The Decorator Who Knew Too Much

by Diane Vallere

  But Emma had said she saw him throw the bag on the passenger-side seat of the truck. That meant the bag hadn’t fallen out of the truck. If anything, it had been thrown. Whoever had expected Dr. Hall to show up with those had been disappointed. I had a feeling that meeting hadn’t gone as planned.

  We had to tell the cops. That likely meant Buchanan. What if he was involved?

  The last thing Tex had said to me when we spoke was to leave Buchanan to him. But Tex was thirteen hundred miles away. His job was to protect the people of Lakewood, Texas, not me. Besides, I didn’t know how to explain to Hudson that I’d called Tex for help. If Buchanan showed up at the Middletons’ front door, then we were going to have to deal with that head on.

  There was a knock at the door. I stiffened. I’d expected sirens to announce the approach of the police, but it seemed this wasn’t that kind of call. If Buchanan had taken the call, and he was crooked, would he be able to keep the call under wraps and come here by himself?

  Ernie turned to his wife. “Eunice, get the door.” He bent down and shoveled the bags of pills back into the duffel bag.

  “Don’t touch them,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know where those pills came from, but the police are probably going to consider that entire bag as evidence. There might be fingerprints on it.”

  Ernie looked like he’d been hit with a bug zapper. He dropped one of the bags and it split open on contact with the floor, scattering oblong cornflower blue tablets under the sofa and chair. A couple rolled toward the toe of my sneaker. I bent down and picked one up. On one side, it said OC. The other had “160” printed on it.

  Only a person who’d been on prescription painkillers would immediately recognize the OC as OxyContin.

  It was what I’d been prescribed after the skiing accident that tore my ACL, but in a dose much lower than this. I’d written off my reaction to the drug—nausea, vomiting, and dizziness—to what was arguably a nervous breakdown brought on by emotional stress, and as soon as my body could tolerate the pain, had switched to Ibuprofen and flushed the Oxy tablets down the toilet. Since then, the news had reported on drug-related deaths linked to OxyContin. The base of the drug was an opioid, and it seemed there were people out there who crushed, snorted, and injected the pill as a way to get high. But what struck me the most about the blue pill between my fingertips was the number 160. I’d been prescribed 80mg, a dosage that had been discontinued in 2011 because of the dangerous risk of misuse. Just one of those pills had incapacitated me with side effects. What would double that amount do?

  “Ms. Night, Mr. James,” said Detective Drayton.

  “Detective Drayton,” Hudson said. “I think there’s been a mix-up.”

  “No, wait. I don’t think so.” They all turned to me, and I turned to Hudson. “Until today we had no proof our accident by the hairpin turn had anything to do with Dr. Hall’s death. But now we do. This duffel bag, the pills, they connect everything. We have to tell them.”

  “Tell us what?” Ernie asked.

  “Ms. Night, are you suggesting you’ve been withholding evidence?” Detective Drayton asked.

  “The only person here who’s been withholding evidence is Ernie Middleton.”

  Everybody in the room turned to face the old man. He clutched the now-empty duffel bag to his chest and looked at the rest of us. Eunice stepped closer to him but slightly behind, as if they were Bonnie and Clyde and we were the FBI. Detective Drayton looked back at me. He seemed to be waiting for an explanation.

  “This past Monday when Hudson and I arrived in Palm Springs, our car was almost run off the road on the way to his sister’s house. The Jeep flipped over and Hudson was trapped inside it. At the time we thought it was a freak accident.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to report the accident to the police?” Drayton asked.

  “Why would we? Nobody was hurt. The other driver didn’t stick around, so we had no leads on how to find him. The Jeep is part of Jimmy’s fleet and any damage to it will be covered by insurance. We were eager to get to Hudson’s sister’s house, which was less than a mile from where the Jeep tipped over.”

  “Why’d you come back here today?”

  I snuck a quick glance at Hudson. So far everything I’d said had been true, but I was about to veer off into grayer territory. “I think something fell out of my overnight bag when the car tipped, so we came back here to look around and see if we could find it.”

  The vague nature of “overnight bag” didn’t have the same effect on Detective Drayton as it had on Ernie when we’d first arrived. “What was missing?” the detective asked.

  “Her dope,” Ernie spoke up. He picked up a plastic bag of pills and shook them at me. “She’s some kind of dealer. Look at this stuff. Palm Springs is a clean town. We don’t need people like her bringing big-city crime with them.”

  The humor of a blonde, blue-eyed, middle-aged woman in vintage green and white golf clothes being at the head of a prescription drug scandal was lost on everybody in the room.

  “Detective Drayton,” I said calmly. “Ernie Middleton told us he found that duffel bag after his wife saw a car tip in front of his house last Monday. That tipped car was ours. He mistakenly thought the duffel belonged to us, but instead of either coming to our aid or contacting you to turn in the evidence, he kept the bag in his garage. Before you arrived here, he admitted to having looked at the contents. Doesn’t it seem odd that someone would find a duffel bag filled with prescription drugs and not call the police?”

  “Ernie, honestly. She’s right. What did you think you were going to do with those pills?” Eunice asked.

  “They were blue. At first I thought they were—you know—”

  “Ernie!” Eunice blushed a deep shade of red. She turned around and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Ernie shook his head. “I know now they’re not Viagra, but I didn’t then. Seemed like I was doing the world a favor by keeping them off the street.”

  Detective Drayton cleared his throat and appeared to fight a smile. “Mr. Middleton, why don’t you go check on your wife while I talk to Ms. Night.”

  “Good idea.” Ernie shuffled into the kitchen after Eunice.

  Detective Drayton turned to Hudson. “Mr. James, I wonder if you could give Ms. Night and me a couple of minutes alone. I’d like to talk to you too when we’re done.”

  Hudson nodded. “I’ll move the car into the driveway,” he said, and then left.

  It had been a long day and I was tired. I sank down onto the sofa and rubbed my kneecap. The detective sat in the tweed chair across from me.

  “I talked to your friend Captain Allen this morning. He says you have some concerns regarding Officer Buchanan.”

  It was one thing to talk over my concerns with Tex, but another to know my possibly unfounded suspicions and residual distrust of men in uniform could cost someone his career. An overwhelming sense of guilt washed over me.

  “Detective, I had a confidential conversation with a friend this morning, one in which I might have led him to believe things about Officer Buchanan that were the product of my imagination. I hope your conversation with Captain Allen was about something more substantial than that.”

  “This investigation would be in a whole different place if Officer Buchanan had found the body the day you first saw it in the river.”

  “The victim was a psychiatrist named Dr. Hall, wasn’t he?” I asked. Drayton nodded. “Hudson and I didn’t have reason to believe he was the person driving the car that drove us off the road until recently.”

  “What makes you think he was?”

  It wasn’t the time for theorizing. I took a minute to review what I knew for sure. So many of my facts came from Emma’s story. I wanted to tell the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt her. “Hudson’s sister lives about half a mile past the bend in the roa
d. She said she saw the doctor get into the truck with two olive-green duffel bags.” I picked up the now empty bag. “Mr. Middleton found this after the accident.” I bent over and scooped up a couple of the scattered blue pills. “Do you know what these are?”

  Drayton picked one of the pills up from my open palm. He held it up and looked at one side, and then looked at the back. “I have an idea. Do you?”

  “I think it’s OxyContin. I was prescribed 80 mg when I injured my knee. My doctor said it was the strongest thing he could give me.”

  “You still have a prescription?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not a fan of drugs in most circumstances, and I had a bad reaction to that one. My knee still bothers me from time to time, but physical therapy has done wonders. I’ll never feel like I felt before the accident, but I prefer a slight amount of pain to the side effects of the drug.” I flexed my knee, stretching my leg out in front of me, and then relaxed it.

  “Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who don’t feel the same way,” he said. “That’s why this country has a growing drug problem.”

  “I’m pretty sure Dr. Hall was on the wrong side of the drug war. See the OC on the tablet?” I leaned forward and pointed to the surface of the small round pill. “A few years ago, after all the OxyContin deaths were being reported, the FDA ruled to change the formula. The new version has an ‘OP’ instead of an ‘OC.’ People used to crush the tablets, inhale them, or inject them.” Involuntarily, I shuddered. Whether it was the cool air from the Middletons’ AC on my formerly hot, sweaty skin, or the memory of a long needle injecting me with medication that kept me in a cloudy state while I’d recovered, I couldn’t say.

  “You know a lot about it.”

  “The stories on the news started popping up shortly after my accident. I was already on the fence about taking it, but that sealed the deal. When I went in for a checkup, my doctor told me about the change in formulation and said he’d write me a new prescription, but I turned him down. I went home and flushed my pills the same day.” I looked up at Drayton. “If I’m right about these pills, they’re twice the dosage of what I was given. My doctor said mine was the strongest he could prescribe. How’s that possible?”

  Drayton didn’t answer. He glanced at the plastic bags bulging with pills stacked on the sofa. He pursed his lips and nodded his head, though I didn’t think it had anything to do with what I’d said. He picked up one of the plastic bags and stared at it. “How many pills you think are in here?”

  “A lot,” I said. “My prescription was for a month’s supply. A hundred and twenty pills, taken four times a day. My pill vial was about the size of a roll of quarters.” I paused. “I don’t know how many pills are in that bag, but it’s a lot more than necessary for treating a torn ACL.”

  Drayton pulled out his phone and made a call. “Let me talk to somebody on the Narcotics Task Force,” he said. “I’ll hold.” A few seconds later, Drayton spoke again. “I’m looking at five large bags of pills found on the side of the road. Blue. Oblong. One side says OC, the other says 160. How many?” He looked at me and held the phone away from his head. “A hundred and twenty pills takes up about the size of a roll of quarters, you said?”

  “Somewhere around there,” I answered.

  He stared at the bag for a few seconds and then put the phone back to his ear. “I’d estimate about ten thou per bag. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. You got it.”

  He hung up and looked at the bag for a few seconds, and then back at me. “I don’t want to be presumptuous, but looks like we found ourselves a motive.”

  “You think Dr. Hall was part of a drug ring?”

  “Looks that way. No confirmation yet, but Narcotics said the same thing you did. OxyContin 160. It was only on the market for about a year back in 2000 before it was discontinued. People have been killed for a lot less than what this is worth.”

  “These are fifteen-year-old pills. Would they still be any good?”

  “FDA doesn’t require companies to test how long their ingredients will last. Opioids don’t expire.”

  “I’m not up on the street value of prescription drugs,” I said. “How much do you think these bags are worth?”

  He looked directly at me and held my stare long enough to make me uncomfortable. “According to my buddy, what we’re looking at would bring in close to two million dollars.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Two million dollars for a couple of bags of pills?” I asked.

  He handed me one of the full bags. “Do the math. About ten thousand pills in there, don’t you think?”

  I rested the bag on my thighs and used my fingers to approximate the width of the pill bottle I remembered from my own experience, and then slowly slid my fingers along the bottom of the bag and counted. “Probably around there.”

  “Fifty thousand pills.”

  “How do they sell them? By the dozen? By the bag?”

  “By the pill. Forty dollars each.”

  “Two million dollars,” I said, repeating the number his contact had given him.

  He slowly nodded his head. “Depending on the exact count of these pills, it’s going to be close. Biggest drug apprehension in the history of Palm Springs,” he said. “Narco Squad is going to take over the investigation from here, but I’m not going to be happy until I know who killed Dr. Hall. What else can you tell me about the day your car flipped over?”

  I thought back to the day we’d arrived. “I don’t remember much else,” I said honestly. “Truth is, it happened so fast Hudson and I don’t even agree on what kind of a car caused the accident. Hudson is convinced it was a black truck.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  “Dark blue Chevy Avalanche.”

  “That’s pretty specific for something you don’t really remember,” he said. “You think your mind is filling in holes in your memory?”

  “No. I can’t shake the fact that the car that ran us off the road was the same one parked at the river the day I first saw the body.”

  “You think the car belonged to Dr. Hall.”

  “I do. And I don’t think it was an accident that the bag ended up here. I think he tossed the duffel out the window and planned to come back for it. Either way, if he showed up empty handed, somebody might have been angry enough to kill him.” I chewed my lower lip. “Didn’t you ask Officer Buchanan to get the keys from Park and Recreation?”

  “Buchanan talked to one of the park rangers. She said the keys were claimed. Didn’t you notice the truck wasn’t there anymore?”

  “I haven’t been to the river in a while. I just assumed it was still there.” We stared at each other for a second. If I was right about the truck at the river being the same one that drove us off the road, then it was suspicious it was suddenly gone.

  “Ms. Night, we know Dr. Hall was found dead in the water, and we know the drugs in this living room have a street value high enough to be a motive for murder. What we don’t know is how, if at all, those two things are connected.”

  “But you think they are, right?”

  “It’s not about what I think, it’s about what I know.” He stared at the bag of pills in his lap for a few seconds. “But it does seem to me Dr. Hall signed his own death certificate.”

  Based on what Detective Drayton had learned, conversations with Ernie and Eunice Middleton were more about fleshing out details of the pill discovery than a search for accomplices. It became pretty obvious the elderly couple had no idea of the value of the pills in the bag. Whatever Ernie thought would be his big payoff for finding the stash paled in comparison to the danger he’d put himself in by holding onto the bag in the first place.

  A team from the narcotics squad came out to the house while Drayton was finishing up with Hudson. Twice Eunice offered them coffee and cookies. The first time, they politely declined. The second time one o
f the team explained they weren’t there for a social visit. After that, she shuffled around the kitchen, wiping the counters clean of imaginary spots and straightening the dish towels. Ernie drummed his fingers against the dining room table, adding in the occasional grunt just in case we’d forgotten he was there. It was late and I wanted to go back to the motel.

  Scratch that. I didn’t want to go back to the motel. My trip to the mid-century capital of the country had been a bust. Leaving Dallas had been partially about getting away from the setting of the recent string of crimes surrounding me, but at least when I was there, I had my own routine. Sleeping in my own bed, swimming at the local pool, creating proposals for new clients, and reorganizing the showroom of Mad for Mod. Even in the midst of the craziness I’d lived through, I’d been able to find my center. But here, the rug had been pulled out from under me from almost the minute we’d landed.

  I wanted to go home.

  Hudson and Detective Drayton joined us in the kitchen. “I think I have just about everything I need,” Drayton said. He handed each of us a business card with his contact information on it. “If you think of anything else you might have forgotten to tell me today, don’t hesitate to call.”

  Ernie took the card. “Who do I have to talk to about a reward?” he said.

  “Ernie!” Eunice looked mortified.

  “What? They wouldn’t have a case if I hadn’t taken such good care of that evidence.”

  Hudson cleared his throat. I bit my tongue. Detective Drayton spoke. “Mr. Middleton, somebody was murdered over this bag. By keeping it here instead of turning it over to the police, you put yourself and your wife in danger. You might still be in danger.”

  Ernie went pale.

  Drayton stood up straight, thanked the rest of us for our time, and went out front. A few minutes later, the rest of the men followed him out the front door.

  I took Hudson’s hand. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. My normally polite manners had been shot an hour ago. I managed to say goodbye to Eunice and Ernie before beating Hudson to the car.