A Bitch Called Hope

by Lily Gardner

  There they were back in their old booth and his eyes were still the color of the sea and his dimples miles deep. Not that she cared how he looked, not much anyway. He lifted his drink and read the jokes on his napkin, groaned and shook his head like he always did. Then he set his drink down and squared the napkin to the edge of the table. Took a sip and set it down again. Finally he said, “What did you want to see me about?”

  “The autopsy report on Bill Pike,” she said. “What did you make of the tobacco under his fingernails?”

  “Whoa.” Tommy’s drink sloshed over his fingers and soaked the napkin. “You know better. I can’t talk to you about this. They’d fire my ass.”

  Fire his ass? Who did he think he was talking to here? “Jeannie,” she called. “Give me a Jack. A double. Two doubles. One for me and one for Laughing Boy.”

  “No-oh,” Tommy said. “I’m not talking about the case, Dish.”

  “Come on, Tommy, give me something,” she said. “I thought you wanted to be friends.”

  Tommy rolled his shoulders, popped his neck, his leather jacket creaking with every adjustment as he made up his mind. “The old guy smoked. Probably why he had asthma. So what?”

  She said, “Delia tells me Bill had given up smoking five years ago. Said the smoke would bring on an asthma attack.”

  “So he lapsed. It happens all the time.”

  “Bill probably smoked one of those cigars you found out behind the house.”

  Tommy put his drink carefully on the table and turned the full wattage of his attention on her.

  “How do you know what we found in the back of the house?” His tone was dangerous.

  “We’re entitled to discovery.”

  “There was nothing back there. Yard debris,” he said. “Which is why you didn’t get it in discovery. Who have you been talking to?”

  “Are you telling me you didn’t find any cigar butts?” she said.

  “You got all the discovery. Period.”

  “When I was a cop, we didn’t keep secrets,” she said.

  Which was never true. A married man always has his secrets. It was a dig. If not for Tommy she’d still be a cop. She knew it, he knew it.

  “What about Bill and Delia’s laptops? Their datebooks?”

  Tommy took a long pull from his drink. “If I’m getting this right and I give you what you want, we can be friends?”

  What he was calling friends wasn’t about sharing stories and a bar tab; he was asking her to whore for information. So she had a choice: throw her beer in his face, or get what she came here for. “I’m not asking for the moon,” she said. “Someone tempted Bill with a box of Havanas that cost as much as a car payment. I just think maybe the person who talked Bill into having a cigar was the same person who switched labels on the inhalers. As for the computers, I should have access.”

  “There was nothing interesting on their computers,” Tommy said. “Photographs. Music. E-mail. None of it had a thing to do with the murder.”

  “Just the same, I’d like a look.”

  “You know the drill. We don’t use it, you don’t get a look at it.”

  “What about the cigars?” she said.

  “How do you know Pike didn’t buy them for himself?” he said. “You’re making too much of this. The guy had some drinks. Impaired judgment, not good impulse control to begin with.” Tommy smirked. “What did I always tell you?” he continued, taking a patronizing tone with her. “The simplest explanation is most likely the correct one.”

  “You were always the lazy one not thinking things through,” she said. “Impulse control. How does that jibe with buying the cigars for himself?”

  “You want to bet who’s right this time?” he said. The missing grin materialized on his face.

  “If it’s just yard debris,” she said, “let me have it.”

  His smile deepened and the dimples plumbed new depths. “What will you give me?”

  Like she hadn’t already given him more than he ever had a right to. “You’re blocking a legitimate lead. And now you want to turn this into some kind of game?”

  He wore that stunned look men get when you get too real for them. “I just want to be friends,” he said.

  “Then give me the fucking evidence.”

  Tommy did a credible impression of a man who’d given up trying to be reasonable with an unreasonable woman. He slapped a couple bills on the table and slid out of the booth.

  “Good-bye, Dish,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  You’d have to live in Portland to witness firsthand how hysterical Portlanders get when they see two flakes of snow. The local news jams with school closings and cancelled events from book clubs to Pilates classes to the Knights of Columbus monthly meeting.

  Lennox’s twenty-minute commute to the jail the next morning turned into a forty-five-minute slog as she passed cars creeping at twenty miles an hour. But once she got downtown it was life as usual, a river of intrepid consumers going from store to store still shopping for the holidays. God bless ‘em, every one. Lennox parked the Bronco five blocks from the jail.

  Kline was waiting at the top of the jail steps, out of the weather. He glanced at his watch. She was fifteen minutes late.

  “Traffic,” she said.

  “Delia’s not happy with us,” Kline said.

  Kline glanced past her and drew in his breath. She turned as Doctor E marched up the sidewalk and climbed the jail steps. He wore a pale blue muffler wrapped several times around his neck. The tip of his sharp nose was red with the cold.

  The three of them passed through security and stood together in the high-ceilinged lobby of the jail. The floor was gray granite, the few sticks of furniture were black, one wall was covered with what looked like crumpled tinfoil, the other walls were gray. There was a slight oily tinge to the air, which added to the impression that they were standing inside a vast firearm.

  “Delia called for me. I can’t tell you how upset she is,” Doctor E said. “Instead of working to get her out, you’ve been pestering her family. Why is she still in this place?”

  A policewoman walked past. Kline knew better than anyone that a jail lobby was no place to have a sit-down; still, a guy can have his chain jerked only so many times.

  He rocked slightly forward on the balls of his feet. The two men stood in the middle of the lobby floor, slugging distance from one another. “I’ve told my client why she’s still in here. If she wants to share that information with you, she will.”

  Good. Two alpha men— best thing for Lennox was to let them struggle with the reins of power. See what shook out.

  “Delia’s too fragile to manage anything beyond her own health and spirits,” said Doctor E. “I’m representing the family now.”

  Kline fastened his iron gray eyes on the doctor. “Delia may feel fragile,” he said. “But she’s not incompetent and you’re not family.”

  Several uniformed officers had passed them to get to the elevators. It seemed to Lennox they were keeping an eye and both ears on Kline and the doc.

  Doctor E said, “Delia’s asked me to manage her affairs, as both her doctor and her fiancé.”

  Excuse me, her fiancé? Was Delia out of her ever-loving mind?

  Kline stared at Doctor E, his mouth half-open. Which made Lennox realize she, too, was standing there gape-mouthed. Kline said, “Of course, I’ll need to check this with Delia.”

  “Do that.” Doctor E looked pointedly at his watch. “You were hired to protect the family, not to poke into their private business. Now Father Mac is complaining to Delia that your investigator has insulted him.”

  Lennox leaned forward. “Wait a minute—” She was going to say, you’re telling me the priest is off-limits?

  But Kline lifted a halt-right-there hand. “Not a word,” he told her. To the doctor he said in an even voice. “We were just discussing this very thing.”

  “Good. I’ll tell her it’s handled.” Doctor E nodded, looking pretty damn se
lf-satisfied. Then walked to the elevator.

  Lennox never set herself up as the chairman of propriety, but this was flat wrong in so many ways. “We’re taking orders from Mrs. Pike’s boyfriend?”

  “We’re taking this outside,” Kline said. “We’ll have to meet with Delia later.”

  They passed the security line and walked down the steps into the snow.

  “Why didn’t you want me to say anything?” she said as they reached the sidewalk.

  “What I’ve been trying to tell you for a couple weeks now, but you’re so busy acting like a cop, you don’t listen. Delia has made it clear she doesn’t want you to investigate her boys or Doctor E. If you don’t stop now, she’s prepared to hire a different defense team.”

  So that was it. First and foremost he wanted his fee. “Come on,” she said and jammed her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “The DA’s got a winnable case against Delia. Someone in her family murdered her husband. If we don’t find out who, it’s damned likely she’ll go down for it.”

  “You don’t know that.” Kline brushed off the snow from his hair and hauled in a deep breath. His exhale was white as smoke. “Since you’ve been a PI you’ve been investigating insurance claims. Once in a while you get a divorce. What do you know about investigating murder from the defense side of the bench?”

  “It doesn’t matter what side of the bench I’m on,” she said. “I’ve had four years as a homicide detective.” The cold seeped through her shoes making her whole body ache from cold.

  They were heading in the direction of Kline’s office. The longer they argued, the faster Kline walked. If they couldn’t find something to agree about, she’d be sprinting by the time they reached the Park blocks. The snowflakes grew bigger and wetter. A BMW lost traction and fishtailed, missing a parked car by a whisker. They reached the corner of Salmon and Broadway.

  “My truck is parked on the next corner,” she said.

  But Kline continued marching past her corner. Pontificating. Apparently there were a hundred ways a PI’s work is different from a cop’s. No shit. How witnesses weren’t required to talk to her. They could lie to her. Yada-yada.

  “You must’ve walked to the jail from your office,” she said.

  He nodded. His indignant breath puffed out in clouds into the frigid air. Still with the differences between cops and PIs, ending with how the client could fire you at any time. Her toes felt like someone was biting down on them. What was that crap about hypothermia being a painless death?

  “Maybe I could talk to Delia. I’m a friend of the family,” she said. “I wanted to ask her about a box of very expensive cigars that was given to Bill, maybe as an enticement to smoke—”

  “Are you not listening?” Said too loudly. A couple wrapped in scarves looked over their shoulders at Kline and her.

  She and Kline jogged through the slush, Kline lecturing her about cracks in the DA’s case and reasonable doubt. Her shoes were soaked through. “Only one juror and we’ve done our job,” he said. He told her to round up an expert witness for the inhalers. Then more about cracks in the case.

  “Cracks,” she said.

  “You need to know, if she fires us, I’m out a boatload of money,” he said. “Bet your ass you won’t want to use me for a reference.”

  Chapter 19

  Kline wanted cracks? Lennox would find cracks. She drove home and turned on her computer. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, over seven thousand deaths occur each year from medication errors: dosage errors, mislabeling of medicines and drug interaction. Only eight percent of those seven thousand deaths were due to mislabeling of medicines and, of that eight percent, there were no deaths reported in the state of Oregon. Lennox pored over the directories for any and all expert witnesses who might have an axe to grind with pharmaceutical companies.

  She worked until eight, then turned her light off and walked down the hallway to her living room. The only sound was the hum of the furnace. The porch light from her front windows lit the room just enough to maneuver. She padded over to the windows to pull the curtains closed.

  Across the street, parked east of Mrs. Kurtz’s driveway, was an eighties Camaro. The muscle car stood out in her neighborhood, where two out of three cars were Subaru station wagons. The driver lit a cigarette, and she thought there was a passenger as well. Two males. They were parked so that she couldn’t see their license plate.

  Lennox closed all the curtains across the front of the house and checked the locks on the front and back doors. She went back to the window and eased the curtain aside just far enough to see if the men were still sitting there. They were. A couple of guys sitting in a car at night. No reason she could think of why they were parked in front of the Kurtz’s house. The only people who visited Mrs. Kurtz were people from her church and never, never at night.

  Lennox had lost the shield protecting her from all the sane criminals, the ones who knew better than to harm a cop. Now she was just a civilian. “Civilian”— just a nice way of saying “prey.” Lennox went for her night vision scope.

  Clear as clear, the guy at the wheel of the Camaro was John Resnick, the man she’d sent to the state pen. The guy next to him Emory Zimm, the other Altar Boy.

  What were they doing in her neighborhood tonight? It couldn’t be anything good. Lennox went upstairs, retrieved Old Ugly from the night table and strapped it on.

  Old Ugly was a Colt .45 1911, about as sexy as a pair of house slippers and about as comfortable. She’d been issued a Smith and Wesson M&P service revolver when she’d joined the force but she never bonded with it. Ugly was her firing piece all those years in. When she was called to use it, thank God that wasn’t often, it never let her down. She pulled the slide to the rear, pressing up on the slide release, fed the loaded magazine and seated it with the heel of her hand. She checked the safety with her thumb, then holstered it.

  She stood before the mirror in her bedroom and ran her trials, clearing the pistol from the holster, seating it again in the holster, clearing, seating. Drills she could do with her eyes closed. When she was satisfied, she holstered the gun, went back downstairs and checked the window. They were still sitting there, cigarettes glowing red in the dark.

  Two a.m. and four cups of coffee later, the Camaro was gone.

  The next morning Lennox combed through the public records. There were no cases of mislabeling at Nob Hill Pharmacy where the Pikes got their prescriptions filled. But Delia had a cupboard full of inhaler samples. Delia had told Lennox that when the inhalers became hard to find Doctor E had given her everything in his inventory.

  Still, it was possible Bill’s death was a mistake. She called the pharmacy and asked about the availability of both inhalers. The asthma inhaler was readily available; the insulin inhaler was not. No, they could not special order it. Lennox spent an hour on the computer trying to find a source for the insulin inhalers with no success.

  So then she checked into both the Pike couple’s physicians. Bill’s physician, Doctor Chun, had no lawsuits filed against him, no record of any mislabeling. Doctor Engstrom, however, had a much more checkered past. In the last ten years, four of his patients had overdosed and ended in the emergency ward. Three cases involved a drug taken for ADD. Sixty-year-old women being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder? God forbid he ever got a hold of Aurora. The fourth case involved a barbiturate prescribed for some stress situation. In all four cases it was proved that it was the patients who took too many pills rather than the prescription itself. None of the four women sued.

  Cracks in the prosecution’s case. An unhappy marriage? Lennox wasn’t going to touch that with a stick. A trace of Delia’s lipstick on the label? No contest there. The pharmacy didn’t supply Delia’s inhalers. How in God’s name was she supposed to refute this case? Expert witness? An expert witness would declare it impossible that somehow the label switch was an innocent error.

  Someone in the family gave Bill a Cuban cigar for Christmas. Christmas,
a time to make merry. With all the champagne and brandy Bill had imbibed, he would’ve blown a .115 if he could’ve blown. She had that piece already. But then he smokes a cigar, grows short of breath, stumbles upstairs, reaches for his inhaler from the dresser drawer. Takes a big old pull from the inhaler. The rush of insulin makes him even shorter of breath. He figures he needs more, takes a final pull and collapses on the bedroom floor. The murderer dumps the inhaler in the caterers’ garbage, only Detective Sloane insists on gathering up all the garbage as evidence and the inhaler is discovered.

  From her office window, Lennox watched the sky grow from gray to indigo. A gust of wind buffeted the window and it began to hail. Her clay pots on the deck filled with bits of ice the size of peas. The telephone rang.

  “I need to talk to you,” Sarge said. No small talk. Translation: Sarge was at work and possibly being overheard.

  “When?” she said.

  “I get my lunch break in an hour,” he said. “Meet me at the carts?”

  Over a hundred food carts were available within walking distance from the cop shop. Sarge’s favorite, the one that Lennox always knew to meet him at, was Starchy and Husk. Starch was something Sarge missed, living with a lifetime member of Weight Watchers, and Starchy’s famous mac and cheese delivered the carbs he longed for.

  The air was cold and damp. Lennox spotted Sarge’s bald head across the street from the carts under the porch roof of Cameron’s Books, holding a white carton in one hand and a plastic fork in the other, his back to the dusty plate glass. He looked decidedly grim as he shoveled the macaroni into his mouth. Lennox stuffed her hands in her pockets and joined him under the porch roof. The rain dropped from the eaves and bounced off the sidewalk at her feet.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “The evidence from the Pike murder, the cigar butts, everything collected from outside is missing,” he said. “It’s gone, Lennox.”