She shrugged. “Like I said, I was his research assistant. His right-hand man, so to speak. After taking a look at the clinic’s operating budget and balancing it against what I knew we were bringing in with our fundraising efforts . . . well, I had my suspicions. Of course I dismissed them as flights of fancy. Doctor Gerard wouldn’t . . . He couldn’t . . . But then I found out it was true. Doctor Gerard was . . . he is—”
“A crook.”
Madeline made a face. “You make it sound so tawdry. And Doctor Gerard is anything but. He’s a wonderful, warm individual. And a great humanitarian. He’s from old money, you know. His father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, they were all distinguished psychiatrists, too. Back in the late 1800s, his great-grandfather founded the Gerard Hospital for the Insane and Mentally Feeble up near Winnetka. The name of the hospital makes it sound so incredibly antiquated and cruel, but back then, the place was cutting-edge and the therapies they used were humane and helpful. That Doctor Gerard . . . well, everyone who knows anything about psychiatry knows about his work.”
Ancient history. It was getting us nowhere, and nowhere meant we’d never get through this and get inside someplace where it was warm. I wouldn’t have had to point this out if she wasn’t dead and oblivious to the cold. Instead, I pinned her with a look that told her to get a move on.
Thinking, Madeline chafed her hands together. “Hilton never would have done what he did if I was still around. Like I said, I made sure the clinic was—”
“Shipshape. Yeah, I know.”
She didn’t appreciate the interruption so she pretended it hadn’t happened. “He also never would have gotten involved in what he’s involved in if he didn’t give so much of his own personal fortune to the clinic to make sure it stayed solvent. Government funding cuts, you know, and Hilton, he can’t bear to see his patients suffer because of ridiculous government bureaucracy. He—”
“He cooked the books. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
Madeline blinked rapidly. “He knew it was the only way, and then...well, like I said, I wasn’t around and... and then things got out of hand.”
“How out of hand?”
I doubt if ghosts can blush, but I swear her cheeks got dusky. “There’s the house in the Bahamas,” she said. “And the offshore accounts. Hilton isn’t flamboyant, but he does appreciate the finer things in life. Clothes, cars, food, wine. I mean, it’s just about impossible to hold any of it against him. If he’s going to convince the city’s elite to support the clinic, he needs to mingle with them. And if he’s going to mingle with them, he needs to live like one of them. Besides, a man in his position has a great deal of stress and he deserves the little luxuries of life.”
“Some people wouldn’t consider a house in the Bahamas a little luxury.”
“Of course not. Please don’t get me wrong.” Madeline’s voice was almost pleading. “I don’t want you to think badly of Hilton. That’s not why I’m telling you any of this. He’s misguided, that’s all. And the quality of patient care at the clinic hasn’t deteriorated in the least because of what he’s doing. I know this for certain. I go over there now and again just to reassure myself. I’ve told myself that as long as the clinic is running efficiently and patients aren’t affected, it’s really none of my business, but—”
“But you’re in love with this Hilton character. Or at least you were when you were alive. And you don’t want to see him get in trouble.” It didn’t take a genius to read that much into Madeline’s words, so really, she shouldn’t have greeted my statement with a snort of contempt.
“In love? With Hilton? You really haven’t been paying attention to a word I’ve said, have you? Hilton is a big boy, he can take care of himself. And he will. Believe me, you don’t become as successful or as powerful as Hilton Gerard without learning to fine-tune your self-preservation skills. When the net closes around the Gerard Clinic, Hilton isn’t the one who’s going to be caught in it.”
“Dan?” The name escaped past the sudden knot of anxiety that blocked my throat. “You mean he’s mixed up in all this, too? No. Wait!” I swallowed down my panic. “No way. There’s no way Dan would ever do anything dishonest. Whatever your Doctor Gerard is up to, Dan isn’t a part of it.”
This time, my loyalty to Dan didn’t impress Madeline. Her sour expression pretty much summed up what she thought of me. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter if Danny knows what’s going on or not. He’s getting funding from the clinic for that study he’s conducting. Funding cuts or not, a whole lot of that money still comes from the government, from Medicare and such. When the federal authorities close in—”
Two little words—federal authorities—and my panic was back in full force. The psychology-minded might have called it conditioning. I attributed it to good old-fashioned been there, done that. I was backing away even before I was aware that I was moving.
“Oh no. No feds for me. I’ve had enough of those guys for one lifetime.”
It wasn’t until Madeline gave me a blank look that I realized that like it or not, I owed her an explanation.
“My dad,” I said, and damn, but I hated telling this story. “He was a plastic surgeon. There was a little matter of Medicare fraud. Dad will be in federal prison for at least another eight years.”
It was the Reader’s Digest Condensed version, of course. I’d purposely left out all the stuff about how, thanks to Dad’s illegal doings, our family had lost everything: the upscale house in the upscale suburb, his bank accounts and investments, the people who’d always said they were our friends. Mom didn’t wait around to watch the Martin family go down in flames; she hightailed it to Florida to hide from the shame. And me? Well, I’d been dumped by the fiancé who had claimed he loved me more than my family’s money, and instead of becoming a CCW (that’s country-club wife) and working on my tan, on my backhand, or on completing what had been shaping up to be a superior collection of Marc Jacobs handbags, I was working as a tour guide in a cemetery.
Enough said.
Fortunately, Madeline didn’t bother with any sympathy. Fine by me, since I wasn’t looking for any. Ever the logical scientist, she breezed right on. “Then you understand the problem completely. I’ve heard rumor that the FBI is nosing around the clinic, and if that’s true, you know they’re going to uncover Hilton’s wrongdoings. They’re not going to care that the money Danny is using was filtered through Hilton. They’re going to see that he’s spending government funds on a study that was never approved. And then—”
“Dan’s going to join my dad as a guest of the government.”
I didn’t like the thought or the picture that popped into my mind—the one of Dan behind bars. I swallowed hard and told my imagination to sit down and shut up.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” I told Madeline, forcing myself to think like a detective, because that was better than giving in to the panic. “We’ve got to look at the facts before we jump to conclusions. What kind of study is Dan working on with Doctor Gerard, anyway?”
Madeline shrugged. She didn’t like being out of the loop, and three years of being dead pretty much assured that. “I don’t know all the details. I do know it has something to do with brain waves. Whatever it is, it’s not worth Danny risking his reputation. Or his freedom.”
I was so not going to go there. That’s why I glommed on to the brain-wave part. “So Dan really is a research scientist, right? I mean, the whole thing about studying my brain and my aberrant behavior, that’s legit?”
She cocked her head. “You didn’t think it was?”
“I wasn’t sure. I mean, I believed him at first because I met him in a hospital and all, but then when he saved my life—”
“Did he?” Madeline looked interested in spite of herself. “Danny’s a man of many talents.”
“And he believes in ghosts.” I wasn’t sure if this was news to Madeline, but I thought it only fair I share it. “He’s never come right out and said it, but he’s
hinted, you know? He knows what he’s talking about. He knows you guys exist.”
Her smile was nothing short of beatific. “I told you, Danny thinks outside the box. And you . . .” When she looked at me, the expression faded. “You’re glad he was telling the truth, aren’t you? About the brain studies?”
I was, and I wasn’t ashamed to admit it.
“Then you want to help him?”
I groaned. “Of course I don’t want to see anything bad happen to Dan. But I can’t believe he’s mixed up in Doctor Gerard’s fraud scheme. Really. Dan isn’t the type.”
“You haven’t been listening.” Madeline stalked away, whirled around, and came back at me. “It doesn’t matter if he knows what’s going on. Hilton’s going to get caught, and when he does, Danny’s going down with him. His career will be over. His life will be ruined. You’re the only one who can stop it, Pepper. You’ve got to help him.”
“But—”
Madeline’s voice simmered with anger. “You just told me Danny saved your life, and now you’re going to let him spend the best years of his life in jail?”
“No. I mean, I don’t want to. It’s just that . . .” I collected my thoughts. “I just can’t believe—”
“You don’t believe Danny’s involved? Well, I can prove it. He and Doctor Gerard are having dinner tonight at Piece, the brewery over on West North Avenue.” Madeline shimmered around the edges. She faded like a bad TV picture. “Go there.” Her voice faded, too, until it didn’t sound as if it was coming from her at all. It was in the air all around me. And in the icy wind that ducked under my collar and shivered down my back. “You’ll see.”
“But . . .” By the time I made a move to close in on her, she was already gone. “What am I going to say to him?” I asked anyway. “How am I going to explain that I know that Doctor Gerard is skimming the clinic’s money?”
My only answer was the sound of the wind that blew across the headstones around me.
“Damn,” I grumbled, and I turned back toward the Palmer memorial.
That’s when I realized the tour group—and the tour bus—had already moved on to another part of the cemetery.
And didn’t it just figure? It started to snow.
5
Sure, Madeline told me that Dan and this Doctor Gerard character were having dinner that night at a place called Piece. But she’d failed to mention the time, and I’d been so worried about Dan (not to mention my noticeable lack of circulation and how I was certain it was just the first of the many ugly signs of hypothermia), I’d forgotten to ask. I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of watching me stand in the middle of Graceland to try and call her back from wherever it was ghosts went when they weren’t bugging me. It would brand me as unprofessional, and something told me she would enjoy that far too much.
There might have been tiny drifts of snow on my shoulders, and yes, I was frozen to the bone, but I knew what I had to do. Instead of worrying about Madeline or about Dan’s dinner time, I came to grips with the fact that my tour group was long gone, found my way out of the cemetery, and hailed a cab.
Never let it be said that Pepper Martin is not committed to her investigations. Even the ones she doesn’t want to be involved with in the first place. I got back to the conference hotel and took a very long, very hot shower. Even before I could feel my hands and feet again, I was bundled in jeans, a wool sweater, and the chunkiest, flattest-heeled, most utilitarian shoes I owned (which were not all that chunky, flat-heeled, or utilitarian, of course, but would have to do). Thus prepared, I decided to go to the restaurant early and stay late if I had to. It was the only way I could hope to catch Dan and Doctor Gerard together, and maybe in the bargain, find out if Madeline knew what she was talking about.
With that in mind, I arrived at Piece Brewery and Pizzeria a little before five. There was already a waiting list, and the tiny entryway was packed. Luckily, it was no longer snowing, but the wind was still as icy as it had been at the cemetery. When I stepped back onto the sidewalk to wait, it hit me in the face, and I cursed whoever it was who’d planned a February conference in Chicago rather than one in some nice, civilized place like West Palm. My teeth were knocking together and so were my knees. I hunkered down, stuffed my hands deep into my pockets, and nestled my chin into the scarf I’d bought at the hotel gift shop.
I know, I know . . . gray is not my color and acrylic is definitely not my fabric of choice. I was hardly making a fashion statement, but at that point, I didn’t much care. The scarf cut some of the chill, and, more importantly, like the matching gray felted bucket hat I had pulled over my ears, it provided a bit of camouflage. I wasn’t ready to let Dan know I was in Chicago, or that I had my eye on him. Not yet. Not until I had a better understanding of what was really going on.
“It’s cold.”
“No kidding.” I’d already answered before I pulled my gaze away from the warm paradise that lay just on the other side of the front door of the restaurant, and saw that the person standing on the snow-pocked sidewalk next to me was a guy with a scrawny beard and hair that stuck out in weird spikes from beneath his battered baseball cap. The first thing I noticed was that he looked too young to be homeless. He did not, however, look too clean. His standard-issue green Army jacket hadn’t been washed in forever, and his jeans were torn. His face was streaked with dirt. Even so, he had nice eyes. They were as brown as a teddy bear, and just as warm and friendly looking.
Nice eyes or not, no way this guy was waiting for a table. Even before he spoke, I knew what was coming.
“You got any extra cash?” he asked.
As it happened, I did. I also had enough experience in the downtown shopping districts of cities far and wide to know that like ghosts, panhandlers are persistent. I couldn’t afford to be pestered while I was trying to go unnoticed and keep an eye on the people filing into and out of the restaurant. I felt around in my pocket for one of the dollars the cab driver who brought me to Piece gave me as change. I pulled it out.
Homeless Guy almost looked embarrassed. “Most people just give me quarters,” he said.
“Sorry, no quarters.” I held out the dollar, and I swear, he hesitated for so long, I actually thought he wasn’t going to take it.
He gave in; I knew he would. With an embarrassed smile and a mumbled word that might have been “Thanks,” he reached for the dollar. That’s when something spooked him.
I can’t say what it was, because as far as I could see, nothing had changed. Or had it? There were still tight knots of people standing on the sidewalk on either side of us. There was still traffic crawling by on the narrow street just to the other side of the cars parked nearby. I was still as cold as hell, and I wished he would just take the money and get it over with so I could put my hand back in my pocket.
Call it a hunch, or maybe it was detective’s instinct, but I knew something was suddenly wrong with the picture when Mr. Homeless snatched the money out of my hand, tugged his jacket sleeves down around his bare hands, and took off for parts unknown. At that moment, a cab rolled up to the curb. A thin middle-aged man with high cheekbones and salt-and-pepper hair got out first, and a couple seconds later, Dan Callahan emerged from the backseat of the cab. While the older man paid the driver, Dan waited on the sidewalk not twenty feet from me.
I wasn’t going to take the chance that he’d see me. Not this early in the game. I thanked those detective instincts for the scarf I was hiding behind, and spun around to face the front window of the restaurant. For once, I didn’t focus on how warm the people inside looked. I was too busy watching Dan’s reflection.
Here’s the quick skinny on Dan: he’s cute (I may have mentioned that before). He’s got nice blue eyes and brown hair that’s sometimes a little too shaggy, and he wears wire-rimmed glasses. They must have fogged when he stepped out of the warm cab, because he took his glasses off and rubbed the lenses with one corner of the houndstooth scarf he was wearing with a black leather jacket and jeans that were
nicely worn and even more nicely tight.
“Well, are you just going to stand there like a lump? Or are you going to do something? Like follow them, maybe?”
There was no reflection in the window next to mine, but when I glanced to my side, there was Madeline in her boxy skirt and her lab coat.
My scarf covered my mouth, so in the great scheme of things, I was glad I’d plunked down my MasterCard and bought it. At least I could talk to her without looking too loony. “I am doing something,” I pointed out, though I shouldn’t have had to. “I’ve been standing out here freezing, waiting for Dan. Now he’s here and—”
“They’re going inside.” Even before the door closed behind Dan and the man who must have been Hilton Gerard, Madeline was headed that way. “You’ve got to follow them, Pepper. It’s the only way you’ll find out what’s going on.”
She was right, and shit, but I hated when ghosts did that! Keeping an eye on Dan and the doctor, I sidestepped my way through the crowd and was nearly to the door when I realized I wasn’t alone. Not ten feet away, Homeless Guy stood with his hands in his pockets. He was looking exactly where I’d been looking.
Night of the Loving Dead Page 6