Dead Ringer

by Michael A. Black

  “Where’d she go?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Come on, nobody called for references? How about giving me her last known address?”

  He looked away, his mouth drawing into a tight line—his obvious defense mechanism.

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t do that, even if I wanted to,” he said. His accompanying smile had all the sincerity of a used-car salesman. “Our company policy forbids us to divulge any information about our employees, even former employees, without a subpoena. Otherwise, it could open us up to civil liabilities.”

  I nodded, letting him think he’d won one. “You guys paid for Bayless’s body to be transported up here from downstate, right?”

  His eyebrows rose again. “Yeah.” The tip of his tongue shot over his lips. “Like I said, we’re sort of a big, extended family here at Manus. We look out for each other.”

  “That’s commendable.” I looked around.

  He swallowed hard. “Look, Mr. Shade, I’d like to help you but I do have a company to run.” He stood up. “So unless you can think of anything else that I can help you with . . .”

  I stood, too. Lawyers weren’t the only professionals who asked questions they already knew the answers to. “What funeral home did you use for the transport?”

  His head jerked back slightly, like I’d brushed him with a jab.

  “I . . . can’t recall right now,” he said a little too quickly. “I’d have to look that up.”

  “Okay.” I handed him one of my cards. “When you find out, I’d appreciate it if you’d call me.”

  “You can count on it,” he said, the smile back now that I was moving toward the door.

  I’ll bet I can, I thought.

  I turned as I got back into my car to see if I could detect anyone peeping out one of the windows trying to catch a glimpse of my ride. If they were, I sure didn’t catch sight of them. But I accomplished what I’d hoped to. There was something going on here, and I knew who was involved. Mostly. It was like having a bunch of pieces to the jigsaw puzzle, but missing an exact replica of what I was putting together. And another big question loomed: why? If Herb Winthrope’s ear had been correct, and it was Bob Bayless’s horse laugh he’d heard in that Vegas casino, what was the motivating purpose behind all this pretense and subterfuge? They’d obviously involved a lot of people, and someone along the way had substituted a body that had been mistakenly identified as Bayless. A body that had been warm before it ended up in that smashed-up car on Deadman’s Curve. What was holding all these pieces together? And who stood to gain the most?

  Mrs. Bayless got rid of a boob of a husband and was rewarded with a two-million-dollar parachute for a new start. But she didn’t seem to be part of the equation. Manus, and James Prince, got a larger settlement. About ten mil. While it would be like winning the Lotto to a guy like me, to an up-and-comer business featured in Crain’s, it was probably small potatoes. So how had Bayless convinced everyone to go along with this elaborate scheme? What kind of ace was he holding? And how had the ID been faked? And whose body had ultimately ended up a well-done hunk of meat cooling in a downstate morgue? I glanced at my watch. A little after ten. A good time to visit the dentist.

  Dr. Keith Colon’s office looked less than impressive. It was located in Rogers Park and occupied a section of a strip mall down from a cleaners, a used bookstore, a restaurant called Poppa’s, and a 7-Eleven. Plenty of parking, but not too many cars. Most of them were in front of the convenience store. I parked right in front of Colon’s place. Maybe the Beater being there would make passersby think his rates were as low as his name.

  I pulled open the door and stepped inside. The waiting room was small and unoccupied. Behind a small glass window, a sharp-looking blonde in a light blue medical type smock smiled at me.

  “May I help you, sir?” Her voice was anxious, like I was the first catch of the day.

  “Is the doctor in?”

  “Yes.” Her reply was punctuated with a wide smile. Her teeth looked pretty good, but I figured it would be a bad business move to employ someone whose teeth weren’t.

  “I’d like to see him for a moment, please.” I handed her one of my cards.

  “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

  I shook my head. “It’s business. An insurance problem.” She nodded, and I figured the vague answer would get her moving. Dentists made most of their bread and butter from the insurance payouts. Rising from the chair, she walked back toward an open hallway, leaving the desk and phones unoccupied. It would have been much simpler to use their interoffice phone system. Maybe they didn’t have one . . . Or maybe she’d been forewarned by the good doctor to notify him as soon as a guy named Shade came in. The second possibility, while reeking of a conspiracy theory, seemed the most likely. She came back with a swarthy-looking guy close behind her. He was dressed in the same light blue medical-type outfit. His hair was dark brown and feathered back like a rock star’s, with a greasy sheen to it. Or maybe it was just too much mousse. I estimated him to be in his early- to mid-thirties. His face had a narrow look to it, and I noticed he was either trying to grow a mustache or he’d missed large spots with his razor. A pair of dark eyes, like a hawk’s, sized me up quickly as he extended his hand.

  “Mr. Shade,” he said as we shook. “I’m Dr. Colon. What can I do for you?”

  “Perhaps it would be better if we spoke in your office?”

  He nodded and glanced at his watch. He was either pressed for time or nervous at me showing up. Either way, he wasn’t exactly the kind of person I would want leaning over me, looking into my mouth.

  He turned to the girl. “Janet, let me know when Mrs. Ferguson arrives, okay?”

  She nodded and watched me out of the corner of her eye as I walked by.

  Colon’s office was even messier than mine, and that was saying a lot. Normally, I view the clutter on a person’s desk as a direct indication of his intelligence, but in this case it told me something else. Especially the stack of riverboat casino advertising letters that he quickly set a bunch of papers on top of. I knew in a heartbeat why the doctor’s office was so messy. The man obviously had other, more pressing interests.

  He motioned to a chair in front of the desk and smiled. “Excuse the mess. I’ve been in the process of getting some paperwork done.”

  I grinned. “Reminds me of mine.”

  We sat in an awkward silence for a few more seconds during which time I took out my small notebook and stared at him. It seemed to unnerve him further.

  “Ah, look,” he finally said, “I’m very busy. Patients. You mentioned an insurance problem?”

  “Was Robert Bayless your patient?”

  “Bayless . . . Bayless . . .” He glanced toward the ceiling in a gesture meant to look like pure concentration. “Yes. Bob Bayless. He was killed a few months ago, right?”

  “He was. I’m looking into a few things for Midwestern Olympia Insurance.”

  Two deep wrinkles formed in the space between his eyebrows. “I was under the assumption that he was killed in a traffic accident.”

  “The actual cause of death was from multiple trauma and asphyxiation. He burned to death.”

  Colon sighed and looked down at the stacks of papers covering his desk. If this guy could find anything in a hurry in that shit pile, I was the tooth fairy.

  “Yes, I do remember now,” he said. “I had to assist with the identification.”

  “Did that prove hard to do?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. They contacted me because he’d been coming here for some work. I had recent X-rays and sent them down there. They matched up exactly. Or, so I was told. Case closed.”

  “Almost,” I said.

  His head quivered fractionally and he squinted at me. “How so?”

  “How long had Bob Bayless been your patient?”

  He ignored that I’d answered his question with an unrelated question. He tilted back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling again. I
got the impression that he was a really bad actor trying to make me think he was consulting his memory banks. When he leaned forward again, he spoke so decisively that I knew he’d had the answer all along. He was just stalling for time.

  “Two months,” he said.

  “What was he having done?”

  He took a deep breath and canted his head to the right. “Mr. Shade,” the eyebrows rose in unison, “I’m dealing with a sensitive issue here. I’m not sure I should be discussing a patient’s history with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” the word came out like a mild bark, “there’s a matter of confidentiality. HIPAA laws and all that.”

  “Doctor, the patient is deceased,” I said. “There’s no confidentiality anymore.”

  “Still, I feel like it’s violating a sacred trust we had.”

  “Doctor, come on.”

  “All right.” He pursed his lips before he continued. “He was having some mandibular malocclusion. I put some crowns on two of his molars, and also some veneers on his central incisors. The latter was more cosmetic than medicinal, but with the insurance paying . . .” He tried a quick smile, saw it had no effect, and continued, “I also did some fillings in his mandibular second and third molars and I made two extractions.”

  “How did they match up the X-rays? Through the fillings?”

  He heaved a theatric sigh, pursed his lips again, and said, “It’s a detailed process involving several aspects, but not all that difficult. I’m sure, given a set of the two X-rays, even a layman like you would be able to do it.”

  The guy knew how to shovel the horse shit. I gave him that. But this was telling me other things that were significant, so I tried another angle. “Who contacted you about doing the ID?”

  His head jerked back ever-so-slightly and I could tell this was one question he hadn’t anticipated. “Uhmm . . . I believe it was his . . . his . . . Mrs. Bayless.”

  “Not the Furman County Coroner’s Office?” I asked, letting just a little sound of surprise creep into my tone.

  “Yes, maybe it was them.” He nodded, licked his lips. “I do believe . . .”

  I made a show of flipping through my notebook. “Oh, wait a minute, I was wrong. It wasn’t the coroner. It was his place of employment. The Manus Corporation.”

  He snapped his fingers and flashed a weak smile. “That’s right. They looked in his insurance file and found my office listed.”

  I made it look like I’d scribbled something down. “You see the body?”

  “No, why?”

  “Just wondered, him being your patient and all. Dying in such a tragic way.”

  “The identification was done downstate. They used the X-rays. It was my understanding that he’d been burned pretty badly.”

  I nodded. “I have photos if you want to see them.”

  He shook his head and glanced at his watch. “Excuse me a moment.” Picking up the phone, he pressed four numbers and waited. “Jan, has she called or anything?” Listening, he nodded and licked his lips again. I was going to have to bring him some ChapStick when I came back. “Okay. Thanks.” He set the phone back in its cradle. “I’m sorry, Mr. Shade, but my next patient’s almost here. I have to get the examination room ready.”

  It was good to know that the good doctor’s intercom system was in working order. I took out one of my cards and handed it to him. “Thanks for your time. You have a card with your number on it?”

  “You can get one from my assistant.” He was all business again, standing and smoothing back his greasy-looking hair with his palm. I sure hoped he washed up before Mrs. Ferguson arrived.

  The girl, Jan, gave me one of his cards and I tried to strike up a conversation with her about directions. She replied in typical airhead fashion, but I had the gut feeling that she was smarter than she was pretending to be. After all, she was bright enough not to use the intercom before. The conversation meandered slightly. Suddenly Colon opened the door separating his back offices from the front and did a double take when he saw I was still there. “Janet, I need you to pull that file.”

  She looked like the teacher had just caught her passing a note to a girlfriend in class. I apologized for keeping her from her work and left. But I didn’t go far.

  I sat in the Beater and watched the front entrance of Colon’s office for fifteen minutes. When no one went in, I knew what I’d known all along. There was no Mrs. Ferguson coming in to get her teeth scraped by Dr. Greasy. But I had made him nervous enough that he’d concocted a story to get rid of me. People make excuses to get rid of me all the time, but in this case it was getting to be a habit with everybody I interviewed.

  I shifted into gear, backed out of the parking space, and drove through the strip mall. At the last building, the 7-Eleven, I hung a right and went around the back. A lane for deliveries ran parallel to the front aisle and had spaces where employees could park without taking up spaces reserved for customers. A particular concern when you have adjacent stores that have different types of clientele. In the double spaces behind Dr. Colon’s office I saw two vehicles and wrote down the plates on both. One was a Toyota Celica and the other was a shiny silver BMW. Somehow, I didn’t figure the good doctor for a Toyota-type of guy.

  Alex St. James

  “Thanks, Rita,” I said into the phone, then hung up. I turned my attention to Bass who still sat across from me. “We’re ready to roll.”

  He held up the index fingers of both hands, waving them like windshield wipers gone mad. “Wait just a second, here. You haven’t held up your end of the bargain.”

  “You are not getting out of watching this footage.”

  “Then give me the rest of the dirt on the Firebird.”

  “Footage first,” I said. I heard the tiny chip that signaled a new E-mail. A glance at the monitor confirmed it. “It’s here now.”

  “This better be worth it.”

  I started to swivel the monitor to face him, but he stood and came around to my side. “Better this way,” he said, watching from over my left shoulder.

  With a shrug, I double-clicked on the icon and last night’s adventure came to life on my screen.

  “What the hell?” Bass said.

  “Give it a minute.”

  Jesse’s movements as he traipsed up and down the embankment in low-light conditions made it difficult for the camera to focus. Which in turn made it difficult to watch. A significant headache began to brew as I tried to keep track of the people in the scene.

  “This guy is one of our top cameramen?”

  I shook my head. “He’s new, actually. Fresh out of school. But he was the only one who volunteered for this extracurricular activity.”

  After about thirty seconds of camera-panning, where Jesse took close-up shots of the area and the people there, Bass said, “Get to the good stuff. This atmosphere garbage is boring as hell.”

  “Ya think?” I asked. “You wanted a homeless story. This is it.” I tapped the screen.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “The screen. You touch it, you ruin it. These screens are only a couple years old. I don’t want to have to go buy you a new one because you don’t know how to take care of it.”

  I shot him a look, but he ignored it.

  We watched, as still more nothing happened.

  “Can’t you fast-forward?”

  I sat back in my chair, striking a pose and gasping—for effect. “But you insisted that we talk with these people. You insisted that this would be our next Davis Award story.”

  He ignored that, too. “Get to the good stuff.”

  “The ‘good stuff’ as you call it, is brutal.”

  His eyes remained riveted to the screen. “Brutal brings in viewers. Fast forward.”

  I did.

  Together we watched the entire scene play out like an angry tableau. As the three men approached, my body reacted as though I was back there. I tensed. My heart rate kicked up, my breathing grew
shallow, and sweat tickled my lower back.

  Bass made noises. A couple sounded like tsk, and the others were variations on his customary grunts of displeasure.

  “What?” I asked him when the playback finished. My own displeasure reared its ugly head and I could feel myself spoiling for a fight. “What are you weirding out about?”

  “Christ, we can’t use any of this without the worry of getting sued. What were you thinking with that Taser?”

  “What was I thinking? They were going to attack me.”

  “Were they? From what I’ve seen on this tape, a smart attorney could make a case for you attacking them.”

  “Look what those guys did to poor Jesse.”

  “Yeah, and we’ll probably be receiving a lawsuit letter from his attorney any minute now.” He frowned. “He called in his notice, by the way. He quit.”

  “I hope he’s all right. Poor guy.”

  “Poor guy? He’s a wuss.” His lips tightened up and he glared at me. “When I gave you that Taser it was for self-defense only. Not for you to go play Lady Blue.” He crouched down and mimicked holding a weapon and adding a mock tremor to his hands. “You want some more of this, big boy?”

  “That’s not how it went.”

  He continued mimicking me. “I got plenty more for ya.”

  “Bass, that’s low.”

  “For crying out loud, Alex, what you just showed me is shit.”

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you?”

  He blinked, his brow tightening.

  I was getting angry. “I can’t get anything out of these people. Unless you let me follow the success story—Howard Rybak—then this is the best we’ll come up with. There . . . is . . . no . . . story . . . here.”

  Bass backed up enough to give me room for my vehemence, but he wasn’t about to give up. “No,” he said. “There’s a story all right, you just don’t seem capable of exploiting it.”

  I stood. “You know what? You’re right.”

  He jerked back. “You admit it?”

  “Since I’m not capable of ‘exploiting’ the situation properly why don’t you have our TV star, Gabriela, spend a night out there and see what she brings back?” My voice rose, but I didn’t care who heard me. “Or better yet, why don’t you spend a couple of hours sitting on the curb next to upchucked whiskey? Talking with people who’ve forgotten the simple comforts you and I take for granted? People who can’t work their way out of the hell they’re in because society has given up on them? See what it does to your sensibilities.” I took a furious breath. “If you have any.”