Night of the Living Dandelion (18 page)

Show-and-tell—my favorite sport.

 

Late that afternoon, I was sitting in a wheelchair in front of tiny three-dimensional models of the great pyramids of Giza, listening to a museum docent explain their significance to a small gathering, when Marco whispered in my ear that he had to make a phone call.

“I’ll meet you back here,” he said, then strode toward the door marked with an EXIT sign.

Marco still hadn’t returned when the guide finished his spiel, so I wheeled out of the exhibit room to see what was keeping him. I glanced around the wide balcony, trying to spot his black leather jacket and blue jeans among the throng, then proceeded to the railing to look down on the main floor. I spotted him near the reception counter talking to a beefy security guard. Was there trouble?

I rode the elevator down, then propelled myself through the crowd as fast as I could go. But as I drew near, I saw Marco and the guard laughing as though they were old friends.

“So how long has it been since you’ve seen Vlad?” I heard Marco ask.

“Oh, man, I’ll bet it’s been three months,” the guard said. “Maybe more.”

Marco was questioning the guard about Vlad? Why had he told me he had to make a call?

Not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, I hid behind a thick column.

“No kidding,” Marco said. “We’ll have to remedy that. Maybe we can meet sometime at our old hangout—you, Danny, me, Vlad—”

“That place is long gone, bro,” the guard said.

“Man, that’s a shame,” Marco said. “We had some good times there.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked around to see a girl of about six years of age holding a model of a sarcophagus in one hand and wiping her nose on the back of the other.

“Want to see my casket?” she asked loudly, thrusting the toy at me.

“No, thank you,” I whispered, “and it’s a sarcophagus, not a casket. Now go find your mommy before you get lost.”

“Why are you whispering?” she asked.

I held my index finger to my lips to warn her to be quiet. “I’m listening to someone.”

She wiped her dripping nose again, this time on her sleeve. “Who are you listening to?”

Clearly she didn’t understand the finger-to-lip gesture because her voice was just as loud as before. “My boyfriend,” I whispered, deciding not to use
fiancé
in case that prompted more questions.

“You have a boyfriend?” she asked at a decibel high enough to make ears bleed. She wrinkled up her stubby face. “You’re too old to have a boyfriend.”

And you’re too old to use your sleeve for a tissue
.

She sneezed, spraying mucus all over herself and catching me in the process.

“Go find your mommy
now,
” I snapped, pointing in the opposite direction. “It’s not safe to talk to strangers.”

“Are you a stranger?” she asked, using her sleeve again. “Are you going to hurt me?”

A woman scuttled up and grabbed the girl’s hand. “What are you doing to my child?” she screeched, proving where the girl had inherited her lungs.

I wheeled backward, feeling my face heat up as people turned to see what was happening. “I didn’t do anything except tell her to go find you.”

But the damage was done. The security guard was headed straight for me. And with him came Marco, whose eyes were so wide they nearly met in the middle.

The guard stepped between Screeching Mom and me. “What’s the problem?”

“This woman was bothering my child!” the mother charged, jabbing her finger at me.

What?
“Excuse me? Your child was bothering me.”

Marco said something to the guard, who glanced down at me in surprise. Then he said to the irate woman, “Would you come with me, please?”

“Why me?” the woman shrieked, as the guard led her and the child away. “She’s a perv.”

The guard glanced at Marco over his shoulder and touched his hand to his forehead, as though saluting. Marco returned the gesture, then took control of the chair and pushed me away from the gawkers. “Had your fill of ancient Egypt?”

“Make that an emphatic yes. Did you get your phone call made?”

“I’ll explain about that after you explain why you were hiding behind the column.” He stopped in front of the coatcheck counter and handed the attendant a plastic ticket.

“I wasn’t hiding. I didn’t want to intrude on your conversation. Who was the guard?”

“Ed Quinn, an army buddy.” Marco took my coat from the man, then helped me put it on and get balanced on the Evil Ones. “Let’s go have dinner. We can talk about it in the cab on the way to the restaurant. What are you in the mood for?”

“Italian sounds good.”

“I know just the place,” he said, shepherding me through the glass doors.

We found a taxi van waiting at the stand and climbed in. Marco gave the cabbie the name of the restaurant as we settled onto the middle bench, the crutches on the seat behind us.

“Okay, Buttercup, tell me again why you weren’t hiding behind the column.”

“Since you’d said you had to make a phone call, I assumed you didn’t want me to know you were talking to your army buddy about Vlad.”

“I did make a phone call. To Rafe. Then I went to find Ed, or Eddy Q.T., as he was known back then.”

“What does the
Q.T.
stand for?”

“Ed could sneak up on anyone without being heard. He was always on the Q.T.”

“So you, Ed, and Vlad were in the same unit together?”

“Yep.”

Hmm. Things were starting to add up. “Did you suggest coming into Chicago so you could talk to Ed about Vlad?”

Marco put his arm around me. “My top priority was to spend the day with you, sweetheart. I just thought that I could kill two birds . . . Wait. That didn’t come out right.”

“Why didn’t you just call Ed from home?”

“I didn’t have his new phone number. Look! There’s the Trump Tower. That’s where the old
Sun Times
building used to be.”

Diverting my attention. How original. “Marco, did Vlad use Ed as his alibi when he told you he took the train to Chicago on Friday?”

Marco paused to scratch his ear, the “reluctant to answer” signal. “Yes.”

“And Ed said he hadn’t seen Vlad for months.”

“Yes.”

“Then Vlad lied.”

“Vlad told me he took the train in to see Ed. He didn’t say he
saw
Ed.”

“You’re splitting hairs.”

“Vlad wouldn’t lie to me unless he had a good reason.”

“Are you going to ask him the reason?”

“I’ll mention that I ran into Ed and let Vlad take it from there.”

 

We had a
delicioso
meal at Volare, an Italian restaurant in the Streeterville area of Chicago, then took a cab to the train station and rode home, pulling into the Dune Park station at nine o’clock that night. Back at the apartment, I found Nikki wrapped in a green and purple comforter, sacked out on the sofa, watching the end of
Casablanca
with a pile of wadded tissues on the floor below her.

“Hey, guys,” she said, casting a brief glance toward us.

“Where’s Greg?” I asked, hopping over to a chair as Marco hung up my coat.

“Commercial coming up in a second,” she warned, her eyes glued to the television.

She’d only seen the movie a dozen times. Simon crawled out from under the sofa and came over to rub against my leg. “Why was Simon hiding?” I asked Nikki.

“He hates to see me cry,” she said, then motioned for me to be quiet.

Simon spotted Marco coming down the hallway and galloped out to greet him.

“Okay, commercial break. Now I can talk,” Nikki said. “Greg isn’t here because he had to leave early to prepare for a big trial that starts tomorrow. How was the exhibit?”

“Fascinating. Did you know a pharaoh would start his pyramid as soon as he became the ruler so it would be finished by the time he died? And that a pharaoh’s son was forbidden to build a pyramid taller than his father’s? But the sons would get around that by building—”

“Stop,” Nikki said, as the movie resumed. “The ending is coming up next.”

I went into the hallway, where Marco was crouched on the floor giving Simon a belly rub. Seeing me, Marco got to his feet. “I’m going to head down to the bar, Sunshine. Rafe is going to meet me there so I can show him a few things to do tomorrow while I’m out. Don’t forget to ask Nikki about the procedure for administering drugs.”

“Will I see you later?”

“I hope so.” He kissed me, ruffled the fur on Simon’s head, then let himself out of the apartment.

I returned to the living room to find Nikki whispering the lines with the actors. She blew her nose and sighed. “Is that a great love story or what?” She scooped up her pile of tissues and headed for the bathroom, calling, “What did Marco want you to ask me about?”

“We need to know if there’s a certain procedure that hospital nurses have to follow when they administer a drug to a patient.”

“Is this for the Willis case?” she asked.

“What else?”

“I can answer that for you.” She came back into the room and stretched out on the sofa, pulling the comforter around her. Simon jumped up and rubbed his nose against her chin, then kneaded the comforter into submission, flopped down, and began to wash his face.

“The procedure is very simple,” Nikki said, scratching the cat behind the ears. “Anytime a nurse administers a drug, she records the time and dosage on the patient’s medication sheet. That way, the next shift, as well as the patient’s doctor, always knows what was given.”

“So there would be a medication sheet for the patient that Lori Willis is blamed for killing.”

“There should be. It was probably an exhibit for the lawsuit.”

“So if I understand the procedure,” I said, “a nurse, or anyone with access to the drug, could accidentally give an incorrect dose, mark down the normal dose, and no one would be the wiser unless the patient had a serious reaction.”

“Right. The system relies on the competency of the nursing staff. I’ve also heard about cases where a nurse forgets to mark the medication sheet, and then there’s a shift change, and the next nurse assumes the dose was missed and administers more.”

“Have you ever heard about a case where someone purposely gave the wrong dose?”

Nikki gave me a puzzled look. “Are you saying Lori wanted the patient to die?”

“In this case, maybe the patient’s husband did.”

Nikki’s mouth dropped open. “Do you have any reason to suspect him?”

“Too soon to tell. But I got bad vibes when we were talking to him yesterday. He’s a pharmacist at Dugan’s.”

“A pharmacist? Definitely check him out. Talk to his wife’s friends. They’ll know what kind of husband he was. By the way, I asked around as to whether Lori was seeing anyone, but no one knew. All they said was that she loved to gamble at the casino boat.

“And one more thing.” Nikki got up and went to the answering machine on the table beneath our picture window. “Tara left a message for you.”

She hit the PLAY button: “Aunt Abby, you need to go to that awful Web site—HOW TO KILL A VAMPIRE.COM—and scroll down to the bottom to the photos. They’re bad!”

Nikki brought my laptop to me, then watched over my shoulder as I typed in the URL. When the Web site opened, I scrolled down until a photo appeared. It was a view through a gap in drapes hanging at a window, and showed what looked like half of an oak casket sitting in the middle of the room. It had a shiny brass handle at the end, brass embellishments at the corners, and an arched lid. Beyond it, I could see the arm of a chair or sofa. Beneath the photo was a caption that read: THIS IS WHERE THE VAMPIRE SLEEPS.

“Could that have been taken at Vlad’s apartment?” Nikki asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been inside. I have a feeling, though, that this was staged.”

I scrolled down farther to find a grainy black-and-white photo of a parking lot filled with cars, with the Calumet Casino River Boat in the background. The caption below that photo read: WHO IS THE VAMPIRE AFTER NOW?

In the photo was a tall figure in a black trench coat walking among the cars. He’d been caught in profile and had glowing white skin and black hair combed away from his forehead.

“Can you read the time stamp on the second photo?” I asked.

Nikki clicked the magnifying glass icon. “It’s dated last Wednesday night. Didn’t you tell me Vlad worked that night?”

I felt my stomach twist. “No, Nikki. He was off that night.”

I
phoned Marco at the bar and told him about the photos, but he sounded busy, so I didn’t keep him on the line. Instead, I did an Internet search on Trumble’s deceased wife, Dana, and discovered that her MySpace page was still up. Her profile didn’t reveal any personal information, but she’d posted pictures of herself with Jerry and her son, pictures of herself with two girlfriends, and several pictures of just her little boy.