Twenty-Three

We didn’t have to wait long at the ER.

I’ll take a second run at that. Once we had got past the receptionists, filled out a total of thirty-five pages of paperwork, paid four deductibles varying between fifty and two hundred dollars, and they had run Branston’s credit card for the uninsured subhuman who had the nerve to be cluttering up their waiting room for a few blemishes without even having the wit to invent a time machine, go back, get coverage, and then need medical attention, and was ungrateful enough to do a big fake “Ennn-aitch-esss!” sneeze while she was at it … we didn’t have to wait long at the ER. For one thing, the nurses wanted us out of sight and for another, two of us were doctors and nepotism rules. Thankfully.

I only just had time in the waiting room to lay the theory out before them. “I kept thinking about Diego’s pets and sandwiches,” I said. “And I couldn’t work out why. I even dreamed about it last night.”

“What are you talking about?” said Todd. “Sandwiches?”

“Loaves and fishes,” I said. “And flies, and boils, and I bet if we phone Cindy Slagle we’ll find that the common name for those … ”

“Anoplura?” said Kathi.

“… is lice. Whose fingers aren’t too sore to Google the plagues of Egypt?”

Noleen did it, with a few ouches and one motherfucker that made the receptionist look up and scowl. “Gimme a break,” Noleen said and the woman nodded, winced, and then looked away.

“Yep,” she said, reading from her phone. “Lice, flies, worms, boils.”

“The raccoon was a red herring,” I said. “It was just the host.” I wondered why that bothered me.

“So what’s next?” said Roger.

“Hail, locusts, darkness, and … ” Noleen said.

“Death of the firstborn child,” said Todd. “Don’t even say it. Don’t say his name.”

No one said it, but we were all thinking the same thing: those little feet and that croaky voice saying, “Are my fishies here?”

“Call Mike and tell her to come,” Kathi said to me. “Nolly, you dial and hold the phone to her head.”

“At least we dodged the blood and frogs,” Noleen said, still reading. Then she smacked her head with her hand, making both weep with watery blood. “No we didn’t, though, did we? I wiped the mess up with my own two hands and we put the frogs back in the slough.” She looked round at us all. “Okay, I’m dialling.”

“You can’t use cell phones in here,” said an approaching nurse. Then she took a second look at us. “You do what you gotta do,” she said. A third look. At Roger. “Doc Kroger, is that you? What happened? Jeez Louise!” A fourth look, taking in Todd. “Doc Kroger II? What happened to them?”

Todd slipped his bath sheet off one shoulder. “It happened to me too,” he said.

“Holy crap! Get back here!” the nurse shouted, fishing a mask out of her scrubs pocket and slapping it on. “Cubicles A through E.”

With that, our ER wait was over. Wincing and bleeding, we shuffled away.

I got seen first, since my mouth was affected, but it didn’t get me much of an advantage in the end because, once the word got out, every doctor on duty was on deck, dabbing, swabbing, looking stuff up, and calling their old medical-school roommates to send pictures of us and ask for help.

“The dermatologist is on his way in,” one of the ER docs told me after ten minutes.

“Wait?,” I said. “The guy with the beer-gut and the orange hair?”

The ER doc had a great poker face, but his eyes twinkled. “It’s the other dermatologist who’s on call today,” he said

“Bingo!” a cry went up from two cubicles along. “I know what it is.” Then he let out a string of gobbledygook worse than lawyers, judges, and Professor Slagle combined. A low whistle went up from the cubicle on the other side of me.

“Can we just open the curtains and do this together?” I said.

Once the cubicles were combined, the winning doctor resumed. He was holding his phone on his shoulder and twirling swab sticks through the worst of Roger’s lesions. “Contaminated water and did you consume alcohol? You did. Well, you’re going to be okay. I mean, you’re not going to be pretty for a while, but you’re all going to be fine. You should see a good dentist in a week or two, League-Said.”

“Lexy,” I told him. “I don’t know any good dentists. I only know Branston Lancer.”

“That fucker?” said one of the younger doctors, then blushed. “Excuse me. I’m sleep-deprived and last night was a rough one.”

“Plus it’s a fair comment,” I said. No one disagreed.

“It’s a fungus,” the doc with the phone went on, relaying the news from his friend. “Found in the hills of northern … where? You broke up.”

“Sicily,” said Kathi. The doctor clicked and winked.

“Found in the hills of northern Sicily—good guess.” He plugged his free ear with a finger and listened. “Rare and easy to mistake for … yeah, I have no idea what you just said … easy to mistake for some other fungus. Harmless if ingested or applied externally unless you add alcohol. And then … Quasimodo. Instant Dermageddon. Short-lived but epic. Thanks, man. I owe you. Give my love to Laurel and the rugrats.” The doc holstered his phone with a flourish.

“And what’s the treatment?” said Noleen. “Because I run a service business and this is not a good face for customer relations.”

“Uhhhhhhh, Clearasil?” said the doctor. “Jamie?” He turned to a colleague. “Clearasil, right? You got any better suggestions?”

“Can I take a group photo for our newsletter?” Jamie said.

And so we were almost happy to hear Mike arrive. She had Soft Cop with her and made a nice contrast to him, since she looked as hard as a granite puck studded with hobnails.

The sight of us unbent her a little. Kathi had a boil in the corner of each eye and tears streaming unstoppably down her face making tracks in the lotion the nurses had dabbed on. Roger had one nostril almost closed and one ear so lavishly be-pustuled that he had just slathered a poultice over the whole thing and was trying to ignore the melting ointment dripping down his neck. And then there was me. The only way I felt even halfway comfortable was to keep my tongue hanging out whenever I wasn’t using it, and my eyes were half shut because I had a boil in the crease of one that itched if I opened them. It wasn’t a great look.

Mike subjected the four of us to close study and swallowed hard. She flicked a glance at Todd and opened her notebook.

Todd cleared his throat. “I know I look as if I got off lightly,” he said. “But that’s only because you can’t see my bathing suit area.”

“Oh, tell me your worries!” Noleen said. “Me, Lex, and Kathi have got nooks and crannies you can’t imagine, Todd. And I’ve got belly folds too.”

“For your information,” said Todd, “I am intact in my lower regions and, while I’m usually thankful that my mother was a hippy … not today.”

“Okay,” said Mike. “So who wants to tell me what’s going on? We can leave the bathing suit areas out of it if it’s all right with all of you.”

“First, I need to apologise,” I said. “I was unfair. I took what I believed about some members of the entire class of cops and judged you on the strength of it. Basically, I profiled you.”

“Wow,” said Mike. “You just can’t stop that mouth.”

“Anyway,” said Roger. “We need to report a crime. Someone added an irritant fungus to the guest pool at the Last Ditch Motel and the results are before you.”

“Well,” said Kathi, “it’s more accurate to say someone contaminated a tanker of water and pumped the water into the pool. But yes, the results are before you.”

“And we know who it was,” said Noleen.

“Kind of,” I amended.

“It was a member of the Poggio crime family, from Sicily, Italy,” said Roger. “We have him on video and we have a witness who can ID him.”

“And,” I said, “we have a motive for him to murder Clovis Bombaro.”

Mike sent Soft Cop for coffees and sat down on one of the examination tables to listen to the whole story.

“So,” she said, once we were done, “you’ve experienced an escalating series of harassment. Do you have the logs of your reports to the city environmental protection inspector to corroborate any of them? Any case numbers from any agencies?”

Kathi and Noleen looked down at their feet.

“We’ve got an expert who’ll testify,” I said. “Professor Slagle.”

“The bug lady?” said Mike.

“And we’ve got five people right here who’re telling you what happened,” said Roger.

Mike nodded slowly. Her eyes were travelling over Roger’s arms, where a few of his tattoos were partially visible in between the dressings. “You’re a resident at the motel, aren’t you?” she said. “Can you give me a list of your other addresses since you left … ”

“Stockton,” said Roger. “Yeah, I moved around a bit.”

“Doesn’t have to be today, Mr…. Kroger, wasn’t it? Compile a list of addresses and bring it in to the office. If you need someone to help you, you can dictate it to one of the dispatchers. Mornings are quietest.”

“Wait, what?” I said. “Are you trying to imply that maybe he can’t write? And it’s Doctor Kroger, by the way.”

“And he lives at the Last Ditch because of me,” said Todd. “I have a psychological disorder, currently under treatment, that has forced us to leave our home on Cardinal Way and sublet it.”

“Cardinal Way?” said Mike. “You left Stockton with a pretty decent chunka change then.”

“He’s. A. Doctor,” I said again. “Do you need someone to help you with the hearing?”

“You’re all very close and cooperative,” said Mike. “Any witness outside this tight little crew?”

“I met them all for the first time on Sunday,” I said. But it did no good.

“Quick work,” she said. “Anyone else?”

“There’s Della and Diego,” I said.

Mike missed the quick headshake Kathi gave me. “Who’s Della and Diego?” she said.

“Transients,” Noleen said. “They were staying on Monday night and Lexy got talking in the laundromat. But they paid in cash and moved on in the morning.”

“I thought they might have,” Mike said. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“Look,” I said, “do you think we did this to ourselves? Would you?”

“I’m not here to answer your questions,” Mike said. Soft Cop came back with the coffees and settled down to enjoy his. I suppose after what came seeping out of the omni-spout machine in the cop shop, hospital slop was a holiday.

“But what the hell is it you suspect us of?” I said.

“Absolutely nothing,” Mike said. “Why would you sit on the identity of a suspect in a murder until you all got your stories straight so you can peg him for whatever this is too?”

I had to run this through a few times before it made any sense at all. The strange thing was that the others didn’t seem to have any trouble with it. They sat, stone-faced and dead-eyed, as if she’d hypnotised them.

“So … you think we know who did this and, instead of having him caught and having the trouble stop, we’re pretending it was someone else? And I am obstructing the investigation into my client’s murder by adding this fictitious crap to help people I didn’t even know a week ago?”

I thought Mike’s face clouded briefly, but she got hold of her expression again before she spoke. “There are faster ways to stop trouble than having the police build a case,” she said. “Ain’t that so, mi amigo?” She smiled at Todd.

“Will you at least talk to Visalia and try to see if any of the Poggios is in town?” I said.

“I’ve told you before, I don’t need your help,” Mike said. I couldn’t believe I had thought this woman and I might be friends one day. She looked down at her notebook. “Anything to add?”

“A question,” I said. “Are there any public servants it’s illegal to insult or does free speech cover that?”

“Lex,” said Roger.

“What sort of thing did you have in mind?” said Mike.

“Hypothetically, I was interested in calling a certain official a myopic, egotistical joke,” I said. “But I don’t want to be arrested. You know, if ‘he’ called the cops on me.”

“First amendment’s your best friend,” said Mike. She stood, snapped her notebook back together and left with Soft Cop ambling after her.

“Smart move,” said Roger. “The city of Cuento’s going to get rich off your traffic citations, you know.”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “As soon as I look like someone they’d let on a plane, I’m on a plane.” But I was surprised at the slump in my chest when I said it. “At least that was the plan.”

“It’s a good plan,” said Roger. “You’ve made an enemy for life in Mike.”

“I dunno,” I said. “There’s a story there and I’d love to get to the bottom of it. There’s more to Miss Mike than meets the eye. And don’t trade looks about me. I can see you.” I blinked my swollen eyes. “Kind of.”