Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  “The AP guy asked before I could. Rigoletti evaded the question and the guy didn’t follow up. I buttonholed the lieutenant after the press conference to pursue that line of questioning. He looked daggers at me before breaking out all the clichés—all angles are being investigated, the state police are leaving no stone unturned, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “He mention anything about Patrick’s sister being assaulted in Bangor this morning?”

  “No. Leah texted me about it, but the press conference was over by then.”

  “I’m now on my way to the Bangor hospital. Christie’s riding shotgun. I plan to talk to the cops and see Kathleen if they’ll let me.”

  “If you have trouble getting the cops to talk to you, let me know,” Roz said. “I’m quite well acquainted with one of the top dicks up there, and will be happy to lean on him if they’re uncooperative.”

  * * *

  The big medical center that serves all of eastern Maine is perched high on the west bank of the mighty Penobscot River. A cop who looked like he was on the home stretch to retirement sat in the corner of the Emergency Department, watching the flow of people with one eye and a televised golf match with the other. Because Kathleen worked in the ED, the cop knew her personally. He reassured me she wasn’t badly hurt and told me the name of the detectives working the case.

  “The doc was busy stitching up Katie, so they buzzed back to the scene.” His graveled voice and choice of words would have made him a natural for a 1940s cops and robbers movie. “Two minutes ago they wheeled her upstairs. Third floor.”

  I thanked him for the information and asked directions to the restrooms. It didn’t seem to occur to him that we intended to head upstairs in search of his pal Katie, and I didn’t mention it.

  Kathleen’s room had a water view, but she was in no position to enjoy it. A serious bandage covered the back of her head and her eyes were closed when I slipped into her room. She spoke without opening her eyes.

  “More tests?”

  “It’s Joe, Kathleen. Joe Gale, from the Portland paper.”

  She opened one eye. “What are you doing here?”

  “You called me, when whatever happened to you was happening.”

  She closed the eye. “Well that’s interesting.”

  She pawed around until she found the button that adjusted the angle of her bed and maneuvered herself into a more upright position. “Pardon me for keeping my eyes closed, but I have a blazing headache. It helps to keep them shut.”

  “What happened?” I felt a bit like a jerk for jumping right in, but it’s my job to ask questions. As much as I liked Kathleen, I hadn’t driven like a maniac across three counties to be her friend.

  “I wish the hell I knew.” She opened both eyes a tiny bit, peered at me through the slits in her lids. “You look kind of casual today.”

  “I was hiking when I heard you were in the ER.” I didn’t mention my hiking partner was sitting in the waiting room, reading a magazine.

  “They call it the ED here. Emergency Department. You know Bangor. Fierce about doing things its own way. Anyway, I thought I knew all of its ins and outs, but I’ve never been a patient there before. Got great service. My colleagues up-triaged me. Professional courtesy.”

  “So what went on at your house this morning that brought you here?” Assuming pain meds were warring for her focus, I was prepared to repeat the question as often as necessary.

  She opened both eyes halfway, fixed me with a look that was the opposite of fuzzy-headed.

  “Damn if I know. The EMTs, the cops, the nurses, the doctors and now you want to know that, and so do I. But I have no idea.” She adjusted the bed angle another two inches, then leaned her head back against the pillow. “Last thing I remember is being in the laundry room, hanging up a dress.” Her eyes leaked tears, and her voice fell to a whisper. “The dress I bought to wear to my brother’s funeral.”

  “Did someone knock or ring the bell? Did Ritz go crazy?”

  “Ritz.” She said her dog’s name in a little girl tone of voice. “Who will look after him while I’m here?”

  “Probably your friend Lola. She’s the one who found you on the floor, when she came to find out why you stood her up.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Lola? I don’t know.”

  “She must know what happened. Can you find her?”

  Before I finished saying I’d try, Kathleen had dropped into a drug-induced dreamland.

  * * *

  It took no effort at all to find Lola, because she’d found me. I was sitting across from Christie in the waiting room, filling her in on my unproductive conversation with Kathleen, when a tall, extremely thin woman with long, curly auburn hair strode into the room and introduced herself.

  “The nurse at the desk told me you were in visiting Kathleen. She thought you were a relative.”

  I told I was in fact a reporter, the one she’d redialed on Kathleen’s cell phone, and that the patient had dozed off in the middle of a conversation during which she wasn’t able to tell me what happened.

  “She suffered a concussion, so that’s not surprising,” Lola said. “She was unconscious when I showed up at her house, and unable to talk much when she came to.”

  “Did she give you any clue about what happened?”

  Lola unzipped her pale blue fleece while I pulled another chair over so we’d have as much privacy as a hospital waiting room allowed.

  “She didn’t tell me anything except where it hurt. But it was clear from the state of her foyer that someone else had been there, and there’d been a ruckus. A glass had been smashed on the floor. Ritz was shut in the coat closet, barking his head off. The umbrella stand was on its side. A painting was hanging almost sideways. And the front door was open partway.”

  “Ritz was shut in the closet. That had to be deliberate.”

  “Seemed that way to me, and the police, too. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have been convinced there was an intruder.”

  “Really? What about all the other stuff?”

  “Kathleen might have caused all of that herself.” Lola looked at me, her eyes unblinking. “The broken glass held bourbon. It was puddled on the floor.” She wrinkled her nose. “The smell is unmistakable. And all of us—her friends—have been aware that she’s been self-medicating with booze quite a bit lately.”

  “But you’re convinced today she wasn’t crashing around in her house, drunk.”

  “Ritz in the closet tells me someone else was there, and maybe she was drunk, but maybe she wasn’t. They took a blood sample, so we’ll know soon enough. For now they’re holding back on pain meds.”

  So Kathleen’s inability to stick with our conversation wasn’t due to drugs. And it was almost four o’clock, so hours would have passed since her last drink, if she was in fact drunk when it happened.

  “I’m glad you found her cell phone and called my office.”

  “The miracle of modern technology,” Lola said. “Let’s poke our heads back inside her room, see if she’s awake.”

  This time Christie came with us. I heard a voice murmuring when we reached the door of the room but it stopped on a dime when we stepped inside. The click of someone ending a phone call was audible over the hallway noise.

  “Hey, Joe. I see you found Lola.” Kathleen’s easy tone didn’t hide the surreptitious slide of her cell phone beneath the covers.

  I didn’t push Kathleen about her furtive phone call at first. I waited until I was sure she was feeling strong enough to take a little pushback. She knew that I knew that she’d been trying to hide her phone when Christie, Lola and I walked in. She watched my eyes move to the rectangular bump under the blanket next to her right hip. But I asked no questions, let her tell us that she had no idea how she ended up on the floor of
her home’s entryway, bleeding from the head and surrounded by signs of a struggle.

  “The doc said I may recover some memory, but right now it’s a blank.”

  “Forget about whatever happened in the foyer, what do you remember about the morning generally?” Lola’s voice was soft and soothing.

  “I took a shower, let Ritz out into the yard, put on a pot of coffee. That was early, maybe seven o’clock.”

  “Did you eat breakfast? Talk on the phone to anyone?”

  Kathleen’s face was expressionless. “I can’t remember anything about the rest of the morning.”

  I eased into gear. “That must feel weird.”

  She nodded, face still blank.

  “So who were you talking to on the phone just now?”

  “A neighbor. To ask if she’d watch Ritz.”

  “You know I’ll take him,” Lola said.

  Kathleen shrugged. “I didn’t want to put you out, but if you wouldn’t mind, that would be easier. My neighbor didn’t sound all that enthusiastic to help.”

  She skittered her eyes around the room and eventually closed them. Lola, Christie and I stepped into the hallway but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. Lola left to pick up the dog and Christie retreated to the waiting room to allow me some time alone with Kathleen. She was staring at the wall when I entered, wide awake.

  “So who were you really calling?”

  Kathleen gave me a crooked smile. “You have a fine-tuned bullshit detector, don’t you?”

  “Especially when I’m talking to a bad liar.”

  “I’m not lying. Trying to keep private things private, that’s all.”

  “Your brother was murdered. Someone assaulted you today at your own house. I don’t think it’s a good time to be keeping things to yourself.”

  She fixed her gaze on the window, where the late afternoon sun was illuminating the multicolored leaves on the far bank of the Penobscot River.

  “One thing didn’t have anything to do with the other,” she said. “My brother’s death didn’t have anything to do with what happened at my house this morning.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know quite well who came to my door. It was a friend, who came to offer sympathy. I invited him in. Big mistake. I had been drinking, and he doesn’t approve of my drinking.”

  Her voice trailed off. She bit her lip. When I didn’t fill the silence she eventually began to speak again.

  “I don’t think I really have a drinking problem, but this friend thinks I do. We’ve had words about it before. You’d think he’d have let it go today. I mean, if a girl can’t use bourbon to get through the week when her brother was murdered...”

  Fat tears ran down her cheeks. She wiped them aside. Kept looking out the window.

  “Is he a boyfriend?”

  She choked out a laugh. “Nope. Don’t have one of those. Haven’t since my ridiculous husband embarrassed me in front of the whole world. The way I’m feeling about men these days, I may never bother having one again.”

  “Did you and your friend get into an argument? Did he hit you?”

  “No. No. No.” She sighed. “I don’t know what to say, Joe. The police—who no doubt will be back here as soon as the nurses let them know I’m awake—jumped to the conclusion that someone’s got it in for the Doherty kids. You’re making the same assumption. You need to trust me when I tell you that you’re wrong. What happened to me at my house today was my own fault. I argued with my friend but he didn’t hurt me. I fell and hurt myself.”

  I did not try to hide my skepticism. “How’d Ritz get locked in the closet?”

  “I don’t remember. You’ve got to understand. I drank my way through the night. I was still blitzed when I woke up, and put a shot of booze in my coffee to ease me into the morning. It’s embarrassing as all hell, but nobody assaulted me this morning. So far I’ve told the cops what I originally tried to sell you—that I have no memory of what occurred. But I realize they’re out beating the bushes looking for clues about a home invasion. Before they interrogate every single one of my neighbors I’m going to have to admit to them what I just admitted to you.” Tears flooded her eyes again. “It’s humiliating.”

  “The cops are going to demand the name of your friend. They’re going to want to question him. It’s what cops do.”

  She buried her face in her hands. “I’m not going to drag my friend into this mess. He doesn’t deserve it. The focus this week needs to stay on my brother, my sainted brother, and finding his killer.”

  I didn’t buy it, not all of it, anyway. But it was obvious that, having told me her tale, I’d wasn’t going to get anything more out of Kathleen. Not that afternoon, anyway. I took my leave without pressing her to explain why she’d called me at the Chronicle that morning. No doubt she’d say she was too drunk to remember.

  When I was filling Christie in, a pair of Bangor detectives came off the elevator. They stopped at the waiting room door and gave us a good look. One of them appeared to be about sixteen years old. The other was middle-aged with a bushy moustache and full head of black hair silvering at the temples. I was wondering if he was Roz’s buddy when the young one marched up to me, a peeved look on his face.

  “You the press?”

  “Yeah. Joe Gale, Portland Daily Chronicle.”

  “Since when do Portland reporters come to Bangor?”

  I glanced at the middle-aged guy, whose face was impassive. “When the sister of a homicide victim gets assaulted.”

  “Well, you wasted your time and your gas. We’ve got no comment, and we’re not going to have any comment, so there’s no point sticking around.”

  “State cops in on this?”

  “Got no comment on that, either.” The kid cop turned on his heel and strode down the hallway.

  I shrugged and stood up. “Time to head south,” I said to Christie.

  Let them think I’d been waiting like a good boy all along. And good luck to them getting a straight story out of Kathleen.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rufe left his cell phone on his dresser Saturday morning, determined to spend at least part of the day out of the relentless speculation loop. If he could find a way to clear his mind he was convinced important stuff would surface—details of his conversations with Pat, unconscious observations he’d made while talking with the cast of characters involved in the horrible situation—stuff that might help him figure out what had cost his friend his life.

  He went to the gym early and worked out like a demon with the free weights, then pushed himself on the high-tech cardio equipment until he was drenched with sweat. After a shower and a protein shake, he headed for the shop at the community theater and joined a three-person crew building a set. He was feeling almost normal when they knocked off at noon. He swung into Christie’s driveway on his way home, having forgotten she and Joe were off on a hiking date.

  Theo Pappas—half man, half boy—was checking out the contents of the refrigerator when Rufe tapped on the kitchen door. Dark like his mother, he had a strong, lean build. He’d been navigating the choppy waters of adolescence with relative ease until—consumed by the need to meet the man whose DNA he’d inherited—he tracked down his biological father online. That experience put him on an emotional rollercoaster with no apparent off switch.

  Christie was stunned by the sudden transformation and both Joe and Rufe tried to talk her through the crisis. The most important work of a teenage boy was to sort out his place in the world, Rufe had advised one recent morning at the Rambler. Theo needed more than simply to meet his father, he needed the opportunity to size him up, figure out if there was anything to take away, good or bad. Intellectually, Christie got it. But emotionally, she was a mess, and while she tried to hide it, her son intuited that she was gritting her teeth e
very time her long-ago boyfriend’s name was mentioned.

  Theo gave up on the refrigerated offerings and made them each a peanut butter and banana sandwich.

  Rufe was grateful both for the protein boost and the opportunity to have a private talk with Theo about the questions that had been on his mind since the start of the school year. “Can we talk about this bombing shit?”

  “What about it?”

  “Who’s doing it?”

  “Hell if I know. Why are you getting in my face about that?”

  “I’m not in your face, Theo. But I have been worrying about you.”

  “That I’ll get hurt in an explosion, or that I’m crazy enough to be the bomber?”

  Rufe took a breath. “Can we start over?”

  Theo slouched in his chair. “My mother practically wants to put a leash on me. I didn’t expect this shit from you.”

  “I’m sorry if it sounded like I was accusing you. I’m not. But I raised my share of hell in this town when I was your age, and know how it is when you’re out with the guys, and someone gets an idea...”

  Theo put both hands in the air, a gesture of irritated surrender. “No one knows who the bomber is. Some guys in the know say it’s Portland kids wanting to make Riverside kids look bad. You know, like we’re mill town thugs.”

  “That’s stupid. Riverside’s not a mill town anymore. It’s all high-tech jobs now, and cool condos on the Cascabago River.”

  “Well, Portland guys think they’re better than everyone, which is why my friends think they’re the ones setting off the damn bombs.”

  “I hope the cops nail them soon, then,” Rufe said. “Portland assholes.”

  Theo smiled at that. A few minutes later he was handicapping his team’s chances in the upcoming state cross-country meet when a loud knock at the front door caused them both to jump.

  The second knock was even louder. “Probably someone gathering signatures or handing out prayer cards,” Rufe said. “Two cars in the driveway tells ’em someone’s home. They’re persistent as all hell. You want me to get it?”