I looked at the fax. “Yep, well, I guess the salad days are over.”
She grew quiet. “I’ll go over to the home. Where are you headed?”
“I figured I’d go over to the hospital and talk to Isaac, then I guess I’ll start with the family by telling Lana that somebody poisoned her grandmother.” She started out. “Hey?” She turned back. “There were some cookies on the floor beside her bed. I know it all sounds very Dorothy Sayers, but I thought I’d mention it.”
“And I’ll check the drawers for mothballs. Maybe Mari was schnockered and thought they were breath mints.”
* * *
Isaac Bloomfield wasn’t in his room, but he wasn’t hard to find; he was snoring in the staff lounge with a large bandage running from his temple and around his ear. I sat in the chair opposite his sofa, unbuttoned my coat, and placed my hat on my knee. The old guy snored like a Husquavarna chainsaw. “Isaac?” I said it three times before he heard me.
“Walter?”
“How come you’re not in your room?”
“I’m more comfortable here.” He leaned in and took my hands. “I understand I owe you my life?”
I shrugged. “I almost got both of us killed, if that’s what you mean.”
He shook his head at my inability to accept thanks. “How is my car?”
“Totaled.” I leaned back and watched him. “Isaac, last night you said the brakes failed.”
“Yes?”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes.”
I took a deep breath and went on, before he could interrupt. “Isaac, did Mari have a deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenate?”
He sat up slowly and looked at me, after rubbing his eyes and putting on his glasses. There was a very long pause. “Naphthalene poisoning?” I nodded. “Clever.”
“Why is that?”
“She was a lifetime smoker, it would have made the trace elements difficult to discover, along with the miniscule amount to be effective due to the deficiency.”
I leaned back in the chair. “You learn something every day.”
“But it must be ingested to be poison. That would create a difficulty under most situations, but Mari’s sense of smell had long been deadened.” He thought for a moment. “We discovered her reaction to aspirin during one of her clinic visits, and it was a textbook response. I induced vomiting with a syrup of ipecac, since her respiration was not depressed, and then insisted on further testing.” He smiled and continued to look at me. “This makes things difficult for you, doesn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
“You are looking for someone who knew her medical history.” He continued to smile. “If I were you, I would suspect me but, in that I am innocent, I have nothing to fear from your suspicions. So, I give them and you my blessing.” He leaned forward and again took my hands in his. “Find who murdered her, Walter. She suffered enough in life; there is no reason she should have to bear this final indignity.”
I took Isaac off the unofficial suspect list on my way out to the truck. Dog was waiting, so I let him out to pee and stretch his legs. I leaned against the Bullet and thought about all the Barojas I was going to have to contact in the next few hours. I loaded Dog up and headed out to buy some overdue baked goods.
Someone hadn’t been content to wait for the old woman to die, and all the suspects smacked of being too obvious. That’s how it worked, though. Motive and opportunity rode along like two out of four apocalyptic equestrians, grinning with their bony death heads at us lesser humans as we fumbled along, refusing to believe the obvious.
I had eaten the ruggelach, and I didn’t die.
* * *
I parked the truck and noticed a single set of footprints going in but none leaving. Lana must have walked. I opened the door and carefully shut it against the compacted snow at the sill. She needed to shovel. The bell at the top of the door tinkled, but no one appeared. I took a step in as I followed the dog but stopped to knock some of the accumulated snow from my hat and shoulders and to breathe in the fragrance of rising yeast and baking bread. The only sound was the quiet hum of the coolers and the winds of forced-air heating.
Dog had advanced down the long counter but had stopped at the end. His head dropped, and he stared at the small seating area in the back. I was surprised when he retreated a step or two, froze and growled, and looked at something around the corner. “Dog?”
It took about two strides to get to Lana Baroja who was lying at the top of the steps to the basement in a considerable amount of blood. Spikes of black hair were matted at the back of her head where there was a deep wound. One arm was turned while the other shot off to the side in an unnatural position.
I checked her pulse; the rhythm was fast. Tachycardia—no way to know the pressure. She was pale, bluish, and clammy, with a light sweat, classic symptoms of shock.
The numbers started up like an adding machine in my head; large bold numbers that stated simply that one third of the victims of head injury are unconscious and that more than 80 percent of the total deaths came from this group; that a full 50 percent of the individuals who could speak at some point after their injury and later died could have been saved with immediate treatment. I thought back to Isaac Bloomfield on the highway, my recently accumulated experience, and momentarily considered another line of work.
I checked her neck, but nothing seemed broken. I made the decision I had been making a lot of lately and scooped her up, yanking a tablecloth from the nearest table and wrapping it around her, being careful to support her head. As I made my way toward the door, Dog followed.
I had her at Durant Memorial in four minutes.
A doctor I didn’t recognize pushed me away from the gurney as he felt the region at the back of her head, palpating the lacerations and bruising, checking for signs of hemorrhage behind the eardrums, and shining a light into her eyes to see if the pupils were equal and reactive. I wasn’t surprised when the damaged Isaac Bloomfield appeared and called for a CT scan to examine her brain and the inner lining of her skull for evidence of the subdural hematoma he knew was there. I wasn’t surprised when he called for two units of blood as they rushed her into the operating room, nor was I surprised that A-negative was what he asked for, without consulting any files or records. I wasn’t surprised as I watched the snow from the waiting-room windows and felt the cold creep in from a winter that showed no signs of ending.
I was surprised when Isaac Bloomfield reappeared after twenty minutes and told me that Lana Baroja would live.
8
I reached out and pulled her hand down; it seemed that she was probing the wound a little too aggressively. “No idea, huh?”
She smiled, but I think it hurt. “No.”
I looked into her eyes again, but the pupils seemed normal; they must not have given her any drugs because of the head trauma. Even in the gauze turban, she was looking pretty good; amazing what youth can do. “How do you think they got in then?”
She was studying me now. “I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t get the door relocked.” I guess I made a face. “What?”
“No footprints and, odds are, they wouldn’t rely on you accidentally leaving the door ajar. Anybody besides you have keys to the place?”
She looked at me for a second longer than necessary but then answered. “Nobody.”
“Who rented you the space?”
“Elizabeth Banks at Clear Creek Realty.”
I made a mental note to call Beebee. “Have you heard from your aunts in the last few days?”
“Kay called and said that Carol was flying in from Miami and that we have to have a family meeting on Thursday; something about the Will.”
“Today?”
She looked sheepish, and it was a look that agreed with her. “Is it Thursday?”
“Yep, I think they knocked Wednesday out of you.” I was silent for a moment too long, and she blinked and looked at me. They were fine dark eyes giving a clear view into a very fine mind that continued to operate despite recent abuse. “I’ve got something to tell you, Lana.” It hung there between us as the baseboard heaters ticked in the private room.
“It’s about my grandmother?”
“Yep, it is.” She didn’t move as I told her about the evidence we had assembled; instead, her attention shifted to the knees that were pulled up to provide a resting place for her crossed arms. As I talked, it seemed as though she was drawing in, growing smaller as the world grew colder. I calculated the risk and decided to go ahead. “Lana, do you know about the methane development that’s going on down on your grandmother’s place?”
Thought clouded her eyes for a moment. “Kay is in charge of the estate, but I’m not sure. Carol might be in charge of the ranch. There’s a manager who lives in the old house on Four Brothers.” She shrugged. “I really don’t know.” She was still looking at me when I glanced back up. “You think the same person that killed my grandmother tried to kill me?”
I rubbed my face and looked through my fingers. “I’d rather be chasing one killer than two; it gives me better odds.”
* * *
I got all the way to the front desk before Vic accosted me. She was eating an almond cookie. “So did you have to step on every one of the fucking footprints at the bakery?”
“I didn’t want it to be too easy for you.” I leaned against the receptionist’s desk. “I’m assuming you checked those?”
She winked and pulled two more out of a ziplock bag and held them out to me. “That’s what I’m doing now. Want one?”
I shook my head. “I’ll wait till the report’s in.”
She shrugged and ate another cookie. “Naphthalene’s easy to trace in food. The smell is hard to hide.”
“Where’s the high-altitude Mexican?”
“I left him at the office. He went there from Sonny George’s.”
“Anything at the junkyard?”
I noticed she wasn’t smiling. “The bleeders on both the front and rear brakes had been loosened just enough for the fluid to escape. I called Fred Ray over at the Sinclair station, and he said he did a full brake job on the Mercedes about two months ago, and there is no way the car could have lasted that long with them loose.”
I took a deep breath. “I’ll need to talk to Sancho.”
“He’s going through the boxes and cataloging the crap from Mari Baroja’s room which, I might add, is a lot of crap cataloging.” She looked off toward the windows and casually walked over to the waiting room to watch the snowfall. “Letters, boxes, and boxes of letters, notes, and telegrams. You name it. If it was written, she kept it.”
“That may be handy.”
“Yeah, we got her whole life in boxes.” She turned, and her eyes locked onto mine. “Note the phrase whole life in boxes and note that Sancho is at the office. When we got there this morning, there were the cartons. We found out that the staff at the Durant Home for Assisted Living had taken it upon themselves to box up Mari Baroja’s life, send it to us, and clean the fucking room.”
I could feel my jaw muscles tightening. “I guess they didn’t notice the bright yellow tape across the door that says SHERIFF’S BARRICADE DO NOT CROSS?”
“Maybe they can’t read.” She cocked her head and continued to look at me. “Are you going to get really mad? ’Cause I like it when you get really mad.”
I ignored her. “Anything in the letter boxes?”
“Well, we’re just getting started, and a lot of it’s in Basque, so Sancho’s the only man for the job. A couple of letters from Northern Rockies Energy Exploration, pretty straight forward stuff, and all of it from Baroja-Calloway down in Miami.”
She waited, the tarnished gold of her eyes lying heavily upon me. Then she pulled what looked like a stack of assorted letters from her other jacket pocket. They were old and tied together with a faded piece of red fringe that had been pulled from the edge of a scarf. It looked like the one that had blown across the Powder River and had snagged on the European blue sage that I had seen in my dream. I carefully took the stack of thin paper and looked down at the address: Room 201, The Euskadi Hotel, Durant. In a swirling hand, the letters were addressed from Lucian.
“I thought you might want these.”
I nodded and looked at the fragile letters with the faded words and the worn fuzzy edges. Words like accessory to commit fraud, conspiracy, tampering, and a myriad of others hung there in the small space between us. I glanced up at her, but she was watching the snow, and I stood there for a moment, looking at the reflection in her eyes before quietly shoving the letters in my own jacket pocket.
She remained silent for a moment, then reached out to place the tip of her forefinger against the glass, and I saw her as a child, the kind of child who had to touch everything, the kind of child you couldn’t say no to. I had a child like that and reminded myself to ask Ruby if I could expect Cady by Christmas. “So, are you going to go over to the Home for Assisted Living and assist the staff in an ass-chewing or what?”
I ignored her some more. “No moth balls?”
She licked her cookie-crumb lips. “No moth balls.” She held the bag out to me again. “Last one.” She smiled. “So . . . you think we should have a look at Mari Baroja’s last Will and Testament?”
I looked through the glass doors of the hospital at the gentle but ever-falling precipitation. “We should be thankful for the snow, it’s probably the only thing that’s holding Baroja-Lofton-Baroja-Calloway at bay.”
“Oh, the hyphen-harpies called.”
I sighed. “When?”
She finished off the last almond cookie and stuffed the bag in the inside pocket of her coat. “This morning. I’m assuming they are assembling for the charge.”
“Well, that’s my problem. If there’s nothing over at the bakery, then I guess you should go back to the home. Get the names of everybody who went into that room. Start fingerprinting with the easy stuff, get what you can from contrasting powder and silicon lifts, superglue fuming, and simple photography. Hit the AFIS. It’s a long shot, but you never know.” She was already nodding and smiling. “What?”