Bad Medicine (22 page)

"You heard the one about the lawyer in hell?" the resident immediately asked.

Both Gene and Molly stared him down. He blushed, lifted the duck. "What should I do with him'"

"Try a little stuffing," Molly suggested. "A four-hundred-degree oven for an hour."

* * *

From the slime to the ridiculous,
Molly read on the wall as she sat down to use the phone in the lounge. Or in her case today, the reverse. Allan had been put into a taxi for home, Albert accompanying him in a plastic hospital bag. Lance had strongly suggested that it was unhygienic for the duck to depart the premises, but Molly had overruled him.

The burn patients had been transferred to burn centers, and the fans still ran at high to clear out a smell that clung to everyone's hair and clothing. The post-lunch hour rush was starting up, all the night crawlers just beginning to notice the sunshine, and with it, their infected tracks and gonorrhea.

Molly sat down to eat a quick lunch. She thought about calling Frank Patterson then and there so she didn't have to walk into his office. She spent a long, long time wondering why she just couldn't issue an order that Joseph Ryan not be allowed into the front door of the medical examiner's office.

Yeah, like keeping the ghost of Marley away from Ebenezer Scrooge.

It was only about two in the afternoon, and Molly was already too tired to deal with that shit. She didn't hold out any hope that she was going to feel immensely better by five. She sure as hell wasn't going to be any more patient.

She picked up the phone. Took a breath. Found herself dialing Winnie's number instead.

"I need to run something by you."

"Run fast," her boss said. "I have court in a few."

She always had court. Molly wondered how the ME got anything but testifying done these days. But that wasn't the matter at hand. The matter at hand was to complicate all their lives unspeakably.

"Did you pull that new suicide?"

"What about it?"

Molly closed her eyes, wondering why the hell she was getting even more involved. Wondering why she was asking about somebody Joseph Ryan didn't even know. "What do you think? Isn't it a little weird?"

"I tell you weird," Winnie retorted. "I got a guy today died facedown in a toilet, his feet stickin' straight up. They had to bring in the whole goddamn bowl.
That's
weird. I got another call, a lady, she swears to God that voices been telling her to make sure her neighbor's dog doesn't bark at her, cause that's just the devil trying to snatch her soul. She slits the dog's throat. But before she's finished, the dog, who just happens to be a pit bull, which might have validated her theory, gets a big chomp on her neck. He doesn't let go, so they both straighten things out with God together. You want more weird?"

"Five
lawyers commit suicide in three damn weeks, Winnie?"

"Once in Chicago I saw four butchers die in separate ice-skating accidents."

Molly rubbed at her face. She pulled out the Maalox single-dose pack she kept in her pocket and swilled it on the spot.

"All right then, try this one on for size. Did you talk to all those nice young men who were waiting for me yesterday?"

Winnie grunted. Molly could hear the scratch of her pen across some paper or another, an infrequent keystroke of a computer. Doing three things at once, just as usual.

"What did you think of them?"

"Assholes."

"Besides that."

Silence. Molly knew what it would mean for Winnie to admit that her best friend was dirty. She knew that it would have been a stone shock to Winnie, because Winnie was incorruptible herself.

"I'm late for court, girl," she said. Which meant, I'm not going to discuss this. Now. Ever. Amen.

"I almost got shot, Winnie," Molly said. "Seriously shot. By a guy who was looking just for me. And now I've got people following me everywhere I go. Not only that, I got a psycho homeless guy following right behind them. I need to get some answers, and I don't know who else to talk to."

Yes, she did. She just didn't want to do it.

"I think you're forgetting something here," Winnie shot back, her diction suddenly a little sloppy.
"You
are working for
me
, not the other way around. When I say jump, you don't even have to ask how high. You just hope it's high enough. You
pray
you know which direction, because I'm gonna whip your white-wearin' pill-pushin' butt if it's the wrong one. And then you thank God you're jumpin' for
me
instead of some hacksaw champ with a degree from the goddamn Caribbean, you understand me?"

Molly leaned back in the couch and tried to ignore the spring that gouged her leg. For just a second, she considered distracting Winnie with the story of Allan and Albert, even though she knew it wouldn't do anything but make her madder when she finally got back around to Pearl.

"I hope you're bitin' my ass because it's safer than biting the mayor's," Molly said instead.

She heard it then. A funny, odd sound she'd never heard from Winnie in her life. She could have sworn it was a sob, and it unnerved her.

"I think Pearl killed herself," Winnie said, sounding suddenly so much like Mary Margaret Ryan's mother sitting there on her Early American country print couch. "Just like you said."

And then, before Molly could ask anything else, she hung up.

After that, it was easy for Molly to punch out Frank Patterson's number. Then she just told the lovely Brittany that she wouldn't be arriving at Frank's office at five after all, and hung up the phone.

It took her another hour and a half and two more Maalox packs to call Brittany back. This time she just rescheduled for the next day and did her best to forget about it, which, considering the fact that they ended up with a rare daylight drive-by with multiple victims, wasn't as tough as she thought.

* * *

Three hours later Molly had to admit that she'd had the right idea. She wasn't in the mood to face anybody this evening. She was so tired, so jagged. All she wanted to do was dig in the dirt.

As she troweled around her cannas and hibiscus, she noticed that the car was back. Or another one, she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure she really wanted to notice. It just elevated her blood pressure. Like watching the vultures that waited in the trees for some unlucky settler to piss off the Indians and make their day.

Molly concentrated instead on the loamy smell of the fresh earth, the sound of her new wind chimes, heavy cast brass bells that tumbled from one of the catalpas. She focused on her yard and the flowers she could always make grow, even when nothing else seemed to work for her, and finally the whisper of Joseph Ryan's voice faded away with the distant keening of that mother who had fought with her bare hands to save her children.

Molly could smell the food from one of the nearby restaurants. Garlic and basil and, undoubtedly in this neck of the woods, balsamic vinegar. She heard the faint tinny notes of old Jimmy Dorsey from Sam's house and felt the warmth from the fading sun across the back of her neck. And, just like always in her garden, she courted the quiet.

She heard the front bell first. It didn't occur to her to answer it. After all, she'd been waiting for the press to descend since the cops had informed her about Mustaffa. Her attention firmly on weeds and roots, she never even turned around.

Not even when she heard the wrought-iron gate squeak behind her.

"Go away before I call the cops," she said, jabbing at an unfortunate dandelion as if it had a press pass. "I don't have anything quotable to say."

"Even to me?"

Molly swung around so fast she landed on her butt in the dirt. Her first reaction was absolute shock. Then outrage, then fury. It was the fury that brought her charging to her feet.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she demanded, breathless with rage.

She should have felt him coming, like the devil walking on her grave. She should have at least smelled him, that stupid cologne that seemed to precede him.

Frank smiled at her, that same damn pirate smile that was so infectious, and he dug a pink plastic spoon into his cup of Ted Drewe's frozen custard. "I figured if I gave you the chance you'd cancel the appointment tomorrow, too, Saint Molly. And I know you need to ask me about Joe. Don't you?"

There in her backyard. Breaching her sanctuary. Tempting her with the sight of Ted Drewe's. Molly didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. She damn near did both.

"Frank," she said instead, her voice admirably calm, "why is it that just when I think things can't possibly get worse, you show up?"

Chapter 12

Once again, Frank had the upper hand. He was cool and collected and decked out in his best gray pinstripe and monogrammed shirt. Molly had mulch on her knees and rose dust in her hair.

Frank was too busy sucking on the spoon and sizing up the property value to notice. "So this is what I missed out on," he said, walking on into the yard, his head on a constant swivel. "It really screwed up the size of the settlement, ya know."

Stopping five feet away, he leaned over to check out the fish pond.

"Don't do that, Frank," Molly warned. "Koi startle easily."

She was incredibly proud of herself that she didn't just push him in and make a grab for the concrete as he went over.

He straightened and grinned. "Ever the gracious hostess."

Goddamn him for being so good-looking. Standing there in the slanting sunlight, he looked like a screen image, all angles and shadows and smashing blue eyes. He smelled like a thousand fantasies.

Molly spent an unforgivable moment fighting the feeling of inadequacy she'd carried away from the witness stand with her. She'd had trouble enough battling Frank Patterson in the sterility of his office. Here was above and beyond the call of duty. She couldn't allow him to intimidate her the minute he walked into her yard, but she couldn't think of any alternative but calling the Feds for help.

Not only that, but he was taunting her with one of the greatest sins in life. Ted Drewe's frozen custard. Heart attack in a cup, a St. Louis tradition more cherished than the Cardinals and bad weather. It was not unheard of to see the medical examiner's van parked right alongside one of the big fire department pumpers next to the stand on Chippewa, while the city employees stood in line waiting for their fix with every ball player and prom attendee in town.

Molly knew damn well that somehow Frank knew how much he was torturing her. She wanted to hurt him for it.

Then she saw the avarice in his eyes. Remembered his question, and his frustration at one particular point in the settlement hearing. The idea was so perfectly delicious a light bulb should have appeared over her head.

"Would you like to see it?" she asked.

He damn near did a double take. Molly smiled right back and dropped her trowel. For a change, she was going to break out the good furniture. She couldn't think of anything she'd like more at this moment than rubbing Frank's nose in the hunk of the settlement that got away.

"It's all in an unbreakable trust," she reminded him, leading the way back in through the kitchen door. "But, you know that. You cracked every one of your knuckles trying to get into it."

"Kept me out of the Shyster Hall of Fame," he allowed, following into the still hush of the Burke family shrine.

Molly came to a halt just shy of the doorway into the jackpot. "You can't take that in here," she said.

Still grinning, Frank lifted the cardboard cup. "Want some?"

Molly had seen sexual innuendo before. Frank went right to the head of the class.

"You can leave it in the freezer," she said, which made him laugh.

He had no idea what it cost her to say that. Not because she wanted sex—at least not with him—but because she wanted that damn custard. Hawaiian special, if she was any judge. Pineapple, macadamia nuts, chocolate, and butterscotch. Pure bliss in a cup. And she couldn't so much as ask for a taste. Story of her life.

Just for that, Molly took Frank along the scenic route. Into the dining room where he had to pass the Chippendale table and chairs and bowfront commode he hadn't managed to get in the trial settlement, the Waterford chandelier, the eighteenth century Coney silver service and Sevres serving pieces, the Stubbs paintings on the wall, and the Persian rug on the glossy hardwood floor.