Shedrow (13 page)

“I’ll let you go, then if you DON’T talk, I’ll kill you right here, ya bastard.” He spoke with the distinctive dialect of a southern hillbilly.

He released the hold on Ryan’s collar, throwing him onto his back.

“Now get up! What the hell ya doing here, boy?”

“I’m sorry, mister. I’m new here and just trying to find my way around. I work at one of the horse farms and I have to come here sometimes, and I thought maybe this is where the newspapers go…Is this where they go? I just don’t want any trouble, mister.”

“Where’s your truck, KID?”

“I…I don’t have it today. Had my car out today for a ride, and it was acting up in this heat. So I left it down the road to cool down, then walked up here to see if I could drum up some water and a jug, in case it happens again. And, well, I just got to looking around a bit. That’s all, honest.”

“What farm you working at?”

“Midway.”

Zoom’s temperament seemed to change a bit now, softened either by the young boy’s pleadings, or perhaps by the mention of Midway.

“Whadya do there at Midway?”

“Whatever. Groom. Walker. Drive here sometimes.”

“How often you come HERE now?”

“Once a week, usually.” Ryan relaxed now, feeling he was more in control of his circumstance once again.

“Guess you don’t look like too bad a kid. Come here now.”

Zoom walked around to the front of the bus, to where an emergency exit had been cut wider to serve as an entryway. Ryan hesitated for a moment, then slowly followed. Zoom went inside and came out with a gallon plastic jug.

“Go over there,” he said, pointing across the sandy field. “There’s a spigot over there. Fill it up then you better get your car to a station. Pure water may get you a few miles, but if your engine’s hot, you’ll need a bottle of antifreeze. Same as I need when it gets a little hot or cold, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ryan said with a forced laugh.

“What’s your name kid?”

“Ryan.”

The man looked up and down at the boy. He smiled, displaying a crooked row of half-rotten teeth. “I’m Mahlon. Call me Mahlon.”

Detective Henry Chang was a large, muscular man, well over six feet tall. His friends would often goad him, saying he was the largest Chinese man they had ever seen. He had a low, resonant voice and a gentle demeanor. He took Delores Pawlek’s hand. “My condolences, Mrs. Pawlek. Do you have someone with you?”

“No, I’ll be fine.”

“Come with me, then.”

They entered the morgue together and Chang led her to a steel table. When the face was uncovered, her eyes widened. She considered the corpse, its face grey and waxy looking, then looked across at the detective.

“Oh my God! It’s not him.”

“What?”

“It’s not him, Detective. This is not my husband.”

“But when your son called—”

“My son was in shock. He called me before he called the police.
He was hysterical, and he couldn’t force himself to look at the body for more than an instant. It was hanging from the rafters in a dark attic, for God’s sake.”

“But you said your husband left a suicide note?”

“I have it with me.”

“All right. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

Chang dialed the number for Dr. Laurie Simmons in the office of the chief medical examiner. “Dr. Simmons, Henry Chang. We have no I.D. on the hanging. I want to know the minute you have the toxicology and cause of death. This case gets stranger by the minute. I’ll check with missing persons, but we’ll need complete dental forensics in any case.” After he hung up, he said, “We can walk to my office from here.”

The air outside was thick and steamy. Sweat ran down the sides of Henry Chang’s face. As they entered his office on the second floor of the Englewood Police Department, he turned the air conditioner fan on high, reached into his suit coat pocket and wiped his face and his huge bald head with a handkerchief.

The small room smelled of cheap cologne and body odor. Delores sat across from Chang and passed the letter to him. Chang read it silently.

When you read this I will be gone, to a better place I hope. I want you to know that I will always love you and I will always love John, even if I didn’t always show it. You both meant more to me than anything in this world.

    
With all my love
,

    
Chester

“Would you have expected more than this, Mrs. Pawlek?”

“From my husband? No, he only does short stories. A man of few words.”

“Where and when did you find the note?”

“It was on our kitchen table, tucked under a plate. I found it as soon as I came back home.”

“You were in Savannah?”

As she spoke, she glanced down at one shoulder, then at the other and repeatedly brushed off her knit dress with the back of her fingers. “I was visiting my sister. As soon as John called me I got on the first plane, which wasn’t until the following morning. I called the police myself; John was such a wreck, you know.”

“Who knew that you were out of town?”

“I don’t know. My husband and my son, obviously. And a couple of my girlfriends.”

“Do you have any idea who the other man was, the body we just viewed?”

“No.”

“Now why…and how…would a two hundred pound man end up hanging in your attic? Let’s say your husband wanted to simply escape somewhere. I know that he has been under investigation for a crime in Kentucky. If he staged his own suicide, and actually killed another man as a decoy, he clearly would have needed help getting the body up there. Not a problem for your husband, I’m sure. But why go to all that trouble? Why not just run? I’m sure he has plenty of resources to make that happen. Of course, knowing that you were away, I imagine he figured he had several days before anyone would even find the body. Your husband has killed before, hasn’t he, Mrs. Pawlek?”

“Detective, I would like to call my lawyer.”

“You can call your lawyer. Now we’ll need to dust your bedroom and attic for prints, though I doubt he’d leave that trail. Mrs. Pawlek, how many cars does your family own?”

“Two, the one I drove today and one other.”

“And where is the other one?”

“I don’t know. That’s another mystery. It’s not in the garage.”

“Whose name is the other car registered under?”

“My husband’s.”

“You could save us a little time if you could tell me the make, model and plate number.”

“It’s a red Mercedes SL. You can’t miss it. The license plate says: ‘RACEDAY.’”

“Mrs. Pawlek, do you think your husband is alive?”

“I’d like to call my lawyer now.”

Gianni studied the photograph on his desk. It was a picture of a seventeen-year-old boy from the island of St. Lucia. The tip of the boy’s nose had been bitten off by a rat, leaving a hideous defect. It was one of the cases that Gianni would be asked to manage during his upcoming mission.

As he tried to focus on planning the surgery for the case, he was continually distracted. He thought of Chet, whom he had been trying to contact for days, and to no avail. Was Chet trying to ditch him for good, possibly because Chet
did
have something to do with his stallion’s death? He wondered about Highet, and why he had no additional information on the demise of Chiefly Endeavor. Gianni knew he needed to get to Lexington again, and soon.

A surge of anxiety caught Gianni off guard. He set the photograph aside for a moment, distracted by the recollection of a bizarre, disturbing dream he had during a restless night earlier that week.

He dreamt that he was back in his surgical residency in Queens, NY. He was a patient in a hospital room and his roommate was an amputee, a man named Clem, someone Gianni actually knew when he was a first year resident there. Clem was a double-amputee who had lost both legs to frostbite, living on the streets of Jamaica, NY. He had a simple wooden cart on wheels, and he would occasionally wheel himself into the men’s room on the first floor of the hospital, especially during the winter months. Gianni remembered him washing up at one of the low sinks, or just sleeping in a corner by the urinals, usually with a bottle in his hand. Sometimes they would speak briefly, or else Gianni just let him be. Unlike some of the other house officers, who would tend to feel uneasy and call Security, Gianni never wanted to turn poor Clem in. He knew that on a good day, Security might bring him to the ER. On a bad one, they might just move Clem outside again.

In his dream, Gianni and Clem were talking when Sal Catroni entered the hospital room, dressed like a doctor, with a long white coat and a surgical headlight on his head. He was carrying an orthopedic surgical saw in one hand and a gun in the other. He said he was there to adjust Gianni’s legs, so they would look more like Clem’s. Then he started the saw, only now it looked and sounded like a chain saw instead of the surgical saw. When the saw started up, Gianni woke from the dream with a gasp, his heart racing.

After recalling the dream, Gianni tried to concentrate on the photograph again and to plan his approach for creating a nasal tip on the boy in St. Lucia. He would need to take some cartilage from the ear, and obtain some soft tissue covering from a flap rotated into the nasal area, probably from the forehead or cheek area. He knew that
he could not accomplish everything in one surgery and that another surgeon on a subsequent mission would likely have to take over.

His thoughts drifted again, this time to his decision to enter the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery many years back. He was drawn to the specialty because of a genuine desire to treat the most disfiguring defects—the severe congenital facial deformities, burn victims and the like. Yet in his current practice, he saw those patients only occasionally. Still, it had been
his
decision to enter private practice rather than academic medicine, where the more major deformities were usually treated.

Wasn’t that where his focus should be, on his patients and his craft? Why was he even in this damn horse business at all? Then he recalled working the farm in his youth, turning the young foals out to pasture, alongside their mothers. It was breathtaking to see a newborn foal stand for the first time on its spindly legs, or take that first awkward but beautiful run around the paddock, growing stronger and more graceful with each stride. Duncker had always said you have to love the sport, and the animals. Gianni did, and Chiefly Endeavor had been his favorite.

He worried about having to leave the country in the midst of everything else that was going on with the stallion, the threats to himself or potentially to Janice, and his inability to contact Chet. Still, he knew that he had to honor the commitment. He wondered if on some level, he actually wanted to escape. Regardless, he knew he had to get back to Kentucky again to see Highet and to find out more about Chiefly Endeavor. And he had to do it before he left for the island of St. Lucia.

Ryan survived the first few weeks, including his ordeal with Zoom, whom he now knew as Mahlon. He had managed to impress Travers with his dependability and willingness to do whatever he was asked. He especially looked forward to the days like today when he would be asked to accompany Dr. Highet on his rounds.

“Hold him up close by the halter, not just the lead shank,” Highet cautioned Ryan as the long tube went through the horse’s gigantic nostril, passing on down the airway. “A lot of these horses are bleeders, which means when they over-exert they may get pulmonary edema, swelling in the lungs. The pressure of that swelling can push blood into the airway spaces. In a couple minutes, we can see exactly what’s going on down there. A very useful instrument, this is.”

“Travers said you vets crank these things out just to make money.”

Highet’s upper lip tightened. “Oh he did, did he? Well Travers doesn’t know shit. First of all, a trainer has to ask me to scope their
horse, and Travers should know that perfectly well. I do this because I’m asked to do it. Second, and I don’t give a damn if Travers ever understands this, but I want you to. I didn’t go into this profession just to make a lot of money. Sure, the pay is great, but it’s not the main thing with me.”

They were three stalls down now and onto the next scoping as Highet continued his story. “From the time I was a little kid, we always made a thing out of watching the Triple Crown races. My family had one of those big screen televisions, nothing like today’s version, but pretty fancy for Malone, NY in those days. So half the neighborhood would come over, and we’d all throw a dollar or two into a pot and try to pick a winner. It was great fun and I always loved the horses…loved riding them and loved watching them. But…there were a few times when I saw horses injured, and one time I’ll always remember when they had to put a horse down. This square van drove out on the track like a big overgrown hearse, a curtain went up so the crowd couldn’t see, and the horse’s life ended right there on the track. I remember always wanting to know why the horse had to die. I’d ask my parents but never got a very good answer. So from the time I was a little kid, I thought that if I became a vet, I could save some of those horses. Corny but true.”

“That’s cool. You know,” Ryan continued, “I haven’t told anyone here about this, but I think I may want to be a vet too.”

Highet’s expression softened some. “No kidding. What’s your major?”

“Psych, but I’m taking all the premed type courses I’d need for vet school. I just finished Vertebrate Anatomy last semester and got an A+.”

“Congratulations.”

“So, Dr. Highet, you never really wanted to do anything else? Are you still glad you became a vet?”

“It’s really hard work. The hours are ridiculous sometimes. I left my house at 5 a.m. this morning and probably won’t be home until 8 p.m. tonight. Those hours nearly broke up my marriage. For the first ten years of my daughter’s life, the grooms around the barn probably knew me better than she did. But yeah, it’s all I ever wanted to do, and it’s all I want to do now. Except maybe to own a good racehorse myself some day. So are you sure you want to be a vet? I don’t mean to scare you off, you know.”