Chapter 8
“You’re joking,” I said, but, reaching up to feel the swelling around my right eye, I knew she wasn’t. Even without a mirror, I could tell that much.
“I only wish I was, Rafferty.” Hilda stood in the bedroom doorway, hands on hips, and answered me through tight lips. “You even threw the first punch.”
So the pounding in my brain wasn’t just from a few too many drinks the previous night.
I shook my head. Bad idea.
Tried, but couldn’t recall much from the party.
That sort of thing wasn’t my usual scene and I knew Hilda was going to be busy all night schmoozing and getting people to part with their money for a good cause, so I’d loosened my tie soon after we’d arrived and headed straight to the bar.
Least I could do was to offer my respects to the host’s excellent taste in scotch.
I was three or four in and having a good conversation with the hired bartender about whether the Cowboys had a chance at the playoffs. He thought the new coach Johnson could make the difference. I’d always been a Landry man though and, as far as I was concerned, we’d wasted our draft pick because there was not a chance in hell that the Aikman kid was ever going to amount to anything.
“Did I get into it with the bartender?”
That didn’t sound like me; I’m a fan like anyone else but I didn’t care enough to get into a fight about it. At least, I didn’t think I did. And the guy had been serving great scotch, so I would have thought I’d have cut him a break on that fact alone.
“No. In fact, you’re lucky he was there. I think he was the one who stepped in and stopped security beating you up.”
“Wow, I’m sure glad that didn’t happen.” Reached up and fingered my brow. “So I can assume this wasn’t deliberately inflicted. And what do you mean, security? Was I still at the party? Did we go somewhere afterwards?”
“Of course we were still at the party, Rafferty!” Hilda shook her head. “And now I’m going to spend time I don’t have smoothing over your little incident if I ever want to be able to sell anything to David ever again.” She sighed. “I can see it now; he’ll talk me all the way back down on that Louis-the-fifteenth-style Duchesse Brisée en Trois. I’ve been working him up to my price for months, and now I’ll have to take a bath on it. But if I know him, it’s the only thing that’ll get me back on his good side.” She turned on her heel.
I got out of bed and stood. Balance was okay, but the sight in my right eye wasn’t the best. Shucked on a pair of shorts and followed Hilda out to the living room. She stood in the kitchen, sipping coffee and looking sideways at me. I sat on one of the stools, with the counter between us, and asked, “What the hell happened?”
“You really don’t remember?”
Shook my head. Still a bad idea. “It’s all pretty hazy.”
Hilda sighed.
“You took a swing at one of the guests. You’d already had too much to drink and, apparently, you missed.”
“Who was the lucky guy?”
“His name is Richard, he’s one of my best customers, which makes two people I’ve got to make happy this week, but after all that, it turns out you’re the lucky one.”
“How so?”
“Because Richard is in his late seventies and you’d have probably killed him if you’d connected.”
Rafferty’s Rule Two: Be lucky.
Rafferty’s Rule Three: If you’re going to be stupid, see Rule Number Two.
Hilda continued. “By the time I got there, you were mumbling something about a mysterious shooter, Richard’s wife Mildred was screaming to high heaven about the drunk attacking her husband, and one of the security guys had already grabbed you around the neck and was dragging you towards the front door.”
“Why?”
“I assume to stop you swinging at him a second time.”
“No, why would I do something like that?”
“That’s what I’d like to know!” Hilda huffed. She didn’t often huff, but if she put her mind to it, Hilda could have been world-class. “Last night was meant to be where we could all come together and do something good for the victims of Columbus High. And you had to go and act like … like an idiot!”
I got up, walked around the counter and wrapped my arms around Hilda. She kept her back to me and stiffened, but I held tough and leaned my head down into her neck. “I’m sorry, babe,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to make things tough for you.”
She relaxed a little and we stood there for a few minutes before she broke away.
“We can talk more about this tonight, but I’ve really got to go.” She grabbed her bag off the counter. Turned to me, and her eyes were deep and dark. “Will you be okay?”
“I might put a little ice on the eye, but other than that, I’ll be fine. Why?”
“Because last night, on the way home, you kept mumbling about calling Cowboy and Mimi and heading down to Parkland Hospital to ‘do something’ about Bradley Wright.”
Huh.
Conjured up a fuzzy memory of the bartender starting to talk about the kid who’d survived the shooting only to get hit by a bus. It’s been kind of hard to miss, what with being the story in the newspapers all week and, hey you’re a P.I., maybe that’d be the kind of case you’d have, right?
I think I’d managed to stall for a while, but then some old guy—the aforementioned Richard, obviously—wandered up, inserted himself into the one-sided conversation and announced that he was taking it upon himself to establish a foundation for the young lad and his family. “They’ve been through so much, you know,” he’d said from underneath a salt-and-pepper toothbrush mustache.
My thoughts after that point were as clear as scrambled eggs, which made sense, if what Hilda said was true.
“Hil—”
“I don’t have time to get into this now, Rafferty. I was already going to be busy today, and that was before I had to start working damage control.” I sucked in a breath, but she didn’t let me get started. “Not now,” she said. “I’ll fix it. We’ll talk later. Just promise me, you won’t go and do anything stupid.”
I nodded.
“See you tonight.” She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. “I do love you, you big lunk. Sometimes, I don’t know why, but I do.”
I loafed around the house after Hilda left. Thought about heading to the office then dropped that idea like a stolen piece of jewelry, after figuring I could lay around and do nothing just as easily here at home.
Normally didn’t answer the phone at home, too many people trying to sell me stuff I didn’t want or need, but I was at a loose end, so when it rang I thought, what the hell.
“Good morning,” I announced cheerily. “And thank you for calling Acme Surveys. If I could take just ten minutes of your time and ask you a few simple questions—”
“Rafferty?” Ed’s voice was wary. “Sounds like you. You finally decide to leave investigating to the professionals? You know they say that telephone sales can be a very rewarding car—”
“What do you want?”
“Not so chipper, huh?” I stayed quiet, didn’t want to give him any satisfaction. “Okay then, thought you might like to know that we found the gun in the alley near where the Wright kid was hit.”
“You said the gun. Not a gun.”
Professionals, my ass. My instincts were as sharp as ever.
“That’s right, I did. And why I waited a few days to call you. Only took us about twenty minutes to find the piece after you left here the other day. It had been dumped in a hurry, crudely enough that I was surprised it was still there and hadn’t been picked up by someone else taking a shortcut through the … anyway, at that point we had a gun.”
“And?”
“You giving me attitude, Rafferty? I don’t have to be sharing this stuff, you know. I could hang up right now f’rinstance an—”
I sighed. “Give me the rest of it, Ed.”
He paused. Made me wait.
“Ballistics spent the next two days working on it. Confirmed it this morning. The gun we found in the alley was used in the Columbus High shooting. Specifically, it was the gun used to kill the four vics in the hallway. Slugs pulled out of the bodies are a one hundred percent match.”
I leaned back on the sofa.
“He did it, Rafferty. Bradley Wright did it. ’Course we’ll have to match the prints on the gun to Bradley—there’s a couple of nice partials, which should give us everything we need—but that ain’t gonna be a problem. We have to wait until he wakes up to prosecute, but that’s all just details.”
Blew out a breath.
He wasn’t going to get away with it.
He wouldn’t be remembered as the unlucky kid who survived two tragedies on the same day.
Richard from last night could keep spending his money on mustache combs instead of establishing the Wright Family Foundation.
And I might be able to believe that, in the end, I did something to help.
“Rafferty?” Ed said. “Still there?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“I’m not going to tell you that I owe you one. I’m still pissed that you didn’t get in touch with us sooner, but … this is gonna make a big difference. So … thanks.”
“Yeah. What happens now?”
I could hear him shaking his head. “Nuh uh. No chance. This thing has to be locked down tighter than a drum, so I can’t discuss what’s going on behind the scenes. And that now extends to you too. You need to keep this under wraps until we make a formal statement. Got it?”
“What’s the big deal? You’ve got this kid cold, said it yourself.”
“Yeah, we do. But if you think that’s all it takes, you’ve forgotten too much about policing.”
I got it. One of the great luxuries of being a P.I. was not having to run the bureaucratic obstacle course with every suspect. Correctly identifying probable cause, obtaining the right warrant from the right judge, making sure the chain of evidence is unbroken and each step is documented and double-witnessed, processing the suspect correctly, and oops, you missed a step, back to the beginning, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and by the way the perp now walks because of your fuck up.
It was easier for me. There’s the guy. Did he do it? Yeah? Great, now I do what needs to be done. Simple, clean, and you can be in the bar by four.
“Okay, Ed. You can count on me. My thoughts are as a vault. My mouth is locked, and I’ve swallowed the key. I will not divulge any of the DPD’s treasured secrets, no matter how bad the torture is. Unless they tickle me. I’m sorry, Ed, but I can’t help it. Tickling is my Achilles’ heel. Strangely enough, except for my heel, that’s the only place that I’m not tickli—”
I wasn’t sure how long ago Ed had hung up, but I expect it had been some time.
Mooched around the house a bit more. The eye was improving, but I lay on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on it just to make sure.
Lay there and thought more about Bradley Wright and the juggernaut of the justice system about to roll right over the top of him. Did he have any idea what was about to happen? His family? They were all in for a world of hurt once the DPD and the DA got up to full speed. Especially with the pressure coming from the Mayor’s office.
Sat up and flicked on the TV, and I was swamped with the choices of Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, or Geraldo.
Remembered that’s why I didn’t watch more daytime television.
Decided to do something better with my time.
Showered, shaved, dressed, and headed downtown to clap eyes on Bradley Wright.
I wanted to see what he was like before Ed got hold of him.
Chapter 9
I wheeled into the parking area behind Parkland Memorial Hospital, only saw the pothole in the driveway at the very last second. Tensed and expected the steering wheel to cleave my thumb off at the knuckle, but the clown car just wallowed in and out of the pothole without the slightest complaint.
Maybe I should ask Peter to replace the shocks too, while he was elbows deep in the Mustang.
I parked, leaned against the fender for a few minutes with a pipe, looked up at the windows of the Dallas County Crime Lab in the adjacent building. Thought about the M.E. and his staff processing all the young bodies from Columbus, each begging to tell their story.
I was running down the steps, when something heavy hit me in the back. I fell down. My face scraped on the concrete. I wanted to get up and run again. I couldn’t. I felt cold.
There was this enormous boom to my left. I looked around my locker door, and there was this kid with a gun. I turned to run and it felt like a heavy hammer slammed me in the back twice and I got pushed over onto the floor and I looked up and I could see the classroom in front of me so I tried to crawl towards it and I was getting closer to it but at the same time it was getting farther away and then my fingers touched the door frame but it looked like they were at the end of a long tunnel and then the tunnel closed up and I couldn’t see anything.
I was sitting there against the wall, thinking that my mom would be mad about all the blood on my dress. It was hard to breathe, and I could taste pennies in my mouth. Then this boy lifted a big black gun from under his overcoat and pointed it at me. He gave me a creepy smile and I saw a flash, then nothing.
The sun was trying to break up the clouds, doing a poor job of it. The usual clutch of people huddled outside the hospital’s back entrance, enjoying the cold air and a few lungfuls of cigarette smoke before returning to oxygen tanks and beeping monitors.
A larger group milled together near the fence, and I’d have given good odds they were anything but a usual clutch. The painted banners, ‘Get well soon, Bradley’ and ‘We love you, Bradley,’ were a dead give-away of their status as hangers-on for one particular Parkland resident. Candles flickered, and flowers and stuffed toys abounded. It sounded like a small bunch of them were singing.
Michael, Row the Boat Ashore?
Good grief.
None of them had the first idea what had really happened Monday morning. How would they react when the truth finally came out? Would they be embarrassed that they supported a stone-cold killer who almost got away with it?
Found myself almost on my way over to let them in on a few home truths when I noticed a woman in a brown overcoat waving at me from the far side of the Bradley Wright Fan Club. She began to skirt the crowd, headed in my direction and I realized who it was. Gave her a head shake and a wave, bashed the dead ashes out on my boot heel, and headed for the front doors of the hospital.
Surgical ICU looked surprisingly innocent. The usual hustle and bustle of doctors and nurses keeping their charges alive but other than that it was relatively normal.
No cops on guard near any of the beds, no detectives huddled in the waiting room, comparing notes and planning their next investigative move.
Quiet. Ordinary.
Bradley Wright was anything but.
He lay on the bed, pin-cushioned with tubes and monitors. I didn’t know what any of the machines could tell me about his condition, but the fact that the nursing staff weren’t hovering over him or calling for a crash cart seemed to be positive signs for his continued existence.
That said, he was a long way from being the kid who had stood in the alleyway and yelled at me to shoot him.
He was alive and breathing, but there seemed to be no signs of life detectable by anything other than the cacophony of monitors surrounding him. And, based on the extent of bandages wrapped around his head, I figured he wouldn’t be ready to make conversation for a long time.
A woman—red-haired and slim—sat by his bedside. She held his hand in both of hers, looked up at the visible portion of his face, and whispered to him while her thumb circled the back of his pale hand.
I leaned against the wall near the doorway and thought about what the hell I’d expected to achieve by coming here. Especially now that I knew the truth.
He was guilty.
He might survive.
And after a couple of minutes of what passed for introspection, that was still all that I had.
So what?
Ed, Ricco, and everyone else who could get a ride on that train, were headed in Bradley’s direction and they’d all make sure he got what he deserved. The DPD would have the weight and talents of the DA’s office behind them and whatever resistance Bradley and his family could dredge up at the time would be no match.
There wasn’t a version of the coming story where I would play anything more than a forgotten chorus member. Like the kid in the school play who shouts, “Look! Here they come!” and then scampers off-stage so the main characters can deliver their lines, I’d already done my job. I gave Bradley to Ed and now he could take care of the rest.
“Oh, excuse me.”
The harried man hadn’t actually hit me with the large bag he was carrying into the ICU, but he apologized anyway. I tilted my head—Don’t worry about it. He gave me a weak smile and walked to the unoccupied side of Bradley’s bed. Reached across and gave the red-haired woman a rub on her shoulder. She looked up and gave him a tired smile.
He pulled up a chair and sat carefully, maneuvered the bag under the chair between his legs. Said something to the woman. She shook her head. He looked back at me and dribbled another smile. I decided it wasn’t a weak smile, just an extremely tired one.
We all waited.
Phones rang. Machines hissed and beeped. Nurses squeaked their way across the linoleum. Doctors looked at charts and made their pronouncements. Loved ones whispered, cooed, and sobbed.
Nothing was about to change anytime soon, so I went looking for coffee.
I was seated in a bank of hard plastic chairs and sipping at coffee that was truly awful, when the harried man stepped into the hallway. He fed some change into the vending machine and waited for the paper cup to fill.
“You’ll regret it,” I said.
He turned to me. “I’m sorry?”
Wright & Wrong Page 6