Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

  Major League Record

  Home Runs in a Non-Expansion Season

  Without Chemical Assistance

  George Herman (Babe) Ruth—60 (1927)

  “I agree with the sentiment,” Rep said. “Although I think that, technically, alcohol may qualify as a chemical.”

  “Not performance enhancing, however,” Cerv said. “By the way, my retainer is twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “Let’s see if you want the case first,” Rep said. Opening the suit carrier, he displayed the contents for Cerv and explained that they wanted to know about any matches between trace elements on these items and the Quinlan DNA results on the print-out Pendleton had given Rep.

  “Would this have anything to do with that murder out at the Civil War encampment that they’re talking about on the radio?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me,” Rep said.

  “You understand that I’m not one of those experts who asks you the chemist’s equivalent of how much you want two and two to be—right?”

  “I certainly hope not,” Rep said.

  “If any of this stuff turns out to be possible evidence in a murder case, I can’t sit on it. It would have to go to the police as soon as I had hard data.”

  “Of course. How long will it take to get hard data?”

  “That depends,” Cerv said, steepling his fingers thoughtfully. “How long do you want it to take?”

  “About two days.”

  “Not three months? So your guy might be innocent, huh?”

  “Let’s hope we know in two days,” Rep said.

  “I take American Express,” Cerv said.

  Ten minutes later Melissa was steering the Taurus off of State Line Road onto Sixty-Third Street, on the way back to Ward Parkway.

  “So,” she said. “I think checking the library again for traces of Peter and maybe chatting with Chelsea Tuttle if I can arrange to run into her stops well short of playing Nick and Nora. Any other ideas about how to pass the time while we wait for Cerv’s report?”

  “Try to get Peter and Linda a lawyer,” Rep shrugged. “Meet Pignatano. Hook up with Linda when she calls. Nose around the encampment.”

  “Nose around the encampment about what?”

  “Peter. And whether Jedidiah Trevelyan is an even bigger crook than Sergeant Pendleton thinks he is.”

  “Let a man once stoop to button thieving and he will not stick at murder,” Melissa said. “I’ll bet Ben Jonson would have said that if he’d thought of it.”

  “It sounds thin,” Rep sighed, “and Chelsea Tuttle murdering her editor as a negotiating tactic doesn’t seem like a betting proposition either. But maybe the framed document and the medal on Lawrence’s wall mean that he’s into Civil War collectibles. Maybe Trevelyan sold him some that were stolen or inauthentic. Maybe Quinlan found out.”

  Correctly interpreting Melissa’s polite silence as skeptical, Rep started calling criminal lawyers. He had to call all three numbers Melissa had printed out before he reached an attorney who was neither in court nor in conference. Norm Archer said he was pleased to have been recommended, and asked Rep what he could do for him.

  “Not sure yet. You free tomorrow?”

  “Wide open.”

  “Let’s shoot for nine-thirty,” Rep said. “I’ll check with the potential client and call you back if we can’t make it. Meanwhile, what can you tell me about Andy Pignatano?”

  “If it’s an immigration problem or a white collar rap, Andy’s your guy. Medicaid fraud, commercial bribery, visa extension, embezzlement, borrowing money on collateral that doesn’t exist—he’s the man.”

  “How about murder?” Rep asked.

  “The next murder case Andy wins will be the first one,” Archer said. “He likes to associate with a more intellectual class of criminal.”

  “Thanks. Talk to you later.”

  Glancing at his cell phone as he ended the call, Rep noticed that he had messages waiting. Which figured. He’d left the phone at the Damons when he and Peter went to the encampment. He was about to start checking them when Melissa’s phone beeped. She nodded at Rep, for she belonged to the shut-up-and-drive school. Rep switched phones and answered.

  “Rep?” Linda’s voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Doubletree at Thirteenth and Wyandotte.”

  “We’re on our way,” Rep said. He relayed the information to Melissa.

  “The more I think about Quinlan having his own imprint the more it bothers me,” she said as she turned onto the Southwest Trafficway. “An imprint is a kind of consecration, a statement to the trade that you’re a master craftsman—the kind of editor who’d spend four hours getting a single sentence exactly right. Quinlan struck me as a shallow schmoozer with a gift of gab. I can’t see him spending four hours on an entire chapter—especially if he had a hot date scheduled.”

  “Well, you didn’t exactly meet him in a professional context.”

  “I was at the place where he worked attending an event Jackrabbit Press was sponsoring, and for all he knew I was at the core of his target demographic. I would have felt better if he’d tried to dazzle me with Proust instead of pot. But it’s not just that, there’s also Linda’s comments about him. ‘…that stuff about Titian and Giotto…. ’ Cripes. I don’t see how anyone as superficial and self-absorbed as he seemed could care passionately about how well other people write.”

  “Maybe giving him his own imprint was an ego thing—a substitute for paying him another twenty-thousand a year,” Rep said.

  “Even without ego perks you don’t need to pay DeLorean and Jamaican gold wages to get someone talented enough to do what Quinlan was doing,” Melissa said as she pulled into a curving driveway in front of the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Kansas City. “Do you think you can find your way to the encampment from here?”

  “If I get lost I’ll call,” Rep said.

  A quick kiss and Melissa was gone. After a couple of hints from the doorman about getting to I-35 and then I-29 Rep pulled away from the hostelry. He waited until he had actually made it onto I-29 to retrieve the messages waiting for him on his cell phone. This was providential, for one of them, left at eight-twelve that morning, would have distracted him from tasks far less intricate than finding a freeway entrance:

  “Rep,” a strangled voice said, “this is Peter. God, something terrible has happened. I have to talk to you. I don’t know what to do. Oh, hell, you won’t even get this message, and you can’t reach me anyway. I’ll try to get in touch with you, I guess.”

  Chapter 14

  “I don’t know where Quinlan was before you saw him drive up,” Linda told Melissa around the time Rep hit I-35. “I didn’t see him all night long.”

  The strains of Lara’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago intervened. Melissa realized that this was the ring on Linda’s cell phone. The soul of tact, she avoided rolling her eyes.

  Linda leaped at the phone, her face simultaneously glowing with hope and twisted with anxiety. As she listened and spoke, she seemed to deflate.

  “I see,” Linda said. “No, I’m not sure what it’s about. Maybe they’re just checking everybody who was at the encampment. Thanks for calling.”

  “Police doing something?” Melissa asked as Linda ended the call.

  “Yeah. That was Martha Herzog, one of our neighbors. She said two police cars came to our house, some cops went in, and they carried some clothing and other stuff out. Martha is, uh, kind of nosy.”

  “That doesn’t come as a complete surprise,” Melissa said. “Lawrence told Rep that someone claimed to have seen you talking to Quinlan last night. That’s why my first question this morning was whether you’d seen him.”

  “But they couldn’t have—Omigod! They saw you, didn’t they, in that dress? Now I’ve gotten you mixed up in this mess.”

  “Stop it,” Melissa said firmly. “I’m involved by my own choice. Rep found a lawyer who can see y
ou tomorrow. That’s up to you, but I vote yes. The question is, can we find Peter between now and then?”

  “I’m out of ideas on that one.”

  “Rep thought you and I might nose around the library a bit.”

  “Long shot,” Linda said. “Peter’s boss, Diane Klimchock, accosted me there this morning. She said, ‘Linda, has something got the wind up Peter? I have the oddest signal from him. It sounds like he’s gone wobbly on me about testifying for the library expansion funding. We’ve had to delay our post to the committee.’ ”

  “‘Gone wobbly on me’? Linda, you’re making that up.”

  “Swear to God,” Linda said. “Imagine the president of the Charlotte Brontë Society on steroids, and you have Diane.”

  “Well, we’re not going to accomplish anything here, so we might as well give it a try. Let’s go.”

  The room phone rang. Melissa had already gotten to her feet, so she answered it and heard her husband’s voice.

  “I thought you were on your way to the encampment,” she said.

  “I am. I stopped at a gas station mini-mart to call you on a land line.”

  “What’s up?”

  “There was a message on my cell phone from Peter,” Rep said. “When I called back the number he called from, I reached something called the Palm Gardens Hometel. No Peter Damon registered there. I got nothing from them over the phone, but maybe up close and personal would work better.”

  “Mini-mart?” Melissa asked suspiciously. “Rep, are you eating a Hostess Cream-Filled Cupcake?”

  “Yes. I thought panfried sausage patties and cornbread might not be quite unhealthy enough to make me feel really macho.”

  “All right. Linda and I will check out the Palm Gardens Hometel.”

  The logical place for a local phone directory was the bedside table’s top drawer, so what Melissa found there was, naturally, a Gideon Bible. She was rifling the second drawer when Linda came up with a phone book on the closet shelf.

  “3699 Troost,” Linda announced after paging rapidly through it.

  The mild frisson that this address sent through Melissa and Linda marked them as Kansas City natives. The coasts stereotype KC as a placid bastion of Midwestern blandness and complacent middle class values. The city has always had a raffish facet to its personality, though, like an honor student sneaking a Marlboro on her way home from choir practice. Postwar reformers had tamed a Roaring Twenties/Depression-era legacy of genteel corruption, Mafia wars, and casual vice, but diluted vestiges of that rascality survived—and one of the places to find them in the comfortable city of leafy boulevards and bubbling fountains where Melissa and Linda had come of age was the midtown stretch of Troost.

  In between the Missouri River on the north and ranch-house subdivisions hundreds of long blocks south, Troost runs past job shops, apartment buildings, shopping strips, martial arts schools, neighborhood bars, local drug stores, chain groceries, and working class residential areas. It separates the campuses of two universities, and borders churches from most Christian sects. But it also goes by fabled mob haunts, pornographic book stores, night spots featuring female impersonators, and the odd bordello. A 3699 address unambiguously evoked the seedier end of this gamut.

  “Let’s go,” Melissa said briskly—briskly, because she was afraid that if she stopped to think about it she’d come up with a dozen very good reasons to check out the Jackson County Public Library instead.

  “Coming,” Linda said, sounding a lot braver than she looked.

  A cab dropped them twelve minutes later under a plastic purple palm tree decorating the face of an aqua-colored overhang that shielded the main entrance of the Palm Gardens Hometel. After Melissa had paid the fare, Linda nudged her and pointed to a tiny parking lot abutting the building. The Damons’ lemon-yellow Volkswagen Beetle sat there forlornly, looking like it was afraid that PT Cruisers and Monte Carlos were about to break its glasses and steal its lunch money.

  A raucous bell clanged as Linda and Melissa walked into the hotel. Without looking up from the issue of Maxim he was paging through, a desk clerk with a wispy, minuscule goatee said mechanically, “Forty-nine-ninety-five a night, twelve dollars an hour.”

  “We’re looking for someone,” Melissa said as firmly as she could.

  The desk clerk glanced up and frowned as he tried to focus on the women in the dim lobby light. He turned his head to be sure they could see his greasy rattail, which he apparently regarded as a tonsorial feature of considerable distinction.

  “Good afternoon, ladies.”

  “I’m looking for my husband,” Linda said as they reached the desk.

  “Namely?”

  “Peter Damon, but he apparently isn’t registered under that name.”

  “That will happen,” the man said.

  “He made a phone call from here this morning,” Melissa said.

  “They will do that.”

  “His car is parked outside,” Linda said. “He’s just under six feet tall with light brown hair and kind of big ears. He would have come here sometime since midnight.”

  The man spread his arms and offered a smirk that said, Are you kidding?

  Another man, taller than the desk clerk and with his more abundant but equally greasy black hair conventionally coiffed, came out from behind a partition in back of the desk.

  “Moaner?” he asked the desk clerk.

  “Could be,” the desk clerk said.

  “Local talent?” the man asked.

  “These two?” the desk clerk demanded.

  “No, you putz.” The man punctuated this explanation with a jab at the desk clerk’s bicep. “The one who checked out of the moaner’s room.”

  “Her? No way.”

  “Come with me,” the man said to Linda and Melissa, his tone suggesting that he could just barely stand talking to them. He whipped out from behind the desk and headed for a stairway toward the back of the lobby, with Linda and Melissa scurrying in his wake. They followed him to the second floor and then down a long corridor with turquoise doors and tapioca colored walls to Room 226. He unlocked the door, opened it, and stood to one side.

  “That him?” he asked.

  “Peter!” Linda screamed. She pelted into the room and threw herself on the man twisted in the bedsheet—singular, for there was only one. His pants and underpants were bunched around his ankles, and his shirt was open.

  “Clean him up and get him out of here,” the man said, and stalked off.

  Outside of horror movies, corpses don’t groan or vomit. Peter was doing the first and had done the second quite recently, from the smell of things, so Melissa surmised that he wasn’t dead. While Linda ministered to her suffering husband, Melissa looked around.

  She could smell stale cigarette smoke, tinctured with something non-tobacco that she couldn’t place. It wasn’t pot—less sweet, with a little more tang. Two butts in an ashtray on the window sill had what looked like standard brown filters, but she couldn’t see a brand. She picked up two styrofoam cups from the bedside table and sniffed them. They smelled faintly of orange juice. Her post-undergraduate experience with hard liquor consisted of five or six cocktails a year, but she thought she could have identified the whiff left by enough scotch or bourbon to coldcock Peter. Was it vodka that didn’t have any odor? Maybe that was the answer, but she was dubious.

  “He hardly drinks at all,” Linda said, her voice shaking. “I don’t know how he even choked down enough to get himself in this state.”

  “I don’t think he’s drunk,” Melissa said.

  “Then what happened to him?”

  “I don’t know.” This struck Melissa as a more constructive answer than speculation about attempted suicide, and had the additional virtue of being true. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “St. Luke’s is less than a mile away. Maybe we should just drive him to the emergency room.”

  “I’m not sure we could even get him down
the stairs,” Melissa said as she dialed nine-one-one. And I’m not sure he has time for a couple of amateurs to try driving him a mile.

  A calm and reassuring voice answered Melissa’s call. Following the voice’s instructions, she identified herself and said where she was.

  “And what is the problem?”

  “A man here is near comatose, having some kind of a very bad physical reaction to something he ingested. Nausea, convulsions, loss of voluntary bodily functions, incoherence. Slipping in and out of consciousness.”

  “Drugs?” the voice asked.

  “Don’t know. I just got here.” Melissa decided she’d have to punch the story up if she were going to make anything happen fast, so she began drawing on a smorgasbord of symptoms snatched willy-nilly from her broad exposure to mystery fiction. “Pulse rate is very low. Signs of shock. Lips turning blue. Eyeballs show white under his eyelids. We need an ambulance right away.”

  “Dispatching,” the voice said.

  Scarcely ten minutes later, Peter was strapped to a gurney on his way out of the Palm Gardens Hometel with Linda walking stricken beside him. Melissa had Linda’s keys and Peter’s shoes. She had given the two cups and, just for luck, the cigarette butts to one of the ambulance attendants.

  “Can you take care of…things?” Linda asked over her shoulder.

  “Of course. You stay with Peter. I’ll get the car and find you at the hospital as soon as I can.”

  “Ah, excuse me, Miss, ah, excuse me,” the desk clerk said to Melissa.

  Melissa froze in place. The sound of the voice, all by itself, infuriated her. Her last real fist fight had been a two-punch affair in U-Twelve soccer more than twenty years before, but she was wondering if she had one good knuckle-busting swing left in her right arm.

  “What is it?” she demanded.

  “Well. Ah, technically, check-out time is twelve noon. So, ah, that would be another forty-nine-ninety-five.”