by Matthew Iden
The pudgy manager had watched me from just inside the door as I examined everything. As I straightened up from looking under the bed and wiped my hands on the legs of my jeans, he asked, “Guess there was nothing to find.”
“I guess not.”
He opened the door and I walked out into the sun, waiting for him to lock the door. I followed him back to the office, where he took up his post behind the counter.
“Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
He raised his eyebrows as if to say If you have to. Apparently he thought he had been handed the moral high ground when I’d come up empty on the search.
“You own this place?”
He nodded.
“Were you here the night Hope was killed?”
“Yep.”
“I know you told the police all of this, but would you mind giving me the rundown of that night? Did you see anyone? Hear anything? Who found the body and when? That kind of thing.”
He sighed. “I’m the owner, janitor, chief cook and bottle washer, so I guess I was working that night. I didn’t see anything or anybody. I didn’t hear anything. I turn in around eight every night and live down the road, so if something happened after then, I wouldn’t have seen it.”
“You don’t live here?” I asked. “What about late-night check-ins?”
“Mister, look around. No one’s pulling in here after dark. I don’t even know why I stay open until eight.”
“How do guests get a hold of you if they have a problem?”
“There’s an after-hours number if they need me.”
“And no one called that night, I take it?”
He shook his head.
“Who found the body?”
“Cleaning girl. Started screaming…well, bloody murder, when she saw it.” The man grinned at his own joke.
“And then the cops came.”
“Yep.”
“Were there any possessions or effects?”
The man slipped a finger into his mouth along the gum and fished around for a minute. “A suitcase. The family took that.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nope.”
“Sure about that?”
The first sign of worry, a little crease over the brow. “Yeah. Of course.”
I leaned my elbows against the counter and looked down on him. “I ask because I’m curious how a person—even a single man—leaves nothing but clothes behind. See, I talked to the next of kin and they told me they’d gotten the suitcase, but literally nothing else. No credit card statements, no bank cards, no day planner. Not even junk mail. Isn’t that strange? I mean, who doesn’t get junk mail?”
The man started fidgeting with a paper on the edge of the ink blotter on the desk. “How the hell would I know what he did with his mail?”
I didn’t answer, just walked over to the window and pulled the curtain back. The cold air from the AC unit hit me in the face like a slap. “Help me figure this out. You own a motel five miles from the middle of nowhere. You don’t have any help except the cleaning lady because no one’s coming in. But you’ve got a brand-new Tahoe and a pretty slick computer on the desk. Where’s the money come from?”
“This is a business expense,” the man said, unable to help himself from glancing at the computer screen. “I saved up for the Tahoe.”
“Good man. Not enough savers in today’s economy,” I said. I paused, trying to get the timing right. “But how about the hooker in number seven? She a business expense, too?”
His mouth bobbed open and shut, but he didn’t have anything to say. I pressed on.
“Here’s the funny thing. The happy hooker is still not enough to explain the Tahoe. You can’t be pulling in more than a fraction of whatever she makes and, no offense to her, but I just don’t see your cut of her earnings being enough to pay for a car that’s as expensive as some of the houses down here. Can I guess what else is going on?”
The man stared down at the countertop in front of him like it was a Bible or a schematic for getting out of a bind.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that credit cards aren’t just accepted here, they’re downright encouraged. Am I right? And if your guests were smart enough to track their statements, they might notice something’s amiss. But if you’re careful and keep the charges small, then they almost never notice. And, hey, if you pull in a bonus once in a while—like a dead guy’s private paperwork—you could make a nice living for yourself, emptying his bank account and setting up dummy credit card accounts under his name. Which is a good thing, since you’re losing your shirt on the motel and I bet the money you get from the hooker doesn’t even net you gas money.”
“What do you want?” he asked hoarsely, still staring at the counter.
I rapped a knuckle on the countertop until he looked up. “I want everything you got of J.D. Hope’s. All of it. Now. You leave anything out and I’ll drag you to the police myself.”
I expected a struggle, but maybe the guy had been waiting for someone to drop the hammer on him. Some crooks expect it from the minute they break a law. He stood and waddled to a back room behind the counter. I heard some things being moved around and dropped on the floor, then he came back into the office with a large cardboard box, about two feet to a side. He wrestled it up onto the counter and took a step back, like he expected a cop to pop out of the box.
“If you turn me in,” he said, getting a little gumption back, “I’ll deny it. I’ll just say I forgot about it after I cleaned the room.”
“Sure,” I said. I was still going to hand him over to the Cain’s Crossing’s PD when all this was done. He could be their problem. “Thanks for your cooperation.”
I picked up the box and turned to go. I left him that way, looking forlornly at his computer screen, wondering if his identify-theft ring of one was destroyed forever.
Chapter Thirteen
A quick peek in the box revealed a pile of unorganized paper junk that was going to take some time to work through. I felt simultaneously elated and bored. Paper was a great way to chase down leads, but it took time and patience.
It would be nice to have some help tackling the job. I chewed on that the whole way back to town, then decided Mary Beth made the most sense. Not only was it polite and might endear her to me, she might recognize something that I wouldn’t. Even though she’d lived in Baltimore for years, she could still have an eye for local names, businesses, and addresses. Chick was another possibility, but I had an inherent aversion, going way back, to giving reporters anything but heavily sanitized information. Since the cops couldn’t have been less interested and Dorothea would no doubt refuse to talk to me, there was no one else in town who qualified.
We met at Lula Belle’s. Mary Beth walked through the door five minutes after I’d sat down, looking flushed and harried. She slid into the booth opposite me.
“Is this it?” she asked, lifting the lid on the box and wrinkling her nose.
“Yes.”
“Where did you get it?” she asked.
“I’d rather not say,” I said. “Let’s concentrate on what’s in it instead of who had it.”
“I don’t like the idea that someone held on to something of J.D.’s. Even junk.”
“I understand how you feel, but we can fry those fish later,” I said. “Right now, we’re better off using it to dig for information on J.D.’s killer.”
She sighed, unhappy, but nodded and said, “All right. Hand me a stack.”
We sat at a corner booth, drinking burnt coffee and sorting the paper record of J.D. Hope’s life for the next three hours. Shopping lists and Walmart receipts lay atop fast-food wrappers and fliers for rock shows that had probably been slipped under the door or hung on the knob. We removed each one from the box, smoothed it, and placed it carefully into one of three piles I’d created based on whether they were personal, financial, or random. Nothing was absolute junk. You never knew when the date on a gas receipt was the magic clue or a doodle on
the back of an envelope was actually a decent portrait of the guy you were hunting.
Naturally, I was hoping for something more straightforward, but nothing leapt from the box and danced on the tabletop, waving its arms. A bank envelope looked promising, but contained only some sample checks and a Virginia state map with hand-drawn circles on it. The circles got me excited until Mary Beth gently pointed out that they were printed hand-drawn circles, put there by the gas company that owned the stations circled on the map, which they’d sponsored.
By the time the last piece of paper was stacked on the pile, I felt fuzzy and cross-eyed and I could tell Mary Beth, unused to this kind of tedium, was feeling it too. I put the box on the floor and pushed the piles to one corner of the table, then waved a waitress over.
“Let’s eat,” I told Mary Beth. “I’m going to start crying if I have to look at one more sheet of paper.”
We ordered. I got vegetable soup, Mary Beth a tuna-salad sandwich. The food was unremarkable, but our minds were somewhere else.
“Not much for an entire life, is it?” she said, glancing at the piles.
“Twenty years in the joint doesn’t leave you with much,” I said. “Not much call for Pottery Barn catalogs in the pen.”
She nodded, distracted. “Still, it’s sad.”
We finished and pushed the plates to one side, then I stacked each pile neatly on top of the other, until I had a super pile.
“Okay, if you don’t mind, I’m going to hold on to these. I didn’t see anything worth chasing just now, but you never know when something we’ve got here—a date or a time or the name of a fast-food joint—will break things wide open.”
“Missed one,” she said, reaching deep into the box. She pulled out a very thin, very small piece of paper that had gotten stuck under one of the leaves of the box.
“What is it?”
She frowned. “It’s a prescription.”
“May I?” I asked. She handed it to me. The handwriting was atrocious, so I couldn’t begin to decipher what the medicine or the amount was. But the name of the doctor who had written the prescription was printed legibly at the top, like a letterhead. Dr. Joel Raycroft.
“Does this tell us anything?” Mary Beth asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But Dr. Raycroft will.”
. . .
Cain’s Crossing Medical Arts was located just outside of town on a plot that had probably been a horse farm or a meadow last year. The small hillock it sat on was rounded just so, hinting that nature hadn’t formed it quite that way, and the brickwork, signage, and fresh-out-of-the-box landscaping told me that Raycroft and Associates had moved in since last baseball season.
Mary Beth and I parked and walked through the foyer and into the waiting room. I should’ve been prepared, but my mind was on the case, not myself. Just a single step into the foyer and the smell, look, feel, and sound of the place rolled over me like a wave. I balked like a horse being led though a gate and almost tripped as we approached the registration window. The antiseptic bite of the medical environment had taken me back to every one of the doctors’ appointments I’d had over the last year. Things were trending better in that department, of course, but this wasn’t a part of the brain under my control. Feelings of fear, pain, and confusion were interwoven with doctors’ offices and hospitals and there wasn’t much I could do to stop it.
“Are you okay?” Mary Beth asked. A young woman reading a magazine in the waiting room glanced in our direction.
“I’m fine,” I said, lying. I took a deep breath and moved to the window.
A scruffy twenty-something guy with blond hair and a beard sat on the other side, tapping away at a keyboard. He was heavyset and I could hear his asthmatic breathing through the glass. His gaze never left the monitor screen. I waited patiently. When thirty seconds had gone by and he hadn’t so much as glanced at us, Mary Beth elbowed me to one side.
“Excuse me, sweetie,” she said. The young man raised his head, blank of face. No one had called him sweetie since the third grade.
“Yes?”
“Is Dr. Raycroft available?”
He blinked. “Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“He’s booked for the rest of the day.”
Mary Beth got a worried expression on her face. “Do you think he’s got a teeny bit of time for a few questions? Detective Singer here would like to talk to him regarding a murder case he’s involved in, you see.”
“What? Shit. I mean, sure,” the kid said, pushing away from the desk. “Hold on a sec.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the young woman raise her head from her magazine again at the words murder investigation. Words carry well in waiting rooms. The receptionist disappeared through an office door, banging it shut behind him.
It opened a minute later and the scruffy kid waved us back. We followed him down a hall to an office. Sitting at a small desk was a trim man with a mane of silver hair and just enough color in his cheeks, wearing a white coat over a blue striped dress shirt with perfectly knotted scarlet tie, the very picture of a successful physician. He was writing something on a pad as we walked in, but bounced to his feet as we came near.
“Joel Raycroft,” he said, coming around the desk with his hand outstretched like a lance. We introduced ourselves. “Billy said you’re investigating a murder?”
“Nothing to worry about, Doctor,” I said. “Well, not too much. We’re looking into the death of J.D. Hope.”
“Oh,” he said. He sat on the edge of his desk. “Terrible thing, the way he died.”
“How did you know J.D., Doctor?” Mary Beth asked. “Was he a patient of yours?”
“May I ask what your interest is?”
“I’m J.D.’s sister,” Mary Beth said, sweetly but with steel under the words. “I’ve asked Detective Singer to help me get to the bottom of his killing. Which I very much doubt you had a hand in. I just would like to know as much as I can about J.D., whether it had to do with his murder or not. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course,” he said, hesitating. “Certainly I want to help. But, you know I can’t speak in much detail, I hope? My patients retain their rights to privacy, even in death.”
“Feel free to speak in generalities, Doctor,” Mary Beth said, pouring on the sugar.
Raycroft smiled. “We don’t have to be cryptic. Just careful. I can tell you John was referred to me by a colleague in DC. I’d been seeing him for almost a year. He was a good listener, engaged in the process, wanting to know about how to improve his health. A model patient, really.”
“I understand you have a responsibility to respect your patients’ confidentiality, even deceased ones, but would you mind taking a look at this?” I handed him the prescription we’d found. He took it from me delicately, as if afraid of touching my hand. A glance seemed to be all he needed, as he nodded and handed it back.
“Did you write this prescription, Dr. Raycroft?” Mary Beth asked.
“It appears to be one of mine,” he said. “Though I would want to check our records before I laid ownership to it.”
“Are you afraid it’s a forgery?” I asked.
He smiled weakly and the confident patrician image wobbled a bit. “Not really. But I’m the defendant in two malpractice cases right now. You’ll forgive me if I don’t admit to anything I can’t independently confirm. Or I’m not subpoenaed to confirm.”
“I understand,” I said. “Hypothetically speaking, even if it wasn’t one of yours, could you tell us what drug the prescription is for?”
“Riluzole,” he said. “A rather heavy dose of it, in fact.”
“What is it used to treat?”
“Well, the use of it is still rather controversial. There are reported side effects that many patients claim are as damning as the disease, though I personally think that’s a stretch.”
I sighed. “What disease is that, doctor?”
“ALS,” he said.
“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
Mary Beth stiffened beside me. I asked, “What does Riluzole do for the disease?”
“It’s not a cure, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “ALS is fatal. The disease often progresses quickly. Patients lose muscle control and, eventually, respiratory function. Pneumonia sets in and eventually respiratory compromise leads to death. The best we can offer is relief for the worst of the symptoms. In a nutshell, Riluzole delays the need for a ventilator or a tracheotomy.”
“For how long?”
“Three to five months. There are some rare instances of it increasing patient survival for up to a year, maybe slightly longer. The data is not encouraging beyond eighteen months.”
Mary Beth was quivering like a bowstring. Raycroft, engaged in his clinical element, was oblivious.
“Can Riluzole be abused?” I asked. “Is there a market for it?”
“Dealing it? Like, on the streets?” he asked, surprised by the question. “No. It wouldn’t do a thing to a healthy person. Or for them.”
I asked, “How long had this particular prescription been in use?”
At that, Raycroft shut his mouth with an near-audible snap. We weren’t dealing with hypotheticals anymore—this was a direct question about J.D. I could imagine the advice of his malpractice attorney echoing in his head.
“Please, Doctor,” Mary Beth said. “I don’t want to sue you. I don’t care about money. I just want to know about my brother. What his life was like. What he was going through.”
Raycroft looked at her, suddenly seeming to realize the effect his words had had on her. The struggle between sympathy and self-preservation played across his face, plain to see.
“How long, Doctor?” I asked.
He sighed and closed his eyes. “Almost seven months.”
. . .
Mary Beth made it through the waiting room, but once outside she made a sharp right-hand turn, walked five steps, then leaned against the hot brick and began sobbing. I went over and put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrunk away, so I went back to the car and sat on the hood to give her some time. It was hot and the sun beat on me in the black-topped parking lot, but the least I could do was suffer a little.
