Bad Medicine (7 page)

Molly sat back on her heels and peered up at the gnarled old man who looked more like a German gnome than the corporate wizard he'd once been. "Immigration's open, Sam."

Sam just nodded. He knew Molly's theory on death and dying. Heaven, she'd long since decided, was run on a quota system, like the INS. When St. Peter was low on bodies, people dropped in the street like flies. Young people, innocent people, people who had no business succumbing to stupid illnesses and incredibly bad luck. When the numbers were met, on the other hand, you couldn't kill somebody if you beat them over the head with a hammer.

Tyrell's autopsy had proved the point all too clearly. According to the findings, he should not have died. The gunshot had not been fatal. The shock had.

And according to the family, there should have been no reason for Pearl to have written a suicide note or taken her own life.

Immigration was open, and lawyers and small black kids were on the list. It was enough for Molly.

"I also heard on the news," the old man said, pulling out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his ashen face, the cigarette bobbing at the corner of his mouth as he talked, "that there is some kind of scandal brewing in the Medical Examiner's Office. Did I hear your name mentioned?"

Molly turned her attention back to the weeds that seemed to have taken root amid the dahlias during her absence of the last few days. "You heard my name mentioned."

"Should you be talking to a lawyer?"

"You ever catch me talking to a lawyer, Sam," she said with feeling, " you have permission to put a gun right to my head and pull the trigger. It's easier that way."

Sam
tsked
and shook his head. "It was a bad thing, that lawsuit, Molly."

Molly couldn't have agreed more. "A bad thing, Sam. Especially for that ambulance chaser who started it all, if I ever get my hands on him."

Sam gazed up at the hazy August sky as if awaiting inspiration. "You know, there's an old Jewish saying."

"If you hear the sound of boots, get the hell out of Warsaw?"

Sam chuckled, an old man with emphysema and a faint East European accent. "No. That's just Sam's saying. I was thinking more along the lines of clouds and silver linings."

"The Jews came up with that?"

"Who else?"

Molly grinned up at the crinkled, gray face and sly eyes of the old man she did love. "Who else."

"We also say that a hot cup of tea will make any problem better."

"I thought that was the English."

"They stole it from the Jews."

Molly smiled, straightened, decided that she would like some tea after all. Even if she was still dressed in her scrubs and nursing shoes. Even if her back was hurting like a sore tooth. Even if she hadn't slept in over twenty-four hours and still had to complete the paperwork she'd brought home with her.

The news crews who had done their damnedest to hound her all night and morning would not know to find her at her neighbor's house, and since she was the only person on her block without an answering machine, they couldn't leave messages.

Besides, Sam's tea was not exactly a ritual the English would have recognized. Sam's tea, which he claimed cured all ills, probably killed them instead. Especially with the alcohol content involved.

"Yeah," Molly said, linking arms with him. "Tea sounds wonderful."

Molly left her nursing bag right there among the oak toe. She wasn't about to walk inside and find that maybe the phone was ringing. It was much easier to ignore that way. Much better to sip tea with Sam than sling mud with the newsmen. Sam would have his tea, and Molly would have the regulation kind.

"How's Myra?" she asked, slowing her step to match his, especially in the heat.

"She sends her best."

Myra, Sam's wife, had Alzheimer's. She hadn't made sense in five years. Sam's son and daughter took him to the nursing home to see her every day. At least once a week they begged Molly to talk their father into moving into the home himself. For his safety. Considering what a Bedouin tent the inside of Sam's house was, Molly couldn't ever imagine him surviving the sterile, tiled halls of a nursing home. She'd never told him what his children wanted.

"Somebody needs to work the soil around your bulbs," Molly chastised the old man, knowing perfectly well that she'd be the one doing it while Sam sat in his wrought-iron chair offering tips.

"Tea first," he said, patting her hand with gnarled fingers. "Then a nap. Maybe later, after dinner."

They almost made it across. Down the street a couple of kids were roller-blading along the sidewalk. Pat Breedlove was watering her lawn, and two doors up, Allen Turner was trying to get a huge gilt mirror out of the backseat of his Volvo. The only real sounds came from traffic beyond the iron fence. Voices drifting on the breeze from outdoor cafes, music from passing cars. The air was close, hot, sticky as warm donuts. Molly was just beginning to feel better.

"Excuse me, Molly? Molly Burke?"

That took care of that.

"Don't turn around," Sam suggested, holding on more tightly. "It's probably a salesman."

But Molly knew that voice. She knew that no salesman was worse, or more persistent. She also knew she'd end up talking to him in the end. She'd just make him work for it, as was only proper.

"You haven't been taking your medicine again, have you, Sam?" she accused as he puffed his way along next to her.

"For what?" he demanded. "So the
pisher
druggist can send his son to school in a Porsche?"

"You need to breathe, Sam."

"I need to sleep. I can't with all that money going down the toilet. A hundred-thirty dollars for one month's worth of one prescription. One! I ask you, does that make sense?"

"Molly, please! A moment, that's all I need."

"You on something new?" Molly asked Sam as if she couldn't hear the slick-soled wing tips slipping over her lawn behind them like an uncoordinated angel of death trying to catch up.

"Always something new. Something that lines pockets, you ask me. Something that makes the druggist rich, the doctor rich, the company rich. The poor old men eating cat food to survive."

Molly chuckled. "Seems to me that this poor old man owns more pharmaceutical stock than Eli Lilly himself."

Sam chuckled back and patted at Molly's hand. "Something's wrong with that? Somebody besides sharks should benefit from an old man's illnesses."

"The Irish have a saying about that, you know."

"They do?"

"Yeah. Get what you can while you can. Then get out."

Sam took a last, long drag from his cigarette, until there wasn't much left but ash, and considered Molly with shrewd eyes. "It's just not time to get out," he said.

Molly couldn't answer. Not for Sam, or for her, not for Pearl. So she smiled and came to a stop so her pursuer could catch up.

"She won't even talk to me," he complained in a voice that was somehow breathier than Sam's.

Sam raised hoary, caterpillar-like eyebrows at the young man who had joined them on the cracked, weed-choked driveway that separated Sam's house from Molly's. "Maybe you should try roses."

Finally, Molly felt like laughing. She did, which made Sam frown and the newcomer blush. "Sam," she said. "I'd like to introduce you to Rhett Butler, St. Louis's newest homicide officer."

Sam squinted. Scowled. "You're going to interrupt my tea, aren't you, young man?"

"If I'm lucky," Rhett answered honestly.

Actually, his name was John. John Jason Butler. But back when he'd been a uniform, the women had started calling him Rhett, and it had stuck. Why, Molly wasn't sure. A more unlikely Rhett Butler, she'd never seen. This one was middle-sized, middle height, with thinning brown hair over a high forehead and a face that had been arrested at about age thirteen. It was said down at homicide that Rhett had an almost perfect confession rate, because even the nastiest mopes ended up trusting those guileless brown eyes. Rhett enthusiastically sported the trappings of office; ubiquitous police detective mustache, limp gray suit, and snap brim hat. None of it did squat to make him look like anything but a kid.

Sizing up the uncomfortable detective as he would have an underperforming employee, Sam finally pulled his hand free from Molly to dispose of his cigarette. It landed along with several others in a clump of dandelions. "Well, young Mr. Butler," he chastised, "we Jews have a saying."

Molly fought another smile. Jewish mothers, more likely.

"I apologize," Rhett immediately responded, obviously well acquainted with that tone of voice. "I wouldn't interrupt if it weren't important."

"Rhett here missed at least one autopsy this morning," Molly explained as if Rhett were a recalcitrant kindergartner. Technically, Rhett was not expected to sit in on the autopsy of a suicide. That didn't mean he wouldn't have questions about it, though.

"It was unavoidable," he protested.

Molly still didn't face him. "And, if I'm any judge of character—and I am—"

Sam nodded, Molly nodded, and Rhett squirmed out in the August heat in his brand-new homicide suit with half the neighborhood watching him.

"The chief medical examiner will not now return his calls about what she found on said autopsy. Correct, Detective?"

The detective looked as if he wanted to crawl in with the cigarette butts. "I tried to explain."

"You don't explain to the chief medical examiner," Molly said. "It makes her even more angry."

"So then she isn't talking to either of you," Sam concluded.

Molly nodded. "Exactly. Which is why I'm going to help this young man."

Ten minutes later Molly saw Rhett's eyes widen as he stepped into her entry hall. She caught him sizing up the original Hoppers and Rembrandt sketches, the gleaming woodwork and pristine eggshell walls and high white ceilings. She imagined what he thought and ignored it, just as she would anyone else. Instead, she walked through to the kitchen with its red tile counters and windowsills of African violets and old green bottles, and she poured them glasses of iced tea. Then she led him out to the back patio, where the catalpa trees whispered in an afternoon breeze and the goldfish circled lazily in her little pond.

Rhett didn't look any more settled on the black wrought-iron chair than he would have on the Chippendale settee in the living room.

"This is..."

Molly settled into the chair across from him and began picking dead buds from the hot pink impatiens and purple pansies that filled the planters. "Something else," she obliged for him.

"Nice," he corrected, yanking at his tie.

Molly knew it was unfair to make him sit out in the heat. There was no way she was going to discuss suicide inside that house, though.

"So," she said, "you caught both Tyrell and Pearl?"

Rhett's attention was all hers. "Just my lucky night. I got more press on my ass than Madonna, and not a damn thing to sing."

"Got anybody on Tyrell yet?"

He shook his head. "Looks like North Side Posse, but no IDs. How's his mother?"

Molly sighed and rubbed at her own tired eyes. "You tell me. He was the third son she's lost."

For a minute they both paused, the only tribute time afforded a little boy. Afforded a family shattered on the stones of violence. And then, dispassionately and clinically, Molly told Rhett the findings of the autopsy. She told him that Tyrell had not bled to death, had not drowned in his own blood. She told him that Tyrell had simply not had the strength to survive.

Rhett took notes, asked questions, and moved on. Just as they all did.

"What about Pearl?" he asked.

"Blood alcohol was two-fifty, so that empty gin bottle did belong to her. The rest of the tox screen is pending. The rest of the autopsy was unremarkable."

"Did Dr. Johnson do it?"

"Terry Freeman. Winnie was there."

Rhett snorted. "Poor Freeman. You did the profile?"

Molly scowled, picked apart a wilted petal. "I did the profile."

Psychosocial profiles were done on all suicide victims. Interviews with family and friends who would be able to trace the person's final days toward disaster.

Was she drinking any more than usual, Mrs. Johnson?

Was there a problem on the job?

Pearl's mother had sat in that stuffy, impersonal little room and ripped apart tissues just like Molly picked at scarlet petals in her yard, hands trembling, eyes full, her voice tight as pain.

"You don't understand," Mrs. Johnson had kept saying, shaking her head as if that could rid her of the notion that her daughter might really be dead. "She was so happy. So...
strong.
Especially when she was fighting for that gambling bill. Lord, but she did love a good fight, and she hadn't had one since she left the prosecutor's office."

"When did that change, Mrs. Johnson?" Molly had asked, the questionnaire waiting in her hands for its answers. Each blank worth a point. Four points equals depression. Drinking? Not sleeping? Agitated, preoccupied? Talking about dying? Beep. You do go on to Final Jeopardy.