Unfinished Business - Barbara Seranella (23 page)

Gomez also glanced at the monitors. She turned to the
woman with the chart and said, "Doctor said to give him two
milligrams of morphine." She addressed Mace in that same overly
loud voice she'd used earlier with them. "Sir, the cardiologist
is on the way. Your wife and daughter can stay with you until she
gets here. Try to relax and let the medicine do its work."

Caroline watched Mace's face soften as the morphine
inserted into his IV entered his bloodstream.

"
Don't tell anyone," he said again.

"Okay" she said, looking into his eyes and
understanding him thoroughly. If there was one thing Mace strove for,
it was control, especially over himself. He had to be feeling
terribly vulnerable.

"Let's just get
through this night."

* * *

On the way home from the party Munch remembered she
was out of milk.

"Can we stop at the store?" she asked.
"There's a little mom and pop place at the bottom of Chautauqua.
l just need to run in for a minute."

The only parking was across the street. Garret locked
his Camaro before following her to the store. She grabbed a quart of
milk and headed for the register, where there were two customers
ahead of her. While she waited, she picked up a copy of Auto Trader
magazine and flipped through the import car section.

She was considering buying a Honda with a blown
engine at work, and she wanted to check what that year's model sold
for running.

Garret, meanwhile, picked up a copy of Sports
Illustrated. Munch noticed with amusement that the sports magazines
were placed next to Penthouse and Playboy. Munch's eye wandered to
the cover of Penthouse. She gasped at the face of the model draped
coyly around a grinning scarecrow.

"I know her," she said, picking up the
magazine.

Garret looked up. "Who?"

"This is Robin," Munch said, pointing at
the magazine. "The one I told you about. The customer that got
raped." She stared.

"I've got to call Mace."

Garret stuffed his magazine back into the rack while
Munch took the Penthouse to the counter.

"You're going to buy that?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"So you can show it to your cop friend?"

"What's your problem?"

"What's my problem? Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm
weird. Why should it bother me that my girlfriend wants to share some
porno with another man?"

"This could be evidence or something," she
said.

"Yeah, right."

Munch paid for the milk and the magazine. They
stepped outside. The night was balmy with Santa Ana winds. Three
teenage boys dressed in white T-shirts and baggy pants ran across the
street. Munch watched them closely. The angle of the boys' path led
directly toward Garret's Camaro. She and Garret were stuck on the
opposite side of the street, waiting for another break in traffic.

The boys reached the sidewalk, jostling one another,
looking over their shoulders. Suddenly one of them darted to his left
and picked up a ficus tree in a huge wooden planter from the front of
a pottery store. He ran down the street with the leafy branches
resting on his shoulder, potting soil spilling on the sidewalk.

"Hey!" Munch yelled in a guttural tone, her
best imitation of a cop voice. A voice that said, Stop, punk.

The boy dropped the tree. Unfortunately, the wooden
planter split open on contact with the ground. The kid was still bent
over when he turned to the direction of her voice and said in a high,
almost hysterical voice, "I was just . . ." Then he stopped
speaking, probably realizing that there was no excuse, no innocent
explanation for what he had done. His two friends up ahead gestured
for him to join them.

"I knew they were up to something," Munch
said, feeling excited and powerful. Even heroic.

"Shut up," Garret said quietly.

She didn't look at him. They were both facing the
street. Traffic still hadn't slowed. The three boys were moving away
at a walk too cocky to run. She realized that her challenging the
kids had automatically involved Garret, too. She didn't have the
right to front him off like that. She had assumed that he'd be proud
to do the right thing. She was wrong.
 

Chapter 19

 
A
s soon as they
got back to her house, Munch noticed the empty space on the dinette
table. The tape recorder that Emily Hogan had given her was gone. She
looked quickly over to the shelves housing her stereo system. The
receiver, turntable, and tape deck were all there.

"The tape machine is gone," she said out
loud.

"What?" Garret said. "You mean the one
the cops gave you?"

"Yeah," she answered, striding over to the
table. "The box of tapes is gone, too."

"The TV's still here," he said.

"That isn't what he was after."

"How'd he get in?"

"I don't know." She picked up the phone and
dialed the St. Johns' number, but to her surprise got their answering
machine. "Where would they all be at—" she checked her
watch "—ten-thirty at night?" she asked Garret.

He took off his coat and threw it on the couch.
"Maybe they went to a movie or something." He walked past
her, through the kitchen, and checked the back door. "It's
locked," he reported. Together they inspected all the windows.
None of the screens had been disturbed and none of the sills showed
signs of being jimmied, pried, or broken.

Munch used the phone in her bedroom to call the
police. She dialed 911. A woman's voice answered and asked the nature
of her emergency

"I've been robbed," she said.

"
Robbed?" the woman asked in a patronizing,
almost jovial fashion. "Or burglarized?"

Munch stared at the phone in amazement. She was a
fucking victim here and this woman was going to play semantic games?

"Someone broke into my house and stole a tape
recorder. I guess that makes it a burglary."

The woman read back Munch's address and asked if that
was where she was calling from. Munch confirmed that the information
on the woman's screen was correct.

"
And who are you?" the lady asked.

"Miranda Mancini," Munch told her, giving
her seldom-used Christian name.

"We'll send an officer out to take a report."

Munch hung up and called the beeper number on Emily
Hogan's business card. She was still waiting for the agent to return
the call when the black-and-white patrol car pulled up in front of
the house.

The officer was a dark-haired woman whose name plate
identified her as L. Ducatee. She sat at the small dining room table
and wrote down everything Munch told her, including the facts that
there had been no sign of forced entry and that Munch was already the
victim of menacing calls that were under investigation. Officer
Ducatee advised her to lock her doors, then gave Munch a pamphlet
with her name and badge number filled in at the top.

"A detective from Burglary will be getting in
touch with you," Ducatee said. "If you want, we have a home
safety program. One of our counselors will come to your house and
perform a safety inspection. It won't cost a thing"

"Thanks," Munch said. "I'll give it
some thought."

The cop left. Munch locked the door after her, looked
down at the phone that still hadn't rung, and then said to Garret,
"What is this? Everybody's disappearing on me."

"I'm not," he said.

She took off her coat, the movement concealing her
expression. His words were meant to be reassuring. So why did she
feel exasperated? What more did she want from a guy? Maybe this was
as good as it got. There was no Sir Galahad on his white steed, no
such thing as a soul mate. She wasn't perfect and had no right to
expect perfection from another. You had to take the good with the
bad. The alternative was to be alone, which wouldn't be the end of
the world, but for Asia's sake she'd like to have a more regular
family with a positive male role model.

"Let's go to bed."

She didn't have to ask
twice.

* * *

The cardiologist's name was Dr. Cameron Krueger. She
stood about five feet two inches tall, had short gray hair, and was
surprisingly obese. She waddled into the room out of breath and sat
or rather leaned into the lone chair in the examination room. St.
John realized that her excess fat made bending more than ten degrees
at the waist a physical challenge. He waited for her verdict as she
sat across from him, shaking her head over his lab results. The
padding on her thighs forced her legs apart so that there was a
distance of some two feet between kneecaps.

"So," she said, sweat beaded on her
forehead, "how much did you smoke before you met me?"

"I don't really smoke," St. John said.
"Just cigars."

He saw Caroline rolling her eyes and it pissed him
off.

Dr. Krueger looked up from his chart. "You're
having a heart attack. Your CPK levels haven't started to go down yet
and your EKG still shows a pattern of ischemia, or insufficient blood
flow, in the anterior or front wall of the heart muscle. We need to
get you into a treatment room upstairs and see what's going on in
there. The best way to see inside you is with an angiography. We
basically inject dye into your blood vessels and film the results."

"Then what?" Caroline asked.

"That depends on what we find. Sometimes an
angioplasty is enough to clear out the blockage. Other times, surgery
is the answer."

"As in a bypass?" he asked.

"We'll know more after the procedure." The
doctor handed him release forms to sign.

He looked at Caroline. "What do you think?"

"We have to find out what's going on. I think
you should do it."

He signed his name at the bottom of the consent
forms. Asia tugged at Caroline's shirt and said, "Excuse me, I
have to go to the bathroom."

"Can you hold it for a minute longer?"
Caroline asked.

"No, that's all right," St. John said.
"Take her now."

Dr. Krueger looked at Caroline and said, "You
can meet us upstairs. The cardiac unit is on the third floor. I'll
come find you in the waiting room."

The attendants came in and kicked off the wheel locks
on the gurney. St. John realized they were going to take him away
now, just roll him out. He fought back sudden terror. The monitors
betrayed his quickened pulse.

"We'll see you upstairs," Caroline said.
She bent down and kissed him on the lips.

"Go," he said again. "I'm in good
hands here." When Caroline and Asia had left the room he looked
in the doctor's eyes and said, "Give it to me straight, Doc. Is
this it?"

"I've seen worse," she said. "The
important thing is to get you into treatment."

They wheeled him into an elevator and took him to the
third floor. In the hallway they were met by a swarthy-complexioned
man wearing surgical scrubs.

"This is my associate, Dr. Patel," Dr.
Krueger said. "He's going to be performing your angiography/'

"How do you do, sir," Dr. Patel said in a
postcolonial British accent common to educated East Indians.

"Just peachy Doc."

"Yes, quite," the doctor said with a
knowing but not unsympathetic smile. "I assure you that you will
receive the best possible care. I have performed this procedure
hundreds of times."

They all entered a large room filled with people in
surgical gowns. The sign on the door identified this place as the
cardiac catherization laboratory St. John was helped out of his
clothing and onto a motorized table. There he was strapped in and
harnessed to various machines. A nurse brought out a shallow bowl of
hot water and a razor with which she shaved the inside of his right
thigh all the way to the groin. When she was done she swabbed the
area with a reddish-brown solution that smelled like iodine.

"This isn't going to hurt, is it?" he asked
the nurse, only half joking.

She replied with a weak smile. It didn't take a
rocket scientist to read between the lines.

"You going to knock me out for this, Doc?"
St. John asked Patel.

"Oh no, old boy You'll be with us for the
duration. Not to worry. You'll be getting a local anesthetic. Here."
He touched the crease where St. John's abdomen met his upper leg.

St. John closed his eyes. The image that came to him
was of his father, years ago. St. John was eight, maybe nine. It was
a warm summer evening. The back door was open and the orange trees
his mother had planted before she died were in bloom. Their sweet
scent washed over him as he sat on the front porch holding their
cocker spaniel, Fluffy Digger was standing in the kitchen, ironing.
Harry Caray was on the radio. The Cubs were winning for a change.

He opened his eyes again and saw that they had
erected a surgical tent around his lower body. Dr. Patel kept up a
patter as he worked, explaining how he was inserting a needle into
the femoral artery followed by a guide wire. The guide wire would be
inserted only a small distance, just enough to get the plastic
catheter tube on its way to the aorta. One of the surgical nurses
shuffled over to his side and checked his pulse. He noticed that she
was wearing blue surgical booties. They were identical to the type
criminalists wore when they were trying not to contaminate a crime
scene.