“Miss Noor is feeling a bit groggy and not too talkative,” Detective Hawkline told A.W. and me when we arrived at the hospital. “The doctor says it might be good for her to see some familiar faces.”
We’d been driving back to the Bistro building when A.W. checked in on Bettina and discovered she’d awakened in the early morning. Her nurse was concerned that she had refused to eat. Detective Hawkline was annoyed that she had also refused to talk.
They both thought we might help.
Bettina was sitting up in bed when we walked in. If the bandage on her head had been made of gold, she’d have resembled a Hindu priestess. “Hi, Bet,” A.W. said. “We thought these might brighten the room a little.” He placed the yellow tulips we’d brought on a bedside table.
“Lovely,” she said.
She seemed neither happy nor sad to see us. But when Detective Hawkline followed us into the room, she frowned.
“Feeling better, Miss Noor?” the detective asked.
“Until a moment ago, yes.”
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me a little more about what happened at the old house.”
“There is nothing more to tell,” Bettina said.
“Miss Noor says she didn’t see anything in that basement,” Detective Hawkline said.
“Too dark,” Bettina said.
“But not too dark for you to shoot and kill a man.” To us, the detective said, “The bullet we recovered from Mr. Gault came from Miss Noor’s weapon.”
“Someone fired at me,” Bettina said. “I fired back.”
Detective Hawkline looked skeptical. She knew, as did I, that Gault had been shot in the back of his head.
“Any sense of how many people were in the basement?” the detective asked.
This would be the time that Bettina might be tempted to mention the kidnapping, not knowing that we all would prefer to forget that particular element. But she said, “As I told you, I just saw the one man while I was driving by. He was entering the grounds through a broken section of the fence. The way he did it made me think he was trespassing. I parked and followed him in because I thought he might be up to no good.”
“Can you describe the man?” the detective asked.
“Big.”
“That’s it? Big? How about height, age, body type, race? Wearing what? A tux? A swimsuit? How about a clown costume?”
With each question, Bettina seemed to be withdrawing a bit, physically sliding down under the covers, turning away from Hawkline.
“Could we talk for a minute, Detective?” I said.
Hawkline stared at me, then turned her attention back to Bettina, who had closed her eyes. “Sure,” the detective said. “Talk? Why not?”
“We’ll be right back, Bettina,” I said, and held the door open for the detective. “Care for a cup of coffee?” I asked her.
“Sounds great. My nerves are still asleep, because I’ve only had five or six cups today.”
Her partner, Seestrunk, was at the nurses’ station, chatting up a busty administering angel. Just as Hawkline opened her mouth to call out to him, he leaned in close to the nurse and said something, causing her to draw back in disgust. Hawkline mumbled the words “What a dick” and led me away in the opposite direction.
In a nearly empty waiting room, we sipped bitter machine-dispensed coffee and I explained that Detective Solomon had suggested I inform her of a few things I knew that might help her investigation of Ted Parkhurst’s murder.
“Yes,” she said, “he mentioned something you told him about a mysterious gathering in Afghanistan.”
So once again I described the infamous meeting of the toe-tag gang in Kabul, embellishing it a bit to give A.W. as much time as possible with Bettina, which was my purpose in distracting the detective. I ended by asking her about the man shot in the old mansion’s basement. “You said his name was Gault. Steve Gault?”
“Stephen. You knew him?”
“No. But he was at the Irish pub in Kabul, too.”
She smiled. She had that Spencer Tracy rueful grin down cold. “You make my head swim, Chef Blessing,” she said. “So let’s see what we’ve got. Six men shared a table in a bar in Kabul about a month ago. Now all of ’em are dead. And what should I deduce from that fact? That a serial murderer is at work? That’d be interesting. I’ve never investigated a serial-killer case. Probably because we don’t get many serial killers in real life. Certainly not any with IQs higher than Stephen Hawking’s who like to play tricky games with us.”
“What about Zodiac?” I said.
“Well, that’s the West Coast,” she said. “They live the fiction out there. Here, we’re a little more down to earth. We get Son of Sam. No criminal genius. Just a homicidal nutjob with a talking dog who had a lucky streak that eventually ran out.”
“I’m not suggesting all those guys were killed by the same person,” I said. “But now that we know that Ted Parkhurst was capable of murder, I think it’s possible he did away with one or two of them.”
“Not to put too fine a line to it, chef, I really don’t give a rat’s ass who he killed, unless it helps me find out who killed him. That’s my assignment.”
“I’d be looking for a partner in crime,” I said.
“Well, thanks for that suggestion, chef. I’ve been thinking along those lines, too. What I need help with is figuring out who the partner is.”
“And how Parkhurst was injected with the stuff that killed him.”
“That I know. A hospital is a great place to commit murder with a hypodermic needle and get away with it. How hard would it have been for somebody in a white or green uniform to brush up against Parkhurst as he was being taken out? Maybe standing behind him in the elevator? And the beauty part is, you toss the needle in a hazmat bag, and no cop I know of is going to go rooting around in there looking for a weapon. No. I’m not concerned with the how. Just the who. I don’t suppose you might have been Parkhurst’s partner?”
“If that’s a serious question, the answer is no.”
“Solomon thinks you killed Gallagher,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we add Parkhurst to your bill? You were here last night. You had opportunity.”
“But no motive.”
“Unless you were his partner and you didn’t want to risk him giving you up.”
“You’re just playing with my head, aren’t you, Detective? You don’t really think I killed anybody.”
“I’d be a fool if I went by what I thought,” she said.
“If you seriously suspected me of anything, you’d have invited Detective Seestrunk along and read me my rights.”
“Has Detective Solomon read you your rights?”
“No.”
“That’s because he doesn’t have enough evidence. I have even less.”
She looked at her watch. It was a big, silver retro Swatch. “We’ve been chatting for about fifteen minutes. Anything else you feel compelled to tell me?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” she said, “I think your friends have had enough time to compare notes, don’t you?”
I told her I did.
“I like the story about the Irish pub,” she said.
“It’s true,” I said.
“That’s why I like it,” she said.