A Man to Die for (12 page)

“How’d she do?”

The nurse, an old classmate of Casey’s named Sue who supported her alcoholic husband and four children with the wages of childbirth, proffered a smile of genuine delight. “I didn’t know there was a patron saint of pelvics.”

Casey scowled. “Probably somebody who died on the rack. What’s new and exciting in the wonderful world of labor?”

They walked together through the door that separated office from waiting room. Casey heard Burton’s melodious baritone and the clicks of PCs from billing. There were Mary Cassatt posters decorating the wall and a digital scale with a funhouse mirror in front of it that made people look thin. White-haired for her mother and worthy recipient of the Filthiest Joke Award for her, Burton was an OB who adored women.

“Scandal and dirt,” Sue answered once safely beyond earshot of the uninitiated. “That’s what’s going on.”

Casey pulled out her checkbook to pay for Helen’s visit. “Usual stuff,” she retorted. “VanDyke still trying to sneak those tubal ligations past the nuns?”

Sue’s shrug was eloquent. “And Fernandez is on wife number five.”

Casey’s eyebrow lifted. “Damn, as fast as he’s going through ’em, I should sign up now. I’d be set for life.”

Sue grimaced. “Even alimony for life isn’t worth two months with him. Besides, he swears this time, he’s sticking to mistresses.”

“Just my luck.”

“Speaking of mistresses,” Sue offered, her smile growing avaricious. “Wanna hear what I just overheard from the B man himself?”

Sue was leaning close, too close even for the clerical staff to hear, so Casey knew it was good.

“I’m all ears.”

“What do you think of that new guy Hunsacker?”

Casey did her best not to betray her sudden attention. Even so, she took a calculated risk. “I heard he’s been doin’ the three-finger special.”

Sue’s eyes widened. “No kidding. Did you also know that he had quite an interesting mistress?”

Casey snorted. “From what I heard, he’s had more women in. bed than Sealy Posturepedic.”

But Sue shook her head and leaned closer. “No, not regulation stuff. I’m talking about a hooker. One who specialized in the, uh, rough stuff.”

It was getting hard for Casey to breathe. “From down South Chippewa way?”

Sue nodded, bristling with salacious outrage. “I guess none of the West County girls would put up with the Mike Tyson school of charm.”

“How’d Burton find out?”

Sue shrugged. “You know him. He knows everything that goes on. My suspicion is he heard it down at the city clinic he volunteers at. He’s told me before some of the girls frequent the penicillin gallery there. Of course, maybe we’d better put out warning posters that Hunsacker might be on the lookout again. Evidently his main squeeze lost an argument with her pimp. He beat her to death.”

Except that the story in the papers was different. The story in the papers was that no one knew who killed the hooker.

The hooker who knew Hunsacker. The hooker whose death had been the slippery ball of contest Casey and Hunsacker had batted back and forth in full view of an unsuspecting audience. Casey wondered whether Hunsacker and the hooker had had an argument before she’d died, just like Hunsacker had had with Evelyn before she’d died, just like he’d had with Wanda before she’d disappeared. She didn’t have to wonder anymore about what it had been that she’d seen in his eyes when they’d discussed it. She’d seen it the day she’d discussed Evelyn with him.

It was impossible. It was ludicrous. And yet, an hour later, Casey found herself in the Bishop’s office discussing murder.

CASEY COULDN’T REALLY
see him as a Bishop. More a monk, a hermit, the kind who used to scrape out a life in isolation at the windswept edges of Ireland. Beehive huts and meditation for the glory of God. Her gaze on his bent head and her hand at Helen’s back, Casey wondered if he was a good cop, or just a zealous one.

He wasn’t handsome. Sleek was handsome; well fed and muscled and carefully attended. He was lean and hungry-looking, with a kind of controlled ferocity to his movements and a wealth of the world in the network of crow’s feet that betrayed his age as a few years up on hers. Angles and shadows, a lot of forehead and deep-set eyes, his face was all bone structure and character. The fluorescent lights made his skin look almost pasty in contrast to his heavy brown hair.

Casey was surprised by his undetectivelike attire: dark plaid shirt, knit tie, and pleated pants. It didn’t even look right on a cop, much less a man named Bishop. Well chosen, a little loose on his frame. Casey could see him instead in homespun wool and rope sandals, exhorting the faithful to salvation. She wasn’t sure she could see him waiting through her story.

“You have some information on the Crystal Johnson murder?” he asked without looking up from whatever he was writing.

Casey eased Helen down into one of the two chairs that took up the only free space in the crowded little office where four desks were jammed into the area reserved for one and file cabinets fought for space with bookshelves and computer terminals. The Bishop, as the duty officer called him, sat behind a nameplate that read Sgt. Barbara Dawkins, so Casey assumed he wasn’t even using his own desk.

“I think so,” Casey answered the only way she could, his indifference unsettling.

Helen was already trying to get back to her feet. “I have no place in your confessional, dear,” she admonished. “Although why you wouldn’t want to just go to Father Donnelly…”

That got the officer’s attention. With the economy born of long practice, Casey slid her mother back into her chair and held her there. The detective watched in dour silence.

“It’s not confession, Mom,” Casey said, wishing desperately that she’d taken the time to get Helen home before coming down here. But if she’d gone home, she would have lost her nerve and stayed there. “It’s a police station. I told you.”

“I can accommodate a confession,” he offered equably, his gaze settling disconcertingly on her. “If you feel the need to make one.”

Casey scowled. “You must know the lady downstairs. She made the same offer.”

She thought she caught the ghost of a smile tug briefly at the corner of his mouth. “We like to give people every opportunity to unburden themselves.”

Casey almost found herself smiling back, even as the perspiration began to slide down her back. “And don’t think we don’t appreciate it. But not today, thanks.”

His nod was tight and a lot less congenial than it seemed. “Let me know. Now, about Crystal,” he said, leaning back a little, his attention all hers. “You knew her?”

Casey had seen eyes like his before. The better psychiatrists had them, and Bert when he was questioning people. Deceptively passive eyes, almost hooded in their lassitude, as if their owner were only half-attentive. Casey called them crocodile eyes, because there was a mind behind those eyes as quick and surgical as a crock’s jaw. Snap, and you were caught, before you could even cry out in surprise. They didn’t make her any more comfortable.

“My name is Catherine McDonough,” she introduced herself, settling into the other seat without letting go of Helen. “Casey. I’m an ER nurse out at Mother Mary Hospital. Do I call you the Bishop, or just plain Barbara?”

The only way she knew she’d caught him by surprise was the infinitesimal elevation of his left eyebrow. He motioned to the desk by the wall where a mountain of files and books vied for space with an old brass reading lamp, a Marine Corps paperweight, and a nameplate that read Sgt. Jack Scanlon.

“Sgt. Scanlon,” he allowed, tapping the edge of his ballpoint slowly against the paper he’d been filling in. “I come here for lunch. Now,” he said evenly. “Crystal?”

Casey didn’t remember letting go of Helen. She just seemed to end up needing both her hands to tell her story. “I think I know who killed her,” she admitted in a frustratingly small voice. So much was riding on what she said. So much needed saying, and she didn’t have a clue how to best present it. So, she took a breath and fixed her gaze on Sgt. Scanlon’s steely gray one. “But it’s not going to make much sense unless I tell this in sequence.”

All he did was lift a hand in a signal of acquiescence and lean farther back, folding one leg over the other. Casey took another breath and wondered if she’d end up hyperventilating.

She never got the chance to do even that. Before Casey could open her mouth Helen jumped to her feet. “You couldn’t be diocesan,” she insisted suddenly.

Casey grabbed her just in time. “Mom, sit down.”

Instead of turning back, Helen faced the sergeant.

“You’re not Orange, are you?” she demanded with a hard squint. “I know they have bishops and such.” The only worse insult than faithlessness to an Irish Catholic. Irish Episcopalianism.

“I’m sorry,” Casey apologized, tugging at her mother.

Sgt. Scanlon looked very much as if he’d just been hit in the face with a fish. He kept still, but Casey had the feeling it was with effort.

Helen gave up and folded back onto her chair, her heavy black purse clutched to her chest. “Even Orangeman are coming to the true church,” she insisted earnestly, then fell silent.

Casey sighed. She must have done something very bad to deserve this. It would be a cold day in hell before she ever tried to do a civic duty again. Now her carefully constructed history had fallen apart, and she couldn’t seem to pull it back together again.

“Here,” she said, pulling her own purse into her lap. “I brought a picture of him. It might help you ask questions around the neighborhood. I’ve heard he’s been seeing Crystal.” Pulling the crumpled paper from her purse, she ironed out the Adams column with her palm and passed it across. “At least, I think he’s been seeing Crystal.”

Scanlon uncrossed his legs and leaned up to the desk to take a look at the picture. “Who,” he demanded. “The mayor?”

“No,” Casey insisted, desperately trying to remain calm, one hand still on Helen. “Dr. Dale Hunsacker.”

There, she’d said it. She’d accused him, shared her burden of suspicion, handed the weight she’d been carrying around over to the police. Now they’d take care of it, and she could go back to mass and trauma.

She should have known better.

He looked at the picture for all of ten seconds.

“McMurphy sent you, didn’t she?”

Casey couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say. “Pardon?”

Sgt. Scanlon lifted his eyes and impaled her on them, the gray colder than gunmetal. “She’s paying me back for making her take that suicide last week and ruining her best suit. I can’t help it if the dry cleaners wouldn’t touch the damn thing.”

Casey had been terrified, humiliated, unnerved. The sergeant’s words finally ignited her anger. She didn’t like being here. She hadn’t wanted to come. After all, wasn’t she the one with everything to lose? And now that she’d actually done it, now that she’d taken that gargantuan step into the police station with her suspicions, she got this?

“I’d appreciate it if you’d at least hear me out before you jump to conclusions,” she objected, stiffening in the hard, institutional chair. “Believe me, Sergeant, I have better things to do than this.”

“Mass, for one,” Helen said, popping off the seat again. Casey didn’t even bother to apologize for pulling her right back down. The little woman landed with a plop.

“Now, you want to hear the story or not?”

Sgt. Scanlon did that little trick with his eyebrow again. “I guess so. I don’t want you yanking on
me
like that.”

Casey glowered. Even so, she knew better than to waste her chance.

She began with the concrete stuff. Hunsacker’s arrival, Wanda’s disappearance, Evelyn’s death, the fights. Then she tried to logically lay out the intangibles that brought her to this stuffy little brown and green office: the looks, the odd revelations about Hunsacker’s sense of revenge, his facility at lying. His conflicting attitudes toward his patients.

Casey wrapped her fingers together as she betrayed the suspicion that Hunsacker was doing more than his fair share in exam rooms. Her chest grew tight as she described her confrontations with him. Especially that last one, over the paper. She’d gone home that night and showered for thirty minutes, plagued by the feeling that he’d had his hands on her even though he’d been four feet away.

“I thought it was just me,” she admitted to her thumbs. “That I just hated the guy enough to jump to conclusions. And then I found out this morning from the hospital grapevine that Dr. Hunsacker had been frequenting a hooker down on Chippewa who offered…” Instinctively she looked over for Helen, uncomfortable with the images she had to relate. Helen was picking through her purse like a secretary looking for a lost file. Casey turned back to see that the sergeant had taken up tapping his pen again. “Who offered services for men who liked to hurt women. And that this hooker had been killed.”

She couldn’t tell if she had his interest. She couldn’t even tell if he’d heard any more of her story than Helen, who had retreated to her rosary. The cheap plastic beads clicked erratically in her hands, a syncopated counterpoint to the tapping of Scanlon’s pen against the desk.

“And you think it was Crystal?”

Casey jerked her gaze from Helen. Sgt. Scanlon was at least back to being passive, his eyes veiled and uninformative. At least she didn’t see that disdain in them anymore. Maybe she had a chance.

“I don’t know. It just seemed like an odd coincidence after the conversation I had with him about murders.”

“Where nothing was really said.”

Click, click, tap. Click, click, click, tap
. The damn beads sounded like skittering hail against the window. In other offices, voices muttered and growled, male voices all. Outside the windows, a fire truck howled along Tucker Boulevard and horns bleated a frustrated protest. And Sergeant Scanlon still tapped that damn pen.

“Maybe I’m presumptuous,” Casey offered stiffly, her fingers aching from the hold she had on her purse. “But I don’t think Dr. Hunsacker’s going to boast about murder to an audience.”

“But that’s what you think he was doing.”

Click, click, click, tap
. “In a way that nobody could prove anything.”

Silence.

“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen.”

Casey jumped. The sergeant’s gaze flicked over to Helen.

“Mom,” Casey admonished, fighting a deathly shiver. “To yourself.”

Helen swung a guileless look Casey’s way, and smiled. “Of course, dear. Are we about finished?”

“I don’t know, Mom. Pretty soon.”

The sergeant hadn’t even had the courtesy to take out a statement form. He was only using his pen to keep time. Casey felt the frustration well anew in her as she turned back to him.

“I haven’t anybody I can talk to about this,” she said. “Nobody thinks Wanda’s hurt but me, and Evelyn was killed in East St. Louis, and, well…”

He didn’t even bother to help negate the end of an uncomfortable statement. Instead he leaned back again, his eyes heavenward (revelation? instructions? maybe the manual for dealing with difficult visitors was printed on the ceiling), and rubbed his hand over his face.

That was when Casey realized how weary he looked. She should have spotted it sooner, should have connected that tight set to his face with its bad color. Of course she’d bring the most monumental problem of her problematic life to this man when he wasn’t feeling like dealing with it.

“Sergeant, check my work record,” she pleaded abruptly. “I’m considered a pain in the ass, but not a cookie crumbler.”

She caught the direction of his look before he even cast it. Yeah, well, how
did
you explain a phenomenon like Helen?

“I’ll check your work record,” he promised the same way Casey promised Mr. Philman she’d check the waiting room for Martians. “Mother Mary, you said?”

“And before that St. Isidore’s up in Creve Coeur.”

Still no pen. Still the sense that she was being humored. At best. The sergeant was beginning to fidget, tapping on his forms as if to remind Casey that he had things to do.

Again the anger flared. “You don’t believe me.”

Casey could almost see him flinch. She could even read his mind.
I just about had her out the door
.

This time he actually made it to his feet. Casey’d been right. He had a rangy body that seemed to fight the room for space.

“Ms. McDonough,” he began in his best pacifying voice. It still betrayed his irritation at ending up with her. “I don’t know what goes on in Arnold or East St. Louis or even on the bridges across the river. Those aren’t my jurisdictions, and frankly I have enough to worry about right here. I just got dumped with a fresh homicide that involves a five-year-old and his mother. I have a backlog of seven murders my crew’s working. And I do know what goes on in my jurisdiction. Crystal was a hooker with a long list of priors, a habit for crack, and a nasty pimp. It’s a simple equation, and I don’t feel like screwing it up with mystery doctors.”

Casey followed him to her feet. “You’re not even going to check into it? You’re just going to write me off?”

“Casey, look at this…”

“Sit down, Mom.” She didn’t even look over. She didn’t think she could afford to break eye contact with the sergeant.

“I said I’d check with your work,” he insisted, one hand on his hip near where a snub-nosed gun rested in its discreet holster, the other dropping the pen to massage an area that approximated his epigastrium. “I’ll even call you when we convict Crystal’s pimp, so you’ll feel better.”

Casey shook her head. “And Wanda and Evelyn?”

“I told you,” he retorted. “Not my jurisdiction.”

“I can’t believe it.” She wasn’t stunned. She was furious. Frustrated. Damn, if she’d wanted to feel like this, she would have stayed back at Mother Mary and made this confession to Tom.