We arrived at Zora’s car, a baby blue Saturn parked at the corner of Third and Monocacy. She opened it and I handed her the dry cleaning and she hung it up on the hook by the backseat.
“So I sent in my credit card number to hold my place on the cruise.” She slapped her forehead. “Stupid, stupid, stupid me. Then I went to the cruise.”
“And?”
“It was a bust. There were like three guys there and I wouldn’t let them so much as wash my windshield, much less spend an evening with me.” She folded her arms and leaned against the Saturn. “Debbie claimed that most of the loopers couldn’t make it because of work obligations and she was really, really sorry. But the men on board were clearly not loopers. I swear one of them was an ex-con, though that didn’t stop a few women from trying to hop his bones.”
I thought of the call Lawless received from one of his criminal sources. Louie. Lucky Louie. “Probably.”
“I told Debbie I wanted my money back and that I was going to call my credit card company and have them stop payment. She warned me not to. She said if I did, my life could get very complicated. That was the word she used: ‘complicated.’ ”
“What was she talking about?”
Zora dragged her foot across a crack in the sidewalk, where a bottle cap was stuck in the dirt.
“If it’s confidential, I won’t put it in the story,” I said, kicking myself as I did so.
Don’t offer to take someone off the record, you nincompoop.
“Promise?”
I begrudgingly promised. It was too late now to back down.
She let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t know where Debbie got this information, but she knew something about me, a secret I foolishly assumed only my doctor and I shared.”
I swallowed, rapidly running through the possibilities. An illicit affair rife with venereal disease? An abortion? Halitosis? Psoriasis? Incontinence? Irritable bowel syndrome? Restless leg syndrome? Overactive bladder? Poor credit rating?
“You mean medical information, right?”
“Obviously.”
“What kind of medical information, exactly?”
She lifted her gaze from the sidewalk. “Lookit, I’m sure you’re nice like you claim. You seem very down to earth. But if I was too embarrassed to tell the cops about this, no way am I telling you.”
I felt stung. “Okay. I respect that.” Though, honestly, how could she lump me in with cops? “What happened then?”
“After I called her bluff and had my credit card company retract the charge, an anonymous call was made to my boss at Central Valley Hospital concerning this medical fact. The next day I was suspended without pay. It was fortunate I wasn’t sued. They’d have won.”
“What for?”
“Lying on my employment application,” she said crisply. “I’d lied because I wanted to keep this particular problem of mine private. But Big Brother is everywhere now, especially in the medical professions, and Debbie could have been his sister. Knows all, sees all. I don’t know how she got her juicy tidbit, but it destroyed me.”
“Enough to make you want to kill her?”
A December wind kicked up, blowing street grime and trash down Third Street. Zora and I had to close our eyes. When it was safe to open them again, she said, “No. I couldn’t kill anyone. I’m a nurse. I’m trained to promote and nurture life, not extinguish it.”
That wasn’t true for all nurses in the Lehigh Valley. One monster came to mind: a guy who ended up killing patients here and in New Jersey. I shuddered, thinking about him.
Zora reached in her pocket and took out her car keys. “I better go. I’ve said more than I wanted to.”
She was walking around the front of the car when I asked her one last question.
“By any chance, do you fill your prescriptions at Save-T Drugs?”
She inserted the key in her door and paused. “Years ago. Why?”
“Because Debbie was married to a pharmacist there, a guy who later went to jail, Ern Bender.”
Zora nodded, as if this thought had already occurred to her. “But all my records there were destroyed in the fire like the rest of my family’s. After that, I went to CVS. It’s closer to my house and Save-T Drugs was shut down for like two months, anyway.”
Right,
I thought, watching Zora get into her car and pull away from the curb,
unless those records had been somehow saved—like in the star file
.
Oh my God. The pieces fell together and a picture formed. The star file contained Save-T Drugs prescription records, I thought, turning around and heading up Third to the
News-Times
. That was what Ern meant when he told me he’d been the one with the information and the idea for the scam, but Debbie took over both.
Holy crap. Goose bumps broke out all over my body. Prescriptions revealed so much about a person’s most private and personal concerns. Concerns that none of us would want our employers to know, not to mention our neighbors and friends.
I considered all the possibilities that could be damning: drugs to treat depression or alcoholism, drugs to reduce the severity of mental illnesses like schizophrenia and frightening diseases such as cancer and AIDS. There were drugs to treat impotence, embarrassing foot odor, uncontrollable flatulence, kleptomania, rampant swearing, homicidal and suicidal tendencies, menopausal hot flashes and ravenous food cravings.
Pharmacists had so much information at their fingertips. So much power. Too much, if you asked me. Which explained what Ern meant when he said Debbie could turn the town upside down with her scam.
I was willing to bet that if I could find Tess and confront her, she’d admit that the reason
she
never called the attorney general’s office wasn’t because she’d been so mortified by having
findamannow.com
on her credit card bill, as she’d explained to Stiletto. She hadn’t gone to the authorities because, like Zora, she’d been threatened by Debbie who must have had access to damning medical information on Tess, too.
Information held in the star file.
But why “star”? What did it mean? It was impossible to understand without context.
I was back to where I started. I had bubkes.
“Yablinko!”
Dix Notch’s voice rattled me from my deep thoughts. He was right in front of me in his black Brooks Brothers wool coat holding his dry cleaning and staring at me intently. “I saw you interviewing that nurse back there. What were you talking about?”
What was he doing, stalking me, too? “Nothing, Mr. Notch. We’re just friends.”
He slung the dry cleaning over his shoulder and moved closer. “Really? That didn’t seem like a friendly chat. That seemed more like an interview. You were talking about the Shatsky death, weren’t you?”
“We were talking about medical privacy.”
Notch flinched as if he’d been socked on the jaw. “What do you mean by medical privacy? Is this for a story?”
I was about to answer with some equally vague mush of lies when I caught sight of a very familiar Mercedes with an all too familiar Santa Claus behind the wheel. He was parked illegally at the corner. He was watching us.
“Mr. Notch,” I said calmly, keeping my body still so as not to alert jolly old St. Nick with the .22. “I think what you want to do without looking is to step sideways into the doorway of Tip Top Laundromat right now.”
Notch started to turn his evil bald head and I grabbed his face. “I said, don’t look.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Mr. Notch said, appalled. “Are you sick?”
“Just do as I say. Step off or your head’s going to get blown off any minute.”
“You’re psycho—you know that?”
That was when I caught the slightest glimmer of gun-metal gray offset by the red of the Santa suit. The Salvation Army Santa Claus. He had a gun. He was going to shoot us. He was going to shoot Mr. Notch.
I am ashamed to say that it took a precious second or so for me to decide whether that was a bad thing.
I decided it was.
“Nooo!” I bellowed, moving forward like a bull and head butting Mr. Notch so hard in the gut that he teetered backward and fell flat on his ass, his dry cleaning, thankfully, buffering the blow between his cranium and the hard, cold sidewalk.
I fell on top of him, just like the Iraq war vet had fallen on top of me in the Christmas tree lot, thereby possibly saving me from at worst death or, at the very least, a bunch of uncomfortable pine tree splinters.
“What are you doing?” Notch hollered, his face becoming its traditional bright crimson. He squirmed beneath me. “You dingbat. You crazy idiot.”
He tried to get up but I pushed him down. This was not easy. Notch might have been a jerk, but he was in excellent shape.
I covered my head with my arms, waiting for the gun-fire. It didn’t come. Curious, I opened one eye and found that we were surrounded by multiple pairs of legs.
“Honestly, old man, she’s young enough to be your daughter,” I heard one man say.
And then a woman in disapproval: “Oversexed. That’s what these middle-aged men are. It’s all that Viagra. Think they’re eighteen again, fornicating on the sidewalk in the cold light of day.”
Notch was now beyond crimson. He was fire engine red. Plus, he was still prone and I was straddling him. Thank heavens, I’d decided not to wear a skirt. Being a lady in this business can get you killed.
“Get off me. Get off me right now.”
I rolled off and Notch crawled to standing. He batted at his dry cleaning. Little stones were clinging to it. There were scuff marks from the shoes of those who’d been standing near us and someone had spilled coffee on his neatly starched white collars.
“Look at this. Look at this.” He spun the shirts around and pointed to dirt on a sleeve. “Twenty-five dollars’ worth of cleaning ruined.”
But I wasn’t looking at his stupid dry cleaning. I was looking past him, past the crowd to the spot where the Mercedes had been parked. It was empty. And all that remained of the Salvation Army Santa Claus was his pot, abandoned even though it was stuffed with dollar bills.
I didn’t have one Santa Claus after me, I had two, and with Ern Bender dead, I had no idea who they were.
Or, worse, why they were so very desperate to have me dead.
Chapter Twenty-six
“Y
ou’re gonna need more corroboration than two unnamed, hard-up broads,” Lawless said, reading over my shoulder, sucking on a candy cane. This prompted me to run my hand along the back of my neck to check for candy cane juice. I have a serious phobia about sticky stuff on my neck.
“Do you mind?” I typed the last of what I could remember from my interview with Zora and hit SAVE. The good news about being stuck in a corner by lifestyle was that no one in the newsroom cared what I was doing. As long as I had my Mahoken story ready for tomorrow, I was off everyone’s radar.
Alison, on the other hand, was the center of attention. She had more electrical gadgets on her desk than the entire showroom of Circuit City. Tape recorders. Headphones. Cell phones. An iPod. Her personal laptop. And a PDA, whatever that was.
Yet, oddly enough, I had never actually witnessed her leaving the newsroom or my old desk.
I’d thrown caution to the sulfurous wind of the South Side and brought Lawless into my confidence. Maybe that was stupid. I didn’t know. I needed another brain besides mine to help me find Sandy and the star file. Okay, I’ll admit it. I needed support.
Lawless’s reaction was to listen and take a few notes himself. He was working on Louie to go on the record. And he had a few calls into a source in the attorney general’s office to find out if any women had filed complaints about Debbie’s lust boat cruises.
We were reviewing my notes when Mr. Salvo approached, his yellow legal pad under his arm. Before the five thirty edit meeting, Mr. Salvo dashed around the newsroom asking each reporter what she or he had for the next day’s paper. Every night he was in a lather, as if he’d never put out a newspaper before. Usually, I found it quaint.
Today I found it nerve-racking.
“How’s that Mahoken budget story going?” he asked.
“Quick,” Lawless hissed. “Switch screens like I taught you.”
Nervously, I fumbled with the buttons on the keyboard, afraid of deleting what I had already written, not sure what to do. Finally, Lawless leaned over and with one gooey finger pressed something that made it appear as if I’d been diligently working on the end-of-year budget workshop for the upcoming Mahoken fiscal year that began January 1.
Mr. Salvo beamed at us. “Well, that’s a refreshing change of pace, I must say, to see you two working together so amiably.”
Lawless and I pasted on insipid smiles.
“Just passing on some writing tips, Tony.”
I nudged him with my pen. As if!
“That’s terrific. No more poking around in that Shatsky homicide, right, Bubbles?”
“So, it’s a homicide now, is it?” I said.
“Homicide is merely the Latin term. ‘Homo’ meaning human. ‘Cide’ meaning kill. No murder implied,” said Mr. Salvo, ever the professor.
“Hot damn,” said Lawless. “I could have sworn ‘homo’ meant something else entirely.”
“Alison’s doing a bang-up job on that story, I’m proud to report.” Mr. Salvo said this with about as much sincerity as a Florida swamp developer. “She’s got a lot of talent for such a young woman.”
Lawless next to me fumed. “She doesn’t know shit and you know it.”
“Read tomorrow’s page-one story and be the judge.”
“What’s it about?” I asked innocently, hoping and praying it wasn’t about Sandy flying the coop. That could really paint her in the worst light.
“Now don’t distract me. I’m not supposed to be talking about this with you. Let’s discuss Mahoken.”
“Mahoken. That’s the magic word,” said Lawless. “I’m out of here.”
I gave Mr. Salvo a two-sentence description of my budget story: proposed Mahoken budget to increase spending by five percent over last year. Millage could be raised by as much as .02 cents per one hundred dollars of real-estate value.