A Clean Kill (3 page)

Seven miles outside the city, a paved road interrupted a line of white fencing. Next to the road stood a monument—no more than six feet high and three feet wide—constructed of old brick and sheltered by copper roofing. Bolted to the brick and safeguarded from the elements by a center-pitched roof was a bronze plaque that read T
HE
M
ANDRAKE
C
LUB
.

I turned in and followed the road around a sharp curve, where the pavement split around a walled gazebo. I stopped and rolled down my window. A security guard stepped out. The club’s name was stitched on the front of his cap. Water cascaded from his visor, and a see-through gray raincoat covered his uniform.

“Yes, suh?”

I told him my name. “I’m here to see Dr. Laurel Adderson.”

“Yes, suh. Just a moment, suh.” The guard stepped back inside the structural embodiment of his authority
and checked my name against a clipboard. Then he leaned out of the door and, using a slow karate-chop motion, signaled for me to proceed down the road.

After rounding another hard curve, the clubhouse came into view and I realized two things. One, the road had been purposefully designed into an S-shape to hide both the guardhouse and the clubhouse from nosy peasants on the county highway. And two, Dr. Adderson belonged to one hell of a nice club.

Nestled into a grid of hundred-year-old pecan trees, the Mandrake Club looked at once old and new. Like the sign monument out by the highway, the main building was constructed of ancient brick and the steep roof was sheathed in seasoned copper. Atop the second-story roof and centered over the main entrance, an octagonal turret with a pointed roof supported a weathervane cut in the shape of a prancing horse.

Except for the pecan trees, nothing about the place was really old. But it had the too-perfect weathered ambiance that only big money can afford and only old money knows enough to want.

The road circled in front of the clubhouse—no doubt designed for dropping off Southern belles—and then curved down and to the side, where a parking lot lay hidden by thick rows of longleaf pine.

I stepped out into the waning rainstorm, locked the Jeep’s doors just for spite, and followed a brick walkway through the pines to a covered catwalk that ran along the building to the front entrance, where I got
yes-suh
’d again.

The uniformed doorman pulled open the door as I approached and, not being a rube myself, I glanced at his nameplate before saying, “Why, thank you, Harvey.”

I glanced back to see if Harvey was impressed, and he closed the door.

Inside, the floors were hardwood, the walls were made of brick and dark paneling, and the rugs and furniture looked middling expensive. Someone’s budget had tightened by the time the furniture was put in, but it was still, as I said, one hell of a nice place.

At 4:20 on a Monday afternoon, no one was in evidence in the entry hall. I started out on my own to find “The Gun Room,” where Dr. Adderson had said we would meet. Whether by some flaw of character or streak of useless genius, I walked straight to the club bar and quickly found someone who I assumed was the bartender.

A muscular, ethnic-looking fellow with hollow cheeks nodded hello.

I asked where The Gun Room was.

The bartender’s face remained immobile.

I tried again, “Excuse me …”

“It’s at the other end of the building.” His deep voice was thick with accent—something like the way a French-Canadian would sound if he had learned English in Brooklyn. And it occurred to me that I’d heard that jumbled dialect somewhere before.

I said, “Thank you,” and he just held my eyes. He didn’t look angry. He looked like he was thinking deeply about … something.

I glanced back as I left the room. The bartender had vanished.

Two minutes later, I found The Gun Room and Dr. Adderson, both of which looked rather old and well built. She rose from a table covered in white linen and walked across the room with her hand outstretched.

“You must be Mr. McInnes.”

I said it was nice of her to meet me, and she said, “Nonsense. I just hope it wasn’t too much to ask you to drive way out here in this rain.”

Dr. Adderson knew full well that her club was no more than ten minutes out of my way, and I knew that she knew. But she was setting a courteous tone. Nothing wrong with that.

She turned back toward her table. “Come over here and we’ll get you some coffee or something.”

I followed and took a seat across from hers. After I had ordered a large latté from the waitress, I took a minute and looked around the room at a pretty amazing collection of fine English and American double shotguns hung from sets of brass stirrups. It was beginning to dawn on me that there probably was not a golf course out back.

I turned to the doctor. “What kind of club is this?”

She smiled. “The kind for people who agree with Mark Twain, that the game of golf is nothing but a good walk ruined. We’ve got enough land here for a course, but no one wants it. The club started out as a stable for hunters, what most people would call jumping horses. Now we’ve got stables and some riding trails, and we’ve contracted to ride on some of the adjoining properties. There’s a pool, of course. The room we’re in is a tribute to the gun group, which is where I fit in. We’ve got a sporting clays range and a kennel with some of the best pointers and retrievers in the state. Just north of here we have a tract of land under lease for quail hunting and dove shoots.”

Something was tugging hard at a childhood memory.
Finally, I asked, “What’s that smell in here? It smells kind of like an old hardware store.”

Dr. Adderson smiled again. “It’s gun oil. Hoppes Number Nine. I like it.”

“Yeah. I didn’t mean it wasn’t pleasant. It’s just not your usual tea-room smell.”

“I’m not sure most of our members would like hearing this called a tea room, but … I agree it’s a nice background scent. To me, it always smells like my father’s den.” She motioned at the walls. “You can’t have all these antique side-by-sides in here without spreading a little gun oil around to fight corrosion.”

I was looking over the doctor’s head at what appeared to be a heavily engraved L. C. Smith double from around the late 1920s. “Well, I’ll give you this. You’re sure not trying to put on the poor-country-doctor act for the lawyer.”

Laurel Adderson didn’t smile. “Sheri Baneberry tells me you’re not that kind of lawyer. I was led to understand that you couldn’t care less how much I’m worth. I was led to believe that you wanted to find the truth.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that I assumed you wanted to meet here instead of your office or the hospital so I wouldn’t be tempted to ask for medical records.”

No bullshit from this one. She said, “That’s right.”

“So you’ll have to excuse me for expecting some bobbing and weaving.”

The waitress brought my coffee. As she put it down, Dr. Adderson said, “You’re excused. Now what can I do for you?”

“Tell me about Mrs. Baneberry. I need to hear everything you know about the food poisoning and her
death. But first, let me just go ahead and ask you: Does it make any sense at all for a healthy, forty-six-year-old woman who has sought hospital treatment to die of simple food poisoning?”

“Salmonella poisoning.”

“Okay,” I said, “does it make any sense for Kate Baneberry to have died of salmonella poisoning under those circumstances?”

Dr. Laurel Adderson took a delicate sip of tea from a china cup and said, “No, Mr. McInnes. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

At its Southernmost tip, Alabama drops down next to the Florida Panhandle and splits into two short prongs or legs. The water between those prongs is Mobile Bay, and the City of Mobile sits at the apex, or the crotch, of that split. Some—referring to the city’s sea-faring history and its location—claim that Mobile is the place, literally the birth canal, through which much of the deep South was born. Others—who are less impressed with the city’s Mardi Gras societies and unyielding social climate—say its founders prophetically placed Mobile exactly where an asshole should be.

I loved the old place, or I wouldn’t have located my practice there. But, at the end of the day, even I headed south to live on a more tranquil part of the bay, a place where slipping bare feet into worn boat shoes is considered dressing for dinner.

Highway 98—the road I had taken into Daphne—
runs down the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay through Daphne and Fairhope to below Point Clear, where it cuts across the right foot of Alabama and crosses into Pensacola.

I followed the rain-washed highway as far as Point Clear, where I turned onto the familiar crunch of my gravel driveway a few minutes past seven. Inside the beach house, I placed a call to my mother to see if she and Sam had returned from their Thanksgiving cruise. It was something one of them had dreamed up to avoid another holiday spitting contest between my father and me. I got their machine and left a message. Next I punched in Sheri Baneberry’s home number with the intention of reporting on my meeting with Dr. Adderson. I talked to another tape recorder and hung up.

Finally, I tried Susan Fitzsimmons’s new number in Chicago.

Susan and I had a complicated relationship. Fall of the previous year, I had manipulated Susan into helping me find my brother’s killer, who took exception to our efforts, stabbed Susan, and shot me. Obviously, we both survived. Six months later, she and I became
involved—
the post-college euphemism for affection and sex—during my efforts to help a young friend of Susan’s who had witnessed a murder. Our relationship had lasted almost six months.

But Susan missed what she wryly called “the safety of Chicago.”

As she had become increasingly involved in my life, Susan had come to believe that I was attracted—“almost driven,” in her words—to dangerous people. I, on the other hand, wondered why so many dangerous clients and situations seemed to be attracted to me.

Susan said I was in denial.

I said, probably so.

She then suggested that maybe I had spent my life seeking out life-and-death battles to prove my worth to an overbearing and unforgiving father.

I suggested that maybe she’d been watching too much
Oprah
.

Now she had moved to Chicago, and her phone had rung fifteen times. Maybe she hadn’t found time to buy a machine or hire a service. Maybe it was easier to avoid calling me if I couldn’t leave a message. Maybe the world didn’t revolve around me, and Susan was just out having a life.

Fifteen minutes later, I was microwaving leftover chili when my phone rang. I walked into the living room, grabbed the mobile receiver, and said hello.

“Tom? This is Laurel Adderson.”

“Oh.”

“Did I catch you at a bad time?”

I shook my head, which wasn’t all that helpful to someone on the other end of a phone line. “No. Not at all. I just thought it was going to be someone else. What can I do for you?”

“Well, Tom, I’ve been thinking. And I’ve been talking to the hospital’s in-house lawyer.”

“I thought he might want a report on our meeting.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Dr. Adderson sounded unfazed. “Anyway, I convinced him that you and Sheri aren’t out for blood. And—don’t make me sorry I did this—but I also convinced him that it might help resolve the family’s concerns about the death if he let me go over some of Kate Baneberry’s records with you.”

This was unexpected. “From the night she died?”

“Yes. If you can get her husband to sign a waiver of doctor-patient confidentiality, then I can show you something that’s been bothering me about the progression of her illness.”

As the doctor talked, I had walked back into the kitchen. I pulled the chili out of the microwave and reached for an onion. “How about this? Sheri’s father, Jim, is …”

“Angry.”

“Well, yes, he is.” I grabbed a chef’s knife from a wooden block on the counter and began peeling the onion. “As I told you this afternoon, he’s got his own lawyers. If I ask him to sign a legal waiver, red flags are going to go up and we’ll be buried in pinstripe suits. So, how about if I ask Sheri to get her mother’s medical records from her father? He has the right to access those records, and he can’t very well object to letting his own daughter look at them.” I stepped on the trash can lever and dropped the crinkled-gold onion skin inside. “Since I’m her attorney, she can let me see the file without his permission.”

Dr. Adderson let a few seconds go unfilled. “But that doesn’t give me the all’s-clear to discuss her condition with you.”

I made horizontal cuts through the onion. “At the risk of sounding insensitive, Kate Baneberry no longer has any confidentiality to protect. She’s dead. And besides, we already discussed her this afternoon.”

The line went silent, and I thought I may have offended her. Then she said, “Do you shoot?”

“Yeah. I guess. I go bird hunting about twice a year.” I separated three thick slices of onion and chopped them up.

“Come to the club Wednesday at one. We’ll eat and go over the records. Two o’clock is my usual tee time at the clays range. We’ll shoot and talk.”

I thanked her for calling and got no response. “Dr. Adderson? This may sound crazy, but something’s been bothering me all afternoon. I got directions today from a guy in the bar at your club. He was … he was intimidating as hell is what he was.”

“Charlie? Charlie’s big but he’s not what I’d call intimidating, especially not to a man like you.”

I put the knife down and turned to lean my backside against the kitchen counter. “This guy was about my age or a little younger. Black hair. Gaunt cheeks. Build like a fighter, like somebody who works out for strength, not bulk.”

Laurel Adderson laughed. “That’s not Charlie. Our bartender’s tall and round, with a big red beard. The guy you described … if there is someone like that who works at the club, I don’t know him. And he doesn’t sound much like he’d be one of our members.”

“No. I’d say this guy would scare the living hell out of the membership committee. Thanks anyway.”

“Sure. See you Wednesday.”