by Tracy Clark
I groaned and buried my face in my hands. I was never going to hear the end of this. Deek suddenly took a corner on two wheels, and it took another half block before my brain swung back to its central position. Muna patted my head to soothe me.
“Truthfully, I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that gun in your purse. I don’t care for guns myself. I don’t hold to violence of any kind.”
I opened one eye, looked up at her incredulously. “You keep a bat behind Deek’s counter.”
“Sure do. People are crazy. But a bat’s civilized.”
I closed my eyes again, tired now of talking. “Would you mind letting me out at the bus stop? I’ll walk home.”
“Shush. We’re here. Open up, Deek.”
The car jolted to a stop and the car’s overhead light went on when Deek got out on the driver’s side. The light felt like the sun and nearly burned my corneas, filling my eyes with dancing spots, which were now the least of my worries. When the back door swung open, Deek, still in his greasy apron, reached in and lifted me out like a sack of potatoes.
“I’m fine. I don’t need to be carried. I can walk in on my own.”
“Keep quiet.” His face held its usual scowl. “How do you think you got in the car in the first place?”
I nearly choked on surprise. “You?”
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Muna.”
Chapter 37
“You’ve got a concussion,” Barb said as she unlocked my apartment door and stepped aside. She then held the door open for me while I toddled through on leaden legs, a half-melted ice pack pressed to the back of my head, compliments of the U of C Hospital’s ER. My head felt like a Macy’s Thanksgiving-parade balloon, only bigger, and I was still seeing two of everything.
“The doctor said mild concussion, and so what? There’s a guy out there killing dying people. I don’t have time to be coddled right now.”
“I’ve never seen anybody so pigheaded,” Mrs. Vincent said.
“Huh,” Ben sneered, “don’t I know it. I partnered with her for five years. See what you’re signing up for?” Ben was speaking to Weber, who brought up the rear. He’d shown up at the hospital, too, after Ben called to tell him I was there. And we’d definitely talk about that when my head stopped spinning. Weber said nothing, though he was likely adding “pigheadedness” to his mental list.
“I can beat that,” Barb said, but then caught the look on my face. “But I won’t.”
Everybody had completely ignored both my countless declarations that I was fine and my bazillionth request that they all go home and leave me the hell alone. It was well after one AM, and I had work to do, connections to make. I tossed the ice pack on the table and headed for the phone to call Marta.
“Drop it,” Ben ordered when I picked up the receiver. “There’s nothing more you can do with this tonight.”
“What part of ‘murderer’ and ‘out there’ don’t you people get?”
If I thought I could have pulled off an end run, I’d have made a play for the door.
“You should rest,” Mrs. Vincent said.
Barb handed me back the ice pack. “At least a few hours.”
Ben padded over and took the phone out of my hand. “I’ll call Marta. I’ll tell her you made dupes of the files those idiots took. She’s going to want to know how you got them, though, and let’s face it, you’re not on the side of the righteous here.”
“Tell her I got them from a source.” That would hold her off, I thought. At least until the footage from Spada’s security camera surfaced. By then, though, I hoped Spada would be in custody and in no position to get all high-handed.
“She’s stubborn,” Ben said. “She ain’t stupid.”
“I don’t care what you tell her, then. There’s a woman out there with a target on her back. That’s priority one. If Marta wants to come after me for the rest of it, she knows where I live.”
Ben scowled. “Forget it. I’ll handle it. Go to bed.” I didn’t move. “I’m not saying you can’t.” He knew me. “This is me saying I got this.”
I stared at him, at them all, uneasy with the thought of leaving things in someone else’s hands, but, deep down, I knew they were right. I was dead on my feet, my brain scrambled, the room a little off-kilter. I was done in and outnumbered. Without another word, I turned and headed for my bedroom. I groused some, but the bite had gone out of it. Still, I fought for the last word.
“This doesn’t count as number three,” I called back to Weber.
“I’m still waiting on that move,” he replied.
I could hear Ben asking him what the number meant as I closed my door and flicked the lights off. I climbed into bed fully clothed, asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
* * *
I woke with a start in the dark, every bone and muscle I owned throbbing like a decaying tooth. The bedside clock read 7:00, which meant I’d gotten about five hours of dead man’s sleep. It hurt to breathe, but I had little choice in the matter. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood holding on to one spot, waiting for everything to settle. When it did, more or less, I padded to the bathroom. Peeling gingerly out of my clothes, I stood at the mirror and marveled at all the bruises quickly forming up and down my neck and across my back, chest, and shoulder blades, gifts from the giant goons who grabbed me and slammed me into a very hard wall.
I stood in the shower till the water went cold, then got out and headed back, dressing in a quiet, painful hurry, so as not to wake my keepers. I wasn’t sure who was still here to guard me—Ben, Barb, Mrs. Vincent, or Weber—but I was sure they hadn’t left me completely alone. I grabbed a bottle of aspirin from the dresser, shoved it into a pocket of my jeans, then tiptoed out of my room and down the hall past the guest room, where Barb was sleeping soundly. She was a committed nun, a fantastic teacher, but a lousy prison guard.
Slowly lifting my keys out of the ceramic bowl by the front door, I grabbed my bag and eased out, mindful of the door’s squeaky hinges, backing out of the quiet apartment as stealthily as a sobered-up one-night stand trying to get out before things got weird. Down the three flights of stairs, out the door, I raced for the curb where the rental sat. I jumped in, started it up, and peeled off. Home free.
Spada had to know I was onto him, that’s why he’d sent his goons. They’d taken a copy of the photographed files, but I’d built in redundancies. Let them think they’d gotten what he sent them for; let Spada think he’d won. But that still left Stella Symonds, the last name on his death-and-dying hit list. Was Spada cocky enough to make one final play for her now, or would he cut his losses and slip away? I guessed the former. He struck me as being too arrogant a man to leave a job undone, even if that job was murder. He’d go for Symonds.
I could call Marta, but I didn’t know how much time I had before Spada made his move. Besides, Marta would be of little use. Her hands were bound by department bureaucracy, which ran deep, and the law, which ran even deeper. Ben’s call to her last night couldn’t have been met by an open mind and a willingness to cooperate, or else she’d be all over me now, and she wasn’t. Spada was a prominent citizen and likely had a cadre of lawyers at his disposal, which meant he’d be given the royal treatment. No, Marta would need a lot more than a few photocopies and my word to stick her neck out. My traipsing through Spada’s private files and the names I’d gotten were fruit of the poisonous tree. No good in court. Spada would walk. I would go to jail. For the time being, I was on my own.
The Symondses lived on the southwest side in a small bungalow at the corner of a quiet block. Some of the backyards would have prefab pools sagging in the center; each house would have a grill. This was a neighborhood of Saturday-morning Little League games and potluck dinners, Blackhawk banners and American Legion halls. And change. Old stalwarts, such as the Poles, the Irish, and the Italians, were slowly being replaced by Hispanics, blacks, and Middle Easterners—and the changeover wasn’t going down easy. Those who’d been here for year
s now locked their doors, shuttered their windows, and kept to themselves out of fear and ignorance. The new ones coming in ignored the shutters and the locks, expecting as much, and the fraying at the edges, the tension, crackled like fresh tinder on a campfire.
Overhead, Southwest planes, red and yellow tail fins gleaming in the sun, streamed by, heading toward and away from Midway Airport. Announcing their presence with roaring engines, which rattled the windows of the matchbox houses, they left behind a trail of chemical particles that rained down on the rooftops like droplets of summer rain, tingeing the air with the stench of aviation fuel. I sat in the car for a moment, studying the two fake geese sitting on the Symonds porch; they were dressed in yellow rain slickers and matching Gloucester fishermen hats. Cute, I supposed, if your sensibilities ran that way. Weird, if they didn’t.
Stella Symonds was just fifty-six and in the late stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her husband’s name was Ron. I knew my presence, no matter the reason, would be an intrusion on private time. I eyed the house, not wanting to go in, but I was sure that Spada wanted Stella Symonds dead. Someone had to tell them what was headed their way.
As I gathered my things, a silver compact Ford pulled in behind me at the curb and a blond woman got out. I stared at her through the rearview, watching as she powered up the Symondses’ walk, all business, dressed in a blue smock and carrying a nurse’s bag. Neither were good signs. At the door, she exchanged a few words with the man who opened it, and then the two disappeared inside. I flicked a look at the dashboard clock. It was a little before eight, way too early to ruin a person’s day, but I got out of the car and walked toward the door, glancing back at the Ford. On its side, a sign read TEMPLETON HOSPICE CARE. Would even Nick Spada stoop so low as to kill a woman in hospice care?
I rang the bell. The same man returned. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“Mr. Symonds?”
Tired brown eyes rimmed with red stared back at me. It looked like he’d been crying. According to the file, he was fifty-eight, though he looked decades older now. His hair, more gray than brown, was shaggy and uneven, as though he hadn’t had a haircut in months, and his shirt and jeans, seriously rumpled, hung loose, both at least a size too big. I’d have gladly taken a long drive in the desert with thugs than add to this man’s sorrow.
He opened the screen door. “Yes?” He addressed me, but his eyes checked out the street and the sidewalk behind me, as though he hadn’t seen either in years. “Are you with Templeton, too?”
“No, my name is Cass Raines. I wonder if I might talk to you about Nicholas Spada?”
The beginnings of worry showed in the deep furrows on his forehead. “Spada?”
“More specifically about the settlement your wife received through his company.”
His eyebrows rose. The Symondses were not wealthy people. The settlement would have enabled them to keep their creditors at bay and to stay in their home as expenses mounted. There would be meds to purchase, doctors to see, final arrangements to make. Dying was expensive.
“We signed all the papers. He said everything was taken care of. Is there a problem?”
I did not want to tell him, while standing on his front porch, that his dying wife was targeted for murder. I just didn’t. “Maybe we could talk inside, Mr. Symonds?”
The look on his face said, Not so fast. He would be worried about the money, sure, but not so worried that he’d open his home to a stranger. “Do you work for Spada?”
I reached into my bag for my ID and presented it to him. “I don’t, no.”
He looked from the card to me, bewildered. “Private investigator? And this is about our settlement?”
“I can explain how, if you’ll give me a moment of your time.”
He eyed me for a moment longer, his suspicious gaze taking me all in. I didn’t think I looked dangerous, but I sure felt it. I wanted to put a stop to Nick Spada in the worst possible way, and I had the feeling he was someplace gloating, thinking there was no way in Hell I could. Finally Ron Symonds stepped back and let me in. I’d cleared the first hurdle, I thought, as I stepped into his living room. There were more to come.
I was led into a neat, unfussy living room decorated for comfort, rather than show. Two broken-in recliners, a small fireplace between them, faced a big-screen television set with a thin film of dust on the screen. It looked as though no one had dusted it or even turned it on in weeks. Pale green drapes matched a pale green carpet, the couch and lamp shades were the color of warm oatmeal, subtle accents placed around the room pulled it all together. Stella Symonds had made her house a home, though she probably hadn’t been able to attend to it in quite some time.
The house smelled of antiseptic and sickness, and I might have shuddered, were it not for the fact that I’d lived it all before. Symonds’s pain, his living in unrelenting stasis, waiting for the inevitability of his wife’s death, was something I understood. My mother, diagnosed with cancer in March of my twelfth year, was gone by the Fourth of July. There’d been the hospital bed and the nurses and the hushed tones of adults searching for a way to tell me what I already knew—that death was near.
I stood in one spot next to the Symondses’ couch. Its cushions were wrinkled, creased, as though he’d been sleeping on it. He fussed around me, gathering up old newspapers and clearing away coffee mugs and odd bits of clothing—a sock here, a sweater there.
“Sorry for the mess. They moved the hospital bed in a few weeks ago, so I’ve been camping out down here. We don’t get a lot of visitors anymore.”
“Please don’t go to any trouble.”
He tossed a stack of papers onto an end table, smiled weakly. “I should get our copies of the settlement papers, right? Like I said, everything’s supposed to be squared away. We even had a lawyer look them over before we signed off.” He moved to snake past me. I stopped him.
“You don’t have to. I have copies from Spada’s files. They’re what I’d like to talk to you about.”
He gestured for me to sit, and then eased down into the chair facing me. “I can’t imagine what any of this has to do with a PI. I don’t think I’ve ever even met one before. Why do you have our files?”
I cleared my throat, then started. “I’m working a case, an accidental death. This person signed on for the same kind of settlement as your wife . . . through Spada’s company, Sterling.” I stopped, took a breath, pushed on. “This person was ill, like your wife, and like your wife, he lived beyond his doctors’ projections.”
He nodded. I could tell he was keeping up, that he was following me so far, but I hadn’t yet relayed the worst of it. I took a moment, more for me than for him. He spoke before I was ready to go on.
“Holding on is a curse and a blessing, I guess.” He ran his nervous hands up and down his thighs, as if warming them. “I’m glad I still have Stella, of course, but her quality of life, well, it’s not so good. I look at every day as a bonus, a gift, though it feels like we’re both kind of living on borrowed time.”
I smiled. “Yes, I understand.” I scooted closer to the edge of the couch, closer to Symonds. “While investigating that one accidental death, I discovered that there had been others. Each victim had a viatical settlement, and each lived longer than they were expected to, and each person was a client of Nick Spada’s.”
I could see the confusion in Symonds’s eyes, but I kept going, wanting to get it all out and done with. I fanned Spada’s paperwork on the coffee table and turned them so Symonds could read them. He pulled a pair of battered readers out of the pocket of his button-down shirt, slipped them on.
“You can see the dates. None of these people died from illness. These appear to indicate that Spada, or someone working closely with him, arranged accidents in order to maximize profits. The deaths were caused by house fires, tragic falls, a mugging, and, in the case of my client, a suspicious drowning.” I picked up his wife’s file, handed it to him. “This is your wife’s. There’s a red dot along the top. As far as
I can tell, she’s the only one on Spada’s books still living.”
Symonds looked from the file, to me, and back again. This is where I lost him. He couldn’t make the jump on his own. He couldn’t grasp the horror of it. “What are you saying?”
“I believe Nick Spada killed these people. I believe your wife could be his next victim.”
Symonds sat in stunned silence, his eyes on mine. He didn’t say a word for a long time. I could almost feel his skin go cold. I sat on the edge of the couch, waiting. The floorboards upstairs creaked as someone, presumably the nurse I’d seen, moved about and cared for Stella Symonds. But downstairs, here in the small living room decorated for comfort, there was little of it, only shocked silence and dread. Then Ron Symonds’s pain found its voice.
“This is some kind of cruel joke.” He rose slowly. “A scam. What sick person put you up to this?”
I stood. “This is not a scam. It’s a warning. Spada is a dangerous man, and he has to be stopped.”
He nearly chuckled. “You’re nuts, you know it? That nice man? A killer?” He glared at me. “How dare you come into my house and tell me this crap. Have you no decency?” He bent down, gathered up the papers, and shoved them at me. “I want you out of my house, now, or I’ll call the police and have you dragged out.”
“Did you know Vincent Darby?”
“I said I want you out.”
“Please, answer the question. Vincent Darby, did you know him?”
It was the cop in my voice that got his attention and held it. It startled him, pulled him up short. “He came with Spada when we finalized our arrangement. He didn’t say much, after that we dealt directly with Nick. And none of that has anything to do with you.”
“Darby’s been murdered.” Symonds froze. “And I know that firsthand, because someone—I think Nick Spada—delivered his body to me as a warning to mind my business. I don’t know how many so-called accidents there have been. I don’t know how long he’s been doing this.”