I did what any sensible, caring person would have done under the circumstances: I left to find the maid.
She was wiping down a counter in the kitchen. “She’s in trouble,” I said and the girl immediately understood. “Did the doctor give her anything?”
She nodded and retrieved a prescription pill bottle from a hiding spot behind a six-pack of cola stored on top of the refrigerator. “I keep them hidden,” she explained. “I’m sure you can understand why.”
“She’s in the study,” I said. I followed the maid as she came to her employer’s rescue, watching discreetly from across the room as she coaxed Sylvia into swallowing two pills. She wet a washcloth and wiped Sylvia’s face tenderly. I felt like a nosy child peeking through the keyhole odenhe keyhf her parents’ bedroom.
“I don’t want to go back to bed,” Sylvia whimpered as her maid took her hand and led her from the room.
“Don’t have to,” the maid promised in a soothing voice, leading her back into the quiet comfort of the den. She helped Sylvia lie down on the overstuffed sofa, then arranged huge pillows around her head and on both sides of her body. She drew a throw blanket up under Sylvia’s chin, then dimmed the lights. “Don’t sleep,” she told her. “Just lie there and rest. I’ll take care of Miss Jones.”
By the time we reached the kitchen, I figured poor Sylvia was back in dreamland.
“Good thing you’re here,” I observed.
She shrugged. “I’m no stranger to lousy breaks. We’ll help each other.”
“Was the study kept locked during the wake?” I asked, once we were well out of earshot.
She nodded. “Something missing?” she asked.
“Something important,” I told her. “Papers. Some file folders. Stuff like that.”
She considered the problem. “Someone could have come in through the window. Or found the key on the shelf. It’s not a great hiding place.”
“Anyone peculiar at the wake?” I asked.
“They were all peculiar,” she answered.
“Were you here the whole time the funeral service was going on?”
“Sure.” She nodded. “Never leave a house empty during a funeral. That’s the time when someone is most likely to break in. I ought to know.”
“And you didn’t notice anyone strange hanging around? Or hear any unusual sounds?”
She shook her head, pulled out a kitchen chair, sat down and began to sip what was left of a beer she had been drinking. “Are we going to call the police?” she asked.
“No.”
“I’ve got a record,” she said, after a pause.
“I know. Sylvia told me. I’m not accusing you at all.”
She was silent for a moment. “I wish I could help you,” she said. “Especially if it would help out Miss Bennett. But anyone who knew what they were doing could have taken those papers at just about any time today and I would have no way of knowing.” She glanced at me. “The man in the red car?” she suggested.
She was smart. I was surprised she’d ever been caught. Ten to one, her boyfriend had made the mistake. “What did he look like?” I asked, dropping any pretense that I knew who he was.
She shrugged. “White with sunglasses and dark hair. Had all his hair. That’s all I saw.”
“Not much.”
“Not much,” she agreed.
I stared out the window above the kitchen sink. Clouds had rolled in with the night. It was very dark outside. “Know anyone who could come stay here?” I asked. “Keep an eye out for you and Sylvia?”
My voice gave me away. The maid paused with the beer bottle lifted halfway to her lips. She locked her eyes on mine. “Someone big?” she asked.
I nodded. “Preferably a member of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation.”
She thought for a moment. “I know someone.”
“Good. Tell him to bring his brother along, too.”
She nodded grimly, and I turned to go. There was nothing left for me here. “Take good care of her,” I said.
“You know I will,” she promised, unlocking the back door with a key she kept in her front apron pocket. At least she was careful. Sylvia would be okay until reinforcements arrived.
It was late enough on a Friday night for dinner traffic to have cleared, but the bars had not yet let out for the evening. I was the only car for long stretches of Creedmore Road, a winding artery that connects part of North Raleigh with the rest of town. The surrounding neighborhoods were set back from the road behind protective rows of heavy pine forest. Intermittent strip shopping centers provided the only signs of civilization.
Within minutes, the quieting effect of Sylvia Bennett’s grief wore off and I started getting pissed about the theft of the files. Not even the thought of a late dinner with Bill Butler could cheer me. If someone had bothered to steal them from under the noses of dozens of potential witnesses, those files were important indeed. I was damned if I would let some creep stop me from discovering their significance, even if he was talented at breaking and entering.
I drove toward my office, puzzling out the possibilities raised by Sylvia’s sketchy description of the files: longer sequences of figures, maybe with dashes in between. Prison numbers, perhaps? Or some sort of code to represent the names of people who knew more than they were telling about Roy Taylor’s police activities? What I needed was a secret decoder ring—or maybe just a more straightforward approach. It was possible that Peyton Tillman had simply been engaging in old-fashioned legal research, digging up old court cases and hoping to uncover a judicial basis for overturning Gail’s death sentence.
No, none of those theories fit with the little he had told me. He said he had “proof,” and that he was looking for more. Plus, Sylvia said that he believed the police were part of the problem.
As quickly as the answer came to me, it was gone—jolted out of my consciousness by a sudden bump from behind that rudely pushed my car forward, sending me momentarily out of control. I looked in the rearview mirror, and, without warning, where there had been darkness, the high beams of a pick-up truck glared, threatening to blind me. The blazing lights drew closer, right on my tail, predator seeking its prey with terrifying concentration. The truck sped up and knocked my rear bumper once more, nudging me to the left of the road toward a muddy shoulder. I swore and gripped the steering wheel tightly, accelerating for the extra control it gave me.
The Valiant took off, and I inched away from the truck just as I rounded a bend and headed up a hill. No good. The truck had more power than my souped-up Plymouth could handle. It caught up with me halfway up the hill and jammed my rear once again. This time, the Valiant fishtailed and I felt the tires slipping. I turned with the skid, momentarily regained control and swerved toward the center of the road.
The truck’s engine roared and it closed the gap between us, ramming the rear side panel of my Valiant and sending me spinning closer to the far side of the road. If another car appeared heading the other way at the top of the curve, I would be facing a head-on collision.
Adrenaline surged through my body, directing feet and hands without conscious thought. I steered wildly, first left and then right, desperately seeking a purchase on the smooth road. Just as I thought I was safe, a sharp crack split the air, and I felt something whiz by my right cheek. The front windshield exploded in a spider web pattern, and I realized that the driver behind me had opened fire. I ducked low as another crack exploded within the close confines of the car. It was too much. Without front sight, I was doomed.
The truck engine roared in my ears as the driver poured on the power and rammed me full force from the side. Time slowed and my car spun slowly in circles, centrifugal force clutching at my gut. I thought inanely of the spider ride at the state fair. I was conscious of two full spins, and then my head whipped to one side, hitting the side window.
After that, another cracking sound and darkness.
I woke the next morning in a hospital room with Bobby D. leering over me. Talk about your nightmares. I thought for a moment I was in restraints. Then I realized that he was simply leaning on the top sheet.
“You look like shit,” he said cheerfully. “Want a mirror?”
“What are you doing loose?” I replied. “Siphoning out blood supplies? Aren’t you supposed to be at death’s doorstep?”
“Me?” He settled back in his wheelchair and popped a few wheelies to prove his friskiness. He was wearing a hospital gown, or at least trying to. It covered maybe ten percent of his bulk, and his legs poked out from beneath the green cotton like giant pink tree trunks with hair. “The nurses don’t care where I go,” he boasted, “so long as I report for my medication.”
I bet they didn’t care where he went. In fact, I bet they were itching to tell him where he could go.
“This case sucks,” I told Bobby, feeling a crusty bump on my upper lip with my tongue. It hurt to talk. “I’m starting to feel like the Roadrunner. There’s always someone after me.”
“This time they got you,” he said, wheeling closer for a better look. “You have a couple of stitches in your upper lip and two black eyes. The left one is just a little mouse, but the right one’s gonna be a real shiner. Want me to take a look at the rest of your body?”
“No thanks. I gave at the office.” I pulled the sheet up under my chin and felt a sharp ache in one arm. “Someone ran me off the road. On purpose. Hand me my chart, will ya?”
Bobby expertly wheeled to the foot of the bed and tossed a clipboard my way. If they’d known I was awake, the nurses would never have left it within snooping distance. I read the report eagerly. What could possibly be as interesting as one’s own injuries? After translating all the goobledy-gook, I figured out that nothing major had been broken, pierced or replaced. But they wanted to keep me forty-eight hours for observation, even in these cost-sensitive times.
“They’re not keeping me forty-eight hours,” I said. “No way in hell.”
“They’re worried about head injuries,” Bobby explained with the irritatingly superior air of someone who presumes to be an expert on medical affairs. “I tried to tell them that your head was too hard to crack, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Good idea,” Bobby agreed. “The food here is terrible. No salt, no seasonings, no taste, no—”
“Will you stop already about the hospital food? Jesus, don’t you ever think about anything else?”
“The nurses,” he admitted honestly.
“Dream on.” But the mention of Bobby’s libido reminded me. My dinner date with Bill Butler had been blown. Remembering that tidbit brought back other memories. The minutes leading up to the wreck were fuzzy, but the information Sylvia had given me on the stolen files returned in a rush. And with it, the conclusion I had reached. “Don’t you have a contact in the court system?” I asked Bobby. “A court reporter or something?”
“Babe, this is Wake County. I got me a contact on every corner. In this case, she’s small and soft and fluffy. Like a kitten.” He meowed enthusiastically, then broke into an extraordinarily horny sampling of “What’s New Pussycat?”
“I get the idea,” I interrupted loudly. Geeze, Tom Jones singing it had been bad enough, but Bobby D. was worse. He sounded like Burl Ives on acid.
He took the hint. “Tell Bobby what you need and it’s yours,” he promised.
I explained about the sequence of numbers on Peyton Tillman’s stolen file folders. “Sounds like court cases,” he said when I was done.
“I thought so, too. But I don’t know where to begin.”
“That’s where Big Daddy can help.” He wheeled his huge bulk around the curtain that shielded my bed from the rest of the room, then pulled it back with a flourish. There, a scant ten yards to my right, another human being in pain was revealed. At least I think it was a human being. It might have been an exhibit for the Museum of History. Whatever the creature was, it was bound from head to foot in a bodysuit of bandages. One leg was cradled in an aerial sling, and both arms were set at right angles in plaster casts. Only small openings for the eyes and nose, plus a slit for the mouth, gave evidence that the thing could breathe.
“My god, I’m rooming with Christopher Lee in The Mummy” I said. “Get his autograph.”
An angry movement beneath my roommate’s sheets proved that she was alive and could hear—and had no sense of humor.
“She fell off a scaffolding,” Bobby explained. “I don’t think she likes the food here, either.” He wheeled over to the side of her bed and commandeered her telephone. When an angry howl issued from beneath the bandages, he stared at her in reproach. “You’re not going to be using it,” he admonished her. “And this is official business.”
Poor woman. First she broke every bone in her body, and now Bobby was busting her balls.
I listened in admiration as he dialed a number—from memory, no less—and oozed charm all over the receiver. He knew all the right questions to ask and exactly what I wanted. It took him less than a minute to get to the point. When he hung up, he was beaming in self-satisfaction.
“You’re amazing,” I told him and meant it. Without Bobby D. and his fingers in every slice of the system, this take-no-prisoners and make-no-friends girl would have been lost long ago.
He preened and patted his belly. “I asked her to pull every case involving Peyton Tillman when he was a judge and to cross-check for Roy Taylor’s name or any other Durham police officer.”