Trudy, Madly, Deeply (Working Stiffs Mystery Series) (26 page)

I grabbed my denim jacket out of the hall closet.

My mother looked up from the fashion magazine she’d been reading while Gram snored in her recliner. “Where are you going?”

The less I said about going to the hospital in the middle of the night, the better. “Out.”

She glanced at the clock. “It’s almost ten. Kind of late to go out when you have to get up early for work tomorrow, isn’t it?”

Since when did my mother pay attention to the hours I kept?

“It’s not a date. It’s just something I have to do for work.”

“Dressed like that?” She tossed aside her reading glasses. “Are you’re going on some sort of stakeout?”

“It’s not a stakeout.”

Marietta sat at the edge of the sofa. “But this has to do with Trudy’s death, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t have time to play
Twenty Questions
. “I have to go.” I grabbed my car keys from the kitchen table and headed for the door.

“Is this something dangerous?” she asked, closing the distance between us.

I sure hoped not. “I’ll be fine.”

I slid behind the wheel of the Jag and was about to shift into reverse when my mother climbed into the passenger seat.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Riding shotgun.”

“I’m going to be gone all night.”

Her eyes widened. “
All
night? Seriously?”

“If you get sleepy or bored or have some sort of midnight rendezvous planned with Barry Ferris, I’m not bringing you home. And I don’t have time to talk anymore about this.”

Marietta fastened her seat belt. “Then let’s go.”

I backed out of the driveway and glimpsed the light glowing in Steve’s living room. Part of me wanted to pull over, pound on his front door and refuse to leave until he convinced me that I didn’t need to worry about Peggy Como becoming Virginia’s next victim. But I knew that would be a waste of time. He wasn’t going to tell me anything and I was going to suffer Lucille’s wrath if I didn’t show up in the next five minutes, so I hit the accelerator to put any hesitation I felt in my rearview mirror.

“Oh, I almost forgot. I’m packin’,” Marietta said, patting her Louis Vuitton tote bag.

I had a very bad feeling that she wasn’t talking about a midnight snack. “Packing what?”

“Just a Taser, but it’s better than nothing.”

Lord help me. “Says you.”

After all the coffee I’d sucked down, the last thing I needed was to come back from the bathroom and get tased by a mother with an itchy trigger finger. “Do you actually know how to use a Taser?”

“I had a training class a couple of years ago,” she said, looking at her reflection in the visor mirror as she fluffed her cropped hair. “Where are we going anyway?”

“The hospital. Keep that thing in your bag. We don’t want to have any accidents.”

“Sugah, I’ve never shot anyone accidentally in my life. Well, I did hit the instructor in the ass, but he was a jerk and had it coming.”

Criminy, it was going to be a long night.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“About damned time,” Lucille grumbled when Marietta and I found her sitting outside of Peggy’s hospital room. “I gotta pee.”

Marietta sniffed, scanning the speckled blue-gray vinyl. “It smells like someone else did, too.”

Lucille pushed herself out of her chair. “You get used to it.”

“I seriously doubt that,” my mother said under her breath.

“Just be grateful you were spared the play-by-play about Luther Purdy’s prostate.” Lucille scowled at the doorway across the hall. “I got to hear about his plumbing problems for two hours. Thank God Tina medicated him. At least the snoring helped keep me awake.”

“Tina?” As in Tina Norton?

Lucille jabbed her thumb toward the nurses’ station. “The little brunette down there.”

I glanced at the petite woman in blue who had been on duty just hours before Rose Kozarek and Jesse Elwood died. I hoped Tina didn’t have anywhere to run off to because she and I needed to take a stroll down memory lane.

“You brought your mom?” Lucille smirked. “What for, back up?”

“She wanted to help.” And I couldn’t get her out of my car.

“We’re tag-teaming on this one,” Marietta said, like it was a line from her old show. “And if there’s any sign of trouble, I’m packin’.”

Lucille’s eyes widened. “Me, too. Whatcha got?”

Marietta fished a black leather case out of her bag. It looked innocuous enough until she unsnapped the cover. “Fifty thousand volts, six ounces, laser sight, stun feature. It’s got it all.”

“Sweet!” Lucille said, nodding with approval at the metallic pink Taser aimed at my belly button.

“Whoa!” I ducked into Peggy’s doorway. “Careful where you point that thing.”

“Don’t be a wuss. Just look at what this baby can do.” Marietta took a shooter’s stance and shined a LED light into Luther’s room. “It doubles as a flashlight. Cute, huh?”

Anything that could fire fifty thousand volts at Luther Purdy wasn’t cute.

“I’ve got its daddy.” Lucille pulled out a heftier black Taser from her patent leather handbag. “I call it the Intimidator. Not quite as stylish, but pretty dang effective as a motivator.”

“The Intimidator—I like it,” Marietta said, giving Lucille a fist bump.

The sight of Marietta and Lucille bonding over fifty thousand volts gave me the willies.

“I don’t, and you need to put those things away before we get tossed out of here.” I peered over at the nurses’ station and saw that Tina Norton had a telephone receiver to her ear, no doubt with security on speed dial. “Now!”

Lucille waved the Intimidator in Tina’s direction. “Hell, you don’t have to worry about Tina. Her ex was the one who sold it to me. Said it used to be hers. He got it back in the settlement.”

Which showed how boring I was. The only weapon my ex ever got from me was a can of pepper spray I’d been too afraid to carry in my tote bag. “Just because she used to be a member of your Taser packin’ mama club doesn’t mean she wants anyone taking target practice in the hallway.”

Lucille holstered her Taser and dropped it in her handbag. “Will you relax? She’s good people, and she knows we’re here to get Peggy through the night.”

“You told her that?”

“Well, I’ve been sitting out here for the last four hours. I had to tell her something.”

“What did she say when you told her?”

“Nothin’ much. Said it made sense given everything that’s been going on lately.”

All the more reason for me to talk to Tina Norton as soon as possible, but first, I needed to complete tonight’s changing of the guard. “Other than that, how did it go?”

“Aside from Luther, it’s been real quiet the last couple of hours,” Lucille said.

I glanced into Peggy’s room. Illuminated only by the light from the hallway, it contained two beds, two chairs, and no husband—just a slumbering Peggy hooked up to a monitor silently displaying numbers and a steady, pulsing bright red heart. “How’s Peggy doing?”

Lucille shrugged. “Must be doing okay. They’re sending her home tomorrow.”

“Peggy Como?” Marietta whispered, leaning into my shoulder as she slipped her holstered Taser back into her tote. “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to hurt Peggy?”

“Or Trudy or Rose,” Lucille added.

My mother’s face screwed into a Botox-resistant frown. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Unless Virginia Straitham was responsible for five deaths in this hospital, and in the world according to Virginia, Bert Como deserved a wife upgrade.

“A lot of things don’t make sense right now.” Trudy, Rose, Howard, Bernadette, Mr. Elwood, my mother dating Barry Ferris.

Marietta patted my back, like that would make it feel better. Maybe it did. A little.

“What’s the game plan?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you what my plan is,” Lucille said, pulling on a white cable knit sweater. “I’m gonna go home and catch the last half of
Law and Order
, but first I gotta hit the head.”

I sat in one of the two chairs outside Peggy’s room and watched Lucille wave at Tina as she squeaked her way down the hall. With Tina alone at the nurses’ station and off the phone, it seemed like a perfect chance for me to take her pulse on what she thought was going on in her hospital.

My mother sat in the chair next to me. “Stay here,” I told her. “Watch anyone who goes into Peggy’s room. Any doctor, any nurse, any anybody.”

She patted the bulge in her tote bag and saluted.

“Please don’t shoot anybody until I get back,” I said, heading for the nurses’ station.

Tina looked up from the computer monitor she was sitting behind. The overhead florescent light didn’t do the little bags under her eyes any favors. I shuddered to think about what it was doing to mine.

She squeezed out a shy smile as she looked past me. “I’m sorry. I have to ask. Was that Marietta Moreau with you?”

“Yep.”

“I knew it.”

“Would you like her autograph?” I wasn’t above selling out my mother for some information. “When you have a couple of minutes, come on over and I’ll introduce you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to impose.”

The wide-eyed spark of joy in her eyes told me Tina wouldn’t need much arm-twisting.

“She enjoys meeting fans.” Understatement of the year. “And we’ll be here for a while, so you might as well say hello to her.”

I leaned on the counter separating us. “My name is Charmaine by the way.”

“Tina Norton,” she said with a pleasant smile.

“Could I ask you a couple of questions?”

The smile disappeared and she broke eye contact. “I suppose.”

“You worked the nights Rose Kozarek and Jesse Elwood died.”

“How do you know—”

“I’m a Deputy Coroner and I’ve been looking into the death of Trudy Bergeson. I’m concerned that the three deaths might be related.”

She pressed her lips together as if she dared not say what she was thinking.

“You also were here the night of Trudy’s death, weren’t you?” I asked.

Tina squinted at her computer monitor like she wanted to jump inside it and disappear. “I’ve already told the police everything I know about that night.”

It figured that Steve would have already talked to her. “I’m sure you have.” And Steve won’t share. “But if I could ask just a couple more questions it would really help with our investigation.” I tossed in an earnest smile for good measure.

“If this is about Dr. Straitham, I’m quite sure he didn’t have anything to do with those deaths,” Tina said with a flush creeping into her cheeks.

She was very quick to jump to the conclusion that I wanted to talk about Dr. Straitham. “Why do you say that?”

“He wasn’t here,” she said softly.

“Neither were you unless you worked a very long shift.”

“My shift ends at midnight.” Eyes downcast, Tina pressed her palms together as if she were offering up a prayer. “Neither one of us was here.”

The other woman. A small piece of this deadly puzzle clicked into place.

“I understand, but you may have seen something before you left.”

“I don’t remember seeing anything unusual,” she said.

“Your initials are on a log that indicates that you were one of the last members of the staff here to see Rose Kozarek and Jesse Elwood alive. Do you remember seeing anyone hanging around their rooms those nights?”

She shook her head. “We lock the main entrance at nine, so typically, aside from the staff, no one but immediate family is here that late.”

Marietta and I had no trouble getting in through the emergency entrance. A nurse even held the door open for us. There’s no way that Virginia would view a locked door as much of a deterrent.

“Did you happen to see Mrs. Straitham that night?”

“No, I’d remember that.”

I didn’t doubt for a second that Tina was telling the truth.

A light flashed on her computer monitor and she pushed out of her chair. “I’m needed by a patient. You’ll have to excuse me.”

I watched Dr. Straitham’s lover pass another nurse as she walked down the other end of the hall. Tina moved quickly, with quiet, compact steps—the kind of silent footfalls that would be perfect for darting in and out of a room without disturbing the patient. Especially useful in the wee hours of the morning if the situation warranted some stealth.

Virginia Straitham was a much bigger woman. In a pair of flats with crepe soles was she capable of stealth mode? Maybe. She had certainly snuck up on me at Norm Bergeson’s house. Add in the fact that there could easily be times when there was no one at the nurses’ station with line of sight to a patient’s room, and the killer didn’t need to be extraordinarily sneaky. She just needed the opportunity to get in and get out unobserved. And with the elevator just thirty feet away, she could probably slip in and out of any one of these rooms, administer a deadly injection, and be off the second floor in less than a minute.

I pulled out my cell phone as I walked toward Peggy’s room.

“Are you calling for backup?” my mother asked.

And Steve thought I watched too much TV. “No.” I looked to see if the coast was still clear, then I punched a button to start the stopwatch feature on my phone.

I didn’t want to give poor Peggy another heart attack, so I hesitated at the doorway for a moment to make sure that she was still asleep before moving closer to stand by her bedside. After waiting ten seconds I looked up and down the hallway from her doorway.

Marietta frowned at me. “What the heck are you doing?”

“Give me a minute.” Even less if my theory proved true.

I walked to the elevator and pressed the
down
button. When the door opened I checked the elapsed time on my cell phone. Forty-one seconds.

I looked up, expecting to see an empty elevator. Instead, I locked eyes with Virginia Straitham. The air vacated my lungs as if I’d just been punched in the solar plexus.

Stepping around me like I was no more significant than an ant invading her picnic, she surveyed the hallway with a determined set to her jaw. Her emotions seemed to be on lockdown, giving her the appearance of a matronly Marine on a reconnaissance mission. After her gaze landed on Marietta, Virginia returned to the elevator.

Mission over or aborted? I couldn’t read her.