The Ditto List (31 page)

“No.”

“Any chance my getting in?”

“None at all.”

“Okay, Bobby. Thanks.”

“I think I think a little less of you, Mr. J.”

“That's okay, Bobby. I think I think a little less of me, too.”

D.T. hung up and got into a cold and empty bed. He tossed and turned, struggling for comfort, wondering if he should call Barbara and invite her over, wondering what she would do to punish him, wondering how to handle Chas Stone's Achilles heel. He was in the middle of a dream that featured Victoria Principal when the telephone destroyed it.

“Mr. Jones?”

“Ummm. Who's this?”

“This is Rita Holloway.”

“What time is it?”

“Two, I think. It doesn't matter. It's Esther Preston, Mr. Jones.”

“What happened? Did she die?”

“No. But almost.”

“Why call me?”

“Because her husband tried to kill her.”

FOURTEEN

The little red house was lit inside and out, the only sign of life on its side of the street, a single tooth in an empty mouth. As he pulled to the curb, D.T. noticed a man across the street standing stiffly on his dark stoop in his dark bathrobe, disapproving of whatever the hell was going on over there. When D.T. waved at him the man muttered an oath and went inside to vent his outrage on someone who wouldn't fight back. D.T. trotted up the ramp to Esther Preston's door and rang the bell.

The door opened immediately. Rita Holloway stood before him in her nurse's uniform, its slick bright sheen like a white shadow atop the deep dark beauty of her flesh. “Thank God you're here.” The words were breathed, her eyes were cans of Kiwi black. She reached for his wrist and drew him inside.

“What happened to Mrs. Preston?” D.T. asked as she closed the door.

“She fell. An ambulance took her to the hospital. They're taking X rays to see if she broke her hip. There may be a concussion as well.”

“How did it happen?”

“Come here. I'll show you.”

Rita Holloway turned and led him down one of the rubber causeways that crisscrossed the floors, this one leading to the bathroom off the kitchen. She opened the door, flipped on the light, then stepped back. “She fell in here. I took her out to dinner tonight. We stayed late. About two hours after I brought her back here she telephoned. She thinks she was unconscious for almost an hour. It took her another hour to crawl to the telephone and call me. I don't know how she managed it.”

D.T. looked at the bathroom. The fixtures were white, the wallpaper and shower curtain pink, the linoleum speckled like the eggs of small birds. Little sprigs of dried flowers and little portraits of Victorian ladies ornamented the walls and surfaces. A mound of scented soaps rose off a clam shell by the basin. A mobile of wooden fish swam lazily in the air above the tub, in the center of which was a sturdy plastic chair on which Esther Preston evidently sat to shower.

Beside the toilet, two steel bars had been anchored tightly to the studs, slanting toward the bowl from shoulder height, like the provision for the handicapped in public restrooms. The only sign of the fall was a wadded throw rug in the corner by the tub and an upturned wastebasket made of white wicker. D.T. backed out of the tiny room.

“She hit her hip on the edge of the toilet, I think,” Rita Holloway said. “And her forehead on the sink. I just hope it's not her hip. Her bones are so brittle.”

“I'm sorry,” D.T. said. “She had an overdose of problems already. But I don't understand why I'm here,” he went on. “You said something about murder. It was just a fall, wasn't it? Nobody pushed her or anything. Did you just say that to wake me up, or what?”

“Come here.”

Rita Holloway edged around him and went into the bathroom and stood beside the toilet. “You know what the rails are for, right?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Pretend you're Esther Preston. Pretend you back in here in your chair and have to get to the toilet without using your legs. Here. I'll put the lid down.”

She lowered the fabric-covered toilet lid and backed out of the room. D.T. looked at her. “Go on,” she urged. “Just try it once.”

D.T. walked to the toilet, turned around, grasped the nearest rail with his left hand and tried to support himself as he sank toward the seat. Immediately his hand lost purchase and slipped down the shiny rail. D.T. lurched to the side, extended a hand to the sink and caught himself, and stood up. He rubbed his fingers together. “What is it?”

“Baby oil, I think. Someone put it on the rails. That's why she fell. She couldn't hold herself.”

D.T. closed his eyes and shook his head. “Come on, Miss Holloway. There must be a hundred ways those rails could get covered with some slick substance, and none of them have anything to do with murder.”

“I know,” Rita Holloway said, surprising him. “Come on.”

She flipped off the bathroom light and closed the door. D.T. followed her through the kitchen and into the living room. She walked to the far corner and picked up the aluminum walker he had seen on his first visit. She turned it upside down. “Look at this.”

D.T. walked to her side. She pointed at one of the walker's legs, at a point some six inches from its bottom end, just below where the cross support attached. “See the crease?”

D.T. looked where she directed. The aluminum leg was cracked across a third of its circumference, an evil smile in the satin smoothness of the rest of the support. The crack was thin, its edges smooth, the cylinder undented. Perhaps a natural defect, more likely a deliberate slice. “It would buckle with enough pressure,” Rita Holloway said. “Want me to show you?”

D.T. shook his head. “I believe you.”

“Okay. Now come over here.”

Rita Holloway walked briskly through the kitchen to the rear door of the house. “I've spent a lot of time here,” she said to him along the way. “I know Esther's patterns. One of the things she does is take the kitchen garbage out every night, just before she goes to bed. So the house won't smell. She goes through this door and down the ramp and over to the garbage can by the corner of the house and back again.”

“So?”

“Imagine you're her again. You've got a plastic bag full of garbage in your lap, and you open the door—go ahead—and you push your wheelchair down the ramp, the way you've done it a thousand times.”

He decided to humor her. “Okay. Here I go.” D.T. walked to the door and opened it.

“Now push yourself down the ramp.”

“Okay.” D.T. started to take a step.

“Look down.”

He looked. There was no ramp. Only a two-foot drop from the kitchen threshold to the concrete slab poured over the ground outside. A woman fell through his mind, a helpless flailing body in a rolling chair that no longer had anything to roll on.

D.T. stepped outside and looked around. The wooden ramp was some ten feet down the side of the house, upside down, clearly dragged there by someone who knew exactly what he was doing and the havoc he would wreak.

Rita Holloway spoke from behind him. “Can you imagine what would have happened if she'd tried to go outside tonight?”

D.T. stepped back into the kitchen and closed the door. “Any other surprises?”

“Not that I've found.” Rita Holloway gave him that look again, the one that had as much as anything gotten him into Esther Preston's life in the first place. “Now do you believe me?”

“I believe someone wants to hurt her, or frighten her, or both. I don't think they're out to kill her, though. None of these little stunts is calculated to do that.”

“Not yet, maybe. What if they get worse?”

D.T. ignored the invitation to speculate, remembered instead his encounter with Dr. Preston at Joyce Tuttle's party. “Who do you think is doing it?”

“Her husband, of course.”

“Why?”

“So she won't sue him.”

“Pretty extreme reaction. She's hardly a threat to his well-being, financial or otherwise. Even if she wins it'll be a pittance. And frankly I don't think she'll win a dime.”

Rita Holloway frowned and crossed her arms. “Maybe there's something else involved. Something that might cost Dr. Preston really big money.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. You're the lawyer.” Rita Holloway's mouth flipped up in an indication that being a lawyer was akin to being a ghoul.

“I guess I'd better talk to Mrs. Preston,” D.T. said. “Which hospital is she in?”

“Providence.”

“Do you think I can see her tomorrow?” He looked at his watch. “I mean today?”

“Probably. For a little while. But if she's had hip surgery she won't be in shape to say much.”

“Do you know people at that hospital?”

“I used to work there.”

“Can you see to it they'll let me in to see her?”

“I suppose so. What are you going to do? I mean, I'm scared, you know? I thought I was going to help her and instead I've—”

“I'm going to call the whole thing off,” D.T. interrupted.

Rita Holloway sighed deeply and closed her eyes and nodded. “Good. And no police, right? We just leave it where it is?”

“Right.”

“I hate to be so chicken,” Rita Holloway said softly, “but I just can't gamble with Esther's safety. I don't have that right.”

D.T. nodded his agreement and went into the living room and looked at the scene that had once charmed him and had now become so sinister. Rita Holloway followed him silently, perhaps lost as he was in thoughts of the consequence of bravado, the cost of courage, the allure of swift surrender. “Are you sure you looked for other sabotages?” he asked her.

“As well as I could.”

“I think we'd better touch everything electric, to see if they've been rewired to shock her. Also open cabinets and doors, to see that nothing falls out. I guess it would be impossible to tell if any of her food had been adulterated.”

Rita Holloway's eyes widened. “My God. I never … She doesn't have all that much food. I'll make a list of everything that's opened and toss it out and buy her new.”

“That'll cost money.”

“I owe her that much and more.”

A tear leaked over a lid of Rita Holloway's eye and traveled blithely down her cheek. She crushed it with a swipe of her hand. “Goddamnit,” she said, and began opening cabinets and switching switches. “Me and my good deeds.”

D.T. did the same. They worked silently and fearfully. Eventually D.T.'s eyes came to rest on the ancient wheelchair that was like a riderless mount grazing beside the bathroom door. Rita Holloway saw where he was looking. “I checked the wheels. They seem okay.”

D.T. went over to the chair and stood behind it and pushed it gently to and fro. Its workings squeaked like mice. He pressed down heavily and did the same. Nothing collapsed, although at one point in its movement the chair bounced as though it had struck something. He pushed the chair away and bent down to look first at the spotless floor and then at the rubber tires.

On hands and knees he pushed the chair again. Something glistened and caught his eye. He rubbed his hand over it. “Look at this.”

Rita Holloway hurried to his side. A shard of glass, sharp and jagged and thick, perhaps a piece of broken bottle, lay firmly imbedded in the rubber tires where eventually, inevitably, Esther Preston would someday place her hand to stop the wheels that spun beneath it. “It would slice her palm to ribbons,” Rita Holloway said.

“We'd better look some more.”

They spent a half an hour peering, kneeling, crawling, feeling, searching through the house, finding only a hard-earned luster. When they had looked and re-looked everywhere they trudged back to the living room and slumped, exhausted, side by side, onto the horsehair couch. “I guess it's safe,” D.T. said.

“It better be.”

“Can you stay with her when she gets home?”

“For a while. Sure.”

“I guess I'd better make sure I get word to the good doctor that we're not snooping into his business any more. The son of a bitch.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “I was terribly frightened when I saw what had been done. Now I'm not so scared. I'm mostly mad.”

“Good. Just don't do anything about it that would make Preston think we're still after him.”

“I won't. Don't worry. I just hate to let him win like this, is all. I wish he'd come after
me
.”

“Maybe he will. You'd better watch yourself.”

“Let him try. I'll bring Toledo.”

“Who?”

“My dog.”

D.T. took her hand and kissed it, then left the house and drove slowly toward his apartment. His mind, so thick with sleep when he'd arrived at the little house, now spun with speculations and considerations of the usual type that tortured him when he became the cause of danger. Halfway to his home he veered toward his office.

When he got there it was four-thirty. The rooms were cold and hollow, without solace. The coffee took forever to brew. The furnace gave off the stench of long decay. The box of documents Dick Gardner's man had left seemed to have grown monstrously during the night, its contents to have multiplied like mutants.

D.T. began to paw desultorily through the papers, arranging them by category, slowly absorbing their significance. The drudgery was common to litigation, so common that most successful lawyers now hired non-lawyers to do it for them. It was boring, the chance of spectacular discovery almost nonexistent, the project a gloomy byproduct of the independence he had cultivated like a cymbidium for the past two decades. Not unlike the Fiasco.

An hour later a quick calculation told him Chas Stone's investment business had been only marginally profitable in the early years, which would allow D.T. to claim that its subsequent success was due in major part to the marital contribution of Mareth Stone. As the rising sun peeked slyly through the window, D.T. began to check the confirmations of individual investment transactions, to see that the sum was indeed the total of all the parts and also to see what investments Chas Stone had made for his own account.