Death in a Green Jacket

by James Y. Bartlett

  “Stop,” Conn said. “Don’t care about charging rent. You are my guests.”

  He held up his wine glass. We all clinked on it.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  When we got back to the Old Magnolia a couple of hours later, we found the place in an uproar. People were milling around in the lobby area, and a group had gathered in the sitting room. I saw Hans Kleiber and approached him. He was ashen faced, sitting in a chair with his head in his hands.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  He looked at me, shaken. “Christian Geer is dead!” he said, his voice hoarse. “the poor man had a heart attack while at the National this afternoon. It happened right after we dropped him off.”

  “My God,” I said. Mary Jane made sympathetic noises next to me.

  “Yes, it is a terrible thing,” Hans said. “He was a very good friend. I cannot believe the news. But you saw how disturbed he was this morning. He was not himself at all.”

  “Did it happen while he was meeting with Grosvenor?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” Hans admitted. “We are trying to contact his family now in Belgium and make arrangements for sending his body home. Oh, this is a terrible event.”

  “Where have they taken him?” I asked.

  “His remains were taken to the local hospital,” Hans said. “There is nothing we can do until tomorrow.”

  We stayed and listened for a while as Hans reminisced about his friend. The other internationals filed in and out, offering condolences and talking about the tragic event. It was a reminder that golf is just a game, but life is real.

  After some time, I motioned to Mary Jane and we made our exit. I grabbed her arm and led her out to the parking lot.

  “Where are we going?” she wondered.

  “To the hospital,” I said. “I need to see someone.”

  In all my driving around town, I had passed the sprawling medical complex of the county hospital several times, so I knew where it was. We got there and parked in the near-empty lot. At the front desk, I asked for Travis Kitchen’s room.

  “He’s on the fourth floor,” the lady at the desk told us. “But visiting hours were over at nine. You can’t go up now.”

  “This is official business,” I said and dragged Mary Jane onto the nearest elevator. The lady protested, but I didn’t really care.

  On the fourth floor, there was another counter at the nurse’s central station, with wings and corridors heading off in three directions. A middle-aged black nurse with a no-nonsense look on her face folded her arms across her chest.

  “Didn’t they tell you visiting hours were over?” she demanded.

  “I need to see Lt. Kitchen right away,” I said. “It’s important.”

  “Life or death, I suppose,” the nurse said.

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Sonny boy, you have been watching too much television,” the nurse said sternly. “This is the real world and our patients are resting. Go away.”

  “Now listen,” I started in hotly. Mary Jane put her hand on my arm to stop me.

  “No, Hacker,” she said. “The lady is right. We can come back in the morning. It’d be smarter then.”

  I turned to argue with her, when I caught a look in her eye that made me stop. I heaved a sigh of frustration instead.

  “Good boy,” Mary Jane said. She leaned in and gave me a quick kiss and a hug. While we were in the brief embrace, I heard her whisper. “Be ready.”

  “Can I use the rest room?” Mary Jane asked the nurse as we broke our embrace. “He dragged me down here right after dinner, and …”

  The nurse was still glaring at us, arms folded. “Well, all right,” she said. “Down the hall on the right.” She motioned the way. “And you, Sonny Boy, you stay right here where I can keep an eye on you.”

  Mary Jane winked at me as she walked down the hall. I stood against the wall, arms crossed. The nurse went back to writing things on the charts in front of her. In a minute, there was a soft but insistent beep-beep-beep coming from the nurse’s desk.

  “Oh, what now?” the woman said, wearily heaving herself to her feet. “Mrs. Cathcart again?” She glared at me. “You stay right there, bub.” And she hurried off down the hall.

  Once she was out of sight, I leaned over the counter and looked at the charts. Kitchen was in 405. I followed the signs on the wall and quickly found the room. I pushed open the door and stepped inside. It was warm and dark in the room, all the lights were out. The only illumination was from the LED lights on a monitor that was keeping track of Kitchen’s vital signs.

  “Hold it right there,” said a deep voice I recognized as Kitchen. “I’ve got a gun, it’s loaded and it’s aimed right at you.”

  I heard him as he sat up and leaned over. He flicked on the bedside light. It was true. He had a pistol in his hand and it was pointing at my belly.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, surprised.

  “They allow you to keep firearms in this hospital?” I said. “Seems counter-productive to me. I thought this was a place of healing.”

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t get shot at yesterday,” he said, lowering the gun. “I did. And until they catch the guy, I’ve gotta think he’ll try again. So what the hell are you doing here? I know it’s not a social visit because you didn’t bring either flowers or candy.”

  “I think it’s time we had a chat,” I said. “And I need an official favor.” Quickly, I filled him in on Christian Geer. How he had arrived, demanding to be taken to the National and Charlie Grosvenor, hinting that he had something very important and problematic to discuss. Whereupon he had a coronary and died.

  Kitchen understood right away. “That sounds kinda fishy,” he said.

  “Will they do an autopsy?” I asked.

  He stroked his chin, thinking. “Probably not,” he said finally. “Foreign national. No apparent crime. Heart attack in front of witnesses? All of whose stories match? Nah, they’ll probably do a quick embalm and ship him home.”

  “Can you still order one? Or don’t retired homicide dicks have any pull in this county?”

  “You really shouldn’t insult an officer of the law,” he said. “Especially one that’s grumpy, has a sore ass and is armed. Not good for your longevity.”

  But he reached over for the telephone, pulled it onto his lap and began dialing.

  A few minutes later, the nurse came in spitting fire and just about dragging Mary Jane by the scruff of the neck.

  “All right, buster,” she said. “Are you two going to leave on your own, or do I have to call the authorities?”

  Kitchen pulled his gun out from under the covers. “Want me to shoot them, Cassie?” he asked dryly.

  Mary Jane gasped at the sight of his pistol. The nurse glared at him, and then smiled. “No, Lieutenant,” she said. “You’d better not. I think I can handle it.”

  I apologized, and so did Mary Jane, who had been the one to sneak into someone’s room and trip the call button. Cassie the nurse was still angry, but she eventually accepted our apologies. But she also demanded that we get off her floor and fast.

  Kitchen and I agreed to talk in the morning. His phone rang as we were leaving, and I heard Cassie berating him for being up so late, taking all these chances, not getting his proper rest … Her voice disappeared as the elevator doors closed.

  “That was a pretty neat trick,” I said. “Where did you learn that?”

  “Hacker, don’t you ever watch sitcoms, soap operas or ER?” she said. “It’s the oldest trick in the book.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. “Well, it worked pretty good. Thanks. Kitchen is going to try and get the medical examiner to do a quick autopsy tonight.”

  “What do you think they’ll find?” Mary Jane asked as we arrived on the ground floor and began to make our way back to the car.

  “I dunno,” I said. “But I’ll bet they find something.”

 
Chapter Twenty-Two

  What they found was atropine. Knowing the situation, the county medical examiner had done a favor for Travis Kitchen and run a down-and-dirty toxicology report on Christian Geer. Normally, such test reports take a couple of weeks to produce, at a minimum. But that’s because the labs know they have to be careful and diligent and methodical because the results may very likely end up in a court of law in a homicide case. Kitchen had convinced the M.E. to just pull a blood and tissue sample from Geer and run some basic tests looking for a handful of agents that might have caused a coronary. If the tests showed anything suspicious, he said he’d go to court and get a warrant for a more complete examination before the body was returned to Europe.

  Freed from the responsibility of doing the procedure by the book, the M.E. had quickly tested for a list of substances that he and Kitchen worked out. And he hit pay dirt on the third one.

  “His blood levels showed an extremely high concentration of atropine,” Kitchen told me the next morning when he called. “Doctors sometimes inject a few cc’s to speed up your heartbeat if you’ve got coronary trouble.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t taking some other medications that contained atropine?” I asked.

  “If he was, he was overdosing by a factor of fifty,” Kitchen said. “The doc said atropine in that concentration meant that his heart pretty much exploded. I’ve heard that it has been used before to disguise assassinations. You can sneak up on someone, stick in a hypodermic and zap ‘em, and they’ll be dead within minutes. Nice and clean. Looks just like a heart attack, with the sweating, the pain in the chest, the gasping for breath, and then boom. You’re down and out. Shoot it into somebody old and everyone will assume it’s the big one. Like we almost did.”

  “We?” I said.

  “Yeah, I talked to the chief about my resignation,” he said. “I was pissed that they wanted me to stop on this case.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked.

  “The feds. They’re tracking some South American drug lords and they feel this is all part of it. And that my investigation might ruin their case. I told them the citizens of Richmond County don’t give a rat’s ass about their case—they want justice. My chief backed them. So I quit.”

  “Can’t say as I blame you,” I said.

  “I talked to the chief today, and told him what we’d found. That and the fact that they tried to kill me made both of us reconsider our positions. We also decided not to announce it publicly right away. I’m officially on medical leave for a few weeks. But in the meantime, I’m back on the case, unofficially.”

  “When do you get out of the hospital?”

  “In about ten minutes, or I’m leaving anyway,” he said. “As long as I don’t have to sit down, I think I can function.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “First thing, I’m going to take a ride down to the Terry,” he said. “I want to talk to Lester.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He’s our local criminal enterprise,” Kitchen said. “He runs the prostitution, gambling, loan sharking and narcotics games in this town. If something bad is happening in Augusta, Lester is either the one doing it, or knows who is.”

  “Sounds interesting. Need someone to go along?”

  “I got shot in the ass, not the head,” he said, chuckling. “I can’t take a newspaper reporter along on an official investigation. I can see the county attorney getting red in the face just thinking about it.”

  “You just said this was an unofficial investigation,” I pointed out. “Plus, with your injured, um, quarters, you might need someone to drive so you can sit on a pillow or something. I’ll try and miss all the potholes, too.”

  “We don’t have potholes in the South,” he said. “Maybe the occasional possum.”

  “I’ll sign a waiver if you want,” I said. “Promise not to hold Richmond County responsible if Lester decides he wants to shoot us.”

  I heard a loud woman’s voice in the background that sounded a lot like Nurse Cassie complaining about something that Kitchen was, or was not, doing. He sighed.

  “I’m too weak to argue with either you or Nurse Ratchet here,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Over at the Olde Magnolia,” I said. “Ready to rock n’ roll.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be over shortly.”

  Nurse Cassie said something that sounded like “The hell you will…” before the phone went dead.

  I told Mary Jane what was up. She whistled at the news about Christian Geer, but frowned at the idea of me going with Travis down to the Terry.

  “What is it about you?” she asked rhetorically. “You always have to be right there on the front lines, don’t you?”

  “I might be able to ask a question to help find out something useful,” I said. “You never know.”

  “And the danger?”

  “I’m going with the chief of homicide for the county,” I reminded her. “I doubt that we’re going to get into a gun fight.”

  She was not happy, but when Kitchen showed up driving his county issue Chevrolet Caprice, she managed to smile at both of us. “Be careful,” she said.

  “I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Kitchen said, giving her a wink.

  I got behind the wheel, while Kitchen eased himself into a semi-comfortable position in the passenger seat. I asked how Nurse Cassie was. He growled. “Good nurse. Total bitch,” he said.

  He gave me directions as we motored down the hill and into downtown Augusta. We talked as we drove. I told him about my talk with Maria Sanchez, who had been the first one to tell me about Enrico. I also told him about our dinner with Wilcox, the federal agent. He found that most interesting.

  We passed the Medical College of Georgia where the Golf Writers Association once held their annual awards banquet during the Masters, and eventually passed through the downtown. I followed his instructions to head south on 7th Street. Once we passed Greene Street, the streetscape changed.

  Here, we drove past ancient triple-decker tenements with sagging wooden porches and peeling paint. Back yards, if there were any, were wrapped in layers of chain link. On almost every corner, some seedy looking storefront attracted two or three black men, who lounged against the wall, drinking from something hidden in a brown paper bag, who stared at us as we drove past. It was like driving from America into some other world that most of us don’t know exists, and the rest of us try to forget.

  We passed a block-sized park with concrete basketball courts and playgrounds, and bare-dirt ball fields. A few brave-hearted trees along the edges of the park were beginning to produce a bit of shade as their spring leaves popped out.

  “This is Dyess Park,” Kitchen said. “At night, it’s not someplace you want to be. But James Brown used to give away turkeys to everyone here at Thanksgiving.”

  “He grew up here, didn’t he?” I asked.

  “His aunt ran a whorehouse right over there, on Twiggs,” Kitchen pointed. “He used to sing and dance for pennies and nickels when he was about 10 years old. No wonder he became the ‘hardest working man in show business.’”

  On the far side of the park, Kitchen told me to take a right and then a few more quick turns until we reached Dugas Street. It looked like most of the other streets—dusty, drab, occupied by sad-looking little houses, and mostly empty save for a couple of beat-up cars and one mangy looking dog napping on the sidewalk in the sun.

  At the end of the street—it just stopped in a tree-shaded thicket—there was the usual group of men, gathered around a stoop. They looked at us without expression as we pulled up in front of a blue-gray house with brick steps and a narrow front porch. One of the men in the group peeled off and walked, slowly, inside.

  “Reception committee?” I guessed.

  “Just some of Lester’s homies,” Kitchen said. “I’ll bet they knew we were in the neighborhood ten minutes ago.”

  I got out of the car and went a
round to help Kitchen ease his way carefully out of the seat. Once he was upright, he walked, with a slight limp and a wince or two, up to the house.

  “Heard you done got shot,” one of the men on the front steps said. The others sat there, impassive, silent, stone-faced.

  “Right in the ass,” Kitchen said, smiling. “Not convenient.”

  “You know thass right,” the man said.

  Travis put out his hand and the man, after a brief hesitation, shook it.

  “How you doin’ Chester?” Kitchen said. “The boss in?”

  “Ain’t he always?” the man said.

  Kitchen nodded. We climbed the stairs and entered the front door across the porch. I looked back. The men still sat there, impassively, staring at the car as if they expected it to get up and fly.

  Inside, there was a stairway leading up to the second floor along the left wall, and a narrow hallway that led to the back of the house. A front sitting room to the right was empty, save for a high-backed couch and two wooded chairs sitting on a round, woven rug. Another black man, broad-shouldered and buff, dressed in a gray suit that stretched tightly across his upper body, stood in the hallway, cracking his knuckles. He nodded at Kitchen.

  “Lieutenant,” he murmured in greeting.

  “William,” Kitchen said. “We’d like to chat with Lester for a minute if he’s free.”

  “Umm, hmm,” William said. “Who this be?” he said, looking at me.

  “Name’s Hacker,” Kitchen said. “From Boston.”

  “Boston, huh?” William said, giving me the up-and-down. “I lost me a bunch of money on the Patriots last fall.” He didn’t look happy about that.

  “You and me, both,” I said.

  William looked at Kitchen. “He packin’?” he asked. Kitchen shook his head no, but I held out my arms anyway. William gave me a quick, but thoroughly efficient pat-down. He stood up, shot his cuffs, and nodded for us to go on through.

  I’m not sure what I expected the office of the head of Augusta’s black criminal enterprise to look like, but it surely wasn’t what we found after we walked through that hallway door. We walked into the back of the house which was entirely taken up by the kitchen and a breakfast nook of sorts beyond it. Old, peeling linoleum covered the floor, and the porcelain in the sink was worn down to the black iron beneath the veneer. An almond-colored refrigerator from Sears competed with a lime-green gas stove for attention. Open shelves lined the walls—some held melamine dishes and others various boxes and cans of food. A dirty window over the sink, the screen folded over in one corner, looked out on a scruffy back yard where a mean-looking, muscular brown dog ran around, chained to a metal post in the center of the yard.