The Greeks of Beaubien Street (29 page)

“Mike needs to make sure we are aware of everything there is to know about his involvement with Gretchen Parker. I mean
everything,
” Jill said. She motioned to Albert. “We will leave now, but I am asking you to get a lawyer and come into the station as soon as possible. Today is Friday. You aren’t safe waiting until Monday.” She leaned across the table to shake Mrs. Ahmed’s hand. She found it interesting that yet another stereotype about Arab marriages had just been proven false. Mike’s mother was definitely in charge here. Mrs. Ahmed dug through her purse and brought out a card.

“A twenty percent discount on tax preparation for you both,” she said. Jill took the card, resisting a smile. She was afraid she’d laugh. Was this a bribe or just good marketing?

“What a goddamned waste of time,” Albert said when they were back out in the car. “I’m ready to move on. Let Alison figure it out, okay? It’s clear to me that mommy and daddy are going to advise against Mike showing up at the precinct. That asshole is in his thirties. Does it ever end?” Albert yawned. “I need coffee. I wish we had time to stop at my grandmother’s house.”

“I’ll get you some. There’s a Speedway on Joy Road.” Jill was in a quandary. She somewhat agreed with her partner that their part in the case was finished. They had gathered evidence and handed the criminals over to the court. It wasn’t their fault that one of them had taken her own life. Now they needed to move on to the next case, whatever that would be. Murder, unfortunately, was a way of life in Detroit. In the first months of that year the homicide rate was down. By the end of February, forty human lives were taken. The violent crime rate was projected to be dramatically less than it was a few years ago, but it was still three hundred percent more than the rest of the nation. Jill loved Detroit and it made her sick that punks, reprobates, and angry fathers ruined its reputation. Suddenly, she wasn’t in a big hurry to get back to the precinct.

“Let’s go to Nana Wong’s,” she said.

Chapter 37

The Surgical Services unit at the hospital where Joan Zannos worked, although several years past retirement age, was one of the busiest operating rooms in the country. They managed over sixty rooms and hundreds of nurses and surgical technologists. Joan had about had it. Physically, the job was so taxing that overweight or arthritic nurses barely stood a chance of getting through the day without having to take some kind of pain killing drug. Joan took aspirin every four hours and her stomach was rebelling even though it was only Thursday. She still had another day to get through. Her hospital grandfathered in the nurses who had been there a long time, not requiring them to work the twelve hour shifts demanded of younger nurses. Joan worked five eight hour shifts; on the inside leg of her scrub pants she’d marked off eight lines and when an hour passed, she’d cross a line off. It was the only way she got through the day. She had tried a ten hour shift, and even one twelve. There was no way in hell.

Joan was fond of her sisters-in-law Paula and Liz. Paula lived closest, and over the years they’d come to spend weekends together antiquing or retreating at Liz’s; they would take books they had wanted to start for ages, knitting projects to work on together, and indulgent foods. Retreat weekends with the in-laws were no-diet zones. There were sometimes hard feelings from the rest of the family for their exclusion, but that didn’t change a thing. When the men went golfing or fishing or hunting, the women found a way to get together. Paula was a nurse too. Liz was a teacher. They had both retired recently and were hounding Joan to do it. They loved and accepted each other in the way women who share family histories are able to.

Joan grew especially close to Paula. She felt protective of her and so was angry at Nick. Joan had never trusted Nick, and although she didn’t have any proof, she always thought he might be a philanderer. There was something about his arrogance that set her teeth on edge. He was in the neighborhood every day to visit Gus and Christina’s son, but in the early years, when Christina was still alive, Joan felt that there had to be some hanky panky going on between her sister-in-law and Nick. She
didn’t
know that Christopher was Nick’s however. That possibility never crossed her mind. Peter knew Joan wasn’t thrilled about his brother. Nick would often stop by the house when he was in town. If Peter wasn’t home, Joan didn’t let him in the house. He’d never tried anything, but she felt his hugs lasted just a little too long.

Liz called Joan the night before last, filling her in on Paula’s meltdown, Dana’s funeral, the discovery of the paternity test, and Nick’s moving out. And the icing on the cake; Nick was seeing a nurse who worked in the same OR Joan worked.

“He came home to get more of his things last night and fessed up. Paula said she had done such a great acting job pretending that she was fine with his exodus that he cozied right up to her and confessed everything. He’s in love with a girl in her thirties.” Liz laughed out loud. “Men don’t give it a thought that their bodies are not what they used to be, evidently.” Joan stretched out on her bed and switched ears. She was nervous about spending a lot of time talking on the phone in the middle of the week, no matter how dramatic the news was. Maybe she could when she retired. But Joan just couldn’t give up the money yet, so as long as she was working she just didn’t have the time to chat for long. She had two daughters, Sally who was pushing forty and her baby Jen who was still in college. Sally finally had a serious boyfriend. That meant a wedding on the horizon and she wasn’t going to skimp.

“Do you have a name?” Joan asked, referring to the girlfriend. “I’ll see if I can find her tomorrow.”

“All Nick said was he met her when he had his knee arthroscopy last fall. So she must be someone who works in orthopedics.” The nurses at her facility pretty much stayed with one service until they asked for a different assignment. But there were a lot of nurses in orthopedics, a huge department.

“Okay, so I am looking for a thirty-something nurse on the ortho team. That covers about twenty women. I’ll see what I can find out. But I better hang up. I’ve got laundry to do,” Joan said. They said their goodbyes. Later that night, Joan mentioned her conversation with Liz to Peter.

“Nick talks about the nurse who took care of him all the time. Her name is Dawn,” Peter said. “Now don’t go causing trouble.” He knew his wife was fiercely protective of her sisters-in-law. He was worried how the divorce was going to affect her. Nick had fallen for Dawn in a big way.

The next day, the first thing Joan did was check out the names on the white board that listed the surgical cases under each service. Nothing jumped out at her. Maybe
Dawn
was off work for the day. Joan worked through her schedule: simple, local anesthesia cases, one after another until she was ready to drop. One long major case was easier to do. You set up for the case and unless something unusual happened which was rare, you just observed and supported the surgeons. She finished up her paperwork at the end of the day, stopping by the women’s bathroom on her way to the locker room. There was a rack of hooks in the bathroom, not an ideal place to hang lab coats, but until the money for the new women’s locker room was scrounged up it would have to do. Joan went to the coats and rummaged through them until she found one that had the name
Dawn
embroidered on it. Under the name were the words,
Orthopedic Department.
Joan thought, S
o this is Nick’s new girlfriend
. She made sure the door was locked and then went through the young woman’s pockets. A wadded up tissue, breath mints, coral lipstick, and the piece de’ resistance, a folded up sheet of paper with the name Nick Zannos, and his cell phone number. Joan took it and rumpled it up, throwing it in the trash can. She went to the toilet and untied her scrub pants, pulling them down to pee. The toilet seemed to get lower and lower every year, and took so much effort to get off of. She was really feeling her age. When she finished, she looked over to the toilet paper dispense. Empty! There was a pile of paper towels on the sink and she stood up carefully to grab one, when she eyed
Dawn’s
lab coat.
Why not? It’s just a little pee.
She took the coat off the hook and pulled the sleeve inside out, using the inner cuff to wipe her crotch. The ludicrousness of what she had done, the insanity of it, struck her as she hung the coat back up on the hook. She turned to flush the toilet and as she opened the door to walk to the locker room, laughter hit her. Barely able to control herself, she quickly pulled her scrubs off and dressed in her street clothes. She had one goal: to get the hell out of that hospital and head for home.

Chapter 38

She had one more day to get through until the weekend. Jill could feel the anxiety in the back of her throat, a tickle that almost choked her. How much shit could one person have crammed into their week? She thought of Andy and the little boys. They were already acclimating. When she went for her breakfast that morning, they were playing with a pile of small plastic cars, crawling around on the store floor, running the cars up the sides of cans and over bags of rice, back down on the floor. Andy was in the back, prepping vegetables he had gotten early that morning at the market. Today’s special would be stuffed tomatoes. As long as the crops kept producing in the end-of-summer heat, they would utilize the bounty in traditional Greek dishes: Mousakka, with tender Michigan eggplant, anything that had a cavity that could be stuffed they would stuff, and monumental salads laden with feta and Kalamata olives.

“I feel guilty because Andy is working so hard that there isn’t much left for me to do,” Gus whispered. “I’m daydreaming about making the store bigger. Andy has the brawn and Big Andy has the money.”

“Papa, it’s a great idea. I bet they’ll be glad to help out. It will benefit the neighborhood, that’s for sure,” Jill said. She was in the early stages of a depression that was hard to shake. The anticlimax of the Gretchen Parker investigation, waiting for the trial to begin, and feeling her own life was stalled added up to a feeling of dread that was plaguing her. “Maybe I should help out in some way,” she said, hoping that sublimating by working in her father’s store would take the edge off her own angst. Gus looked up from his reverie with a frown.

“What would you do here?” he asked. It came out more abrasive than he meant it to, but Jill didn’t take it personally.

“I’m not just another pretty face, Papa. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m able to do more than arrest criminals,” she said, referring to her clean and organized apartment and her drama-free life. But she thought that he might have a point. What purpose
did
she have outside of her job? Her brother’s face popped into her thoughts.

“I’ve been thinking about Chris a lot lately. For more than the obvious reasons,” she stated, before Gus could go on an apology spree. “I’d like to organize some kind of family gathering in Plymouth. He’s never had anything like it. We all go to see him separately, but I’d like to see him with all of us, the way we are at a Sunday dinner.” It had occurred to her that her father might not want Nick at such a function, but it felt to Jill like everyone was arranging her brother’s life so it suited them and not by what was necessarily best for him. Was it just a happy accident that he was thriving in Plymouth all these years without much intervention by the family? Gus didn’t know what to make of Jill’s idea.

“Do you think having everyone in the group home would be wise? Where do you draw the line? Is it because of guilt you are thinking this way? I don’t like to upset the apple-cart,” Gus said.

“You don’t think he’d like having all of us there?” Jill
did
feel guilty. She found it even more astonishing that no one had taken Chris out of the group home for an outing knowing now that he had two families. “Do you know if Nick ever took him anywhere?” Jill was concerned about hurting her father, but she wasn’t going to leave things unanswered because of his secrets.

“We allowed him visitors, but the group home mother had to get our permission before anyone could take him out, and no one ever asked. So no, no one took him out. I think we should leave things alone,” Gus stated. “It’s worked well all these years. He’s happy living there, you’ve said it yourself.” Defeat took over; a feeling to which Jill rarely succumbed. Trying to be the cheerleader for Alex had become a habit, and one that served her well over the years. But this morning, in the light of day with everything exposed, all the dark secrets and lies revealed, she felt herself slipping into despair. The only panacea was to take action of some kind, and her father was thwarting it.

“Would you allow me to at least ask the group mother? She may have some insight that we don’t have.” The moment the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them
. Of course, if she thought Chris would benefit from a family gathering, she would have said something years ago, wouldn’t she?
The truth was, this guilt, or whatever irrational feelings she was having, was not something that would go away by good deeds. It was too late. She’d gone through life with the comfort of not having had to deal with a Down’s Syndrome brother. One hour-long visit a month and she was free. As a child, her parents lavished attention on her because there was no one else there. Her mother had died trying to make up for the deficit.

Jill struggled to keep it together there in her father’s store. The boys were playing with their cars; her cousin was preparing something delectable to eat in the kitchen. Dana was only dead three days and life was already moving on. The realization that everything she knew about her life there in Greektown was not what it appeared to be galvanized at that moment. Her father was not who she thought he was, nor was her mother. What would she make of it? She wasn’t going to solve life’s issues there in the grocery store, so she drank down her cold coffee and got up to leave.