The Last Clinic (13 page)

It was odd that someone of her means chose to live in neighborhood that resembled a war zone. Perhaps, like so many of her political leanings, she romanticized life in the ghetto, and thought she was noble because she lived among the low-lifes. What a crock of shit. Whatever her reason, it would end up making the gig a lot easier.

It was a straight route between her home and her place of work, a two-way street. He drove it both ways twice. The visibility from inside the car to the sidewalk was good all along the route. Also, there were no stoplights or street signs to contend with. Another positive.

Satisfied that his plan could be executed with minimum risk, he looked up the nearest ticket agency on his cell. It was not that far away. He drove over and paid one hundred sixty-five dollars, cash of course, for a box seat at Busch Stadium and spent the afternoon watching the Cards have their way with the visiting Chicago Cubs.

That night he enjoyed a leisurely dinner at a first-rate restaurant on The Hill, Saint Louis’s historic Italian neighborhood. To cap off the evening, he phoned an escort service and had them send over a girl. She turned out to be coarser looking than he would have liked, but she knew how to handle herself. She was friendly and low key, not all business-like. He loved the way she blew him, going nice and slow, teasing him a little. He tipped her an extra hundred.

All in all, it was a very relaxing day.

The following morning, he was up and on the job early, driving out to the hood. As usual, his rental car had tinted windows. The tint was dark enough to make it impossible for a passerby to determine his race. He didn’t need neighbors or passersby reporting afterwards about some strange whitey riding around their neighborhood.

He found a space across the street from her place of work and waited. The subject arrived at work ten minutes later, right on schedule. She was a small-framed black lady in her middle fifties, still attractive. She’d probably been a knockout in her day. He checked her against the photo he’d been provided, just to be sure. It was she, and just as he had figured, she was on foot. She walked with a slight limp, another plus. Everything was in order.

He left the neighborhood and grabbed some lunch at a popular rib joint on the other side of town. Afterwards he drove over to the multiplex next to the old Saint Louis train station, now a fancy indoor mall. He wasted a couple of hours on a movie called
Juno
about some teenaged slut who banged her boyfriend in an easy chair, got knocked up and decided to give up the baby to some yuppie couple from the suburbs. The actress who played the woman from the suburbs was hot stuff. He’d seen her before in one of those phony hand-to-hand combat movies. He liked her. The rest of the movie bored him.

The movie was out at five. He was too hyped up to eat and he didn’t feel like going back to his room. He drove around this neighborhood and that, waiting until it was time to go to work.

He found the perfect spot to park, half a block up from the entrance to the building. It was dark by seven-thirty p.m. giving him plenty of time to check his equipment and make sure everything was in order, then just sit and wait. If she came out with someone, or if there were cars blocking his way or other bystanders, he’d be forced to call things off and try again tomorrow. As always, he’d built a few extra days into his schedule, just in case.

At 8 p.m., she was right on time. He watched her lock up, then walk the full length of the block and cross the street. Right on cue, he pulled out of the parking space heading in her direction. His was the only car on the street, giving him a clear path to her. He stepped on the gas and shot down the street, intentionally weaving a little from left to right. He wanted to be sure anyone witnessing the crime would report to the cops that the driver was excited, jacked-up, out of control.

He was next to her in a matter of seconds. He hit the brakes, screeched and rolled down the window. She looked his way and must have realized what was happening because she turned her back to him and tried to duck. It didn’t matter. His weapon was already out.

The first two rounds of the AK-47 caught her between the shoulder blades, at the neckline. The third hit the back of her head, killing her instantly. Next, he pulled the gun up, aimed in a straight line at street level and sprayed, shooting out a couple of car windows and headlights. Aiming higher now, he laid down a second spray of fire, across two houses, taking out a picture window in one house, shredding the front door of another, and shattering the basement window in the third. It was over, the whole thing, in less than twenty seconds.
Jesus
, he thought to himself,
you’re good. The fucking forensics people will be pulling their hair out trying to figure out the spray pattern
. He peeled away, intentionally swerving and fishtailing for the next two blocks but careful not to hit any parked cars.

 Ten minutes later, he was on his way out of Saint Louis, crossing the Mississippi to the Illinois side. He glanced back, checking for any sign of police. There were no cop cars, just the usual stream of traffic and the Saint Louis Arch shining in his rearview mirror.

He drove fifty miles upriver, checked into a Comfort Inn, took his pill, and went to sleep without bothering to turn on the TV.

Next morning he picked up a copy of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
at the front desk and read it while he had his complimentary breakfast in the dining room. The article read just as he had hoped. Metro section, left column, above the fold, the headline read: DR. KILLED IN DRIVE-BY. A gangland style shooting, possibly drug related, the story said. A neighborhood resident, a woman doctor, an ob-gyn who operated the community woman’s health clinic, was on her way home from work when the drive-by took place. She did not appear to be a target of the shooting. Just another innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had happened before, and it would happen again, the paper lamented. The reporter wondered if the shooting would discourage other medical professionals from practicing in the neighborhood.

He couldn’t have written the story better himself.

14

Pinch The Tail. Suck The Head.

It was lunchtime at The Crawdad Hole, a crawfish joint near the reservoir. Three of them—Darla, Shelby and Uther Pendragon Johnson—were sitting out back around a picnic table. The table was covered with a triple layer of yesterday’s newspaper, The
Jackson Crier,
which was, in turn, covered with thirty pounds, more or less, of boiled Cajun crawfish mixed in with a few pieces of andouille sausage, red potatoes, and corn on the cob. The headlines of the murder peeked up at the diners through the mound of tiny red-orange crustaceans.

The three of them were working their way through the crawfish with their fingers and their teeth—pinching the tails, sucking the heads—and putting out the fire in their mouths with glasses of Lazy Magnolia, a Mississippi beer brewed down in Kiln, below Hattiesburg. Shelby didn’t usually go for officers drinking at lunch, but beer was the only acceptable beverage to serve with crawfish.

“Here’s a little test for you, Mr. Uther,” said Shelby. “See if y’all can tell me why eating crawfish is a like working a homicide case?”

“I’m afraid growing up I was never one for social riddles, Sheriff.”

“Probably didn’t care for knock-knock jokes either,” said Shelby, and turned to Darla. “Care to weigh in?”

“Is this necessary?”

“Come on. For Uther’s benefit.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Eating crawfish is like working a homicide case in that it’s a hell of a lot of effort and damn little to show for it,” said Shelby.

He demonstrated by holding the tiny bit of the white meat between his teeth, then letting it disappear in his mouth.

“In the never ending fight against crime, job satisfaction, like the crawfish boil, is experienced, out of necessity, in minuscule doses. Every small taste is to be savored, especially seeing as how we don’t always find the bad guys. If fact you hardly ever do.”

 “He does this with every new recruit,” she said to Uther. “He thinks he’s being philosophical.”

Shelby cast his eyes heavenward as though about to bless the meal.

“Apropos of that, let me see what pleasure the good Lord has provided for me thus far? I’ve got the governor of Mississippi, the mayor of Jackson, the entire city council, Josh Klein over at WJAK, The National Rights of the Unborn, stringers for a bunch of national news media, most of the Republicans down at the Legislature, which is most of the legislature, and a fair portion of the God-fearing people in the 601 area code, calling my office, demanding to know when they are going to see someone—most of them think it should be Dr. Nicoletti—do the perp walk. Then I’ve got your friend and fellow officer, Tommy Reylander, who, in-between singing engagements, has managed to come up with a prime suspect. And guess what? It’s Dr. Nicoletti, whom the aforementioned Detective Reylander says, has motive, is in possession of the possible murder weapon, and is the owner of a vehicle similar to the one from which the fatal shots were fired. So what do you, my hate crime specialist, and your newly minted protégé—that would be you, Uther—have for me?”

Darla was watching the lady at the next picnic table, a women nearing forty, having lunch with a boy in his tweens. They didn’t look alike exactly, the lady and the boy, but you could sense the family connection in the naturalness they had with one another. After a few seconds of silence, it came to her that Shelby was expecting an answer.  

“Where should I start?”

“How about the grieving widow? She account for herself, did she?”

“She said she was at home at the time of the shooting. I believed her. Or rather, I believed that she didn’t have it in her to kill her husband. I haven’t had an opportunity to talk to the daughter yet. Lenore says the girl was out at the reservoir at the time of the shooting. We’ll see if that checks out. The daughter and father weren’t getting along too well.”

Shelby poured himself the last of the Lazy Magnolia. “Now, just so you know, Lenore called my office and offered a less-than-stellar assessment of your job performance. Said she was gonna take you off her Christmas list.”

“Lenore also said she didn’t know anything about the three thousand dollars. I guess I believed her there too.”

“How about Higgenstone over at the church?

He was adamant that Reverend Aldridge didn’t get to handle that money. It may have come from a private donor—something the Reverend collected on the side.”

“Somebody looking for a down payment on the hereafter, no doubt,” said Shelby.

“Maybe. Or it could be money he’d saved, but the money doesn’t show up anywhere on his personal records or anywhere in the church records.”

“So we got a dead minister with a casino-sized wad in his glove compartment in an envelope marked ‘For Deposit,’” said Shelby, picking his way through the few remaining crawdads, looking for the biggest ones. “And you say Tommy don’t give no-never-you-mind about it?”

“That’s a fair characterization.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s the key I told you about. I found it taped to the back of the desk drawer in Reverend Aldridge’s study.”

“I remember. That would be the key that opens a post office box that doesn’t have any mail in it?”

Shelby held up his fingers up, eyeing the stain from the Cajun spice.

“Any tax records in the state of Mississippi for this RJA Enterprises?” he said.

“I checked with the Secretary of State’s office. There’s no record of them registering as a business or a not-for-profit. Also, no address and no phone number.”

“Anything on the internet? That kind of thing?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Uther.

“So we got a key to an empty mailbox that doesn’t have any mail in it, purchased by a company that doesn’t officially exist. Is this what you want to me to tell the mayor? That it looks like his minister and life-long friend was up to no good, but we don’t have any idea what kind of no good he was up to?”

“Uther has also come up with some activity on the computer.”

“Something a bit more intriguing than the usual salacious material,” said Uther, “although, it’s my understanding salacious might be helpful,” then he added, “according to Detective Cavannah.”

“Please don’t tell me Reverend Jimmy was a butt boy. Sorry, homosexual. And don’t go taking no offense, Uther, if you happen to be of that persuasion. Not that I think you are? Or not that it matters? There, is that politically correct enough for everybody?”

“Thank you for the courtesy Sheriff, but I’m not gay,” said Uther. “And neither was Reverend Aldridge, as far as we can tell from his internet activity. However, he did spend a good deal of time on adult sites.”

“I hope we’re not talking about kiddie porn. WJAK will have a field day if that gets out.”

“They were young women, to be sure, but not underaged.”

“Well, it is a sin to look at dirty pictures. I’ve been hearing that since about age seven. It probably says that somewhere in the Bible. But even as conservative as we are in Mississippi, it’s not against the law. On the other hand, there may still be a law against self-abuse on the books. I know cunnilingus isn’t strictly legal.”

“There’s an interesting twist here,” said Darla, setting Uther up, giving him a chance to score some points.

“He liked, well, how should one put it? He liked dark meat,” said Uther. “He accessed five adult sites; all of them featured young African American women exclusively.”

“I don’t see nothing strange about that. Lots of white men like women of color. I’ve had a few interracial dates myself, in-between my various and sundry marriages. Upstanding Christian women they were too.”

“The sites he visits, the photos he’s downloaded, have a very narrow profile. The women are of legal age, but just barely so. I’m of the opinion that there’s an identifiable pattern present but beyond age and race, but I’m not seeing it yet,” said Uther.