Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues (17 page)

“Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

Jane Collingswood started to slide past the door Zitin held open for her. “There is one thing,” she said.

I turned back. “Yes?”

“Most of us came down here primarily to make sure he was really dead.”

“Jane!” Zitin said. He practically tripped over himself helping her into the car. Then he scrambled to the driver’s side. He peeled out of the parking lot, jerking into traffic without stopping. I stood there in the hot sun, grinning.

I could see why he was in love with her.

    Back inside the funeral home, James spotted me in the main hall.

“I see you met Dr. Collingswood and Dr. Zitin,” he said, as we stood in a corner away from everyone else, kind of underneath the curving staircase.

“Yeah, but they wouldn’t talk to me. We set up an appointment for later. So tell me, guy, how come you showed up here? You didn’t like Fletcher very much. Why pay respects?”

James hung his head slightly, a lock of his long hair falling
down on his forehead. “Most of us came here to make sure the guy’s really dead.”

“You’re the second person to say that to me in the last five minutes. What’s the story here, babe? How come everybody hated the guy? Really.”

James surveyed the room, making sure no one was close enough to hear.

“Med school’s rough enough without being nailed just because some smart s.o.b. doesn’t like you.”

“C’mon, James. Didn’t like you?”

He bristled a little but kept a cool head. “I’m no dummy, Harry. And I work my butt off. What I’m not clever at is sucking up. And the only way to get anywhere with Fletcher was to suck up to him or, if you were the kind of woman he took a notion for, to hop in the sack with him.”

“That’s a pretty rough accusation these days,” I said. “How come he hasn’t been brought up on sexual misconduct charges? Women don’t put up with that garbage like they used to.”

“I don’t have any doubt that he would have someday, one way or another. In fact, a couple of women came forward, but they mysteriously wound up leaving school before anything could happen.

“You see, Harry, he knew that for every med student, just surviving medical school’s the be-all and end-all. You know what you do when you flunk out of med school, Harry? You go to work as a pharmaceutical salesman, or you wind up running a place like this.…” He swept a small arc with his arms, taking in the surroundings.

“Fletcher had a way of getting to you,” James continued. “He knew that most of us would do anything to stay in school. He was cutthroat, and he was politically powerful. I don’t know if he had pictures of the dean with a goat or what, but nobody crossed Fletcher. I hated the guy. I admit it. Rumor was that he was trying to bust Jane Collingswood out of her residency program. He had the hots for her, and he figured if she wouldn’t put out for him, then he’d drill her out of the program.”

I had a hard time visualizing Jane Collingswood in the same thought with the term
put out
. High school cheerleaders put out. For women like Jane Collingswood, something much more elegant is required.

“And Zitin’s obviously gaga for her,” I said.

“Half the hospital is,” James said. “But I’m not sure Zitin’s got any further with her than the rest of us.”

“And when Fletcher didn’t have any luck either,” I reflected.

“He was going to ruin Jane’s life. Professionally speaking, anyway. Getting busted out of a residency program means you’re still a doctor. But you’re not likely to get anywhere with that on your record.”

“What was that you were saying about doctors making a lot of money?”

James smiled. “If they’re any good, they do.”

“Enough money to kill for?”

He shook his head. “Wake up and smell the coffee. In a heartbeat, Harry. In a heartbeat.”

I ducked out of the funeral parlor, cranked up the Ford, and drove out to the intersection of Division and 21st, near the law school, then out 21st until I found a parking spot in front of the Medical Arts Building. I had no idea when the shifts changed at the hospital, but there was something I wanted to chase down.

While hanging around the funeral home, I replayed the night of Fletcher’s murder over and over again in my head. I was walking down a long hall, and I saw this nurse come out of a room. I can’t be sure, but I seem to remember it was the same room where I found Fletcher. But the lights were down low; it was late. I was tired, and my leg was bothering me. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, and when you stand in the middle of a long hall peppered on both sides with identical pastel doors, they all blend into haze.

Then it came to me, and I could have slapped myself for not figuring it out sooner. I would have, too, except that I’d already had a years’ worth of slapping in the past couple of days.

I remembered the nurse, and I remembered the maybe-two-second good look I got at her as she buttoned the top buttons on her uniform and nervously smoothed out the wrinkles. But what I mostly remembered was Marsha Helms, my buddy at the coroner’s office, telling me that Conrad Fletcher had managed to ride the hormonal roller coaster one last time before somebody whacked him. Not to put too indelicate an edge on it, Conrad didn’t strike me as the type to be in love
with his right hand. So I figured somebody else had to be there. And I figured that nurse was my best bet.

All I had to do now was find her.

Time was a factor as well. I knew, from my newspaper days, that the one advantage I might have over the police was that dear Dr. Marsha had let me in on the autopsy results in advance. Ordinarily, the full report wouldn’t be given to the police until the toxicology tests were completed, and that took at least seventy-two hours. Which meant that for about the next twenty-four hours, I was the only one who knew that Conrad Fletcher’s last moments on this earth had been spent basking in a post-sexual glow. If I were going to make use of what I knew, I had to hustle.

It was loads of fun being back in the hospital. My playback of Fletcher’s death night became even more vivid. I walked down the hall, past the information booth, to the elevators, then rode up to the fourth floor. Instinctively, my ankle began to throb, as if the mere return to Horror Hospital brought with it an aura of pain.

I smiled once again at the irony of a doctor being murdered in his workplace. It was damn funny as long as you weren’t the doctor doing the dying. Hospitals are a good place to die, or so I’m told. As good a place as any, I guess.

I stopped briefly at the nurses’ station, where the same woman who’d been there two nights ago still sat in front of the computer terminal, punching in numbers while the green glow of the screen danced in front of her. She didn’t turn around; it was still early enough that there were visitors around. There was nobody else behind the glass with her just then, so I turned and walked down the same hall I’d been in the other night. The hair on the back of my neck crinkled.

Carts filled with plastic food warming trays lined the halls, mixed in with an occasional medication cart. Nurses buzzed around carrying sphygs, stethoscopes, clipboards. It was the busy part of the shift, before patients drifted off into oblivion and families left for the night. I was grateful for the activity and all the visitors milling around in the hallway; I’d stick out less amidst the chaos.

I casually scanned each person’s face as I walked by, trying not to be recognized, looking for the nurse in the hall, or anyone else who might have been there that night. I was sure the police had questioned everyone, but they still didn’t know what I knew. Not yet, anyway. Walking around these halls somewhere was a woman who shared the last moments of a dead man’s life. Maybe she killed him. Maybe she didn’t. Either way, I wanted to talk to her.

Only problem was, nobody I saw looked like her. I walked on. The bright red exit sign at the end of the hall still blazed like before. I struggled to recall which door I’d opened to find Fletcher. The last one, I believe. I was ten feet away from it when that door opened, and she stepped out.

We stopped dead in front of each other, our eyes meeting in a hint of recognition. She stared at me for a second, her mouth dropping open, her clipboard held tight to her chest.

“You—”

“Yeah, me,” I said. Then I realized she wasn’t the nurse I’d seen coming out of the room that night; she was the young one who found me in the hall after I’d been bashed in the head.

“Hey,” I said, holding out a hand, “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for helping me out the other night. If you hadn’t come along, I might have lain there for who knows how long.”

She lifted one hand off the clipboard, took mine loosely. Her nameplate read
JACQUELYN BELL, R.N
.

“No problem,” she said, her voice cautious. “How’re you feeling?”

“Lots better.” I smiled at her as pleasantly as I knew how. Maybe she could help me, but I had to warm her up a bit first. “The bump on the head’s almost gone. Say, Nurse Bell, I was actually looking for you. Is there someplace we could talk? Privately, I mean. This won’t take long. Honest.”

“Well,” she hesitated. Her voice was riddled with a deep drawl, the voice of a young girl who’d grown up in the country, gone to school in Nashville, and fallen in love with the big city. The kind of girl who drove an expensive car she
couldn’t afford, lived in an apartment complex catering primarily to singles, and plastered her walls with hunk posters. “We’re pretty busy around here.”

“It’s important, Ms. Bell. You were one of the few people up here who actually knew what happened that night.”

“Wait a minute, I don’t have any idea what happened that night. I told the police that. All I did was find you and—”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Of course, you don’t know what happened with Dr. Fletcher’s murder. I’m talking about what happened after you found me in the hall.”

I paused awkwardly, trying to figure out how to articulate this. “Listen, Jacquelyn—may I call you Jacquelyn?”

She nodded her head.

“C’mon, is this room empty? Can we step in here for just a second?”

She looked around nervously, as if I were a dirty old man in a trench coat offering her a piece of candy just outside the school playground. “It would really be better if we talked alone. What I’ve got to tell you, nobody else should hear.”

That got her. Her curiosity primed, she opened the door next to us and led me into an empty hospital room. We stood in the dim glowing light of the fluorescent tube at the head of the bed.

“Jacquelyn, I’m Harry James Denton. I’m a private investigator.” I pulled out my license and flipped it open, with my impressive gold and chrome badge that I’d bought from a mail order supply house. The badge was damned impressive. And absolutely meaningless.

“A private detective?” she whispered, intrigued.

“Yes. I was up here that night trying to find Dr. Fletcher. I’d been hired by the family because they thought, well, they thought he was in some trouble. And they wanted me to help him out. Anyway, I was trying to track him down, but I was a little slow. Somebody got to him before I could, and they killed him.”

She nodded her head. “Yeah, I know that.”

“What you don’t know, though, is that I’ve got a … well,
let’s say a friend, who let me take a peek at the autopsy results before they were released to the police.”

Her eyes widened, a young woman dying to be let in on something no one else knew. “Yeah?”

“Before he was killed, and
just
before he was killed, Dr. Fletcher had just … well, he’d just had sex, Jacquelyn.”

“No kidding,” she spewed, “you mean?” She pointed behind her.

“Yes,” I said. “In that room.”

“Wow! I knew he was a sleaze ball, but boinking somebody right here on the floor. Wow!”

“Well, you knew the kind of guy he was, right?” Talk about leading a witness.

“Oh, yeah. We all knew it. He hit on everybody. He was gutter slime.”

“Yes, Jackie, he was gutter slime. But his family loved him. Don’t ask me why. And they’ve hired me to keep digging, to try and find out who really killed him.”

“But what about the police?”

“Well, you know how the police are,” I said, fully confident that she had no earthly idea how the police are. “They have their own agenda, their own methods. Sometimes the interests of the police don’t jibe with the family’s. I’m involved in this to represent the family’s interests. To make sure they’re taken care of. You can understand that, can’t you? If something like this happened in your family, even if it was somebody you didn’t care for, you’d want your interests protected. Wouldn’t you?”

She thought for a moment. “Actually, I’ve got a cousin who reminds me a lot of Fletcher. If somebody killed him, yeah, I’d want the family protected.”

“So help me out here, Jackie. I’ve got to find whomever it was Fletcher was having an affair with, if you want to call it that. You know what’s going on up here. Who could it be?”

She backed off a couple of feet and laid the clipboard down on the bed. She was young, pretty, naive, thrilled to be the
center of attention. “Well,” she cooed, “I’ve heard a few rumors.”