Jonny was still asleep when she left. He usually was, because he kept late hours. Sometimes she woke him up to have sex, but not this week. On her way to work, she stopped at the basement bakery called Amazing Grace in Canal Park, and she talked with the college kids behind the counter while she ate a cranberry-walnut muffin. They all knew her. She stuck her nose into their lives and gave them advice. The kids probably rolled their eyes when she was gone, but she didn’t care. Unlike her husband, Cindy was an extrovert who felt energized by other people.
She arrived at the clinic before everyone else, which was part of her routine. Turned on the lights. Made more coffee. She caught up on insurance paperwork at her desk. This was her peaceful time of the day, when she was alone to think. She read the newspaper for a while, and then she stared at the photographs pinned to the fabric wall of her cubicle. Jonny, of course. Their neighbor and doctor, Steve Garske. Jonny’s boss and Cindy’s friend, the deputy police chief Kyle Kinnick, looking ridiculous in his golfing outfit.
Cindy’s sister, Laura.
She only had a teenage picture of Laura, because her sister had been killed when she was just eighteen. They hadn’t been particularly close, but sometimes she found herself looking at Laura’s face and wondering what she would have been like as an adult. It wasn’t that Cindy felt alone. Not really. She had Jonny, she had tons of friends. Even so, she wished that her relationship with Laura had been stronger when they were kids.
Her morning was busy with physio appointments. She worked with a seventy-two-year-old woman recovering from a hip replacement. She taught exercises to a thirty-something man dealing with a pinched nerve in his neck. A sixteen-year-old girl who’d broken her ankle playing soccer came in for work on the weight machines and got an extended lecture from Cindy about safe sex.
At lunchtime, she wandered around the corner of 3rd Street to St. Anne’s to eat in the cafeteria, but when she spotted the cardiac wing on the hospital sign, she took an impulsive detour and headed for Janine Snow’s office. She hadn’t seen her friend since the night of the murder.
Cindy asked the receptionist to get a message to Janine, and she sat down to wait. It was a typical doctor’s office. Old magazines. Soothing paintings on the wall. Children’s books and toys. The only other people in the waiting room were a black woman and her son. The boy was around ten, and he had his face pushed against an aquarium, making nose prints as he watched the brightly colored tropical fish.
‘Sherman,’ the woman called to her son. She was probably in her late twenties but had the tired posture and foghorn cough of an older woman. When he didn’t answer, she spoke more sharply: ‘Sherman, you look at me right now.’
The boy turned away from the aquarium and folded his arms across his chest. ‘What?’
‘See if this nice woman here would like a cup of coffee.’
Cindy smiled. ‘Oh, I’m fine, thank you.’
‘No, it’s the polite thing to do,’ the woman said. ‘He has to be polite. Sherman Aloysious, what did I say?’
With an exaggerated sigh, the boy wandered to a coffee urn on a corner table and filled a Styrofoam cup. The woman winked at Cindy. ‘We named him after his grandfathers, but truth to tell, he’s not so fond of either name.’
Sherman Aloysious brought Cindy a cup of coffee, and she thanked him profusely. He was at that little-boy stage where his ears had grown faster than the rest of his head, and his skinny arms and long legs looked out of proportion. Even so, he was cute. She won him over enough to get a shy smile, and he returned to his previous job of studying the fish.
‘You here to see Dr. Janine?’ the woman asked, with a hint of concern. People who came to see Janine typically had big problems.
‘I am, but I’m not a patient. Janine’s a friend.’
‘Oh, I’m glad she has friends. Awful thing she’s going through. She’s a good woman.’
‘Yes, she is,’ Cindy said.
‘The police should just leave her alone,’ the woman announced defiantly, ‘instead of hassling her the way they are. Damn cops.’
Cindy didn’t identify herself or her husband. ‘The police have a job to do. I’m sure everyone just wants the truth to come out.’
The woman shook her head. She had a narrow face with too much eye makeup, a big pile of dark hair, and a curvy, over-padded figure. ‘Wish I could believe that’s true,’ she said, ‘but you know how it goes. Woman gets too uppity, men want to tear her down. That husband of hers is no big loss.’
‘Did you know Jay?’ Cindy asked.
She shook her head. ‘I know his type, that’s all. Think a white wife makes them God’s gift.’
‘Well, the whole thing is a tragedy,’ Cindy said.
‘You’re right about that.’
Cindy got up and crossed the small office and sat down next to the woman. ‘Is he your only child?’ she asked, nodding at the boy.
‘Lord, no, three more back home. All girls. He’s the oldest. My husband’s watching the others. Didn’t think Dr. Janine needed the whole clan running around. My boy was born with a heart problem. Started getting worse last year. We thought we were going to lose him, but Dr. Janine saved his life. Believe me, I love that woman to pieces. It makes me mad to see the police and the newspapers talking about her the way they do. Anybody says something bad about Dr. Janine around me, I’ll kick their ass.’
Near the aquarium, the boy giggled at his mother’s language. Looking at him, Cindy could see the beginnings of a zipper scar on his skin, where his loose T-shirt hung on his chest.
‘Want the truth?’ the woman went on. ‘I don’t much care whether Dr. Janine killed her husband or not. Everything that woman does for people? All the lives she saves? I say, put that man in the ground and move on. Give her a medal or something for who she is. The world needs her doing what she’s doing.’
Cindy gave the woman a weak smile but didn’t reply. The trouble was that even people who defended Janine still thought she’d pulled the trigger. This woman didn’t believe that Janine was innocent. She simply didn’t care if Janine was guilty.
‘Cindy,’ said a Texas voice. ‘This is a surprise.’
Janine stood in the doorway in a white coat over her blouse and skirt. She looked better than she had on the night of the party. She was calm, strong, a professional – not a woman suspected of murder.
‘I’m sorry to barge in on you,’ Cindy said. ‘Do you have five minutes?’
‘I suppose.’ Janine nodded at the woman next to Cindy. ‘Toiana, do you mind?’
The woman waved a hand. ‘You two friends take all the time you want. We’re just fine here.’
Janine led her into her office. Cindy had been here many times, but it felt different now, and she felt out of place. Janine sat down behind her desk and said what Cindy was thinking. ‘You probably shouldn’t be here, you know. We shouldn’t be talking. Your husband and my lawyer wouldn’t be happy with us.’
‘I don’t care,’ Cindy said. ‘Do you?’
Janine laughed, showing a little bit of her old self. ‘Not really.’
‘So how are you?’
‘Trying to go on with my life as if nothing was happening,’ Janine replied. ‘Which is impossible, of course.’
‘Sure.’ Cindy bit her lip and then said: ‘I just wanted to tell you that I believe you about Jay. I told Jonny you didn’t do it.’
‘I appreciate that. Most people seem to have their minds made up about me.’
‘You have lots of defenders.’
‘I’m not so sure. Everywhere I go now, people suddenly stop talking. I realize it’s because they were gossiping about me and Jay. And not because they think I’m innocent.’
‘That woman outside thinks you’re a saint.’
Janine didn’t look comforted. ‘Oh, patients, yes. You save a life, they love you forever. Mind you, if you fai
l, they hate you just as much. I’m not comfortable with it either way.’
She got up and went to the window. She put a hand on the glass, and when she took her fingers away, the warmth left behind a ghost of steam. ‘I’m not looking forward to facing a jury of my peers,’ she added. ‘I don’t have peers. I know how arrogant that sounds, but I don’t. I’m not sure an ordinary person could understand my life.’
‘It won’t come to that,’ Cindy said.
‘Yes, it will. Let’s not kid ourselves. There’s a courtroom in my future.’
‘Jonny won’t ignore evidence that exonerates you.’
‘Maybe not, but it’s hard to dislodge an idea in someone’s head, once it puts down roots.’
Cindy wanted to say something more, but Janine held up a hand to stop her. Her friend came closer. For a moment, Cindy thought Janine might hug her, but she stopped short. Janine wasn’t a physical woman in that way. She shied away from sentiment.
‘Listen, you should probably go,’ Janine told her. ‘I appreciate your coming to see me, though. Really. No one does now, if they don’t have to. I’m a pariah.’
‘I’m always here if you need me. If there’s any way I can help you, I will.’
‘Thank you.’ Janine looked at her in a strange way, as if seeing her for the first time. Cindy wondered what she saw. For a woman who was typically self-confident and happy with her life, Cindy felt a nagging sense of inferiority around Janine Snow.
‘You know, I envy you,’ Janine went on.
Cindy was so surprised that she laughed. ‘Me?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Why is that?’
Janine reached out and touched Cindy’s long hair. It was a meaningful gesture for a woman who was particular about walls and distances. ‘You’re a woman first. A wife. You’re more than your job.’
‘So are you.’
‘Oh, no,’ Janine said, shaking her head emphatically. ‘That’s not me at all. I don’t think of myself as a woman. And definitely not a wife. I’ve never been good at that. No, I made my choice a long time ago. I’m a doctor. A surgeon. That’s me. That’s what I do, it’s who I am. There’s nothing else.’
She gestured around the office as if it were her home. Her sanctuary.
‘All this,’ she said, ‘this is what I live for.’
6
‘So why isn’t that doctor in prison yet?’ Clyde Ferris asked Stride. ‘C’mon, man, if she was black, you’d have closed the book and she’d be rotting behind bars already. We both know it.’
‘The investigation is still in the early stages,’ Stride replied.
Clyde grabbed a lit cigarette from a crinkled piece of aluminum foil on the concrete floor of the garage. Both men were smoking, and the bitter smell clouded over their heads. The wooden garage door was open, letting in cold air and the noise of a truck engine on Grand Avenue. Jay Ferris’s brother sat among the disassembled parts of a rusted snow blower. He ran a small engine shop out of his house in West Duluth, repairing snow blowers during the winter and lawn mowers during the summer. The garage walls were covered with spare motor parts hung on hooks.
‘You saying she didn’t do it?’ Clyde asked. ‘Or is it just that she’s a rich white doctor, so you have to treat her like the queen?’
‘I’m saying we’re still gathering evidence, and that takes time. We have to work our way through a lot of potential suspects.’
‘Including a few cops,’ Clyde said.
Stride didn’t respond to the taunt, even though it was true. ‘Jay made a lot of enemies with the things he wrote.’
Clyde labored on an over-tight screw with a wrench that had seen a lot of seasons. He wore coveralls that were greasy with oil stains and a pair of old Converse sneakers. He was shorter and skinnier than his handsome older brother. He wore his hair in a bushy Afro that looked like a throwback to the 1980s. His beard was scraggly and untrimmed. He had a reddish birthmark on his cheek shaped like a turtle with its head and legs poked out.
‘Yeah, Jay was honest, and that scares people,’ Clyde said. ‘People around here don’t like a black man messing with their privileged little lives.’
‘I’m not sure many people in Duluth see themselves as privileged,’ Stride said.
‘Well, that’s the point, right? Jay was just telling it like it is. Like that cop of yours. Skinner. Jay knew what that boy was all about.’
‘Nathan Skinner made a mistake,’ Stride said. ‘I never said he didn’t.’
‘His mistake was getting caught. You know Skinner came after Jay after you gave him the boot, right? Took a swing at him over by the Saratoga bar?’
‘I do. Nathan was drunk. He spent a night in jail.’
Clyde spit on the floor. ‘One night.’
‘We’re talking to Nathan,’ Stride said. ‘We’re talking to everyone who might have had a grudge against Jay. Is there anyone you think wanted Jay dead?’
‘Other than that bitch of a wife? Yeah, okay, it was a long list with Jay. He pushed people’s buttons. Got everybody riled up. That was his job. Remember that column he did on suburban drug addicts last July?’
Clyde got to his feet and wiped his hands. He strolled to a bulletin board in the back of the garage. Stride could see that Clyde kept many of his brother’s newspaper columns pinned there on thumbtacks. The man pawed through yellowed clippings and grabbed one, tearing it and leaving a scrap behind on the board. He brought it to Stride.
‘Folks were talking about this one for weeks,’ Clyde said.
Stride read it, and he remembered the column.
Think you’re safe? You’re not.
Think you know who you should be afraid of? You don’t.
Case in point: I was in line behind a woman at a pharmacy this week. Me, I like my New York steaks, and if that means 40mg of Lipitor a day, so be it. This woman ahead of me, let’s call her Holly. That’s not her real name, but it doesn’t matter. You know who she is. She could be your next door neighbor. Your wife. Your sister. Your boss. Mrs. Everywoman.
Holly had a prescription for Vicodin. The pain med that makes you feel no pain. Weird, she didn’t look like she was in pain, but I guess you can’t always tell. Holly paid cash. Sometimes you just know something’s not right, and my radar told me that Holly wasn’t right. Ping ping ping, that’s how it works. I picked up my all-the-meat-you-can-eat drug, and then I followed Holly. To the parking lot. To her car. Followed her all the way across town to another pharmacy.
That’s right. You guessed it. Another prescription. Vicodin. Cash.
Yep, sweet-faced all-American housewife Holly is an addict. Don’t be so shocked. There are Hollys everywhere. But who cares, you say, right? If she’s a pill popper, nobody gets hurt except herself. We’ve all got our vices.
Oh, but I left out the best part. Guess what Holly does for a living? She drives a school bus. You hand your kids over to her every day, and she’s an addict. She could fall asleep at the wheel. She could forget to stop at a railroad crossing. Maybe she already has.
How are you feeling now?
All right, cards on the table. I lied. I don’t know who Holly is. Or what she does. Maybe she’s a secretary. Or a waitress. Or a pilot. Or a cop. That’s the point, she’s the only one who knows.
But I’ve got your license plate, Holly. I can rat you out any time I want to. Get help, okay?
Clyde laughed. ‘I bet half the pill poppers in town started looking over their shoulders at Walgreen’s after this column came out.’
‘Did Jay ever tell you who Holly was?’
Clyde shook his head. ‘No, he’d never spill something like that.’
‘Did you and your brother have a close relationship?’ Stride asked.
The man wiped sweat from his brow and grabbed an open can of beer from a metal shelf.
‘Me and
Jay? Not so much, really. I saw him every couple of months. He had better things to do than hang out with me.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘Right after New Year’s. Dude almost killed me.’
Stride cocked his head. ‘How so?’
‘Jay took me ice-fishing in the harbor. Didn’t look safe to me, but Jay wanted to go. Winter started out pretty warm, remember? Next thing you know, ice started cracking, shanty started going down. We barely got out with our necks. He lost his truck and his fish house, but that was Jay. He liked risks, liked going all in. It was the same way when he was growing up. Smart as hell, way smarter than me, but all you cops knew his name because of the stupid shit he pulled. He near got thrown out of UMD half a dozen times, but they were scared he’d write about them in the college paper.’
‘Jay made something of himself,’ Stride said. ‘That wasn’t easy.’
‘Oh, sure, Jay was going places. He had the looks, the brains, the mojo.’
‘What about Dr. Snow?’ Stride asked.
‘What about her?’
‘I gather you don’t like her.’
‘Oh, hell, no. Rich Southern bitch, that’s who she is. I warned him off her when they started dating, but he didn’t care. I met her exactly once. Treated me like a turd she was stepping round on the sidewalk.’
‘So what did Jay see in her?’
‘You can’t figure it out? That face, that body? Jay said she was wild in the sack. And let’s face it, the money was a big thing. Jay liked money. Everybody knew his name because of the newspaper, but he didn’t have a dime to call his own until he met her.’
‘I heard their relationship was rocky,’ Stride said.
‘Oh, yeah, the two of them could fight.’
‘Jay signed a prenup, though, right? If he walked out, he got nothing.’
‘Jay wasn’t walking out,’ Clyde said. ‘No way. Fact is, for all the shit, he loved her. Or maybe he just loved shoving it in everyone’s face, white doc with her black stud. He didn’t want a divorce. No, sir. He was never going to give her up. If anything, she was a bronco he was determined to bust.’
Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) Page 5
