She wasn’t dead, but her pulse was so faint I could barely feel it. I called 911: two ODs at the Lion’s Pride. I put my coat over the woman to keep her warm. I photographed her and Naomi Wissenhurst in situ. I didn’t want any complaints coming back that I’d moved them, injured them, robbed them.
Just because the three guys were gawking and not helping, I took their pictures, too. They scowled and moved away from me.
The cops arrived first, blue-and-reds flashing. My one brief entertainment for the night—the male trio melting away like snow as the squad cars arrived, dumping little bags filled with pills and powders into the gutter as they fled.
I stood as two officers reached the staircase. “I was trying to get this woman to wake up when I saw the other one under the staircase.”
They shone their flashlights, more powerful than my phone flash, and I saw the woman’s face. Middle-aged, jowly, thick eyebrows, a trickle of vomit at the corner of her mouth.
The female officer called in the report, demanding two ambulances at once. A third squad car pulled up. The driver stayed put; he was ferrying a more senior officer, who joined us at the top of the stairs.
By now the police strobes had penetrated the bar. Eager patrons were trying to leave, or at least to gape at the action. The senior officer sent one of the uniforms down the stairs to keep everyone in place.
“What have we got here, Suze?”
Suze swung her light in my direction. “This person called it in, but that’s Sonia Kiel, Sarge, you know—”
“Oh, yes, we all know Sonia.” The senior man squatted and felt her wrist. “Sonia, what’d you take this time, huh? We gonna save your life for you one more time, or are you determined to let it go?”
He stood. “And the other one?”
I hesitated, not wanting to be closer to the center of attention than I already was, but when Suze didn’t speak, I said the other one seemed to be a student who’d drunk too much, or swallowed roofies, or both.
“I was trying to get her to wake up enough to tell me where she lived when I saw the other woman lying there.” I hesitated again, but there was no point in keeping my connection to Sonia quiet; everyone in the bar would report my dramatic effort to get her name.
“I’ve never seen Sonia before, but she called me about forty-five minutes ago, asking me to come here to talk to her.”
The ambulances arrived. The officers backed away as the EMTs jogged over with their equipment.
“Let’s get our ladies to the hospital, and then you”—the sergeant nodded at me—“come over to the station and tell me all about it. You know where we are?”
I assured him I knew. When I started away from him toward my car, he said, “Other way.”
“I know, Sergeant. My dog is in my car. I need to make sure she’s okay.”
“Officer Peabody will go with you. Suze, I’ll drive your squad car back to the station.”
As we walked to my car, I said, “Your sergeant said you all know Sonia Kiel. Does this happen often, her passing out near a bar?”
“Sergeant Everard can tell you more about her than I can,” Suze said stiffly.
I ignored the rebuff. “I’d think if she needed hospitalizing very often, her health must be close to the breaking point.”
“She isn’t in good shape,” Suze admitted, “but usually we just take her back to the group home. They don’t want to keep her—” She broke off, remembering she was supposed to leave all those details to the sergeant.
We’d reached the Mustang. Peppy stuck an eager head over the backseat to inspect Suze, who patted her in return, a good sign, before strapping herself into her seat.
When we got to the station, I took Peppy out to stretch her legs. Suze said she thought it would be okay with the sergeant if I brought Peppy into the station. “If it isn’t, I’ll take her out and walk her while he talks to you.”
Everard raised his eyebrows when we walked in. “That your lawyer?”
“More like my analyst,” I said. “I don’t have any secrets from her.”
“I hope you don’t have any from me. You want to start by telling me who you are?”
When I told him my name and started to pull out my PI license, he said, “Oh, right. We got a notice about you coming into town looking for two missing African-Americans. What took you to the Lion’s Pride in the middle of the night, or is that all in the line of a big-city detective’s life? They tell me you caused a bit of a disturbance.”
“Hmm. More like I quieted the place down.” I told him about getting Sonia’s phone call and finding out that she’d used the bar’s phone. “It was hard to get them to acknowledge that Sonia had been in there or that she’d used the phone. The place was pretty wild, even by big-city standards.”
“Hawks won tonight, Sarge,” Suze contributed.
I looked blank, thinking Chicago Blackhawks and wondering why Lawrence, Kansas, would care.
“Men’s basketball,” Sergeant Everard said sardonically. “If you’re going to spend more than another twelve hours here, you’d better memorize the Hawks—Jayhawks—men’s schedule so you know when you’ll be able to get anyone to listen to what you’re trying to say.”
He asked me for chapter and verse on why I’d come to Lawrence to look for August and Emerald. I told him. He asked for proof that Sonia had phoned me from the bar. I showed him my call log. He asked what Sonia had to say. I gave him the gist.
“You really think she saw them?” Everard said. “She’s quite a few filaments short of a bulb.”
“She said a young man was taking pictures and an older black woman was encouraging him. I didn’t include anything about Veriden being a videographer in the posters I put up.”
Everard thought it over. “Maybe Sonia did see them. Just seems odd that no one else in town knows anything about them.”
“Where’s the cemetery that Sonia was talking about, where her truelove is buried?” I asked. “If I go there, maybe I can find someone who would have seen Ms. Ferring or August Veriden.”
Everard shook his head. “That’s all in Sonia’s mind, a truelove and his burial ground.”
“Who is she? Officer Peabody said you’d explain about the group home and who Sonia— What’s her last name? Kiel, was it?”
Everard made a sour face. “Sonia Kiel. She grew up in this town. My older brother went to high school with her, and she was an oddball then. She’s only turned odder with time.”
I would have put Everard at about forty: the skin on his face was still taut, none of that sag under the chin where aging begins. Even if his brother were a lot older, Sonia had looked to be a tired fifty-something. Life on the streets does terrible things to the human body; a diet of alcohol and drugs isn’t exactly a healing recipe.
“Oddball how?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s all ancient history. Her old man was a big noise up on the hill, scientist, knew all there was to know about what bugs got you sick. Anyway, Sonia, she’s his youngest kid. Her two older brothers were academic all-stars, you know the kind. One was a math whiz, and the other could learn any language you put in front of him.”
His cell phone rang. When he hung up, he told Suze that a fight had broken out over by the Cave. “Polanco is there. No shots fired yet, but you go help him sort it out. Call me if you need a bigger club to hit them with.”
After Suze had taken off, he was interrupted by one of his patrols who’d found some kids slashing tires in a west-side mall lot, and then a holdup in a park on the south end of town. By the time he got back to me, he’d lost his train of thought.
“Sonia,” I said helpfully. “Two whiz-kid brothers.”
“Oh, yeah. Sonia was the ugly duckling, only she never turned into a swan. When she and Tyrone—my brother—were in school together, she used to spy on the kids who were dating. She was lonely, she was ugly, who knows what was driving her? She started making up stories about having a romance with some mystery man in her father’s department. It was embarrassing to listen to.
“I don’t know all the details, but there’ve been a lot of hospitalizations. When she was younger, she tried to make a go of it out east somewhere—thought she was a singer or an artist, I forget what—but it all fell apart, and she came toddling home. Kiel and his wife finally got fed up, turned to tough love. She’s supposed to be living at St. Rafe’s, only she keeps sneaking out and ending up drunk. They should boot her out, but I guess Dr. Kiel still has plenty of pull in the town.”
“Dr. Kiel? He’s a doctor?”
“Well, yeah, he’s a professor up there, with all the degrees and everything.” Everard stared at me, puzzled at my urgency.
Cady had started to ask about a doctor when Gertrude Perec cut her off. I’d assumed it was an M.D., because at the University of Chicago, where I’d done my degrees, there’s a kind of inverted snobbery about the title “doctor”: it’s only for M.D.s. Ph.D.s are Mr. or Ms., and they call you out pretty sharply if you violate the code.
“Do you know Gertrude Perec?” I asked.
“I know who she is,” he said cautiously.
“Do you know if she has a connection to Dr. Kiel?”
He shook his head. “It’s a small town, but still, eighty thousand people give or take, we’re not the KGB with the details of everyone’s love life or whatever. Or the NSA, come to that. What’s Ms. Perec got to do with this?”
I flung up my hands. “I have no idea. I have no idea about anything right now, except that I’m so bone tired I can’t think. Can I leave? Do you need anything else from me?”
“Just the address where you’re staying. And, you know, until we see what’s going on with Sonia, I’d appreciate it if you stuck around town for another day or two. Give you a chance to look at the cemeteries. We have two.”
“Five.”
I jumped: an African-American officer, who’d been sitting so quietly in the corner that I hadn’t noticed him, was speaking.
“There’s that little Jewish cemetery out by Eudora and the Catholic cemetery over on Sixth. And don’t forget Maple Grove, Sarge.”
Everard nodded slowly. “Right, Leonard. It’s not used much anymore for new burials,” he added to me, “but it’s in the old part of town, north of the river. A lot of abolitionists and escaped slaves from when the town was first settled are buried there. If Sonia was going to imagine she had a lover who’d been buried, I bet that’s where he’d be.”