down it, I can feel it with my fingers.” He started to laugh. The sound was as edgy as his rebel yell had been. “At last, an advantage to being paralyzed. I can’t feel a goddamned thing.”

“Stop joking about it,” I ordered him. “It could be an artery.”

As I crawled toward him in the darkness, I heard loud banging at my front door. “What’s going on in there?” a voice demanded. Murmurs backed it up.

“Come in,” I called out in a totally unsuitable, automatic hostess voice. I was too focused on finding out how badly Burly was injured to comprehend anything else.

Burly lay on his back next to the bed, the Colt .45 still in his hand. “Oh, God, Casey. It was great. I knew if I could just get to the box on my chair, I’d have him. I reached over and—”

“Don’t talk,” I ordered him. “Just lie still.”

“What’s going on in here?” my landlady demanded in an outraged voice from somewhere in the darkened living room. “The front door’s been forced open and what have you done with the electricity? What’s that funny smell?”

“Nothing,” I replied calmly. “Gunpowder. It’s okay, Mrs. Scoggins. Some guy just cut the power line before he tried to kill me.”

Oh great, that ought to reassure her.

“This is a respectable building,” she began to lecture me.

“Call the cops,” I interrupted in my most authoritative voice. “Somebody just tried to kill me.”

“It’s okay,” a calm male voice assured me. “I’ve already called them. Do you need a flashlight?”

“Yes,” I said gratefully. “Watch your step in the doorway. There’s a body there. Can you bring the flashlight over here? My friend’s been shot.”

“Coming,” the same calm voice replied. “It’s okay. I can take a look. I’m a third-year medical student at Duke.”

For once I was grateful that Mrs. Scoggins had jacked the rent up so high that only us old-timers and new yuppies could afford it.

The round glow of a flashlight bobbed toward me, but the man stopped short in the doorway and bent over the body.
“This guy is still alive,” he announced after a few seconds. “Someone call an ambulance.”

Sirens sounded in the distance. “I think one is already on the way,” a female voice offered timidly from the hallway. She was congratulated on her foresight by a round of other voices. Geeze, when this was over, I’d have to give a potluck dinner so we could all get to know each other. At least no one was videotaping it.

The flashlight wobbled over to me and I was abruptly pushed away from Burly’s side.

“Sorry,” the med student mumbled, “but I need room to take a look.”

I crawled on the bed, hoping to get a better view without being in the way. If anything had happened to Burly, I would never forgive myself. If his artery was severed, what would that mean? God, what if he—

“He’s all right,” the med student announced in a loud voice. “He’s not shot. The bullet just hit his colostomy bag.”

“Get out of here,” Burly ordered suddenly.

“Pardon me?” The med student sounded offended.

“Not you. Her.”

“Come on, Burly,” I pleaded. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Wait in the other room,” he ordered me in a peculiar voice.

I didn’t argue. He meant it. “Give me your flashlight,” I said to the med student. “I’ll bring it right back.”

I stepped around the splintered glass as best I could and made my way to the doorway. A bulky figure lay face down on the carpet. He looked dead to me. I grabbed his shoulder and started to roll him over.

“Hey, what are you doing?” the med student demanded, lurking like a disapproving Mother Superior at my elbow. He pulled my hand away. “Don’t touch him. Give me the flashlight back. He’s seriously hurt.”

“Good,” I said. “He tried to blow my head off.”

But with Burly no more than embarrassed, the med student had turned his attention to the wounded man in the doorway. He was in no mood to suffer my presence. “Stand back,” he said. “And don’t touch him.”

“I want to know who it is,” I demanded.

“Don’t touch him,” the med student repeated, as if he knew only one phrase in the world. He lifted one of the intruder’s arms and placed his fingers on the pulse point.

I would have argued but at least six cops chose that moment to barge into the apartment with their flashlights drawn. They shouldered their way through the growing crowd and filled the living room with their stamping, panting presence. They sounded like a herd of buffalo at rest. I could practically smell the testosterone in the air.

“What’s going on in here?” one of the cops demanded.

“I’m a private investigator. The man in the doorway is an intruder. He emptied his gun at me. My friend shot him.”

I hoped that said it all. Apparently, it did.

“Turn him over so we can I.D sso p>

There, spotlighted in the dancing beams of a half dozen flashlights, lay Harry Ingram, his face bloody and still. He didn’t look at all jolly.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I know him. He’s a lawyer.”

As if on cue, every flashlight in the room turned from Ingram to me. I was illuminated in a spectacular glare.

“I do know him,” I protested, reading the silence as disbelief. “He has an office in Brightleaf Square.”

The room was utterly still. Until Burly began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I demanded.

“You don’t have any clothes on,” he told me, laughing harder. “You’re naked as a jaybird, Casey darlin’.” 

The paramedics arrived for Act II. Red lights circled the room in jerky intervals, a gift from the ambulance parked outside. I tried to follow one dancing beam and it gave me an instant headache. Disco lights gone bad.

I closed my eyes, content to sit and wait on one corner of the bed, dressed in a comfortable T-shirt and gym shorts, until the cops got around to questioning us. Burly lay stretched out next to me. My neighbors had been shooed back to their own apartments, where they were no doubt busily calling one another on the telephone to discuss, among other things, the fact that I was not a natural redhead.

There was a woman paramedic inspecting Burly’s legs by flashlight for glass shards, while the rest of her crew worked on Harry Ingram under the glare of a portable stand of klieg lights. Burly ignored the medic.

“You okay?” he asked, reaching for my hand.

“I’m okay. You saved my life,” I answered quietly. “Thanks.”

“Good. That makes us even. I like an equal partnership, don’t you?”

“I don’t know if I like the idea of a partnership at all,” I confessed. Burly’s face fell in the weird glow of the ambulance lights. “But I know I like you,” I added. “And I don’t want you to go anywhere any time soon.” I leaned over and kissed him. He locked his hands behind my neck and pulled me to him sledamedic i. The kiss lasted long enough for the paramedic to clear her throat.

“He needs to watch his heart rate,” she said apologetically. “Maybe the two of you should knock it off for a little while?”

“Sorry,” I said, settling back against the headboard to watch the rest of the emergency squad work on Ingram’s unresponsive body. He was alive, but barely. And far from conscious. The white uniforms of the ambulance crew were stained with blood and he already had an IV of fresh plasma trickling into him.

“Is he stable enough to move?” someone asked.

“Just about,” a grim-faced medic replied. “Let’s lift on my signal.” Six men took their positions around the body, preparing to lift him onto a metal gurney that had been lowered to the floor at his side. “One, two, three… lift.”

They raised him from the ground about a foot, and gently eased him onto the pallet. The gurney’s legs unfolded until it was waist high.

“Uh-oh,” one of the paramedics on the far side of Ingram suddenly said. “I feel an exit wound along the spine.”

A small crowd gathered as someone focused the portable klieg light on the gurney. “Yup,” the first medic announced after a moment of probing. “Somewhere between the T2 and T4. Jesus, it feels like he was shot with a cannon. Even if this guy survives, no way he’s ever going to walk again.”

Burly was inconsolable. We sat, surrounded by strangers, caught in our own private anguish. It was a pain I felt but did not understand.

“I can’t believe I did that to someone,” he said. “It’s totally freaking me out. What the hell does it mean?” He put his head in his hands. “You’ve got to get away from me, Casey, before it happens to you.”

“But he tried to kill us,” I said.

“You don’t get it,” he answered through gritted teeth. “To do that to someone is terrible. He’d be better off dead, believe me.”

“How can you say that?” I answered angrily. I shook him by the shoulders, but he wouldn’t look at me. “Would you rather be dead?” I demanded.

He shoved my arms away, “When this happened to me,” he explained softly, “I wasn’t the only one who ended up in the hospital, okay? There was a girl. She was only sixteen and she was driving a car coming in the opposite direction. She tried to avoid me, but she swerved and hit a steel and concrete barricade. She went through the windshield and boun sielth=ced off the hood. When she fell into the road, another car hit her. She lived, but she’s even worse off than me. Her whole face was crushed and she’s never going to walk or even to be able to talk ever again. And now I’ve done it to someone else.”

“Stop it,” I ordered him. “You didn’t do anything to Ingram. He brought it on himself. With his greed. Just greed. Pure and simple.”

“Is that right?” a rough voice interrupted us. “I’d like to hear more about that, Miss Jones.”

A beefy man with a crew cut stood before us, notebook in hand. He’d been standing there listening to us, soaking up every word.

“Fuck you,” I told him.

Burly, in spite of himself, smiled. Maybe it would all be okay.

“Fuck me?” the man repeated cheerfully. “Sure thing. But I suggest we introduce ourselves first.” He stuck out a hand and I shook it glumly. “Detective Richard Cole, Durham Police Department.”

“Casey Jones,” I mumbled back. “What are you doing here? I thought you were working the Nash murder.”

“Oh, I am,” Detective Cole said, flipping open his notebook. “Something tells me that I am.”

Bobby D.‘s theory is that proving “The lawyer did it” is the modern-day equivalent of saying “The butler did it.”

I have to disagree. I think that’s an insult to people like Winslow and his hardworking cronies everywhere.

Harry Ingram did it for the money. The worst reason of all. Not out of love, not out of envy or hatred. For the money. I guess business really was just business to him, and he couldn’t afford to be afraid of his conscience. He stood to make over five million dollars as his share if the wrongful death settlement between Randolph Talbot and Tom Nash’s parents had been signed. And he was prepared to kill anyone who threatened the settlement, whether it was Lydia, Burly or me.

I thought I understood his frustration. Death had never been his intention. It was vtal, ahotoo messy for a fastidious man like Harry Ingram. He was always just after the money all along. Unfortunately, all of us pesky supporting characters refused to play along with his plan, and he was forced into violence.

What I think happened is this: Ingram laid a careful trap for Randolph Talbot, first targeting Talbot as the perfect mark. After all, Randolph Talbot was one of the better known settlers of lawsuits in the state, famous for his desire to stay out of court. Then Ingram had identified the perfect candidate to be injured by Talbot—Thomas Nash—before carefully creating evidence to make it look as if Talbot was behind the harassment. Even Nash had been fooled.

But Nash had pulled out of the lawsuit out of love for Lydia and refused to reinstate it, without explanation, even when the attacks against him seemed to escalate. Ingram had watched as a year’s worth of planning evaporated, before taking the businesslike step of confronting Nash in his laboratory one hot July night, a meeting that ended with Tom Nash lying on the floor dead, three bullets in his back and one fatal shot to the head. Killing Nash, Ingram probably reasoned, would give him a chance to file an even larger lawsuit, one based on wrongful death. The fire had been set to cover his tracks, to destroy any evidence Nash may have kept of their conversations together.