Dangerous Minds

by Dee Ann Palmer

  She must have discovered someone was after her. I thought she probably ran into the Forecourt to hide or slip away but it was a dead end. She was trapped. The only thing that made sense to me was that her pursuer had been after the contents of the bag, then became enraged when she didn’t have it. Only rage would have made him risk slashing her throat while all those runners were going by. He must have had a car stashed away because he’d slipped back here to the Biltmore to ransack our room.

  Janet had to have been a drug dealer. A dirty little drug dealer, I thought in disgust. And what about the phantom Spyder that wasn’t registered to a guest or to Janet? Big money bought that car, and she knew its owner. The owner trusted her to drive it. Woman’s intuition told me locating the car might be very important—if not to finding her murderer perhaps to uncovering a drug ring. I couldn’t think of anything else that would bring in the kind of money required to buy a high end sports car unless she had a multi-millionaire lover. Considering her jealousy over my relationship with Hal, if she’d had such a lover I’m sure she’d have told me. It was called one-upmanship, and it fit her personality to a T.

  My muscles were stiff and sore, my feet still tender and padded in spots by Dr. Scholl’s moleskin, but I was curious enough to want to track down that car. Confident I wouldn’t be recognized, I braved the soreness in my muscles and feet to hobble up to the Biltmore. I needed information and a purchase.

  Downtown hotel parking wasn’t always large enough, and at the Biltmore all the cars were parked by valets and often driven to other nearby lots. My approach to the valet about who had parked the Maserati was a bust. I don’t think the man spoke a word of English.

  I turned away disappointed, but my main reason for returning to the hotel was to buy a gift for Marina. I searched through the gift shop where I’d seen what I wanted. Finally, the silver locket decorated with light-blue faux gems and zircons I was looking for gleamed at me from a glass case. Perfect for Marina, who had missed the marathon and whose favorite color is blue.

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” the shop owner said as she rang it up.

  She had graceful hands. Her long acrylic nails were lacquered in red. I watched them as she handled the locket.

  “I saw it yesterday. I’m glad it’s still here,” I said.

  Business, she admitted, had been surprisingly slow during the marathon. Part of it had been the wedding reception. “None of those people were interested in fake jewels.”

  We shared a laugh over that.

  Trolling to see if the Maserati belonged to someone connected to the hotel, I said, “Parking must have been terrible this weekend for the caterers and the people who work in the Biltmore.

  “You’d better believe it. We don’t often have every bed filled and every ballroom scheduled for an event at once. Same thing today, but that’s because they’re demolishing the parking structure most of us use. Yesterday I had to park a mile away in one of the public lots. It’s no better today. There are catered luncheons in every ballroom for various conferences, and the house is full.”

  I watched the bright nails as she pulled a blue velvet bag from underneath the counter. “Today I was lucky. Found a slot in the lot above us on Olive.

  She slid Marina’s locket into the bag, and then I stopped breathing.

  Ohmygod. Of course. It wasn’t drugs at all. Janet passed the stolen jewels to me.

  In a trance, I took my package and left the hotel to head for the parking structure she’d told me employees and caterers were using now. I had a hunch I’d find the Maserati there. It was just a hunch, but worth checking out. I pulled out my cell phone and left a message for Hal. I telephoned Detective McAnally.

  “Stay away, Ms. Taylor. Let us do the investigating. Your friend died over those jewels,” McAnally said. His voice was cold and very stern.

  “Two other things,” I said.

  Quickly, I told him about the swarthy busboy who’d threatened Janet and argued with the Mexican waiter. I explained that no one used the staircase. How the tread on Janet’s shoes would be those of my Brooks, and if she had used those stairs the morning of the marathon they might learn how she’d come and gone and from which floors. They might even find yarn fluff and dust on the shoes of the person who had actually stolen the jewels if that’s how he had slipped up and down.

  “What if Janet was in on the heist and then double-crossed the Maserati owner by stealing the jewels? Maybe even took the money. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have that car to rule out some of this?” I said.

  “Stay away from that parking structure. If we think it’s necessary, we’ll look into it,” McAnally said.

  The tone of his voice convinced me I wasn’t the only one who thought that car might be important. “I’m only three blocks from there. Think I’ll have a look.” I hung up smiling. Envisioning a police car roaring in in just a few minutes, I passed the parking structure in question and climbed the hill to the Watercourt restaurant.

  Like I said, it’s a jungle out there, and I am not stupid.

  I’d already ordered lunch when Hal reached me.

  I greeted him with, “You know what?”

  “What?” Hal said as he brushed his lips across mine.

  “I just realized that I gave the waiter our room number when I asked about the stairs.”

  * * *

  The Maserati was there, twice stolen, now abandoned, Detective McAnally told us the next morning. In it they’d found the money and the knife used on Janet. The busboy had been Janet’s boyfriend. He wasn’t a drug dealer, he was an accomplished thief. My friendly Mexican waiter was the fence, and he’d discovered Janet had taken the jewelry.

  “Ms. Widlow was no doubt shocked to find her lover, who drove a Maserati she’d assumed was his, working as a busboy. We believe she hadn’t known he was a professional thief until she stumbled on the stolen jewelry. We think she found it the morning of the marathon and took it with the intention of handing it over to us as soon as she’d finished the race.”

  The sadness I felt weakened my smile. “A race always came first for Janet. She was determined to finish before I did, you know.”

  “We doubt she understood the extent of the danger she’d put herself in. When she suspected she was being tailed by her lover, she knew she couldn’t risk having the jewels found on her, although I doubt she thought he’d murder her. His fingerprints were on the knife, by the way.”

  I nodded, my throat in a knot.

  “When she knew she was being followed, she passed the bag off to you because she thought it would be safe.”

  “We’d competed on opposing college relay teams.” The pain I felt now pushed my post-marathon physical aches into the shadows.

  “Right, and she trusted you to turn them over to us after the race.”

  Dismay flooded me. I had so misjudged her! Choosing to dislike her, I’d never made any attempt to find out what was hidden beneath her arrogance. Yet she would have done the right thing with those gems, and had understood me well enough to realize I would do the right thing too.

  “There’s a reward for the return of the jewelry. We’ll see that you get it.” McAnally shook our hands and left.

  My tears couldn’t be held back. “Oh, God, Hal. Was I her only friend? She wanted to show me off. Poor odd woman, using the Spyder to show she had a rich boyfriend, taking me with her to show she had a femalefriend.” I broke down.

  Hal’s arms enclosed me in his solid warmth.

  “I should’ve ridden with her to the Convention Center.”

  “It’s okay, Babe. There’s no way you could’ve have known. It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay, and it was something I could never undo. It was me I needed to fix.

  * * *

  After buying flowers in the hotel florist shop, we checked out of the hotel and tipped the valet who brought our car around. Parking near the Chinese Theatre, we walked to the Forecourt and found a bright mound of flowers, ribbons, candles, and notes
. The spot where she had died had been cleaned. A floral arrangement on a stand from the theatre owners had been placed there, but the other flowers and items for this impromptu memorial had come from strangers. Many of them, I suspected, were runners. My heart ached as I leaned to place our flowers with the others.

  Hal pointed to a pair of new running shoes someone had left. I knelt to read the note attached to them. For the golden streets of heaven. You go, woman.

  My throat tightened and the ache in my chest enlarged. Through vision blurred once again by tears, I searched in my purse until I found the narrow red strip for fastening my marathoner’s chip, then I knelt to pick up one of the shoes and I threaded the strip through the laces. Pressing the Velcro closed, I replaced the shoe.

  “Goodbye, Janet. Forgive me for not riding with you, for being a lousy judge of you.”

  I stood and wiped my eyes.

  “Run well, friend,” I whispered. “Beat us all.”

  The End

  The first version of Marathon Madness appeared in the Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles anthology LAndmarked for Murder. Reprinted with permission.

  Compulsion

  It had begun again. Ever since childhood, when she had been disciplined with electrical shocks from her stepfather’s cattle prod and locked with the rats in the dark root cellar without food or water for a week, there had been episodes when it hammered her brain against her skull and threatened to close off her throat unless she acted. Since the beginning it had been this way—intolerable until she satisfied it. It was what she, Margo Lindsey, R.N., C.C.R.N., called The Urge.

  So far she had been able to stay on top of it, manage it.

  It would kill her someday if she lost control of it.

  On Friday, at half-past twenty-two hundred hours, Margo stepped out of the elevator at the east end of the fourteenth floor of St. Michael’s Hospital. Always early for a shift which would end at seven-thirty the next morning, she turned left, strode a few feet and stopped to look out over a magical San Francisco. From this height, through glass that rose from floor to ceiling, the Tinkerbelle lights of the city below winked through a mysterious fairyland of mist under a blue-black sky. Pleasure welled in her chest only to be replaced by sadness. She had been happy here.

  Thanks to The Urge, she was forced to say goodbye.

  A man who smelled of stale cigarettes, a lone visitor in the chair nearest where she stood, spoke. “No place like this city.”

  “No, there’s not.” She turned her smile on him, the smile everyone told her lit up her face and revealed what a beautiful young woman she was. “I’m going to miss it, but it’s time for me to move on.”

  “Too bad,” the man replied, with a tired shake of his head. “It’s a great town. Too bad.”

  Her white running shoes made cushioning sounds as she turned and walked across corridor floors that gleamed from regular cleaning and polishing. As she entered the intensive care unit, the silken whooshes of a ventilator sucking out air which had circulated throughout the patient’s body collecting dirty carbon dioxide, then filling the cleansed lungs with oxygen, welcomed her.

  Satisfaction filled her. This was where she belonged. It was unfortunate she must find another unit in another hospital. Perhaps Arizona this time. Or maybe Mobile, Alabama.

  The overhead lights illuminated the white desk where Katie Anderson, the registered nurse who worked evenings, sat at the computer charting. Soon she would unlock the medicine cart and they would count the controlled drugs together. The count being correct, she would give Margo a report on the only two patients in the room.

  Margo, a natural ash brunette whose dark hair gleamed under the lights, found it hard to understand why Katie didn’t do something about the lifeless color of her hair. While Katie completed her charting, Margo she would check her patients. She lifted the clipboard with the nurse’s notes from the hook at the foot of the first patient’s bed. Margo had been off for three days, but she knew this woman.

  The patient’s urinary output was good. The ventilator was functioning as expected. The pacemaker monitoring the woman’s weakening heart was set on capture, not kicking in unless her heart skipped a beat, which it did now. Margo glanced at the monitor above the bed. The device should be sending a minuscule jolt of electricity down around the damaged pathways. She watched as the heart contracted. And beat again.

  Pleased, she checked the central line that dripped normal saline solution into the subclavian artery in the woman’s neck. Without it the woman’s blood pressure would hover at 80/40—below the shock level. The fluid was adding volume to her veins, and the pressure remained low but in a higher, safer range. The IV line was clear, flowing at the rate indicated. Later she would removed the old dressing over the entry site, cleanse it and apply fresh disinfectant and bandage.

  There was no signal from The Urge at this bedside. Margo relaxed. After pressing a stethoscope to her patient’s lungs to check for rattles, she squeezed the comatose woman’s hand and leaned over the raised bed rails to whisper in her ear. “Hello, Evelyn. It’s Margo back again to take care of you. Rest well, love.”

  Replacing the clipboard, she approached the nurse’s station, stepping around the back-and-forth movement of the rag floor mop wielded by Victoriana Sanchez, the new custodian from Housekeeping.

  The stooped housekeeper, dressed in blue scrubs two sizes too large for her, bent over her mop as if she were married to it. A scrub cap covering her hair was pulled low over her brow, revealing only the lower part of her face and her dark eyes. They flickered upward then down again as Margo passed—small, calculating eyes with what Margo had once described acerbically as no doubt a “marmoset size” brain behind them.

  As Margo filled the white leather fanny pack at her waist with packaged alcohol wipes, hypodermic syringes, Bandaids, penlight, small notebook and pen, Katie looked up at her replacement and sighed. “God, how you manage to look so great in scrubs is beyond me.”

  Margo flashed her smile, a less dazzling one than that she’d shown the man at the window. If Katie would have her scrubs tailored to fit as Margo did, and not send them out with the hospital laundry but pay for it privately, she would look better in them. Not as good as Margo, of course, but better than she did now.

  Margo didn’t tell her this, however. She changed the subject. “What happened to old Mr. Samson in bed two?”

  “Expired. This afternoon.”

  “Really.” A little frisson of pleasure, a slight pulsation of excitement from The Urge flashed through Margo, but she kept it from her face.

  “That infection overwhelmed him. He died at about thirteen hundred hours. No one seems to know how he contracted the bacteria that killed him.”

  “Sad. What about this new patient?” She meant the one now occupying Bed 2.

  “William Craychert, age twenty-eight. Motorcycle accident. Had emergency abdominal surgery and was admitted to the post-op unit, but was sent to us because he isn’t doing well. They haven’t figured out why.”

  They lapsed into silence for several minutes as Margo pulled up his chart on a second computer and studied it. “He’s got a slow bleed somewhere internally.”

  “What?”

  ”Look at the pattern in his daily hemoglobins.”

  “Crap. They’ve been dropping slightly each day for the last three, and no one noticed.” Katie turned toward her, and Margo basked in the admiration in Katie’s eyes. “Super Nurse here saw what no one, not even the surgeon, did. Too bad you were off for three days or you’d have spotted it sooner.”

  This time Margo allowed herself to blush. As if the compliment embarrassed her. Which it most definitely did not. She was brilliant. Why should she be embarrassed?

  “Incompetents.” Cratchert spat it out, startling both nurses.

  The word triggered hammering inside Margo’s skull as the monstrous Urge awoke. Dizziness threatened as her throat tightened. She fought to relax it by breathing in slow and deep. The night R.N.s read and in
terpreted lab results, and, yes, on the post-op floor they had missed this, but Margo allowed no one to malign her profession.

  While Katie notified the physician and they scheduled emergency surgery, Margo began a pre-op assessment on the motorcyclist. “They’ll find that bleed and have you fixed up in no time.”

  “Yeah, like shit. This place is full of incompetents.”

  Even her most dazzling smile hadn’t erased the anger from the young man’s face.

  The hammering in her brain intensified.

  Truth of the matter was he was at fault. Hadn’t other injured bikers told Margo that when they’d bought their hogs, the salesmen, the very ones who profited from the sale, had discouraged them from the purchase? Had warned them that everyone who rode a motorcycle ended up in the hospital at some point. What idiots they and this nasty young man were—too dumb to figure out you didn’t have to jump thirty buses or the Snake River to be hurt.

  He would never know it, but Margo had no use for this young, foul-mouthed fool in the bed before her.

  She fought nausea as the pounding in her head threatened to blow it apart.

  Katie stayed over to help her prep the patient for surgery. When he was almost ready, Margo asked, “Can you stay with him until I take my medication? I think I’m getting a migraine.”

  “Ooh, those are so painful. Go ahead. Staying’s no problem.”

  In the staff lounge, Margo once more dodged Victoriana’s mop after it swept over the tips of her white shoes.

  “Hey. These are new shoes.” She was curt because she couldn’t keep the annoyance out of her voice. Tomorrow she would report this stupid worker to the head of Housekeeping. The old woman lacked good sense. Mopping, mopping, mopping—always in someone’s way.

  Margo took a couple of headache pills from her locker and swallowed them with a cup of water although she knew the only thing that would ease her head was to act on The Urge.

  She slipped into one of the stalls, shut the door and removed a syringe from her fanny pack. Drawing up ten milliliters of water from the toilet bowl, she recapped the needle carefully to prevent sticking herself, flushed the toilet, and left the stall. As she approached the sink to wash her hands, she slipped the hypodermic into the pack once more.