by Daniel Kalla
“Yes.”
“Perfect. Can we use your phone to relay one more call?”
“To?” she asked suspiciously.
“Philip Maglio.”
“Maglio? You heard what Helen said about him. You think this is wise?”
“Let’s find out.”
I gave her the number and a quick tutorial on how to record calls on her cell phone. She put me on hold. A moment later, Maglio’s receptionist Megan answered in her singsong voice. When I introduced myself again as “J. D. Emily,” she laughed and said, “As in the poet, right? Please hold a moment, Mr. Emily.”
More than a minute passed before the line clicked. “Phil Maglio,” he growled in his gravelly baritone.
“Phil, we spoke last week.”
“No shit.”
I pictured the tight jaw and fuming gray eyes from his photo. “I wanted to ask you about Whistler,” I said.
The cool silence that followed was broken by his wet cough. “What about it?”
“I heard that you got shafted and ended up losing a lot of money on SnowView.”
“So?” he grumbled. “That’s the development business for you. Rarely a day goes by when somebody doesn’t screw me, or vice versa.”
“Yeah, but in this case we’re talking about Emily Kenmore,” I said. “Somebody you were screwing outside the office.”
“You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“No?” I said. “I’m talking about the woman who upended your dream development with her careless drug habit.” I paused. “The same woman who exposed you to HIV.”
The line went dead quiet. The receiver could have frozen in my hands.
“Phil?” I said after a moment.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous I can be?” he hissed.
“Oh, I think I do,” I said with feigned indifference, though my heart was hammering. “I saw the photos of Emily’s bedroom in the paper. I saw what you did to them.”
He coughed into the receiver and then loudly cleared his throat. “Haven’t you heard? The cops already know who killed those two.”
“But I know better. And so do you.”
“You don’t know your ass from your elbow,” he grunted. “I’m not sure who is feeding you this line of bullshit, but I do know this: It’s not good for your health.”
“Phil, we both know—”
“Listen to me.” He cut me off. “You’re as big a pain in the ass as your brother was.”
I felt winded.
“Next time you want to talk to me, Ben”—the use of my name shot a chill through me—“we’ll do it face to face.”
Chapter 24
I had little time to consider Maglio’s threat, because Edith’s guarantee proved prophetic. By the time I returned to the clinic, patients filled the waiting room. And the rest of the morning passed in a blur as I raced to keep up with the unending stream of clients.
Joe Janacek didn’t materialize until noon. In a black sports jacket and gray tie, he stood in my office’s doorway, munching a chocolate chip cookie and studying the huge pile of charts on my desk with a look of gleeful amusement.
“You don’t work mornings anymore?” I closed the chart and put it on the smaller pile of completed ones.
He finished chewing a mouthful of cookie. “Do you know when I last had help around here?”
“Six months ago?” I guessed, based on the evidence I’d seen of another physician’s writing in the charts.
“Seven,” he said. “So I hope you are not too terribly put out if this sixty-five-year-old physician takes one or two mornings off to catch up on a half year’s worth of his personal banking and accounting.”
“I’ll manage somehow.”
“Ah, such stoicism.” He approached, holding out the bag of cookies. “Do you want one?”
My stomach growled; I hadn’t eaten a bite since waking. I reached inside, pulled out a cookie, and took a bite. My hunger aside, it was delicious. “Do you bake, Joe?”
“Pusinky.”
“Pardon?”
“A Czech meringue pastry. Mouth-watering.” He shrugged. “But my wife was the baker in my house. Vanilkové rohlícky, orechove pracny, pusinky.” The Czech names rolled off his tongue longingly, though they meant nothing to me. “Nothing she couldn’t bake.”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know?” he said, bewildered. Then his eyes filled with understanding, and he shook his head. “My wife’s not dead.” He laughed. “Between the rheumatoid arthritis in her hands and my elevated cholesterol, Eliska doesn’t bake anymore.”
“Eliska!” I laughed. “You married her!”
His forehead creased into a frown, and he patted his chest. “You think I’d blow up a tank for just anybody? You’ll meet Eliska at dinner on Saturday. Six o’clock.”
I wasn’t keen to socialize while on the run, but I felt deeply indebted to Joe, and I had no excuse for not accepting the invitation. Besides, I was intrigued to meet the woman who converted Joe into a revolutionary. “What can I bring?”
“A bottle of wine would be nice.” He turned for the door. “But for God’s sake, not Hungarian!”
I chuckled. “Where did you get these cookies?”
“Patricia Holmes dropped them off for me.”
“For you?” I said, remembering the transgendered patient with the fractured cheek. “I spent an hour getting her sorted out.”
“I think she mentioned you could have one, too.” He pointed to the remaining half of a cookie in my hand.
“How did the surgery go?”
“Well. She’s decided to move back to her mother’s house on Vancouver Island. A wise move on her part, I think.” Joe nodded. “You did all right by her, Peter.”
After he left the room, I sat at the desk, enjoying Patricia’s cookie. My troubles still shrouded me like a dense fog, but for a few moments I brightened with the satisfaction of a well-managed case that ended in a positive outcome.
Finishing the last crumb, I rose from the chair and headed out to the examining rooms with a renewed sense of purpose. I reached for the first chart on the wall: Jennifer Ayott, age thirty. In the margin below the date, a note read PRESCRIPTION REFILL. Flipping back through the thick chart, I saw several blood test results for CD4 counts and viral loads. I’d already seen the same test on many of the clinic’s patients, and I knew that the lower the CD4 count and the higher the viral load, the more advanced the HIV illness. Jennifer Ayott’s numbers for both tests were on the wrong side of the curve, but going back over her previous results, I noticed they had improved since she had started treatment.
With a light knock, I opened the door and walked into the examining room. In jeans and layered white-on-pink long-sleeved shirts, Jennifer sat on the examining table with legs crossed. Her head was buried in the book on her lap. Though thin and slightly pale, she had a flawless complexion and striking cheekbones. I couldn’t help but think of Emily.
Jennifer looked up at me and fumbled with the book before catching it with both hands. Her full lips parted and her green eyes dilated in astonishment. “Aaron?” she sputtered.
I fought off the sudden constriction in my throat. “I’m Dr. Peter Horvath,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too adamant. “But you’re talking about Aaron Dafoe, right?”
Dumbfounded, she nodded, as she clutched the paperback to her chest as if it were a Bible.
“People make that mistake all the time.” I mustered a big grin, then strode up to her and extended my hand. “Aaron’s my first cousin.”
“I see.” She shook my hand tentatively. “I’m Jenny Ayott.”
Jenny! I buried my surprise in a cough. “Nice to meet you, Jenny.”
Her eyes fell to her book. “You look an awful lot like your cousin.”
“Tell me about it.” I forced a laugh. “Growing up, some people thought we were twins.”
She looked up with her head tilted and lips pursed
. “Doesn’t Aaron already have a twin?”
“Yeah, he does…um, Benjamin,” I stammered. “But Ben put on a bunch of weight, so I’ve ended up looking more like Aaron than his own twin.”
Her face relaxed, and her eyes softened. “That’s ironic.”
She seemed to be accepting my explanation, and the knots in my stomach loosened. “How do you know Aaron?”
She ran a hand through her hair, reddening slightly. “We dated for a while.”
“When?”
“A couple years ago.” Her voice cracked.
“You haven’t seen him recently?”
“Not since our breakup.” Her face flushed, and she looked at the wall. “How is he?”
I hesitated, considering my response. I opted to go with the official version. “He disappeared two years ago. It’s presumed that he, um…died.”
She was on her feet in a heartbeat. “Died?” The tears were already rolling down her cheeks. “How?”
“Well…they think he was murdered.”
She wiped her tears away with a sleeve and then dropped back down on the examining table. “Who? Why?” Her shaky voice was barely above a whisper.
I sat down on the stool in front of her. “Jenny, his body was never found.” I went on to tell her about the blood in the trunk of his car. “Some people think Aaron set it all up.”
She tilted her head and bit her lip. More than her features, her expression reminded me so much of Emily that it hurt. I couldn’t imagine the impact my resemblance to Aaron was having on her. “Set up his own murder?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No. I mean, faked it.”
“But why?”
From the bewilderment in her wide eyes, I knew that whatever happened to Aaron, Jenny hadn’t been included in the plans. “Did you know Aaron was mixed up in the drug trade?”
“He was trying to get out.” She swallowed. “We both were.”
“You were in the business?”
Jenny shrugged and looked down at her feet again. “Not really. Before Aaron and I…hooked up, I used to help an ex-boyfriend move some of the crystal meth he cooked.” Her eyes drifted tentatively up to mine. “In fact, that was how I met Aaron.”
I remembered Kyle telling me how Aaron and he used to get their crystal meth at a discount price from Malcolm Davies. I suspected Malcolm was the ex Jenny referred to, but I knew I would only draw suspicion by asking.
Jenny rubbed her eyes and let her hand drift through her hair again. “We were going to start over. I was going to go to Seattle with Aaron. We planned to get clean together. His brother had arranged rehab for us both.”
I acted surprised as I nodded along to the story that I knew as well as she did. “What about the drug trade?”
“His cousin, who was also his partner, was already sick from cancer.” She held out a hand to clarify. “Another cousin, Kyle. I don’t know if he’s on your side of the family or not.”
“He is,” I said without explaining how.
“Your cousins didn’t see eye to eye, but Aaron wanted to get out of the business. With Kyle in hospital, Aaron thought the timing was perfect for him to make a clean break.”
“Jenny, did you two ever make it to the rehab in Seattle?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“No.”
“What happened?”
She sniffed a couple of times. Her chin dropped to her chest. She dug in her jean pocket and pulled out three empty pill bottles of HIV medications. She held them up without looking at me. “This did.”
“HIV?”
Jenny nodded. The tears welled up again and flooded over the rims of her eyes. She wiped at them with her forearm.
“What did it have to do with you and Aaron?”
“Nothing, I thought.” She looked at me with plaintive eyes. “He knew about my disease early on in our relationship. He told me it was okay.”
“But it wasn’t?”
She shook her head slowly. “A couple of days before we were supposed to go to Seattle, he showed up at my place acting strange.” She sniffled. “He said we had no future together. He blamed it on my illness.” She stopped to get her voice under control. “He said he didn’t want to risk having ‘mutant’ kids with AIDS.”
I shook my head, stunned by the anecdote. “Aaron told you that?”
She swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Unbelievable,” I mumbled. The heartless words sounded nothing like my brother. Despite his fatal weaknesses for drugs, Aaron was a gentle person. I’d never seen or heard him be deliberately cruel to anyone. Or was I wrong? Could I have my misjudged my own flesh and blood that badly? I wondered. No. Not Aaron.
“I was sure something was wrong with him. Drugs or whatever.” Jenny spoke to the wall. “He’d never acted like that before.”
“And later?”
Her head bobbed slightly, and I knew she was crying again. “I never saw him again. He just…disappeared.”
Chapter 25
Embarrassed, Jenny Ayott tucked the prescription in her pocket and made a hasty exit with only a quiet thank-you spoken to the door. I sat at the desk, wondering whether she’d truly believed my cover story. My fingers trembled as I flipped open her chart and copied her address and phone number onto a piece of scrap paper that I hurriedly stuffed into my pocket.
I was still staring at her chart when Joe poked his head into my office. “Tell me, please,” he said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “How are you enjoying your retirement?”
I closed Jenny’s chart, rose to my feet, and followed Joe out to the examining rooms. With my mind miles and years away from the clinic, I grabbed the first chart on the door and walked in to face a skinny, skittish heroin addict. He claimed his addiction was a direct byproduct of cold-hearted physicians unwilling to prescribe sufficient quantities of the painkillers he needed for his chronic back pain. I didn’t even bother to put up a fight. I simply reached for my prescription pad.
I coasted through the rest of the afternoon in a similar vein, repeatedly choosing the path of least resistance. My thoughts kept wandering back to Jenny’s account of how cruelly Aaron had stomped on her heart on his way out of her life. I couldn’t correlate the anecdote with the brother I knew, especially thinking back on our last conversation and what a promising future together he had painted for them.
I wondered why he would go to the trouble of asking me to arrange rehab for both of them if he never planned to follow through with it. Such a pointless step. Unless Aaron suddenly needed to fake his death in a hurry! Was the frigid breakup Aaron’s way of protecting Jenny from the people he was running from?
But everything indicated that if Aaron had staged his own death, he had planned it meticulously. As Alex pointed out, the blood in the trunk alone would have taken months to collect.
My head pounded as I dwelled on the possibilities. My anxiety receded and frustration bubbled up in its place. The fragments of history I’d painstakingly collected had begun to contradict one another. None of this makes any damn sense!
As I ground my way through the afternoon, one person crystallized in my mind as the focus of my anger, confusion, and sense of betrayal: Michael Prince. Though I doubted it would serve any purpose, by the day’s end I couldn’t resist the urge to contact him. With the last of the patients gone, I pushed my stack of charts out of the way and reached for the desk phone. I typed in the code used to obscure the caller identification and then dialed his office number.
Janelle patched me straight through. “Hello, Benjamin,” Prince said in a formal but warm tone. “I was hoping you would call.”
“Why?” I snapped. “You need to mislead me about something else?”
“Excuse me,” Prince said calmly.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” I gripped the receiver like a pair of pliers I couldn’t squeeze tightly enough. “Was I not being clear? How selfish of me, after all the trust and forthrightness you’ve poured into our relationship.”
“Ben, would y
ou like to tell me what is bothering you?”
“Not what. Who!”
“And by that, you mean me.”
“Exactly, you lying son of a bitch,” I spat.
He was the epitome of patience. “Lying about what?”
“For starters, pretending you didn’t know Emily when you were involved in diffusing the legal charges at Whistler!”
He didn’t reply.
“Or acting as though you knew nothing about Philip Maglio and his Whistler scam when in fact you were one of the principal investors.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said softly.
“You were going to be, if the thing was ever built!”
“I never committed to it.”
“But you knew about it, inside and out,” I growled. “Some service you’re providing to me at five hundred bucks an hour!”
“This is exactly the reason why I get paid as well as I do.”
I threw my free hand up, flabbergasted. “For selling out your clients?”
“The contrary,” Prince said with a slight sigh. “Let’s assume what you’ve said is true, and the others you mentioned are also clients of mine. Did it ever occur to you that I might be protecting their attorney-client privilege by not discussing them with you?”
“Emily is dead,” I said, faltering.
“That doesn’t alter the law. Think about it, Ben. How could you trust me to protect your sensitive information with them, if I were to discuss theirs with you?”
His logic was twisting me in knots, but I found it hard to argue. I relaxed my grip. My tone steadied. “Sounds like you have an inherent conflict of interest in all this.”
“Not at all,” Prince said. “When it comes to trial, I will represent you against the state of Washington, not any of my other clients.”
When it comes to trial. My stomach sank digesting the inference. “What if the information I uncover implicates one of your clients?” I asked.
He was a silent for a long moment. I picked up a pen and began to doodle on the prescription pad in front of me. Without thinking, I sketched a gravestone. “Can you be a little more specific?” Prince finally asked.
