The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

by Elizabeth Sims

  “Oh, my dear. What did—do you know what was used?”

  Sherri reaffirmed, “I gotta go pick up Tyler, and then Gary’s taking us for pizza.”

  Dengel ignored her. “Let’s just say there are people around here who know things about explosives.”

  “Yet the clinic still stands.”

  “The device should’ve been more incendiary. The problem is, the more fire you want, the bigger and heavier the bomb has to be. The more there needs to be in it, you know?”

  “Oh.”

  The afternoon was growing chillier. A few buzzards circled high beyond the rooftops, out over the prairie. It was a quiet time in East Horton.

  “Dom, tell me something—”

  “I’m on disability.”

  “Huh?”

  “I had cancer. Before that, the thing was—”

  “Dom, did someone hurt you?”

  He looked into my eyes deep, real deep. “Sister, it’s like you know me. Usually, a woman needs to give me a massage before she can really know me.”

  I suppressed a shudder.

  “Sister, sister—uh, I’m sorry?”

  “Theresa. Mary Theresa.”

  “Sister Theresa, I was hurt bad. It happened when I was too young to know how to protect myself. I’m the kind of man who loves kids. I’m the kind of man who wants to be a father. I think about a lot of things when I’m sitting out here. I’m a very competitive person. When I do something, I do it to win.”

  “Was it a girl? Someone you loved very much?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Dom, I might be a nun, but I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  He chuckled gratefully.

  I said, “It was a girl, then, and it was about a child you wanted.”

  “Yeah. I’d have a son today if she hadn’t—”

  “Killed it, right? I see. Where is this girl—woman now?”

  He snorted. “You’d never believe it. Never in a million years.”

  He was spilling it, so easily and purely.

  I assured him, “I have all the time in the world.”

  “We both came from the same shithole on this prairie—pardon my French—and what do you think? She’s big now, she’s a big star. Wealthy, very wealthy. She got out and left me here.”

  “A movie star?”

  “Not exactly. I’m not—I can’t—let me put it this way.” He leaned close to my ear. Sherri was just sitting there nearby; I judged she must have heard all of this, but somehow he wanted a measure of privacy, if only for show. “I’m going to pay her a visit real soon. It’s time she remembered me. She thinks everything’s over, done. But I’m not going to stand by and let her ruin my life.”

  “Do you have friends who help you, sometimes?”

  “I do. That I do. You’d be surprised how far and wide my friends reach.”

  “And they help you in return for...”

  “I help them with information.”

  “Like, how to do certain things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dom, I want to know, could you—have you ever loved anyone else?”

  “Love’s got nothing to do with it. Not anymore. I got cancer. I got cancer in the you-know-where—pardon my French again—and I can’t have any kids anymore. I used to think, big deal. But now I know different. Now I know what it means to give your name to a new generation. I learned.”

  “He wants to get inseminated,” Sherri said.

  “What?” I said.

  “That isn’t it,” Dengel said. “It’s that I saved some of my sperm, you know—they saved it for me, and I can still have a kid if I can find somebody to, you know, get impregnated. Who’ll agree to do it.”

  Involuntarily, I glanced over at Sherri. She quickly stared at the cracked pavement.

  “It costs money, see, to get somebody to do it, who doesn’t know you. Not like somebody who would just want to do it out of...out of—”

  I said, “Love? Or idealism?”

  “Yeah.” He shot a dirty look at Sherri.

  She leaned forward in her lawn chair, grunted, and got up. “I gotta go pick up Tyler.”

  “See ya tomorrow.”

  “See ya tomorrow.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I chimed.

  She looked back at me with a totally fake smile.

  “It’s expensive,” said Dengel, “and I’m on disability. I used to have a good job. I ran an equipment place.”

  “Oh. And if you can get some money from the one who hurt you—”

  “It’s caring, not money.” Suddenly, his eyes narrowed and his whole body tensed. “I’m the last of the Dengels! Sister, do you have any idea of what that means to a man? My old man said, ‘Son, you’ve got to carry on the family name. You’ve got four sisters! I had four sisters! Don’t let me down!’ On his deathbed he told me that. Now what am I supposed to do? I’d have married her! I loved her! I’d have offered to marry her if I knew she was gonna—or if I knew I was gonna get cancer, I’d have married her!”

  Genie Dengel. I shook my head sadly.

  Dengel went on, “I mean, money is a sidelight of caring. If she cared, she’d spring loose a little money, or she’d do it herself.”

  “Do it? You mean get inseminated with your—”

  “Yeah. I bet I could convince her, given the...”

  “The?”

  “The right situation. You know?”

  22

  After leaving Dengel with a promise to keep in touch, I stopped at a gas station and used the pay phone to call Dr. Fischell’s office.

  “My husband,” I told the friendly receptionist, “was a patient of Dr. Fischell’s before we moved to Cicero—uh, that would be fifteen years ago. Sixteen years. He never bothered to ask Dr. Fischell to send on his records, but now he’s got cancer and—”

  “Oh, no!” The receptionist was the sweetest old thing. I pictured her with honestly gray hair, a partial bridge, and her glasses on a chain around her neck. This receptionist kept a cardigan sweater handy, to drape over her shoulders when she got chilly.

  “Yes, and the oncology doctors want to see his records—I don’t know what for. Can you send them right to me? Because we’re flying next week to the Mayo Clinic.”

  “Oh, absolutely, Mrs.—?”

  “I’m Mrs. Kenneth Johnston—t-o-n. Do you keep records for so long, then?”

  “Oh, we absolutely do! We—”

  “And you have them right in the office?”

  “Oh, absolutely! Dr. Fischell has every file on every patient, from the first day he opened his office after the war. I’m sure I can find them quickly. Let me just...”

  I wondered which war she meant. After giving her a fake address I drove out of town to the office, which, as described by Skip Doots, was miles from nowhere. I was lucky; it was getting close to five o’clock. The building was a small neat brick one. I pulled in to the gravel parking lot and popped in just for a sec.

  Using a high little voice, I told the receptionist, “I’m trying to find Pearl Center, and I think I’m badly lost.”

  “Oh, you’re not lost at all! Not the least bit!” Her smile was overwhelmingly reassuring, as though she just had all this good will pent up inside her. She wore her glasses on a chain around her neck; her cardigan was neatly folded on a shelf behind her. I am so good.

  “It’s such a lonesome road,” I whined.

  “Oh, you poor thing! You’re almost there! Eight miles, right straight on. You’ll go through East Horton first, and you’ll see a sign? Class D hockey champs. Then you’ll go over some railroad tracks, then...”

  She gave me deluxe directions as I cased the joint. No alarm system at all, it appeared. I saw no control panel, no sensors. Just a stout front door and a good lock.

  Back in the car, I circled the building before peeling out, and I noticed a rear door and a few side windows. The building was flanked by a bed of low evergreen shrubs set off by a cobblestone border. Stubble fields stretched off in both
directions along the road; woods grew up to the doctor’s property from behind. Across the road, a few snarly acres of brush; a farmhouse sagged, weather-beaten and abandoned, amidst them.

  I really started to hold my breath at this point, because now everything depended on what I’d find in that office.

  I drove southeast toward Chicago, as the afternoon waned. I was hungry. I saw a McDonald’s sign and reflexively turned off, then decided to keep going a little ways. Eventually, I stopped at a Szechuan restaurant. The cashew chicken I ordered was good, and so was the hot tea; I took my time.

  When I came out it was seven o’clock and dark, but not late enough yet. In the car in the darkened parking lot I changed back into my jeans, sweater, and pea coat, also my Weejuns. It felt good to put on my old red sweater again. Sister Mary Theresa got dumped into the trash bin at McDonald’s. I drove around Chicagoland for a while, taking the I-290 all the way downtown, then picking up the Kennedy to the Edens. Then I cut west again somewhere around Waukegan. Déjà vu set in as I remembered driving around just like this in Detroit, settling my nerves before a task just like this, some few years back. That break-in had been dangerous from the get-go—highly dangerous—but this one ought to be a slice of pie: No homicidal maniacs were out to get me, no would-be paramour was stalking me. Still, it gets your nerves when you’re planning to break the law, when you’re planning to go creeping around a strange place in the dark.

  All I needed to think about, though, was Genie Maychild: Wondrous, beautiful, unsurpassed sexpot of the LPGA Tour, she was all I needed to calm right down. I thought of her hands, so easy and sensitive, caressing me; I thought of the glade of golden down in the hollow of her back, stirring in subtle, delicious response to my breath. I thought of all her parts, and a serenity came over me, and a longing. Ah, my darling, I’ll take care of everything. You can count on me. After this weekend I will be your love slave forever, and you will be my goddess, except for once in a while taking a turn as love slave.

  The country G.P.’s office was deserted and dark, and the road was even more lonesome than in the daytime. The afternoon overcast had thickened into a velvety black night.

  I drove off the gravel lot onto a patch of half-frozen lawn on the side of the building away from the road. My headlights picked up an opossum moseying along the edge of the woods. It looked into my beams with those red eyes.

  Turning off the motor but leaving the car door ajar, I moved fast. I yanked on my leather gloves, kicked loose a cobble from the shrubbery border, strode up to the lowest window, whose sill was about knee-high, and broke it out. I could see well enough by the glow of the car’s dome light.

  Tossing the cobble aside, I carefully stepped in, finding myself in the doctor’s private office. Nice mahogany desk, leather swivel chair, hat rack—nice. I heard no alarm, and, walking quickly to the reception area, saw no blinking lights, no silent alarm that I’d missed earlier. The air smelled cool and antiseptic.

  My Weejuns patting on the clean floor, I pulled out my trusty Mag-lite and went to the bank of sliding drawers behind the receptionist’s desk. This was an old country doc’s office all right. The very feel of the place was comforting to me, the burglar. The braided rug in the waiting room, the sheaf of magazines expertly fanned out on the coffee table. All around me were the symbols of cleanliness and kindness. Isn’t it funny? But I felt it.

  I doubted I’d find Genie Wickers’s file right in with the active ones; likely, the doctor stored old files in a more remote space. But it was so easy. I’d already rejected the possibility that she’d used a fake name; it just wasn’t Genie. My fingers flicked along, Walciski, Warrell, Westphal, Weyandson, Wickers.

  WICKERS, GENIE. I lifted out the thin folder.

  The file consisted of just one sheet, a printed form with Genie’s medical history on one side, and notes about an examination on the other.

  “Patient requests Rx for birth control. Pt. complains of ‘a tennis ball moving in my tummy.’ Pt: ‘I’m afraid I might have cancer.’”

  Then the pelvic examination. “Cervix long & closed...Fundal ht. 25 cm...Fetal heart tones heard. Rate 122 per min. Fetal movement noted. Gestation around 24 weeks based on LMP...Diagnosis: probable hidden pregnancy. Patient & partner very surprised at diagnosis. Recommended prenatal care ASAP, possible counseling.”

  I read it over a couple of times more. I heard my own breathing in the silence that suddenly pressed around me. Now what the hell?

  I expected to break into this office and find a record of an examination, then of an abortion, both of which I’d steal and destroy. Because Dom Dengel was threatening Genie with revealing this illegitimate pregnancy and abortion. But without the actual medical file, there’d be no proof of any pregnancy, no proof of any abortion. The doctor’s own memory? Would he remember Genie from fifteen years ago? Would it even matter? Medical files are confidential, aren’t they? Stealing the abortion file was only part of my overall plan, but it was a key part. If no evidence was available to Dengel, even if he was intending to steal it, Genie could dismiss his threats.

  I stood there for another minute, knowing I had to leave, yet rooted, stunned.

  She’d been six months pregnant.

  You’ve come for the file; now take it.

  I creased the folder with its single sheet into quarters and tucked it inside my sweater. I found a sheet of the doctor’s letterhead and a ballpoint pen and took them into the doctor’s private office. Holding my light in my teeth, I printed: “TO HELP PAY FOR THE WINDOW. I’M SORRY. I BROKE INTO THE WRONG PLACE.”

  I placed the note in the center of the doctor’s desk pad and laid a twenty-dollar bill on top of it, then weighted it down with his pencil cup. I climbed out the window and drove away.

  23

  I just made it onto the last United flight from O’Hare to Los Angeles. As I hurried into the jetway, I almost got run over by a sprinting executive hissing into her cell phone.

  “That is not acceptable! If the jury believes her even a little bit, we could be totally—” She slowed down after jostling me. “Tell him to try again. Tell him—no, go up ten thousand.”

  We were the last passengers on. As the executive, or lawyer, and I made our way down the aisle, she apologized for bumping me. “Things turn to chaos sometimes.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said over my shoulder. “That’s all right. Looks like we’re seat mates, then.”

  I helped her hoist her garment bag into the overhead bin as the flight attendants urged us to get settled.

  “Hey, this one’s not full at all,” said the executive, moving over to an empty row. “Give us both more room.”

  “Thanks.”

  Having a row to myself again made me happy in spite of the baffling situation I was in. I settled down with my thoughts and my notebook and wished for a drink.

  When the plane got to cruising altitude, I bought a Scotch on the rocks, even though it almost killed me to pay four dollars for it.

  So here we are. Nothing in my experience made me think there could have been any way a healthy girl could’ve gotten a doctor to abort a six-month pregnancy. What had happened to that baby? Dengel thought it had been aborted. Could Genie have given it up for adoption without anybody knowing? What was the deal with the baby?

  The threat of Dom Dengel, I felt, was both pressing and not pressing. He was a weirdo, all right, a nasty son of a bitch, but he seemed listless, almost passive, sitting there in his lawn chair, talking big.

  But who, then, had broken into Dewey O’Connor’s house and scared the hell out of us that night? Who had left the note on the car? Well, I’d gotten Dengel to admit that he had friends who helped him.

  I leaned over from my aisle seat to peer out the airplane window into the blackness below, into the invisible grandeur of the North American continent. Fairylands below—towns and cities and their lights—little tiny fairylands.

  Genie and I needed to have a talk. But somehow I had to hold off doing it unti
l this weekend was over.

  A terrible thought rose up in my mind. It jumped out at me from the jumble of my day on the Illinois prairie, but it was so terrible that I shut it away instantly. No. There’s an explanation, and I’m going to get it sooner or later.

  The whisky made me feel warm and cozy inside my sweater and jeans.

  With the time difference, the flight would come into L.A. around one in the morning, then I’d have the ninety-minute drive out to the house. I wondered how Genie had scored that day in the tournament. Earlier, I’d lucklessly fiddled with the car radio, trying to find a sports report that mentioned it.

  Even with my coat over me, I wanted to be warmer. I asked a most attractive flight attendant for a pillow and blanket. During the twenty seconds it took her to fetch them, I fantasized that she would compassionately tuck me in, as the advertisements encouraged you to expect. But she wordlessly handed them to the passenger in the row ahead of me.

  “Oh!” said the passenger.

  As I popped up and stepped forward to claim my bedding, she, the passenger, perceiving my face, said “Oh!” again.

  And my heart plummeted through the floor into the baggage compartment and I said nothing to coach Marian Handistock, who in her aisle seat, looked very different than she had in the afternoon. Her face was drawn, yes, but that wasn’t all.

  She said nothing to me, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. She glared at me with utter coldness, utter contempt. Having surely seen me board, she wasn’t surprised. She had that look ready for me. Distracted by my hurry and talking with the stranger, I hadn’t spotted her. There was nothing to say, anyway.

  I sat down in an icy sweat. Coach Handy suddenly had a thorough-going furtiveness about her. What else had caught my attention? For one thing, I’d noticed that her hands looked terrible. They were red; they looked sore. Several knuckles were covered with Band-Aids.

  Her legs were crossed, and one foot stuck slightly into the aisle. I studied her shoe, noticing that it had gotten terribly muddy very recently. Mud had been scraped off the sides and the sole. The remaining mud hadn’t had a chance to start to flake away yet. There was mud, too, on her pant cuff.