7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7

by Frederick Ramsay

  “I do, so do that, yes.”

  “I know it’s too soon to ask, but do you have any idea when you’ll be back?”

  “I can’t say just now. I have to talk to the doctor and then we’ll see what happens next.”

  “Take your time. We have everything under control. Oh, by the way, I almost forgot. Doctor Fiske’s secretary called. She said that Fiske was concerned and all that and wanted your cell phone number. I told him we didn’t give out personal numbers but if he’d leave his, I’d have you call him.”

  “That’s Fiske as in the Acting President of Callend?”

  “That’s the one. He wanted to check on Ruth. I guess that’s pretty normal.”

  “I suppose so. Tell him, if he calls again, what I just told you and that I’ll call the university when I have some real news.”

  Ike hung up and stared at his laptop. He tried and failed to conjure up an accurate face for Scott Fiske. Aside from being tallish, fair-haired, almost an art nouveau throwback look, all he could remember about Fiske was that Ruth had some questions about him. He couldn’t remember what they were at the moment. He might later. His absentminded musings were displaced by what transpired on the computer screen. A colleague from another jurisdiction that he’d met at a local police conference the previous year had given him a screen saver. He’d installed it out of curiosity and left it there out of laziness. It depicted a series of chase scenes from actual police footage, including the famous O.J. Simpson in a white Bronco caravanning through Los Angeles. He rarely watched the whole sequence because he either switched to an application or turned the computer off. At the moment he watched fascinated as a police car from somewhere in the Midwest, in pursuit of some baddie or other, pulled to the car’s right rear, hooked the bumper, and put it into a spin. Like Ruth’s vehicle the night of the accident, it slued sideways. Only this cop did not proceed to ram it as the truck had done to Ruth, and there was no utility pole for it to slam into.

  That particular classic maneuver by a police chase car is learned by law enforcement officers on the job. Could an amateur, someone not experienced with it, have done it? Ike guessed not. Whoever smacked Ruth’s car that night knew what he was doing. That implied he or she had been, or still served, in a law enforcement capacity somewhere.

  What had Charlie said last night?

  “How about hurting you? Had you thought of that?”

  Could he have misunderstood the message? Who would want him out of the way, and why? It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Chapter Eight

  Karl Hedrick and Sam Ryder would be at work, and what Ike needed to ask of them was best left off a government-monitored phone line. He sipped the lukewarm coffee and made a face. Too late to call them, too early to go to the hospital. He stood and paced. His second ration of toast somehow became stuck in the toaster and began to smoke. He pulled the plug and pried the charred slices of wheat bread from it, tossed the smoking ruins in the disposal, ran water into the sink until the mess disappeared from view, and then dumped the remains of his coffee cup in after it. Breakfast had been a disaster.

  Ike was a compartmentalized thinker, or so he claimed. Those who knew him well thought he was anything but. Somehow, they said, he could hold several thoughts, possible outcomes, or probabilities in place at the same time even if one of them conflicted or contradicted another. True or not, he desperately needed to think this through. One thing seemed clear: irrespective of the motivation behind it, someone had deliberately sent Ruth crashing into a pole. That someone needed to be caught and taken care of, and soon. The problem he struggled with at the moment centered on the why of it—the motive. If the act had been aimed at him, a different set of factors and possibilities came into play. If the target was really Ruth, then he’d start somewhere else. But in either case, the task remained the same: find the bastard.

  So, do first things first. Who wanted to hurt him but not directly? He’d been through the experience of having a woman he loved shot out from under him, so to speak, and he understood how it might work. His late wife Eloise had been a pawn in such a game. But that happened in a different time and place—a time when he was embroiled in covert work. The instigators of that particular piece of work had wanted him out of the loop but not dead. Killing him would have made what they intended transparent. They wanted him angry and nonfunctional, not dead. The situation differed here. He no longer mucked about in the shadowy backstreets and dim corners of international intelligence. He hadn’t for years. He was a country cop. Hurting him indirectly meant nothing. If he stopped being a cop, another would step up and take his place. With the election close, it could happen anyway. He’d not incurred many enemies in his tenure as sheriff, none he could think of who’d vowed some sort of revenge for being incarcerated. Well, there was one, but only one for sure, George Lebrun. But he still sat on death row somewhere and his family, while dysfunctional, was not the sort to take on George’s dirty work, and certainly not if it involved the commission of a capital crime.

  For the moment then, he ruled himself out as an indirect object of attack. That didn’t mean he should forget the cop car maneuver. It added a new and important dimension to the act and said something about the perpetrator. Whoever hit Ruth had most likely been in law enforcement at the street level at one time or another. When he culled through the list of possible suspects he hoped to develop, he would use that as one discriminator.

  His stomach began to growl and he felt the need to move, to do something. He decided he would find a restaurant and have breakfast. Some place where they brewed drinkable, hot coffee and didn’t burn the toast.

  ***

  Ike spent the remainder of the day talking to various contacts he had in the several agencies he’d worked with in the past. Ruth’s boss at the Department of Education promised to send him copies of any e-mails that were either threatening or suspicious that she might have received in the past two months during her tenure as chair of the textbook committee. He had a long and tearful chat with Agnes Ewalt, Ruth’s secretary at Callend. She alternately tried to cheer him up and had to be cheered. She didn’t know of any threats, nasty electronic or snail mail, but she would look.

  She did tell him that she found Doctor Fiske, her temporary new boss, to be a disagreeable man, and wished she’d accepted Ruth’s offer to accompany her to Washington. That brought on another spate of tears, guilt, and hiccups. She said she’d cull through all of the correspondence she had and look for anything suspicious. Ike thanked her and hung up. He made arrangements to have his crumpled car transported to Picketsville. He should have junked it but he felt unless and until the case was resolved one way or another, he should hang on to it.

  He spent several hours on the Internet making notes from sites that offered information on automobile impact statistics, safety standards, and survival rates. If these studies were to be believed, Ruth should be dead. The next car he owned, he decided, would have side window airbags. And maybe a roll-bar installed. Safety standards left something to be desired, surely. He spent the next hour surfing sites that connected directly or indirectly to El-Hi school textbook controversies.

  By four o’clock he’d done what he could and drove to the hospital. Eden had beaten him to the bedside and greeted him when he entered the room.

  “Look, Honey, here’s Ike come to see you. Here let me fix your sheet. Your poor foot must be freezing. She’s looking much better, don’t you think?”

  “Beautiful, except for that overlarge clerical collar. You should see yourself, Kiddo. You look like a nineteenth-century English vicar.”

  “It’s a neck brace, Ike. Don’t listen to him. He hasn’t had his dinner.”

  “Have you?”

  Eden shook her head but said nothing.

  “Speaking of religion, Kiddo, I had a chat with your friend the Reverend Blake Fisher today. He says that at y
our suggestion, he’s taking up Bilphism. Why would you do that to him, I wonder? I thought he had enough problems with his bishop.”

  “Ike, what are you talking about?”

  “Bit of pseudospirituality from one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels.”

  “So you’re playing the accordion again?”

  “Trying to.”

  “It hasn’t worked yet.”

  “Not yet, no. But we live in hope.”

  When visiting hours were over they were all but forcibly removed from the room by a nurse who looked to be about thirteen years old and had a Middle Virginia accent that could have charmed Adolph Hitler. Ike took Eden to dinner. He filled her in on the rough outlines of what he’d been thinking. It was the sort of thing he’d have done with Ruth before—talking a problem through. The difference in this instance was he didn’t expect much coming back from Eden whereas he would have from her daughter. Ruth would have found the holes in his narrative. He missed that.

  After he dropped Eden off at her car, he sat in the parking lot next to the hospital’s emergency room and phoned Karl Hedrick and Samantha Ryder. He used his store-bought throwaway.

  “Ike, we only heard today. What happened?” Sam was on the extension. “How is she?”

  “In a coma, I’m afraid. She was forced off the road in a rainstorm two nights ago. I need to find out who did it.”

  “How can we help?”

  “You can send me the list of people the FBI has on file, Karl, who are activists in the textbook wars.”

  “You mean the people, mostly in Texas, who think the history of the United States should be drafted to assure that the Founding Fathers were all Christian, white, and capitalists.”

  “And not descended from monkeys, among other things, yes.”

  “Ike, you know I can’t do that. The Bureau’s files can’t be shared that way, especially without a demonstrable national interest or an open criminal case.”

  “Then I’ll ask Sam to hack into your mainframe and get them for me.”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Yes I would, Karl. Hey, it’s Ike we’re talking to here. Give him the lists.”

  “I’d love to but…Ike, are you on a monitored phone?”

  “No.”

  “Give me your number, I’ll call you back. But as of this minute, the answer is no. No for me, and no for Sam.” Karl hung up.

  Ike understood. He would wait for the call, probably from a throwaway like his or one of the few public payphones still operating in the city. It would take Karl a while either way. He’d wait. He started the engine and drove back to Charlie’s.

  Chapter Nine

  Ike’s store-bought phone deedle-deedled at ten o’clock the next morning. Without waiting for a “hello,” Karl Hedrick said he’d meet Ike for lunch, gave an address, and rang off. Very good. Any trace on the call might note his location, but no recipient name, no history, and, more importantly, no compromising message. He turned the phone off and would leave it that way and use his personal phone until he had a chance to talk to Karl. He looked at his watch and realized he could stop at the hospital for an hour or so before the meeting.

  Doctor Kravitz, as it happened, was on the floor and had left a message for Ike and Eden to call him. Ike found him in the Doctor’s lounge. He received a few scowls from the other occupants in the room that he undoubtedly could have avoided if he had been wearing a white lab coat. Kravitz waved him into a chair.

  “Mr. Schwartz, we need to talk. Is your mother-in…sorry, is Ms. Harris’ mother here? No? Okay, you can tell her what I say. As I mentioned to you that last time we chatted, your fiancée is stable. There is nothing more we can do for her at the moment. I also mentioned possible difficulties that could arise. That is a problem for the hospital.”

  “What’s a problem for the hospital? I’m sorry but you’ve lost me.”

  “Just this, we can do nothing more here that cannot be done anywhere else by any competent neurologist. Our protocols call for her discharge.” Ike started to object but the doctor held up his hand. “This is a tertiary care hospital, Mr. Schwartz, and the per-bed cost is double or triple what it might be in a primary or secondary care unit. My advice to you is to confer with Mrs. Saint Clare and make arrangements to move her to a facility which is set up to care for her special needs.”

  “You make it sound like you’ve decided she is not going to pull out of this.”

  “No, no, not at all. It’s just, please listen, this hospital does not provide care past an allotted time for certain conditions. We deal with the trauma, the tricky medical procedures. Care for more than a week, or for what amount to long-term needs, is not something we are set up to do. Other places are. If Ms. Harris’ signs were moving toward a recovery in the next day or two, there’d be no problem. Frankly, they’re not. That doesn’t mean they won’t eventually, only that they aren’t now, you see?”

  “But we’re happy with the care she’s receiving here, Doc. I can’t see how putting more stress on her system by moving her can be a good thing. I’d think you’d keep it to no more than absolutely necessary. I’d as soon she stayed here until you know for certain. Can’t you give her a few more days, a week?”

  “She is off the ventilator and breathing on her own. That’s a good sign. A move should not be too stressful, so I’m sorry, but we are obliged to release her to a long-term care facility. The cost review people, you know, the money crunchers, the suits in the finance office, insist on it. They run health care now, not the doctors. It’s all about the money.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. If it’s about the money, I’d think they’d want her to stay forever. Are you short on beds or something?”

  “That’s the second part of the decision. At the moment we are not, strictly speaking, short on available beds. Technically the hospital is at capacity, which means we are at somewhere between eighty and ninety percent occupancy. But that is neither here nor there. The policy in the hospital, as a tertiary care facility, is we do not treat chronic conditions. Ms. Harris’ initial trauma has been attended to. There is no need for the high dollar medical intervention this place provides. Insurance providers will not pay us, you can’t afford it otherwise, so, I guess I’m saying you move her to where you want her, or we discharge her and move her where we want to.”

  “That’s not much of a choice, Doc.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’m sorry. Do you have a place in mind?”

  “If she has to be moved, I guess we’ll go home. Well, not exactly home, but close. We’ll take her to Stonewall Jackson in Lexington. They bill themselves as a critical care hospital but they’ll take her. They have a heliport as well. We can fly her down.”

  “If you can manage all that…”

  “I can manage it. You and your bean counters are wrong in thinking I can’t pay, but now I don’t want them to have my money anyway, so we move. I’ll see Ruth’s mother this evening and in the meantime, I’ll call in some favors and make the arrangements for the chopper and the bed.”

  ***

  Ike sat in a booth at the rear of the restaurant Karl had selected. He’d arrived early and had set up a mini-office. He kept the manager happy by paying for coffee. He called his father who “knew people” on the board of the corporation that ran the Lexington hospital. Abe in turn phoned some people. Ike called in a favor from a med-evac company run by a former spook pilot whose chestnuts he’d once pulled out of a fire in a country that had since changed its name three times. He managed to get Eden on the line and explained what he’d been told and what he’d done since. She didn’t know if she was happy or sad. The thought of getting Ruth closer to home, she liked. The idea of a risky flight in a helicopter, she didn’t.

  Karl Hedrick and Ike had a history dating back to the time Karl spent a season on loan from th
e FBI to Ike’s Sheriff’s Department. He’d returned to the bureau and ultimately taken Ike’s favorite deputy, Samantha Ryder, with him. For that, Ike assumed, Karl was forever in his debt. Karl did not agree, as he’d nothing to do with Sam’s departure and subsequent employment by NSA. But he greatly admired Ike and went along with the illusion.

  He sat down opposite Ike and made small talk, ordered lunch, asked about Ruth, and ate. Ike responded appropriately, asked about Sam, and would there be any wedding bells in the future? The crisis in the Middle East came up, as did the weather. Fall was football season and the relative merits of various teams, their coaches, quarterbacks, and chances for a run at the BSC and a championship game were discussed with some enthusiasm. On the whole the half hour passed in a totally uninteresting and one might say boring manner. When Karl finished his lunch he carefully wiped his mouth, stood, shook hands, and left.

  Ike apparently mistook Karl’s rumpled napkin for his own. He wiped his fingers and then palmed the thumb drive Karl left within its folds. He waited until two men at the counter paid and left before he extricated and pocketed it. He had his lists. Now he could go to work.

  Chapter Ten

  Ike’s father’s call and an additional one from Armand Dillon, patron of Callend University and admirer of Ruth, to the corporate office in Roanoke freed up a bed in Lexington that Ike had been told did not exist. Eden had returned to Picketsville the night before and arrived at the hospital early to complete the paperwork for Ruth’s admission. Ike saw Ruth onto the helicopter and then followed it by car southwest into the Shenandoah Valley. By the time he pulled up to the hospital’s glass-dominated facade, she was safely ensconced in her new room. He couldn’t tell whether she was aware of the change or not. As far as ambience went, there seemed little to choose between the one in Washington and this one. A hospital room, like a motel room, doesn’t vary much from one place to the next. Ike guessed the helicopter ride would have made an impact, but nothing else.