Mother Gets a Lift (3 page)

“I’ll need another Coke to wash this down.”

The detective lowered his head into his hands, and I thought he was going to weep right there at the table, but he gathered his courage. He simply raised one hand and waved at the glass again. “Please go on,” he muttered from the tabletop.

She inserted the candy into the hole in the wrappings leaving chocolate stains on the bandages around her mouth.

“Let’s unwrap those dressings.” The mummy look was distressing me.

She held up her hand. “Do not touch them.”

“But, Mom, they’re dirty and falling apart.”

“I don’t have any make-up on. They stay in place unless you care to get me my make-up bag from home.”

Estevez and I exchanged looks and shook our heads in unison. I was beginning to like this guy.

“You look fine, Mom.”

“I can’t imagine anyone wearing bandages better.” Estevez smiled. A little smile, but a smile. I liked him a lot. He really got Mom.

She crumpled the wrapper and the detective held out his hand. He trained really fast.

“Vera and I ran into Clay and he did his usual thing. Kept telling me he wanted us to work things out. ‘I am working things out, Clay. I’m filing for divorce. You and I are over.’ Then he said the most hurtful thing.”

“What?” I couldn’t imagine mild-mannered Clay saying anything mean to Mom.

“He said, ‘no divorce.’”

“That is mean. Your other husbands were more than happy to get out from under.”

She reached out and patted my hand. “I’m so happy you understand.” I got Mom, too.

“I was so distraught when he walked away that I told Vera I was going down to the clinic to ask the doctor for more pain medication. I left her at the rail and went to see the doctor. The nurse said he was on the phone and to wait. I could hear him talking in the next office. I wandered around the empty waiting room while she left to check on other patients still in the infirmary.” Mom stopped talking and looked around the room.

“Before I go on, I want you to guarantee me police protection.”

“You claimed earlier that the doctor tried to kill you.” The detective sounded skeptical.

“Tried, but failed. He killed someone else. He meant to kill me. A case of mistaken identity.”

“I don’t understand, Mrs. Davis.” Estevez rubbed his temple. “Why would the doc want to kill you.”

Okay, so he didn’t quite get Mom. Or maybe he was being coy. After serving as Mom’s waiter for the last ten minutes, he had to have an inkling why someone would want her dead.

“I heard some stuff I shouldn’t have, and he caught me eavesdropping.”

“Stuff. Like what stuff?” I had a bad feeling I knew where this was going.

“He told the person on the other end of the line he wanted more money or he’d tell the authorities about the scam.”

“What scam?” Estevez was now all attention.

“The cruise line knew the doc was a fraud it seems and he was threatening to expose the line’s involvement in the scheme while he skedaddled out of the country. I kind of bumped into the drug cabinet while he was talking. He heard the noise and came out of his office. I dashed for the door and he followed. Once on deck, I hid behind a pillar, but he saw that other woman standing at the rail wearing the robe and bandages and chucked her overboard.” Mom licked the last of the chocolate off her fingers and sat back in the chair.

“How did you know who the dead woman was?” Estevez’s suspicious tone told me he didn’t quite buy Mom’s innocence in all this.

“I didn’t. I got lucky. I was wandering down one of the corridors looking for some place to hide. I couldn’t go back to my room. If he found out he’d tossed the wrong bait overboard, he would have come after me again. One of the stewards stopped me. I guess he thought I was the woman in a room assigned to him. He called me by the name of Mrs. Tribble and asked if I was all right, so I thought,
what the hell, I’ll hide in her room until she returns or whatever.
I told him I lost my key and he let me in. No one came to the cabin until the next morning when that awful person who dragged me in here earlier appeared and claimed I was her mother. I wouldn’t have let her take me off the ship if I’d known how poorly she intended to treat me.”

“Have a little sympathy. She thought you were her mother and she was taking care of you. Now she has no mom.”

Mother’s glance slid over to meet mine. “That bothers her, but thinking I was a goner didn’t seem to upset you much.”

“I thought you died the way you’d want to go, with a new face, a firm jaw line, a better nose, maybe even a tighter tush. Why would I be unhappy if you got what was most important to you?’

“I would have been dead.”

“But great looking.”

“But I’m no better now than before I set sail. Worse, actually. The doc didn’t do his job, he tried to kill me, I lost three nights in a row at the roulette tables, and then some woman treated me like trailer trash by feeding me canned fruit and microwave food. When I said I needed a drink, she offered me a Miller Lite. Someone owes me a new face.”

*

“Oh, yes you will.” The detective was leaning over Donnie, a threatening look on his face. “If you don’t, we’ll charge you with the murder.”

“I have his cell phone number, but he’s probably already left the country with the extra fifty thousand he demanded and I paid to keep his mouth shut. A lotta good that did me.” Donnie looked as if he had dropped at least twenty pounds since I first saw him. Interrogation done right is tough. No candy bars and no soft drinks.

Mom and I watched through the two-way mirror as Estevez worked on Donnie. The detective looked as wrung out as Donnie. Time interrogating my mother can do that to a cop.

“Mom, we need to go now. I’ve got a hungry newborn to feed. Don’t you want to meet your granddaughter?”

“Sure, honey. Later. This detective needs help.” She flapped her hand at me with a dismissive flip and walked into the interrogation room.

“I’ll call the doc and tell him I’m still alive. Then I’ll threaten to go to the cops unless he does my face. The way he should have done it the first time.”

I walked in behind her. “Forget about your face, Mom. This guy doesn’t do faces. He kills people.”

Estevez stepped in front of me, desperation written all over his face. “Let’s think about this. I think your mom has a great idea.” He said this while gritting his teeth.

“Don’t be absurd. He tossed one woman to the fishes and now you want to use my mother as bait to catch him. I’d rather throw her into a tank of hungry sharks.”

“Oh, thanks, honey, but it’s my civic duty. Think of all those poor women who woke up looking the way they did when they went to sleep.”

*

Mom called the number Donnie had for the doctor. She arranged to meet him later at an address in south Miami, a kind of clinic, the doc said. Estevez claimed the area was mostly rundown apartment buildings and warehouses. Mom discarded her bandages and her eyes twinkled at the prospect of working with the cops. Or was it that she really imagined she’d get free plastic surgery?

I dropped her at her condominium in Coral Gables. Instead of going all the way back to Key Largo, I met Fred and the kids at a McDonald’s off the last exit on the Florida Turnpike before it merged into US 1 in Homestead. I fed Stella and told her she was soon to meet her grammy. She showed her delight by letting out a loud burp followed by a smell I won’t describe. I quickly changed her and handed her back to her dad.

“I should come with you. For protection.” Such a macho stance was not typical of Fred. He was worried.

“The cops will protect us from the doc.” I rubbed Stella’s back.

“I meant from your mother.”

I knew he wasn’t trying to be unkind. What he really meant was “don’t leave me here with these kids and a dog producing Technicolor turds.”

I looked at my watch. “I’m going to be late, honey.” I patted him on his arm, gave everyone except the dog a kiss and ran for my car. When I looked back, Fred, kids, and dog were moving around in the family SUV like a football team at practice.

“Your bag,” yelled Fred. I ran back and got it, then sped off. Once on the turnpike, I settled back in the seat and reached for a piece of gum from my purse, but it wasn’t my purse. In his flummoxed state, Fred had handed me the diaper bag. To be fair, I was in such a hurry I didn’t notice. Oh, well. I had my driver’s license and wallet in my back pocket of my jeans, which were still too tight to be zipped in the front. I pulled my smock down over my stomach.

Mom was still applying her make-up when I pulled up.

“Estevez wants to move on this thing as soon as possible.” Of course he did. Then he could take a vacation, retire or resign and forget about mothers. I turned off the curling iron and took her cosmetic bag out of her hands.

“I don’t have a thing to wear.” She entered her walk-in closet and began looking through the clothes hanging there.

I knew there was no sense losing my patience, so I decided to join in the seriousness of the decision-making process.

“It is a big moment, I agree, so I’d select something eye-catching, but casual. How about this?” I pulled a turquoise warm-up suit off the clothes bar, hoping I could fool her into thinking I actually cared about what one wore to arrest a killer.

“Not dramatic enough.”

She spent the next ten minutes selecting and rejecting outfits.

The doorbell rang. Thank goodness. I was about to drop her in a Neiman-Marcus bag and deliver her to the nearest thrift store that dealt in secondhand mothers.

I dashed to answer it.

“It’s Detective Estevez, and he wants to get going. Now.”

“He’ll have to wait.”

Estevez looked as if he were going to cry. I held up my finger and whispered to him. “I’ve got an idea.”

“The detective told me they just released Clay and he should be here any minute. So I guess you want to wait for him. Right?”

She walked into the living room wearing the turquoise warm-up suit. “I’m ready. Let’s get it on.”

Estevez was right. The so-called clinic location was in a crummy section of Miami off the southernmost end of I95 before it spilled into even crummier neighborhoods.

“My men are already here.”

Estevez made Mom wear a wire, something she was reluctant to do at first until she found out she wouldn’t have to pull up her shirt and expose her stomach. “I gained a lot of weight in captivity at that woman’s house eating canned stuff and drinking beer.”

They planted the tiny device in her earring. She was very happy, but kept tugging on her ear.

Estevez reached over and grabbed her hand. “Please don’t do that Mrs. Davis. You might pull it out. All you have to do is go in and get him talking about how he threw the other woman overboard. A confession would be good. Not that your testimony about seeing him kill her isn’t enough.”

I was skeptical about what he said. I’ve found my boys tend to smile a lot when they lie to me, and Estevez was showing enough teeth to hypnotize a dentist. Obviously he had doubts about Mom’s story or how she might be perceived testifying before a jury of people who might not share her fascination with rhinoplasty.

“Then you say, ‘Now what about my facelift?’ Think you can get him to believe you’re serious about having work done? It’s a stretch after what he tried to do to you.”

“Just look at me. Don’t you think I need a little nip and tuck, detective?”

Estevez glanced at me with a terrified look on his face.

I took pity on the guy and got him off the hook.

“Oh, the detective will tell you look fine, but we gals know the truth, right, Mom?”

“This way we can get him for the murder and for running a clinic with no license, the whole ball of criminal and medical malpractice wax.” Estevez looked happy again.

I found the scheme a bit much, but as long as Mom believed she’d get a new face in return for her cooperation, I knew it was a go.

From across the street we watched as Mom approached the door, knocked, and was let in.

The conversation skimmed along as planned, but after she said “what about my facelift?” all we heard was a door open and close, followed by silence. We waited a minute or two, and then we broke into the front entrance and through a door, which led into a make-shift operating theater, a small room draped in plastic curtains. Mom lay on a table not moving, not breathing.

“I think he killed her.” Anger flooded through me. Destroy Mom’s dreams and her life? He’d pay. I rushed through the back door to the operating room and into an alley where a man dressed in a white lab coat ran for a car parked at the end of the building.

I yelled at him to stop as Estevez attempted to get by me, but my elbow accidentally caught the detective in the nose. The doctor took out his keys and inserted one into the car door giving me enough time to grab his sleeve. Then I used the only weapon at my disposal, the diaper bag. I hit him with it. He went down with a solid thunk, covered by the contents of the bag—bottles, diapers, baby clothes, and, most unfortunate for him, some used diapers Fred had tucked into the bottom.

“Help. I’m being gassed.” The ersatz plastic surgeon rose to his knees and began vomiting.

“Hold your noses,” I warned Estevez and his men. Estevez signaled several of his bolder men in. They held their noses and handcuffed the doc.

I ran back into the clinic in time to see Mom’s eyes open.

“Thank goodness.” I wrapped my arms around her.

“So how do I look?” She fluttered her eyelashes.

*

Mom was furious at all of us. She waved off Estevez’s comment that she’d been very brave. “If you’d waited another few minutes I could have gotten what I deserved.”

I thought about replying to that, then decided I was being ungracious.

“But, Madam,” said Estevez, “we made the case because of you.”

“Oh, who the hell cares. Look at me! I’m a mess.” She held a tiny compact mirror up to her face as we traveled in the squad car back to the station.

“Don’t be silly, Mom. You deserve the best. Not some second-rate cutter who might make you look older rather than younger.”

She sighed. “I’ll have to reschedule, won’t I?”