by Leslie Glass
Inside the front door, a tiny lobby had been created a long time ago with an inner door that was locked. The intercom system was very old. Gunn lived on the top floor. April pressed the button by her name and almost immediately heard static.
“Gunn,” she said loudly into the intercom, “this is April Woo. Remember we talked on Friday?”
Crackle, crackle was the only response.
“Gunn, I need to talk to you. It’s very important.”
“Well, I’m sick. I can’t talk.”
“Listen, Gunn, this is urgent.”
“Really, I can’t—”
“Gunn, this is a homicide investigation. You don’t have a choice.”
There was a prolonged silence, then a click as the door lock was released. April let the door close behind her and trudged up a flight of creaking stairs that seemed to drag itself down as it turned the corner. Only one of the five bulbs glowed dimly in the ancient ceiling fixture high above. Gunn lived in the back apartment on the fourth floor. Her door cracked open as April rounded the corner at the top of the stairs.
“Hello, Gunn,” April said.
Reluctantly, Gunn opened the door enough for a thin person to enter. April slid through. Gunn scanned the hall before shutting the door.
The apartment consisted of two small, very cluttered rooms with a galley kitchen tucked into one corner of the front room. The bedroom was in the very back of the building. The front and back rooms were separated by two huge, sliding wooden doors that were open most of the way.
“What do you want?” Gunn’s eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but she did not look sick. She was dressed in shiny black pull-on pants and several layers of tee shirts and sweaters. April could see the flickering light of the TV in the bedroom. She could tell that Gunn had not been lying on her bed watching it. The weepy-eyed little woman smelled as if she had spent the last few days on a diet that did not include any of the four food groups.
“Gunn, you lied to me about Bobbie Boudreau.”
Gunn reeled back, bumping into a floral-upholstered rocking chair with a white lace napkin thing draped over the top, vibrating her head in tiny arcs of palsied denial. “No, I don’t know anybody with that name.”
“Oh, come on, Gunn, sure you know Bobbie. He’s a drinking buddy of yours.”
“Who said so?” Gunn looked surprised, moved away from the rocking chair, and collapsed onto a floral loveseat.
“Gunn, you’ve been seen with him in the neighborhood, in the French Quarter, right around the corner and other places.… ” April paused to let her words sink in. “We know Bobbie lives right here in this building with you. We know everything.”
“What? You can’t.”
“What we don’t know this minute, we can find out by tomorrow.”
“How? How can you find out?”
“By asking questions, Gunn. By asking a lot of people a lot of questions. One way or another we’re going to find out, so you might as well tell me about you and Bobbie right now.” April cautiously moved to the back of the apartment, her hand on the gun in her waistband. “Is he here now?”
“No, I haven’t seen him since you people started hounding him,” Gunn said sullenly.
“Fine, then we can talk.”
“I didn’t tell that other guy and I’m not telling you.” Gunn shook her head. “Bobbie got a bum rap the last time. He has nothing to do with this. You can kill me if you want to.”
“Nobody’s going to kill you.”
“Well … good. Now you can go.”
“Gunn, you know I can’t go.”
“The other guy did.”
“No, the other guy didn’t go away. He told you he’s with the FBI, didn’t he? Well, the FBI doesn’t ever go away, Gunn. You’re going to have to tell one of us. Him or me.”
“Well, Bobbie had nothing to do with it. You’re just looking for someone to blame.”
“Blame for what?” April asked.
“I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not stupid. You think Bobbie killed Dr. Dickey the way they say he killed that patient last year, but he didn’t have anything to do with either one.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do you know the things you know? I know. Some things you just know, right?”
“Sure. Except it doesn’t work that way in homicide investigations.”
“I know how it works. Something bad happens and somebody has to take the blame. Her job was to blame Bobbie. Your job is to blame Bobbie.” Gunn crossed her arms over her chest, mashing her bread-loaf breasts together. “I’m not going to help you do that.”
“Who’s her? Dr. Treadwell?”
“Yeah.”
“She have it in for Bobbie?”
“How would I know? I’m only in Personnel.”
April checked her watch. It was eleven-thirty. She was due to meet Mike and Daveys at one. This plump little lady was in trouble up to her pale blond eyebrows. April had a feeling Gunn knew every single answer, but she’d have to get all tangled up in lies before she’d start telling the truth. She said, “It’s nice and cozy in here, Gunn. Do you mind if I take my jacket off?”
Gunn shrugged her square shoulders. “Do what you want; you will, anyway.”
“Not necessarily.” April unbuttoned her jacket and the navy blazer under it, revealing the scarf tied around her turtleneck. It was silk, one of the fake Chanels she’d bought on the street in Chinatown. The scarf had big gold chains and buckles on a blue background. Sometimes the chains looked like handcuffs to her. Tension pinched the muscles in her neck and shoulders. She took out her notebook and flipped over pages until she came to a clean one. Somebody had put Boudreau’s file back in the personnel drawer—somebody who wanted it to be there but not readily visible. Now what kind of person would do that?
Gunn snuffled into a sodden wad of paper towels. “Bobbie is a great guy,” she sobbed.
April watched her blow her nose and waited.
“He was a Lieutenant in Vietnam.”
“Really,” April murmured. “That must have been some time ago.”
“Yes, he was, little Bobbie Boudreau, a Cajun from Louisiana. You know what a Cajun is?”
April inclined her chin.
“French-Indian. There are a lot of them in Louisiana. Some kind of mixture. They speak a funny French the real French can’t understand at all. Have you heard of voodoo?”
“Voodoo?” April blinked. She’d heard of voodoo practiced in the big cemeteries in Queens. Kids dug up the graves because there was a market for the skulls.
“Yeah, black magic.” Gunn’s bleary eyes drifted across the room to a white mask on the wall. Ribbons dangled from it.
“Uh, does voodoo have something to do with this case, Gunn?” The mask didn’t look as if it had come from Haiti to April. It looked more like the ones she’d seen in Italian restaurants.
“Bobbie thinks maybe he was tainted by voodoo back when his Daddy got the cancer.” The old woman shook her head solemnly. “That visiting nurse he liked so much died, too.”
April inhaled. What did this have to do with anything? “So what happened to him—Bobbie, I mean?”
“He went into combat nursing, of course. He said it was a sacred mission. He wanted to help America. He wanted to be white, you know.”
April nodded solemnly. Who didn’t?
“So I guess he was used to the blood or something because he was real good at it.”
“Used to the blood?”
Gunn shook her head again. “I told you. He was very close to that visiting nurse. He went around with her sometimes, helped her. He saw a lot of sickness and blood.”
A lot of sickness and blood.
“I guess it made him want to help people.” Gunn was defensive now. “No good deed goes unpunished,” she insisted.
April’s watch told her she’d been there for seven minutes. A car horn sounded out on the street.
“Where is Bobbie?” she asked.
Gunn blew her nose again. “How should I know?”
“You know a lot about him. You must spend a fair amount of time together. He sounds like a close friend of yours.”
“I know him. He’s a good man.” Gunn sucked in her lips, sullen.
April changed the subject. “What happened to Bobbie in Vietnam?”
“Oh, he was in an advanced MASH unit. He had a lot of bad experiences.”
“People dying all around him? Missiles exploding? Drugs? What—?”
“Doctors practicing their specialties on soldiers who didn’t need it, that’s what.” Gunn glanced at the mask again. “That comes from New Orleans. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“How does all this fit in, Gunn?”
“You wanted to know about Bobbie. I’m telling you about Bobbie. The Captain of his unit was ordered to take a hill. They took the hill. The Captain lost an arm. His face was burned to a crisp. They lost thirty men. The next day they were ordered to give the hill back for reasons that were never explained.”
“What about Bobbie?” Time was ticking away. April could feel him lurking out there somewhere. The story about the MASH unit didn’t ring true, but April didn’t want to challenge it.
“The new Captain had been in charge of body count—that’s the number of enemy killed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“When he took charge of the unit, he started making up numbers.” She snorted. “Some place for a moral kid. Everybody high on marijuana and opium, and drunk all the time. Bobbie was having nightmares, waking up screaming. They were making up numbers of enemy dead. And this Captain was a cardiovascular surgeon. He wanted to try new techniques out on his patients whether they needed the surgery or not.
“Marine came in, just a kid from Iowa. The Captain wanted to do some real dangerous surgery Bobbie knew the kid didn’t need. He told the kid to refuse. The kid was scared but insisted the doc would never lie to him.”
Gunn stared into the deep abyss that was Bobbie Boudreau’s life in Vietnam. “It must have been terrible. The Marine died in surgery, and later that night there was a fight. One of the male nurses fragged the Captain.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know, a dirty trick, I think. Threw a live hand grenade into his tent and blew him away.”
There was a powerful old furnace in the brownstone. April felt the heat penetrating all around her. She removed her silk scarf. There was a dirty trick in Vietnam and the Captain died. A dirty trick on a ward a year ago and a patient died. A dirty trick last week and Harold Dickey died. What about Clara Treadwell?
“Gunn, did you know Ray Cowles?”
Gunn shook her head. She seemed bewildered by the question.
“Gunn, you’re going to have to tell me where Bobbie is,” April said softly.
“But Bobbie didn’t do it. He wasn’t the one. He got a bum rap. The MPs that investigated didn’t like him. He was a Catholic, a Cajun. He talked funny. They were prejudiced against him, you understand?”
April didn’t respond.
“They went to the real killer, who was crazy. They asked him what happened and he said he saw somebody French cursing the Captain after the Marine died.” Gunn’s eyes were wild now. “He killed himself, shot himself in the head.”
“Who did?”
“The real killer. There was no murder trial because there were no witnesses, but Bobbie was finished for no reason. Just got transferred from unit to unit to unit and passed over for promotion. God, the system destroyed him. He ended up carrying bedpans and left the Army with a low-efficiency rating.”
“Well, that was some time ago,” April said. “And he’s been in some trouble since.”
“No, he had a perfect record until—”
“Until a patient died from an overdose of Elavil a year ago, just like Harold Dickey last week.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Gunn insisted. “He was a scapegoat. The pharmacist gave the wrong prescription. It’s happened before. I should know. But did he lose his job? No. Bobbie lost his job. He lost his health insurance. His mother was sick. She couldn’t get help. She died.”
“Is that when you became friends?”
“What would you do with him if you found him?”
“Talk. Same as I’m doing with you. Is he likely to call or come see you?”
Gunn shook her head vigorously. “No.”
“Are you worried about him?”
“Sure I am. I don’t want him to get hurt.”
“Gunn, did you help Bobbie get another job somewhere else in the hospital?”
Gunn sucked in her breath. “How did you know?”
Well, he had access to all the floors. “Did you know Bobbie was threatening Dr. Treadwell?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Gunn, does Bobbie blame Dr. Treadwell for his troubles?”
“He says she’s a hypocrite. None of the doctors ever get fired for their mistakes. And they make plenty, believe me.”
“Does he hate her enough to hurt her?”
“He wouldn’t hurt anybody,” Gunn said flatly.
“Gunn, people around Bobbie get hurt. We don’t want anybody else hurt. Now he’s been seen in the hospital, so we know he has access. How did he get the keys?”
Gunn was silent for a minute, holding her breath. “He’s in maintenance in the main hospital building,” she said softly.
“Where’s the office?”
“Below ER.”
“Day or night?”
Gunn looked guilty now. “Day shift.”
“Gunn, we’re going to have to go into the station now. Get your coat.”
“Why? I told you everything I know.”
“Police work,” April told her. “We need everybody’s fingerprints.”
The old woman started to cry. “Oh, my God, this is police brutality,” she sobbed, “just like the movies.”
fifty-nine
There was a message from Clara on Jason’s machine on Monday morning when he came into the office at eight A.M. She said she needed to talk to him right away. He didn’t return the call. At one P.M. he had a cancellation and let Emma persuade him to take a break and go out for lunch with her. As they left, he heard the phone stop ringing and Clara’s voice talking to his answering machine. He didn’t stop to find out what she wanted.
He was moody and distracted as he and Emma left the building. They turned east, away from the sharp wind off Riverside Drive, their breath making steam in the cold, wintry air. Emma bounced along, puffing the clouds happily, her hands plunged deep in her pockets, excited by her future.
Jason brooded quietly about his. He was losing time on all sides. He’d had to juggle patient appointments to carry out Dickey’s teaching duties. He had spent many hours on the Cowles file. He now knew that Clara had given him the file because she wanted him to back up her story that she hadn’t been responsible for the direction of Ray’s treatment; her supervisor had betrayed both her trust and that of her patient. It was a nasty story that she was counting on him, the hospital, and its various committees not to reveal, for it would discredit them all. Unfortunately, the supervisor in question happened to die under suspicious circumstances in his office while Clara was with him.
Jason was shocked by Clara’s arrogance. She seemed to believe that nothing could touch her. Never mind the suicide of her patient Ray Cowles and her six minutes of conversation with him before his death. Never mind her presence in Dickey’s office when he died. Clara was going to rely on her position to stonewall her way through it all. She intended to come out of it unscathed, and Jason knew that she would sacrifice anyone and anything to accomplish her goal. There were some very good reasons not to get into a confrontation with her. Jason didn’t want to discredit the Centre. On the other hand, he didn’t want Clara to get away with murder by blackmailing the institution, either. He was torn, overworked, and overtired. And now he was taking the time to be with Emma and have lunch.
“Don’t tell me you’
re not enjoying this,” Emma said happily.
“What—winter, homicide, Clara Treadwell, or you?” Jason grumped.
“Thanks, that’s lovely. I could have left you there and gone out to a fancy lunch, or gone shopping. Could have gone to the gym. Lot of things I could have done, you know.”
“Sorry. Except for Clara, I’m having a ball, really.”
“What’s going on, Jason?” Emma asked, suddenly serious.
“I don’t know, Em. I really don’t.”
“Oh, come on, you’re a shrink. What’s your theory?”
Jason inhaled on the question. His breath caught on the cold air, and he coughed.
“It’s hard to imagine Clara a murderer,” Emma mused when he didn’t answer.
“There are other possibilities.” Jason sighed, scratching his beard. “I really hate getting sucked into this.”
“What are you going to do, baby?” Emma tucked a hand in his pocket, found some fingers. “You’re rich. You don’t have to put up with it.”
They speeded up to cross West End Avenue before the yellow traffic light turned to red.
“Darling, you’re rich. I’m not. I still have to put up with it.”
“What does that mean? If you made lots of money, wouldn’t you share it with me?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He fell silent, not wanting to seem churlish by pointing out that he couldn’t exactly count on her good fortune since she’d only just returned from leaving him for six months. She might take off again at any time. And having a big earner for a wife would not be a complete joy to him in any case.
“Sexist,” she muttered.
They got to their favorite place, the Lantern Coffee Shop, where they used to go years ago when they first met. At the door, Emma tugged at his arm.
“Look, there are those cops and that FBI guy.” She turned away. “I can’t go in there.”
Jason peered through the dirty glass door. April Woo, Mike Sanchez, and Special Agent Daveys were sitting at a table in the back. As if she sensed Jason’s presence, April suddenly glanced up. She saw Jason and smiled.
