“You okay, Iz?” Shannon asked, snapping him out of his reverie. “You look like you’ve seen better days.”
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep,” he said. “I think I got dumped yesterday.”
“Oh, hon,” she said, sympathetically. “That’s the pits. The hits keep coming, huh? Anything I can do for you?”
Izzy rolled his head around, cracking his neck, and said, “Yeah, tell me which respiratory therapist did Cynthia’s ABG.”
“Izzy.”
“You asked.”
“Well, it would have been Tim Lewallen, but he called out sick that day,” she said.
“So who was on staff?”
“No one was. I did it.”
Izzy raised his eyebrows.
“If you get me fired, I’m going to kick your ass so hard you’ll be standing for the rest of your life,” Shannon said, flicking her fingers through the files. “But I’ll tell you right now it was completely normal. For a dead person, anyway.”
“I just want to take a peek,” he said, feeling like something between a B-movie spy and a peeping tom.
“Fine, but make it fast, okay?”
She extracted the file and withdrew the report. Izzy snatched it and held it close to his face, analyzing the details. Shannon fidgeted, watching the door.
“Are you finished yet?” she said.
“I think you tapped a vein,” Izzy said.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean I think you missed the artery. Some of these levels are way off.”
Shannon pursed her mouth and went rigid.
“I think I know the different between a vein and the radial artery, thank you very damn much.”
“Then what’s the deal with the helium?” Izzy demanded, turning the report to show her where he was looking.
“Could be any number of things,” she said. “Scuba tanks. The old balloon gag, the thing with high voice? Izzy, she was loaded up with opiates and had half a dozen fresh puncture wounds on her arm. This is a straw man.”
“It’s something.”
“If it was something, don’t you think it would have been noted by someone like, I don’t know, NDI Forbes?”
Izzy gave her back the report and said, “She’s only human like the rest of us. And nobody gives a shit but me.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“Cynthia wasn’t a junkie.”
“The evidence says otherwise.”
He poked the folder in her hand.
“Maybe not,” Izzy said. He patted her shoulder and went back to the ER, his mind astir with small details that did not seem to add up to a picture of anything solid. Or at least not yet.
Eleven
In the morning Izzy drove out to Sunspot Records on Guadalupe, near the university, to browse the old Motown and Tamla LPs. He’d only started collecting in the last couple of years, and slowly, but he was developing a taste and an eye for what he liked and wanted to add to his gradually growing collection. He skipped past most of the Marvin Gaye, Supremes, and Four Tops stuff, though he hadn’t quite acquired all of them; Izzy was in search of rarer, more obscure items lest he never find them again. He eschewed eBay and other online retailers because they removed the thrill of the hunt. Mom and Pop record shops, thrift stores, and yard sales were his beat. So when he came across an original 45 single of Eddie Holland’s “Darling I Hum Our Song,” Izzy was elated despite knowing full well he could have found it online in seconds. It was just much more fun this way.
He paid at the front and took the record out in a thin paper bag, eager to get it on his turntable for a listen. Trish had never understood the interest, either for the music or why Izzy couldn’t just download the tracks to his phone. She had no sense of nostalgia and tended to consider what he thought of classic as simply old and passé. Almost mechanically, his thoughts turned from Trish to Cynthia, and he found himself wondering what she might have thought of Hitsville U.S.A. and the old Motown sound. Probably not much, he decided as he turned down Sixth toward Loop 1. Not that people couldn’t have eclectic tastes, but if trance raves were her thing like Deacon said…
Izzy had to resist the impulse to stomp on the brakes, instead turning at the next available right and swinging round back to where he’d just come from. That stretch of Guadalupe was positively plastered with posters and fliers advertising events like that, pandering to the college kids. He’d glanced right by a dozen of them without even thinking about it. And he knew nobody ever took them down. They just stapled or pasted new ones right over top of them.
Eddie Holland was going to have to wait.
He parked on a side street behind what used to be a great coffee shop but since had turned into an upscale clothing store. It seemed to Izzy a lot of what contributed to Austin’s uniqueness had been scrubbed away over the years, slowly but surely turning the city’s infamous weirdness into cut and paste strip malls and chain stores. At least they kept the old “Hi, How Are You” frog on Guadalupe and 21st, he conceded, though he reckoned it was only a matter of time before that too was history.
Having sufficiently depressed himself more than he was already, Izzy started at the frog and made his way north, pausing at every lamppost, street sign, and wall that featured fliers of any kind. Most of them advertised bands, and most of those were raw, homemade things that could easily have been old photostats from the Eighties. Some had a sociopolitical bent, calling for the legalization of marijuana or demanding action to stop campus assaults against women. There were missing pet fliers and fliers from desperate guys trying to find the random girls they hooked up with at the bar last weekend or the weekend before. And tucked among the lot of them were the most outrageously colorful and eye-catching fliers of them all: the advertisements for parties and raves.
He was sure he looked like a lunatic—ten years older than almost anyone for several blocks in either direction, gazing intently at one poster and then another, and another. Eventually he noticed the odd looks he was getting, but they amused him more than they offended. Mostly, he just concentrated on finding one specific piece of information in print: the date of the party Cynthia went to the night she died.
When he found it between 24th and 25th on the west side of Guadalupe, he emitted a celebratory “Yes!” and tore it from the window of a smoothie joint. In a flash of green, yellow, and purple, neon text screamed out the time and location of something called Tripnosis on the correct date. Izzy nearly tore the flier in half, he was gripping it so tightly.
His joy was, however, short-lived. Just a few feet away, a poster for an event named The 9th Element listed its roster of nine DJs, sponsored by a student council and several local businesses—also on the same date. He tore this one down as well, and continuing up the sidewalk, found more and more block by block. The night Cynthia died was a busy night on the party scene, it appeared.
By the time Izzy crossed Dean Keeton Street, he’d amassed a stack of thirteen different fliers, and he hadn’t looked very carefully underneath newer ones, nor did these account for ones already taken down.
Feeling defeated, he rolled them up into a tube and sat down on a concrete divider to watch scantily clad co-eds and thick-necked jocks travel in packs on and off the campus behind him. His brilliant idea did not seem so ingenious now, but he admitted to himself that at the very least, he’d collected thirteen viable leads.
Leads, he thought. Now I’m thinking like an old P.I. paperback.
Now all he had to do was figure out how to track some of these people down, none of whom were likely to remember a single shy, unassuming girl in a crowd of possibly hundreds in a darkened room.
“No problem,” Izzy said, and began the trek back to the frog.
Twelve
By the late afternoon Trish still hadn’t called, and Izzy wasn’t entirely sure he wanted her to. There were still a few of her things lying about—some clothes, a few paperback books, some makeup and toiletries—but these were, perhaps, collateral losses.
He unfurled the posters he’d taken from Guadalupe and set a heavy Forensic Nursing textbook on top in an attempt to flatten them out again. Not one of them had a phone number, and he was too hot and too tired to go looking for the addresses just yet, so he left them alone and opted for a cool shower.
The water needled into his skin, just below lukewarm, and he stood there stock-still, running all the fragments of information he knew through his mind. She went to a party, which had to be a major element. She was seeing someone, but he didn’t know who. Something she’d said, on that last day he saw her—everybody has enemies. It seemed like depression talking then, her social withdrawal. But now it sounded a lot more sinister.
The wound on her hand still bothered him, though Forbes was sure it was from debris at the dump site.
Dump site. Assuming she didn’t really sit down and die. But if she was dumped, surely it couldn’t have been very far from where she did die? Why risk driving a body a long distance just to leave it in plain sight?
To make it look like what everybody already assumed, naturally.
Izzy cranked the water down colder still and formulated a loose hypothesis. Cynthia died or was killed either at the party or near to it, and the party was close to the overgrown yard where she was discovered the following morning. All of the fliers he procured had addresses printed on them, which meant he could narrow his search to those closest to that particular address.
He clapped his hands, pleased with himself, but recognized how many gaping holes remained in the picture. He had no idea who, or how, or why. Just the heroin in her system, and a nebulous off-hand mention of enemies.
It wasn’t much. But Izzy could think of one person who might feel particularly ill-disposed toward Cynthia Ramos.
Luke Osborn. The scumbag rapist Izzy helped put away.
Turning the knob, he shut off the water and yanked a fresh towel from the rack. He wasn’t altogether sure it was the best idea of his life, but it seemed to Izzy that he was going to prison.
The Travis County State Jail wasn’t far from the crime scene he’d visited with Forbes, about ten miles northwest off Route 183. Following the narrow farm road to its terminus, Izzy approached a parking lot, largely vacant, in front of a broad field surrounded by fencing and razor wire. On the other side of the field was the main building, behind which several other structures lined up in a row. A red, white, and blue floral arrangement in the shape of Texas decorated the grounds in front. A maximum security prison this was not. Izzy found a spot and parked.
Inside, he provided his driver’s license and hospital ID, signed in, and walked through a metal detector, and consented to an additional pat down from a disinterested guard. The guard to whom he’d given his credentials guided him across the lobby to a waiting area, where Izzy was asked to sit and wait.
After fifteen minutes of sitting there, listening to the hum of the air conditioning, a broad-shouldered man in a department store suit appeared, smiling perfunctorily as he approached. Izzy rose to meet him.
“Mr. Bishop? Dwight Foster. I’m the deputy director here.”
The men shook hands, and Foster said, “I understand you’d like to speak with an inmate, which I can certainly arrange for you, but you haven’t made an appointment or anything like that.”
It wasn’t a question.
“To be honest,” Izzy said, “I’m doubtful he’ll want to speak to me. I testified against him at his trial last year.”
“I see,” Foster said. “In which case it’s really up to the inmate. You’re not his attorney, and you’re not law enforcement, are you?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“We get writers sometimes,” the deputy director mused. “Come in wanting to look at cells, talk to all the inmates. One of them wanted me to lock him up for the weekend to get the full experience. It’s not like walking into the DMV.”
“I expect not.”
“If you don’t mind waiting a while longer, I’ll speak to the individual and see what we can do. Of course a name would be helpful—we have over a thousand residents in this hotel.”
“Osborne,” Izzy said. “Luke Osborne.”
“Ah,” Foster said, his face brightening some. “You want to talk to the good reverend.”
Izzy said, “I beg your pardon?”
“Sure, I remember you,” Osborne said politely, his hands resting gently on the round white table between them. He had put on weight, but he was the same smarmy-looking creep Izzy remembered from the county courthouse where he presented the evidence of Cynthia’s sexual assault exam.
Like every other inmate in the open visitation room—Izzy expected glass partitions—Osborne wore a white jumpsuit that blended with his particularly pale skin. Unlike most of his peers, he was completely at ease and smiling comfortably.
Izzy did not smile in return.
“Then I presume you also remember Cynthia Ramos,” he said, “one of your victims who also testified against you.”
At this, the smile melted away. Osborne dropped his head a little and took a deep breath.
“Yeah,” he said. “Poor girl.”
“Why poor girl?”
“Because of what I done to her.”
“I don’t recall you being particularly contrite about it before.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“I means you did not appear to regret your actions.”
“That’s true,” Osborne agreed. “I wasn’t saved then.”
There it was. Izzy raised an eyebrow.
“You found religion,” he said.
“God found me. Right here in lockup.”
“How fortunate for you.”
“I came from a real bad home,” Osborne said. “Daddy was a thief, Mama was a smack-head. Bounced around foster homes. I didn’t turn out so good, but you know that. I got mad and I got mean. But in here, I got Jesus Christ. He turned me ‘round, and all I want now is to be his vessel.”
He said vessel like he didn’t quite know what that meant, either.
“I can’t say I think much about the Good Lord’s timing,” Izzy said. “Seems like he might have saved some people a lot of pain had he found you a little sooner.”
“Mysterious ways, Mr. Bishop. Mysterious ways.”
“That’s what I hear.”
The inmate closed his eyes, raising his face toward the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
“How is she, Mr. Bishop?” he asked, opening his eyes. “Is she still prostituting herself?”
“Why would that concern you?”
“I only want the best for her,” Osborne said. “Bad enough what I done. I’d take it all back and more besides if I could.”
For a moment, Izzy watched Osborne’s face. He almost looked sincere, but there was something play-acty about it all. Izzy frowned, glancing around the room. Three posted guards were doing the same, while a handful of other convicts visited with family or legal representation. Every word was just barely above a whisper. Suddenly Izzy felt like he’d been shouting.
“So,” he said, “you wouldn’t say you hold a grudge against her on account of your conviction?”
“A grudge? Mr. Bishop, it was the best thing ever happened to me. This place? It ain’t like you see in the movies. I’m getting rehabilitated. When I get out I aim to start my own congregation.”
“What about the women you attacked? What do you aim to do about them?”
Osborne screwed up his mouth, thinking hard like the question had never occurred to him before. Izzy found his hands starting to shake. He hid them under the table.
“I don’t know,” he said after a while. “Maybe I’ll write some letters or something. I do want to apologize, but I don’t want to dig up bad memories for nobody. I guess I’m just figuring on trying to balance it out with good works for other folks, you know?”
“You kidnapped her, raped her, and beat her up,” Izzy said, his voice rising. “How do you balance that?”
“Mr. Bishop,” Osborne said, grinning out of one side of his mouth, “I can’t unrape somebody. Besides, she wasn’t no soccer mom to start with.”
He punctuated this with a wink.
Izzy thrust himself up to his feet. The chair honked against the tiles. Osborne sat back, and a guard lunged forward, hand on his sidearm.
With a passive gesture of surrender, Izzy slowly sat back down, forcefully evening out his breathing and gripping the edge of the table until his fingertips turned white.
The guard relaxed his hand, but stayed where he was, eyes firmly fixed on Izzy and Osborne.
“I came from a real bad home too, Osborne,” Izzy said quietly. “My mother was dead before I was two, leaving me with a father who frequently vocalized his hatred of me and a brother whose favorite hobbies included raping me and attacking me with fucking power tools. And you know what that inspired me to do? Help people. Not hurt them, like you did. You didn’t become a piece of shit because of where you came from. You’re a piece of shit because that’s just who you are, and it’s all you’ll ever be.”
Osborne affected shock, letting his mouth fall open and eyes bulge.
“Everybody deserves a second chance,” he said. “If I’d read the Bible ten, fifteen years ago—”
“You can try that game on somebody else, too,” Izzy interjected. “You and I both know a loving God wouldn’t have ever let something like you loose on the world to do the things you’ve done. Satan never made you a sadist, and God won’t make you a saint. Maybe this charade will get you out with time served if you’ve sold everyone else on the bullshit baby Jesus garbage, but I swear to you if I find out you had anything to do with her murder, anything at all…”
“Shit, murder? Fuck me, I didn’t never murder no bitch!”
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 6
