MURDER IN RETROSPECT (Allie Griffin Mysteries Book 5) (10 page)

              It wasn't exactly the best time to see Detective Harry Tomlin coming up her walkway.

              The man looked different. She hated to admit it, but he looked...humble. Something had softened the man's features. Was this to be the new Tomlin then? Ever since he admitted that he no longer had a case against her, perhaps he was a mere shell of who he previously was. He looked somewhat pathetic now. Defanged. Sapped of strength.

              "Listen, I'm sorry."

              Allie's skepticism kicked in, and she uttered a cautious, "Ok?"

              "Yeah, listen..." He shaped the air with his hands, trying to find the vocabulary. "I didn’t know, Allie. And, I don’t know, I guess I'm not always as sharp as I need to be. You can understand that, right?"

              "Sure," she said, still cautious.

              The detective bit his bottom lip. "This ain't easy, Allie. But the truth is, although I'm flattered you feel the way you do, I got a wife already. Now, she ain't exactly the catch of the century, you know what I mean? I mean, some days I feel like kicking her to the curb. But she's all I got. And I made a promise to her, for better or for worse, you know what I'm saying?"

              Allie's throat closed first. Then her mouth dried up. And then the hotness began in her collarbone. "Uh..." was all she could manage.

              "No, no. Don’t say anything. You don’t have to. I mean, you're incredibly attractive, Allie. And, you know, I wouldn’t kick you out of—, well you know. Anyway, I want to thank you for the card, and for having the discretion to deliver it to me at work." He chuckled nervously. "Man, I can't help but think what would have happened if the ball and chain were to discover that one. I don't know, I guess we can laugh, right? After all, this ain't high school, right?"

              "Billings gave
you
the card?"

              "Yeah, he did. I couldn’t believe it at first. But then it all made sense. Your words, they made perfect sense."

             
Give this to your boss.

              "Detective, did Billings get transferred to your department?"

              "Yeah, about a month ago. Great kid. Loyal. Team player. You gave it to the right guy. He won’t say a thing."

              Allie ran a hand through her hair. "I...listen, Tomlin..."

              "Harry, please."

              "Harry..." No words were forming in her brain. So Allie Griffin shrugged. "Oh well," she said.

              "Yeah, oh well," Tomlin said with a good-natured smile on his face. "We're cool though, right?"

              Allie sighed heavily. "We're cool."

              "Alright. Listen, an attractive babe like yourself should have no trouble, you know? I mean, you'll look long and hard before you find something this good, you know what I mean?" He laughed heartily and then stopped abruptly. "Yeah, well, see you around, Allie."

              "See you around, Harry."

              The Verdenier Public Library was unusually crowded tonight. They were showing one of the X-Men movies for free, and a crowd was milling about the stacks, talking in loud voices, holding cell phone conversations, and reprimanding children for misbehaving. Allie swore she could smell fresh coffee brewing.

              "They brew coffee now," said a voice.

              She turned around and there was Richard Teller's drooping face and sad eyes staring at her.

              "They think they need to keep up with the big bookstores. They think people expect coffee with their books. I don’t want coffee with my books. I don’t drink coffee."

              Allie took a deep breath. "Richard, do you still have friends at the hospital?"

              "Cass Hawkes herself canned me on the spot. Said my work had fallen off. Fifteen years at that hospital."

              "Do you still have friends?"

              He stared at her. "Yes, I still have friends there."

              "Good. We need someone to let us into the tech room. We need to look at one of the POCs you had there."

              Teller shook his head. "Nope. Not gonna happen. I'm done with that place."

              He started to walk away.

              "Richard!" she yelled.

              He turned around, startled.

              "Yes, I'll bet that got your attention. You can't stand to see people violate the sanctity of the library like that. Look around you, Richard. Look at the crowds, the noises they’re making. People are leaning on the shelves talking about sports and all sorts of nonsense, and no one's reading. Do you want to know why that's the case? Because years ago, someone got the idea to stop caring about things as they used to be. Only caring about what is and what’s coming. You know what happened then? That person's ideas infected their work and their livelihood. And it infected the ideas of those around them. You stopped caring too. Long ago. And now look. Look around you. Look what happens when someone who knows what's happening doesn’t speak up and fight. You watched this happen to your library and you said nothing. And now you're walking away from me, knowing that what I have to do is of dire importance. My husband died six years ago, Richard, and no one said anything, including you. No one said it didn’t need to happen. Well, it didn’t need to happen. There, I said it. And I'm saying now that you better not turn your back on me again."

              When she was done, she felt the hot tears streaming down her face.

              She wouldn’t have imagined it was possible for Richard Teller's face to look sadder or droopier, but here was the proof before her now.

              "What do you need me to do?" he said.

#

              Avery Hendrickson was the guy everyone knew and trusted. He was the guy who you went to when you were having problems in your marriage, and he was there for a quick pick-me-up in the form of a joke—dirty or clean, your choice—and everyone loved him. He'd worked there for longer than anyone realized. He was an innocuous presence, and often an invisible one, but he was indispensable.

              Such is the nature of the hospital janitor.

              Del Collins had dug into her enormous and impressive stockpile of theatrical wigs to find one that suited Richard Teller's face. And she found one. It made him look like a droopy George Clooney. She finished the makeover with a pair of dummy glasses, horn-rimmed, and the old adage that "simpler is better" paid off: Richard Teller was transformed.

              So much so that Allie felt almost no nervousness about getting caught.

              "Here we go," said Avery Hendrickson, a towering man with a smile that lit up the room. "Door's open. No one's gonna bother you. I got it covered."

              "Are you sure?" said Richard Teller, tack-sized beads of sweat streaming down his face.

              Avery leaned in. "As far as everyone's concerned, someone dropped something nasty in there and I'm on my way to clean it up."

              "Something nasty?" asked Allie.

              "Do you really want to know what I told them? It has to do with bedpans."

              "We don’t want to know," said Richard. "Thanks, Avery, I owe you one."

              He shook the man's enormous hand. Allie shook it as well and melted slightly at the feather touch this giant had offered her.

              The door shut behind them, and Allie flicked on her cell phone's flashlight.

              She closed her eyes.
I called my home the silver year of the fall of the wall.
"I need serial number 5542589."

              A few seconds of looking and Teller found it.

              "How do we open this thing?"

              "Open it?"

              "Yes. That machine you sent back for Cass Hawkes, that wasn't the one she brought back to you. The one she brought back was this one. Don’t ask me how I know. Just get me a screwdriver…Philips head. I can see where the back panel comes off."

              She accompanied Teller to his desk and held the light as he rummaged for a screwdriver, then held the light as he undid the back panel of the portable oxygen concentrator.

              Inside was a maze of parts.

              "Help me make sense if this," she said. "How does it work?"

              "Air comes in through these vents here on the side." He pointed to two cylinders mounted side by side in the center of the machine. "You see these? These are molecular sieve beds. They filter all the nitrogen out of the air, leaving just pure oxygen. That then gets stored in this tank on the side here, the product tank, and from there empties out so that it can be breathed in by the patient."

              "Let me see that," said Allie. "The product tank."

              "See it?"

              "Remove it."

              Teller looked at her and huffed. "Something tells me we could get into a great deal of trouble here."

              "The library, Richard. Remember?"

              Without another word, the man undid a couple of wingnuts with his fingers and dislodged the product tank from its mooring. This he handed to Allie.

              She turned it around and looked closely at it. It was a metal cylinder, about the length and width of a medium-sized flashlight. On the bottom end where the pure air entered into it was a compartment that looked as though it had been sloppily annexed to it with solder. She gave it a twist and it came apart in her hands. Another, smaller cylinder spilled out. Teller picked it up.

              "It smells like rotten eggs," he said.

              "Don't!" she said. "Put it over there. It's poison."

              She looked inside the product tank she still held in her hands.

              "Richard?" she said, still peering in, shining her light. "All hospitals have cotton swabs. Please tell me you have some in here."

              "I use them for cleaning," he said. "Hold on."

              He rummaged through his desk and came back with a handful of long cotton swabs.

              "Perfect," she said, and swabbed the inside of the canister. "You still have friends here, you can tell them to analyze this for traces of any substance that deadens the olfactory sense. Can you do that for me?"

              "I think so."

              "Great," she said, "Now let's put this thing back together. Don’t breathe anything in. And one more thing, we're going to need our friend Avery to continue his little ruse for just a little bit longer. We can’t have anyone in this room for the next twenty-four hours. Do you think that can be done?"

              "If anyone can do it, it's Avery."

              "Good ol' Avery. Here," she handed him a gum wrapper with her number on it. "Text me when you get the results."

              They closed up the machine and Teller texted Avery to let him know they were finished.

              A moment later, the door opened and Avery's enormous head peered in.

              "Coast is clear," he said.

              "I hope so," said Allie Griffin.

              They left the hospital going in separate directions, Teller with his disguise in place, Allie with her head down low.

              "Allie Griffin?"

              She turned around, and there was a short man with a shock of red hair approaching.

              Her heart began to thump in her chest. "Hi, can I help you?"

              The man stopped a few feet away from her. He was panting, a worried look on his face.

              "I'm Eddie Ganz," he said.

              She agreed to follow him to the nearest out-of-the-way place.

              Now she regretted it.

              It was the third level of the hospital's parking garage. It was now officially after hours and the place was hollowed out. Only a few cars speckled the lot. They stood by a pillar near the elevator. It was the scene of every cliché mystery and horror movie. She would have laughed at it if she wasn't standing here now, keeping an eye out for where she would run if this man suddenly turned threatening.

              But Eddie Ganz was anything but threatening. He was nervous and paranoid, plus he was scrawny and about five-foot-two. Allie thought about it and figured she could probably take him in a fight if she had to. Of course, provided he wasn't packing a weapon of some sort.

              "I'm sorry," he said as he held his hand up and opened in a gesture of trust. "This thing got way out of hand. I don’t know what to do."

              "Let's start with your explaining to me what we're doing here. Certainly it's not so that you can apologize to me."

              "I'm terrible at my job. I admit it. The industry, it's so impersonal, you just don’t know who you're affecting in the long run. Yes, I let those parts go. Yes, they were defective. I don’t know how to apologize. I've been living with this thing all these years and I just can’t take the guilt anymore."

              The man was now breaking down and it was getting awkward and pathetic.

              "Eddie," Allie said calmly, "Calm down. I'm not here to take you to task for your role in that generator failure. It sounds like you've done enough of that on your own. I need to know what's going on with you and Cass Hawkes."

              The mere mention of the name caused a change in the man's demeanor. Suddenly there was a dead coldness in his eyes that made Allie shudder.

              "She used me. I was in love with her and she used me."

              "Talk to me, Eddie."

              "Don’t you want to know how I found out about you?"

              "The thought did cross my mind."

              "My stupid debit card, that's how. The bank forgot to issue me a new pin. I tried to pay the concierge at the Tree Top Inn and the card was rejected. She knew me, I'd been there a number of times with Cass, so she let me run a tab. I went to settle it this morning, and that's when she told me about you. The great Allie Griffin was looking for yours truly. I have to admit, I got pretty desperate. I knew what you were looking for. The same thing everyone is on my case about. That damned generator failure."

              "You were in love with Cass, Eddie. Talk to me about that."

              He chuckled and shrugged. "What is there to say? The oldest story in the book. Look at me. I was an idiot to think a woman like Cassandra Hawkes would go for a guy like me. And yet, I went along with it. I liked the attention. Until..."

              "Until what?"

              Eddie looked around. The blood seemed to drain from his face. His voice became a raspy whisper. "Did you hear that?"

              Allie shook her head. "Hear what?"

              "Allie, you better get out of here."

              She heard it now as well: Soft footsteps reverberating throughout the garage.

              "The stairs," he said, staring off into the shadowed areas of the lot. "Take the stairs. Behind you."

              Allie ran, literally for her life, toward the stairwell. Darting down one flight, two, three flights...

              She heard the gunshot.