The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (11 page)

“
Did you see the dog jump
into the back of the van?”

“
Dog? No, I didn’t see any
dog.”

“
Did you get a look at
either of the men in the van?”

She shook her head, thick
black hair shimmering. “Somebody was driving, of course. But I
didn’t really see...”

“
How about any writing on
the side of the van?”

“
There was. All I remember
is there were white-on-green words. And there was
something–something about death, I think.”

I blinked at her.
“Death?”

“
Yes, death or dying. It
was some kind of phrase, or slogan, you know. But I can’t remember
what it was now.”

“
Good enough, that helps.
Might help a lot.”

I looked at my watch.
Getting close to eleven a.m. It had been an odd and already fairly
full morning, but I knew there was much left to do this day. I also
realized I had asked all my questions.

So, reluctantly, I said,
“I’d better be on my way. Thanks very much for your time, and
help.”

“
Wish I could’ve remembered
more. Do you really have to go, Shell?”

“
Afraid so. Back to work,
alas.”

She smiled. “No Jacuzzi
today, then?”

I shook my head, got to my
feet. “Not today. But I sure appreciate the offer–if that’s what it
was.”

“
That’s what it
was.”

She walked with me to the
door, opened it. I stepped outside, but just past the doorway
turned, looked at Lucinda and said, “Thanks again for the info,
especially about that ‘death’ van, Mrs. Erickson.” I scowled. “Do I
have to call you–”

She interrupted me. “Mrs.
Erickson is a little clumsy. You can call me...” She stopped,
smiled at something in her thoughts, and said, “You can call me Lu–
” and laughed.

She’d noticed. But instead
of scowling some more, I joined in her merry laughter. A
little.

Then she said, “I couldn’t
resist that, Shell. Call me Lucinda.” Her smile faded as she went
on, “About Precious. I guess there’s not much chance I’ll see her
again, is there? After all this time.”

“
Not much, I’m afraid. But
you never know, I might get lucky. I don’t suppose she looks much
different from any other cat, or kitten.”

“
She’s actually a year old,
but she just looks like a regular–oh, there’s one thing. You mean,
something different, so you’d know it was Precious if you happened
to see her?”

“
Yeah. In case I should
spot her wandering around, or maybe even right outside in the
bushes. In fact, on my way out I’ll check ‘em.”

“
When she was about six
months old, a dog chased her and caught her, almost bit her tail in
two. The vet stitched her tail up and saved it, but it goes like
this.” Lucinda drew a line in the air with her index finger,
straight forward and then sharply left.

“
Got it.” I mimicked her
angular movement with my finger. “I’ll check those
bushes–”

“
And when she wiggles her
tail, for some reason she wiggles her whole little tush. It’s the
cutest thing.” I opened my mouth, then closed it, partly because
Lucinda was continuing. “And if she likes you, at the same time
she’ll meow, only it’s a really high, kind of scratchy sound, sort
of maaah-maaah, or just maaaaaah!”

“
No kidding.”

“
I’m not explaining this
very well, but it’s so unusual because she does it all at once,
like...I’ll show you.”

Lucinda bent forward there
in the doorway, and started rapidly wiggling her, well, tush, back
and forth sideways, while making that odd noise, Maaaah! She was
facing away from me during this exercise, or rather facing pretty
much toward me with the exercise away from me, but it was
nonetheless, all things considered, a truly memorable
experience.

“
You’ll have to imagine the
crooked tail,” she said.

“
I’d...rather
not.”

Then Lucinda stopped
vibrating and straightened up, lovely face slightly flushed. “Will
that help?”

I took a deep breath, let
it out saying, “I’m...not sure.”

She sighed.
“Realistically, I suppose it isn’t likely I’ll ever see her again,
and that’s so sad.”

“
There’s always a chance.
No question, I’ll recognize her if I get anywhere near
her.”

“
I hope so. I really do
miss her. She’s such a sweet little kittycat. Nuzzles me with her
head, reaches up and gives my cheek a soft tap-tap with her paw
sometimes, and she loves to knead my tummy or breast with her tiny
little claws–”

I sucked in my breath
involuntarily, and it made a little squeaking sound in my throat.
“Don’t say that,” I said. “I mean, don’t tell me Precious...” I
stopped, hung up on that dumb name again.

“
Don’t say she loves to
knead my tummy?” Lucinda was smiling, with her lips and
eyes.

I looked down at those
dark brown almost-black eyes, looked for quite a while, then said,
“Close enough. You’re warm. Well, I really do have to leave,
Lucinda, but I hope you’ll keep that Jacuzzi warm for
me.”

It seemed a long time
before she answered, her eyes on mine, tongue moving slowly over
those full lips. Then, “I’ll keep it...hot,” she said.

I turned, heard another
little squeak, drifted over to my Cadillac. Got in. Backed out of
the driveway. The front door was closed, as it had been when I
first saw the little cream-colored house with chocolate-brown trim
and rang the chocolate-brown bell. It looked different, though, a
lot different, now that I knew what was inside.

And I was at least ten
blocks away before I realized I’d forgotten to check those
bushes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I was on Eucalyptus, half
a mile from Maple Street where the Vungers lived, when I parked,
pulled out my pocket notebook and cell phone. On the remote chance
that the Vungers were home and had simply stopped reading
newspapers and answering their phone, before talking to them I
wanted to learn what officers Murphy and Devincent could tell me
about Henry Hernandez, M.D.

It took me about five
minutes to run them down—taking a food break for coffee and
hamburgers at Wendy’s—and another five minutes for the two of them,
taking turns on the phone to fill me in. It wasn’t exactly what I’d
been hoping to hear about my new client.

Details and times of their
meetings with Hernandez on the 18th and 25th of this month were
exactly as Hank had given them to me. Unfortunately, however, both
Ed Murphy—a big-boned and deep-voiced man of thirty-six, whom I
liked a lot—and ten-years-younger, handsome intense Lou Devincent,
a casual acquaintance of mine, thought Hernandez was full of
it.

Murphy first: “You ask me,
the old boy may think he’s being spied on by Martians. Lou and I
never came up with any indication –besides what he told us himself
and you know what that’s worth—anything happened at all. No
physical evidence, for sure. We checked the street, talked to
neighbors, got nothing. You know this character?”

“
Yeah, just talked to him
this morning.”

“
Well, can you guess what
he told us? He says, if the word of an honest citizen isn’t
sufficient evidence itself, did there have to be fenders and
bumpers and axles and pieces of bleeding torsos scattered—or
strewn, yeah, strewn I think he said, or strewed—all over the
intersection and piled up on his dead body before we might consider
considering it evidence? Something like that.”

“
Uh-huh. I think we’re
talking about the same guy.”

“
Hey, Shell, that’s not the
whole scam about this one.” That was the higher, speedier voice of
Devincent. “This old crock is a medical quack.”

I winced, but kept
listening.

“
Killed a bunch of
patients, we hear, but got off somehow because he’s an M.D. None of
the other docs understand how come he’s still licensed to practice.
Neither do I, after what they told me. Or told us both—Murph didn’t
buy it at first when I filled him in, thought I was pulling his leg
again, like I do sometimes. But he checks and gets the same thing
from the docs himself, which finally convinced him.”

“
Who are these other docs
you’re talking about?”

“
Well, when we still
thought maybe there was something to what this Hernandez said, we
checked with the local medical society. State board, too. They all
told us about his history of taking advantage of sick people, even
incurables, giving them false hope with his quack treatments. And
getting rich off them, of course.”

“
He didn’t look all that
rich to me, Lou. Doesn’t even seem to have an office, except in his
house.”

“
Maybe he’s not so rich
now. The State Medical Board, and the FDA, they’ve been making it
hot for him the last three, four years. Way the docs put it—didn’t
actually say it, but I could get the drift—sometimes the only way
to get these quacks out of business and stop ‘em ripping off
people, is to keep bringing them into court for malpractice, or
other legitimate charges, and let the law squeeze ‘em down. Sooner
or later they’re history.”

“
Uh-huh. You check with
anyone besides the medical boards and FDA? Like any of his
patients?”

“
What for? The guy’s a
doctor, so we checked with other doctors. They ought to know,
right?”

“
Did I hear you say
Hernandez killed some people?”

“
Yeah, a bunch I guess.
They only sued him for some that died while he was treating them.
But the way the docs explained it, there’s no way to tell how many
of his patients kicked off later, maybe even years later, when
nobody can connect it with whatever he did to ‘em. See?”

“
Yeah. And they ought to
know, right?”

The next voice was
Murphy’s rumbling baritone. “Shell, you said you’ve talked to
Hernandez. You didn’t let this sawbones sell you a bill of goods,
did you?”

“
I’m not sure yet, Murph.
But I am working for him, as of today. Which is why I called you
guys—”

“
Shell, you gahdamn
criminal, you make us sit here giving you all this info from
top-secret police files for a gahdamn quack? Man, you’re gonna owe
me a couple fingers of E. T. just for the gahdamn pain in my
ass.”

I grinned. Murphy was a
good guy, and a good cop, but he liked to talk like a rock-hard
macho terror. I happened to know he picked up spiders in Kleenex
and carried them out of his house. When he thought nobody was
looking. Also, E. T. wasn’t a cute alien but Early Times
bourbon.

“
Okay, pal,” I said, “in
your locker at Parker there’ll be a quart of E. T., and some cheap
wine for Lou, next time I get down there. But consider this, Murph.
I don’t know for sure—and neither do you— that Hernandez is a
quack. None of us has spoken to his patients, friends, neighbors.
Sounds like the only people you checked with were other
doctors.”

“
So? Man, if you can’t
believe what doctors tell you, who can you believe?”

It was a pretty good
question. In the last minute or so of conversation I got what
Murphy and Devincent knew about the two fairly recent lawsuits
against Hernandez, the charges, and as much as they could remember
of dates and plaintiffs and such, plus the fact that Hernandez had
not—not yet in Devincenzo’s words—been convicted of a solitary
thing. And obviously Hank still had his medical license, and was
still practicing.

So I said—again to
Murphy—“Hell, don’t you find that significant? How come, if
Hernandez is really such a medical disaster, he’s free as a
bird?”

“
What I find significant
is, both times in court his mouthpiece was Webster J.
Montrose.”

I hung up, thinking that
last bit of info was, maybe, not only significant but disturbing.
Montrose was one of the best and most expensive attorneys in
Southern California. For three decades he had brilliantly won
acquittals for nineteen of every twenty defendants he’d
represented, most of them guilty as sin. And most of them were
accused murderers, embezzlers, stock swindlers, and/or
Mafiosi.

I’d finished making my
notes and was putting the book back into my pocket when I saw the
green van, rolling past me on Eucalyptus.

My pulse kicked up, then I
reminded myself that what I’d spotted was merely a green van; could
be hundreds like it around L.A. But I pulled into traffic, gunned
the Cad’s engine. The van was more than a block ahead of me, in the
left or speedier lane, but the driver didn’t seem to be in any
hurry. So half a minute later I rolled alongside the van and eased
my foot off the accelerator, close enough to read the white-painted
letters on its right side: SOCAL PEST CONTROL; below that, in
smaller block letters, was the interesting line, “We Kill ‘em
Deader Than Dead!”

Interesting, because that
was close enough to “death or dying,” the two words Lucinda had so
recently mentioned—the “something” she’d seen painted on the side
of a green van when it had stopped briefly in front of her home—but
also because nothing else was painted there. People display names
and slogans on their commercial vehicles for advertising purposes,
promotion, to drum up business. But except for those two lines the
side of the van was blank—no address, no phone number.