Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  “Lillian, you are not law enforcement; I cannot do that,” Demetrious said.

  “There are medical reasons not to move her now, that is for sure,” Dr. Weinstein said. “She’s very weak, and—”

  “And whose fault is that?” I snapped. “First the OD, now this—”

  “It will take some time, but we will get it arranged,” Simon said, no doubt with his risk-management radar on full alert. “I will see to that myself, coordinating the efforts between Chief Dupree and Dr. Weinstein. We’ll have her in a hospital of your choice as soon as it is medically safe for her to be moved and the legal issues are resolved. You just tell me where you want her to go. I will help you. I promise.” Simon looked at me, concern evident in his long face.

  “I’ll rotate the guards outside her door every four hours,” Demetrious said.

  “Outside of the ICU?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” he assured me.

  “And we will see to it somebody in the family, or otherwise trustworthy, like Shalonda, is with her. Every second,” I said, and wondered where in the hell Patti and Dan were, but didn’t ask.

  And so, there we left it.

  With nobody but me understanding that there was a despicable person out there on the loose, who, for some reason I could not imagine, wanted to kill my mother. I mean, it’s not like somebody wanted to avenge Ray Glenn, a man everyone apparently despised. Nor was it likely that Willette accidentally witnessed some terrible crime, when she never left her house.

  But despite the fact I didn’t see any apparent motive for trying to kill Willette, I was already planning to break her out of the hospital if I saw the slightest drop in security.

  I mean, how hard could that be? Given the ease with which someone had carted in a bucket of red ants and a pot of honey, I had to figure security at this place was slack.

  chapter 21

  As the sun rose higher in the sky, I got tired of sitting there guarding Willette, who was sleeping soundly in a cubbyhole room in the corner of the ICU, hooked into a wide variety of little hospital machines. A new police officer had appeared, and he was so earnest about his duties that he wouldn’t even chat with me. Or, I noticed, flirt with the nurses.

  So, he was serious.

  Which made me feel a little bit better, despite the fact he appeared to be all of fifteen.

  But he had a gun and a walkie-talkie, and he was alert.

  Besides, I told myself, young people can stay awake better.

  Meanwhile, Shalonda, having naturally noticed when Demetrious was called out in the early hours of the morning, had showed up, was horrified by the fire-ant story, and took note of not only the bites up and down Willette’s arms and neck, but the ones on me.

  “Put you some cold vinegar on them,” she said.

  “I’ve got some calendula cream back at Dan’s, I’ll use that. Willette’s got hospital stuff all over her, plus a shot of antihistamines.”

  “You called Dr. Hodo yet?” she asked.

  “Fourteen hundred times. He’s off at some crisis at a group home in another county, but will call me when he’s free.”

  “White girl, if you need to go find out what’s going on, go. Nobody’s gonna mess with Willette while I’m here.”

  Well, okay, I thought. I did need food, a change of scenery, and to find Patti and Dan. Leaving Willette should be all right now, I mean, come on, nobody would try to kill her again this soon, not with all the attention.

  But just as I was heading out the door, Patti and Dan came running in.

  “Oh, my Lord, my Lord,” Dan said. And if that wasn’t good enough, he took one look at Willette’s sedate but red-spotted face and uttered an anguished, “Oh, my God.”

  Patti scanned the ICU room in a second, turned back to her very own husband, and said, “There is no reason to blaspheme.”

  “Where were you?” I said, not trying to keep the accusation out of my voice.

  “Where were you? Where are you ever? Not here, no, not here,” Patti said, her tone ratcheting everything up a notch.

  “We were, we were—” Dan started.

  “You come waltzing in here like some princess, acting like you’ve been dealing with this…this crap…and taking over, and ordering Dan around, and now you’re, you are…accusing me…accusing us…of some kind of neglect, when you’re the one who took off and left us with all this…this mess in the first place. You didn’t even come to your own grandfather’s funeral.”

  “I was in a trial,” I snapped. “I tried to get a continuance and the judge denied it, you know all that damn well, and you need to stop throwing that in my face. Wasn’t I the one who paid all the bills for the last few years of his life, and—”

  “Whoa, now, whoa,” Shalonda said, her trained-social-worker voice in play. “Let’s all calm down. Everything is under control now, and you need not be—”

  “You might be my friend, Shalonda, but butt out. This is between Lilly and me.”

  “Patti, come on, Patti,” Dan said.

  I inhaled deeply, and tried to visualize my calming waterfall.

  What I saw instead was the highway out of town.

  For a moment, nobody spoke.

  Which was good, given, apparently, the direction things had been fixing to go—that is, toward a big family fight.

  “We were…we were here,” Dan said. “But then Dr. Weinstein came by and told us to go on home, that Willette was fine. He was…so sure. Said he’d left orders that the nurses were to check on Willette every fifteen minutes, and, you know, Otis was outside the door, and…well, Dr. Weinstein was just so sure we didn’t need to be here.”

  “It’s bad enough Dan having to take some of his vacation days to be helping out, and him not getting any sleep, and you…you…just too good to spend the night with your own mother,” Patti said.

  “Now, Patti, sweetie, you’re being a bit hard—”

  “Don’t you—” Patti started.

  “Whoa, now, whoa—” Shalonda said.

  While Patti and Dan snapped at each other and Shalonda whoa’ed and whoa’ed them, I stood in the center of the room, doing my best to ignore them, and added it up.

  Dr. Weinstein denied any responsibility for the OD or the bruises, but he was overmedicating Willette and refused to stop at Dr. Hodo’s request.

  And he sent Patti and Dan home, very coincidentally the same night someone tried to kill Willette.

  And he could come and go in the hospital without anyone taking notice or thinking it strange.

  So, yeah, means and opportunity, ding, ding…but what on earth was his motive?

  Why would Dr. Weinstein want to kill Willette?

  chapter 22

  Act normal.

  Act like I wasn’t suspicious, and wasn’t planning on tracking down a would-be killer.

  That was my current plan.

  Oh, that, and pestering Henry and Bonita both to scour the cyberworld and find out everything they could about the strange Dr. Weinstein. I mean, what good was it having them on my side, what with all the databases the insurance companies had or could access, if I couldn’t find out more about the spiky-haired man than from his bio in the hospital pamphlet?

  Six phone calls to and from Bonita or Henry later, with rising levels of anxiety and frustration on my part, all I knew was Dr. Weinstein had moved to Bugfest two years ago, from a private practice in New York City, and he had opened an office here and had hospital privileges and no obvious trail of malpractice suits or misdeeds.

  So, okay, that didn’t mean he wasn’t a killer, did it?

  And, I’m sorry, but okay, why does someone leave New York City and move to Bugfest? Leave an established practice to start over again in what had to be a whole new environment, political, social, and weather-wise. Hell, I wasn’t even sure the folks in both places spoke the same language. I mean, consider the culture shock alone.

  So it was that I was sitting in my car, thinking upon these things, in the hospital parking lot, glarin
g at my cell phone, when Dan came up.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  When Dan didn’t say anything else, I ventured a “So?”

  “Patti’s upset right now. You mustn’t take her…take it wrong, what she said. She didn’t mean anything by it. Patti’s just…real stressed out.”

  Oh, and I’m not?

  But what I said was “There’s no need to explain, or apologize, or anything.”

  “If we can just get that house cleaned up…”

  “Forget the damn house,” I said. “I need to find out what the connection is between Dr. Weinstein and the deep freeze. Or what the connection is between Ray Glenn and Dr. Weinstein. And we’ve got to get that judge, Judge Parker, to sign that damn guardianship order. And why…”

  But then I thought—what if the key to all this is somewhere in the garbage in that house? In all those piles of paper? Good grief, the woman could be hiding the Holy Grail or the Da Vinci code or the stash from a bank robbery or who knows what in there. What if the deep freeze didn’t have anything to do with this? I mean, that was just Dan’s guilt-ridden theory.

  What if all this was about something we didn’t even know anything about yet?

  Willette’s house, and all the mess inside it, suddenly seemed like a big possible clue. Only trouble was, that potential clue was deep in piles of filth I never wanted to touch.

  chapter 23

  All the airborne toxic dust particles floated around me in a sick halo of something gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  I was back in Willette’s house. And wading in before me was my sister-in-law, the formidable yet good-souled Patti, with whom just moments before I’d shared our time-tested family version of an apology—that is, we pretended nothing had happened and were pleasant in a kind of tries-hard way.

  Confronted once more with all of Willette’s stuff, I was frankly rethinking my parking lot inspiration that, potentially, possibly, just maybe, the explanation for this whole blooming predicament was hidden in the rubbish in her house. Nonetheless, we had all converged on it. Patti Lea and I, with Hank and Jubal and a ton of wrestling boys, all of us wearing masks and coveralls, except for the wrestlers, who considered it too weenie-brained, girly-girl to take sensible precautions, and we all dug in to take another stab at cleaning Willette’s house. Dan was glum, guilty, and apologetic about having left Willette open to the ant attack—like a soldier who had deserted his post—but ready to work. Patti, straining for a good-behavior medal, had only mildly protested Dan’s explanation that he—not me—had invited Jubal and Hank in.

  “After all, sweetie,” he had said to Patti, “we been knowing them since Lilly Belle was just a babe.” I appreciated that Dan took the heat on letting them in the house to help, and I sensed that he trusted them—maybe even Patti trusted them.

  But then they also trusted Dr. Weinstein, Simon, Demetrious, Lonnie, and their own teenage son.

  Ah, but to quote that very same teenager: “Whatever.”

  We needed help, and if I kept an eye on everybody, maybe they wouldn’t throw out the clue that might lurk under the garbage.

  After I commanded the teen squad that no paper with writing was to be thrown out until I had looked at it personally, a task for which I hope God took notice and penciled in some extra-duty brownie points, Patti Lea steered Jubal toward the kitchen, and I trailed him for a moment. But the stench was so bad that both of us soon left. Someone had been bringing her paper plates of food and sacks of takeout. They must have left the food on the porch, but at least Willette had carried it inside. And not eaten much of it. Just piled it on top of other refuse in the sink, until the sink was full, and then onto whatever space she could find.

  “Reckon there’s a roach colony in here,” Jubal said, looking a bit nervous for a rough and robust country fellow.

  “Roaches! Jubal, I bet there’s a colony of rats in here.”

  “Well, at least it ain’t full of them red ants. Lord, Lilly, I sure was sorry about that. I always hear good things about that hospital, can’t believe they’d be so—”

  “It wasn’t carelessness.”

  “You don’t think somebody did that to your mama on purpose?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “Now why on earth would somebody want to hurt Willette? She’s never done no harm to anybody ’cept herself.”

  And Ray Glenn, I wondered. Didn’t he count? But what I said was, “I don’t know. I don’t even have a theory. Let’s just get this place cleaned up, and maybe we all can think better when we can see the floor.”

  “Well, awright, but let’s get out of this here kitchen, let’s let them boys of Hank’s take out this kitchen trash. Boys that age don’t hardly mind anything if there’s good food or money or a girl at the other end.”

  That made me wonder what Hank had bribed them with, but I readily agreed with Jubal that somewhere other than the kitchen was a better place to be. Especially since I could conceive of no version of any truth in which a New York doctor would try to kill a Bugfest woman over a pile of rotting food.

  No, the clue had to be paper.

  Of course, as a lawyer, trained as we are to scour through little tiny words on many sheets of paper, I would think that way.

  “Reckon her bedroom might be a good place for me to go clear out,” Jubal said. “Why don’t you just take it easy, go see what Hank’s up to, talk with him about things. He’s a good talker, knows a lot about a lot, you give him a chance.”

  With that, Jubal ambled off to Willette’s bedroom.

  I’d already been there, and wasn’t eager to go back, but I caught Patti Lea tearing around a corner and pausing long enough to recognize that I was just standing there, and I put my face mask back on and dashed into Willette’s bedroom on the theory that Patti Lea wouldn’t approve of Jubal’s plan that I go flirt with his unmarried son instead of actually working.

  In Willette’s bedroom, I discovered Jubal was looking under the bed.

  “If you’re looking for her jewelry, I already got that out the first day. Family stuff, some from my grandmother. Scattered everywhere, some of it just thrown in with the used Kleenex.”

  “Lord, Lilly, I wasn’t looking to steal no jewelry, jes’ getting the lay of the land, trying to figure out where to start.”

  I hadn’t meant to imply I thought he was a thief, I was just expressing my dismay, and explained that to him, and then suggested we start by bagging up the used-Kleenex trash and working our way down to the actual floor. “You see anything that isn’t used tissue, you let me look at it,” I said.

  Jubal eyed the used Kleenex while I watched him. “Maybe I ought to strip the bed, then,” he offered. “No telling what’s going to come flying out of there. Why don’t you go see about Hank? Boy’ll overwork himself sometimes.”

  But instead of going to see Hank, I agreed stripping the bed was a good idea, and we lifted the mattress and pulled off the nastiest sheet I’d ever seen. “Might as well just drag the whole mattress outside, I don’t think there’s any saving this,” I said, when I saw how old and tattered it was.

  When we started to drag the mattress off the box springs, the underside of it split wide open along an existing tear, and a bunch of pill bottles spilled out.

  There must have been twenty of them. Mostly empty. Some had labels made out to Willette, but, I noticed, most of the bottles were either unmarked or their labels had been pulled off.

  Those that had labels were pain pills of the narcotic kind, plus some Ativan, Valium, or other sedatives.

  Downers. The same stuff my mother had used when I was a child, only, apparently, judging from the number of bottles, plus her condition and that of the house, the consumption rate had gone up quite a bit.

  As I studied the labels on the pill bottles, a little glee club started singing inside my head: Aha, motive! Dr. Weinstein had been illegally overprescribing downers to Willette, and now wanted to kill her to hide his sin. But I was quickly
disappointed. Only two of the bottles contained pills prescribed by Dr. Weinstein, and they were standard antibiotics.

  Not something anyone would need to kill Willette over, I thought, and pitched the bottles back into the pile.

  “We should call Demetrious,” I said, eyeing the rest of the stash. “Someone was supplying her with narcotics.”

  “You reckon?” Jubal asked, picking up, studying, and then discarding bottles one by one. “Could be all her stuff. You know, lawful and all.”

  “Not this many,” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be touching these. You know, fingerprints of the dealer?”

  “Yeah, right, right,” Jubal said, and put down the bottle he was holding. “You go call the law if you got to, and I’ll see to it none of them teenage boys get in here. Boys that age like to try just about anything.”

  I stepped out in the hallway to go outside for fresh air and to use my cell phone, but then thought of Patti Lea and her futile attempts at damage and gossip control. And I thought about my brother Delvon and me, supporting ourselves through high school by growing and selling pot after our mother kicked us out of the family nest. I’d financed an entire college career, law school included, off illegally grown marijuana.

  The pot calling the kettle black. No pun intended.

  The family gene pool. Grandmom’s granddaddy had made his own whiskey and sold it for a profit, and her daddy had run untaxed liquor and then illegal rum during the Prohibition. Delvon and me had been the new-age whiskey runners—at least the past tense applied to me. I wondered what Bobby would do, given his gene pool, and shuddered a bit at the thought of poor Patti Lea, with her good Methodist roots traceable all the way back to the Declaration of Independence.

  The sister-in-law from the good family, who shamed easily.

  Okay, Patti was a tad bossy, and maybe she had some resentment issues, but she and Dan had always been good to me, and they were trying to rise above Willette and Delvon. Rise above me, too, I guessed. Calling the law in to look at Willette’s stash wasn’t going to help Willette much, and it would sure embarrass Dan and Patti. I headed back to Willette’s bedroom, and found Jubal studying the bottles, picking them up and looking at the ones with labels and putting them down. So much for not touching them.