Clearwater Journals

by Al Rennie

“Yeah, I’ll go with you, but I’d feel better not leaving my car in this neighbourhood.”

  “Really?” said Cooper in mock surprise. “I can’t understand that—a nice almost new Jag in this place—what are the odds?” I found another cop with a sense of humour—what are those odds?

  “Slim and nil—there would be nothing left if this trip takes longer than five minutes.”

  “Give me your keys. I’ll get one of our uniform guys to take it into the station parking compound. It will be safe there until you need it.”

  Cooper called over one of the remaining uniforms and told him what he wanted. The young guy’s eyes lit up as he took my keys and he turned to look at the Jag. Cooper called him back to say something else like—take care of it.

  “Instead of going to the station, let’s go directly to the hospital,” said Cooper. He started to direct me back towards the front of the apartment where he had left his car. “We can talk there for a bit, and I can get an update on Miss. Doulton’s medical condition. I’ll need pictures of her injuries as well.”

  I agreed to Cooper’s proposal by nodding and walking along beside him. His unmarked cop car was a two-year old gray Chevy Impala. It had a whip antenna and a flashing red light that he’d stuck on the front top left hand corner of his roof sometime before he had left the vehicle when he arrived at the crime scene. The irony was not lost on old Fred.

  “Neat disguise eh?” he said with a self-mocking chuckle as he pulled the red light in through the driver’s window and started the car. I looked out the side window in time to see Max’s white Escalade crawl by.

  The drive to the hospital was fairly quiet. I was still puzzling through the reason anyone would want to hurt Mia so badly. It might have been random, or it might have been the result of stirring up the investigation into Vickie’s death. Or for a long shot—maybe Frank had given Max some direction. I didn’t like that idea. For his part, Cooper wanted to keep the conversation innocuous until he had more information and could make notes at the hospital. He radioed in his destination and asked for a patch to Chance Kemp. When the desk person finally made the connection—apparently Kemp was at home preparing to go to bed early—he simply asked Kemp to meet him in the emergency ward of the Tampa General Hospital as soon as he could get there.

  When we reached the hospital, Cooper pulled around behind the emergency area to a relatively small but quite crowded parking lot. The area was reserved entirely for cop cars and ambulances.

  When we entered the emergency area, Cooper directed me past the throng of sick and injured multi-coloured and varied ethnic humanity waiting, not so patiently in a few cases, for medical attention. He led me to a small, sparsely furnished, room. A moustachioed young muscular black officer in a sheriff’s department uniform was writing slowly on an official form. He looked up, nodded to Fred Cooper, who returned the gesture, ignored me and went back to his meticulous writing.

  “Wait here Joe, okay? I’ll be back in a few minutes. At my age, I gotta take a whiz about every hour,” Cooper confided by way of explanation. He turned quickly and left the small room.

  “These old guys,” the black cop said with a chuckle as he took a quick look at me, “they drink coffee and eat donuts all day, and then they complain when they always got to find a can. They’re detectives. You would think they might figure that mystery out.”

  I just smiled weakly. He had a point. But I was worried about Mia. He nodded again and went back to writing his report.

  A few minutes later, Cooper came back into the room with another man. This guy was the antithesis of Cooper. He was a sharp dresser and even though his suit clothes had been tailored to minimize the effects, it was readily obvious that he was a body builder. He was quite tanned and looked to be in his early forties, but being extremely fit, seemed much younger. The black cop who had been busy writing his report quickly stood up. The new guy waved him back to his seat and then turned his attention to me. If the reaction of the uniformed sheriff’s guy was any indication, this new cop with Cooper was a heavy weight in the chain of command. Cooper and his friend moved over to where I had stood and waited. Cooper’s pal extended his hand. We shook. His grip was firm but not over powering. His eyes were a gray blue and reflected a strong intellect. This guy was no lightweight intellect.

  “So you’re the Canadian cop that Stu told Fred about. By the way, I’m Chance—Chance Kemp. It’s good to meet you Joe. I would have preferred the meeting to take place in better circumstances. I am truly sorry.”

  “Ex-cop,” I corrected Kemp. “Any word about how she’s doing?” I asked.

  “Nothing yet,” Cooper answered. “She’s still unconscious and is likely to be that way for awhile according to the ward nurse. The doctors are still working to stabilize her. Her head injuries are pretty serious. According to the emergency nurse I talked to, there was significant damage done to her right frontal and occipital bones. I guess that she’s been hurt real bad other places as well.”

  “What’s your take on this?” Kemp asked. “I’ve talked quickly with Fred here, but I just started to get involved. You’ve been a part of it. You used to be a cop. Are we looking at random opportunity or pre-medicated savagery? Someone she knew or a total stranger?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that one out since just after I found her like that,” I confessed.

  “And?”

  “And that’s the same question we—Mia and I—have been asking about Vickie’s murder—random or premeditated? It’s just too coincidental not to believe the attack on her was planned.”

  “And the problem with that supposition is?” Kemp asked as if I was a rookie detective reviewing an old file.

  “The difficulty with that premise is—how did whoever it was know that she was going to be at her apartment this morning? I mean she’s been with me on the beach for the last two nights.”

  I paused to look at Kemp and then Cooper before I continued, “The only way I can answer that one is that, at sometime, she told someone—besides me—that she would be there during that time. If she did phone or tell someone, I would sure like to know who the hell that person was. I’d have a few hard questions that they would have to answer for me. Beyond that, there’s the extent and the nature of the assault. On a guess, I’d say someone—perhaps even two guys—tortured her through a fairly extended period of time—a couple of hours maybe. Usually, this kind of torture is used as a tool to get something—information. That again strongly points to it being done by someone who knew her. Then there’s the bloody blindfold. Maybe she knew the guy, and he really didn’t want to kill her—at least not at first. There also seemed to be overkill there—a lot of emotional rage—also indicating that the person who did this to her, knew her. In my limited experience, a pro or a psycho gets what he wants and moves on.”

  Even as I continued talking to Cooper and Kemp, I realized that I had slipped into the detached mode of thinking and talking that I had always used when I had been with McGregor on the Metro force. I wasn’t certain that I liked the feeling very much.

  “Your scenarios are along the lines of what we were thinking,” Kemp said when I finished with a shrug. “By the way, I’ve decided that I’ll be working with Fred on this one.”

  The sheriff’s deputy who had just been getting ready to leave the small room did a double take as Chance Kemp said he would be working with the old detective, Cooper. In fact, so did Fred. There was definitely something about Kemp that I needed to find out. Who the hell was he to generate the type of response he did? And how could he decide that he would be working with Cooper? With the Metro force, the brass always decided what criminal investigations a detective is assigned to work. Kemp must have some heavy clout.

  “Good,” I said. “If you go on the premise that Mia was not a random attack, what will you do now?”

  “Two things,” Kemp replied quickly, “We’ll follow regular police procedure making no assumptions whatsoever. That would include checking her phone records
for yesterday and today. The area will be canvassed to see if anyone saw or heard anything. How did this guy get to her apartment? If he drove in, did anyone see any strange cars? Young guys are good on that one. Forensics will do its thing. We’ll hit our snitches real hard to see if they have heard anything. I believe that we’ll go back and take a closer look at the murder of Vickie Doulton. How far had you and Stu Langdon got into reviewing that case?”

  “We really just started. I have a short list of the names of people I want to talk with. Right now, the name Eddie Ralston is big on that list, but apparently, he’s in jail. We wanted Mia to talk with him because we thought that she would stand a better chance of getting him to open up than Langdon. I guess it is common knowledge that there is some bad blood in the history between Ralston and Langdon. But I don’t guess that Mia will talk to Ralston now.”

  “Why is Ralston on your list?” Kemp asked almost surprised. For the petty crook Ralston was represented as, he seemed to be quite a well-known character.

  “According to Mrs. Bullock—Mia’s mom—Eddie Ralston was hanging around Vickie in the weeks before she was killed. We thought that maybe Vickie had told him about something in her life that led to her being killed. Maybe, she told him something that he doesn’t even recognize the significance of. Maybe, we just get a better feel for the girl’s state of mind during that time. Talking to mom or stepfather is like talking to blocks of stone. Again though, the random element is still a real possibility.”

  At that moment, a middle aged nurse who looked like she could be anybody’s favourite grandmother put her head in the door, nodded at the phone on the wall and told Kemp that he had a call.

  “I’ll wait outside, give you some privacy,” I said happy to be out of the small room. I wanted to be able to go and check on Mia for myself.

  Hospitals have never been a favourite hangout for me. After I was shot years ago in my gunfight at the mom and pop’s convenience store in Toronto, I spent more time in a hospital than anyone should have to in a lifetime. I found the nurse who had just told Kemp about his phone call and asked her about Mia.

  “No change, Sir, sorry,” she said as she turned away to deal with her next medical emergency.

  “Any chance I can stay with her—or at least sit with her?” I asked as I hurried along beside her.

  “None,” she replied curtly.

  “Excuse me a second longer,” I said to her as I stopped walking beside her which in turn stopped her in her tracks. “Could I ask you one more question?”

  She hesitated and glanced at me standing beside her then turned slowly to face me—probably counting to ten and muttering “God give me patience”—and said, “Yes, Sir. What is your third question?”

  “Fourth actually,” I said, “If you count the Mia one. Who is this guy Kemp?”

  The nurse sighed. Her impatience was evident. An exasperated frown crossed her face. “You are kidding me—right?”

  “No,” I replied innocently.

  The ward nurse looked at me as if I had just arrived from a different planet. “He is top cop in the entire area. I believe that his actual title is Chief of Detectives. His name and picture are in the papers all the time. When he says jump, his men, and there are a lot of them, ask how high. So if you don’t know him, and you’re walking free in the hall here, why is he talking with you?”

  “Good question.”

  The woman just waved her hand uncertainly and shook her head as if the world had suddenly become too much for her. She turned away from me abruptly and walked off towards the emergency reception area.

  As I stood there momentarily watching her move away from me, I was wondering what I should do next. I took a quick look at my wristwatch. It was approaching two in the morning. I was supposed to be at work on Sand Key in less than five hours. Not that that really mattered now. I turned back towards the small room where I’d left Cooper and Kemp. They were just leaving. They saw me and moved towards me.

  “Any more news on your lady friend?” Cooper asked.

  “Nothing.” I liked Cooper. He was experienced and probably a really good cop, but he hadn’t lost the ability to care about people and their feelings. Most cops his age, like Langdon, have become more callous and cynical.

  “So what do you want to do now?” Kemp asked.

  “The nurse won’t let me see Mia, and there’s nothing more I can do here. I’ve got to be at work in about five hours,” I replied pragmatically, “so I guess I’d better get back over to the beach and get my stuff together. There is one thing that occurred to me. Mia said she was going to buy some minutes for her cell. I didn’t see the cell when I was there—but then I wasn’t really looking for it. Did your guys come across it because if she used the cell instead of the apartment phone the records for that number aren’t going to help?”

  “We’ll check into that. You have a job?” Kemp asked with a wry smile.

  ‘The guy is going to report me to immigration?’ I thought angrily—better do a quick tap dance on this one. “Not really—just helping out a friend.”

  “Just toying with you,” Kemp said with another weak mocking smile. The guy was authority. “How about I arrange a ride for you back to the station? You can get your car and head back to the beach.”

  Sometimes I don’t relate too well to authority. I didn’t know whether I liked this guy or not. Probably not!

  “That would be great. Thanks.”

  “No problem. I guess Fred and I will meet with you and Stu tomorrow for lunch. If you need anything or you think of anything that might help the investigation, let me know. We should have something on her phone number records tomorrow.” As he said this, he held out his business card that he had slipped from a thin black leather cardholder he kept in his jacket pocket.

  “As a matter of fact …”—and I told him about my run in with Billy Ray and his pal, Sammy, a few evenings earlier at the beach bar. “I think that this guy Sammy is probably the one Mrs. Bullock was talking about, so I guess someone should have a chat with him sometime soon.”

  When I had finished speaking, Kemp nodded to Fred Cooper who had taken his spiral notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket. “I’ll check it out,” the detective said.

  Five minutes later, a young uniformed officer, who didn’t say a word to me for the entire drive, drove me back to the Tampa City Police Station impound yard. I thanked the kid cop when we arrived. He nodded once and drove away. I was alone—again.

  Inside my room, I noticed the little flashing red light on my often forgotten answering machine. I was wiped out, but maybe the call was from the hospital. I pushed the play button and held my breath. It wasn’t the hospital; it was Stuart Langdon.

  “I heard about what happened to your friend Mia. I’ve got a few ideas I want to follow up on. If anything turns up, I’ll call you in the morning. Listen kid, you be careful. If the guy did this to Mia because of the stuff you’ve been kicking up around her sister’s murder, you could be next. Watch out for yourself. Oh yeah, I talked to my wife about picking up my private cop license. She was okay with it when I told her why. You and Missy gave me a friggin’ reason to get up in the morning. You know—you remind me of someone I once knew a long time ago—me—when I still gave a flying fuck. I think I told you that before. I’ll talk to you soon Joe.”

  I thought about what Langdon had said. He’d want to be careful too. I hope he knew that.

  Life Takes a Definite Turn—For the Worse