A Death Before Dying (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  “Yes—close.” Somehow she suddenly felt ridiculous, repeating the single word close. Was that all there was to say? Lovers—passionate lovers—for three months. All reduced to close.

  “After the first policeman arrived, though, you talked to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you go downstairs and talk to him? Or did he come up here?”

  “I went down. I—I thought I should help. Tell them his name, tell them about the car.”

  “I wonder …” The detective paused, studying her. Then, apparently having come to a decision: “I wonder whether you could tell me what kind of a man Brice Hanchett was.”

  “I …” She frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean, give me a description of him. Was he even-tempered? Hotheaded? Did he make enemies? Was he cautious, or was he reckless? Things like that.” Transparently trying to put her at ease, reassure her, he smiled. “I’m looking for impressions. No big deal. I won’t repeat what you say.”

  Her answering smile twisted ruefully. “Hot-tempered, even-tempered, that’s easy. He had a terrible temper. At least on the job, he supposedly had a terrible temper.”

  “What about privately? Did he have a temper privately, would you say?”

  Considering the question, how best to answer, to be fair, she let her eyes wander. Then, speaking deliberately, she said, “Brice was a very intelligent, very attractive, very vital man. He was one of those people who have it all. His personality—well, it was very powerful, very compelling. And he had the ego to match. He was a very egocentric man. When everything was going his way, he was charming. But cross him, and sparks flew. Big, bright sparks.”

  “Did he hold a grudge? Was he that kind of a man?”

  She nodded. “I suppose he did. But no more than the next man, I’d say. If Brice got in a fight, he usually won. And winners don’t hold grudges. At least Brice didn’t. As long as he got his way, there weren’t any problems.”

  “By ‘fight,’ I presume you mean verbally. Not physical fights.”

  She hesitated. Then she nodded again. “Yes. Right.”

  Hastings folded his notebook, clipped his ballpoint pen to an inside pocket. “This’ll probably turn out to be a street hoodlum who panicked and pulled the trigger by accident. An attempted robbery, in other words. At least that’s the way I’d bet.” A pause. Then, quietly: “Is that how you’d bet, Mrs. Pfiefer?”

  Behind the question she could sense some secret meaning. But what? Why? How much did Hastings really know?

  “I—I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “What I mean is, if it turns out not to be robbery, or attempted robbery, do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Dr. Hanchett?” A moment passed as they eyed each other. Then: “Your husband, for instance. Is he—was he—jealous of Dr. Hanchett?”

  “Are you saying—suggesting—that Jason would—” Incredulously, she began shaking her head as she felt anger growing, warming her. A small glowing ember of anger. “Are you saying that Jason could have done it, killed Brice?”

  “I’m just looking for information, for opinions. I gather it’s your opinion that your husband couldn’t have done it.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Yes, that’s definitely my opinion. Definitely, yes.”

  1:20 AM

  In silence, Hastings watched the doors of the coroner’s van close. With their measurements checked and their evidence bagged and tagged and their pictures taken, the lab technicians were switching off their lights and taking down their yellow tapes. In an hour the night would reclaim the murder scene. In the morning, bright and early, the householders responsible for this section of sidewalk would be out with hose and broom, washing down the blood.

  Standing beside Hastings, Canelli noted the time in the log as Hastings glanced across the street. Was Carla Pfiefer still watching from her darkened living room? How would she sleep tonight? Had she been in love with Brice Hanchett? Or had they been using each other? If Hanchett was an egotist, what did that make Carla Pfiefer?

  And what had Carla Pfiefer made of her husband except a cuckold?

  He waited for Canelli to make his log entries. “So what’s it look like?”

  “Well,” Canelli answered, “it turns out that he had his wallet and his money—about a hundred dollars—and a ring and a fancy wristwatch. So it doesn’t look like robbery. Except if the bad guy got spooked, the old story. But from what Taylor says, and what the pizza guy says, the whole thing was pretty—you know—deliberate. The victim—his name was Brice Hanchett, and he lived on Jackson Street, in Pacific Heights—he was just walking calmly, not expecting a thing. It seems like the assailant was waiting for him, standing behind that tree”—Canelli pointed—“in the shadows. So that was it. Three shots. Hanchett went right down, apparently. So then the assailant, very cool, stood over him for a few seconds, then walked off. The M.E. says Hanchett probably died right where he fell, by the look of the wounds. Two shots hit him, it looks like, large caliber, in the chest. So the third shot went wild, probably. We got two shell casings, by the way. Two out of three, not bad.” As he said it, Canelli looked hopefully at Hastings, for approval.

  Hastings nodded. “Great. That’s great. By the way—” He pointed to the tan Jaguar, parked a short distance up the hill. “That’s his car, that tan Jag. Did you hold on to the keys?”

  “Yessir. I figured they wouldn’t take prints.”

  “Okay—good. Well—” Hands in his pockets, Hastings surveyed the scene. “Well, let’s wrap it up. Or rather—” Hastings smiled, yawned, took his hands out of his pockets, stretched his arms overhead. “Or rather, let’s you wrap it up. After the towtruck comes, unblock the street. Then …”He hesitated. At one-thirty in the morning, was he presuming too much on Canelli’s amiable good nature? No. Canelli was the officer in charge at the scene. It was a trial run for command, for promotion. In for a dime, in for a dollar. “Then you’ll have to find his family, break the news.”

  “Right.” Canelli nodded. Then, tentatively, he gestured toward Carla Pfiefer’s flat. “What about the lady? Carla Pfiefer? What d’you think, Lieutenant? Should I mention her to the guy’s family, or what? I mean, if his wife asks where he was—where he’d been, before he got killed …” Letting the question linger, Canelli furrowed his brow. His brown eyes were anxious. “I mean, if you were me …” Once more, his question trailed off.

  “If I were you,” Hastings said, “I’d discharge my duty to notify the next of kin. If they’re in shape to answer questions, I’d find out what they know. But I wouldn’t volunteer anything. And I wouldn’t answer any questions—not any hard questions, anyhow. I’d just do it by the book—get through it. And then I’d get out. That’s best.”

  “Yeah …” Gravely, Canelli nodded, then repeated dubiously, “Yeah …”

  1:30 AM

  She turned her gaze from the bedside clock to the ceiling of the bedroom. It had been just a little after ten o’clock, she knew, when she’d arrived at the Green Street address.

  Three and a half hours …

  The pistol had been a snake in her hand, deadly and alive, the dark metal tracking him like a cobra’s head. The flame licking out to find him, touch him—

  Kill him.

  Wands were metal, too. Magician’s wands, touchstones of her childhood. Wands come alive, reincarnated, the flame that could kill.

  A touch of her finger on metal, flame finding flesh, death unto death.

  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

  And hers, too. Finally hers.

  Tuesday, September 11

  9:10 AM

  AS HASTINGS MOUNTED THE broad stone steps of the Barrington Medical Center, the realization suddenly surfaced, paired with a name: Susan Parrish, someone he’d known in high school. Newly promoted, Susan was head nurse at Barrington. She’d married young, just out of high school. Quickly, she’d had two children. Her maiden name had been Jessup; she’d married Arnold Parrish, whose fa
ther was a dentist. After she’d had two children, a girl and a boy, and after the children were in their teens, Susan had decided to go to college and become a nurse. When he’d returned to San Francisco, soon after he’d gotten his shield, Hastings had discovered Susan working at San Francisco General, in the emergency room. They’d both been rookies, both in their thirties, both of them taking a second look at life. For Susan, the career move had been voluntary, a search for another dimension. For him, the move had been involuntary, a retreat from the failure of his marriage and the sudden end of his playing days with the Lions. Followed by the final defeat: he and the bottle, no contest.

  At the reception desk, a young black woman with quick eyes and a melodious voice asked whether she could help him.

  “Susan Parrish, please. Tell her it’s Frank Hastings.”

  Moving efficiently, the woman nodded, wrote the name on a small notepad, punched out a number on her telephone console. “Susan Parrish. Frank Hastings is here.” She listened, nodded, smiled at him. “She says for you to come right up. Do you know the way?”

  “Afraid not.”

  She produced a printed floor plan of BMC and deftly began laying out his route with a felt marker.

  9:36 AM

  When Hastings had finished his account of the murder, Susan Parrish smiled broadly. “God, this is great. Obviously, everyone at BMC’ll be talking about Hanchett. But I’ll be the only one with an inside track. Wait’ll I tell Arnie tonight.”

  Sternly, Hastings raised a forefinger. “You can tell Arnie. But that’s it.”

  She nodded, a deep, good-natured inclination of her head. She was a stocky, robust woman, with the mannerisms to match. In high school, Hastings remembered, she’d almost always been on the honor roll. During the twenty-odd minutes they’d been talking, Susan had taken three calls, each obviously involving problems only she could solve. In each case, Susan had dealt with the problem smoothly and efficiently. It was a talent Hastings envied.

  “So what can you tell me about Hanchett?” Hastings asked. “The inside stuff, I mean.”

  “The truth?”

  “The truth.”

  “The whole truth?”

  “The whole truth.”

  “Well, the truth is—let’s see—” She broke off. Crow’s feet showed around her eyes as she considered. Without realizing it, Hastings sat up straighter in his chair, sucked in his stomach.

  “The truth is,” she said, “Dr. Hanchett was a stuffed shirt and a petty tyrant and a bush-league megalomaniac—and a hell of a surgeon. And, oh yes, a philanderer. You already know that part. Scandals—triangles—didn’t faze him. If he saw a woman he liked, he went after her.” She shrugged. “Maybe he couldn’t help himself. Dr. Pfiefer and his wife were only the latest triangle. There were others. Always.”

  “Did he make enemies, would you say?”

  Promptly, she nodded. “All the time. Excluding lovers, I can’t think of any friends he had, at least not at BMC. But he definitely had enemies.”

  “Did anyone hate him enough to kill him?”

  “That,” she answered evenly, “is a judgment you’d have to make, Frank. What causes someone to murder someone else?” She spread her hands. “That’s outside my area of expertise.” She paused, looked at him speculatively. “Was it premeditated? Is that what you’re saying?”

  How much should he tell her? How much should he hold back?

  “The way it came down,” he said, “the way it seems to’ve happened, it could’ve been premeditated. That is, there wasn’t anything taken, no robbery. However, that can happen if a potential robbery victim resists, and gets shot. The bad guy usually forgets about the wallet or the purse, and runs.”

  Her smile was mischievous. “So what’re you saying? What is this, the either-or game? Premeditated, not premeditated, take your pick?”

  “What this is,” he answered, “is a guessing game. I don’t have the faintest idea who killed him, or why. But if it’s premeditated, then the murderer was known to the victim, that’s the first rule. Someone who knew the victim, and someone who hated him, that’s the profile. And so far, the guy I know about that best fits into that profile is Jason Pfiefer, the jealous husband.”

  Susan Parrish’s smile turned inward as she reflectively shook her head. “Doctors—those two doctors, especially—they’ve got three-hundred-pound egos. At least.”

  “Was Jason Pfiefer jealous of Brice Hanchett, would you say?”

  “I have no idea, Frank. None.”

  “Carla Pfiefer said Hanchett was chief of surgery.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Jason Pfiefer is a neurosurgeon.”

  She nodded.

  “So they worked together.”

  “Right. But except for the transplant team, they really didn’t have much to do with each other.”

  “There wasn’t any friction between them, then.”

  Wryly, she shrugged. “If Hanchett was involved, there was friction. Guaranteed. But the only time Hanchett and Pfiefer worked together was on transplants, like I said. Still, there wasn’t any unusual friction between them during the operations, that I know of.”

  “Transplants … you mean hearts, livers, like that?”

  “No hearts,” she answered. “Livers and kidneys, at Barrington. We specialize, you see. That’s the secret of Hanchett’s success in transplants. Specialization. Which is why we have a worldwide reputation, especially for livers. And it’s all thanks to Dr. Hanchett and his ego.”

  “How do you mean, ‘specialization’?”

  “I mean we don’t take chances. We do one kind of operation—livers and kidneys—and we do it very well indeed. We don’t experiment. That’s when you fail, you see. Which is why …” Her voice began to fade, her eyes began to lose focus. A random thought had surfaced, something significant.

  He prompted her. “Which is why?”

  Thoughtfully, she responded, “Which is why, occasionally, Hanchett had problems. Not with the doctors. With recipients. Or, rather, with their families.”

  “Someone needs a liver and doesn’t get one. Is that what you mean?”

  “For every organ that’s available, there’re always a dozen candidates. Someone has to rank them, give them a priority number, one to twelve, whatever. Actually, it’s a committee of three that assigns the priorities—the Recipient Selection Committee. And Hanchett, of course, was the chairman of the committee, which means—meant—that it was a one-man show, really.” Now, mischievously again, she smiled. “Some cynics say playing God came naturally to Hanchett. But whether it came naturally or not, the fact remains that someone had to decide who got a chance to live. Which meant, of course, that someone else would probably die. And Hanchett had to make the decision.”

  “How’d he decide? What were the guidelines?”

  “Mostly it’s a medical decision. It’s very complicated, really. But basically it comes down to how successfully the recipient will get through the operation—and how long he’ll survive, assuming the operation succeeds.”

  “So a ten-year-old kid has a lot better chance of being chosen than someone who’s eighty.”

  She smiled. “Try fifty.”

  “What about money? Does a forty-year-old millionaire have a better chance than a ten-year-old whose family’s on welfare?”

  She let a beat pass before she decided to say, “I hope not.” Another moment of silence. Then, as if to divert his next question, she said, “The primary consideration is need—how sick the patient is, how long he can live without a new liver or kidney. Sometimes that translates into”—she paused, searching for the phrase—“into geography.”

  “Geography?”

  “‘Harvesting organs,’ as it’s called, is a minute-to-minute operation. It’s distance, and it’s time. The ideal source is a nineteen-year-old kid riding a motorcycle without a helmet. He hits his head, goes into a coma. His parents agree to donate his organs, if and when. Barrington is notified that a liver and kidney
might be available. A couple of transplant surgeons pack their instruments and a change of underwear. If the organs are in Sacramento or San Jose, they drive to the hospital—and wait. Otherwise, they get into a corporate jet—and hope the weather is flyable. Because once the donor dies, those surgeons have got to get the organs and pack them in ice, and get in their Learjet and get back here. They always come in an ambulance, sometimes with a police escort, from the airport.

  “And while all that’s going on, the recipient has got to get to the hospital—time and distance again. He’s got to be on the operating table. Because once that organ comes through the doors, the surgeons start cutting. So, obviously, the recipient who can get here the soonest has an edge. Which is why, just last month, a young couple with a twelve-year-old girl who was dying of kidney failure got in their motor home and drove down from Redding. They drove to San Francisco, and they started living in our parking lot. They parked there for almost two weeks before—” She broke off, looked away. Meaning, without doubt, that the girl had died.

  “So are you saying Hanchett made enemies, playing God?”

  “I’m saying that he had to deal with some pretty distraught people. Especially parents with young children—mothers. Believe me, Frank, you always hear about the ferocity of the mother fighting for the life of her young. And I’ll tell you, it’s all true. You see it constantly in this business. But never more dramatically than when there’s a mother whose child is going to die unless he gets a particular organ from a particular donor by a particular time. The mother will do anything—anything—to get that organ. And a mother who sees an organ go to another woman’s child, then sees her own child die …” Susan shook her head. “I only dealt with it once, when the woman went off the deep end. But it was awesome. Really awesome. Most times, I like being a nurse. But dealing with that woman …” She turned up her hands. “That night I about decided to go into real estate. Even after one of Arnie’s double martinis and a backrub, I still thought about real estate.”

  “How long ago was this?”