A Bitch Called Hope (19 page)

Gut feeling? Jillian was telling it the way it was.

What happened to the god-like boy she had adored all those years back? What happened to the family she’d grown up knowing? Bill, Delia, the boys, every one of them corrupt. Peel back enough layers of good manners and beautiful clothes, more than half the people you know have ugly secrets. Stay in this profession long enough and you’ll end up having a pretty sorry view of humanity. Maybe Aurora was right. This was no job for a nice girl.

It was ten after eight when Lennox ordered take-out. Just as she hung up the phone another call came in.

The woman on the line sounded terrified. Lennox could hear her gulping breath. It was Alice Stapely. Someone had run her boyfriend down. Gabe was in the ICU. Alice couldn’t reach his mother.

Lennox got the name of the hospital and told her she was on the way.

Chapter 30

It was 8:40 when Lennox reached the ICU waiting room. The hospital had pulled out all the stops to make the room soothing. The light was soft and the walls were hung with watercolors of Mount Hood and Cannon Beach. Three families were scattered amongst the groupings of teal upholstered chairs. Alice sat separate from them curled in a corner chair. Army camo jacket, pink tutu, black tights, red nose, raccoon eyes.

“They’re not sure he’s going to make it,” Alice said. “And they won’t let me see him. ‘Only family,’ they said.” Both she and Lennox looked over to the desk situated by the door leading into the ICU.

“Have you reached his mom yet?” Lennox asked.

Alice shook her head and crushed a tissue against her mouth.

The police had already come and taken a statement from Alice. Told her they’d be getting back to her. Alice pulled the policeman’s card out of her jacket pocket and handed it to Lennox. Fish was running the investigation. First Tommy, now Fish. Lennox was having serious misgivings about her luck.

As Alice told her story to Lennox, spent tissues puddled beneath her chair. Gabe had picked her up from class like he always did. They stopped at the corner pub for a bite before he went on to Dark Horse Comics. He was working on a layout with the print guys. Alice and Gabe had been arguing, same subject they’d been fighting about since he quit both his jobs. Alice came right out and said she was positive Gabe had seen something the night of the Pike murder.

“He goes off about the patron. The patron.” Alice blew her nose. “I told him, ‘Don’t lie to me.’ He gets pissed and walks out. I’m thinking I’ve so had it with this guy. I pay the check and I’m waiting for the change. Boom! A crash outside, tires squealing. I run out the door of the pub and there’s a car flying down the street. I look over and see Gabe. He’s in the middle of the street. Even in the dark I can tell he’s bleeding like crazy.” Tears ran down her cheeks.

“What time was it?”

“What time was it? How the hell should I know? It was dark. Okay?” Alice put her hands up to shield her face. “What is wrong with people they can hit him and not even stop?” Snot mixed with tears roped down her face. “Hit him and leave him like that.”

Lennox kept handing her tissues, sat as close as she could. “I know,” she said in a low coo of a voice. “I know.” At some point she started patting Alice on the back, saying, “He’ll make it, he’ll make it.” A chorus of
he’ll make it
s until at last Alice calmed, her breath coming back in long shudders.

Alice had to use the restroom. Lennox took the time to gather up the sea of spent tissues and stuff them in the trash. When Alice got back, she had washed her face. It was still red and blotchy, but she looked as composed as a person could be under the circumstances.

Lennox said, “Alice, did you see the car?”

“Do we have to talk about this right now?”

“No, we don’t have to talk about it,” Lennox said. She held Alice’s hand, which was wrapped around a damp tissue. “I want to help and this is how I do it. Ask questions. Just one little piece of information and all of a sudden I can see a clear path back to things that didn’t make sense before.”

“You think someone deliberately ran him over?”

Lennox repeated the old saying: there are no coincidences in a murder investigation. She should’ve kept her big mouth shut. She said the word “murder” and Alice started crying again.

“It’s the way you said: blackmailers end up dead.” She pulled her hand out of Lennox’s and pressed the tissue against her mouth. Mewling sounds escaped.

It wasn’t like Lennox got any satisfaction about being right. If only she could’ve convinced Gabe to go to the police, she would have made a difference. Instead she offered tissues to Alice while Gabe lay in the next room fighting for his life.

“I’m going in to see him,” Lennox said. “If they ask you, I’m his sister.”

Lennox went to the desk. The guardian of the ICU was a plump senior lady with white curly hair. Lennox showed the nice lady her identification, told the lady she was Gabe’s married sister, Lennox Cooper. The guardian looked pointedly at Lennox’s naked ring finger. Lennox gave her plenty of eye contact. She was passed through.

Down a glossy white hallway, so highly waxed you could fix your makeup in the reflection, Lennox came to a circular nurses station. The ICU had tiny glass-faced rooms forming an outer circle facing the nurses station. If someone were to ask her what the place smelled like, she’d say, “Like nothing.” It was even more hushed than the waiting room. The only things she could hear were the electronic pulses from the units. Lennox asked about Gabe Makem.

A male nurse in his early forties nodded. His name was Dave according to the badge on his blue scrubs. Dave was a solid man with short dark hair and acne scars. He typed something into the computer. “Well, he’s on a ventilator. He has three broken ribs. One of them shifted and punctured the right lung. He has a shattered femur. His spleen ruptured. That said, he’s made it so far. He’s young, that helps.”

“Whoever hit him must have been going fast,” Lennox said.

“The damage to his leg, I’d say the car hit him and drove over his body.”

“Is he going to make it?” Lennox said.

“You’d have to talk to the doctor about that. Gabe is in room 612. Only five minutes; he needs to rest.”

Lennox crept into Gabe’s room. He was sleeping, hooked up to a bunch of machines. Tubes led from his arm, from his nostrils. His hand rested on top of the sheet, the fingers curled. He looked very pale and small and young. If he was a blackmailer, what were the odds that this hit-and-run was random? Zero to zip.

The ventilator was a clear plastic cylinder, an accordion pump rising and falling with a mechanical hiss. A machine monitoring his various vitals beeped rhythmically. There was a scent here, like a low current of trauma. Gabe slept there, broken in a lot of pieces, helpless as a lamb. He was just a gormless kid. She kissed her fingers, brushed them against his cheek and wished him well.

“Ma’am?” Dave, the nurse, entered Gabe’s room along with an older woman. He gave Lennox the eyeball. “You need to leave now,” he said.

The older woman shook her head. “Never saw her before.” She was tall and skinny and covered in freckles. Her red hair had lightened from Gabe’s color to a faded ginger.

“Mom?” Lennox said.

Gabe’s mother looked way too worried to crack a smile. “Nice try, kid,” she said in a husky voice.

Gabe’s mother walked over to the bed while the nurse escorted Lennox out of the ICU. He talked to the threshold guardian who in turn looked the way a person does who’s been lied to.

“Ma’am,” said the threshold guardian. God, Lennox hated being called ma’am. “You need to leave now or we’ll call security.”

Security. Would whoever ran him down come back to finish the job? Lennox and Alice passed through the glass doors to the hallway. The guardian pointed a finger to the elevator.

“Tell me how he is,” Alice said to Lennox. “Was he awake?”

“He was sleeping peacefully,” Lennox said. Isn’t that what people always said? No reason to tell her how many machines he was hooked up to.

“Don’t go back to your apartment,” Lennox said. “I don’t think you’re safe there.”

“But what about my clothes?”

“I’ll pack a bag for you,” Lennox said. “Can you stay with your parents or something?”

“What about Gabe?” Alice’s eyes were wild.

“I’ll call Officer Bartel right away,” Lennox said.

“You’re going to tell him about the blackmail?” she said in a loud voice, then looked even more frightened and clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Alice, do you think that nice old lady back there in the waiting room can keep the bad guys out of the ICU?”

Alice agreed to stay with her girlfriend, but said she wasn’t going anywhere until Gabe was better. She gave Lennox her keys and a list of everything she wanted.

By the time Lennox got back to the hospital with Alice’s things it was after midnight. She gave Alice another one of her business cards and wrote on the back her super private cell phone number. Made her promise to be careful and to call her any time, day or night.

Chapter 31

It was twenty minutes after midnight when Lennox got home. The only people taking a call this hour of the night were baby doctors and cops. She pulled the business card Fish had given Alice from the pocket of her jacket. He’d written his cell number on the back of the card. She turned on her desk lamp and dialed Fish’s number and waited as it rang six times. About the time she’d figured he wasn’t going to take her call he picked up.

“What?” he said.

“You’re sleeping when you got a big case?”

“What big case?” Sounding suspicious as hell.

“Your hit-and-run,” she said. “I’ve got information about your victim.”

Fish was willing to listen, but she got nowhere with him. How could Gabe be blackmailing the Pike murderer when they had the murderer locked up? Then who ran the kid down? The harder Lennox tried to explain the more he blocked her. Finally she gave up on him, told him he was the dumbest cop in the world. That if either Gabe or Alice was attacked it was on Fish’s flat head.

What could she do here? Call the cop station? And tell them what? She had no proof that Gabe was run down because he was a blackmailer or even that he was a blackmailer. Tommy. Bite the bullet and call him.

Give the devil credit: he picked up. “I thought you never wanted to see me again,” he said.

“This is business. That hit-and-run victim today?” She could hear the breathlessness in her voice.

“What hit-and-run?”

“A guy got run over in southeast Portland tonight. Around seven thirty. His name is Gabe Makem. The reason I’m calling you: he was a caterer you interviewed the night of the Pike murder. He saw something and was blackmailing the murderer.”

“Whoa there. Who’s handling this?”

“Fish,” she said.

“Why aren’t you talking to him? Isn’t he your poker buddy?”

He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. “No,” she said. “He’s not my buddy. Listen, you interviewed both Gabe and his girlfriend the night of the party. He probably told you he didn’t see anything unusual or suspicious. But right after the murder he quits his job and he’s got a whole bunch of cash. His story about where it came from is too lame to even repeat.”

“Try me.” There was an edge to Tommy’s voice.

Lennox felt her palms sweating. “He says he has a patron.”

“Is that like a boyfriend?”

“A patron of the arts. Some rich guy who pays him to write comic books.”

There was a pause on the line long enough that Lennox wondered if the call had been dropped, then she heard him clear his throat.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. I’m finishing some reports. I’ll be done in a half an hour. How about I come over to your place, you can tell me all about it.”

You wouldn’t have had to know Tommy well to hear the ”better to see you with, my dear” running beneath his just-business voice.

“How about the all-night burger joint on Forty-seventh and Sandy?” she said.

“They sell beer?”

“Tommy, this is serious.”

“You’re the one that called me,” Tommy said.

“They sell beer.”

“See you in a half an hour,” he said and hung up.

Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rang. Tommy with a wine bottle poking out from the pocket of his jacket. Nothing was straight up with that guy. She grabbed her jacket and bag.

He walked past her into the house. “It took me less time to wrap up than I thought,” he said in that breezy way he had. “Is Lover Boy here? Is that why you didn’t want me coming around?”

“Don’t try to make this personal. Gabe Makem is in the ICU. He needs police protection.”

“Which is why I came over here after working ten hours. Because you needed my help.”

Fatigue creased the skin around his eyes and mouth. It made him look sincere.

“Sit down,” she pointed to her sofa. She waited until he settled himself, then she sat in a chair close enough to talk to him, far enough away he couldn’t get too chummy. She said, “Gabe saw something the night he was catering the Pike party. Something he used to blackmail the murderer.”

“We have the murderer, Dish. You mind getting me a drink?” He held up a bottle of cabernet. She went into the kitchen and poured some wine for him. When she got back he was slouched on the sofa like he’d taken root. She handed him the glass. Put the bottle on the side table by his elbow. He lifted the wine to his lips and swallowed a third of it.

“Tell me,” he said.

Lennox sat in the chair facing him and gave him the whole deal. How both Alice and Gabe had been witnesses. How, shortly after the murder, Gabe quit his job.

Tommy listened and drank wine. Poured himself more. Lennox finished. She had lined out a logical path from witness to blackmail to attempted murder.

“That’s it?” he said.

“You’re the one that always used to say there are no coincidences,” she said.

“Did the kid ever admit he was blackmailing the murderer?”

“The money is the proof. Makem has spent seventeen thousand dollars in the last month and he’s not working.”

“If he doesn’t have a boyfriend, he’s selling drugs.”