by Linda Barnes
The Laundromat was slightly too warm and smelled of bleach and Downy fabric softener. I took off my jacket, sat down again. Fidgeting escalated to pacing. If Foley didn’t come home soon, I was going to start folding laundry.
He’d been out running; no mistaking the regalia. I stifled the thought that he ought to be wearing a black suit instead of royal blue shorts over gray sweats. Physical activity has always proved a healer for me.
I did a little sprinting myself and was by his side as he turned up the front walk. He glanced at my legs. When his eyes traveled up to my face, he abruptly U-turned and started running again.
“Hey!” I said. He didn’t stop.
“Tony,” I yelled. “Come on.”
No reaction. He ran well, long easy strides down Park Drive. He already had thirty yards on me.
I took off after him.
I don’t run long distances for exercise or pleasure. I prefer volleyball, with other people and competition, and swimming, with buoyant water and no shin splints. But I’d waited a long time to talk to Tony Foley and I wasn’t about to lose him.
He wasn’t racing, just pounding along at a good rhythm, a distance man’s run, the kind of pace that he could probably maintain for an hour and that would kill me in half.
He turned a corner at St. Mary’s and headed toward the university. Afraid he’d hide in some alley or vestibule, I speeded up another notch. When I caught sight of him again, I’d gained a few yards and he was looking back worriedly. I hoped he’d already done a hard day’s workout, a marathon at least. Get tired, you bastard, I thought, my sneakers smacking concrete.
He seemed to be heading toward the river, which made sense since the banks of the Charles are the major running path for those who don’t enjoy traffic roulette. Racing across Commonwealth Avenue, I almost got smashed by a red Buick. I heard the screech of brakes, kept my head down, and ran.
I thought he’d take the footbridge to the Esplanade, but he kept going, hung a right, sped over the crest of the B.U. Bridge, cut another right, and headed toward MIT.
The going got easier along the river, turf and muddy ruts replacing the pavement, springier but more uneven. Now I had to look down to keep my footing. When I did glance up, I seemed to be getting closer. But I was starting to breathe hard, and my right side was aching.
I don’t know if I’d have caught him if he hadn’t stumbled. Stupid ideas were crowding my brain. I saw another runner nearby and thought about yelling at him to tackle Tony, considered a traditional cry of “Stop, thief!” But it would be just my luck to get an avenger on the trail, some bozo who’d shoot first.
I could see myself trying to explain it to Mooney.
He went down near the spot where the geese hang out, across from the Hyatt Hotel ziggurat. I put on a burst of speed. He looked back, lowered his head, and struggled to his knees. I was close enough to see the sweat on his forehead and hear the rasp of his breath.
“What the hell?” I stopped next to him, hands on my aching thighs, panting so hard the words could barely surface.
“Leave me alone.” He forced the words out between gasps, and I felt vindictively glad he wasn’t daisy fresh after practically maiming me.
“You hurt?” I asked, hoping for a positive response.
I got a stream of expletives.
“Why the hell did you run?”
“I don’t have to talk to you.”
“You twist the ankle, sprain it, or what?”
He put weight on it, winced. “It’s gonna blow up, I don’t get ice on it.”
“I don’t usually carry ice,” I said. “Maybe if you wait long enough, the river’ll freeze.”
He tried to stand, but his foot wouldn’t take the weight. He hopped a couple of futile yards before collapsing again.
“You gonna help me here?” he asked angrily.
“Oh, sure,” I said sarcastically. “What’s in it for me?”
“Yesterday, I didn’t figure you for a detective. Today, you’re actin’ like some fuckin’ supercop.”
“The fuckin’ supercop would like to ask you a couple questions,” I shot back.
“I didn’t know you were a runner.”
“I’m not a runner.”
“Your wind’s good.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Think you could help me over to the hotel?”
“Answer the questions?”
“Hell, once I get ice on the ankle and a drink in my hand, I’ll tell you my fuckin’ life story.”
“Deal,” I said.
It was plain luck we didn’t get run over crossing Memorial Drive.
21
Our sweaty appearance was not greeted by hotel staffers with any great consternation. In fact, we were pretty well ignored. The place was jammed, the seafood restaurant off the lobby filled to bursting, humming with conversation and background music. Velvet theater-lobby ropes and a black-and-white sign declared it off limits to the dining public this evening, taken over by the American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians.
“Whole shit box fulla doctors,” Tony Foley complained. “You see one volunteerin’ any aid, you let me know, and I’ll go have a heart attack.”
I said, “Maybe they can’t tell you’re pregnant.”
“Hell, OBs are regular doctors, too.”
A harried maître d’ finally noticed us. I asked for a bucket of ice and got the feeling Tony wasn’t the first injured runner the headwaiter had encountered.
“Can we get a drink?” My surly companion’s request sounded more like a demand.
“Certainly, sir. I’ll send a waitress over. Why don’t you, uh, take a seat in the lounge?”
I smiled at the maître d’ and he ruefully returned the grin. The “lounge” was a couple of chairs plunked near the checkin desk for weary travelers.
Tony limped toward the restaurant proper, glaring. “You want to take a guess how many of these sharks are eatin’ on their own dime?”
“You really ought to sit down.”
“Every time some Joe takes a friggin’ aspirin, it goes into a doc’s pocket.”
I took an elbow and steered him. He lurched into a yellow armchair, sank into the cushion with a groan.
“Think he’ll bring the damn ice today?” he muttered, already bent over untying the laces on his worn left Nike. “Shoulda told him I tripped on the hotel grounds, over some goddamn tree root. Shoulda told him I’m some kinda lawyer. Get him hoppin’.”
A waitress approached warily.
“Double scotch,” Tony demanded. “And bring it before you go back and serve those fat butts their wine, okay?”
“Beer. Whatever’s on tap.” I thought I might learn more from Tony if I drank with him. Separate myself from the cops anyway.
The waitress was young and easily flustered. She edged around Tony’s chair. “It’s real busy,” she murmured softly.
Tony glowered. She turned and practically ran.
The maître d’ brought not only ice but an ice pack improvised from a folded hotel towel. Foley stopped cursing long enough to mumble a hostile thanks.
The waitress served our drinks in a rush of squeaky shoes and dropped napkins. Foley glared at her and gulped his scotch.
“Ice and a drink,” I reminded him. “Life-story time.”
“Pretty tame stuff,” he said.
“Up till now.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Now you get to be the number-one suspect.”
“Hell.”
“Meaning?”
“The cops are full of it.” He took a deep breath, then another pull on his drink. “Nobody killed Tina. Nobody ever would.”
“Then what happened?”
“She made some kinda mistake is all.”
“You saying she used drugs?”
“Not like that.”
“She pop pills when you were around?”
“You recordin’ this or what?”
“You watch
too much TV.”
“Hell,” he said, “what I figure, Tina—look, I love her. I do, but this is how I see it. I mean, she’s a good-time gal. She’ll try practically anythin’ once. Hell, so will I.”
“You think she got the dose wrong?” I asked skeptically. “A nurse?”
“How do I know? How the hell do I know? What I know is I never got to thank her for the stereo. I never bought her a goddamn gift worth more than twenty bucks. We’d go to flea markets, and I’d buy her cheap earrings. That’s all I ever bought her. Cheap earrings.”
He stopped talking abruptly and applied his mouth to the glass. Sitting so near, he seemed as silent and remote as Tina’s photograph.
I took a sip of beer and decided I ought to be more particular about ordering by brand name. “Do you know what Tina was doing at JHHI last night?”
“Try another one. Cops asked me that all day.”
“Taking a class, filling in for a sick friend?”
“Look, I been through this.”
“You find yourself a dinner companion last night?”
“Ordered in pizza. Hope to hell the delivery boy remembers.”
“If he took the stairs, he’ll remember.” It was warm in the hotel after the race along the river. My sweater was starting to stick to my back. “Think Tina went to JHHI to steal drugs?”
“I don’t have to answer—”
“How about if I dump you over by the geese and you can crawl back?”
He summoned a ragged smile. “I want another drink.”
I flagged the waitress. If cops could ply suspects with liquor, they’d make more arrests.
“I never guessed you for a private eye,” he said as soon as the timid waitress departed. He grimaced as he spoke, either from the pain in his foot or the pain of the admission. The number of people who don’t guess my profession is one of my major assets in the field.
“You gave my card to the cops,” I said. Why had he run away from me? Because he thought I’d be angry about the stupid business card? Did he think I’d shoot him for telling the cops I was looking for Tina?
Did he think I’d killed Tina?
“Yeah, I sure did,” he said. “Why’d you give it to me anyway?”
“I was impatient,” I admitted. “I wanted some answers fast. Wanted to know if I was wasting my time checking out some rich woman’s fantasy.”
“This rich woman hired you to ask Tina questions?”
Not exactly, I thought.
Tony lowered his voice. “If you tell the cops I was hittin’ on you, I’ll flat-out say you’re lyin’.”
They must have questioned him long and hard about his fidelity. I said, “The subject won’t come up.”
“Anybody says I didn’t love Tina is crazy. I wouldn’t do anythin’ to hurt her ever. Hell, I didn’t even know where she was last night.”
“She stay out all night often?”
“She worked nights, some.”
“You had an exclusive thing?”
“Mostly. Look, I’m not saying I been a saint, but Tina, I figure she’s the faithful type.”
“Sure about that?”
“Sure as anybody is.”
“Did you call the police when she didn’t come home?”
“I fell asleep. They called me.”
A businessman replete with yellow power tie and alligator briefcase gave us a haughty glance, as if to say “Why are these homeless people cluttering up my lobby?”
“Are you taking the day off today?” I asked Tony.
“I’m not workin’ right now. Cops loved that. I got fired three friggin’ weeks ago. Crummy economy, you know.”
“Where did you work?”
“Bicycle shop over on Cambridge Street. Little repair, little sales. Little was about it, that’s why they laid me off.”
“You looking for a job?”
“You offerin’ one? Sorry. I been thinkin’ things over, if I oughta go back to school or what.” He jerked his head over his shoulder. “I’m not like those fellas. I’m not an ambitious kind of guy, tell the truth. Tina had enough ambition for the both of us.” He tried out another smile, but his bottom lip shook. “You know, I had ideas of myself as a daddy, a full-time daddy.”
“Tina liked to work?”
“Yeah. She sure did. She was the planner, the one figuring on striking it rich. And no, she wasn’t pregnant. It wasn’t anything but dreamin’, and now it’s nothin’ at all.”
He frowned and took a gulp of his fresh drink. “You ever eat here?”
I glanced at the fern-bar decor. “Nope.”
“Looks like a buffet setup. Think they’d miss a few clams?”
“You want ’em, you got ’em,” I said.
If the cops could ply suspects with seafood, they’d make more arrests.
I liberated a lavish plateful. A waiter glared at me. I glared back. No one tried to stop me.
“Want one?” Tony asked.
“All for you,” I said. “Did you see Tina last night?”
“No,” he intoned, like he’d given the same response a hundred times.
“Well, did you talk to her last night?”
He peered at me from under pale lashes, his mouth full of food.
“She telephone you?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“You tell the cops this?”
“Sure, I did.”
“If you didn’t, you’d better.”
“Well, I did.”
“Where’d she call from?”
“I dunno.”
“Did you tell her about me?”
“I guess. I read her your card.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“Sure.”
“And?”
“She said she didn’t know what the hell you could want.”
I sighed. “How’s the ankle?”
“Another drink?”
“Not on my tab. Look, I need some stuff about this Cee Co. place.”
“Like what?”
“How did Tina hear about it?”
“I dunno.”
“Did she go for an interview?”
“I dunno.”
“Did anybody at the hospital tell her about the job?”
He just looked at me blankly.
“Did she want to leave JHHI? Was she unhappy there?”
“She was … depressed about somethin’.”
“Something that happened at JHHI? Look, last night, you thought I might be from some quality board, a committee that checks on patient care. Right?”
He peered at his empty glass, looked around for the waitress.
“What happened?” I asked softly: “What got Tina upset?”
“Why should I tell you? She’s dead. She was a damn fine nurse. They’re tryin’ to say she was messed up with drugs, one more dark-skinned girl dead from drugs, no big deal, right? But it’s not like that.”
“Then don’t let them write her off,” I said.
“Nothin’ I can do, is there?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe not,” I said, taking a sip of warm beer, keeping silent, watching him decide.
He started slowly, in a low, flat voice. “A while back, beginning of the year, just before she left JHHI, she came in from work a mess, went right into the bedroom, wouldn’t hardly talk to me.”
“Yeah?”
“I cooked dinner. She wasn’t hungry. I tried talkin’, she wasn’t listenin’. Wound up watchin’ TV reruns most of the night. The Tonight Show, but she didn’t laugh once. Didn’t even hear the jokes.”
I kept quiet. He held his empty glass in one hand. The index finger of his other hand traced a circle on the arm of his chair, the same circle over and over.
“She took a shower before bed. I always know it’s really bad if she takes a shower at night instead of in the morning. Like she wants to wash somethin’ offa her. So when she comes out I ask her flat-out did she lose a kid? Seven years she’s a nurse, it still rips her up to lose
a kid. And she gets this look on her face and she says, ‘You know, I had bad days before, but this is some kinda personal best.’ I remember she said that, ‘personal best,’ ’cause she’s a runner, too, like me. And she tells me she lost three. Three in one day, one right after another. All real sick, yeah, but she don’t understand it, and she’s worried as hell thinkin’ maybe, maybe, she did somethin’ wrong. Thinkin’ about how it’ll look and all. Three.”
Three.
“Can you pin the date down on that?”
“Huh? How?”
“What did you watch on TV? Anything besides The Tonight Show?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was it the first week in January?”
“Could be.”
Becca Woodrow had died January sixth.
“Did she get fired?”
“No.”
“Was there an investigation?”
“I dunno.”
“She didn’t talk about it?”
“No. And I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to get her upset again. I was just damn glad when she left that place is all.”
“Left for Cee Co.”
“She only mentioned the name Cee Co. once. And then she kinda laughed.”
“She only mentioned it once?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You didn’t ask her about it?”
“What’s to ask? ‘You have a nice day, honey?’ Yeah, I’d ask her stuff like that. ‘Say, what’s the real full name of that company you work for?’ Naw, that didn’t come up.”
I swallowed my exasperation along with a mouthful of tepid beer. “How about this? How soon after her bad day at work did she leave JHHI?”
“Maybe a month later.”
“Think hard, Tony. Do you ever remember Tina mentioning a woman named Emily Woodrow?”
“No. Sorry. I don’t.”
“Isn’t there anything you can remember about Cee Co.?”
“Honest, no. I didn’t pay it hardly any mind, and she didn’t seem to work much, to tell you the truth. Put in a few hours is all. Nothing like the hours she worked at JHHI.”
“A few hours?”
“Some days she didn’t go in at all. Then, the last few weeks she spent a lot of time away. But some of that was at the library.”
“What library?”
