“Enough to make you want to kill her?”
A December wind kicked up, blowing street grime and trash down Third Street. Zora and I had to close our eyes. When it was safe to open them again, she said, “No. I couldn’t kill anyone. I’m a nurse. I’m trained to promote and nurture life, not extinguish it.”
That wasn’t true for all nurses in the Lehigh Valley. One monster came to mind: a guy who ended up killing patients here and in New Jersey. I shuddered, thinking about him.
Zora reached in her pocket and took out her car keys. “I better go. I’ve said more than I wanted to.”
She was walking around the front of the car when I asked her one last question.
“By any chance, do you fill your prescriptions at Save-T Drugs?”
She inserted the key in her door and paused. “Years ago. Why?”
“Because Debbie was married to a pharmacist there, a guy who later went to jail, Ern Bender.”
Zora nodded, as if this thought had already occurred to her. “But all my records there were destroyed in the fire like the rest of my family’s. After that, I went to CVS. It’s closer to my house and Save-T Drugs was shut down for like two months, anyway.”
Right, I thought, watching Zora get into her car and pull away from the curb, unless those records had been somehow saved—like in the star file.
Oh my God. The pieces fell together and a picture formed. The star file contained Save-T Drugs prescription records, I thought, turning around and heading up Third to the News-Times. That was what Ern meant when he told me he’d been the one with the information and the idea for the scam, but Debbie took over both.
Holy crap. Goose bumps broke out all over my body. Prescriptions revealed so much about a person’s most private and personal concerns. Concerns that none of us would want our employers to know, not to mention our neighbors and friends.
I considered all the possibilities that could be damning: drugs to treat depression or alcoholism, drugs to reduce the severity of mental illnesses like schizophrenia and frightening diseases such as cancer and AIDS. There were drugs to treat impotence, embarrassing foot odor, uncontrollable flatulence, kleptomania, rampant swearing, homicidal and suicidal tendencies, menopausal hot flashes and ravenous food cravings.
Pharmacists had so much information at their fingertips. So much power. Too much, if you asked me. Which explained what Ern meant when he said Debbie could turn the town upside down with her scam.
I was willing to bet that if I could find Tess and confront her, she’d admit that the reason she never called the attorney general’s office wasn’t because she’d been so mortified by having findamannow.com on her credit card bill, as she’d explained to Stiletto. She hadn’t gone to the authorities because, like Zora, she’d been threatened by Debbie who must have had access to damning medical information on Tess, too.
Information held in the star file.
But why “star”? What did it mean? It was impossible to understand without context.
I was back to where I started. I had bubkes.
“Yablinko!”
Dix Notch’s voice rattled me from my deep thoughts. He was right in front of me in his black Brooks Brothers wool coat holding his dry cleaning and staring at me intently. “I saw you interviewing that nurse back there. What were you talking about?”
What was he doing, stalking me, too? “Nothing, Mr. Notch. We’re just friends.”
He slung the dry cleaning over his shoulder and moved closer. “Really? That didn’t seem like a friendly chat. That seemed more like an interview. You were talking about the Shatsky death, weren’t you?”
“We were talking about medical privacy.”
Notch flinched as if he’d been socked on the jaw. “What do you mean by medical privacy? Is this for a story?”
I was about to answer with some equally vague mush of lies when I caught sight of a very familiar Mercedes with an all too familiar Santa Claus behind the wheel. He was parked illegally at the corner. He was watching us.
“Mr. Notch,” I said calmly, keeping my body still so as not to alert jolly old St. Nick with the .22. “I think what you want to do without looking is to step sideways into the doorway of Tip Top Laundromat right now.”
Notch started to turn his evil bald head and I grabbed his face. “I said, don’t look.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Mr. Notch said, appalled. “Are you sick?”
“Just do as I say. Step off or your head’s going to get blown off any minute.”
“You’re psycho—you know that?”
That was when I caught the slightest glimmer of gun-metal gray offset by the red of the Santa suit. The Salvation Army Santa Claus. He had a gun. He was going to shoot us. He was going to shoot Mr. Notch.
I am ashamed to say that it took a precious second or so for me to decide whether that was a bad thing.
I decided it was.
“Nooo!” I bellowed, moving forward like a bull and head butting Mr. Notch so hard in the gut that he teetered backward and fell flat on his ass, his dry cleaning, thankfully, buffering the blow between his cranium and the hard, cold sidewalk.
I fell on top of him, just like the Iraq war vet had fallen on top of me in the Christmas tree lot, thereby possibly saving me from at worst death or, at the very least, a bunch of uncomfortable pine tree splinters.
“What are you doing?” Notch hollered, his face becoming its traditional bright crimson. He squirmed beneath me. “You dingbat. You crazy idiot.”
He tried to get up but I pushed him down. This was not easy. Notch might have been a jerk, but he was in excellent shape.
I covered my head with my arms, waiting for the gun-fire. It didn’t come. Curious, I opened one eye and found that we were surrounded by multiple pairs of legs.
“Honestly, old man, she’s young enough to be your daughter,” I heard one man say.
And then a woman in disapproval: “Oversexed. That’s what these middle-aged men are. It’s all that Viagra. Think they’re eighteen again, fornicating on the sidewalk in the cold light of day.”
Notch was now beyond crimson. He was fire engine red. Plus, he was still prone and I was straddling him. Thank heavens, I’d decided not to wear a skirt. Being a lady in this business can get you killed.
“Get off me. Get off me right now.”
I rolled off and Notch crawled to standing. He batted at his dry cleaning. Little stones were clinging to it. There were scuff marks from the shoes of those who’d been standing near us and someone had spilled coffee on his neatly starched white collars.
“Look at this. Look at this.” He spun the shirts around and pointed to dirt on a sleeve. “Twenty-five dollars’ worth of cleaning ruined.”
But I wasn’t looking at his stupid dry cleaning. I was looking past him, past the crowd to the spot where the Mercedes had been parked. It was empty. And all that remained of the Salvation Army Santa Claus was his pot, abandoned even though it was stuffed with dollar bills.
I didn’t have one Santa Claus after me, I had two, and with Ern Bender dead, I had no idea who they were.
Or, worse, why they were so very desperate to have me dead.
Chapter Twenty-six
“You’re gonna need more corroboration than two unnamed, hard-up broads,” Lawless said, reading over my shoulder, sucking on a candy cane. This prompted me to run my hand along the back of my neck to check for candy cane juice. I have a serious phobia about sticky stuff on my neck.
“Do you mind?” I typed the last of what I could remember from my interview with Zora and hit SAVE. The good news about being stuck in a corner by lifestyle was that no one in the newsroom cared what I was doing. As long as I had my Mahoken story ready for tomorrow, I was off everyone’s radar.
Alison, on the other hand, was the center of attention. She had more electrical gadgets on her desk than the entire showroom of Circuit City. Tape recorders. Headphones. Cell phones. An iPod. Her personal laptop. And a PDA, whatever that was.
Yet, oddly enough, I had never actually witnessed her leaving the newsroom or my old desk.
I’d thrown caution to the sulfurous wind of the South Side and brought Lawless into my confidence. Maybe that was stupid. I didn’t know. I needed another brain besides mine to help me find Sandy and the star file. Okay, I’ll admit it. I needed support.
Lawless’s reaction was to listen and take a few notes himself. He was working on Louie to go on the record. And he had a few calls into a source in the attorney general’s office to find out if any women had filed complaints about Debbie’s lust boat cruises.
We were reviewing my notes when Mr. Salvo approached, his yellow legal pad under his arm. Before the five thirty edit meeting, Mr. Salvo dashed around the newsroom asking each reporter what she or he had for the next day’s paper. Every night he was in a lather, as if he’d never put out a newspaper before. Usually, I found it quaint.
Today I found it nerve-racking.
“How’s that Mahoken budget story going?” he asked.
“Quick,” Lawless hissed. “Switch screens like I taught you.”
Nervously, I fumbled with the buttons on the keyboard, afraid of deleting what I had already written, not sure what to do. Finally, Lawless leaned over and with one gooey finger pressed something that made it appear as if I’d been diligently working on the end-of-year budget workshop for the upcoming Mahoken fiscal year that began January 1.
Mr. Salvo beamed at us. “Well, that’s a refreshing change of pace, I must say, to see you two working together so amiably.”
Lawless and I pasted on insipid smiles.
“Just passing on some writing tips, Tony.”
I nudged him with my pen. As if!
“That’s terrific. No more poking around in that Shatsky homicide, right, Bubbles?”
“So, it’s a homicide now, is it?” I said.
“Homicide is merely the Latin term. ‘Homo’ meaning human. ‘Cide’ meaning kill. No murder implied,” said Mr. Salvo, ever the professor.
“Hot damn,” said Lawless. “I could have sworn ‘homo’ meant something else entirely.”
“Alison’s doing a bang-up job on that story, I’m proud to report.” Mr. Salvo said this with about as much sincerity as a Florida swamp developer. “She’s got a lot of talent for such a young woman.”
Lawless next to me fumed. “She doesn’t know shit and you know it.”
“Read tomorrow’s page-one story and be the judge.”
“What’s it about?” I asked innocently, hoping and praying it wasn’t about Sandy flying the coop. That could really paint her in the worst light.
“Now don’t distract me. I’m not supposed to be talking about this with you. Let’s discuss Mahoken.”
“Mahoken. That’s the magic word,” said Lawless. “I’m out of here.”
I gave Mr. Salvo a two-sentence description of my budget story: proposed Mahoken budget to increase spending by five percent over last year. Millage could be raised by as much as .02 cents per one hundred dollars of real-estate value.
He was practically salivating. What is it with city editors that the words “millage” and “increased spending” can turn them into drooling idiots? I wanted to explain to him that back when I was a civilian, way before I ever became a reporter, a story like that would have been a reason not to buy a paper.
Then again, back then all I read was “Dear Abby” and weddings and, maybe, the personals. Then I skipped straight to the coupons.
Then again, that’s all I read now.
“That’s definitely a page B1 above the fold, though it could work as a front-page below the fold.”
“Oh, joy.”
Mr. Salvo took a note on his pad. “You got anything in the hopper we can use while you’re on your honeymoon? It’s death, this week between Christmas and New Years, you know. There are just so many end-of-year wrap-ups we can do.”
The hopper was his word for storage. It was my duty as a beat reporter to manufacture stories—in my abundant free time—that could be culled at any moment and run on slow news days.
“I’m not going on my honeymoon,” I said.
“No?” Mr. Salvo stuck his pen behind his ear. “Going to take it later, are you?”
I observed the two wet spots under his armpits. I was really going to have to buy that man a couple of arm shields. Maybe I could sneak them into his stocking.
“No. I’m not getting married.”
His pen dropped.
I leaned over and picked it up.
“Does Stiletto know that?” he asked.
Mr. Salvo and Stiletto were old friends. Their relationship went wayyy back and once nearly got me killed. “I’m telling him in an hour.”
He checked his watch. “You better make it fast.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know?”
“No. Do you?”
Those armpit stains spread some more. “I gotta go. I’m late for the meeting.” And he ran away like a little kid running from a bully on the playground.
This was really beginning to annoy me, all the secrecy about what Stiletto was up to. I wished these men would stop being so babyish and come right out and tell me what was going on.
The phone rang. It was Dan. Speaking of babies.
“How the hell are you, toots?” His voice was slightly slurred. He sounded as if he’d had a few. Clearly, the men in my life were collapsing around me.
“Dan? Are you okay?”
“Sure, I’m okay.”
“You’re not . . . mad?”
“Oh, I’m mad, all right. I’m downright furious.” He slurped, as if from a straw.
This was very weird. In fact, now that I thought about it, this whole day was shaping up to be something out of the Twilight Zone. Multiple Santa Clauses stalking me like zombies after human flesh. Lawless helping me. Stiletto’s coldness on the phone and then Mr. Salvo’s cryptic remarks about Stiletto.
“I’ve had four Tylenol with codeine and so I one hundred percent forgive you,” Dan said. He slurped some more. “They’re for my back. The Tylenol.”
“I hope you’re not drinking alcohol with those meds. That could kill you.”
“I’m not drinking alcohol. I’m sucking on a milk shake. It’s damn tasty. Strawberry, I think. Or maybe chocolate. I can’t tell. Whatever it is, I’m going to drink one every day for the rest of my life. I LOVE these.”
“Dan,” I said, not even stopping to think about what I was about to say, “I can’t marry you.”
There. Done.
This was answered with a loud, long slurp. “Whaddya mean, you can’t marry you?”
“No. It’s I who can’t marry you. I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be right. I don’t love you. I don’t even like you.”
Dan burped. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Sure, whatever.”
This was stunning. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. “Are you for real?”
“Of course, I’m for real. Hey, what’re you doing for Christmas?”
I hadn’t thought about it. My entire future had stopped with the prospect of saying, “I do.” Everything after that was blank.
“I don’t know. The usual.” Frankly, I was still trying to absorb his acceptance of my rejection.
“Great. I’ll come for Christmas dinner at four. I’ll bring my present for Jane and a date, if I can scrounge one up at the last minute.”
Were my ears playing tricks? Was this Dan’s idea of a joke? It was all too easy. Then again, maybe not. Dan had never professed to love me, either. It could have been that he was just as relieved to be rid of me as I was of him.
“What about the wedding arrangements?” I asked.
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. Hey!”
“Yeah?”
“We still have our appointment tomorrow morning with Dr. Caswell, right?”
“Do you want me to pick you up? Can you drive?”
“Don’t worry
about me, toots. I’ll be there with bells on.” He yawned loudly. “Man, I’m bushed. See you tomorrow in the a.m.” He was actually very pleasant.
“Nighty night,” I said.
I looked at the clock on my computer screen. It was almost five thirty. Then I heard a thud followed by a snore. Dan had just passed out with the phone off the hook.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I hadn’t felt so light and free in months!
I couldn’t stop from grinning in the News-Times green tiled women’s room as I carefully applied my face, lining my lids with fawn eye shadow, adding a deeper mink in the creases, highlighting under my brows with stardust. Every once in a while I’d stop and smile at myself in the mirror. It was like having the test results come back negative or the final exam being canceled. Breaking up with Dan was better than winning the Lottery. I know—sacrilege.
I hadn’t appreciated how tight I’d been lately. Now I could actually sense the knots in my back muscles unraveling. My lungs inhaled and exhaled with new elasticity. I must have been holding my breath ever since I’d accepted Dan’s marriage proposal. So that explained why my skin had turned so yucky and pale.
Best of all, this wasn’t the best part. The best part was yet to come when I surprised Stiletto with the news that I was once again a free woman.
Wait. I didn’t want to imagine how he’d look, how he’d swing me around and wrap me in his arms and kiss me until we fell down, breathless. I erased all images in my mind. I wanted a fresh slate. Tabula rasa, it was called, according to what I could remember from my Lockean Empiricism for Dummies course at Two Guys.
I blew Veronica a kiss and didn’t bother to complete her stupid sign-out sheet as I wooshed past her, leaving a trail of Chloe perfume. She was predictably shocked and immediately reached for her WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips to jot down my exact exit time and how I’d completely disobeyed management’s orders by flagrantly refusing to punch out.
Bubbles All The Way Page 22
