Three To Get Deadly (68 page)

Anson Phillips's house was the third from the corner, west side of the street, on a block lined with heavy-limbed oaks leaning over the center of the street in a green canopy. Well-tended lawns, one-car garages, and sturdy wooden front stoops spoke to the longevity of the neighborhood.

Mason parked in the driveway behind a late-model white Buick, a car the size of Brazil. His TR6 looked like a mutant exhaust pipe protruding from its tail end.

Anson was as round a man as Mason had ever seen. He filled the width of the glider on his porch, work boots not quite touching the ground. His head perched like a paperweight on his shoulders, with no visible support from his neck. Eyes, nose, mouth, and ears melted into a pie-pan face. He was a denim-wrapped doughboy given too long to rise. Mason bet he hadn't seen his feet in years.

"Morning," Mason called out from the driveway. "You Mr. Phillips?"

"What you want, boy?"

No one had called Mason a boy in years. He liked this guy already.

"Help. I'm looking for a woman named Meredith Phillips. Last I knew, she lived in Rogersville. You're the first Phillips in the book."

"What d'ya want with her?"

"I'm a lawyer from Kansas City. She may have a child who's inherited some money."

"Don't know her. Might try Vernon Phillips. That family's been around here a long time."

No one was home at Vernon's, so Mason spent the next hour running down the rest of the Phillips clan. Only a few were home and none of them as helpful as Anson. He decided to try Vernon again.

This time there was a car in the driveway, a lime green, road-worn Chevy with a
Baby on Board
sign hung in the rear window. It was littered with Happy Meal bags, two car seats, and a scattering of diapers and baby wipes.

A chorus of bleating kids sang their demands from the other side of the screen door. A loose-jointed girl no more than twenty, her right hip jutting out to hold the rheumy-eyed infant glued to her side, answered Mason's knocks.

Stringy maize-colored hair hung over her narrow forehead as she examined him with defeated, washed-out eyes ringed by dark circles. She ran her tongue over chapped lips, while another toddler clung to her T-shirt, dragging it off one bony shoulder. The sour stench of soiled diapers followed them to the door.

"I'm looking for Vernon Phillips. Is this his house?"

"Yeah," she said, pushing the older child behind her and tugging her shirt back over her exposed dull gray bra strap.

"May I speak to him, please?"

"He don't live here no more. I'm renting from him."

"Do you know where I can find him?"

She disappeared for a minute and returned with a scrap of paper on which she'd written an address, 1860 Lincoln.

"Do you know Mr. Phillips?"

"Sure, known him all my life. We moved in across the street when I was five."

"Did he have children?"

"A girl, Meredith."

"She's the one I really need to talk to. Do you know where she lives?"

"No place. She's dead. Killed in a car wreck 'fore my folks moved in."

From the back, Mason heard another wailing voice cry out. The toddler bolted while the baby spit up. She didn't have to say good-bye.

Eighteen-sixty Lincoln was the address of the Loving Hands Convalescent Center, a low-slung, U-shaped building made of sandblasted brick. Heat waves radiated off a playground on the south side. Overgrown weeds had erupted through the asphalt, wrapping around the legs of a steel jungle gym. It was the only landscaping. A faded tire hung from a chain in the center of an otherwise empty swing set.

Mason parked in the circle drive next to a barren flagpole. The plaque embedded at its base declared that the alumnae of Lincoln Elementary School had donated it in 1953. A pair of oversized, pale pink cupped hands had been painted over the entry beneath the gracious claim that those inside had cared for loved ones since 1985. He wondered if any of the alumnae had reenrolled at their alma mater, proving again that life is a circle.

Airplane propeller–sized fans stood in the lobby blowing antiseptic flavored air down each stuffy hallway, though the breeze passed by the closed doors of the patients' rooms.

He shuddered, remembering when his aunt Claire dragged him to a nursing home to visit her mother. He was six. His grandmother was ancient. She lay in bed, near death, her hair fanned out around her head.

Claire had patiently brushed her hair, working out the tangles. He had looked into her cloudy black eyes sunk deep into her face. Her skin had been brittle and translucent, like looking through tissue paper into her skull. Her parched lips had been shut, silencing the voice that used to sing him to sleep, her gnarled hands lying uselessly at her sides. She had smelled like the stuff that the cleaning lady used to clean the toilets. He never went back.

Vernon Phillips lived in room twelve on the north wing. So did three other people, each cordoned off by a peach-colored vinyl curtain suspended from a track along the ceiling; four to a classroom, each bed with a view. Probably a lot less crowded than the days when kids roamed the halls.

A clipboard with an erasable surface hung on each classroom door, listing the occupants and their bed numbers. Vernon was bed number three. Each patient's space was furnished with a chair for visitors. Sandra Connelly sat in Vernon's.

"About time you got here, lover boy. I almost gave up on you," she said as she stood.

Sandra had an inexhaustible capacity for the unexpected. She had made it plain that she was doing her own investigation. Still, he was surprised to see her.

"Sorry to keep you waiting. I had some other stops to make."

"Tell me all about it."

"Later. How's Vernon?"

"Like all vegetables. Not good company."

His chart hung from a hook at the end of the bed. The top page contained the admitting information. He'd been there five weeks following a stroke. Mason put the chart back and looked at the figure lying in bed.

He was propped up, placing them in his line of sight. His gaze passed through them, through the walls, and kept going. Ragged gray stubble covered his chin and peppered his mottled cheeks. A loose-fitting hospital tunic lay over his chest and upper arms. His Adam's apple bobbed rhythmically, the only sure sign part of him was still with the living.

Mason couldn't take his eyes off of him. Vernon knew the answers to Mason's questions, but they were locked inside him. Mason sat at the foot of his bed, staring at him, weary at another dead end.

"Let's go," Sandra said. "Maybe you'll come up with another bright idea." Mason didn't move. "Come on, it's not your fault. We'll come back on Monday and check the city's birth records."

"Good idea. But I think I'll stay a while. He might come around."

"Yeah, and the first thing he'll say is 'Lou, good to see you. Let me tell you about my daughter.'"

Mason looked at Sandra, feeling the harshness in her, trying to figure out why she was risking her life to solve this case. He decided that she thrived on the combat. It was all about winning.

"Stranger things have happened. I'll call you."

"Don't count on it."

She waited for him to say something. He ignored her, content to watch the old man's breathing. Sandra waited in silence for five minutes.

"You damn well better call, Louis," she said and left.

Twice over the next hour, an aide came in to turn Vernon so that he wouldn't develop bedsores. She was a copper-colored Hispanic woman, jet-black hair, broad, flat features, and strong hands. Vernon had had eight inches and a hundred pounds on her in his prime. Even now, he retained most of his bulk. Yet she rolled him effortlessly from side to side, massaging his flanks to encourage his circulation. She spoke no English. He hoped for Vernon's sake that Medicare didn't ask for her green card.

At three o'clock, she returned with a syringe, rolled up Vernon's sleeve, and gave him an injection. Smiling at Mason, she moved on to her next patient.

Curious, he picked up Vernon's chart and studied the doctor's orders. Vernon was diabetic. He called Blues.

"What'd you find out about Angela's death?"

"Insulin overdose, just like Sullivan. Cops canceled the suicide."

Now he knew how Sullivan and Angela had been murdered. Vernon could tell him who and why, but he wasn't talking.

Mason stood at the edge of his bed, staring at him, feeling like an idiot. What did he expect Vernon to do? Listen to a list of suspects and blink once for innocent, twice for guilty?

The Loving Hands people provided a nightstand for each patient's personal items. A copy of a
Kansas City Star
newspaper lay on Vernon's. Mason picked up the newspaper to check for the date. It was two days old. Vernon had had a recent visitor.

Mason dropped the newspaper in the trash can next to the bed and saw a Bible that had been hidden beneath it. The Bible was bound in black leather,
Phillips Family Bible
embossed in small gold filigree letters on the spine.

Tommy Douchant's family also had a Bible embossed with the family name. He remembered Tommy showing him the family tree on the inside cover that traced his clan back five generations.
Be there, baby,
Mason prayed as he picked up Vernon's Bible.

And so it was written. Vernon Phillips and his wife had been married in 1956. Four years later, a daughter, Meredith, was born. She died in 1990. Beneath her name was the inscription Alice, born to Meredith July 3, 1977. Alice made no sense. There was no Alice. Mason went back to the beginning, to Vernon and his wife. He read her maiden name. Then he knew.

He said good-bye to Vernon and tucked the Bible under his arm. Promising himself that he'd return it when everything was over, he drove straight to Blues's house, struggling with the last hurdle in solving Sullivan's and Angela's murders. How to prove it? A brilliant trial lawyer once told him not to bother him with the facts, just tell him what the evidence was. Now he knew what the evidence was, but he wasn't certain that he could prove the facts.

He flashed back to the chalkboard at The Limit announcing the symposium on alternative AIDS therapies. He conjured the haunting image of Sullivan injecting himself, thinking it was some experimental AIDS treatment, not realizing he was killing himself. The killer had watched from a safe distance, not wanting to betray any undue interest, content in the knowledge that Sullivan would die by his own hand.

And that would be the killer's defense, that somehow Sullivan had made a terrible mistake. Whoever Sullivan had bought the phony AIDS meds from had made the mistake.

There would be no confession. Too much was at stake. The killer knew that, at best, the circumstantial evidence was as thin as yesterday's soup. Mason would prepare the same way he prepared for trial. And that meant tying up a few more loose ends.

Tuffy's barking announced Mason's arrival at Blues's house before Mason could knock on the door. Blues was standing at his kitchen sink, cutting slices from a fresh peach. Tuffy pawed happily at Mason's side until he scratched her ears.

"Peach?" Blues offered.

"Pass. Here's how I think Sullivan was murdered."

Blues listened, probing, picking, and ripping at any weakness. When Mason finished, he dropped the peach pit in the sink and wiped his hands on his shorts.

"I believe you. But you can't make it stick."

"Why not? It's all there."

"On Sullivan, maybe. But where does Angela fit in?"

"Murdered the same way. Insulin overdose." It was clear to him, why not to Blues?

"People get shot every day. Don't mean it's the same gun. If you're right about the killer, why take out Angela?"

Mason sagged under the weight of the question. "Angela told Sandra she had something else to tell her about besides the money laundering. Something she could only tell her in private. It must have implicated the killer. Did the cops find anything at Angela's apartment?"

"Harry Ryman told me they turned the place upside down. Nothing."

"I thought you guys didn't talk to each other."

"We don't. He's helping you, not me."

Mason's phone rang. He answered, listened, and hung up."

"Who was that?"

He looked at Blues, shaking his head. "That was the hospital. Man, I've got a new client."

"Who?"

"Jimmie Camaya. He's out of intensive care, and he's asking for me. Says he won't talk to anybody until he talks to me."

"Where is he?"

"Truman Medical Center," Mason said. "I'm guessing a private room with a cop on the door."

"You better take something just in case Camaya is feeling frisky."

Blues disappeared for a moment before coming back carrying a pistol he handed to Mason.

"What is it?" Mason asked as he held the gun.

"Thirty-eight caliber. Good enough for close range."

"Camaya can't be dangerous. I already shot him once. Plus the cops will be there."

"Somebody might be hanging around the parking lot waiting for you to come visit. Stick it in your waistband in the small of your back. Less chance you'll shoot your dick off."

Blues followed Mason out to the driveway and tossed Vernon's Bible onto the passenger seat of the TR6.

"Don't leave the Good Book lying around."

Mason drove away, uncertain whether he would agree to plead for justice and mercy on Camaya's behalf. He alternated the lawyer's litany that everyone was entitled to a defense with Claire's corollary that he didn't have to represent everyone.

When he arrived at the hospital, Mason got a text message from Kelly.