1 A Dose of Death

by Gin Jones

Between the pills she'd taken and the effort it had taken to get away from Pierce, she was exhausted and more irritable than usual. Whoever was outside, answering the door would not be a good idea. She'd bashed one person's head today, and it wouldn't take much to tempt her to do it again. The police might start to wonder if maybe she was as crazy as Pierce claimed if she thumped all of her unannounced visitors with her cane.

  Helen ignored the knocking at the door, until finally a woman's voice spoke. "Helen? Tate told me you were home. I need to talk to you about Pierce and the nursing home fraud."

  She recognized the voice. Judge Nolan.

  It figured, Helen thought. Now that the judge wanted to listen, Helen didn't feel like talking, and considering the two painkillers she'd taken, she wasn't even sure how much longer she'd be able to string together a coherent sentence.

  "It's late," Helen said through the closed door. "I'll stop by the courthouse tomorrow. Just tell me when would be a good time."

  "I'll be tied up all day. I've got a major trial starting in the morning," the judge said. "It's embarrassing enough that there was fraud at the nursing home while I was on the board of directors. I'd like to be able to show that as soon as I realized what was going on I took quick action."

  Helen was feeling a little lightheaded from the first painkiller, but it should be another half hour or so before the second one really kicked in. She could tell the judge what little she knew before then.

  Helen opened the door. As the judge came inside, Helen noticed that she was wearing sneakers. A haute-couture suit, trendy necklace and sneakers. She'd been wearing designer pumps in her previous visit to the cottage, even when she'd been walking around the yard. Why was she wearing sneakers?

  The sound of the door closing and the deadbolt turning brought her back to the present. Her mind was wandering, she realized. She didn't have time for anything except telling the judge about Pierce.

  "Come on over to the kitchen island and have a seat. All my guests sit there. I prefer the recliner, unless I'm working at my desk. I've been making spreadsheets recently. You can learn a lot from spreadsheets."

  Helen glanced at the judge, to make sure the woman was following her across the room. The judge was right beside her, but there was something wrong about the judge. More likely, Helen thought, there was something wrong with herself, and she was projecting onto her visitor.

  For one thing, Helen realized her words had been rambling. She didn't normally chatter about nothing. Probably the painkillers messing with her head. She forced herself to stop talking, except it didn't stop her thoughts. The judge wanted to know about Pierce. Who had admitted to the fraud but had refused to confess to killing Melissa. It was almost as if he hadn't actually done it. Which meant someone else had killed the nurse.

  Helen slowed and then stopped in the middle of the room, vaguely aware that she'd lost her train of thought. She was supposed to be talking about Pierce. The police had him. He wasn't bothering her any longer. The judge was here now. Wearing sneakers. Ugly, beat-up sneakers that should have been thrown out a long time ago. They were so old, they really were sneakers and not running shoes. Everything else the judge wore was new and fancy. Designer suit. Silk blouse. Necklace that was as much expensive art as jewelry. All pristine. Except the sneakers.

  Before Helen could bring her wandering thoughts back under control, the judge said, "You don't look so good. Why don't you have a seat? I'll get you a glass of water."

  Helen was closer to the recliner than the kitchen, and she really didn't think she could stand much longer. She barely had enough energy to drop onto the chair. The pills seemed to magnify her usual lupus fatigue, sapping her strength.

  The judge crossed the room to the kitchen and used a dish towel to open the cabinet under the sink. "I understand Pierce confessed to his involvement with insurance fraud. What, exactly, did he tell you?"

  Pierce. Right. That was why the judge was here. Helen needed to explain everything she knew about Pierce, and then the judge would leave.

  "The fraud started two years ago, but Melissa didn't get involved until later. That's why he killed her. Except he didn't kill her." Wait. That wasn't right. Pierce had to have killed Melissa. Why would Helen even doubt it? Stupid painkillers. They were confusing her. She needed to explain Pierce's actions more clearly. "Pierce used Melissa to ramp up the fraud. She had the inside information that made the billing seem legit."

  "That's what I thought." Judge Nolan had pulled on a pair of yellow latex dishwashing gloves, and was now systematically investigating the contents of the kitchen cabinets. In the second one, she found the beverage glasses. She took one down and began filling it from the faucet. "There's a good chance that neither Jack nor Pierce will be convicted for Melissa's death. Someone needs to be punished."

  "Exactly. Otherwise, the police will do a better investigation, and they'll identify the real killer." Her brain finally caught up to itself, but her body wasn't fast enough to do anything but sit where she was. "They'll identify you."

  "You're not as silly as you look." The judge kept poking through Helen's cabinets, seemingly unconcerned about having been accused of murder.

  Helen tried to concentrate, but her head was spinning. Maybe she was actually asleep, and this was all just a weird dream. The idea of the judge having killed Melissa was as surreal as the methodical way the judge was investigating Helen's cabinets.

  What on earth did the judge want? Helen clearly remembered the woman saying she'd come here to talk about the nursing home fraud. Except no one official knew about the fraud yet. The police had taken Pierce away for assault, not for the fraud.

  Helen knew she should keep her mouth shut, but apparently the painkillers were in charge of her actions now. "How'd you find out about the fraud, anyway?"

  "My mother told me." The judge paused in her search of the cabinets to turn and face Helen. "Can you believe it? I only volunteered for the board so I could be sure my mother was in a good place, and my being there didn't help at all. Pierce was still cheating Mom, right under my nose. He'd been billing for physical therapy she never received, and she didn't tell me for months, because she didn't want to worry me."

  "Family can be like that," Helen said. "I'd have been furious if someone had been taking advantage of my nieces. It wouldn't be enough just to have her arrested. I'd want to confront her directly. Like you did with Melissa."

  Judge Nolan nodded and went back to opening and closing cabinet doors. "It wasn't going to be easy for anyone, once the police were involved and the story hit the news and the grapevine. I was going to get a lot of criticism for not preventing the fraud. I needed to know the truth. Beyond a reasonable doubt."

  Helen's nod of agreement turned into a whole series of nods. She had to hold her head to make it stop bobbing. "You tried to convince Melissa to turn herself in, and when she refused you got angry and murdered her."

  "Not murder," the judge corrected sharply. It was self-defense."

  "Either way," Helen said, "Melissa still ended up dead."

  "It matters to me," the judge said, seeming distracted by whatever she'd just found in a drawer. "You need to understand that I didn't mean to kill her. It wasn't my fault. I was on the way to her house, and we would have passed each other on the road, except her car had broken down, and she was waiting for the tow truck. I stopped and offered her a ride, so we could talk about the fraud."

  "She asked you to bring her here?"

  "Said she had found your walking cane and wanted to return it to you."

  "She was lying," Helen said.

  "I'm not surprised." The judge paused in her search of the drawer in front of her. "She lied about everything, didn't she? She certainly denied that she and Pierce had done anything wrong. I've been on the bench long enough that I've seen much better liars than she was. Eventually, they'll trip themselves up."

  "Literally?" Helen said. "Melissa tripped and hit her head? But there wasn't anything near her body that could have d
one that much damage."

  "It would have been so much better if that's what happened," the judge said wistfully. "Melissa did kill herself, in a sense, but not by tripping. She just kept lying about what she and Pierce had done and why she was at the cottage. When her key didn't work on your front door, I thought she'd break down and admit everything, but she came up with another story. I've learned to be patient, so I pretended to believe her. She wanted us to go around to the back deck, where she said there was a hidden spare key. I kept trying to reason with her, telling her she had to admit what she'd done and turn herself in and cooperate with the case against Pierce. And that's when she spun around with your cane raised to hit me. She missed, and it must have surprised her, because she hesitated just long enough for me to grab it away from her."

  "You must have been pretty certain you were right about her at that point," Helen said. "Why didn't you just leave then?"

  "I tried. I was already a few feet away from her when she screamed and started running at me. She was wearing her nursing clogs, much better suited for your lawn, and I was in my pumps. There was no way I could outrun her, not without more of a head start. So I spun around, intending to shove her to the ground just to slow her down. I'd forgotten about the cane, but my subconscious hadn't, and the next thing I knew she was on the ground, dead, with her blood all over the cane and my suit."

  "Why didn't you just call the police and tell them what happened?"

  "I meant to," Judge Nolan said. "But I needed to clear some things up at my office first, so I changed into a spare suit that I always keep in the car for emergencies, bagged up the bloody clothes, and went to the courthouse. Then I lost track of time until one of the court officers came into my chambers to tell me that Melissa's body had been found, and the police suspected it was the work of the Remote Control Burglar. I thought it might be best if they continued to think that. After all, it was self-defense, so I hadn't committed murder, but if everyone knew that I'd killed someone, it would have made it more difficult to do my job, presiding over criminal trials."

  The judge seemed to feel the need to justify her actions, much like Helen's ex had never been able to accept blame for any problems in their personal lives, without first trying to split legal hairs to prove he was right, even when he knew he was wrong. Especially when he knew he was wrong. The habit had always annoyed her, but it might actually come in handy right now. As the judge laid out the detailed argument in her defense, the fog in Helen's head was beginning to dissipate. Not enough, but it might lift enough for her to escape if she could just keep the judge explaining her motives. "So you were the one who tipped the police to Jack's role in the remote control burglaries."

  "I saw him with you at the nursing home, and getting him arrested seemed like a good way to distract you from investigating Melissa's death. His family has quite a reputation here in town, so the police were more than happy to follow up on the tip."

  "You'd let an innocent man go to jail for you?"

  "I'm telling you, I didn't do anything wrong, and everything would have worked out just fine if you hadn't meddled. I never thought Jack was really the Remote Control Burglar. I figured the real one wasn't stupid enough to stick around and get caught after all these years," she said. "Whatever game he'd been playing might have had its rewards up until recently, but it couldn't possibly have been worth the risk of being implicated in a murder. If he'd had any sense at all, he would have destroyed any evidence that could connect him to the burglaries and left town for good measure, starting fresh somewhere else, and the police would have had to let Jack go eventually for lack of evidence But no. The burglar had to be a Clary, and Clarys never leave Wharton for more than a few hours at a time. Compared to Jack's cousins, he's practically a world traveler, since he drives all the way to the airport on a regular basis, but even he would never completely relocate."

  "You can still turn yourself in now."

  "No, I can't." She had one of Helen's prescription bottles in her hand. The one containing narcotic painkillers. Judge Nolan poured all of them into her palm and stared at them.

  Helen didn't know for sure how many would constitute a lethal dose, but she'd only taken four or five, including the two this evening, since filling the prescription. There had to be more than enough left for the judge to kill herself with. The only question was how quickly the pills would act. Would there be time to get help after the judge took the pills and passed out? She couldn't take the chance that it would be too late then.

  Could she knock the pills out of the judge's hand? Helen wasn't even sure she could stand up. She tried, as she spoke. "You don't need to do this. Everyone respects you. They'll understand that it was self-defense."

  "They couldn't have impeached me for anything I did in self-defense, but they could get me now for the cover-up. I'm not ready to retire, and I probably never will be. Melissa and I had that much in common, our dedication to our jobs. Except I do important and useful work, while she was hurting people." She closed her hand around the pills and looked up, resolute once again. "The citizens of Wharton need me."

  "They do need you," Helen said as she finally managed to push herself onto her feet to stand somewhat unsteadily. "You can't take those pills."

  "The pills aren't for me," Judge Nolan said, advancing on Helen. "They're for you."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  "I don't need any more painkillers right now."

  The judge smiled. "You already took some? Good. That should confuse the autopsy blood work sufficiently that they won't know the exact time of the overdose. I doubt anyone would think to question me about your death, but if they do, I was in the courtroom most of the last few hours. I have at least a dozen witnesses to my being there whenever you took the first pills."

  Helen looked for her cane. It had stopped Pierce, and it would stop the judge. Except it wasn't where it should be, next to the front door. Then she remembered she'd taken it into the bathroom to clean off the blood and had left it there. It was too late to retrieve it now, with the judge between Helen and the hallway.

  Helen took an involuntary step backwards and bumped against the recliner. It was enough to knock her off balance, and she fell into the chair. There was no time to gather her strength to try standing again. She reached surreptitiously for the cell phone in her pocket.

  The judge leaned over her. "Just relax and take your pills like a good little patient."

  Helen clamped her mouth shut and shook her head.

  "Don't be difficult," Judge Nolan said. "I've done this a time or two before, you know."

  Helen's eyes widened.

  "Oh, don't look so horrified," Judge Nolan said. "I didn't kill anyone. Except Melissa, of course, and that was an accident. I just meant that I've given pills to a reluctant patient before. My mother's been resisting her heart medications for the last few months, on the bad days when she can't remember who I am."

  The judge pinched Helen's nose, not hard enough to leave a bruise, but enough to make it impossible to breathe without opening her mouth. Helen resisted the automatic urge to do just that. If she was going to use her phone, though, she had to do it now while the judge's hands were both occupied. Helen hadn't had this particular model of phone for long enough to dial it without looking, so she raised it just enough to be able to glance down at the numbers.

  She only managed to hit the 9 before the judge released Helen's nose to grab the phone. Judge Nolan erased the number and then tossed the phone across the room. "What a pity you dropped your phone and broke it before you took the pills. If you'd had it, you might have been able to call for help when you realized you'd overdosed."

  "No one who knows me will believe I overdosed," Helen said before the judge leaned over her again.

  "But that's the beauty of the situation," Judge Nolan said. "The people who know you won't be directly involved in the investigation. And no one here knows you. Not like they know me. I'm sure I can drop a few hints about your instability, and no one wil
l question anything. Now, open wide."

  Helen clamped her mouth shut, and the judge pinched Helen's nose again.

  Helen tried to push up out of the chair, but the judge just used the fist holding the pills to press down on Helen's shoulder, keeping her in place. Frustrated, and feeling a little faint from lack of oxygen, Helen struck out with her hands, pushing at the judge, who grunted in surprise but didn't move more than an inch or so.

  Helen needed to do something more decisive than pushing the judge back inch by inch; she needed to incapacitate her, at least briefly. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than a back-and-forth shoving match that Helen couldn't win. She had to aim for a more sensitive spot, one that would hurt enough to give the woman pause. The face or ears, perhaps.

  Helen struck out again, this time aiming for the woman's head, but, seated as she was in the depths of the recliner with Judge Nolan leaning over her, she couldn't reach that high. Her fingers brushed the chunky stones of the judge's necklace.

  How strong was that necklace, anyway? Helen had read once about a woman who was inadvertently strangled by her own necklace, although that one had been made of leather. The judge's necklace wasn't that heavy, but its stones were strung on a thick silk cord, which looked more than capable of serving as a garrote. The weakest element might be where the two ends connected, but usually one of the hallmarks of pricey jewelry was the strength of its clasp. It was certainly worth a try if the judge really intended to kill her.

  The judge had the advantage of having been able to breathe freely for the last few seconds, so Helen had to get at least a little more air into her lungs before she made her move. She kept her teeth clenched but opened her lips in a grimace to let in whatever air she could, without giving the judge access to her mouth.

  "That's a good girl," the judge said. "Just a little wider, please, opening the jaw too. Although really, this will do. All I have to do is put the pills inside your cheeks and wait for them to dissolve. It will take a bit longer that way, but I'm a patient person. It's one of the traits that make me a good judge."