King City (16 page)

Wade tapped the photograph with his finger. “Her.”

Mandy turned the picture around and looked at it. “Do you know who she is?”

“Not yet.” Wade picked up the picture and held it out to Fallon. “Maybe you know somebody who does.”

“Maybe.” Fallon took the picture from Wade and stuck it in his pocket. “What about the other women?”

“What others?” Wade asked.

“The crack whores. Maybe five or six the last couple of years. I didn’t see anybody processing the crime scene and gathering evidence for them,” Fallon said. “The only time I’ve seen that happen before down here is when the bodies on the ground were cops.”

“Things have changed,” Wade said. “I live here now.”

“Maybe that’s why your horoscope didn’t come true today,” Fallon said. “But you never know what will happen tomorrow.”

He smiled at Charlotte, acknowledged Pete with a respectful nod, and walked out of the restaurant with Timo.

Wade turned back to his plate and took a bite out of his pie.

“Do you know anything about other women being murdered?” Wade asked Mandy.

“No, but people get killed here all the time,” she said. “Most of them for crossing Duke Fallon.”

“Makes me wonder why he’s inviting me to investigate,” Wade said.

“Maybe he’s daring you to,” Charlotte said.

“It’s not that,” Pete said, his voice raspy. “Duke grew up here. This is his home. Nobody wants to find a corpse in their front yard.”

Wade worked on his pie and mulled things over for a few moments. Neither one of the women minded Wade’s silence. Charlotte had some thoughts of her own to consider, and Mandy had customers to serve.

After a time, the bell rang over the door again.

The new customer was a heavyset woman in her late forties with bloodshot eyes, tear‐streaked cheeks, and a large mole under her left ear. She walked up to Wade. She was shaking.

“My name is Ella Littleton,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “The girl you found, her name is Glory. She’s my daughter.”

They took Ella to a booth in the back, got her a cup of coffee, and began by asking her for basic details, like her address and phone number, and her family history.

In Wade’s experience, going over the dull, mundane details had a calming effect on emotional individuals and helped them focus.

Ella told them that she’d lived in Darwin Gardens all her life. She and her three children lived in a bungalow in Belle Gardens, a few blocks from Mrs. Copeland’s place. Her children each had a different father, none of whom stuck around, which she saw as a blessing, since they were all shitbags, anyway.

She got by on welfare and by doing laundry for single men in the neighborhood she called “useless trash too dumb to know how to wash their own socks,” not unlike her own sons.

“Glory’s older brother is in prison for armed robbery. Her younger brother is in the gangs, so it’s only a matter of time before he’s in prison himself or in the dirt. But Glory isn’t like them,” Ella said, sitting across from Wade and Charlotte, who took notes. “She’s a good girl. A hard worker. Cleaning houses in Havenhurst every day and offices downtown every night.”

“When did she leave the house yesterday?” Wade asked.

“I don’t know, maybe eight. She took the bus to clean for the Burdetts. They’re rich folks, good people, bought her some nice clothes so sometimes she can work at their parties.”

“But you don’t actually know if she did or not,” Charlotte said.

“I heard her leave, but I didn’t get up,” Ella said. “I wish I had.”

“When does she usually get home?”

“After she’s done cleaning the offices, around midnight,” Ella said. “But she didn’t come home last night.”

“Has that ever happened before?” Charlotte asked.

Ella gave Charlotte a hard look. “She always comes home. She’s a good girl.”

“I’m sure she was,” Wade said. “But even good girls have boyfriends.”

Ella shook her head adamantly. “I told you, Glory is a good girl. She was getting out. She wasn’t supposed to die here.”

She looked down into her coffee cup and started to cry.

Wade decided not to press Ella any further for now. He could circle back to her later if he needed more information. So he expressed his condolences and promised to do everything within his power to find out what happened to her daughter.

The two officers got up and walked out, leaving her with her sorrow.

____

Wade let Charlotte drive again. It gave him more time to think.

“Did Fallon tell Mrs. Littleton to talk with us?” Charlotte asked.

“She wouldn’t have spoken to us without his OK. I get the feeling nothing goes on down here without it.”

“Except the women getting killed,” Charlotte said. “Do you think he really cares about them?”

“I know he cares about his authority being ignored and the message it sends if he lets anyone get away with it.”

“The same could be said about you.”

“Maybe that’s why Duke and I get along so well,” Wade said.

A yellow taxicab sped past them in the opposite direction, heading toward downtown. The light on his roof indicated that he had a fare, but his backseat appeared to be empty.

“He’s speeding,” Charlotte said.

“I don’t blame him,” Wade said.

“It’s brazen,” she said. “He sped right by us and we’re the police.”

“The law says he has to accept a fare to anywhere in the city. But now that he’s dropped off his passenger he wants to get out of here alive and with all of his money.”

“So we aren’t going to give him a ticket?”

“Nope,” he said.

“Maybe we should give him a police escort out of the neighborhood.”

“That would be overkill,” he said.

“Glad to know we’re drawing the line somewhere,” she said.

Something fluttered at the edge of his peripheral vision. He looked out the windshield and saw a woman staggering across the road, right in front of their car.

Wade yanked the steering wheel hard, sending the car up onto the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding the woman.

Charlotte slammed on the brakes and they stopped, a few inches short of hitting a streetlight, the car straddling the asphalt and the sidewalk.

Wade bolted from the car and rushed over to the woman. She was in a hospital gown that was hanging open in the back, exposing her naked, bruised body. Her feet were bare, calloused, and dirty, her knees scraped and bleeding. She was easily in her sixties and, from the looks of it, a homeless person.

“Ma’am?” Wade asked. “What happened to you?”

She looked through him as if he weren’t there. “Here, kitty‐kitty. I’ve got tuna for you.”

Wade waved his hand in front of her eyes. She noticed him now.

“Yes, I’ll supersize that,” she said.

Charlotte joined him. “Should I call for a paramedic?”

Wade gently took the woman’s right hand and examined a yellow plastic band around her wrist. There were some numbers on it, the day’s date, the name “Jane Doe,” and the name of the hospital.

“No,” Wade said. “We’re taking her to Community General ourselves.”

“Blake Memorial is closer,” she said. “Community General is at least ten miles from here.”

“But just a short cab ride away,” Wade said.

He led Jane slowly by the arm back to the squad car and helped her into the backseat.

Community General was on the north end of town, where downtown slowly dissolved into Crescent Heights, a recently gentrified neighborhood of restored Victorian homes, small cafés and boutiques, art galleries, and several prestigious interior design and architecture firms.

The hospital was saved from bankruptcy and the wrecking ball by community activists eager to preserve its art deco architecture and to ensure that an urgent‐care facility would continue to serve their neighborhood. Wade suspected that their idea of urgent care was a collagen injection to puff up a lip before a date.

The entire way there, Jane Doe babbled incoherently about grout, Pat Sajak, watermelon seeds, flatulence, and a hundred other things.

They pulled up to the ambulance entrance. Charlotte got out, found a wheelchair, and brought it to the car, and Wade helped Jane into it.

Wade marched into the ER and Charlotte wheeled Jane in behind him.

The ER looked more like an Apple Store than a hospital, all the surfaces gleaming and white, aglow from hidden lights. Flat‐screen monitors and high‐tech devices that Wade didn’t recognize were everywhere. The staff’s lab coats and scrubs all fitted as if they’d been tailored by fashion designers.

The young nurse at the front desk had the smile of a stewardess and the body of a fashion model. Her smile became a scowl when she saw Jane.

“She’s back already?” the nurse asked.

“You know this woman?” Wade replied.

“This woman doesn’t know this woman,” the nurse said. “She’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

“Then why did you release her?” Wade asked.

“You’ll have to ask Dr. Eddington,” she said and paged the doctor.

The doctor arrived a few moments later. His hands were in the pockets of his lab coat, his silk tie perfectly knotted, his sparse comb‐over covering his bald spot with surgical efficiency. His eyes narrowed behind his octagonal glasses and his face puckered into a scolding sneer as he caught sight of Jane.

“Oh God,” Eddington said. “When will you people learn?”

“Which
people
are you referring to?” Charlotte asked tightly.

“You people,” Eddington said, waving his hand at Wade and Charlotte. “This is a hospital, not an elder‐care facility.”

“She needs medical attention,” Charlotte said.

Jane bolted up from her wheelchair. “From Miami Beach, it’s
The Jackie Gleason Show
!”

Charlotte gently eased her back into her seat.

“She’s had medical attention,” Eddington said. “You people brought her in here three days ago. Apparently, she took a tumble in Riverfront Park. Her injuries were minor, nothing more than simple scrapes. We treated them and waited for someone to show up to claim her.”

“She’s not a piece of baggage,” Wade said.

“We made every effort to locate family or friends,” Eddington said. “And you people were no help. In the meantime, we fed her, cleaned her, and gave her a bed for three days. When she asked to leave, we had no authority to keep her.”

“You could have had her committed,” Wade said.

“She seemed perfectly lucid at the time.”

“Like she is now,” Wade said and gestured to her. Jane was playing a make‐believe violin and humming to herself.

“She wasn’t a danger to herself or to others,” Eddington said.

But she was to the hospital’s bottom line.

Community General had barely avoided bankruptcy once already, so Wade was sure that the employees were under enormous pressure to cut costs. The staff knew that they would never be reimbursed for the medical care she’d been given or the bed that she’d occupied. They didn’t want to risk the potential of any further costly involvement with her that might arise from committing her to a mental institution. And since no one seemed to care about her anyway, there was a simple, low‐cost solution to their problem.

“So you called her a cab,” Wade said.

“I even paid for it out of my own pocket,” Eddington said. “As a courtesy.”

“Aren’t you sweet,” Charlotte said.

Eddington shot her a nasty look.

“Where did you tell the cab to take her?” Wade asked.

“I didn’t,” Eddington said. “I gave the cab driver thirty dollars and figured that would take her wherever she wanted to go in King City. You’d have to ask her where she told him to go.”

Eddington turned to walk away. Charlotte stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Back to work,” Eddington said. “I’ve got patients.”

“And she’s one of them,” Charlotte said, pointing at Jane. “She’s suffering from some kind of dementia.”

Eddington snorted. “So now you people are doctors as well as police officers?”

Charlotte got right in his face, their noses practically touching. “If you call us ‘you people’ again, you’re going to need a fucking doctor.”

Wade bit back a smile.

“We are a hospital,
Officer
,” Eddington said tightly, taking two steps back from her. “We are not an Alzheimer’s treatment facility or an old‐folks home.”

“The law requires you to make arrangements for post‐release care before discharging any patients,” Charlotte said. “We didn’t find any medications or paperwork on her.”

“Obviously, she lost them,” Eddington said.

“Here’s what I think,” Wade said. “You stuffed a senile old woman wearing nothing but a hospital gown into a cab and told the driver to dump her in Darwin Gardens instead of back in Riverfront Park so she’d be Blake Memorial’s problem if anything else happened to her. You didn’t want to incur any more costs. The mistake you made was forgetting to snip off her wristband.”

Eddington shot an involuntary glance at the nurse, who immediately looked away. She was in for some hell once Wade left. The doctor focused his attention back on Wade.

“She wasn’t ill, she asked to leave, and we discharged her,” Eddington said. “What you think is irrelevant.”