Brainy-BOOM!
Page 14
“But legal.”
“Sadly, yes, but that’s what greed does, both to the doctors who sold their practices and to her.” He tore off another piece of toilet paper and wiped his nose. Another basket. “Vasomotor rhinitis. A consequence of my mad cow disease. That and anosmia. Extremely troublesome.”
“I wondered about the toilet paper.”
“It keeps me from having to find a Kleenex box all the time.”
“Problem solving.”
He wiped his nose again. “Why are you interested in Diane Warren?”
“One of her employees recently tried to kill my friends and me.”
He wiped his nose again. “Please tell me what happened.”
I did.
67
Peebler took notes on my chart. “You shot the man in the chest?” he asked.
“I did,” I said. “A double tap in the O-ring.”
“Ah. Two shots in the center of the target. Well done.”
I was shocked that he knew what I was talking about. He glanced up. His eyes were still bright and still looked black. “Don’t be so surprised. My knowledge is limitless.” He paused and glanced down at what he had written. His face drooped. “Or at least it used to be before the mad cow disease. I still have my moments.”
I wanted to ask if that bothered him, but from the sagging corners of his mouth, I was positive I knew what his answer would be.
“What did you do with the body?” he asked.
I hesitated. Should I tell him? I decided to, hoping it might encourage him to provide some helpful details and counting on the progression of his mad cow disease to ensure he would forget everything shortly after I confessed it to him.
“I didn’t do anything with it. Frankie’s boys took care of it.”
“Frankie? I don’t remember you mentioning him.”
“I didn’t. He’s a friend of mine.”
“Is he in the body disposal business?”
“No. It needed to be done, so he did it.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“I’m not sure, but I think some of it might be considered to be illegal by most people, especially his wife Janet.”
“Is she a lawyer?”
“No, she’s a Chicago police detective.”
“An interesting couple. Doesn’t she object to this type of behavior?”
“Not if she doesn’t know about it. Frankie is good that way.”
“Where did they take the body?”
“His guys buried it in the basement of a house that is being rebuilt.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Did you select random construction?”
“Not exactly. One of the Irregulars suggested we use his home.”
He wrote that down, and then it appeared he added a large question mark. “Irregulars?”
“It started as a group of bored stay-at-home moms who wanted something more stimulating to do, so they began helping me try to write compelling stories to revive my journalism career. We now have two male members too.”
“Would Frankie be one?”
“Not exactly. He’s more like a consultant. The men are David Scott and Rick Carey.”
“Marcia’s and my hairstylists?”
“They are. It was Rick who suggested that Frankie put the body in the basement of the home they are remodeling. The builder’s subcontractor hasn’t poured the concrete yet, so Frankie’s boys buried the body in David and Rick’s basement. The sub is supposed to pour the concrete tomorrow.”
He wrote that down. “Good luck with that. They hired Charles Sullivan, the same worthless builder we employed, and his cement subcontractor never showed up when he said he was going to be here.”
“I saw the chunks in your yard.”
“He still hasn’t picked them up. A worthless sot. If I took care of my patients with slipshod behavior like that, they would all have died.” He raised his voice. “I cannot and will not tolerate incompetence, and Sullivan and his crew are at the top of the list!”
He really doesn’t like Sullivan.
“By the time the inside construction was nearly completed here, Marcia and I wanted to kill Sullivan and most of his worthless subcontractors. They always lied about when they would be here. It drove us crazy!” He yelled the last part.
“A lot of people seem to want to do that.”
He slammed his hand on the table top. “Clearly it would be justifiable homicide!”
68
“Will you tell me something about autoimmune diseases?” I asked. “I went online but what I read was confusing.”
Peebler’s eyes narrowed. “How would you even know a term like that?”
“My friend Linda and I did some spying in the ICU at MidAmerica Hospital. The nurses were complaining about the sudden increase in admissions of those types of cases.”
“Was this in conjunction with your investigation of Diane Warren?”
“It was.”
He stared at me for several seconds. I thought I’d lost him, but then he nodded to himself and smiled. He also wiped his nose again.
“Autoimmune diseases are heterogeneous disorders that share certain common features, including inflammation of skin, joints, and other structures rich in connective tissue, as well as altered patterns of immunoregulation including production of autoantibodies and abnormalities of cell-mediated immunity.” He closed his eyes. It seemed like he was reading behind the lids.
“While distinct clinical entities can be defined, manifestations may vary considerably from one patient to the next, and overlap of clinical features between and among specific diseases can occur.”
He opened his eyes and realized I was staring at him. “You can shut your mouth now,” he said.
I reached up to my lips, not realizing my mouth had dropped open while I listened to this amazing recitation.
“I wrote the chapter about this subject for Harrison’s Manual of Medicine,” he said.
“That was amazing, but I’m not sure I understood what you said.”
The muscles in his face drooped, and his eyes dulled.
Picking up my chart, he stood up and glanced around — almost as if he was confused by his surroundings. He shuffled away from his desk, and a frightened look came into his eyes.
“Dr. Peebler?” I said. “Are you okay?”
He turned completely around. “I’m late. I have to make rounds at the hospital. I have patients waiting there for me. I can’t seem to find my car. I know I parked it here somewhere.”
He didn’t seem to be aware that I was in the room with him.
“I enjoyed our visit,” I said. “May I come back and see you again?”
“Don’t bother me. I have to find my car. My patients need me.”
He kept turning around in circles. I ran back into the outer office. Lori worked on her computer.
“You need to do something. Dr. Peebler is hunting for his car.”
Her shoulders sagged. “He does that when he becomes agitated. You should probably leave now.”
“He was doing so well. Was it something I said?”
“No. This is happening with increasing frequency these days. He can seem totally normal and then he begins to act like this. Was he speaking English?”
“Doesn’t he always?”
“Oh, my, no. He is fluent in several languages. When the mad cow disease takes control, he reverts back to the language of his youth. It’s maddening, because I only speak English.”
“How old is Dr. Peebler?”
“He’s in his late sixties. Why do you ask?”
“From the dates on his medical diplomas I guessed he would be younger, but it’s not important. There are several things I would like to discuss with him. May I come back?”
“Let’s see how upset he is after you leave. He likes to have visitors. He seems to enjoy the mental stimulation, or at least he does for as long as he can assimilate what is being said. How about coming back next week?” She gave me a card. “C
all me. Maybe you can have lunch in the gallery with him. I know he would like that.”
69
It was midmorning Tuesday. Alicia watched Macy so I could make a detour before I worked out at XSport Fitness. I’d had another sleepless night thinking about the man I’d shot, and I had to keep working to not become any more depressed about what I had done to him.
I turned left onto the east-to-west part of West Henderson Street. Two cement trucks were parked in front of David and Rick’s home. I found a parking place behind them. Several Hispanic men pushed wheelbarrows of cement inside the house. A tall man stood in the front doorway. He rolled a steaming Venti Starbucks cup back and forth in his gloved hands.
I walked up to him. “Are you Charlie Sullivan, the builder?”
His graying, curly hair was sticking out from beneath a Chicago Bears stocking cap. His cheeks were bright red from the biting March Chicago wind howling in from the north.
He took off his glove and extended his hand. “I am. Do I know you?”
“No,” I said, as we shook, “but several of my friends want to kill you.”
He laughed, and his breath came out in clouds. “Let’s see. That could be about any of my clients. We have six major projects going right now, and all of the owners want their home finished first. Hard to do with one crew.” He took a long pull on his coffee. “Which ones do you know?”
“David and Rick, and Dr. and Mrs. Peebler.”
He laughed again. “Wow, you do know the ones who want to kill me. Rick had a hissy fit yesterday and absolutely insisted this be done today.”
“Are you usually on site when cement is poured?”
“Never, but when the sub who does it didn’t show up, his crew called me to supervise.”
“Does that happen often?”
“You mean subs not showing up?”
I nodded.
“It should never happen if they want to keep working for me, but it does. Like today. Saul is usually reliable, but he’s not even answering his cell phone.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Maybe somebody killed him.”
“More than likely it has to do with his papers.”
“Is he an illegal?”
He waved his arms around. “Ma’am, most of them are illegal. I wouldn’t be in business without them.”
The wooden planks leading from the yard into the front door sagged under the weight of the wheelbarrows full of wet cement being pushed into the house.
“Your crew is working hard,” I said.
“Harder than they need to,” he said. “Rick wanted the floor four inches thicker than the normal pour. Hard to figure, but it’s his money.”
I know why.
Rick wanted to be certain the body of the man with the missing fingers would never be found. So did I.
“Mind if I go in and see what they’re doing?” I asked.
“Not at all, but they’re only pouring cement. It’s not all that interesting.”
“Trust me, I love to see cement being properly poured.”
“Follow me.”
70
I followed Sullivan up the planks into the entry hall. The inside of the house was almost as cold as the outside, but at least the painful north wind wasn’t blowing in our faces.
There was another set of wooden planks going into the basement. Next to them were temporary wooden stairs. We walked down the stairs as one of his men pushed a load of cement down the planks into the basement.
The room was large, at least three thousand square feet. The floor that was not covered by fresh cement was dirt. Portable gas heaters in the corners of the room made the air hot and dry. The area smelled like sweat and dust, with a touch of mold.
“It’s warm down here,” I said.
“It has to be or the cement won’t set up properly,” Sullivan said.
“Why is the floor dirt? Isn’t that unusual for an older home like this?”
“The house had several cracked sewer pipes,” he said. “Rick and David didn’t know about it when they bought the place. We had to break up the floor to find the problem. I told them we could fix the broken pipes and leave the room with a dirt floor, and that was the plan until Rick called and said they had changed their minds and wanted the corner of the floor where we placed the new pipes covered with cement, so I pulled the men off another job and here we are.”
“What about the rest of the dirt floor?”
“At this point, Rick said they might not cover it.”
I guessed Rick didn’t want it cemented now in case more bodies needed a resting place. I wanted to make sure Sullivan hadn’t picked up on Rick’s unusual request.
“That’s going to look kind of strange, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Ma’am, they’re the owners. I do what they pay me for. No more, no less.”
In the north corner was a patch of freshly turned earth covered by rebar. Sullivan saw me stare at it, but before he could say anything else, the workers poured two loads of wet concrete over that spot and began smoothing it around.
Hopefully, my RPG man was now gone forever.
71
As I walked toward my van, a freezing drizzle began pelting me. I pulled my red Indiana Hoosier stocking cap out of my pocket and tugged in on my head. I snuggled up the collar of my North Face parka and hunched my shoulders against the screaming north wind. My face began to sting as the drizzle intensified.
My ski gloves kept my hands warm but didn’t help my manual dexterity, resulting in me dropping my van keys on the slushy street. Cursing to myself, I bent down to pick them up. When I stood up, I saw to my right a large black SUV at the end of the block near Paulina Street. The engine was running. The SUV hadn’t been there when I first drove up.
I climbed into my van and turned on the engine and the heater full blast. The windows were iced over, and I had to wait until the defrosters kicked in to see well enough to drive. While I waited, I wiped the driver’s window and adjusted the rearview and outside mirrors. I wanted to see the car behind me.
It appeared to be a Chevy Suburban SUV, but my outside mirror was also frosted over and it was hard to tell. The storm made it hard to see through my van’s back windows, but it looked like there were two people in the front seat.
An unexpected tap on my passenger window made me jump in my seat. I could see the form of a person standing outside the window, but the heavy ice on the window precluded me from seeing who it was. The person tugged at the locked door handle.
I ripped off my thick gloves and yanked the Glock out of my backpack. Jacking a round into the chamber, I threw my door open and jumped out of the van. I leveled the gun across the roof at the man who was trying to open the passenger door.
It was Detective Tony Infantino.
72
“Tony, you scared the crap out of me!” I yelled, as the drizzle turned to snow.
“Sorry, sweets, but I was freezin’ my ass off and wanted to get in out of this freakin’ terrible weather,” Tony said. “Unlock this damn door.”
I climbed back into the van and unlocked the passenger door for him. He climbed in and slammed the van door.
Even covered with snow and ice from the worsening blizzard, his appearance was nearly perfect. He wore an Indiana Jones brown fedora, wraparound mirrored Oakley sunglasses, a brown cashmere topcoat, and an off-white cashmere scarf. He still had his ever-present tan.
I pointed at his feet. “I don’t believe what I’m seeing. Tony Infantino in rain boots.”
He leaned back and I could see them better. “Hunter. Only way to go. Thick socks are the secret. Got tired of ruinin’ my Italian leather shoes.”
“Aren’t the boots a problem since they go over your calf?”
“Problem?”
“With your ankle gun and holster.”
“Got it covered.” He reached down into the top of his right boot and pulled out a tiny gun. “American derringer LM5, 15 ounces, .32 with four shots.”
“It’s cute
.”
He glared at me. “Sweets, I don’t do cute guns.” He pointed at David and Rick’s house. “Anything you need to tell me?”