by K. J. Emrick
Now it was time to press my luck just a little further.
“Say, is Louise Timmins working today? My friend was seen by her when she came here, and she said Louise was just wonderful with her.”
Charlene was very happy to hear someone had complimented their staff. “That’s a nice compliment. Sure, I’ll send Louise in to do your preliminary work before the doctor sees you. You just take your time filling out those forms and Louise will tell you what to do after that, all right?”
She left me alone in exam room two and closed the door for my privacy. It was way too bright in here, especially since everything was white. The wallpaper, the floor tiles, the cabinets, all of it. The cushion on top of the exam table was peach colored but even that was covered over with a roll of disposable white paper. The only real splash of color was a poster with a very detailed diagram of a woman’s uterus and vaginal tract.
With a sigh, I put the clipboard down next to the single-basin sink. Then I started pacing while I waited, trying to rehearse what I would say to Louise. Instead, that stupid fortune of Harry’s kept coming back to my mind.
You will die.
Know what? I think I’m going to tell him to make me another cup of that absolutely amazing coffee and have him read the coffee grinds again. We’ll just see what kind of a fortune he gives me then. You can’t tell me that little brown specks at the bottom of a cup tell you anything at all about a person’s future. And that’s coming from a woman who sees her own in three second bursts.
Like when that door’s about to open.
I jumped up on the exam table, crossing my legs, hooking my hands around my knee.
Sure enough, when the door opens it was Louise Timmins who came in. She was just exactly like her Facebook photo. Her permed hair was graying. Her glasses were round and reflected the lights from overhead. Her nurse’s smock was as white as this room, with dancing Snoopy’s printed all over it. The wrinkles on her face told me that she was probably older than I thought, but she still had the energetic presence of someone just at the top of their hill, instead of over it.
“Hello there,” she says to me. “Are you Laura?”
“Yes. I’m Laura Berkenstein.” See? Always the same name. “You’re Louise Timmins?”
“Mm-hmm, that’s me.” Her smile slips away as she looks down at the clipboard where I’d tossed it with the forms still not filled out. “I’m afraid we’ll need this information from you, dear, if we’re going to help you. Is this your first pregnancy?”
“It would be,” I say, which wasn’t exactly a lie and wasn’t exactly the truth. If I was here for a pregnancy, it would definitely be my first. That’s just not why I was here. “I’ll get to the forms in a minute, but first I wanted to ask you about my friend.”
“Oh? Is this the friend that so highly recommended me? I was curious to know which of my patients said such nice things about me.”
She’s facing away from me, and from behind I watch for her reaction as I say the name. “Katarina Borishev. You know her, right?”
“Oh my, yes.” She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t tense up. Her voice didn’t change pitch. If there’s something she’s hiding I can’t see it. Not from this angle. “I remember her. Katarina came in with much the same problem that you have. Boyfriend got her pregnant, and she didn’t want to let him know.”
Wow. I was not expecting that. I mean, I’m in a medical center that specializes in pregnancy but still. Barlow had been going on and on about how much he and Katarina loved each other. So why would she hide something like a pregnancy from him? That put a whole new spin on her taking his money and disappearing. She’s expecting a child, maybe doesn’t want to raise the kid with Barlow—that whole, she’s a ten and he’s a six on a good day thing—so she takes his money and runs. She leaves behind her stuff because she wants to travel light. She left behind her cellphone because even a woman from Croatia knows they can be tracked and she doesn’t want to be found.
Looking at it that way, it all made sense.
And, yes. Sometimes my cases really are just that simple.
“Did you know,” Louise says as she finally turns around with the clipboard in her hand, “Katarina and I kept in touch after she left here? I made sure to tell her to friend me on Facebook because I was so worried about her. We messaged a few times and we talked, but she hasn’t been online recently. The poor dear, she was so upset about all this. She just kept saying that her boyfriend couldn’t find out. She knew it would mean trouble if he did. I tried to give her the experience of my years but I’m not sure it helped her. She seemed so upset when she was here, like her whole world had just come crashing down.”
I suppose, in a way, it really had. She wasn’t a US citizen. Now she was unexpectedly pregnant and unsure about what her life would be like from here on. Yes. That would qualify as the world crashing down in my book. And she had no intention of telling her boyfriend…
Wow. Barlow was not going to like this. Not one bit.
Of course, it also wasn’t lost on me that I wasn’t able to see any of the messages Louise had just mentioned between her and Katarina. Not having her Facebook login details made it impossible for me to see if the messages were still there or not. I suspected that she most likely would have deleted them anyway. It seemed like she wanted to keep this pregnancy hidden and I had to ask myself why. Realizing Louise was still waiting for me to give her some sort of answer about how Katarina was doing, I cleared my throat and thought fast. I had an idea, but I needed Louise to confirm it for me. “Katarina’s doing really well, actually. Um. She was very happy with the place that you referred her to.”
“That I…? Oh, you mean the place doctor McGillicutty referred her to. Yes. Well, I know how expensive medical care can be, especially for someone who isn’t a US citizen. She couldn’t get the procedure she wanted here without proper insurance but the clinic over on Brightmoor would do it for cash. That’s where we refer all of patients who are in bad straits.”
Well, the surprises just keep coming. The ‘procedure’ Louise is talking about can only be an abortion. Not only was Katarina pregnant, but she was trying to terminate it before it went too far. Medical abortions could be performed in Michigan up to a woman’s tenth week but they aren’t cheap. Clinics like that, the ones that let you pay in cash for shady situations, do the dirty work legitimate doctors don’t want to do, like an abortion for an immigrant without health insurance. That would explain why she needed that much money. Not just to get away and start a new life, but to pay for an abortion at a cash-only clinic.
Now I was really, really sure Barlow wasn’t going to be happy to hear all this.
But what if he did know it already, I wondered to myself? What if he found out about what Katarina was up to, with the pregnancy and with taking his money, and he decided to take matters into his own hands? Maybe the reason she was missing… was because Barlow had made her go missing. Maybe he hired me just to cover his own tracks so that he could say later on he tried everything he could to find her.
That’s twisted and confusing logic, but that’s the way humans are. Twisted, and confusing. It also wouldn’t be the first time a client of mine had done something illegal.
Now I had a suspect. I just wish I didn’t.
“I have to go,” I told Louise abruptly. The paper crinkles under me as I jump down from the table and grab my satchel. “Sorry. Um. Thanks for everything. Maybe another time?”
“But… but… your pregnancy?” Louise looks completely baffled behind her glasses.
“False alarm,” I tell her. “Probably just gas. Yeah. Just the spicy burrito I had last night. Thanks for everything. Bye!”
I made sure to get out of the exam room, and out of the medical clinic, before anyone else could ask me anything. I was starting to run out of excuses.
Things that suck about being a Private Investigator, number thirty-three.
Your client isn’t always completely, one-hundred-percent truthful with y
ou.
Barlow Michaelson had hired me and paid me with a large enough check that most people would have looked the other way no matter what they found out. I, however, am not most people. Too bad for him.
What I’d discovered so far seemed to be a straight line from start to finish. Barlow finds an incredibly attractive woman online who is both willing to immigrate to the United States and able to make him feel like the most important man in the world. As it turns out she’s only using him to get here but that means she has to—forgive the crude terminology—put out to keep him happy. That leads to a pregnancy that’s going to tie her down to Barlow and, refer back to point one, she’s only using him for his money, so she doesn’t want a child with him. She takes his money, arranges for an abortion.
He finds out.
He’s angry.
He kills her.
Then, he hires me and pays me a lot of money so I won’t look too hard at him.
Well, I’m looking.
It seemed open and shut, but… there were still questions. Who was Carol, and did she have anything to do with this at all? Who was the woman at the bank? Was she Carol? And most of all, where was Katarina now? Even if she was in some shallow grave somewhere, I wanted to know. Barlow could cancel his check for all I cared. I started this, and now I’m going to see it through.
And I was going to do that over a big sandwich and some fries.
It was lunchtime, after all, and I figure calling Barlow to a meeting at the Songbird Café and Deli on Harper Ave would count as a working lunch. I could write it off and include it in my expenses before he fires me from jail. Anyway, people are more likely to confess when they have a full belly. No really, it’s true. They’ve done studies and everything.
The Songbird Café is an out-of-the way place to eat in the middle of a quiet street lined with trees. When most people think of Detroit, they think of the interconnected Renaissance Center skyscrapers on the waterfront, and One Detroit Center, or the extensive urban blight that’s begun to plague the Motor City. The truth is that a lot of Detroit is just like Harper Ave, lined with family-owned businesses and trees and honest-to-God telephone poles. Small town America, big city problems.
I’m already sitting at a small round table meant for two and eating away at a turkey club when Barlow arrives. Through the deli windows I see him park a BMW at the curb and get out, pulling a knee-length men’s coat tighter around himself. The day has turned unexpectedly chilly but that’s not unusual this close to Lake Michigan. When the wind shifts, so does the temperature. Smart Detroit natives know to dress for the unpredictable weather.
He spots me easily enough in the small space inside the eatery, and I wave him over. He’s all smiles, blissfully unaware that I know a lot more than I did when he was at my apartment this morning.
“I didn’t expect to hear from you again so soon,” he says to me, taking the other seat at my table. “You are just as good as they say. Did you find Katarina? Do you know where she is?”
This bastard isn’t even breaking a sweat. I rehearsed what I was going to say all the way over here and ran it through my mind again while I waited for the waitress to bring my food. At first, I was thinking, go slow, start easy, come at it sideways. Work up to the heavy stuff and watch him squirm.
Screw that. I’m more of a head-on kind of girl.
“Your girlfriend was seeing a doctor.”
“What!” There are only four other customers in here, three at tables and one up at the counter getting takeout, and every single one of them turns around to see why Barlow’s shouting. “What doctor? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure, and you need to keep your voice down.” Frankly, at this point, I don’t care if everyone else in Detroit knows his business, but I’d like it if the manager doesn’t call the cops on us because we’re making a scene. That would kind of ruin my plan. “She was seeing a doctor at a place not too far west of Hamtramck. She didn’t tell you about it, because she didn’t want you to know.”
“That’s absurd.” He’s still upset, but at least he isn’t shouting anymore. “Why wouldn’t she want me to know about it? We talked about everything. I have a personal doctor I use for everything and she could have just gone there. Why wouldn’t she tell me about something like that?”
“She was seeing a doctor,” I tell him, “because she was pregnant.”
His angular face starts to slowly turn red, from the neck up. He looks more embarrassed than angry, though. Guilty, maybe?
Then his eyes turned cold.
“She couldn’t be pregnant.”
I take a slow bite of my sandwich, and make sure to chew it really well before I swallow. It’s a good sandwich, worth enjoying, on crusty rye bread and with just the right amount of garlic mayo. As tasty as it is, that’s not why I’m taking it slow. I want him to stew a little bit. Let him realize that he’s not in control here. The girl with the sandwich is the one in control.
“She was pregnant,” I insist, after a sip of my pop. “The nurse at the clinic confirmed it for me.”
His hands on top of the table begin to shake. He folds them together to get them to stop. Before he can say anything more the waitress comes over, pad and pen in her hand, ready to take Barlow’s lunch order.
“Is your friend going to have something too, sweetie?”
“Not now!” Barlow snaps at her. He doesn’t even notice the way she shrinks back from the heat in his voice.
I lift my glass and give the ice inside a shake, giving her a smile. “I’d love a refill if you have the time.”
She takes the half-full drink from me to top it off, stepping wide of Barlow as she does. I’m sure she’s dealt with angry customers before, but I’ll be sure to leave her a big tip to make up for how rude Barlow was to her. This is all going in the expense report he’s going to pay for anyway.
Once the waitress leaves with my glass I continue with my information. “The nurse at the medical center said Katarina was worried about her boyfriend knowing about her pregnancy. Apparently, she was acting like it would be the end of the world for her. Why is that, Barlow?”
Now the color in his face was doing a complete reversal, from hot red to pale white, starting from his hairline down. “You don’t understand,” is what he says to me.
“You’re right, I don’t understand, but I’m starting to. From that clinic she went to another one. A place where she could have an abortion and pay for it in cash.”
The waitress placed my drink down in front of me just as those words come out of my mouth. Yes, I knew she was there. I figure this way we’ll have privacy for the rest of the conversation. No way she’s going to want anything to do with my table now.
“You,” Barlow says again, “don’t understand.”
“Katarina was pregnant, and she wanted an abortion. She didn’t want you to know anything about it. From what you told me when you first hired me, you made sure to know everything Katarina was doing. You brought her to this country, and you kept close tabs on her, because you knew if you didn’t you were going to lose her. Then she got unexpectedly pregnant, and when she chose to end it, she disappears.”
Now his eyes looked up from the gingham tablecloth and focus on mine. “You think I’m the reason she’s gone?”
“I think men do stupid things when they find out the woman in their life doesn’t want their child. Is that what happened here, Barlow? Did you do something stupid? Was it an accident?”
His jaw drops, and now his hands ball into fists. There were a lot of emotions swirling around in this guy. “You don’t understand. You just don’t understand.”
“What, Barlow? What is it that I don’t understand?”
“She couldn’t be pregnant.”
“She was.”
“It’s not possible. You don’t understand.”
“I know how babies are made, Barlow. What exactly is it that you don’t think I understand? She was trying to leave you, Barlow, and I don’t think a guy like you co
uld handle that. Sounds pretty obvious to me. What is it you think I don’t—”
“We’ve never had sex!” he shouts, and every single head in the place turns our way again. A couple who had been about to enter the diner stop in their tracks, their eyes wide, and then they turn right around again and walk out, making the bell over the door ring twice.
Well that was… unexpected. I clear my throat and try to pick up the pieces of my carefully mapped out conversation but I had no idea where to go with that truth bomb.
Yeah. I’m going to have to leave the waitress one hell of a tip after this.
Chapter Six
I took the rest of my sandwich to go after that.
I’ve never left anyone a fifty percent tip in my life, but under the circumstances I figured it was a good idea this time. I eat there quite a bit and I’d like to be able to show my face there again. They have fantastic paczkis.
With Barlow right beside me we walked down to a little park up the street that’s really nothing more than a couple of benches and an area of mown grass on an empty lot. There’s a half-dead willow tree planted in the middle of the space that rustles in the breeze, but I almost think it grew there by accident.
We sat side by side on one of the benches, and when he didn’t say anything right away, I decided to start.
“All right.” I dropped my to-go bag with the deli’s logo on it to the ground next to my satchel beside the bench. “Do you want to explain yourself to me? Your girlfriend’s pregnant, but you haven’t had sex with her? Unless her name’s Mary that just doesn’t happen.”
Barlow leans his elbows on his knees, his long coat flapping around his shins. If I looked up ‘miserable’ in the dictionary I’m pretty sure this would be the picture next to the description. “If you’re telling me Katarina was pregnant, then I’ll have to believe you. You’re the detective. I can even believe that she didn’t want me to find out about it, because yes, it would have made me angry. There’s no way that baby was mine.”