Bad Medicine (6 page)

Molly didn't insult her by softening the blow. "Do you know who William T. Peterson is?" she asked.

Winnie's head came up, but she didn't look at Molly. "Why?"

"His name was mentioned in the same sentence with a reference to sleeping with snakes and getting bitten."

That got Winnie's full attention. There was fire in her eyes. "She said that?"

"I'm sorry, Winnie."

For a long moment, Winnie didn't say a word. Then, she sighed. "Yeah. Me, too. Where's her mama?"

Molly didn't hear any voices out in the hall anymore. It meant that Sasha had gotten the family out of sight safely before the bottom feeders could find them. "Quiet room two. Ettie's psychiatrist is in there with her, I think. You gonna tell her?"

Winnie laughed, but it was a bitter sound. "It's why I decided to stay here, ya know, with this system. Cause I never in my life wanted to have to be the one to tell another mama that her baby was dead. That's why I hired you, cause you're good at it." She looked down at what was left of her friend, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears. "You're good at it. I'm not."

Winnie shook her head a final time, a regal farewell from a formidable lady, and addressed her friend a final time. "I'm never forgiving you for this one, Pearlie."

And then she turned to the door.

"I need to talk to them when you're finished," Molly said simply.

Winnie nodded without turning around. "Make sure they schedule her as my first case in the morning."

Molly straightened from the wall and put her job on the line. Probably her life. "I was just about to call Terrence."

Terrence Freeman, assistant medical examiner. Winnie turned on Molly as if she'd slapped her.

"What are you saying?" she demanded, stalking right back to her. "Are you telling me you think I can't handle this? That some pimply-faced, nappy-headed, diaper-wearing choirboy's supposed to do my job for me?"

"I'm saying," Molly answered, wishing she were home, wishing she were anywhere else, "that if William T. Peterson isn't her boyfriend—and I don't think he is—the last thing you need, with that suicide note, is to be doing the autopsy on your best friend. If Pearl was involved in something political, it's not going to help her if you go down in flames with her."

For a minute Molly seriously thought Winnie was going to hit her. She wouldn't have stood a chance. Winnie had a good fifty pounds and years of boxing practice behind her. Boxing, Molly thought in no little desperation. Of all the things for a woman to do to keep herself in shape.

"Call Terrence," Winnie said, very quietly, her teeth showing in a half snarl, her nostrils wide again. She was trembling, hands clenched, posture so rigid she should have snapped in half. Molly wanted to reach out to her. She knew better.

This time, when Winnie walked out the other door, Molly did nothing to stop her. She just stayed where she was, for once preferring the silence of the room here to the chaos of the hallway outside. She stood against the wall watching Pearl's face and wondering what she saw with those half-open eyes.

On the television, they got it wrong. On TV, when people died, their eyes closed. Neat and tidy and sterile. It never worked that way. It took effort to close one's eyes, muscle groups that couldn't maintain tone in death. Eyes always stayed open. They watched the ones who were left behind, and sometimes they seemed to accuse, or ask, or beg. Molly thought maybe Pearl just looked tired.

Tired.

Molly understood that, sometimes more than others. Molly just wished she knew what it was in Pearl's eyes that betrayed lost hope. She wondered when she would see it in her own.

Molly hated suicides.

"She gone?"

Molly must have jumped a foot. She hadn't heard the door open, but right next to her, Sasha was poking her head in.

"She's been gone since noon, Sasha. Where've you been?"

Sasha's expression was guarded as she stepped into the room, her hands behind her back, her street clothes back on. Precision-pressed cotton slacks and shirt in perfect pastels, white-blond hair brushed into a smooth cap around her head. She also had yellow fingertips and a lingering aroma of cigarette smoke about her. Sasha, the ice queen, was also one of the driveway fraternity who stood shivering all winter in the snow so they could have their smokes.

"Not her," she said, then motioned in the general direction of the other door.
"Her."

Finally getting the chance to get out her equipment to finish the task at hand, Molly nodded. "Yeah. She went to sit with Pearl's family."

Sasha nodded once, a sharp movement that failed to reach her hair. "Good. Then she can't bitch about dinner."

"What dinner?" Molly was busy unlatching the metal case so she could get to the thermometer and Polaroid camera inside. Everything else she needed, she had at hand.

"This dinner," Sasha said, and proceeded to bring her hands forward with the panache of a magician to produce a sack of White Castles.

Molly should have smelled them. She'd been too preoccupied. She wasn't now. Her saliva glands went into immediate overtime.

In her life, Molly had picked up a bad habit or two. The worst, without question, was her addiction to junk food. When she'd lived in LA, she'd dined on hot dogs at Pink's; in Austin, tacos at Willy's Mex. In Chicago, Italian beef anywhere on Diversey; and in Little Rock, hamburgers at Doe's. But in all the world, there simply was not a treat like White Castles, little flattened balls of meatlike material smothered in onions on buns the size of credit cards. Alternately called Belly Bombers and Sliders, eaten not by unit, but by sackful. There was simply nothing to compare with the taste or the clientele met at the drive-up around three in the morning or the taste of the food with a nice dry Ripple.

It wasn't the professional thing to do, but Molly figured that Pearl would forgive her. She let the case fall closed again and pulled off her gloves. There was a dead certainty she wasn't going to get food any other way, and it was bad etiquette to eat hamburgers in formal attire.

"You know that this is the real test that sets sentient beings apart from lower life-forms," Molly was saying as she dug into the bag and came up with her first treat.

"Of course."

"Only a higher form of life would create something that tasted like this and then choose to eat it. Someday we'll elevate it to the religious form it deserves, and you will be its first saint for crossing the desert to deliver me."

"Damn right I will. I had to sneak these past half a dozen crows out there. Thompson just showed up."

Crows being Sasha's term for mucky-mucks. As in, "if he makes you nervous, picture him with a crow sitting on his head." And Thompson was a big crow. Chief operating officer of the medical center, the man who held all their professional lives in his hand.

His arrival was no surprise. His taking even this long, was. Nobody respected the politics of St. Louis more fervently than Dr. Stanley Thompson, nor profited from them better. Born with the rare talent to finesse both politicians and civilians, he always managed to get extra funding for his hospital and exemptions from his taxes. Molly toasted him with her first hamburger.

"So, you got a note, I hear?" Sasha said, leaning a sleek hip against the counter by the door.

Her full attention on the taste of old onions and mystery meat, Molly scowled. "Word travels."

Sasha checked her watch. "It's like a game of telephone out there. The first rumor I heard mentioned rejection by a boyfriend. As of two minutes ago, it's rejection by the mob. We probably wouldn't have three people out there if Pearl hadn't missed the press conference today announcing that gambling thing. Evidently nobody can imagine anybody on God's good earth passing up the chance to rub the mayor's nose in a big win."

Molly was glad she'd already dispatched the first hamburger, because the sense of déjà vu damn near took her appetite. "Gambling," she muttered to herself, the name Peterson fitting in there somewhere. "Gambling. God, I wonder if that's it. She mentioned something about sleeping with snakes."

Sasha's eyes widened. "Scandal. How droll. You still have it?"

Licking the juice off the fingers of her left hand, Molly used the right to reach into her scrub pocket. Then she dipped her wet fingers into the other pocket. All she came up with was lint and one lone rubber band.

She looked at Sasha and then at Pearl, her appetite suddenly gone.

"Oh, shit."

"Am I going to have to take your reward back?" Sasha asked.

Molly forgot the bag of hamburgers. Suddenly she couldn't remember what she'd done with that note when she'd gotten called out of the room. Dropping the wrapper in the trash, she headed toward her next best bet. Pearl herself.

"I bet I left it on her," Molly said. "Since I got called away and didn't want to just leave it out."

Suddenly, she couldn't remember, and that was the last thing she needed.

"Go find Lorenzo for me," she begged.

Sasha didn't move. Molly checked the robe, checked the gown beneath. Checked the cart and came up just as empty.

"Might as well finish your hamburgers," Sasha offered with a dry grin. "Looks like you're going laundry-diving."

Molly just stood there, trying her damnedest to remember just what she'd done right after Lorenzo had poked his head in the door.

As if in answer to her thoughts, he did it again. "Molly, the chief of police wants to talk to you. You have a note?"

"Lorenzo," she begged. "You saw the note. Didn't you? Did you see what I did with it?"

Lorenzo's handsome face wrinkled. "I saw you holding something. Didn't you stick it back in her robe?"

"Get out her scuba tank," Sasha suggested.

"Hear the one about the lawyer and the rabbi?" somebody asked just outside the doorway.

Molly
bated
suicides.

Chapter 3

Molly never did get her sleep. She spent the night fielding phone calls and irate questions at the Grace ER, where she used her free time to wade through laundry bins and trash bags, and she spent her morning watching autopsies. By the time she made it back to her house at the north edge of the Central West End, she was feeling dirty, exhausted, and impatient. Which was not the way to run into her next-door neighbor.

Molly's neighborhood was a quietly genteel one of old houses lovingly restored. Her street had once emptied onto Euclid, the main thoroughfare for the West End. In these times of higher crime and upscale paranoia, though, iron gates kept the circling cars away. Molly's neighbors were successful gays, adventurous young families, and older urban pioneers. Molly's house, which her grandparents had owned and passed along, was a graceful three-story Federalist-style brick box with black shutters and a lawn cultivated with more care than most children in the city.

Molly had grown up in the house. She did not love it. But then, she'd never felt much more for her parents, who had communed more comfortably with their careers and acquirements than with their offspring. They had in the end had the foresight to leave what they had accumulated in an unbreakable trust that allowed Molly the use of the house with all contents during her lifetime. Afterward, it would pass to her brother and his children. Even that long ago, Molly's father had just assumed that Molly would never have anyone of her own to pass it all down to. He'd been right. It didn't make her any more grateful to him for the security.

Molly lived there anyway, among the antiques and art her parents had collected over the many years of traveling the world courtesy of Uncle Sam. She ignored the statuary and the pedigreed paintings in favor of the hostas and iris and azaleas that were her real love. People who walked by on their way to the bookstores and restaurants and antiques shops of the Central West End always told her when they saw her how lucky she was. When she was in her garden, she agreed.

She was in her garden when Sam noticed her.

"Bad night, huh?" he asked as he hobbled across the lawn, propped up with his silver-headed ebony cane.

Molly didn't bother to look up from her work. "What makes you say that?"

He laughed, a gravelly sound that made Molly want to grab the cigarette out of his mouth. "The fact that you usually use more than your bare hands to dig up the dirt."