"Go see her," he said. "Maybe she'll tell you something new."
19
I'D made the doctor's appointment for 8 a.m. With a little luck and a lot of stealth, I'd be up and out of the house before Edna could ask too many questions.
I don't remember much of that morning, just that it was again unusually hot for a spring day. Finding out the results of a mammogram seemed like serious business, so I'd worn a dress. Black. The disc jockeys on the morning drive show said it could get up to 90 degrees that day. Then they started making stupid dead-Elvis jokes. When the hilarity got too inane I shut off the radio with such force the knob came off in my hand.
Rich Drescher's office was in a pale pink neoclassic temple. Maybe the architect thought an ob-gyn's office should reflect a woman's sensibilities. Personally, I thought the building looked pretty silly.
The receptionist was chatting with one of the nurses when I walked into the waiting room. They fell silent when they saw me. The thought occurred to me that they were discussing the Callahan Garrity case. It was paranoia, of course, but finding a lump in your right breast will make you paranoid.
After she called my name, the nurse walked me right past the examining rooms and into Rich's private office. I couldn't decide whether that was a bad sign, either.
Rich smiled up at me like he always does. "How 'bout them Dawgs?" he said, referring to the Georgia Bulldogs. He's corny, but as gynecologists go, he's the best. Drescher and I go way back. We even dated a few times in high school before he fell in love with Jana Spears. She was a tall serious type who was president of the National Honor Society. They got married in secret their senior year of high school; then, somehow, both of them worked their way through college and med school. Jana was what Rich liked to call a pecker checker. She did research on sexually transmitted diseases for the Centers for Disease Control, which is headquartered in Atlanta.
I collapsed into the wing chair facing his desk and accepted the mug of hot coffee he handed me. It had a color drawing of the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes on the side.
"Tell me," I commanded.
A month ago, in the shower, I'd been shaving my underarms when I encountered a bump in my right breast that I hadn't remembered being there before. At first, I'd thought it was an ingrown hair or something. It was the size of a small pearl when I found it. Two weeks later it was a bigger pearl. That's when I'd called Rich in a panic. My grandmother died of cancer when Edna was a teenager. Edna had had a radical mastectomy before she was forty. My own breasts weren't State Fair winners or anything, but I'd grown attached to them.
The idea of cancer scared me shitless. It had taken all my courage to go in for the mammogram. Once the test was done, part of me didn't want to know the results. That's why I hadn't returned the nurse's phone calls until Rich had tracked me down and threatened to throttle me.
His usual smile was a little lopsided that morning. "We found a suspicious mass in the right breast," he said. "You wanna see the picture?" He opened the folder lying on the desk in front of him and slid out an X-ray.
My mouth was so dry I could barely speak. I held my hands tightly in my lap. Forced myself to breathe. In. Out. In. Out. "Just tell me," I croaked.
"It's not that bad," Rich said. "The mass looks like nothing much. Probably just a silly little old fibroadenoma."
I shook my head to signal my ignorance.
"It's probably a noncancerous breast lump," he said. "Kinda like a hemorrhoid on your boob." Rich had always had a way with words. "But with your family history, we like to be extra careful with these things."
My tongue seemed especially sluggish that morning. Carefully, I formed the words. "Will you have to remove the breast?"
"Relax," Rich said. "Really. All we're going to do is take a look at the tissue. We've got two options here. We can do either a needle biopsy or an excisional biopsy. Either way it's day surgery. With the needle biopsy, we give you a little Valium to relax you, then we numb the area with a little Xylocaine. The needle draws out some tissue, and we send it to the lab to see how it looks. What I'd recommend though, again because of your family history, is an excisional biopsy."
Almost unconsciously, I felt myself start to calm down a little. Rich Drescher has that effect. With his frizzy blond hair and brown puppy-dog eyes, he looks like an oversized lap dog. In high school we'd called him Drescher the Undresser.
"Tell me about this other thing. What did you call it?"
"An excisional biopsy," Rich said. "We'll check you into the hospital early in the morning. Give you a sedative, then take you to the operating room. I'll make a small incision, take out a slice of tissue, and send it down to the pathology lab. We'll get the results back while you're still on the table. Then, if the force is with us, we'll staple your boob back together and send you home."
"And if the forces aren't with us?"
He held the X-ray up and scanned it closely. "No shit, Callahan. I really have a feeling this is just a fibrous mass. Women your age get them all the time."
I let the crack about "women your age" pass.
"If there are some abnormal cells, we'll go to plan B."
"Is that a mastectomy?" I forced myself to say the hated word. A vision of myself floated through my mind. Me at the beach, wearing one of those flowered swim dresses like my Great-aunt Edith used to wear. Or me, strapped into a special bra fitted with a giant plastic breast in one cup. The prospect of losing a breast suddenly seemed equal to losing an arm or a leg.
Rich was talking again, but I was having a hard time concentrating. I kept thinking about Edna, losing a breast before she'd even gone through menopause.
He was saying something about precancerous cells and calling in a specialist.
"Lonette Jefferson is the best breast surgeon in town," I heard him say. "We were residents at Grady together, and she's on staff at the new Women's SurgiCenter. If we do find something, I'll refer you to her. She might recommend a simple lumpectomy, followed up with radiation and chemotherapy, or in an extreme case a mastectomy, either partial or radical.
"Lonette is the conservative type," Rich assured me. "She's not going to go cutting on you unless it's absolutely necessary."
He pulled a desk calendar toward him. "So. Let's get this baby booked. I'll have one of the girls call the SurgiCenter to check for a room. They can probably schedule us right away. How's Monday morning look for you?"
I'd been daydreaming again. "What? You're not talking about doing this thing this Monday, are you?"
"Callahan," he said, waving a pencil at me. The pencil's eraser looked like a birth control pill dispenser. "You've been ducking this long enough. My nurse called you three times before you'd agree to come in and get your test results. You can't run from this, you dumb-ass. Let's get the surgery scheduled right away. Jana and I kind of like having you around. Hell, since your girls started cleaning the house, we actually have time to spend with each other. That Jackie of yours even put all our medical journals in chronological order. What about this same time, eight a.m. Monday, assuming I can get the room booked?"
I could feel my neck getting all prickly again, and the in-out breathing wasn't working too well either. Rich was moving way too fast.
"No, really, Rich. I'm not hiding. I've got something important going on. I'm doing some investigative work on a murder case. My client is in the Atlanta jail. I can't get operated on Monday. Let me see if I can make some headway with this case, and I'll call you sometime next week. All right?"
He folded his arms across his chest. "I know you, Garrity. You're a world-class procrastinator. If I don't hear from you by Monday, nine a.m., I'm calling you at home personally. If you don't answer the phone I'm coming out to the house to find you. And if you try to hide, I'll go to your mother and tell her why I'm looking for you. Edna will know how serious this is, even if you don't."
"That's not funny, Rich," I said. "Don't even joke about telling Edna. You know how she is; she's totally hyper on the sub
ject of cancer. I don't want her dragged into this. It's none of her business, and you've got no right telling her about it."
"You're right," he said calmly. "Totally against professional ethics. But I'll do it if it means you'll have this lump looked at."
He scribbled something on a prescription pad and handed it to me.
"That's Dr. Jefferson's office number. The lump is probably nothing. But cancer isn't anything to mess around with. You might want to call Lonette and ask for a consultation. I'll let her know she may hear from you."
I got out of the chair and headed for the door. My whole body felt numb.
"Nine A.M. Monday, Callahan," Rich repeated. "Call me and tell me a time next week when we can schedule your biopsy. Or I'm goin' gunning for you."
20
IT WASN'T UNTIL I LOOKED UP and saw the giant neon Bluebird Truck Stop sign that I realized I had headed for the Atlanta jail.
When you think about it, it's sort of funny; a gigantic bluebird of happiness perched atop a truckstop, looking down on a jail. Actually, it's not really the jail at all. It's the Atlanta Pre-Trial Detention Center. Aside from the bluebird, you know you're getting close when you start seeing all the bail bondsman offices.
I sat in the van for a few moments after I pulled into a pay parking lot. What the hell was I hoping to accomplish by seeing Ardith Cramer again?
Her own lawyer wasn't convinced of her innocence. And even if she hadn't killed Kristee Ewbanks, Ardith was still guilty of helping Kristee pull off the nanny scam. The Beemishes hadn't been blameless victims, but they were victims. Their home had been ransacked, they'd been blackmailed, and their children had been put in the care of a remorseless little criminal. I wondered if Lilah Rose and Bo knew how lucky they were that their real valuables hadn't been harmed.
The sun was beating down hard on the windshield of the van now, and I could see the attendant in the cashier's shack staring at me to see if I was going to pay up. "Shit or get off the pot, Garrity," I heard myself say out loud.
What the hell. I'd driven to the jail in a kind of fog after leaving the doctor's office. If my subconscious wanted me to go see Ardith Cramer, that's what I'd do. I had promised Rich Drescher I'd go in for surgery next week. All right. That would be my deadline. If I couldn't find a way to get Ardith off the hook for Kristee's murder by then, I'd drop fighting crime and go back to battling waxy yellow buildup.
If the city's planners had wanted to pick the most depressing setting in Atlanta for a jail, they'd done a good job. At least half the businesses around the jail were empty or boarded up. There were pay parking lots and vacant lots, many with concertina wire stretched across to keep the homeless from congregating there. The only going concerns seemed to cater to either the hopeless or the helpless. As I walked toward the jail I passed a labor pool. A knot of empty-eyed men loitered on the doorstep. I kept my eyes pointed ahead, felt them staring, ignored the comments. Across the street was a gray brick single-room-occupancy hotel, so long a part of the scene its sign no longer had a name: just ROOMS BY DAY OR WEEK. At the corner there was a confectionary, a place to cash checks without identification, to buy a pack of smokes, a bag of chips, maybe a bottle of cheap wine or beer. Directly across the street was a grimy little cafe. The only cars in the postage-stamp-sized parking lot in front were two Atlanta Police cruisers. Coffee-break time.
The sidewalks here were crumbling; weeds grew up through the cracks. I felt sweat beading on my nose and my back.
Ahead of me, the jail loomed large, like an up-ended red brick shoebox. Completed in the early '80s, city officials had admitted the day after the jail opened that it was already obsolete. I'd read in the newspaper that this year the jail had already processed 78,000 prisoners. It had been built to process 30,000 annually. Somebody was always suing the city to try to force them to provide better health care and security for the prisoners; the city was always blaming the state for not giving it enough money to run the place.
As usual, there was construction going on outside. Piles of sand, bricks, and lumber blocked the narrow sidewalk leading to the door. Workers sawed and hammered desultorily in the midmorning heat.
Once I'd picked my way through the mess to the entrance and pushed open the door, I was plunged into semidarkness. Half the light fixtures in the lobby weren't working. Here and there people lounged, dozing on the scarred wooden benches that lined the west wall of the lobby.
I hadn't been to the jail in at least two years, but I swear these were the same people who'd been waiting here on my last visit.
At the glass-walled information desk a detention officer checked to see whether my name was on the list of people approved for contact visits with prisoners. She nodded silently as her finger found my name on the computer printout and buzzed me into the holding area.
A few seconds later another buzzer sounded, and I pushed open the door leading into the holding and visiting area.
Nothing had changed here. The concrete block walls were still beige and blue. The smell was the same, a combination of urine, blood, vomit, stale smoke, and Pine-Sol. The same white-uniformed trustee pushed the same mop down the twenty-five-foot-long hallway. Narrow metal doors lined both sides of the corridor. Each was punctuated with a small six-inch-square window. Faces were pressed up to the windows, mostly black faces. These were the isolation cells for prisoners considered violent or, in these perilous times, infected with AIDS. The violent ones wore blue cotton prison jumpsuits, the sick ones wore bright orange.
The men's holding cell was on the right. Designed to hold a dozen prisoners at the most, this morning it held maybe twice that many. They were splayed out on mattresses on the floor, squatting on the floor against the wall, standing in line waiting to use the pay phone bolted to the cell wall.
At the end of the corridor the hall veered right into a room broken up with small cubicles, each with a four-foot-high dividing wall. I sat down in a metal chair to wait for my client. Ten minutes passed. Finally a female jailer brought Ardith into the cubicle and told her to sit.
At first I wondered whether they'd brought down the right prisoner. This woman seemed to have shrunk. The hair I remembered as reddish-brown was dark brown and matted to her head. A navy blue jail smock and slacks hung limply from her body. The ruddy skin tone had faded to a sallow yellow, her nose was swollen and red, and her lip had been cut. She shuffled in wearing jail-issue paper booties.
The jailer, a short stocky black woman with orange-blond hair, handed me a document to sign, swearing that I wasn't bringing in any explosives or contraband. Then she left.
Ardith made a halfhearted attempt to smile. At least I thought it was a smile. It was hard to tell with someone who had a perpetually sullen look on her face. I could tell the effort was costing her.
"You OK?"
She nodded. "A lot of women up here seem to think I need a new girlfriend. After I got my nose busted trying to persuade them otherwise, they put me in isolation. It's better, really. No cigarette smoke and no whores bothering me. My lawyer promised to bring me something to read. Thanks for coming, by the way. My calling you was his idea."
"It's all right." I looked at her closely to see if a few days in jail had changed her attitude toward me. I couldn't tell. "What made you decide you needed help?"
She shrugged. "Does it matter? Kristee's dead. Beverly ripped me off. I'm broke. I don't know a soul in this town. My lawyer said there's not much he can do for me. So I called you. So help me."
When she put it so graciously, how could I refuse?
"Look," I said, tilting my head to try to get her to look me in the eye. "Look at me, dammit. It matters to me. If I do help you I won't be getting paid anything. When I work for free, which I really can't afford to do, I like to know why. So far, all I've been able to get out of you is a bunch of lies. Now I want you to quit jerking me around and tell me what the deal is here."
She stared at her hands, which were folded in her lap. The nails had been bitten short and
her short stubby fingers were covered with little scratches. She gingerly ran one finger along the swollen ridge of her nose.
"If you help me get out of here, there's a chance I could pay you something," she said. Her voice was so low I wasn't sure I understood her correctly.
"Pay me with what? You've got a court-appointed lawyer, you've been staying in a nineteen-dollar-a-day motel, for which you owe a week in back rent, and I happen to know you've been living on saltines and peanut butter."
"I've got a way."
I rose out of the chair so fast and hard it fell over backward with a loud crash. Ardith looked up at me in shock.
"I'm outa here, Ardith. You obviously aren't ready to cooperate. And I don't have time to screw around with somebody who won't help herself. Have a nice life."
I picked the chair up and set it back on its legs. I was halfway down the corridor, walking fast, when I heard her calling out.
"Ms. Garrity. Come back. Please."
Don't ask me why. I went back. She was scrunched into a ball in her chair, a pathetic little rodent hiding from a mean hungry cat.
"What?" I demanded.
"I want you to help me because I didn't kill Kristee," she said woodenly.
"You've already told me that," I said. "Tell me something new."
Her eyes finally met mine. "I talked to somebody last night who offered to help me."
"Who?"
"My former father-in-law. He's rich, I guess."
I looked at her dumbly. "Ex father-in-law? You were married? Didn't you tell me you're gay? And I thought you told me you didn't know anybody in Atlanta."
She made another stab at smiling. It was an improvement over the scowl. "Yeah, I was married. It was a long time ago. Even dykes get married sometimes, you know. And I was telling you the truth. I don't really know my ex's father."
I sat back down in the chair. "Why don't you tell me about it."
Every Crooked Nanny Page 13
