Clearwater Journals

by Al Rennie

Back in the Jaguar, I used the Blackberry to call the hospital. I needed to check on Mia. There was a new nurse on duty—one I had not bothered before. She informed me that Mia was awake again and asking for me. I asked the nurse if any of her family members were with her or had tried to contact her. After a lengthy pause, during which time I suspected that she did a check of her charts, the nurse told me that there had been no visitors and the only callers had been cousins from various European locations as well as a Joe Holiday and a Detective Sergeant Fred Cooper. There was one other call taken earlier that morning. Her brother, Terry, had called to see if he could visit. Damn, that wasn’t good.

  “Has he come in?” I asked anxiously.

  “Um, no, I don’t think so. Ms. Doulton was not conscious when he called.”

  I thanked the nurse and asked her to tell Mia that I would be there faster than Clark Kent on speed.

  The drive to Tampa General was done in record time. It took almost as long to find a parking space. After hastily spending an exorbitant amount of money for a stuffed Teddy Bear in the hospital gift shop, I returned to the room where Mia had been when I had visited there earlier with Fred Cooper. I tried to ignore the hospital smells as I hurried along the brightly lit hallway. I was delighted to see a uniformed cop parked in a stuffed armchair reading a magazine outside her room. Cooper at work again. The cop guarding the room must have been Fred’s idea after he was told that they hadn’t been able to bring Sammy or Terry in for questioning. The uniform rose slowly as I approached.

  “Whoa there partner?” he said as his right hand landed on the butt of his weapon. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  It took me a few seconds to convince him that I was okay. Even then, he looked in at Mia and talked with her briefly. I guess he got her approval. I love a cop who is thorough.

  When I was beside her, I said, “Heard any good blonde jokes lately?” I am an idiot.

  Mia had been resting fitfully before the cop roused her. She was still pretty vague. Her quiet voice was one that I had never heard before, “Joe—you’re here.”

  “Bingo! First try. How are you doing beautiful?” God, I really am an idiot! She’s wrapped up like something from an Egyptian mummy’s tomb, and I’m asking her how she’s doing. I’m the blonde joke.

  “I don’t feel very beautiful right now,” Mia replied softly. “Wanna digitate?”

  “I’d love to,” I said as I moved around her bed and gently picked up her left hand. Her right hand was taped to a flat plastic splint and had an intravenous drip going under a tape into a vein. There was a button to call the nurse for help fixed in place close to her right index finger. She gave my hand a weak squeeze. I thought maybe I was going to cry.

  We sat there quietly. I didn’t know if I could get it together enough to say anything. After a few moments, Mia spoke. She told me in that low, drugged soaked voice that I had to quit our investigation into Vickie’s death. There was nothing more that we could do. If we tried to continue, more innocent people would get hurt. It was too dangerous.

  I could see absolutely no point in arguing with her given the state she was in. What would an argument accomplish? I mumbled my agreement that she was right—it was too dangerous. We would turn it all over to the police. Had she been more lucid, I might have told her that it was much too late for us to stop. This thing had taken on a life of its own, and it had cost both Langdon and her dearly.

  I don’t remember very much from the many university courses I have taken, but for some reason, I do remember an old professor named Baxter. I always remember him because the guy was Ichabod Crane tall and thin. The weird guy wore the exact same outfit every day—black suit, white shirt, black tie, black socks and black shoes. I guessed he liked black. He had a sonorous voice that he used like a stage actor. I believe that he had been teaching the under graduate Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age course from about the day after the bard of Avon shuffled. He could recite the entire works of Shakespeare—even all of the sonnets. But that wasn’t why I thought about him at that very moment.

  I think that Professor Baxter was trying to teach us something in King Lear when he made an off-hand reference to the image of starting a large boulder pitching down a steep hill. Old Baxter and Shakespeare believed that if you started that big sucker rolling, it would soon be impossible to control. If you tried to stop it, that boulder would crush you faster than you could say, “Oops!”

  We were not going into the boulder stopping business. So instead of arguing with Mia, I asked her how the ambush had happened, and more importantly, for my purposes, who had done it to her?

  Her voice was weak and strained. “I called my mom. I asked her if she wanted to meet me at my apartment ‘cause I had to clean out my refrigerator and water my plant. I was going to tell her about us moving in together.”

  “Did you talk to your mother directly?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. I can’t remember exactly. I think maybe I left a message on their answering machine—but maybe not. It’s kind of foggy now.”

  “Mia, do you know who attacked you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied tiredly. “I was blindfolded from the time I woke up. Whoever he was wore some kind of strong coconut aftershave and changed his voice a number of times. It was spooky. I was terrified Joe. I thought I was gonna die.

  “How did it happen?”

  “I had to go to the bathroom when I got to the apartment. When I came out, someone must have bashed me on the head. I passed out. When I woke up, all my clothes had been stripped off. I was taped to a kitchen chair. My legs had been pulled apart and back and then taped to the outside of the chair legs. It was like sitting up spread-eagled. I was terrified. It was impossible for me to move. I was blindfolded too.” Mia started to cry. “When I first woke up, and realized what was happening I threw up. The guy gave me hard smack across my face. I think something must have broke in my cheek. I think he was wearing rubber gloves.”

  Mia’s voice faded to be almost inaudible. I had to move my head close to her lips just to make out what she was saying.

  “It seemed like forever. He asked me questions about you—where you lived and if you were an undercover cop. He asked about Stu Langdon—what information you had on Vickie’s murder. If I didn’t answer fast enough, he did things to me. I lied to him. He hurt me real bad. I think I passed out a couple of times. I tried to fake being out, but that only pissed him off more. I remember that the television was on real loud. I knew he was going to hurt me again when he put tape on my mouth.”

  Mia seemed to pass out. I sat there and cried. She came around. I told her she didn’t need to tell me anything else right now.

  “Rest baby” I said. “Get better and then tell it when you can.”

  “No,” Mia mumbled “now—I need to tell it to you now Joe.”

  “Okay, Mia, I’m here. Just take your time.”

  Mia continued in a voice that had all but disappeared. “The last time that I woke up, I wasn’t taped to the kitchen chair any more. I was lying on the floor blindfolded and naked, but I thought I was free. Joe, I thought it was over. I really thought he had left. But he hadn’t. He sat there watching and waiting for me. When I was feeling a bit better, I tried to undo the blindfold. Then he laughed at me and started doing really ugly stuff to me. The bastard raped me Joe, and he stuck things in me. He hurt me even worse. Then he beat on me some more.”

  She told me that she remembered passing out that final time and then drifting in and out of awareness and hearing different voices until she woke up in the hospital.

  I knew that I had a number of questions that I wanted to ask, but when the nurse came into the room, she rushed over and told me to get out.

  “Visiting hours are over, and Ms. Doulton needs her rest.”

  Before I left the room, I told the nurse that Mia had asked me to pick up some PJs and stuff for her at her apartment—and feed her cat—I threw that in for good measure—but I didn’t ha
ve the key to the apartment. And almost as an afterthought, I better get her car keys or her car would be towed. God must have laughed at me and then taken pity.

  The nurse, possibly sensing that she had been too abrupt with me, softened and told me to come with her to the nursing station. While I stood in front of the oversized desk covered in clipboards and paper, trying to look as innocent as I possibly could, she went to get Mia’s keys from her personal effects bag that had been stored in a locker.

  “Thanks” was all I had to say when she handed me the keys.

  I knew that both Chance Kemp and Fred Cooper were not going to be pleased that I had managed to talk with Mia before them—unless this also was part of Kemp’s grand scheme. It didn’t matter. I needed to tell them what I had just been told. I phoned the number Cooper had given me. He had said that he could be reached at this number anytime night or day. After a long series of holds, I was connected to Kemp at his home. Funny how that works—ask for Cooper—get Kemp—must be some kind of new police methodology. Kemp was pretty abrupt at first—why are you calling me at this hour. It was only just after nine o’clock.

  When I told him that I had talked with Mia, he didn’t waste time getting pissed off at me or at the hospital; he wanted to know what she had said. I gave him the short form version—enough to whet his interest. After I finished, he told me that he and Cooper would pick me up at my place on the beach first thing in the morning. Then, we would go back and talk with Mia again. Before hanging up the phone, he told me to get a good night’s rest and to be careful. His advice sounded pretty good but really, who was he kidding.

  On the drive back to Clearwater, I didn’t bother turning on the GPS. The result: I got lost only once. I made a right turn instead of left. If I hadn’t spotted an overhead sign on the highway indicating the direction to Clearwater Beach, I would have been half way to Miami thinking it would only be a few minutes more before I reached the Memorial Causeway.

  I Have an Unexpected Visitor