Josie Tucker Mysteries Box Set 2

by E M Kaplan

  Now she kicked him under the table. When he jumped and rubbed his shin, she tipped her head toward the door, hoping he’d get the hint and go take a stroll outside. He frowned at her, then at the door, but stayed put, adding a confused shrug.

  Darn it.

  “Seriously, you weren’t even named after anyone? Just DJ?” she asked, wondering if it was a country thing. “Does it go better with your last name or something?”

  “Nah,” he said, and now the grin came back, the cocky bastard, “but it does keep ‘em guessing.”

  “Hey, DJ,” the guy who’d taken over the front counter hollered. “Phone for you.”

  “Pardon me,” he told them. He tapped their table with two knuckles before he walked away, saying over his shoulder, “You two enjoy your meal. Don’t forget, it’s on me.”

  Well, if that wasn’t a dismissal, Josie didn’t know what was.

  She hadn’t touched her beer after the first sociable sip she’d taken while DJ was sitting with them. Staring at her plate, she couldn’t muster up the desire to take a bite, though it looked the same as it had the other day when she’d enjoyed it. Just as she was debating how to ask Drew, politely, to take a walk, DJ’s voice rose up over the lunchtime din of the restaurant.

  “What in hell are you talking about?” he shouted into the phone.

  Her eyebrows shot up as she turned to look. The entire restaurant had fallen silent. Even the table of old-timers had put down their beers and listened with heads tilted, exchanging glances with each other.

  His side of the conversation consisted mostly of cursing and whats and whens. Then he slammed down the phone and stood there staring at it with his hands on his hips. His face was a mask of tension, and a florid pink flush had taken over his entire neck and face up into his fair hair line. One of his large meaty hands swept across his mouth as he visibly tried to gather himself.

  “What’s going on?” Josie approached the counter.

  He shook his head. “I don’t even know where to begin. The Sheriff says Billy’s house burned down this morning. Not much left standing of the west side. Major damage to the rest. They’re questioning some bum about it, but the guy was so beaten up they took him to the hospital. And now they’re looking for Billy—but I know for a fact Billy is out of town. He called me from El Paso early this morning. That’s about an eight hour drive.”

  Josie’s heart sank. Sweet, sassy, vulnerable Marion beaten up? How could anyone want to hurt someone so painfully vulnerable? And Billy’s big, beautiful mansion charred and in ruins? No more Errol Flynn staircase and crystal chandelier. She wanted to cry. Or cuss a blue streak and hit someone.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  #

  “Why are we going to the hospital instead of the house?” Drew asked. “I mean, yes, I’m concerned about the well-being of the person who got hurt—doctor here, obviously. I just want to know why you’re more concerned about him than any potential clues at the fire.”

  He has a point. This diversion off my single-minded track must seem out of character to him. Fair, but ouch.

  He was driving now that this was a new neighborhood for both of them and she had wanted to call Skip. She held up a finger as his voicemail picked up. “Just a sec.”

  “Hi, it’s Josie,” she said. “You probably already heard about the fire at the Blake house this morning, but also there was a man…person at the house who was badly beaten.” She went on to explain, as best as she could, who Marion was and what he was doing at the house. It was possible Skip already knew about Marion, or at least had either seen or heard of him before, since he was hard to miss tooling around downtown on his bicycle in his string bikini.

  After she hung up, she explained to Drew, “Marion saved my bacon the other night. He could’ve let the cop take us in, but he didn’t. That’s a code of honor I can only hope to understand one day. I’m not even going to attempt to emulate it. I just want to see if I can do something, if he needs any help.”

  Seriously. The guy was homeless, literally homeless, again now that the fire had probably burned up his lounge chair. Going to the hospital to see how he was doing was the very least she could do. Maybe he needed something that she could help with. She just pictured him there, all bruised and bandaged, attached to beeping machines, and something in her cold, shriveled chest felt like it cracked.

  “I think you may have a heart after all,” Drew said. He said it as if he were joking, and the side of his mouth crooked upward, but she took his words as truth. She wasn’t entirely sure what the state of her insides was underneath her crusty, hard shell. Maybe she was soft and squishy—sentimental—on the inside. All she knew was that she couldn’t bear it if Marion were lying alone and broken in a hospital bed with no shoulder to cry on.

  Her phone rang while she was trying to gather back together her soft, nougat center.

  “Josie,” a voice who was not Skip said.

  “Greta,” Josie said, stalling while she tried to remember whether she’d actually called the woman when she’d been thinking about it before.

  No. No, I did not. This proves she has ESP. I should think more quietly next time.

  “When you return to Boston, I have a favor to ask of you. Normally, I wouldn’t bother you, but I didn’t want you to come home and immediately make arrangements for another trip. I know your blogging career allows you to move about easily.”

  That was the most Josie had ever heard her employer say in any one stretch.

  “You miss me, don’t you?” Josie asked.

  Greta was silent. It was possible the woman didn’t know how to respond to an open statement of affection, not having experienced it much in her life. On the other hand, she probably thought Josie was being sarcastic, which she might have been. Even she didn’t know.

  “Incidentally,” Josie continued, “I have a question for you.”

  “Yes?” Greta sounded a little too eager to enter back into the normal parameters of their relationship. Namely, to get back to talking about work instead of feelings. Josie was on board with that. However, it was fun to taunt someone even more out of touch with herself than she was.

  “Do you know of a Houstonite named Bunny Rogers? She’d be in her sixties—”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “I met her once in person at an American Red Cross function in Washington, D.C. in the early 1990’s. We were seated at the same table, so we conversed for some time. I thought she was a very cold woman, though she behaved perfectly sociably.”

  Dang. Anyone the ice queen Greta Williams assessed to be cold had to be sub-zero.

  “She had three sons and a daughter,” Josie said, intending to ask if Bunny had been more of a Patsy Ramsey questionably murderous mother or a Carrie Fisher stage mother extreme.

  Greta paused. “I heard about the misfortune with her daughter some years later. I now feel a certain empathy for her.”

  Now it was Josie’s turn to pause awkwardly.

  “Sorry I can’t be much more help than that. I met her only one time.”

  “Of course,” Josie said. “And I’ll text you as soon as I’m back in town.”

  “Thank you. I prefer that to phone calls.”

  And that is why we get along so well.

  “She sounds good,” Drew said, not meaning it. He put on his signal to turn into the hospital parking lot.

  Josie had to snort as she rested her chin on her chest for a minute. Though she didn’t actually know if she were laughing at herself or Greta.

  Hospitals used to give her the willies, but her frequent, sometimes unplanned visits to them were helping her get over her fears. She guessed it was a kind of immersion therapy of an unplanned nature. All the same, her heart rate hardly ticked up as she caught the attention of the receptionist.

  “I’m looking for Marion, the beating victim from the Billy Blake house fire over in Bee Caves,” she said, realizing she didn’t know Marion’s last name or if he even had one. He c
ould’ve been one of those one-name people like Cher, Madonna, or RuPaul—or was that two names?

  “Are you a reporter?” the woman asked. She had a sticky note stuck to her sleeve and her hand on her desk telephone, probably to call security, before Josie could speak.

  Oh crap. Was this one of those family-only situations? Was Josie going to have to lie to get in to see Marion? Or was she going to have to pull out her P.I. license again? She cleared her throat, ready to spread some kind of ferocious B.S. all over the woman’s desk.

  “Excuse me,” Drew said, “I’m Dr. Hornsby. I’ve been called in as an independent consultant by the victim’s doctor.” He had come up behind Josie. He pulled out his hospital badge from home and flashed it at the woman.

  “Oh!” she said. Flustered, she reached for a pen lodged behind her ear. “This is highly unusual. You’re supposed to check in down the hall. I’m just a hospital volunteer, not a Human Resources officer. I’m not really equipped to handle consultants.”

  Though she still looked hassled, with gray curls escaping the clip on the crown of her head, she batted her eyes at Drew in appreciation. Josie felt a spike of annoyance.

  Oh, how the tables have turned.

  “It’s all right. Just point us in the right direction and I’ll find the right people to talk to and the forms I need to sign,” he said, his voice ringing with an authority that made even Josie want to eat a more balanced diet and cut back on caffeine.

  He continued to bluff until the poor woman directed them to the nurses’ station upstairs. They followed color coded stripes on the wall around the corner and located the elevator bank. She pressed the button for the second floor, and they waited in silence.

  “Dr. Hornsby?” she asked as the steel doors slid shut.

  “Sorry. Mandolin Rain was playing in the lobby. Bruce Hornsby. It was the first thing I could think of under pressure. I’m not good at this—I’ve never lied like that before. I could lose my license to practice medicine if someone finds out.” He paused. “If I get fired, can I be your professional sidekick?”

  “It really doesn’t pay.” She listened to the bing-bong of the elevator passing the second floor. “Can you actually play the mandolin?”

  “No, but I know all the words to Mandolin Rain.”

  “First chance we get, we are getting you drunk and doing karaoke.”

  On the third floor, they followed more color stripes on the walls to the nurses’ desk, where Skip Richmond was talking to two police officers.

  “Josie,” he said, a thin smile on his wrinkled face, when he spotted her. “I got your message, but I was already here. Figured I’d run into you.”

  “Hey, I know you,” one of the cops said. “Josie Tucker. From last night.”

  She recognized him as the officer who had come to the Blake house in the middle of the night. So, he had read her I.D. after all, the sneaky bastard with his aw-shucks attitude. She’d been right to be wary of him.

  “Uh, hi,” she said, not quite sure if he was about to arrest her for assault and battery, or possibly arson.

  To her surprise, he gestured to a nearby room with a tip of his chin. “Marion’s over there. He mentioned he was hoping you’d come visit him. Honestly, I wasn’t sure where you were staying until Skip here saved me the trouble of tracking you down. For an out-of-towner, you sure do get around.”

  She thanked him and finally thought to read his name tag, which said, “Handsome.”

  Chapter 34

  Marion was frail and plain without his makeup and finery. Propped up on a mountain of pillows with a nurse swabbing his arm with an alcohol wipe, he looked as dainty as a baby chick in a nest. Even a decorated war vet could look vulnerable clothed in nothing but a paper-thin hospital johnny. Josie knew all too well the feeling of having nothing but threadbare cotton ties between her and flashing a full moon to a room of strangers. Despite his beaten and bruised face and looking like someone’s malnourished granddad, Marion was still full of sass.

  “Sorry, girly,” he told the nurse, lisping even worse than before. “My veins on that side are shot, plain and simple, even though I’ve been clean for years. Tell me a homophobic joke and make the angry ones on my forehead pop out. That’ll help ya.”

  The nurse chortled and switched arms, getting his IV changed out in a matter of minutes.

  “Honey, baby,” he cried when he noticed Josie. “I’ve missed you.”

  Both of his eyes were almost swollen shut and already purple. The right one had a pool of red in it that probably looked worse than it felt—at least, she hoped so, because it looked disgusting. One of his cheeks had a trail of stitches high up on the bone. He had a bandage on his forehead, lips so swollen a Kardashian would be jealous, a torn earlobe, and bandages wrapped around his entire rib cage that made him look like he was wearing a tube top under his front-opening johnny.

  “Oh, Marion,” she said, her chest tight with regret, almost to the point of pain, as she pulled up a chair next to his bedside. “What happened to you?”

  “You will never believe it. About an hour or so after you two and Officer Gorgeous vamoosed, I was sound asleep in my chair having probably the best dream ever—shoe shopping at a store that didn’t want my money—when this stunted Nazi skinhead shows up and starts beating the ever lovin’ stuffing out of me. I didn’t know what to think. I’ll tell you what I did think. I was back living on the streets in Tulsa again, that’s what. My dream turned into a nightmare real quick.” The word stuffing came out sounding like th’tuffin.

  Josie bit her lip. If she and Lizzie had stayed just an hour longer, they might have prevented this from happening. Three against one, even if the three were woefully unqualified to defend themselves, were better odds than Marion had faced.

  “Did you get a look at the guy?”

  “He was short and blond, like one of those baby Nazis they used to put in Nazi school before they could be real soldiers. That’s all I know. After that, all I saw were his fists.”

  Short? That ruled out both Billy Blake and DJ. The two of them were both giants compared to Josie, and shortness wasn’t a characteristic a person could fake.

  “Did he say anything to you?” she asked.

  “Just the usual stuff,” Marion hedged, smoothing his bed sheet.

  “What do you mean?” She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she had a rough idea.

  “He said eff you a million times and insulted my sexual orientation,” Marion said. “Not like we were swapping secrets and having a sleepover. He just assumed I’m gay. Who does that anymore? This isn’t the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Dark Ages. If he wanted to know that bad, he could have just asked me. At least then he’d know whether he was assaulting the right type of person.”

  Was Marion gay? She didn’t know either. Whatever. It didn’t matter to her. “How did you get away?”

  “I started throwing things at him—that jerk broke my tiara, too. My beautiful crown. I could almost cry. But then I got mad and hit him with my acrylic platforms. Pow. Right in the head. He was coming after me for real after I did that. I thought it was worse than that other time—long story short, I thought I might as well kiss my butt goodbye. Then there was a big boom. The house shook like a tornado was coming through. We saw smoke and the patio roof started to fall over. He got scared and ran.”

  Josie glanced behind her, glad to find both Drew and the police officer standing in the doorway. By their expressions, they had heard Marion’s statement as well. She turned back to him. “Is there anything else you can remember about the guy? You said he was short and had fair hair? About how old was he?”

  “Young, young, young. So young, I don’t even remember being that age.”

  Josie got a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Like, how old would you say?”

  “Barely old enough to grow a beard, though he was trying.” His own beard was even more rumpled than before and still had some blood in it.

  “So he had some facial hair?”
/>
  “Yeah, one of those little fake looking goatees. But you could barely see it because it was almost invisible. It almost looked like crotch hair, if you know what I’m saying.”

  She nodded. Unfortunately, she knew exactly what he was describing. And who.

  “Anything unusual about his hands?”

  “No, not that I can remember, other than his knuckles connecting with my face.”

  Hmm, Josie hadn’t been expecting that. The last time she’d seen Ryan, he’d had black fingernail polish, but maybe it was a smashed nail from working with his steel sculptures. Nevertheless, she was pretty certain Marion’s attacker had been him.

  “Is there anything you need that I can help you with?”

  Where would he go after this? Who would take care of him if he needed help?

  “Aw, you’re a sweetheart”—thweehar—“but as long as I’m here, I get some good meals and cable TV. I’m all set for now. And believe me, girly, this isn’t the worse shape I’ve ever been in.”

  #

  “You get all that?” Josie asked the cop as they exited the room and lingered in the wide hospital hallway, the squeaky clean floors shining up at them like a white, MRSA-filled river. She could feel a strong case of the hospital willies coming on. She’d need a gallon of hand soap and a 30-minute Silkwood shower at this rate.

  Hospitals. Yuck, man.

  Skip hung back to ask Marion a couple more questions before his painkillers kicked in. He’d refused opiates, so Josie didn’t know what they were giving him. Every tiny thing she learned about him made her like him just a bit more.

  “Go ahead and fill in some of the blanks for me, would you?” the cop that Marion—and now Josie—had taken a shine to asked her. She made a mental note to ask him where Marion could find some people to lean on after the hospital kicked him out. He’d mentioned some kind of shelter the night before. Maybe they had a place for Marion. She just couldn’t handle picturing him living on a street corner, wounded, after seeing his setup poolside at Billy’s mansion.