Head Case

by Michael Wiley

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said.

  He showered and fed the cats. Then he turned his phone back on.

  There were seven voicemail messages from Venus Johnson and one from her partner Dan Peters.

  Johnson’s messages played a single tune. Where the hell are you? Where the hell did you go? Get the hell back here. Dan Peters’ message summed up her words. We expect you to give a statement at the station at eight a.m.

  Kelson looked at the clock. It was 7:48. ‘Expect away.’

  He rode the elevator downstairs and drove to AZT Emergency Services instead. The company sent out ambulances from a single-story gray-brick building a block from the tangle of on- and off-ramps where the Dan Ryan Expressway met the Eisenhower. A sign in front said A Z T in big red block letters and We’re there when you need us in smaller cursive.

  ‘Or when you don’t,’ Kelson said. ‘As the case may be.’

  Kelson went into the office through a glass door. No one was at the reception desk, but behind a glass wall, a dispatcher wearing a telephone headset sat at a desk, waiting for any emergencies the morning might bring.

  When Kelson tapped on the glass, the dispatcher raised his eyebrows. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Could I talk with whoever’s in charge?’ Kelson said.

  The dispatcher hit a button and spoke into a mouthpiece. ‘Mrs Erichsen – office, please.’ His voice reverberated through the building from an intercom. Then he said to Kelson, ‘Behind you.’

  A squat woman in jeans and a floral jacket came through a door from the ambulance garage. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kelson offered her a card. ‘I’m looking into the deaths of some people you took to Clement Memorial.’

  She studied the card. ‘Are you working for an insurance company?’

  ‘Nope – a bull rider.’

  ‘A bull rider?’

  ‘He’s a nurse now – though I sense he misses the rodeo. The dead people are Patricia Ruddig and Daryl Vaughn. There’s a third person too, though I don’t know if you transported him – Josh Templeton.’

  ‘None of those names means a thing to me. Our service transports dozens of people every day. Aside from the paperwork, we know little about them.’

  ‘That’s why I’m hoping you’ll check the paperwork,’ he said.

  ‘Can you tell me why we would want to do that for you and your bull-riding client?’

  ‘Can you tell me why you wouldn’t?’

  ‘As you can see, we’re very busy.’

  Kelson glanced into the dispatch room. The dispatcher sat listening to them, his headphones slack around his neck.

  ‘One of the Clement Memorial doctors died last night. She arranged for AZT ambulances to pick up Patricia Ruddig and Daryl Vaughn. She died of an overdose. Fentanyl. I found her when I went to ask her about the ambulances. Was the overdose accidental? Was it suicide? Was it something else?’

  The woman’s face fell. ‘Suzanne is dead?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know about any of this.’

  She stared into the dispatch room, then pursed her lips and gestured for Kelson to follow her into a conference room, where she closed the door. She offered Kelson a chair and took one herself. She seemed to need to sit. ‘Yes, I knew about Daryl Vaughn,’ she said. ‘And yes, Suzanne asked me to bring him over from Northwestern Medical.’ She stared into Kelson’s eyes as if looking for something to keep her afloat as a current drew her down. ‘Suzanne did this kind of thing a couple times a year – bringing in a man from one of the shelters or from the street. This was the first time she got one from another hospital. I told her it might raise flags. She reassured me. She died last night?’

  ‘I found her yesterday evening,’ Kelson said. ‘She’d already been dead a couple hours.’

  The woman looked down at the conference table. ‘This was Suzanne’s secret thing. Our secret thing.’

  ‘Sorry, but the secret’s out now. The hospital will check everything she had her hands on. They’ll have to.’

  ‘Suzanne would be mortified.’

  ‘Yeah, I would think so,’ Kelson said. ‘How did it work? You gave her kickbacks?’

  ‘What? No. You don’t get it – the men were injured or sick. She found them and brought them to the hospital for care they couldn’t afford and wouldn’t get without her. Once they were at Clement Memorial, the hospital was legally required to treat them, but they never would have gotten there without her. The hospital would fire her if anyone found out, but she did it because she cared about the men. She didn’t do it for money.’

  ‘Saint Suzanne?’

  The woman looked angry. ‘If you want the truth – yes.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You billed the hospital, right? You earned money from the deal.’

  ‘Because if I didn’t submit a bill, the hospital would know something was funny about the admissions. I stood to lose more than I gained. Without the Clement Memorial contract, my company would be in trouble. But Suzanne approached me – she persuaded me …’

  ‘Did you talk to her lately?’

  ‘Last week,’ she said. ‘We became friends, you know – over the years.’

  ‘Did you sense she ever worried about someone discovering your secret deal?’

  ‘She always worried. So did I. We reassured each other, I guess.’

  ‘Did you know about her using fentanyl?’

  ‘No – but it seems like most of the people I know use something.’ The sadness in the woman’s face looked deeper than tears. ‘Suzanne said she set up the admissions so no one would understand them for what they were.’

  ‘Would you check the paperwork?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They went out of the conference room and through the door into the ambulance garage. Four gleaming yellow and white ambulances stood on a polished concrete floor. In a break room, paramedics watched TV, played cards, or read their phones.

  Kelson followed the woman into a little windowless office.

  She sat at a desk and typed on a keyboard. When the results came up, she read the screen, touched another key, and read a new screen. ‘Yes,’ she said then. ‘We scheduled a pickup for January first, nine a.m. A bariatric patient named Clarence Viabhav. Probably to prep him for surgery the following day. An unusual date for an elective pickup, mostly because of doctor schedules over the holidays, but not unheard of. Then a nine-one-one call came in, and we grabbed it since we were close by. The elective pickup could wait.’

  ‘Was it ever rescheduled?’

  ‘No. That’s unusual too.’

  ‘I heard Dr Madani’s name is on the order.’

  ‘She was the physician on record for Clarence Viabhav’s transportation request.’

  ‘Did she do bariatric surgery?’

  ‘No, no. Sometimes orders come through with the name of any physician available for a signature. Her name on the order means nothing.’

  ‘How about Josh Templeton?’

  She typed on the keyboard, then read a screen, a second, and a third. ‘OK, this one is odd too. But Suzanne’s name doesn’t appear on it.’

  ‘So, what’s odd?’ Kelson asked.

  ‘When people report car accidents, they call nine-one-one. If we’re closest or have an ambulance nearby, we respond. This accident happened on Lake Shore Drive in an area usually serviced by other companies. But we got a direct call – which almost never happens for emergencies. And the caller asked us to take the victim to Clement Memorial – not the closest hospital.’

  ‘Who reported the accident?’

  ‘Someone identified in our records only as a witness.’

  ‘Any phone number?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything else unusual?’

  ‘That’s all,’ she said. ‘Does any of it help?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  Now there were tears in her eyes. ‘Suzanne did this for years without getting caught. Maybe no one
will see it now.’

  ‘Maybe …’

  ‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ she said.

  ‘I wish that was an option,’ he said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  As Kelson drove toward his office, his phone rang. He checked caller ID, then answered. ‘Get it over with.’

  ‘Where the hell did you go last night?’ Venus Johnson said.

  ‘Home to sleep.’

  ‘Why did you leave when I told you to stay?’

  ‘I’d had enough. Too much.’

  ‘Dan Peters told you to come down and give a statement.’

  ‘I was sleeping.’

  ‘Do you know what I want to do to guys like you?’

  ‘I have a pretty good idea. I try to keep a step in front of you.’

  ‘Kelson, you’re so far behind you can’t see my tail lights.’

  ‘As long as we keep our distance.’

  ‘Most of the time, I’d like that. Right now, I want you here telling me everything you know about Suzanne Madani.’

  ‘How about ten minutes?’

  ‘How about five?’

  Twenty minutes later, he walked through security at the Harrison Street station and went to the homicide room. Johnson and Peters sat in their cubicle.

  ‘Good morning,’ Kelson said.

  Peters snatched a digital recorder from his desk and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  They went to an interview room – air conditioned even in the middle of January. ‘If you’re not already shivering with fear?’ Kelson said, and sat on a metal chair.

  Peters switched on the recorder and stated the time, the date, Kelson’s name, and the officers present. Then Johnson said, ‘Tell it.’

  Kelson told it. All of it. Including what he’d just learned from the woman at AZT. When he started to explain how he felt excited as Dr Madani massaged his fingers to check for sensation after he woke from his gunshot wound, Johnson switched off the recorder.

  ‘When you spill, you spill everything,’ she said.

  ‘No levees on this river,’ Kelson said. ‘No sandbags around this foundation. No—’

  ‘Got it,’ she said.

  ‘No drains in this tub.’

  ‘Got it,’ she said.

  ‘Was the death accidental or a suicide?’ he asked.

  Dan Peters shook his head. ‘You were a narcotics cop for, what, eight years? You know better than that.’

  ‘You mean because there weren’t old needle marks on her thigh? I tried not to look. You mean because if you’re killing yourself, you load it all into the syringe – you don’t go to sleep with a full vial of fentanyl in your hand?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean that and more,’ Peters said.

  ‘What’s the more?’

  ‘The more is her prints were on the empty vials and syringe – close to but not quite where they’d make sense if she was injecting herself. The more is why would a successful doctor who’s so good-looking she can turn on a screwball like you just by touching his hand want to kill herself?’

  ‘A lot of suicides make little sense, though, right? Besides, she was afraid her charity deal with the homeless men was about to go public.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s that. But except for one set of prints on the doorknob – yours – the place was clean. Her prints weren’t on the knob. Someone wiped it down and then you touched it. Personally, I kind of wish we could nail you for the killing.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ Kelson said.

  Peters said, ‘Do you think there’s anything to this idea about the three deaths at the hospital being funny?’

  ‘I didn’t worry much about them at first,’ Kelson said. ‘No pattern. No connection. I can still explain away each of the circumstances. But add them together and there’s a lot to explain.’

  ‘Madani is a connection,’ Peters said.

  ‘And now she’s dead,’ Kelson said. ‘A broken connection.’

  Johnson said, ‘We’ll need to talk to your bull rider.’

  ‘You can try,’ Kelson said. ‘You’ll find him working at the hospital. But he distrusts cops. He has a big, bad history with you guys. What else did you find out about Suzanne Madani?’

  ‘Nothing we can share,’ Peters said.

  ‘I tell you everything I know, and you give me nothing?’

  ‘That’s the way it works,’ Peters said. ‘We’re the cops. You’re the not-cop. We ask questions. You give answers.’

  ‘Long answers,’ Johnson said.

  Kelson said, ‘Don’t expect me to come running when you need help.’

  ‘You didn’t come running,’ Peters said. ‘You went home and slept.’

  ‘I’d had enough.’

  ‘Go home again now,’ Peters said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘Funny thing.’ Kelson stood up. ‘I woke full of energy.’

  Before he got to the door, Johnson said, ‘We think Madani might’ve been unconscious when she was injected. No signs of struggle. We’re testing for Rohypnol. She went down to the hospital cafeteria an hour and a half before you found her. Eating alone, we think. But people stop by a table when you eat alone – colleagues, families of patients. One of them could’ve slipped her something. Or maybe someone gave it to her afterward in her office.’

  ‘How about security video?’

  Johnson glanced at Peters, who shook his head. She told Kelson anyway. ‘No cameras in Madani’s hallway. Plenty around the rest of the hospital. We’re looking at recordings to see if we can identify a trail.’

  ‘Do her files tie her to the dead patients?’

  ‘We haven’t touched them,’ Johnson said. ‘We need a court order to get around doctor–patient confidentiality. We haven’t even started into her computer.’

  ‘Will you tell me if anything turns up?’

  ‘I’ve already told you more than I should,’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘You push too hard,’ she said. ‘You need to learn when to shut up and be grateful.’

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ he said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Kelson got back to his office, he pulled his Springfield pistol from the bottom desk drawer and checked the magazine. He put the gun away, took the KelTec from its under-the-desk rig, and checked it too.

  He took his laptop from the top drawer. ‘Circle back,’ he told it.

  As it booted up, he called Jose Feliciano. The call bounced to voicemail, and he said, ‘You must know about Suzanne Madani by now. A couple of homicide cops are coming to talk with you about – well, everything. Sorry.’

  He hung up and opened Google. ‘Circle,’ he said, and typed the name Dougie Ruddig – Patricia Ruddig’s son. He got no hits. He tried Douglas Ruddig and then Doug Ruddig. Nothing and nothing.

  He stared at the computer. Then he said, ‘First husband.’ The deskman at Patricia Ruddig’s building told him Dougie was her son by her first marriage. ‘Not Ruddig.’

  Kelson got the building phone number and called it.

  ‘Y’hello,’ said the deskman.

  ‘As cheerful as a guy who wears reindeer sweaters in January,’ Kelson said, then told him what he wanted.

  The deskman said, ‘Tomlinson. Dougie Tomlinson.’

  ‘You said before that he lives in Barrington?’

  ‘Yeah, works at a bank there.’

  Kelson Googled Dougie Tomlinson. He got a couple hundred hits, and so he added Barrington – and got nothing. But Douglas Tomlinson was a Wells Fargo branch manager in Barrington. Kelson found Tomlinson’s Facebook page. It included a profile picture of a round-faced man in his forties with thinning black hair and glasses. ‘The unassuming type,’ Kelson said. The posts – mostly from the summer months – showed Tomlinson racing a little Sunfish sailboat. In those pictures, he wore Ray-Bans. ‘Nope, Dougie,’ Kelson said, ‘you don’t sell it.’

  An hour after Kelson tucked his computer back into the desk drawer, he drove into Barrington, a moneyed suburb forty miles northwest of the c
ity. He went past a wine bar, turned at a jeweler’s, and swung into the Wells Fargo parking lot. He edged into a space made skinny by a mound of ice and walked into a lobby where a single teller stood behind a bank counter designed for three. The teller brightened as Kelson came in and asked how she could help.

  ‘Mr Tomlinson, please?’ he said.

  She nodded at an open door, where Dougie Tomlinson, dressed in a gray business suit, sat at a desk. ‘He’s with another customer. But he should only be a few minutes.’

  Kelson sat in one of the vinyl armchairs in the waiting area. ‘Sleepy town,’ he said to the teller.

  ‘No one comes in,’ she said, quietly, as if the secret could get her fired.

  By the time the customer stepped out of Tomlinson’s office twenty minutes later, Kelson had explained his compulsion to tell strangers about himself ever since Bicho shot him in the head. The teller had told him about her plans to backpack through southern Europe when she quit her job next summer – please say nothing about that to Mr Tomlinson.

  When the customer left the bank, Tomlinson put on a practiced smile, adjusted his glasses, and welcomed Kelson into his office. His hands looked soft and well scrubbed, and when he sat at his desk, he crossed his fingers as if he liked to display them. ‘What can we do for you?’ he asked.

  Kelson gave him a card and said, ‘I have a few questions about your mom’s death.’

  Tomlinson stared blankly at Kelson, then wiped the back of a well-scrubbed hand across his lips. ‘It’s been hard. She was all I had. She was difficult at times – always involved in my business – but now that she’s gone …’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kelson said.

  ‘I took care of her in the last few years – after Phil died. If nothing else, I gave her that. I took care of her.’

  ‘The women at Spyner’s Pub have mixed feelings about how you handled it. One of them thinks you’re a prick, though another says you aren’t so bad.’

  That startled him. ‘I worried about people taking advantage of Mom.’

  ‘Did those women do that?’

  ‘I couldn’t be with her all the time. I don’t know what went on when I wasn’t there. You have to understand, Mom liked to involve herself in other people’s lives.’