by John Lutz
McGregor, who was completely cynical about humanity, and who was often in the way of justice because he didn’t believe it existed.
Carver sometimes hated himself for weakening and thinking McGregor might be right.
8
GEARY LEFT VINNY’S after finishing his beer, and Carver asked Tammy to bring him a hamburger and a morning Gazette-Dispatch, if there happened to be one lying about.
Five minutes later Tammy returned with a delicious-looking hamburger heaped with tomato, lettuce, and onion on a sesame seed bun, and a badly wrinkled but readable newspaper that had been left by a previous customer. Most of the sports section was missing, but the front section was intact even if the pages had been shuffled. Someone had torn out a ten-minute oil change coupon, but there had been nothing printed on the back of it about the clinic bombing. Instead the interrupted news item had to do with a hostage situation in the Middle East. Trouble all over the map, Carver thought. He smoothed out the front page and read as he ate.
The dead in the clinic bombing were Dr. Harold Grimm—ostensibly the target, if there was one besides the clinic itself—and a patient named Wanda Creighton, the woman who’d walked into the clinic ahead of Beth. She had come to the clinic, which concerned itself not only with abortion but with many phases of women’s health, to talk to Dr. Grimm about amniocentesis to determine the sex of the child she had decided to bear. The injured were Beth and volunteer nurse and receptionist Delores Bravo. Only slightly injured, and not requiring hospitalization, was a nurse named Janet Havens who had been preparing an operating room for an abortion scheduled for later that morning.
The paper was an early edition and made no mention of Adam Norton. It did mention Operation Alive, describing it as an extremist anti-abortion organization based in Orlando and headed by a Reverend Martin Freel. The Reverend Mr. Freel was quoted as denying that Operation Alive had any connection to the bombing, and that any such allegation was absurd and part of a plot instigated by pro-choice fanatics to undermine the operation’s effectiveness. The Bible was quoted by Mr. Freel, the commandment about bearing false witness. Then he refused to say anything more about the bombing and referred any further questions to his attorney, Jefferson Brama.
Carver set the paper aside and finished his hamburger, thinking the law and the Bible sure made life confusing.
The news item had mentioned Dr. Grimm’s widow, Adelle. Carver paid Tammy, then went to the phone booth against the back wall and tried to look up the Grimms’ number and address in the directory.
But there was no Dr. Grimm listed in Del Moray or environs. Obviously the Grimms had an unlisted phone number, which made sense, considering they were the target of people who were violent.
Figuring Geary was either back at his desk by now or in the field where he could be reached by phone, Carver dropped his change in the slot and pecked out the number of police headquarters. Geary would probably tell him the Grimms’ address and phone number. When Geary had walked out of Vinny’s, he was in the mood to help Carver do anything that might cause McGregor trouble. And if it happened to cause Carver trouble too, that was acceptable. Life in law enforcement was rife with politics and political victims.
The Grimm home was on Phosphorus Lane in west Del Moray, in a palm-lined section of modest stucco houses with tile roofs and attached garages at the end of long gravel driveways. Most of the garages were made of brick and looked more substantial than the houses. Practicing in an abortion clinic was apparently less profitable than other places where a physician might ply his trade. Harold Grimm probably hadn’t been the sort of doctor who spent much of his time on a golf course.
The new widow Adelle Grimm’s house was yellow stucco with a green tile roof, green awnings, and a small front porch with a wooden glider at one end. The front door was painted dark green and had a small, triangular window in it.
Carver thought there was something mournful in the drooping canvas awnings, the sagging gutter over the porch, the shaded windows like the eyes of the dead, as if the house somehow knew and shared the grief of its inhabitant.
He climbed out of the parked Olds and walked toward the house. The small front lawn was green and closely cut so that parallel stripes of varicolored grass from recent mowings showed in it, and the flower bed around the porch was tended and colorful. Birds chirped, bees hummed. The yard wasn’t mourning along with the house. There was no sign out here that one of its owners had died unexpectedly and violently.
Carver took the two low steps up onto the porch and stood in the shade. There was no sound from inside the house. He pressed the brass doorbell button with the tip of his cane.
Still no sound.
A jet airliner roared overhead, rolling constant thunder through a cloudless blue sky, and he didn’t hear anyone approaching on the other side of the door, inside the house.
But suddenly the door was open and the dark-haired woman he’d seen in the emergency waiting room yesterday morning was staring out at him.
She wasn’t a tall woman, but she seemed tall because she stood very erect and her features had a narrow, rectangular line about them. Her hair was mussed and brushed back off a high forehead. The swelling around her red-rimmed eyes narrowed them and added to the straight-lined symmetry of her face. Too old to bounce back after the death of a spouse, too young to bear the burden of sudden widowhood with philosophical acceptance, she gazed out at Carver from her new situation and did not smile or say hello.
Carver tried a smile. A fierce-looking man in repose, he knew that his smile was surprisingly beatific and reassuring, transforming his face and putting people at ease in his presence. One false impression replaced by another. Was that how it was with Beth’s nurse? The somber one with the mirthful smile?
Carver suspected she might be somber all the time, considering what she saw almost every day.
“I saw you yesterday at the hospital,” Adelle Grimm said, not returning his smile. There was a delicacy about her, not of physique but of attitude, that suggested she wasn’t strong enough to survive emotional storms. And right now she was in a hurricane.
“We have something in common,” Carver said. “You lost your husband in the clinic explosion, and I lost a child.”
“A child?” She appeared puzzled. Then she said, “Oh,” and the lines of her face softened. Her eyes, which were a dark violet, became moist. Carver hoped she wouldn’t cry. “You mean the pregnant woman who died?”
“No. The mother lived. She’s still in the hospital.”
Adelle nodded, understanding. “The African-American. How is she?”
“She’s going to be okay.”
“I’m glad.” She said it with such sincerity that, looking into her sad, violet eyes, Carver felt an interior tug and was afraid his own eyes would brim with tears.
“My name’s Fred Carver. Would you mind if we had a talk?”
“About what?”
“I’m a private investigator, Mrs. Grimm.”
“Are you working for someone?”
“No, I consider this a personal affair. I’m my own client. I want to know what happened. I need to know. Do you understand that?”
She seemed to give it some thought. She was a woman who thought a lot about things, Carver figured. More a deliberator than a creature of impulse.
“Come in out of the heat,” she said, opening the door wider and stepping back to allow him room to enter,
The house was furnished in a clean but cluttered way that must make people feel at home. The carpet was gray with a red border. There were two matching gray-and-red chairs, and before a wide window with white curtains was a cream-colored sofa with a bright floral design. A long coffee table sat in front of the sofa and had a vase of plastic daffodils and some dog-eared Home Companion magazines on it.
“This is nice,” Carver said, leaning on his cane and glancing around. “You have the homemaker’s touch.”
Adelle Grimm managed a smile. “I suppose that’s a compliment, even if it isn’t politica
lly correct.”
Carver didn’t see why it was politically incorrect. “I mean, you make a home look comfortable and attractive.”
She motioned for him to sit on the sofa, then sat down in one of the gray-and-red chairs and crossed her legs, lacing her fingers over the top knee.
“I’m, uh, sorry about your husband, Mrs. Grimm.”
She nodded and looked around her, as if suddenly finding herself in strange surroundings. “Harold never really spent a lot of time here. He was so . . . dedicated.”
“He did useful work,” Carver said.
She stared at him with her red-rimmed eyes. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes. Did he spend a lot of time at the clinic?”
“Every other day. He alternated with Louis—Dr. Benedict. But on off days he was usually on call at Kennedy Hospital.” Again she glanced around, as if appraising her life from this new and terrible perspective and wondering if her husband’s effort and dedication had been worthwhile. So many missed dinners and parties, so many nights home alone. “Harold did sincerely believe in his work. It consumed his thoughts and his time and eventually it got him killed. Murdered.” For a second it appeared that she might begin to cry, but she took a deep breath again, even managed a smile that came and went in an instant. It was a smile that pierced Carver’s heart like a beak.
“It’s . . .”
“What, Mr. Carver?”
He didn’t want to put it into words. Why should he, when she had to know how he felt? “Life can be surprising and unfair at times,” he said inadequately.
“Yes,” was all she said.
“They caught the man, at least.”
“I hope they execute him,” she said dispassionately. “Harold wouldn’t approve, but I hope they convict Adam Norton and then kill him. He’s the kind of zealot who’s ruining this country.” She sniffed and bowed her head, placing the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Not that he isn’t entitled to his point of view, if all he wanted to do was argue it and demonstrate.”
Carver thought that was an odd thing to add to what she’d just said.
“Then you’re convinced of Norton’s guilt?” he said.
“Of course. Witnesses place him at the scene, and the police found explosives and instructions on how to make bombs when they searched his home. But if you ask me, he’s not the only guilty one.”
Another surprise for Carver. “He’s not?”
“I don’t mean anyone else is legally responsible,” Adelle Grimm said, “but that bastard Reverend Martin Freel should pay some kind of penalty for killing my husband. He’s one of the people who feed religious zealotry and murderous delusions to maniacs like Norton, feed it to them by the bucketful knowing the more they eat, the hungrier they get. Then when someone is injured or killed at a women’s clinic, people like Freel step back and cluck their tongues and profess to have no connection to the violence.” She gazed at Carver with her sad, swollen eyes, “When is this country going to have enough of this kind of thing?”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. It was a good question, all right. “In the months before his—before the bombing, did your husband receive any threats on his life?”
She laughed hopelessly. “Are you joking? He was a physician at an abortion clinic. He received threats almost every day. Vicious phone calls in the middle of the night, threatening letters, graffiti on the side of our house or on the sidewalk out front . . . it’s all been an intimate part of our lives. A few months ago someone even sent us an aborted fetus in the mail.” She swallowed and wiped at her eyes. “It was gift wrapped so it looked like a box of candy.”
Death is like a box of chocolates, thought Carver with revulsion. He could better understand why she thought Norton should be executed.
Adelle stood up and walked to a small cherry wood secretary and opened one of the desk’s wide drawers beneath the fold-down writing surface. She withdrew a bundle of envelopes bound with a large rubber band.
“Here,” she told him, handing him the bundle. “You can take them with you. The police have already seen them, and I’d just as soon have them out of the house.”
Carver accepted the envelopes, then planted the tip of his cane in the soft gray carpet and stood up. He handed Adelle Grimm one of his cards.
“If you think of anything that might help,” he said, “or if you need help, call me.”
She nodded, then preceded him to the door. Her step was heavy and deliberate, as if she were weighed down by her loss. He felt that he should say something more to console her, but he couldn’t find words that wouldn’t seem contrived and hollow.
“I wish you well with your grief, Mr. Carver,” she said from behind the closed screen door, as he limped from the porch and along the bright sidewalk toward his car.
So she had found the words for him. Women were so strong and savvy about such things. In the depths of her own grief, she’d been aware of his and known what to say to him. It was a demonstration of empathy and strength worth admiring.
He noticed now that the lawn, though it appeared well tended and neat from a distance, was beginning to fall victim to weeds.
9
IN HIS OFFICE ON Magellan, Carver examined the letters given to him by Adelle Grimm. For the most part they were the usual nutcase notes, written or typed with misspellings, deliberate or otherwise, and for some reason with very narrow margins. They conveyed the sense that while they were threatening and irrational, the writers were unlikely to pose an actual danger.
Two of the letters, however, interested Carver. They were signed, and they seemed to amount to more than the venting of paranoia and frustration.
One, from a man named Xaviar Demorose, with a Del Moray address, went into detail as to how he was going to abduct, torture, then murder Dr. Grimm. The other letter was more temperate but quoted scripture fluently and was signed by a Mildred Otten, who identified herself as a member of Operation Alive.
Carver folded both letters and slid them into his shirt pocket. Then he dragged the desk phone over to him and pecked out the number of A. A. Aal Memorial Hospital and Beth’s room extension.
Her voice sounded throaty and weary when she answered the phone by her bed. Maybe she’d been asleep, or she was groggy from her medication.
“You feeling better today?” he asked.
“Fred?”
“Yes.”
“Just a moment.” There was a pause. Then, “I had to switch the receiver to my left ear. I keep forgetting I still can’t hear well out of my right.”
“The doctor didn’t tell me you suffered a hearing loss.”
“Told me,” Beth said. “Whispered it in my left ear.”
Carver almost smiled. It was good to hear her usual acerbic tongue. “Has the hearing in your right improved any?”
“Yeah. They tell me it should return to eighty or ninety percent normal eventually.”
“We can settle for that,” Carver said. “If you’d walked into the clinic a few seconds sooner you might have been killed.”
“Timing and luck, maybe they’re the same thing.” There were faint sounds in the background, as if someone had entered the room, and Beth said something he couldn’t understand, muffled, as if she had her hand over the mouthpiece. “The nurse was here looking in on me,” she explained a few seconds later. “And McGregor was here about an hour ago, Fred. He was looking for you.”
Carver glanced again at his answering machine; the digital counter registered no messages. McGregor hadn’t called. “Did he say why?”
“No. He was only here a few minutes. He urged me to leave you and sleep with men of my own race, then he left.”
“Did he upset you?”
“No. I wouldn’t let him. I know how he is, how he tries to draw out people’s rage or humiliation so he can feel superior.”
“If he comes back, don’t tell him I called. I’ll avoid him.”
“That would be my advice, Fred. To anyone.”
“C
an you get through the afternoon without me? I’ve got to talk to some people.”
“Concerning the bombing?”
“Yes.”
“About Adam Norton?”
“More or less.”
“You don’t think he’s the bomber?”
“I want to make sure. And if he did the actual deed, I want to know who if anyone put him up to it.”
“What about tonight?”
He smiled. “You’re full of questions.”
“That’s my job, just like it’s yours.”
“I’ll be there tonight to see you.”
“Good. But don’t worry so much about me, Fred. I’m on the mend.”
“I know you are.”
“It’s just that . . .”
“What?”
“The baby.” There was a catch in her voice.
Something bent and broke inside him with an abruptness that surprised him. Was he that vulnerable?
“I’ll drive over there now,” he said. “I should have come earlier today.”
“Don’t you dare.” She sounded angry with herself. Determined.
He listened to his own breathing for a moment. “You sure you’ll be okay alone?”
“I’m not alone, Fred. Including staff, there are about a thousand people in this building. Half of them come and go in this room, checking on me, giving me medication.”
“So you don’t need me.”
“I didn’t say that. Bring my Toshiba when you come tonight.”
“Why would you want a notebook computer?”
“I’m going to write a piece on the clinic bombing for Burrow. I talked on the phone with Jeff Smith about it this morning.”
“You shouldn’t be thinking about work.”
“I’m thinking about my work and yours, Fred. I’ll need you to keep me up to speed on the investigation.”
He almost cautioned her again, but in truth he was glad to find her well enough to be interested in her work. He knew how work could displace pain.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll brief you when I get there this evening.”
“The nurse just walked in again, Fred, this time with something that looks like a turkey baster. I’ve got to hang up.”