Short Money (26 page)

“You’re his attorney, right? Doesn’t that sort of put you in his shoes?”

“Not really. A few months ago, he ran into a nasty lawsuit from one of his patients and asked me to handle it for him.”

“I thought all these guys have insurance for that sort of thing.”

“He didn’t want to go to his insurance company with this one. He performed a routine lipectomy on a woman and caused her navel to migrate.”

“What?” Crow wasn’t sure he’d heard that one right.

“After the procedure, she claimed her belly button was two inches off center. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that he’d had some other problems before and he was afraid his malpractice insurance wouldn’t be renewed. I was able to negotiate a quick and quiet settlement for twenty thousand plus fees, which really impressed him. It could’ve cost him his practice if I hadn’t been there. He liked the way I handled it so much, he told me about all the other problems he was having.”

“More migrating belly buttons?”

“Nothing so cut-and-dried. He took a little fat off this one girl’s thighs. No problem with the procedure, but when the girl wakes up she’s got a hickey on her tit. Maybe she had the hickey going in, but that one cost him fifty grand. He’s got two similar cases that I’m supposed to be working on, but I have to tell you, there’s not a lot of incentive working for a guy whose assets are no longer under his control. One of his patients claims she came out of the anesthesia and the doctor was performing an oral procedure on her private parts. That was how the complaint read. You’d think they’d just say he was giving her head, wouldn’t you?”

“You think he was molesting the Murphy kid?”

Getter adjusted the collar of his coat. “The patients he was having trouble with were all young women. I don’t think he goes for boys.”

“Maybe the gender doesn’t matter. Maybe he just likes them young and helpless.”

Getter grinned. “So who doesn’t?”

Crow looked away, felt the snowflakes striking his cheeks.

“Anything else I can help you with, Joe?”

“Does he have the Murphy kid?”

“I don’t know. All I know for sure is that he has some serious financial problems. If he owes you money, I wouldn’t count on seeing any of it. He owes me money too, you know. I had to take part of it in professional services.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mary wanted some work done on her hips. Dr. Bellweather offered to do the work to reduce his legal fees.”

“You sent Mary to have surgery performed by a guy who mislocates belly buttons? A guy who can’t keep his mouth off his patients?”

“He didn’t have the money.”

“I don’t believe it. She come home with any hickeys?”

Getter laughed. Crow didn’t. The wind was picking up, the snow getting thicker. Crow was cold.

“What about his brother, Nate. You know where I can find him?”

Getter said, “You try the phone book?”

Crow didn’t reply. The phone book? That was too easy. Besides, it hadn’t occurred to him.

Getter held out a gloved hand. “You want to give me that camera now?”

Crow shook his head. “I’ve got a few more shots on the roll, Dave. I’ll let you know when I get them developed.”

Getter shook his head in disgust, climbed into his car, and drove off. When he was out of sight, Crow threw the camera into a trash can, walked to a nearby phone booth, and looked up Nate Bellweather’s address.

You think you know what you want. But what you have to learn is how to want what you’ll wish you’d wanted once you finally get it.

—LAURA DEBROWSKI

C
ROW LOCKED AND CHAINED
his apartment door, showered, and changed into clean canvas pants and a wool sweater. He made himself a meal of crackers and sardines, ate without tasting a thing, then sat staring out the window.

He picked up the phone, dialed, let it ring.

He saw her again, sitting before the mirror with the bloodless face and the bright, wasted eyes. As the image formed, he saw the corners of her mouth curve up into a hollow smile. She reached out with one pale hand and wiped a forefinger over the remains of a white powdery line on the mirror’s surface, put the finger in her mouth, and rubbed the stray grains of coke onto her gum, still holding his eyes, still with the ghastly smile. Crow felt the muscles of his abdomen contract, pressing his organs together. He thought about what Mary had told him. That Orlan Johnson had been looking for him at Melinda’s. Crow squirmed in his chair. Why wasn’t she answering her phone? The more he thought about it, the more he had to know.

After thirty-five rings, he hung up, put on his coat, and let himself out of the apartment.

Crow decided to drop by at Nate Bellweather’s on the way out of town, though he didn’t expect to find Dr. Bellweather there. It was worth a try; he didn’t know where else to look. The address he’d found in the phone book turned out to be a modest bungalow in Northeast Minneapolis, only a few miles from where Crow had grown up. The house was barely distinguishable from the other bungalows on the block, all of them cheaply built dining the housing boom after World War II, now aging gracelessly. Nate’s station wagon filled the short driveway. Crow pressed the doorbell, banged on the door with the side of his fist.

A few seconds later, the curtain over the door window moved an inch, fell back into place. Nate Bellweather opened the door about a foot.

“He’s not here.”

A fiftyish woman with artificially brown hair and a permanent-looking frown appeared at Nate’s shoulder.

Crow asked, “Do you know where he is?”

“He’s gone,” the woman said.

“It’s cold out here. Do you mind if I come in for a minute?”

The woman pushed Nate aside. “We don’t know where he is. Go away.”

“I’m concerned about him,” Crow said, directing his words at Nate. “I think he’s in trouble with the Murphys. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?”

“He’s gone,” the woman repeated.

“Shut up, Ginny.”

“Don’t you tell me to shut up.”

Nate said, “He’s not here, Crow. Your job is over.”

“Where did he go?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“You mind if I come in?” Crow pressed against the door. Nate resisted for a moment, then stepped back. Crow closed the door, looked around the neat, ordinary room. It looked a lot like the house in which he’d spent his childhood. Knick-knacks, plates on the wall, a cheap throw over the shapeless couch, popular magazines—
Reader’s Digest, People, Sports Afield
—fanned out on an oak-veneer coffee table.

Nate Bellweather crossed his arms and took a position in front of the couch. Ginny made a sour face and left the room.

“Nice place,” Crow said.

Nate looked around the room, shook his head. “What do you want, Crow?”

“I’ll be straight with you. Your brother never paid me for the time I put in. I’m just trying to collect my wages.”

“One day’s wages? You’re kidding me.”

“It’s a matter of principle.”

“Yeah, well, the principle here is that you’re at the end of a long line of people that’re going to be looking for their money.” He sat on the couch, crossed his hands on his lap. “In any case, my brother’s not here. He left about twenty minutes ago.”

“Alone?”

Nate shrugged. “What my brother does is none of my business.”

Ginny reentered the room, holding a shotgun, pointing it at Crow.

Nate said, “Aww, for crying out loud, Ginny. Would you put that thing away.”

“I’m telling you what I told Nelson,” she said to Crow, her voice shaking. “You get out of my house. You get out of here and don’t you come back.”

Crow held his hands out and backed toward the door. “Okay, I’m leaving,” he said.

Nate sighed and sank deeper into the couch.

Crow opened the door, stepped outside. Ginny followed him to the doorway, keeping the shotgun trained on him, watched him walk to his car.

Crow hadn’t been gone two minutes when somebody banged on the door again.

Ginny Bellweather said, “It’s probably him again. Don’t open it.”

Nate glared at his wife. He was sick of it. He was sick of running interference for his brother, of getting involved in his crazy schemes. And he was sick of Ginny bitching, complaining, and ordering him around. Bringing out the shotgun was really too much. If it was Crow at the door, come back to ask about something he forgot the first time, he had half a mind to apologize to the guy.

“You hear me?” Ginny said.

Nate pushed his jaw out so far it hurt.
Screw you
, he thought but did not quite say. He pushed up off the couch, walked straight to the front door, and yanked it open.

It wasn’t Crow. It was a skinny guy in a gray Stetson.

Nate opened his mouth. He didn’t know what he was going to say but was saved from having to come up with something when the man on his doorstep planted the heel of his boot in Nate’s belly, sending him stumbling back into the living room, crashing into the coffee table. Nate heard a shout from Ginny, then a thud and a squeal. He forced his eyes open, looked up, saw the cowboy holding the shotgun, saw Ginny slumped against the doorframe, holding her face. The cowboy turned his attention from Ginny hack to Nate.

“How you doing?” He grinned. “You feel like telling me where that Nelly Bell’s got hisself to?”

It was all Nate could do to breathe. He shook his head.

The cowboy’s grin disappeared. He rested the barrel of the shotgun on Nate’s chin.

“How ’bout now?” he asked.

Nate said, “I don’t know. He left a little while ago with the kid. He didn’t say where he was going.”

The cowboy nodded, moved the barrel of the gun off to the side, brought it back, hard, slapping its length against Nate’s temple.

“How ’bout now?” he said again.

Five minutes and several blows later, through the bright flashes obscuring his vision and the ringing in his ears, Nate heard the cowboy pick up the phone.

“He ain’t here,” he heard him say. “That’s right. No, I talked to him and his wife both. They don’t know shit. Okay.”

Nate heard the cowboy hang up the phone, walk across the carpet, slam the door. He heard an engine start, then it was gone. He opened his eyes to look at his wife. She lay on her back a few feet away, her head turned toward him, a cut on her cheek, her nose and bottom lip bleeding. She gave him a look, daring him to say something.

He wasn’t going to fall for that one.

After a few seconds she said it anyway. “I
told
you not to open the goddamn door.”

The sun had set. Two inches of grainy snow covered the streets. Crow slipped and spun and skidded his way to Highway 12, turned west. The road crews had salted the highway. He brought the Rabbit up to sixty miles per hour. The fact that Melinda wasn’t answering her phone could mean many things. He tried not to think about the worst of them, but no matter what direction he forced his thoughts, they would end with the vision of Melinda out of her mind, or dead on the floor. Or—another possibility—she had had some kind of run-in with Orlan Johnson, had wound up in jail. Eyes on the road surface, Crow began to construct an elaborate fantasy. Suppose that George Murphy, driven to an insane rage, was systematically kidnapping everyone who had ever had any connection to Dr. Nelson Bellweather. Suppose the Murphys were holding Melinda hostage. Soon they would approach him and threaten to feed his wife to the tiger.

On one level he knew such a scenario was absurd, but since no one was there to challenge it, he let it play, feeling his rage, imagining himself rescuing Melinda, shooting all the Murphys to get to her. He replayed the episode, trying a few variations, squeezing it for every last heady drop of adrenaline.

By the time he passed through Howard Lake, the salt was losing its battle with the gathering snow. A barking headache had settled low in the back of his skull. Drifts were building up on the roadway, and the snowflakes flashing in his headlights became bright bursts of pain. Crow hunched over the wheel, his jaw clamped tight, and held the speedometer at fifty. Ten miles later, he was down to thirty miles per hour, dodging drifts on the highway, straining to separate the road surface from the flat, white, featureless countryside. Thoughts of Melinda had lost focus and blended with the pain in his head, and he continued on propelled only by a sense of mission.

He arrived in Big River rolling slowly through four inches of blowing snow. Melinda’s driveway was covered by a drift three feet high. Crow pulled over in front of the house and shut down the engine. He felt no relief at reaching his destination, though the pounding in his head receded somewhat. The house was dark, no sign of life. He slogged up to the front door, his shoes filling with ice. Snow had drifted against the door. He leaned on the doorbell and could hear it ring inside the house. He released the button. The house grew darker and quieter.

The mailbox was stuffed with three days’ mail; Crow emptied the box and held the assorted envelopes in his hands like a bouquet or a box of candy. He listened for the sound of quiet footsteps, Melinda walking in her slippers, but heard nothing. Shifting the stack of mail to the crook of his elbow, he flipped through his keys, finally selecting the one that fit the dead-bolt lock he had installed a year ago. He opened the door. This time it wasn’t chained. He stepped inside.

The air smelled stale. He dropped the mail on a chair and toned on a lamp. He let his breath out, realizing only as he exhaled that he had been holding it for some time. The living room was perfectly ordered, the furniture meticulously placed, the pictures hanging on the walls, the books aligned on their shelves, the magazines carefully arranged on the coffee table, every surface perpendicular or parallel to the walls of the room. The mirror hung in place, recently cleaned. The sense of Melinda’s absence hit him low in the belly, and he sank down onto the sofa. Where had she gone?

On a trip? Crow experienced an image of Melinda on a beach in Cancun, drinking rum punch. I’m hallucinating, he thought.

Shadow creatures played at the periphery of his vision.

Another image: Melinda on her bed, her heart stopped, lying there dead for three days. Would the power of her copper pyramid preserve her body? More likely, it would be grotesquely swollen. He stood and walked slowly up the stairs, fighting the pictures in his mind. He had seen a few bodies during his years with the Big River police; the detail his mind retained was excruciating. Halfway up the stairs he struck an invisible, internal barrier and stopped, then was able to continue only by pretending that he was still a cop, that this was just another house, on another street, in another city. The bedroom door was closed. He pushed it open. The bed was made, there were no wrinkles on the bedspread, no organic reek of decaying flesh. The pyramid was intact. There was no bloated body in the bathroom, or in the spare bedroom, or in any of the other rooms. He turned himself back into Joe Crow.