No Pain, No Gaine

by Edwina Franklin

  Quickly, she slid out of bed, shrugged into her robe, and padded barefoot into the hall, just in time to hear the apartment door close.

  “Sergeant?” she ventured timidly. There was no answer.

  Sergeant Gaine had obviously been called away on a more urgent matter, leaving her alone now, in the dark, silent apartment. No, she reminded herself, she wasn’t completely alone. Sergeant Ishito was watching the front of her building, Detective Jabry was watching the back, and Sergeant Taylor could hear every sound she made. If only those hidden microphones worked both ways. Resisting the urge to turn on every light in the place, Sandy stepped gingerly into the living room.

  At least it wasn’t completely dark here. Gaine had raised the blinds, letting in a faint glow from the streetlights outside. It sketched the outlines of the two love seats and the table, and gave a pale aura to the leaves of her many plants.

  Sandy glanced uneasily behind her, down the hall toward her bedroom door. Lying in a small dark room, listening to every creak and groan of this old building, would only increase her anxiety. She might as well turn on a light, make herself a cup of tea, and wait for Sergeant Gaine to return.

  The floor lamp beside the window gave off the strongest illumination. Sandy crossed the living room and switched it on. And then she froze, listening intently for the noise she thought she had heard coming from the bedroom.

  There it was again! Somebody must be climbing into the apartment, through that half-open back window!

  “Sergeant Taylor, can you hear me?” she whispered frantically. “There’s an intruder. Get someone up here!”

  Just then Sandy heard the soft creak of her bedroom door opening and nearly leapt out of her skin. She raced blindly around the love seats, toward the front door, grasped the knob and turned it. It was double-locked.

  “Goin’ somewhere, lady?”

  As her mind put a face to that death-rattle voice, Sandy’s heart nearly stopped.

  “Dooley!” she cried, and spun around to face him.

  “Turn the light off,” he rasped.

  Obediently Sandy went back to the floor lamp and darkened the room again.

  “Now, what’s this big emergency?” he demanded. As he took a step toward her, she caught her breath. He looked much larger in the dark. “It better be good,” he warned. “I don’t like games.”

  She swallowed hard, forcing herself to stay calm and think. Sergeant Taylor was listening to every word of this, and there was no mistaking what was happening here. That meant help was on its way. All she had to do was keep Dooley talking, stall him until the police arrived. She could do that, she told herself anxiously. If she wanted to survive, she must.

  Sandy fought to keep her voice steady as she replied, “I don’t like games, either, Dooley. The police took Tommy away for questioning Friday night. Because you gave him Vito’s jacket with the bullet hole in it, they think he committed the murder.”

  An ominous pause, then, “Maybe he did.”

  “You know he didn’t.”

  Dooley was staring at her. Even though she couldn’t see his eyes, she could feel them on her, like the crawling feet of an insect, making her skin tighten, making her limbs want to twitch.

  The butterflies were stampeding in her stomach again. How long did it take for two police detectives to run across the road and pound on a door, anyway? They should have been here by now. Where were they?

  Had she been left alone after all, in spite of Gaine’s promise? Had that phone call been an order from his superior to end the surveillance? Wasn’t there anyone out there listening to this and able to end it?

  Oh, please, Ted, come back…

  Caught in a sudden, icy shower of fear, Sandy gasped as Dooley’s harsh voice tore her away from her thoughts. “This whole thing was a setup, wasn’t it?” he grated. “The messages from the street, the cops all around this place. It’s a trap, right? You been workin’ with them all along, just to reel me in.”

  “No!”

  “And I bet you told them that I was the one saw Parmentier get hit, huh? Right?”

  “You’re the one who broke our bargain,” she reminded him. Her throat was closing up now—if she didn’t spit the words out quickly she would choke on them. “When you gave Tommy the jacket, I gave your name to Homicide, just as I said I would do.”

  “Just as you said you would do,” he repeated contemptuously. “Get away from that light!” His outline shifted momentarily, and when he gestured at her with his left hand, something in it briefly caught the moonlight—a gun!

  Desperately trying to swallow a cold lump of fear, Sandy sidled cautiously to the other side of the window—the window with the sill lined with plants in heavy terra cotta pots. Maybe, just maybe, if she could get him talking again, put him a little off guard… After all, they were still in the dark.

  “Is that the gun you used to kill Vito?” she asked unsteadily. “Why, Dooley? I thought you two were friends.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said after a beat. “He just got me so mad I didn’t know what I was doin’. I figured I better leave town, y’know? To get away from Mr. Vanish. So I wanted to take my half of our stash with me, but Vito didn’t want to split it up. We had a fight, out back of the Lucky Shot…and I won. And the stash didn’t get split up, after all.” Dooley chuckled. The sound made Sandy’s skin crawl.

  “And you blamed Mr. Vanish?” she persisted. “Why?”

  “Why not? He’s always killin’ people with guns. What’s one more gonna matter to him? Or two?” As Sandy watched in speechless horror, he raised the gun and aimed it at her. “So long, lady…”

  Suddenly the telephone rang. Dooley wheeled and shot it instead. In that moment of distraction, Sandy snatched a large plant off the windowsill and hurled it at him.

  All at once, a searing pain exploded deep in her left arm, spinning her helplessly backward to crash against the window frame and then down, down, into soft, still darkness. And in the distance, she heard, thought she heard…corn popping. Yes, that was what it must be. Popcorn.

  Forcing his thoughts away from the pale, still form being loaded into the ambulance, Ted strode across the lawn to the curb, where a yellow patrol car sat idling. A front door had been left open, and in the dome light he could see a man fidgeting uncomfortably in the back seat. Ted ducked his head slightly to reassure himself that this was the same fellow they’d caught lurking in the bushes earlier.

  The suspect had just begun to stammer out his story when Sergeant Taylor had buzzed them on the radio to let them know Dooley was inside the apartment.

  Cursing himself for leaving his post, Ted had split up his men for a two-pronged approach. There hadn’t been time to call for backup. They had to act quickly to prevent a hostage situation from developing. So they’d been forced to handcuff the suspect and lock him inside the patrol car until the more urgent matter could be taken care of. Now that the situation was under control, they could resume questioning him.

  At Sergeant Gaine’s signal, a uniformed constable helped the suspect out of the car. The man was a head shorter than Ted, with a stocky build, dressed all in black and wearing his curly dark hair long in the back.

  “Well, now, Mr.—” Ted glanced at the identification he’d stuffed into his pocket earlier, “—Arthur Freiling, of the Lucky Ace Detective Agency. Would you care to tell us again just what you were doing in the bushes over there?”

  At that moment, the doors of the ambulance slammed shut and it pulled away in a wide U-turn, lights flashing and siren shrieking. Ted’s mind recoiled from the noise—it sounded too much like a scream of pain—and suddenly, he found that interrogating Arthur Freiling was the last thing in the world he wanted to do. Just the thought of being in the same place as this man made his throat tighten with revulsion.

  Brusquely, he handed Freiling’s ID over to the senior constable.
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  “Take him in, Muller. We’ll get his statement at the station. Meanwhile, I want him thoroughly checked out. I want every scrap of identification in his wallet verified with two separate sources. I want to know whether that’s his own hair or a wig. I want to know where the lint in his pocket came from. And I want to know where he was last August fourteenth, from 9:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m. Everything. Do it on my authority,” he directed. Then he turned on his heel and stalked away.

  “So, Freiling checked out?” said Joe.

  “Yeah,” Ted growled disgustedly. “His ID checked out, his hair is his own, and he’s exactly what he claims to be: Arthur Freiling, the most junior operative at Lucky Ace Detective Agency. He won’t be getting a promotion for this, either. His boss is not pleased he got caught, and even less pleased that he broke under questioning and admitted to breaking and entering and planting illegal listening devices. Anyway, Freiling was after the Haltford photograph, so the investigators of record are on his case now.”

  Bemused, Joe cocked his head and observed, “And you’re teed off.”

  Ted snapped the file folder shut and dropped it with a grudging “Thanks” into the hands of the desk sergeant. Then he strode down the tunnel-like side corridor of the Eglinton Avenue Station, past the weapons storage and the officers’ locker rooms, back toward the parking lot. Joe caught up with him halfway to the door.

  “Hey, partner,” he admonished gently, “the guy was fixing to break in again and maybe twist her arm. The trap was sprung by a real perpetrator. It isn’t as though we’ve failed.”

  But Ted shook his head stubbornly. “We didn’t catch Mr. Vanish,” he pointed out, giving the fire door an extra hard shove.

  Joe breathed a martyred sigh. “Look, I know that what Dooley told her about Mr. Vanish fit in with your own pet theory about the Parmentier case but, dammit, he lied about Vito’s murder. He’s just not a credible witness.”

  “Obviously he was lying to cover up his own guilt. But he had no reason to lie about the Parmentier case, Joe. Dooley couldn’t have pulled off that hit in a thousand years.”

  “Even if I believe that, Inspector Nielsen doesn’t,” Joe reminded him.

  Scowling darkly, Ted stopped and whirled on his partner, declaring, “Inspector Nielsen isn’t—”

  “—in love with Alessandra DiGianni?” Joe cut in. “You talked around it last night, because you knew Taylor had his ears on, but he didn’t earn his rank by being obtuse, and neither did Nielsen. You didn’t really think you could keep it a secret, did you?” he chided.

  Ted nodded thoughtfully and resumed walking toward Joe’s car. “So you figure Nielsen suspects that I’m…involved with her, and that everything I told him today was an emotional reaction? That to compensate for leaving her unprotected this morning I’m trying to overprotect her now?”

  “Aren’t you?” Joe asked quietly.

  Ted sighed. “Dammit, I’ve got to keep her alive.”

  His partner made an exasperated noise. “Will you lighten up? We nailed a murderer last night, and a second-story man who may hold the key to solving a kidnapping. And with what Taylor got on tape Thursday night, it won’t be long before we have this Charlie character in custody—”

  “But we don’t have Mr. Vanish!” exclaimed Ted. “And nobody will believe that he’s still a real threat.”

  “And with good reason,” Joe pointed out sharply, “since you can’t show any proof.”

  Ted glared at him across the roof of the car for a moment. “Yes, I can,” he said. He dropped angrily into the passenger seat of Joe’s car and slammed the door shut. Ted waited until Joe was sitting behind the wheel, watching his keys dangle from the ignition, to explain, “Alessandra found Bert’s file. We’ve been working on it together for the past week. There’s some powerful evidence in that file, Joe. Bert was close to unmasking Vanish when he was killed. With the new evidence that’s come up since then, I think we’ll have enough to nail him. But until we’re ready to make the case, I can’t show any of it to Nielsen. And until he’s convinced Mr. Vanish is real, he won’t approve any further surveillance. And that means Alessandra is a sitting target,” he concluded with a disgusted sigh.

  “So what’s the scam, partner? Do we borrow some whites and spend all our off-duty hours at the hospital, or what?”

  Ted eyed him uncertainly. “You believe me?”

  “I believe that you believe, and that’s good enough for me.”

  A slow, grateful smile spread across Ted’s face. “Thanks, partner,” he said softly.

  As Joe turned his key in the ignition, he observed casually, “You know, we ought to drop in on Dooley—see if he’s awake enough to sign a confession. We could even stop at my sister’s place and pick up some fresh-cut flowers for you-know-who.”

  Ted gaped in mock horror. “What’s this? A scam?”

  “I guess it’s just the company I’ve been keeping,” sighed Joe.

  She looked so fragile, so overwhelmed by her injury, so…beyond his reach, as she lay unmoving on the bulky hospital bed, securely wrapped in crisp, hospital-cornered sheets. Ted stood quietly just inside the door of Alessandra’s room and watched her sleep. Her left arm looked grotesquely large in its plaster cast. No, he thought with a sigh, the arm was now the right size for the bed, making the rest of her appear disproportionately small. He looked at her face and noticed that she was frowning even in her sleep; and he wondered whether it was the weight of the cast on her chest making her uncomfortable, or simply the pain of having a bullet removed and a badly broken arm surgically reset.

  Ted winced at the thought of what she’d had to endure—the terror of finding herself alone with a murderer, the shock of being wounded, the suffering that had followed. Taylor had been impressed with the way she’d handled herself. She’d let him know exactly what was going on by what she said to Dooley, and she’d even drawn a confession out of him. Taylor had delayed signaling the go-ahead to Ted and the officers outside the door until he had Dooley’s confession on tape, but he’d cut things perilously close. Another second and Alessandra would have been dead.

  And to lose her that way, after promising her over and over that she would be safe, that he would protect her…!

  Over and over, the events of that night replayed themselves in his head, as though by reliving his mistake a thousand times he could somehow atone for it. Or diminish it. He knew he would never be able to excuse it.

  For Ted had promised to stay in the apartment with her. And then Taylor had called with the news that an intruder had been spotted and apprehended by Detective Jabry—an intruder who wasn’t Dooley. And Sergeant Gaine had seen himself as the dispensable member of the surveillance team, the one Alessandra could do without for ten minutes while he went downstairs and made Mr. Vanish. And none of them had realized that in the ninety seconds that Jabry had been distracted from his surveillance, a second intruder had gotten through.

  No matter what the official report might say, Ted Gaine was the reason Alessandra DiGianni was in that hospital bed. If she hated him for the rest of her life, that would make two of them.

  As the room swam back into focus, Sandy was first of all aware that she couldn’t move her left arm. Then she found and felt the persistent sharp throbbing pain beneath the plaster cast. The ache came and went, came and went, like waves on a beach, each one washing a few more memories up on the fine sand of her thoughts. She was in a hospital. They’d brought her here in an ambulance, a long time ago, after the corn had stopped popping. She’d suffered a severe compound fracture, caused by a bullet, the surgeon had told her. It was a miracle that none of the bone fragments had severed any major blood vessels.

  Her family had been here for a while. Then they’d gone home so she could rest. Sandy had been dozing off and on all afternoon, but it wasn’t very restful, she’d found, not being able to move her arms. The one not in the cast was
impaled on an intravenous needle attached to a transparent tube attached to a bottle that hung upside down on a tall coatrack affair, and she could tell just by looking that it wasn’t going to fit through the door to the bathroom.

  Between dozes, Sandy had thought about herself and Sergeant Gaine, about saving Tommy, and about what might have happened last night if Gaine hadn’t left her alone. And each time that her thoughts began to scatter and melt, she’d concluded she was pretty damned lucky all around.

  Suddenly there was a loud clatter in the hall. Sandy turned involuntarily toward the sound, and saw Ted Gaine, clutching a huge bouquet of marigolds, chrysanthemums and shasta daisies in his hand and staring so mournfully at her that she just had to ask, “Did somebody die?”

  He looked confused. “What?”

  “Never mind. Let’s get those flowers into some water,” she suggested, and reached awkwardly for the call buzzer, which, naturally, had been placed on the left side of the bed. It was hospital logic, she decided wearily, like waking someone up to administer a sleeping pill.

  “I’ll get that,” he offered, stepping closer.

  But just then the nurse came in, carrying a small tray with a hypodermic syringe on it. “I thought you might be needing something right about now,” she said. Then, as she noticed the flowers, “Oh, what a lovely bouquet!”

  Gaine stood quietly by while the painkiller was injected into Sandy’s IV tube. The shot began to take effect almost immediately.

  “Bless you,” breathed Sandy. “You read my mind.”

  “Visitors right after surgery can be a bit of a strain, dear. You rest now,” advised the smiling nurse. “And I’ll get a vase for those beautiful flowers,” she promised Gaine on her way out.

  Cautiously, he approached the side of the bed. “How do you feel?”

  “Better now,” she told him with a weak grin. “The doctor told me he had to hammer a stainless steel pin into my arm. Sometimes I’d swear he’s still hammering.”

  Sergeant Gaine swallowed so hard she could hear him. His gray eyes were misty with undisguised misery, and Sandy’s heart ached for him as she heard him say brokenly, “Alessandra, I’m so sorry. If I’d been there when Dooley arrived—”