Trudy, Madly, Deeply (Working Stiffs Mystery Series) (7 page)

Oh.
“Then, maybe you can fill me in on what I’m missing.”

I flipped the page and started reading. “Bernadette Neary, age seventy-six, died March 4th, three-ten a.m. Cause of death: Pneumonia.”

He glanced in the direction of the unoccupied ER desk where a custodian was mopping the vinyl with a sudsy perfume of disinfectant. “Mrs. Neary’s daughter brought her in to the ER because her mom had fallen and broken her arm. Mrs. Neary seemed disoriented and it turned out she also had pneumonia, so she was admitted and we pumped her with antibiotics and oxygen for three days.”

I scribbled notes as he talked.

“I saw her each night on rounds. By day four, her lungs sounded clearer, her sats looked good enough for her to go home, then around three, she … coded.”

“Sats?”

“Oxygen saturation level. And hers had been improving, then she suddenly stopped breathing.”

“She died?”

He nodded. “Pulmonary failure.”

I sucked in a breath and flipped the pages in my hand to Rose Kozarek’s death certificate. Cause of death:
Pulmonary failure
.

Just like Rose.

“And this is similar to what happened with Trudy Bergeson?”

Another nod. “Very.”

“What about Howard Jeppesen?” I turned the page. “Age eighty-three. Died May 19th, two-seventeen a.m. Cause of death: Cardiac failure.”

Kyle’s dark eyes tracked the headlights of a car pulling out of the parking lot. “I’d seen him in the ER a couple of times—chronic bronchitis. Freaked out his wife and the paramedics would bring him in. Two months ago, he was back again, coughing up blood. The senior resident admitted him.”

“And he started to get better?”

“Hell, no! He expired early the next morning.”

“Well, where’s the pattern in that?” Other than the fact that they were both patients of Dr. Straitham. And, of course, they were dead.

“It’s how he died.”

“Asphyxiation?” I asked, my voice mainly breath.

Kyle’s lips pressed into a grim line as he watched the custodian push his bucket down the empty hall. I would have bet my first paycheck Kyle had just remembered something he didn’t want to share.

His gaze hardened, his pupils constricted to the size of peppercorns. “Mr. Jeppesen’s wife was sleeping in a chair by his bed. She woke up to the sound of her husband suffocating.”

My hand flew to my mouth. “Oh God!” I didn’t think I was going to spew, but the morning was young and anything was possible.

The pager on his hip buzzed. He read the display and then turned back to me. “God didn’t have anything to do with this.”

* * *

Three hours and a pot of coffee later, I was buzzing with more than anticipation in Frankie’s office while I waited for her to finish reading my notes from my early morning meeting with Kyle Cardinale.

Frankie’s mouth tensed for a split second. “I can see where Dr. Cardinale would have some concerns.”

Some concerns! If he was right, three people had been murdered. Including Rose, four.

“So what should we do next?” I asked. “Get a statement from Mrs. Jeppesen? Find out what else she might have seen?”

Frankie’s lips thinned. “I understand that you flew solo with the Cardinale statement yesterday, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

I felt an invisible leash tighten around my neck.

“We need to find out what Dr. Zuniga has to say before talking to anyone else,” she added, meeting my gaze.

“Dr. Zuniga?”

“Henry Zuniga—a forensic pathologist who works out of Seattle. He’ll be doing the autopsy tomorrow.”

“At the hospital?”

She shook her head. “There’s no morgue here, so we have a contract with Curtis Tolliver to use his facilities at the mortuary.”

Three years ago, I’d seen Tolliver’s Funeral Home up close and personal when I’d helped Gram make the arrangements for my grandfather’s funeral. This included the sight of Curtis’s cousin Eileen, the embalmer, emerging from a back room while I was on my cell phone with my mother and pacing the hallway. Behind Eileen I’d caught a glimpse of a metal operating table.

I shivered. No doubt that same room would be the site of Trudy’s autopsy.

“Then, once we get the report of his findings,” Frankie continued, “we’ll know if we need to launch an official investigation. Until then, we’ll just sit on this.” She closed the manila file folder.

“And wait,” I added without mentioning the four to six weeks. I didn’t want her to know I’d received my information from Steve.

She flashed me a humorless smile. “You’ll find we do a lot of that around here.”

I was more of a stir, bake, and serve kind of girl, who had never been very good at sitting and waiting for six minutes, much less for six weeks.

This job was going to be tougher than I thought.

* * *

I spent most of the following morning with Ben in Judge Witten’s courtroom at the far corner of the third floor, where I’d been introduced as a Special Assistant to the Prosecution. The semi-lofty title meant that I could sit at a long wooden table with Ben and one of the assistant prosecutors, Lisa Arbuckle, during jury selection—my assignment for the next two days.

Earlier in his office Ben had made his expectations for these two days crystal clear: I was to sit quietly and observe the process, and if I had a strong opinion on any prospective juror I should pass Lisa a note. I got the message, the same one Duke had delivered on Monday.
Keep your yap shut
.

And that’s exactly what I did. That was, when I wasn’t yawning.

Two hours and a twenty-minute recess later, we broke for lunch early because the defense attorney had a meeting. Fine by me. With the mystery of Trudy’s death not far from my thoughts, this gave me a little extra time to grab a quick tuna sandwich at Duke’s, then head south on Main Street and walk the four and a half blocks to Tolliver’s Funeral Home.

With every step something told me that I should do an about-face. The way I saw it, I could heed that advice, hightail it back to the courthouse and continue to play the waiting game, or I could roll the dice and maybe get lucky and catch Dr. Zuniga before he left town.

I spotted an unmarked white pickup with a rounded white canopy parked in the Tolliver’s parking lot. Since the igloo on wheels didn’t look like the typical vehicle belonging to the bereaved, I thought about going inside to see what I could find out, but the mere thought of asking,
“How’s the autopsy going?”
made the tuna sandwich in my stomach do a belly flop. To avoid a sudden reappearance of my lunch on my slingbacks, I popped a peppermint and sat on a bench under a shade tree in the parking lot.

After about fifteen minutes, a woman in her early fifties carrying a navy duffel bag exited the funeral home. A stout man hauling a matched pair of aluminum cases the size of carry-on bags followed the woman to the truck.

“Dr. Zuniga?” I called after him.

He turned. “Yes?”

With a thick head of salt and pepper hair and a face well worn with lines, Dr. Zuniga appeared to be around sixty. He smelled like antibacterial soap, reminding me that I didn’t want to think about where his hands had just been.

“I’m Deputy Coroner Charmaine Digby.” I showed him my badge.

He squinted at it, then his face crinkled into a smile. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those around here. You must be new, Charmaine Digby.”

“Very. But I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

The creases around his warm brown eyes deepened.

“I’ve been working on Trudy Bergeson’s case—”

“Have you.” He sharpened his gaze. “I wasn’t aware that this had already been made an official Coroner case.”

I knew I’d just made a rookie mistake, so I thought I’d better fess up before I dug myself too deep a hole. “It’s not exactly official.”

The woman carrying the duffel opened the rear door of the truck canopy and glanced back at us over her shoulder. “Henry,” she said softly. “If we want to make the one-fifty ferry, we need to go.”

Dr. Zuniga winked at me. “My wife, the clock watcher.”

I edged closer. “I’m sorry, but do you think this will become a Coroner case? Because there are some extenuating circumstances that—”

“Frankie will get my report tomorrow morning,” he said as he lifted the cases into the rear of the truck. “But I didn’t see anything conclusive that would indicate a cause of death other than Mrs. Bergeson’s rather advanced heart disease, which could certainly have led to cardiac arrest.”

“There was nothing conclusive.” Okay. “Was there anything that struck you as odd? Anything that didn’t fit?” I said, using Kyle Cardinale’s words.

Dr. Zuniga pursed his lips, hesitating. That would be a
yes
.

“Not typical,” he said thoughtfully, “but I wouldn’t call it terribly odd.”

But something he found was niggling at him. I could see it as clearly as the roadmap of lines on his face.

“She had a secondary needle mark next to her intravenous needle site. Her chart didn’t indicate any recent injections, but it happens sometimes. Usually a less experienced nurse. Probably nothing to be overly concerned about, but we’ll run the usual labs. We’ll know more in four to six weeks.”

I may have only been on day three of my job, but I was already sick of that answer.

Chapter Seven

Saturday afternoon, I took a seat in the chapel of Tolliver’s Funeral Home four rows back from a narrow table draped with an antique white, lace-edged runner. Two porcelain vases filled with red roses, carnations, and white calla lilies bookended the luminescent ceramic urn sitting center stage on the table, next to a framed photo of a smiling Trudy. Flanking the table, long ivory tapers atop brass candlesticks softly flickered while gentle strains of Mozart were pumped through the wood grain speakers mounted in the corners of the chapel. Since it was the hottest day of the year, pumping some air-conditioning into the room would have been a more effective mood enhancer.

“It feels like we were just here for Rose,” Aunt Alice grumbled, easing down onto the padded folding chair to the left of my grandmother.

Gram answered with a pat of her younger sister’s hand, but I knew that most of the senior crowd in attendance shared Alice’s sentiments.

Marietta wiggled her hips into the aisle seat next to me.

“Mah, isn’t this cozy,” she said, fanning herself with Trudy’s memorial brochure.

“Yeah, cozy.” In a sweat-dripping-down-my-back kind of way that had me regretting my decision to squeeze into my black Nordstrom Rack pantsuit with the help of some control top panty hose to minimize the damage of the last ten pounds I’d packed on. Marietta wore a curve-hugging pomegranate knit dress with a V-neck that minimized nothing.

A couple of hours earlier, I’d made an effort with the hair dryer and beaten my hair into submission long enough to twist it into a chignon, plaster it with hairspray, and call it good enough. Not according to my mother, as she would attest if she’d stop with the sidelong glances at my hair and actually say what she was thinking.

I felt a tug on a strand that had escaped from my chignon, and turned around to fire on yet another hair critic.

Steve’s face split into an evil grin as he took the seat behind me. He wore a charcoal business suit—probably the same one he wore when he had to testify in court. With his lean, athletic body, Steve could wear anything and look great, but with the cut of the suit, the pressed cornflower blue shirt, and his short, cropped, finger-combed dark brown hair, he looked finger-licking good.

He would have looked even better if Heather Beckett hadn’t sat down next to him and given me the stink eye.

“Hey,” I said to Steve.
Heather?
Seriously?

Heather had chewed him up and spit him out our junior year in high school. I thought he was too smart to fall for her act back then. He certainly hadn’t gotten any dumber in the last seventeen years. At least I hadn’t thought so before today.

“Steve, honay.” Marietta turned and took his hand. “Oooh,” she purred. “Now don’t you clean up well.”

“Have you met Heather?” Steve asked.

A smooth deflection move since it required Marietta and anyone within earshot to acknowledge Heather’s existence.

I aimed a smile at my former nemesis. It may even have appeared to be sincere.

“I’m sure ah have,” Marietta said in a tone of indifference that registered loud and clear on Heather’s face.

My mother can be quite condescending at times, especially while channeling her inner Southern belle. This was one of those times and I didn’t mind one bit.

Steve met my gaze. The tic in his cheek told me that he didn’t share my opinion.

Marietta sighed as she turned to face forward. “Lovely man.” She leaned into my shoulder. “You two never—”

“No.” And not something I wanted to discuss, especially with him sitting right behind me.

“I didn’t know Steve was seeing Heather again,” Gram whispered in my other ear.

“That makes two of us.” Again, not a subject for conversation today. “Oh, look.” I pointed across the aisle at Sylvia Jeppesen. Steve wasn’t the only one who could make a deflection move.

Gram waved at Sylvia, one of her exercise buddies from the senior center. “Who’s that sitting next to her?”

“Who’s sitting next to who?” Aunt Alice chimed in.

“Looks like Wally,” I said.

Wally Deford was eighty if he was a day. He drank decaf, always had two eggs over easy for breakfast, and used to be a pie happy hour regular before his wife passed away back when I was at culinary school.

Two rows back from Sylvia and Wally sat Port Merritt’s newest couple from the surviving spouse contingent, Jayne Elwood and Ernie Kozarek, with Gossip Central’s Lucille and Kim in the seats directly behind them, no doubt to be within striking range should anything incriminating come up in conversation. Eddie, Rox, and Donna Littlefield, one of my best friends from grammar school, sat in the rear, behind Nell and her new boyfriend.

There was no Dr. Cardinale in attendance, but the surviving family members of the names he’d provided me were well-represented. So was the hospital with a very stoic-looking Warren and Virginia Straitham sitting two rows back from Steve and Heather, along with Laurel and several members of the nursing staff.