“You’re right,” Will replied with mock seriousness. “Maybe I should recuse myself.”
“Recuse, hell,” Sunny told him. “Who’s going to help me investigate this can of worms?”
“What do you figure our first step should be?” Will asked.
“Talk to Ollie,” Sunny quickly responded. “See what he can tell us about what happened this morning.”
“Right.” Will rose to his feet. “Well? Shall we?”
Sunny tilted her head at him. “You might want to change your outfit.”
“Why?” Will looked down at his uniform.
“My dad has what they call ‘white coat hypertension’—his blood pressure goes up when he goes to the doctor,” Sunny said. “I’m afraid we may encounter some people with a similar problem—‘blue coat muteness.’ Just a guess, but maybe you’ve encountered it.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t rub it in.” Will headed for the office door. “I’ll go home and change. What’ll you be doing?”
“I’ll be on the phone to Ken Howell,” Sunny answered. “He uses a lot of summer interns to get the newspaper out. I’m hoping he’ll have someone dependable enough to let me get out of the office.”
6
By the time Will returned, Sunny had gotten Ken to loan her a young woman spending an unpaid summer working in the office of the Harbor Courier. The intern had walked over to the office, and Sunny was busily bringing her up to speed on the duties to keep MAX going. “Remember, Nancy, whatever you do, don’t install any upgrades on any components in the system. As soon as that happens, it fouls up the way everything else works.”
As they went over the remainder of the points in the checklist Sunny had worked up, she noticed that Nancy kept glancing over her shoulder at Will. Lounging against the wall of file cabinets in sunglasses, a tight gray Henley shirt, and a pair of black jeans, he made a pretty good distraction.
Sunny finished with Nancy’s orientation, then left her to go through the morning’s e-mails.
“Okay, I’m ready,” she told Will. “You’re looking pretty casual.” She fingered the short-sleeved jacket she wore with matching slacks—simple, but businesslike.
“You’ve heard of good cop–bad cop? We’ll try well-dressed cop versus scroungy cop.” Will grinned. “Once you’re out of uniform, crime-busting has no dress code.”
Rolling her eyes, Sunny stepped outside to her Wrangler while Will climbed aboard his pickup. They drove up to Bridgewater Hall, arriving around eleven in the morning. That turned out to be lucky timing, as they encountered a volunteer just rolling Oliver out of the therapy room. Ollie held a rolling walker balanced on the footrests while Elsa Hogue walked beside the wheelchair, talking. Even though the therapist wore another dumpy-looking sweat suit, she seemed to move more naturally, even smiling at Ollie. “It gets easier the longer you work at it,” she assured him.
“Thanks,” Sunny heard Ollie reply. “It’s nice to know I can do something right.”
He smiled hopefully as he looked up at Elsa. But his expression instantly hardened when he spotted Sunny and Will. “About time you got here,” he said gruffly.
“I had to get things squared away,” Sunny told him. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Elsa spoke up. “If you call down to the coffee shop, you can reserve a table, and they’ll have Mr. Barnstable’s lunch waiting when you get there. It’s a nice, quiet place where you can order a meal and chat.”
“Thanks,” Ollie said. “That’s very nice of you to tell us.”
“And have you tried the gardens?” Elsa went on. “They’re really beautiful this time of year.” She smiled down at Ollie the Barnacle and tried to look strict. “Just make it back by one thirty—Jack has big plans for you today.”
“With advance warning like that, I might not come back at all,” Ollie said.
“I know it’s hard, especially to start, but I think you’re one of the patients who takes the work seriously.” Elsa frowned. “Some don’t, and they never regain full function again.”
Ollie nodded. “It’s tough. The little I did yesterday just about knocked me out,” he admitted.
She patted his shoulder. “It really does get better. Believe me.” Then she turned to leave. “Now, let’s see if I can convince Mrs. Jaspers of that.”
Will took over the wheelchair from the volunteer, and Sunny directed him down the hallway. “So, Ollie, do you want to try this coffee shop?”
“Yeah,” Ollie said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to hang around in the room anyway. They had somebody coming in with all kinds of disinfectant sprays when I was leaving.”
Will glanced at Sunny, his expression showing that his worst fears had come true regarding their potential crime scene. He could only raise his shoulders in a hopeless shrug. “They’ve probably contaminated the place already.” He glanced down at Ollie. “Maybe it’s better to let the fumes evaporate before you go back in.”
They stopped at the nurses’ station, and a helpful nurse made the call to the coffee shop for them. “Take the hallway to the front door and make the first turnoff,” she said when they asked how to find the place. “You’ll pass the entrance to the auditorium, and a little farther on you’ll find the coffee shop. You can’t miss it.”
For Sunny, the words “coffee shop” evoked loud, crowded places that served quick, cheap eats, with linoleum-topped tables and waitstaffs rushed off their feet. But Bridgewater Hall’s so-called “coffee shop” reminded Sunny of one of those tearooms of yesteryear—a throwback to an age of more gracious living. It was small, just a dozen or so tables, but each one was decked out with a white tablecloth; embroidered banquettes surrounded slightly larger tables; and for the lone or rushed eater, a few tall chairs faced a highly polished mahogany counter.
“Nicer than a lot of the eateries in town,” Sunny said.
“A better bar, too,” Ollie muttered, taking in the lunch counter. “I wonder if I could get a beer here.”
An older woman with permed white hair approached them with some menus. “Is this the Barnstable party? I can seat you here over by the window.” She led the way to a table with a splendid view of the gardens. Will parked Ollie’s wheelchair facing the window, and he and Sunny sat down flanking him.
“Elsa wasn’t kidding,” Sunny said. “It looks lovely out there.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ollie griped, already done with small talk. “What kind of progress have you made?”
Sunny was about to protest that they hadn’t had time to do anything yet, but Will jumped in with, “I tracked down Alfred Scatterwell and gave him a call.” This was news to her. “He was definitely not happy to hear that you had doubts about his uncle’s death, but he agreed to speak to us tomorrow morning,” Will reported.
Ollie grunted and turned to Sunny, but she started talking before he could ask any embarrassing questions. “What we really need to hear is what happened this morning. Start from the beginning, and tell us what you saw and heard.”
Before Ollie could start, the permed manageress returned to take their orders. “You’re our first customers of the day,” she said, nodding toward the empty tables around them. “You beat the rush.”
Sunny and Will both ordered the hamburger platter. Their choices arrived quickly, along with Ollie’s lunch. Sunny looked at her boss’s slivers of meat in a reddish sauce. “What is it supposed to be?” she asked, lowering her voice. “Pulled pork?”
“According to the menu I signed off on, it’s turkey tetrazzini.” Ollie unenthusiastically poked at it with his fork. “They give you a lot of choices for each meal, but one always seems to be baked fish. On paper, this looked the least bad.” He raised a forkful to his mouth and began chewing.
“So how is it?” Will arranged the tomato and onion slices on his burger and took a bite.
“Better than yesterday’s Salisbury steak
. I guess a lot of the old folks’ teeth probably aren’t up to anything more solid than ground or chopped-up meat. I just wish that they didn’t always seem to have run out of salt in the kitchen.” He watched greedily as Sunny sprinkled salt and pepper on her fries, then dumped a blob of catsup on the side. “I could kill for one of those fries.”
“Are you allowed to have them, though?” Will asked.
Ollie’s expression fell somewhere between annoyed and heartbroken. “They gave me some with the Salisbury steak. Eighteen, to be exact. I counted each one as I ate it.”
Well, the visitors obviously get a more generous portion of French fries. Sunny turned her plate toward Ollie, who reached over to grab a fry—the biggest one, of course—dunked it in the catsup, and then just about inhaled it.
“Well, they don’t stint you on the food,” Will said, not turning his plate to share. “I see green beans, pasta, bread, coffee, milk, and both fruit and Jell-O.”
“Yeah.” Ollie’s eyes followed Will’s burger as he brought it up for another bite. “I’m just a lucky fella.”
“So tell us what happened.” Sunny wanted to get this meeting back on track before Ollie made a grab for her pickle.
“Specifically, why do you think something’s wrong?” Will put in.
“I didn’t want to say it in front of the doctors.” Ollie leaned forward in his wheelchair, his voice low. “They’ll say I was crazy, or dreaming, or blame the pain pills. I’ve been cutting down on them, but I do take one the last thing at night. Makes it easier to sleep.”
“I can understand that,” Will said. “But what did you see?”
“It was more like what I heard.” Ollie shifted uncomfortably in his wheelchair. “Somebody was definitely in the room, with Gardner. I don’t know if what I heard woke me up, or if my eyes just popped open, and that’s why I heard it. But I know I woke up all of a sudden, in the dark, and I heard rustling and low voices over by Gardner’s bed.”
“What were they saying?” Sunny asked.
Ollie shrugged. “I couldn’t make it out. Just a mumble of voices, then a cough—that was Gardner, I think. And then . . .” Ollie groped for a word. “It sounded like someone smacking their lips. I know, that doesn’t make much sense. But at the time I thought, Gardner’s been here awhile and knows everybody. He’s got connections. Maybe somebody’s smuggling in a glass of something for him. He told me once that given the choice, he’d prefer a snifter of brandy to a pain pill. And frankly, I agreed.”
“It certainly might make you cough,” Will said.
“And you might smack your lips afterward,” Sunny added. “But it’s something you wanted, so you could be projecting. Or you might’ve been dreaming.”
“That’s not the kind of thing I usually dream about.” Again, Ollie paused, trying to put his feelings into words. “It felt . . . real.”
I don’t think I want to know what Ollie usually dreams about, Sunny thought, and then found her mocking inner voice chiming in. Says the woman who had a dream about marrying her cat.
“I debated speaking up but decided against it.” Ollie shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I mean, whatever was going on, Gardner was doing it on the sly. I figured if I heard it going on for a couple of nights, I’d ask him about it quietly. Now I wish I’d made a stink—at least found out who was with him.”
“That might not have been the smartest thing,” Will told him. “If it was a killer, what do you think would have happened to you?”
Ollie opened his mouth as if he were about to speak, then shut it with a snap. “I didn’t think of that.”
“So what did you do?” Sunny asked.
“I closed my eyes and must have drifted back to sleep. The next thing I hear, Gardner is moaning. I sat up and got a light on. He tried to talk, but I could barely understand him. Said his face was numb. When he tried to get the beeper for the nurse, he couldn’t handle it. I don’t know if you noticed it, but after his stroke, he was weaker on his left side. Now his right side wasn’t working right, either.”
He shook his head. “I called the nurse, and while I was doing that, Gardner puked. He was choking on the stuff when the nurses arrived. They worked on him, and then Dr. Gavrik charged in. Within a couple of minutes, they were calling for an ambulance. The paramedics came and rushed him off.” Ollie sagged back in his chair. “From what I heard, he was gone before they even got him in the ambulance.”
“And you started raising hell,” Sunny said.
A bit of Ollie’s normal hard edge came back. “I told everyone who’d listen that something was wrong. That Gavrik woman wanted to give me a tranquilizer, but by then I’d already called Frank Nesbit.” He smiled grimly. “Sometimes it’s handy to have the sheriff’s home number.”
Will leaned across the table. “Did you tell him what you heard before Scatterwell’s attack?”
“I didn’t get the chance,” Ollie said. “Dr. Gavrik was all over me, and then they brought in the muckety-muck, Reese. He runs this joint.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I was lucky enough to convince Frank through other means.”
Political means, Sunny thought.
“Do you think this is enough for Nesbit to open an official investigation?” Ollie asked.
“I figure he’s already got me—us—on the hook,” Will quickly said, frowning. “According to your agreement, he’s the one who sits in judgment as to whether there’s a case or not.”
“Well, yeah,” Ollie said. “But—”
“And you know that he doesn’t like to admit that crimes ever happen in his jurisdiction,” Will went on.
Ollie looked so woebegone, Sunny let him have the rest of her French fries. Apparently, chewing helped his thinking process. “Do you know if it’s usual for stroke victims to throw up?”
Will shrugged.
“My dad’s doctor, Dr. Collier, may be able to help,” Sunny suggested. “His practice treats heart ailments and strokes.”
Sunny looked at Ollie’s plate. In spite of his complaints, he’d made good inroads on most of the food there. The turkey was completely gone.
It didn’t seem like there was much else to discuss about the case, so Sunny asked how Ollie’s rehab therapy was going. “Elsa had me working while I sat down,” he said. “She wants me to work my upper body and arms so I can deal with this thing.” He reached for the walker they’d put off to the side. “Now I can look forward to an hour of PT—or as Gardner used to call it, painful torture. I don’t know which is worse, the pain from my leg, or the fear of falling.”
The reminder of Scatterwell’s sometimes sharp tongue stirred a memory for Sunny. “Did Gardner ever say anything about Elsa Hogue?”
Ollie stared at the unexpected question. “No. Why should he?”
“Just wondering. Did he have a nickname for your physical therapist?”
Grinning, Ollie nodded. “He called him Jack the Gripper, from the way he steadies people by holding on to the seat of their pants.”
“Well, that one makes sense.” Sunny glanced around to see that the room was starting to fill up. It looked like the customers were mainly long-term residents and members of their families. “Maybe we should get a move on. Looks as though they could use the table.”
Sunny and Will settled their bills and then set off for the rehab ward, wheeling Ollie along. When they reached Room 114, the pungent smell of disinfectant leaked out into the hallway. Ollie vigorously fanned his hand in front of his nose. “Maybe we should go straight to the therapy room.”
“Just give me a minute.” Will stepped inside. Gardner’s bed still remained stripped, and the drawers on the chest at the foot of his bed all stood open.
“They don’t waste much time, do they?” Ollie muttered to Sunny. “A real sentimental bunch.”
Sunny just nodded. It seemed odd to erase Gardner’s presence so thoroughl
y, considering that the administrator here was an old friend of his. Or so Gardner believed when he was alive, she couldn’t help thinking.
Will came back out. “Looks like the Ritz, compared to some of the state police barracks I’ve lived in,” he said with a grin. “Generally, they kept out the snow but were a bit on the Spartan side.”
He took command of the wheelchair again, and they headed back to the therapy room. Jack the Gripper (as Sunny would now forever think of him) stood just inside the door. He had to be in his forties, shorter than Will but with a lot more muscle on a stocky frame, his reddish-blond hair gelled up in spikes.
If somebody had to hold up Ollie the Barnacle, this would be the guy to do it, Sunny thought.
“You can cancel the search party,” the therapist told the volunteer who was just leaving.
Then he looked down at Ollie with a smile. “How are you doing today?”
“As well as can be expected after having turkey tetrazzini for lunch,” Ollie told him. Catching the man’s inquisitive glance at his companions, Ollie said, “Sunny Coolidge here works for me. She and her friend Will took me out for lunch.”
Sunny had expected a different introduction from Ollie, but apparently he thought people might speak more freely if they didn’t know that she and Will were snooping around. Well, maybe it was better to keep their investigation on the down low—at least as long as they could.
“Jack Quentin.” The therapist extended a powerful hand to Sunny.
“We’ll leave you to it,” Sunny said, sure that Quentin and probably a lot of other people remembered the uproar from Ollie when she’d come into this room just yesterday. She patted Ollie on the arm. “Be in touch with you soon.”
“Yeah.” Ollie gave her a look. “Let me know what you hear from that doctor.”
“Will do,” Sunny promised. Then she and Will got out of there.
Will waited until they reached the parking lot before speaking. “If there had been a glass beside the bed, it’s gone now. And after the bucket-and-mop brigade got done in that room, I don’t expect there’s any trace of physical evidence left.” Cold anger made his face all sharp angles. “I didn’t think it was worth getting Ollie all riled up, especially when he’s apparently hoping we can stay undercover.”
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