Chapter 17

 

I woke before Solomon the next day and claimed the bathroom at just past eight o’clock. When I went downstairs, there was a note on the kitchen table and a fully stocked fridge.

Call when you’re up and me or Hector will come for you. Don’t go out alone. Signed simply, W.

I called the hospital first, and was told Buzz was still listed in critical condition; they wouldn’t tell me anything more. I called Alice—Buzz’s wife—and got her voicemail, so settled for calling Wolf.

“It’s about time you dragged your lazy ass out of bed. What’s first on the schedule?” he asked. I could hear a car’s engine, and figured I’d gotten him while he was driving.

“Solomon and I need to go to the hospital to check on Buzz and talk to his wife. Thibodeau wants to see us today, too.” I hesitated. “And I want to have a chat with Bobby Davies at some point.”

“He’s one of the dirty pols in the pictures you showed me?” Though right now Thibodeau had most of the pictures Mary had given me, I’d held a copy of them back for safekeeping. Not that I didn’t trust the detective, but...well, at the moment I didn’t trust anyone. The night before, I’d shown Wolf the remaining photos in the hope that he might have a theory I hadn’t thought of yet. He hadn’t, but he sure as hell had fixed his attention on Foster and Davies fast.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s one of the dirty pols.”

He grunted. “The same prick who spooked Lizzie not too long ago.” Again, I agreed. There was silence on the line. Then, finally: “I’m going with you.”

I shifted. I was standing in front of a picture window in Johnny’s state-of-the-art kitchen, looking out on a fenced yard Charlene had most likely landscaped personally. “You understand that we don’t really know anything. And we can’t kill this guy.”

“I don’t want to kill him,” Wolf said. “Dead men don’t talk. And I want some answers.”

 

 

◊◊◊◊◊

Buzz was still out when Solomon and I got to the hospital later that morning, accompanied by Wolf’s second-in-command, Hector. Alice was in the waiting room with her cell phone and laptop, her hair pulled back and her eyes dead tired. She got up and hugged both of us while she was still on the phone. Meanwhile, Hector stood in the doorway with his feet hip-width apart and his arms folded over his chest, watching.

Alice was five years older than Buzz, and had been in the newspaper business most of her life. She was tall and striking, with long gray hair she kept pulled back in a dancer’s bun. Today, I assumed she’d come straight from the airport, considering the rumpled business suit she wore. Two suitcases had been stashed in the corner of the room.

“What do you know?” I asked her when she hung up the phone.

“He’s stable,” she said. “He had a transfusion last night, but right now they’re worried about organ failure.” She was strangely calm, professional. The pain in her eyes was unmistakable, but she kept it locked up tight. “It’s hyper...” She consulted a notebook she had beside her laptop.

“Hypovolemic shock,” Solomon supplied for her. “With the blood loss, his organs may have gone too long without oxygen or nutrients. Did the doctor say what they’re doing for him?”

“There’s not much they can do, according to them,” Alice said. “I was just on the phone with a friend of mine who knows someone who specializes in this kind of trauma. She’s going to see if we can get him to fly out.”

“Has Buzz woken up?” I asked.

“No, they’re keeping him under for now. It gives his body a better shot at healing.”

“Was he able to talk to you at all?”

For the first time, her eyes welled. She took a second to get herself in hand before she continued. “He was unconscious when I got here. I haven’t spoken with him since yesterday afternoon.”

“What about damage to the vocal chords or trachea?” Solomon asked.

“Nothing was severed,” Alice answered. “They said the damage there isn’t permanent.”

Solomon looked as surprised as I was by the news. Considering the damage done to Charlene, I wasn’t sure why the killer would show this kind of restraint with Buzz.

“Listen, I hate to bring this up right now,” I said, “but we’re supposed to be ready to go to print Wednesday night. Obviously Buzz won’t be in any condition—”

“You stay on this story,” Alice interrupted. Her eyes were sharp and hard as steel, a testament to the strength it took for a woman to make it this long in a business dominated by men. “Buzz always keeps a couple of stories in the hopper in case he runs short for an issue—I’ll pull those, and I’ll handle the rest. I want you on this.”

“What angle are we taking?” Solomon asked.

“Profile Charlene Dsengani,” Alice said after a second. “Five hundred words max there, I’ve got no more than a couple of inches to spare. If Foster and Davies are involved in this, I want the proof we need—three sources, no mistakes.” She looked at me. I nodded. “Do what you need to do over the next four days, but I want this story.”

She looked down the corridor toward Buzz’s room. “Whoever did this to him? Those bastards are going to pay. Big.”

“I know things have been nuts,” I said. “But did you ever get in touch with anyone over at the Tribune?”

“I did,” Alice said. “I talked to Ted last night—the owner over there. Unfortunately, he wasn’t all that supportive. He passed the buck, said if you can get Rafferty to sign off on the two of you collaborating, he’s fine with it. But it’s up to Rafferty.”

“So it’s a good thing you didn’t do something stupid and piss him off yesterday,” Solomon said to me with a grimace.

A doctor came in then, and work was officially off the table. We talked to Alice for a few minutes more before we told her to lay low and give us a call if there were any changes. Then, we headed out to get to work.

 

◊◊◊◊◊

Hector took us back to Johnny’s from there, Solomon and I crammed into the front of Hector’s pickup with him. Solomon had been awkward all morning, and I knew I wasn’t helping anything by trying to pretend nothing had changed after what had happened the night before.

Finally, when we were back at Johnny’s, I snagged Solomon by the arm and dragged her out to the backyard. There was a small garden thick with tomato plants and zucchini, cucumbers and carrots, and beans climbing a pretty wooden trellis. Flowering daylilies lined the perimeter of the yard, their orange blossoms vibrant against the backdrop of a cedar privacy fence. I took a seat on a stone bench beside a small pond where flashes of silver and orange caught the sun from the goldfish who swam in the murky water. It smelled clean and earthy, a world apart from the city outside.

“What are you doing?” Solomon hissed at me when I pulled her to the seat beside me.

“We need to talk.”

“No we don’t.”

“Yeah, we do. What happened last night—”

“You don’t need to explain,” she said quickly. “You were freaked out, and things have been building between us and then there’s this bed and we’re both in it and...I mean, it’s not surprising that something happened. And it’s not like I didn’t want it to happen or something, but I understand—you don’t think of me that way, and that’s fine because I don’t even know if I think of you that way, and there are a ton of complications that you don’t want to deal with after everything you went through with your ex...” I let her continue like that for a while, until she was babbling incoherently toward the end. Finally, she stopped short.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.

“Do you need me to? You’ve made a pretty good case for me being an asshole with no self-control, apparently teetering on the brink of mental collapse.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No? How about you don’t put words in my mouth, then.” I turned to face her. There were bird feeders lining the picture window. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a hummingbird buzz in for nectar from a bright red feeder. “Yes: I was freaked out last night. So were you. I was tired, and it’s been a rough few months, and you’re right—something has been building between us.”

“You don’t have to—” she started. I put my index finger to her lips. She glared at me, but she did shut up.

“But I’m not nuts,” I continued. “Apart from talking to dead people... Which I’m hoping is a temporary thing. I knew what I was doing. I don’t regret it. I’m not over it, just because we made out a little.”

“A lot,” she corrected me.

I grinned at her. “Fair enough. Made out a lot. But if what you just said is what you’re feeling—that you were just vulnerable and you didn’t really want things to move in that direction—tell me. Own it. Don’t try and tell me where I’m coming from, though.”

“Oh,” she said. She looked at me head on, one of the things I’ve always loved about Solomon. “I just thought when I woke up this morning and you were gone, and you didn’t really say anything when I got up...”

Well, shit. “You slept until ten o’clock this morning, and when you did get up, Wolf and Hector were sitting right there watching our every move.”

“It’s not a big deal. I mean, it’s not like I expected to spoon till noon or something—”

I leaned in and kissed her before she could continue. By the time I eventually pulled back, her face was flushed; I suspect mine was too.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t have any guarantees. I don’t know about next week or next month... But I wouldn’t have kissed you last night if I didn’t want some kind of morning after with you. Some kind of...something. Okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed. There was a light in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, and I got a strange burst of joy and terror at the thought that I’d put it there.

Behind us, Wolf cleared his throat. “I don’t want to interrupt...”

Solomon scooted away from me so fast she nearly fell in the pond. “That’s all right,” she assured him. “We were just talking.”

“Uh huh.”

I stood with a little more grace than Solomon had managed and nodded to the yard. “Charlene did this?”

“Her and Lizzie—and Maisie helped. We bought the place and it was overgrown; Johnny didn’t want anything to do with it. Lizzie did the inside, and Charlene tackled the yard. Worked like hell on it.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. His gaze shifted to the pond. “They wanted to start a business, you know—the two of them, flipping houses in the area. Said I could do the heavy lifting, Lizzie would handle the design, and Charlene would do the landscaping.”

“What about Johnny?” Solomon asked. “Where did he fit in the grand scheme?”

His face darkened. He didn’t answer.

“Did Johnny know you were making plans without him?” I asked. “Maybe he got wind that you were getting ready to steal his girl and jump ship.”

He took a step toward me. “Will you knock off saying that shit? It wasn’t like that.”

“So you weren’t sleeping with Lisette?” I said.

“You don’t need to say it like that. Johnny knew the score—he was done with Lizzie.”

“All the more reason he might have decided to take her out rather than let the two of you make a fool of him—” Solomon said.

If I’d been the one to say it, I think Wolf would have knocked me on my ass. He gave Solomon a hard stare, but made no move. “You’re both wrong. He wouldn’t have done anything to Lizzie.”

“Why not?” I pressed.

“Because he knows how I feel about them,” he finally said with conviction. “He doesn’t give two shits about Lisette or Maisie, but he knows what it would do to me if something happened to them. He didn’t do this.”

I couldn’t say I believed him because I didn’t, but I didn’t know Johnny that well...and brotherhood is a powerful bond. Maybe Wolf was right, and Johnny was willing to look the other way while his model girlfriend fell in love with his older brother and they slept together right under his nose. Maybe.

I wouldn’t bet on it, though.

“Okay,” I said, “so let’s just put a pin in that for now and focus on the other things we need to do to get this story off the ground.”

“I should talk to Rafferty,” Solomon said.

“We can do that later,” I said with a shake of my head. “I say we focus on trying to find Jacob Deng—the man Maisie said was her father. And I want to have a word with Bobby Davies.”

“What about Foster?” Solomon asked.

“You still have the interview with him tomorrow, so let’s just hang onto that for now.”

“And the PI you mentioned?” Wolf asked. “Elias?”

“Cops are on that,” I said. “I’ll give his office a call, but if he was the one to go after Buzz, I don’t think we’ll get too close to the guy.”

“Or even should,” Solomon added. “As a general rule, I try to avoid sources who slice and dice when an interview goes badly.”

“So where do we start?” Wolf interrupted. “I want to talk to this Davies dickhead—we know where to find him and we know he’s got a link to Lizzie. And I don’t like the look of the guy.”

“All right, then,” I agreed. “Davies it is. But just remember, you promised not to kill him.”

“Didn’t say I wouldn’t hurt him a little, though.”

Given everything that had happened in the past few days, I didn’t have a problem with that.