Polly Dent Loses Grip (A LaTisha Barnhart Mystery) (28 page)

“She didn’t scream or rage or yell?” That didn’t sound like Polly, and I’d only known her for those few minutes.

Thomas’s brow squeezed hard. “No. That
’s
why I was so angry. It was like I didn’t mean anything to her.”

“You didn’t find it strange?”

“I guess I didn’t think about it until now. You think it meant something?”

“Did you see her fall?” I asked.

“No.” Thomas leaned forward. “When I realized what I had done, how it could have hurt her and landed me back in jail again, I left.”

Hardy stared hard at me, sending signals of some sort. “Dr. Kwan said he saw Thomas with Polly.”

I cocked my head at him
,
wondering if he was percolating a full pot. “We know that.”

Hardy moved closer to me. “‘Tish, Otis told us that evening after we found Polly that he had to call Dr. Kwan in.”

“Then how could he have seen. . .” I know my eyes must have bulged out of my head then. I recalled Darren’s statement about Polly yelling at him. Polly’s reputation was one of a fighter. Her words her choice of weapon.”

“Poison,” Hardy said pure and simple. “It comes together.”

“Digoxin?” I asked.

“Something laid her out
.
” Hardy nodded.

Thomas cleared his throat. “You mean to tell me you think Polly was poisoned? But how?”

I asked a question of my own. “Mitzi’s doing better. I was up there earlier and Darren showed me something. She has a new bottle of prescription pills that she’s been taking. Darren said he wondered why there was a new bottle when her old bottle wasn’t yet finished. Since no one seems to trust Dr. Kwan, Darren checked the old prescription bottles. Those capsules were all empty. Just now, Hardy and I found some things in a bathroom behind the gym. Empty capsules and lots of pills in different colors.”

Thomas looked stunned. “Is he stealing the drugs and replacing them with something else?”

My excitement built. “Polly never mentioned anything about Dr. Kwan? Anything strange?”

He pinched his eyebrows together. “The only thing I can think of was where she said in her note that certain people were desperate for money. Do you think she knew something about Dr. Kwan?”

Hardy crossed his arms. “If so, it sure gives him a motive to shut her up.”

I had something to add to the pot now. “Sue Mie said Mitzi had told her the same rhymes she told me. If she told others and they thought she really had seen something that implicated them, it would be a good reason to keep her quiet.”

“And what better way than to give her fake capsules of the drug she relies on for clarity?” Thomas added.

Matilda broke silence, her back rigid, hands braced on her cane. “One thing you are all forgetting, Sue Mie gave Polly a sugar snack instead of a sugar-free. Did the same thing to me. What’s to say that she didn’t do Polly in?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

When my cell phone started to ringing, we were all a little spooked. Caller ID showed Sue Mie was on the other end.

“LaTisha, listen, I’ve been looking around the building, trying to stay low. I found something I want you to see. Meet me in the basement.”

“And why don’t you just tell me over this here phone?”

“You won’t believe what’s down here. I need a witness.”

Then she hung up. Okay. Right. Sue Mie wasn’t one to talk in long stretches, but a good-bye would have been nice. And she’d sure be surprised when I didn’t show up. This black woman doesn’t do damp basements with mice and crawly things.

When Hardy found out what the phone call was about, he got to flapping like a momma hen over her chicks. “No way are you going there alone.”

“You are so right.”

Hardy stopped stomping long enough to cock his head at me. “You’re not going at all?”

“Remember when Bryton was little and went down to the basement. Then he got all mulish on me?”

Hardy grinned and nodded. “You let him stay down there, ‘cuz you had it made up that all the critters down there would teach him a good lesson.”

 
“Did too. Came screeching up those steps at first sight of a mouse. Slept with the lights on for a month after that. And that house him and Fredlynn just bought, it didn’t have a basement, did it?”

 
“Mrs. Barnhart,” Thomas piped up. “Why don’t I go down there? I’ll explain how you hate basements.”

Now that didn’t set well with me. Sending someone to do what I could do for myself. Too, I had to remember that Sue Mie might have something up her sleeve. But why? We were working together.

Hardy said it for me
,
“You have to go, LaTisha.”

“I don’t have to do anything, Hardy Barnhart.”

“I’ll go with you and protect you from the critters.”

I pushed away the idea of cobwebs and mice. “If anything touches me I’ll scream so loud they’ll think its the fire alarm.”

Thomas went with us to show us the way. Apparently the elevator didn’t go to the basement. The going down was easy, but I sure dreaded hiking myself back up those stairs. Why did all this investigating involve exercise?

We made it all the way down to a lit hallway. Not too bad. “How’d you know where to find the basement?” I asked Thomas.

Thomas smiled. “Not much to do around here some days, so I explored, but the doors down here are usually locked.” He pointed at the door straight ahead of us down a dimly lit, narrow hall. “I’ll stay right here in case you need me.”

Hardy followed me a good ways, when a humming sound caught our attention. A tiny room held two vending machines. I knew I’d lost Hardy completely. The one thing he can’t pass up is a vending machine. I kept right on going as he gravitated to the things like a man who’d fasted for forty days and nights, his hand already working down into his pocket for some change.

I kept going, making sure to look through the little square window in the door. The room beyond didn’t look too bad. It was well lit, and Sue Mie was clearly visible. She even waved me in.

 
The door slammed shut behind me
,
and I took two steps into that room when Sue Mie’s smile flat-lined.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her head turning to the right
,
in time for me to see Dr. Kwan step from behind some shelving
.T
here was a prescription in his hand that had my name on it. He raised the gun and motioned me over next to Sue Mie.

“It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Barnhart,” Dr. Kwan said.

“You better stop waving that thing in my face.”

“Somehow I don’t think you’re the one with the upper hand here. Now sit.” He motioned to two chairs out of the line of the windows. I sat.

“Sue Mie did a good job getting you down here. Did you come alone?”

Good thing Thomas had stayed back a ways. I wondered, though, if they’d seen Hardy. Vending machines aren’t the quietest things when they drop their selections. What if. . .

Dr. Kwan’s eyes shifted away from Sue Mie and me, but that gun had its beady little eye on us all the same.

“Ah, Mr. Barnhart. Bring him over here next to these two, Otis.”

My heart sunk to my toes.

Hardy stood in front of Dr. Kwan and took another bite of a cheese puff like his swivel chair didn’t turn full circle. “You boys shouldn’t be pointing a gun at ladies.”

Otis dragged a chair over from somewhere, a good length of nylon cord draped over one shoulder. He pointed at the seat. Hardy took his meaning, sat, and kept munching.

“I’ll take those
.
” Dr. Kwan held out his hand.

“Nothing comes between my man and his food,” I warned. “You’d better back off when it comes to cheese puffs.”

Dr. Kwan pointed his gun at my head. “This is not comedy central, Mrs. Barnhart, and you’re not in control of this situation. I am.” He turned back to Hardy and made a grab for the bag
,
just as Hardy threw the entire contents in Kwan’s face.

Cheese puffs went up
,
and we all started going wild. Sue Mie and I rose as one. She knocked the gun from Dr. Kwan’s hand with some kind of Karate high-ya move, while I pinned him with my size twenty-four body.

Sue Mie scooped up the gun and handed it to me. “Hold it on him.”

I eased up on Dr. Kwan’s gut and had his heart as my bulls-eye. I had my back to the action going on behind us, but could hear muffled groans and grunts. I did my job and kept that gun pointed right at Dr. Kwan’s chest as Sue Mie glanced that direction.

Her concerned look quickly turned into a chuckle, then an outright laugh. Dr. Kwan seemed to be following her line of thinking, because he looked like he was going to be sick.

“What’s going on back there?” I asked.

Sue Mie grabbed one of Dr. Kwan’s arms and pulled him from the wall, catching the other and bringing it behind his back, using the nylon cord to bind him. Only after she finished binding him to the chair did I relax my gun hand and turn to look behind me.

Matilda held her cane up like a weapon as Hardy and Thomas held Otis between them.

“Hurry up, Tish,”
Momma
said. “I’m hungry.”

EPILOGUE

We’re home now. I’m snuggled down in Maple Gap with a mocha in my hand, satisfied to have another
solved
mystery under my belt. Hardy is on the sofa stirring the air with his snores, and both Matilda and Darren are out back sipping tea and enjoying a game of Scrabble.

Everything came out in the following two months. The elderly man with terminal cancer who was in such terrible pain that evening at the singing, had been pressing his button and dispensing nothing more than water, not the morphine he’d so desperately needed. Dr. Kwan had forgotten to take the old bottle of prescription tablets from Mitzi’s room, which was a huge mistake since Darren had discovered the empty capsules.

Confronted with the evidence I’d gathered from the handles of the treadmill
—
the powder turned out to be digoxin
as Sue Mie had suspected
—a
long with the colored sugar pills and empty capsules I’d gleaned from the bathroom in the back hall, served to pull the rope tighter around the necks of Dr. Kwan and Otis Payne. They finally confessed to stealing narcotics and other drugs to sell for profit.

Otis’s huffing and puffing when I went back to ask if I could see Polly’s body was because he’d just finished dragging T61 upstairs. He’d asked Chester to make sure not to let anyone into that room, even offering Chester a bonus, though Chester said he had no idea about Polly’s fall resulting from the poison on the handles.

And it was Otis who’d come into the bathroom that day Hardy and I got caught in the shower. Seems he was trying to cover Dr. Kwan’s slip in leaving Mitzi’s old medication bottle with the empty capsules behind. Hardy and I congratulated Darren on noticing the bottles after Dr. Kwan’s and Otis’s arrest.

Louise Payne knew of their dealings and was blackmailing Otis to get a cut of the money. Otis dragged Hilda into the scheme with promise of a cut of the money and asked her to mislabel some snacks dispensed to diabetics on the second floor. His thought had been to lay the blame of Polly’s death on whatever CNA happened to be on the floor that evening handing out thesnacks. He would report the mistake, say it caused Polly to get dizzy and fall, leading to a heart attack. Knowing she didn’t have family to order an autopsy made him feel sure her history would help the police swallow that.

Otis Payne did indeed let Polly into the gym that evening and directed her to the treadmill Dr. Kwan had already laced with digoxin, telling her to get started, promising Dr. Kwan would be in shortly for her evaluation. He knew all along the exercise and sweating would help the poison absorb through her skin that much faster. He’d waited just long enough in the room to know she was falling for the scheme.
So the fall didn’t kill her. Digoxin did. Just in case, Dr. Kwan had been prepared to finish her off with a syringe full of the stuff, and had waited in the back hallway to make good and sure she was dead.

 
Polly had stumbled on Dr. Kwan’s narcotics stealing scheme, neither Otis nor Dr. Kwan knew exactly how, but she tried to blackmail Dr. Kwan with what she knew. Getting closer to Otis was her way of making Kwan think she was going to tell unless he paid up. Of course, she didn’t know Otis was in on the whole thing. Playing her games with Kwan only prompted the two villains to hatch their dastardly scheme to kill her.