Trudy, Madly, Deeply (Working Stiffs Mystery Series) (4 page)

“I called her primary care doctor.”

Before calling Trudy’s husband? That struck me as odd, especially since his words were accompanied with a hard edge of distain. “Who was … ?”

“Warren Straitham.”

The name came as no surprise, despite the fact that the doctor who had delivered me had to be pushing seventy. Most of the local gray hairs preferred good old Doc Straitham to the new kids in town, and all the senior citizens in my family were no exception.

“I advised his service to let him know about Mrs. Bergeson and he arrived about ten minutes later,” Dr. Cardinale said.

I looked up from my notebook. “That’s pretty darn quick.”

Folding his arms over his chest, Dr. Cardinale shrugged, a tight, little sneer of contempt dimpling his cheek.

Warren Straitham lived in the hills, a couple miles south of Port Merritt. Once the phone message was relayed to him, there was no way he could have rolled out of bed and driven to the hospital that quickly.

Clearly, the attending doctor had some strong opinions concerning Trudy’s primary care physician, but I’d seen nothing to indicate that Dr. Cardinale had lied to me.

I jotted a question mark next to my notes about the ten-minute arrival time. “After Dr. Straitham got here, what happened?”

“I briefed him on … the situation and told him he’d better call Norm Bergeson.” Shifting in his seat like he wanted to make a break for the nearest exit, Dr. Cardinale scrubbed his face, hiding it from my view. “And that’s about it.”

I didn’t believe that for a minute. He was holding something back.

“Just one more question, Dr. Cardinale.”
Maybe two.
“Why did you call the Coroner to ask for an autopsy?”

He blew out a breath. “With Mrs. Bergeson’s heart and history of stroke, she didn’t have long, maybe a year, but ….” He slowly shook his head. “According to her chart the asphyxiation doesn’t fit.”

I had no idea what that meant, so that made my next question a no-brainer. “For someone in her condition who is also battling pneumonia, would asphyxiation be considered unusual?”

He frowned. “Not necessarily.”

Since I’d just met the man, I couldn’t tell if the tension I saw in his piercing stare meant that he was pissed off or if he was just concentrating. I suspected some of both.

He raked a hand through his hair, making it look even more perfectly unkempt. “I don’t think this is an isolated incident.”

“Which means what exactly?”

“It may be part of a pattern.”

“A pattern in which other people have died this way?”

He slowly nodded.

I sat at the edge of my seat. “How many people?”

“At least two in the last year.”

“Holy cow,” I muttered, my hand shaking as I tried to capture his exact words. “Who?”

“I don’t know if I should—”

“Dr. Cardinale, I’m here to take your statement as follow-up to the call you made to the County Coroner’s office.” I may not have known how to act like a deputy coroner, but I could damned well sound like one. “Trust me, you should name names.”

He cast a quick glance at the door. “Bernadette Neary and Howard Jeppesen.”

Port Merritt was a small town, so I half-expected to recognize the names. But he had just sucker-punched me by naming two friends of my grandmother’s.

“They were
also
Straitham’s patients,” he said, landing another punch.

So was I for the first twenty years of my life.

“Are you accusing Dr. Straitham—”

“I’m just saying that it’s too coincidental. And I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Neither did I.

Chapter Four

It was almost ten-thirty when I pulled out of the hospital parking lot. Duke’s was sure to be buzzing with the news about Trudy, so I thought I’d stop for some coffee on my way back to the courthouse. Not that I needed the caffeine. My body was already pumping with enough adrenaline to catapult me into next week. But since my great-aunt and uncle lived four blocks from Chimacam Memorial and could have driven past Dr. Straitham coming up the hill on 6th
Street early this morning, I wanted to find out if they had seen anything that could confirm the doctor’s arrival time.

After I cruised by a new three-story apartment complex for seniors where a block of century-old, clapboard row houses built for the mill workers had stood last year, I turned left onto Main Street and angled into a parking spot in front of the Shabby Apple, an antique store a half block from Duke’s Cafe.

The silver bell over the door signaled my arrival at the 50’s era diner. If I inched close enough to the wall, the big mouth bass mounted next to Aunt Alice’s fish tank would chime in with a tinny rendition of
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
—my great-uncle’s idea of cheap entertainment.

Wish I could take advice from a plastic fish, but it wasn’t a
Don’t Worry
kind of day.

All but two of the eight booths hugging the buttermilk yellow walls sat empty. Occupying the scarred round table in the corner were four Gray Ladies, members of an early morning exercise group decked out in matching heather gray sweatshirts with their first names stitched on the front like pre-Disney Channel Mouseketeers. They always stopped in for pastry and gossip after their class at the senior center up the street. No doubt Trudy’s death would be the featured topic of conversation of this morning’s coffee klatch.

Ernie and Jayne, a couple in their mid-seventies, sat across from one another in one of the booths next to the front window. Ernie, a widower, looked like he’d gelled his white hair. Judging by the way he was looking at Jayne, it wasn’t to impress his fishing buddy, Duke. Bellied up to the lemon yellow Formica counter was ninety-year-old Stanley, reading yesterday’s newspaper at his usual barstool.

Looming large in the cut-out window above the grill, six-foot-three-inch Duke squinted at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I’m on a coffee break.” Sort of.

Duke, a salty Navy veteran who still sported a military-style crew cut, huffed out a deep breath. “Coffee break, my sweet patoot.”

Worry deepened the creases in his forehead as he turned and watched Alice, his wife of fifty-two years, roll out pie dough on the butcher block work table in the middle of the kitchen. “You must have heard about Trudy.”

“I heard.” I didn’t dare mention what else I’d heard this morning.

I pulled out a white porcelain mug from under the counter and filled it with industrial strength, black as crude oil java from a carafe at the coffee station.

“How’s Alice doing?” I asked as I dumped some half and half into my cup to make Duke’s coffee palatable.

He flipped the two bubbling pancakes on the grill. “Hasn’t shed a tear.”

That was weird. Like Dr. Cardinale had told me,
it didn’t fit
. Trudy and Alice had been friends since childhood. Shedding some tears would be a normal reaction. This news gave me a very uneasy feeling, and after what I’d heard this morning at the hospital I was already feeling plenty uneasy.

I wasn’t going to feel any better until I got some help with the jigsaw puzzle I kept trying to piece together in my head.

Leaning a hip against the counter, I watched Duke through the cut-out window as he scrambled a couple of eggs. “Let me ask you something,” I said, keeping my voice low. Stanley, sitting at the end of the counter, might have been a little hard of hearing, but today wasn’t the day to push my luck.

My great-uncle shot me a wary glance, the same look he reserved for every restaurant equipment salesman who stepped foot in his diner.

“When did you leave the house this morning?” I asked.

“Around four, like usual. Why?”

“Did you see anyone on the road on your way in?”

“We passed a couple of cars on Main.” He furrowed his bushy silver eyebrows. “Why?”

I didn’t want to get into
why
. If I suggested that I had the tiniest concern about where Warren Straitham was when he got the call from Dr. Cardinale, it would spread in the kitchen like a grease fire. “You didn’t recognize the cars?”

“No.”

Then he didn’t pass Dr. Straitham’s Cadillac on the way to the hospital, and I’d just hit a dead end.

“So, is there something I was supposed to have seen?” Duke asked, brushing my arm with the strings of his white canvas apron as he reached for a plate.

Yes.
“No, nothing like that.”

“You’re such a bad liar.”

Not usually. But I had a bigger problem. If I took everything Dr. Cardinale told me at face value, then how did Trudy’s doctor get to the hospital so quickly?

Duke dished up the eggs he’d scrambled, added a wedge of cantaloupe, and set the plate onto the shiny aluminum counter in front of him. “Order up.”

Lucille Kressey, a grandmotherly waitress who had worked for Duke ever since she lost her job at the mill in the late seventies, lumbered past me.

“Denver. Bacon. Wheat,” she said in rapid staccato, slipping the breakfast order on the aluminum wheel over the grill.

Lucille wore squeaky, white orthopedic shoes, styled her fine platinum hair in a bob that curled into her plump cheeks, and punctuated the breakfast order with a heavy sigh.

It wasn’t the sigh that telegraphed her mood. That had more to do with her bunions. The little flicker of disgust at the corner of her puckered mouth, as visible to me as the coral lipstick bleeding into the surrounding fine lines, was what had my attention.

She shook her head. “I really don’t see how people can eat at a time like this.”

“They’re hungry.” Duke pushed the plate toward Kim, a perky strawberry blonde college student who swept by me, leaving a trail of patchouli in her wake.

“They won’t be when they find out what’s going on around here,” Lucille said, directing an icy glare at Jayne and Ernie.

I couldn’t begin to guess what Jayne Elwood and Ernie Kozarek had to do with any of the events surrounding Trudy’s death, but Lucille had obviously made some connection.

Stanley sent a nervous glance our way. So did a couple of the Gray Ladies.

Wide eyed as a horror movie extra, Kim waited at the counter for the rest of her order. “You’re scaring the customers,” she said to Lucille in a breathless stage whisper.

Lucille shrugged. “Maybe they should be scared.”

Duke passed a plate stacked with pancakes to Kim. “Deliver those, then take Jayne and Ernie’s order, and keep an eye on things for a few minutes.” He pointed at Lucille. “You. In the kitchen.”

Lucille narrowed her watery blue-eyed gaze at my great-uncle. If looks could kill, Trudy wouldn’t be the only obituary notice in Wednesday’s
Port Merritt Gazette
.

I knew from experience that Lucille’s conspiracy theories could take me down a rat hole. But if she actually knew something that could back up Dr. Cardinale’s suspicions, I had to jump in with both my size eights.

I grabbed the coffee carafe, three clean cups, and followed Lucille into the kitchen. Rolling pin in hand, seventy-four-year-old Alice looked up at me from her wooden stool. Five unbaked fruit pies sat in a row to her left, awaiting their turn in the oven, the unmistakable aroma of cinnamon and sugar hanging in the air. The news about Trudy obviously hadn’t stopped my great-aunt from filling her bakery racks. But her deep-set hazel eyes seemed dull, the apples of her cheeks devoid of their usual glow, like someone had snuffed out the spark in the former fiery redhead.

Lucille pulled up the old desk chair Duke used to tally the register receipts and lowered herself into it, sitting across from Alice.

“What’s this?” Alice demanded, scowling at Duke.

He sat on the stool next to Lucille. “We’re having a meeting.” Extending his long legs, he glared at me as I set the cups on the table and started filling them with coffee. “Don’t you have a job to go back to?”

I handed him a cup. “Not done with my break yet.”

“Fine,” he said. “Just keep your yap shut.”

Leaning against a stainless steel refrigerator, I smiled sweetly at the old buzzard. “Yes, sir.” I was more interested in listening than talking anyway.

Duke wrapped his meaty hands around his cup like he needed to warm them even though it had to be almost eighty degrees near the oven. He cleared his throat. “Listen, we’re all sad about Trudy.”

“We wouldn’t be if people around here had listened to me,” Lucille snapped.

On a typical day I could easily ignore Lucille’s editorial opinions. But nothing about today felt like a typical day, so I had to ask. “About what?”

Duke fixed his steely gaze on me like a sharpshooter with an itchy trigger finger.

I know, I was supposed to keep my yap shut.

Lucille reached for a coffee cup. “About Rose.”

Rose was Ernie Kozarek’s wife, who had passed away almost two years ago after a lengthy stay in the hospital.

“For crissake, Luce,” Duke snapped, raking a hand through his clipped silver hair. “Give it a rest.”

Lucille aimed a laser-like glare at him. “That’s what you said when Jesse Elwood died, and now Trudy’s gone.”

She was connecting the dots between those three deaths?

Kim stood at the door to the kitchen and waved a white order ticket at Duke, who growled an obscenity, then pointed at Lucille. “Enough of this crazy talk. It doesn’t help anybody.”

I was sure the
anybody
he was most concerned about was Alice. Even before I’d seen the cocoon of pain she was hunkered down in I would have shared his concern.

He stood, flattening his palms on the table. “I don’t want to hear it. The customers don’t want to hear it, so knock it off. Do I make myself clear?”

Grumbling, Lucille waved him away like he was a pesky fly.

Duke stalked past me. “I give up. Talk some sense into her to make her stop stirring the pot.”

That was like telling me to drop ten pounds by midnight. When Lucille had something fixed in her mind, there was no convincing her otherwise.

Once Duke had busied himself at the grill, I scooted his wooden stool over to sit between the two women. “What do you mean people should have listened to you?” I asked Lucille.

She leaned into my shoulder like we were schoolgirls sharing a secret. “All I know is that when I got to the hospital to see Trudy last night, she was sitting up in bed and eating tapioca pudding. After Norm got there, they started talking about how she’d be going home today. I ask you, does that sound like someone who’s gonna die in the middle of the night?”