3 Loosey Goosey (13 page)

“So, if someone did hit him, it wasn’t planned,” I mused. At least, I guessed that whoever hit Daniel took advantage of the stack of poles, rather than luring Daniel to where they knew a stack of poles would be.

Marcy cleared her throat. “Like I said, he’s going to be out for a while.”

“But he’s going to be okay.” This was an important point to reiterate. He wasn’t dead or dying, I hadn’t found another body, and I didn’t have to feel all that guilty that my heart still wasn’t overflowing with love for the conniving reporter.

“But he’s going to be out of work,” she said again, this time with a new urgency.

“Yeah.” I’d got that. Then it dawned on me. “Why did Ted call?” I asked. Not to ease Marcy and Gary’s minds over Daniel, that was for sure.

“Well...” She twisted her toe on the grass. “He’d wanted me to take over Daniel’s beat. Go see him at the hospital. See what he could give me information-wise and all that...” More toe twisting. “But then I mentioned that you were here...” Her eyes morphed from those of a regular human to something you’d see on a cartoon cat begging for tuna. “And he thought, if you weren’t too busy...”

“Ted wants me to work for him again?” This had happened before, and it never went well. I’d left the paper for good reasons, Ted being a major one, and I’d only returned before because I was in danger of having to live on dry beans and rice. But times had changed. I had Phyllis now, procurer of goods that sold and supporter of my need to eat.

“What’s in it for me?” I asked, but before she could answer, I held up my hand. “Wait. I know.” A smile pulled at my cheeks.

Oh did I know.

Twenty minutes later, Ted and I had come to an agreement, and I was at the hospital. I stopped in the lobby to use the computer in the waiting room to check if Ted had fulfilled his end of the deal.

The Internet was slow. As I waited for it to grind its way to the
Daily News
homepage, I made notes on what all I needed to get from Daniel.

Finally, the page loaded. Any sign of yours truly or Ben was gone. Now the page was dominated by a striking image of Pauline sitting on Meagher’s horse’s back in her HA! T-shirt and looking annoyed as hell. Which is to say, her usual cheerful self.

I clicked around some more, making sure Ted hadn’t pulled a fast one and buried the picture of me somewhere deeper in the site. Satisfied that photographic evidence of my misstep was, for now, out of the public record, I shut down the computer and went to see my favorite reporter.

Ted had given me Daniel’s room number, so I strolled in as if invited.

The reporter was lying on the bed, covered with a blue sheet and sipping water through a straw out of a plastic cup that I’m pretty sure was new in the 70s.

“Lucy,” he said, blinking.

“Daniel,” I returned, but more kindly than I would have under normal circumstances. With a horror-movie-quality bandage around his head, he didn’t look good.

“Someone whacked you,” I added.

He took another sip. “Wishing it was you?”

His witty comeback lost some of its impact when he winced.

I sighed. I really preferred my rivals operating on all cylinders. This strange feeling of sympathy for the reporter was not welcome.

Still, the feeling was there. I softened my statement. “Ted said someone hit you on the head.”

Daniel touched the bandage. “That’s what they tell me.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember walking and pain. That’s it.”

“No strange sounds or smells?”

“Like metal cracking my skull or blood spurting from my body?”

For someone so feeble looking, he was doing a good job of maintaining smartass status.

“I was thinking more like someone walking up behind you, the smell of cologne, or something.”

He squinted his eyes in thought and then winced.

I winced too. Damn sympathy. I couldn’t seem to shake it.

Looking back at me, he announced, “Nope, nothing.”

He seemed pretty cheerful about it. If someone had bashed me in the skull, I’d be chomping at the bit to figure out who’d done it.

“Are you sure you don’t remember?”

He frowned. “Of course I’m sure. What I’m not sure of is why I’m talking to you about it.”

Ah, Ted. Trust him not to make my new job any easier.

“Ted didn’t call you?”

“Sure he did. He wanted to know...” The frown deepened. “He didn’t... I’m not giving you my byline.”

I didn’t want his stinking byline. I didn’t even really want to write this story, not with my inside knowledge that Stone saw Ben as suspect numero one. But I had to stay on the story long enough that any appeal of running my picture completely drained away.

I studied Daniel for a minute, sizing up the challenge and determining how best to begin negotiations.

“I don’t need your permission.”

“You need my notes.”

Okay, maybe that had been the wrong approach. What did Daniel want more than anything? A byline. Credit that he could use to get a bigger and better job somewhere else. It was a noble goal, especially considering how much I’d like to move him out of town too.

“I’ll share the byline.” It was a fair offer, for both of us.

“My byline. You’re an assistant.”

Which meant all the crap, none of the credit.

I’d thought I didn’t care about the byline, but seriously... “One story.” I held up one finger. That would be fair, since anything I wrote for the next day’s paper would be coming directly from Daniel and his research.

“One week.” He smiled. Self-satisfied.

In other words, he was planning on being back at the paper in a week.

“Two stories.” I flashed him a V.

“Five.”

Argh. He made me want to bash my own head into something.

“Three, and that’s it. If you won’t go for that, I’ll do without whatever you have. I can reproduce it anyway.”

His eyes narrowed, and I thought for a moment I’d blown it. “I doubt that.” He tapped his finger against the blue sheet. “Okay, but I’m not just handing everything over. I want input.”

Input. That meant more time with Daniel. It was almost a deal breaker. I glanced down at my pocket and my silenced phone. Of course, working on the story gave me access to the paper and what was being posted online.

“Deal.” I held out my hand to shake.

With our deal set, I pulled out a chair and got down to the business of getting as much out of Daniel as quickly as I could.

I decided to stick with what had happened to him for now.

“What were you doing at the Capitol?” I asked, borrowing a notepad from his bedside table.

“Did you not notice the group of naked people marching around?” he asked.

I ground the tip of my pencil into the pad. “I mean, who did you talk to? What did you do?”

“Everyone. Your brother, Eric Handle, even the goose.”

I was pretty sure we could rule Pauline out as the assailant. Not that she wouldn’t have wanted to bash Daniel, or anyone for that matter, in the head, but she was lacking the necessary dexterity.

“And what did you say to them?”

“You seem to be assuming that I said something that provoked being attacked.” Even green, he managed to look indignant.

“Uh, yeah.” Duh. “Unless you think it’s more likely some crazed person was wandering the Capitol grounds and just took a swing at you for fun.”

“What I mean is that the motivation didn’t have to be something I said or asked at the Capitol. It could have been something someone thinks I know.” He gave me a telling look.

“Like your drug theory.”

“Exactly.”

“So who have you told about that?”

“You.”

“Well, I didn’t hit you.” As much as I wished right now that I had.

“But who did you tell?”

I squeezed one eye shut. “You’re trying to pin this on Ben again, aren’t you?”

“Did you tell him?”

“No. I haven’t even talked to him since I saw you this morning.”

“Who have you talked to?”

I really didn’t like how the bony finger was moving my direction, but still, I thought back. I’d talked to Phyllis, of course, and Richard Danes and Betty. I didn’t remember mentioning Daniel’s theory to any of them, but Phyllis could certainly have overheard our conversation.

I looked him in the eye. “No one.”

“Right.”

I shrugged. “You don’t have to believe me. Let’s get back to who you talked to.”

Looking more than a little disgruntled, he ran through his time at the Capitol. “When I got there, the protesters were still milling around. They hadn’t lined up yet. They were taking pictures of each other, talking about the evils of meat, that kind of thing. I talked to your brother…” He emphasized brother.

I smiled as if I didn’t get the point of his intonation and nodded for him to keep going.

He flitted his eyes to the side, but kept talking. “...the other protesters and Handle. I talked to him the most. He was obviously the person in charge of dealing with the press.” He made a face, which I understood completely. The last person a reporter wanted to interview was the person prepped with talking points.

Thinking about what a reporter wanted made something else occur to me, though. “Why were you there at all?”

He gave me an “are you stupid” look. “I told you. Protest. News. Me. Reporter.”

I pointed at him. “You. Crime reporter.”

He had the grace to look a shade sheepish, but only a shade. “It was a chance to talk to your brother when he would want to talk to me.”

I never said Daniel was a dummy.

I kept the admiration to myself.

“So you did bring up the drugs.” He didn’t have to answer. I knew he had. It was what he’d most wanted to know about. The real question was how and who else had overheard him.

“I didn’t bring up the drugs,” he said, huffy.

I raised a brow.

“Okay, I might have made a joke or mentioned that I’d heard Tiffany liked to have a good time.”

Well, that sounded completely uncreepy, saying the dead woman liked to have a good time.

“And I might have asked how long he’d known her, because I had the distinct feeling that her relationship with HA! was deeper than that one protest.”

This was new. “Why do you feel that?”

“FriendTime? Did you see her page? The goose is all over it.”

Pauline did get around.

“Ben is not on FriendTime.” No need to agree that Pauline was.

“The goose is, and I doubt she’s updating her status by herself.”

Damn him for not being an idiot. I kept my knowledge of who might be posting as Pauline to myself.

“Posting on a page is a long way from having a relationship,” I replied. If the opposite was true, I’d be guilty of cheating on Peter with more than one TV star.

“True, but it shows he was aware of her.”

I shrugged. “That means nothing.”

“It means—”

I waved my hands. “Back to your conversation. Who was there?”

“Your brother.”

“And...”

He paused, thinking. “At one point or another, everyone, I guess. Even some of the beef ranchers were standing close by. They’re who called the police. Some guy named Richard Danes. He wanted everyone arrested and hauled off, but the police didn’t really do much that I saw.”

Which meant he hadn’t witnessed my headlong dash and subsequent de-signing of Ben. That actually, now that I thought about it, gave Ben an alibi, at least for hitting Daniel. Ben had been in full view, very full view, of everyone up to that time.

Just to make sure that my guess was right, I asked, “Did you see me there at all?”

His face turned suspicious, but he answered. “No. I don’t remember seeing you. Why?”

Another wave of my hand. This time dismissive. “Just establishing a timeframe.”

Basically, though, what Daniel was telling me was that everyone who had been at the Capitol today might have overheard whatever he said to Ben and might have decided afterward to bash him in the head.

Another idea occurred to me. “Was Gary there then?”

“Yes.”

I made a note on my hospital notepad to ask Gary if I could go over all the pictures he took this morning. Photographers tended to avoid snapping pictures of reporters, but it would still give me some idea of who was where when.

With that decided, I mentioned to Daniel that the piece I wrote about his assault should carry my byline only. “Unless you plan on Ted running it as an opinion piece,” I added.

“Funny. Fine.” He leaned back against the pillows and closed his eyes.

A nurse came in as if she’d been standing guard watching for some sign that I’d outstayed my welcome, but I was done anyway. Well, mainly done. “What about your notes?” I asked.

Daniels eyes cracked open. “What notes?”

“On the Tiffany Williams story.”

“They should be with my stuff.” He motioned to a blue plastic bag that had been set on a credenza by the window.

Inside, I found the clothes Daniel had been wearing at the Capitol, but nothing more.

“I don’t see anything.”

“What do you mean? You’re holding the bag.”

I held up the jeans and shirt. “This is what I mean. Nothing but clothes.”

He started to sit up, but the nurse held him back with a look.

“What about my phone and wallet?”

I felt his pants’ pockets and pulled out a leather wallet. “But no phone and no notebook.”

He cursed in a highly inappropriate manner.

I slid my gaze to the nurse.

He cursed again. “Someone took them.”

We both looked at the nurse then, but our loss didn’t seem to rattle her in the slightest.

“When a patient is admitted, everything on them is logged in. There will be a record in admissions of everything you had on you when you arrived, along with the names of the two people who witnessed the items being placed in the bag. If something was taken, it was before you got here.”

Daniel was done cursing, it seemed. He just looked tired now.

I replaced his items in the bag and retrieved the notepad that I’d been using. “I’ll check with the paramedics. They could have fallen out in the ambulance.”

“Or on the grounds,” Daniel suggested, but with no fire.