Polly Dent Loses Grip (A LaTisha Barnhart Mystery)

by S. Dionne Moore

  “What’s going on?” Matilda asked.

  Hardy went over to his momma and patted her back, whispering something into her ear and steering her into her recliner before returning to Thomas’s side. His other side. Hardy was placing himself between Thomas and the front door in case he made a run for it. My man’s mind is sharp as a razor, not that I thought his scrawny body could bring Thomas down, but he could certainly present an obstacle to slow progress until I could body-slam him.

  Thomas’s rivers finally dried up, and he accepted a tissue I’d yanked from the box next to the sofa. He sighed down into the sofa and braced his hands on his knees, head down. “Polly was a good woman. I-I loved her so much. I trusted her. She wanted this apartment so we could be close.” His hand clenched around the tissue. “All those years I spent in jail and ached to be free, to start over and be a good citizen, seemed within reach when I came here. I met Polly and thought she was everything I’d wanted, spunky, fun, maybe a little eccentric.” He shrugged. “But who isn’t at our age?”

  “I’m guessing she didn’t tell you about her ex.”

  “No.” Another clenching of the tissue. “And when I found out, it was like she’d shot me. Deceived me. All I could think was how I’d been tricked and played for a fool. She wanted my money, and it seemed to become clear that her association with Otis Payne was for reasons less than honorable.”

  “You think they were looking for your stash?”

  “Stash is too big a word.” Thomas gave a little chuckle. “It’s not much, you see, because I paid back everything I stole. But the small amount I had invested of my own money had grown to a nice sum, and I guess she thought there was more, and that as my partner’s ex she had a right to it.”

  “You didn’t think so.”

  Thomas raised his head. “It wasn’t about the money. I don’t care about the money, but I knew others who might have found out my identity might show an interest in me because they think I had money.”

  “You didn’t want to be played for a fool.,” I said, straight out.

  “The whole thing over the robberies was the foolish mistake of an immature mind. In that last note she left for me, it was as if the money meant so much to her. Not even she understood that it wasn’t the money I stole with her ex, it was my own.”

  “But you were in the gym that day.”

  He closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath of air. “She’d betrayed me. My trust. I was so angry.”

  “You found out after we saw you get off the elevator that day we first met?”

  “Sue Mie is a private investigator just starting out, I’d hired her to look into Polly’s background, just to make sure. . .” He massaged his forehead, and I understood how hard it must be for a wealthy person to trust in peoples’ displays of love for them.

  He sucked in air. “Sue Mie had gotten the message to me right after Polly and I dined together that afternoon.”

  “So you got all mad and went down to have it out with her?”

  “I saw Otis open the gym door for her. Watched as she powdered up and got ready to walk, Otis and her whispering the entire time. I hated it. Hated them. They were talking about the money. Plotting how they would split it, but more than that I hated her deception. I watched Otis leave and would have gone in then to face her, but your husband was coming down the hall. He stopped and went into the gym.”

  “Polly said just a few things to me.” Hardy nodded. “She was going back to Otis and demanding my momma be moved, but. . .” Hardy paused. “Right before I left it was like she zoned out on me. She kept swallowing real hard.”

  “Why didn’t you say that earlier?” I asked.

  “I figured she was just mad, or out of breath and wishing she had some water.”

  Thomas picked up the story again. “When your husband left, I went in. . .I can still see her face when I told her what I knew. She didn’t care. Didn’t even answer me. She just jabbed at the button to slow the machine down and wiped at her face.”

  Thomas ran a hand over his head and down his neck. “I’ve been over that scene so many times. Why did I pull the key? Why didn’t I—”

  “You pulled the key out?”

  “She wouldn’t answer me. Like she just didn’t care about me, about what we had. I knew then that I hated her and I pulled on the string of the emergency key where she had it clipped to her waist.”

  “She fell.”

  Thomas shook his head. “She stumbled and caught herself.”

  “She didn’t scream or rage or yell?” That didn’t sound like Polly, and I’d only known her for those few minutes.

  Thomas’s brow squeezed hard. “No. That’s why I was so angry. It was like I didn’t mean anything to her.”

  “You didn’t find it strange?”

  “I guess I didn’t think about it until now. You think it meant something?”

  “Did you see her fall?” I asked.

  “No.” Thomas leaned forward. “When I realized what I had done, how it could have hurt her and landed me back in jail again, I left.”

  Hardy stared hard at me, sending signals of some sort. “Dr. Kwan said he saw Thomas with Polly.”

  I cocked my head at him, wondering if he was percolating a full pot. “We know that.”

  Hardy moved closer to me. “‘Tish, Otis told us that evening after we found Polly that he had to call Dr. Kwan in.”

  “Then how could he have seen. . .” I know my eyes must have bulged out of my head then. I recalled Darren’s statement about Polly yelling at him. Polly’s reputation was one of a fighter. Her words her choice of weapon.”

  “Poison,” Hardy said pure and simple. “It comes together.”

  “Digoxin?” I asked.

  “Something laid her out.” Hardy nodded.

  Thomas cleared his throat. “You mean to tell me you think Polly was poisoned? But how?”

  I asked a question of my own. “Mitzi’s doing better. I was up there earlier and Darren showed me something. She has a new bottle of prescription pills that she’s been taking. Darren said he wondered why there was a new bottle when her old bottle wasn’t yet finished. Since no one seems to trust Dr. Kwan, Darren checked the old prescription bottles. Those capsules were all empty. Just now, Hardy and I found some things in a bathroom behind the gym. Empty capsules and lots of pills in different colors.”

  Thomas looked stunned. “Is he stealing the drugs and replacing them with something else?”

  My excitement built. “Polly never mentioned anything about Dr. Kwan? Anything strange?”

  He pinched his eyebrows together. “The only thing I can think of was where she said in her note that certain people were desperate for money. Do you think she knew something about Dr. Kwan?”

  Hardy crossed his arms. “If so, it sure gives him a motive to shut her up.”

  I had something to add to the pot now. “Sue Mie said Mitzi had told her the same rhymes she told me. If she told others and they thought she really had seen something that implicated them, it would be a good reason to keep her quiet.”

  “And what better way than to give her fake capsules of the drug she relies on for clarity?” Thomas added.

  Matilda broke silence, her back rigid, hands braced on her cane. “One thing you are all forgetting, Sue Mie gave Polly a sugar snack instead of a sugar-free. Did the same thing to me. What’s to say that she didn’t do Polly in?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  When my cell phone started to ringing, we were all a little spooked. Caller ID showed Sue Mie was on the other end.

  “LaTisha, listen, I’ve been looking around the building, trying to stay low. I found something I want you to see. Meet me in the basement.”

  “And why don’t you just tell me over this here phone?”

  “You won’t believe what’s down here. I need a witness.”

  Then she hung up. Okay. Right. Sue Mie wasn’t one to talk in long stretches, but a good-bye would have been nice. And she’d sure be surprised
when I didn’t show up. This black woman doesn’t do damp basements with mice and crawly things.

  When Hardy found out what the phone call was about, he got to flapping like a momma hen over her chicks. “No way are you going there alone.”

  “You are so right.”

  Hardy stopped stomping long enough to cock his head at me. “You’re not going at all?”

  “Remember when Bryton was little and went down to the basement. Then he got all mulish on me?”

  Hardy grinned and nodded. “You let him stay down there, ‘cuz you had it made up that all the critters down there would teach him a good lesson.”

  “Did too. Came screeching up those steps at first sight of a mouse. Slept with the lights on for a month after that. And that house him and Fredlynn just bought, it didn’t have a basement, did it?”

  “Mrs. Barnhart,” Thomas piped up. “Why don’t I go down there? I’ll explain how you hate basements.”

  Now that didn’t set well with me. Sending someone to do what I could do for myself. Too, I had to remember that Sue Mie might have something up her sleeve. But why? We were working together.

  Hardy said it for me, “You have to go, LaTisha.”

  “I don’t have to do anything, Hardy Barnhart.”

  “I’ll go with you and protect you from the critters.”

  I pushed away the idea of cobwebs and mice. “If anything touches me I’ll scream so loud they’ll think its the fire alarm.”

  Thomas went with us to show us the way. Apparently the elevator didn’t go to the basement. The going down was easy, but I sure dreaded hiking myself back up those stairs. Why did all this investigating involve exercise?

  We made it all the way down to a lit hallway. Not too bad. “How’d you know where to find the basement?” I asked Thomas.

  Thomas smiled. “Not much to do around here some days, so I explored, but the doors down here are usually locked.” He pointed at the door straight ahead of us down a dimly lit, narrow hall. “I’ll stay right here in case you need me.”

  Hardy followed me a good ways, when a humming sound caught our attention. A tiny room held two vending machines. I knew I’d lost Hardy completely. The one thing he can’t pass up is a vending machine. I kept right on going as he gravitated to the things like a man who’d fasted for forty days and nights, his hand already working down into his pocket for some change.

  I kept going, making sure to look through the little square window in the door. The room beyond didn’t look too bad. It was well lit, and Sue Mie was clearly visible. She even waved me in.

  The door slammed shut behind me, and I took two steps into that room when Sue Mie’s smile flat-lined.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her head turning to the right, in time for me to see Dr. Kwan step from behind some shelving.There was a prescription in his hand that had my name on it. He raised the gun and motioned me over next to Sue Mie.

  “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Barnhart,” Dr. Kwan said.

  “You better stop waving that thing in my face.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you’re the one with the upper hand here. Now sit.” He motioned to two chairs out of the line of the windows. I sat.

  “Sue Mie did a good job getting you down here. Did you come alone?”

  Good thing Thomas had stayed back a ways. I wondered, though, if they’d seen Hardy. Vending machines aren’t the quietest things when they drop their selections. What if. . .

  Dr. Kwan’s eyes shifted away from Sue Mie and me, but that gun had its beady little eye on us all the same.

  “Ah, Mr. Barnhart. Bring him over here next to these two, Otis.”

  My heart sunk to my toes.

  Hardy stood in front of Dr. Kwan and took another bite of a cheese puff like his swivel chair didn’t turn full circle. “You boys shouldn’t be pointing a gun at ladies.”

  Otis dragged a chair over from somewhere, a good length of nylon cord draped over one shoulder. He pointed at the seat. Hardy took his meaning, sat, and kept munching.

  “I’ll take those.” Dr. Kwan held out his hand.

  “Nothing comes between my man and his food,” I warned. “You’d better back off when it comes to cheese puffs.”

  Dr. Kwan pointed his gun at my head. “This is not comedy central, Mrs. Barnhart, and you’re not in control of this situation. I am.” He turned back to Hardy and made a grab for the bag, just as Hardy threw the entire contents in Kwan’s face.

  Cheese puffs went up, and we all started going wild. Sue Mie and I rose as one. She knocked the gun from Dr. Kwan’s hand with some kind of Karate high-ya move, while I pinned him with my size twenty-four body.

  Sue Mie scooped up the gun and handed it to me. “Hold it on him.”

  I eased up on Dr. Kwan’s gut and had his heart as my bulls-eye. I had my back to the action going on behind us, but could hear muffled groans and grunts. I did my job and kept that gun pointed right at Dr. Kwan’s chest as Sue Mie glanced that direction.

  Her concerned look quickly turned into a chuckle, then an outright laugh. Dr. Kwan seemed to be following her line of thinking, because he looked like he was going to be sick.

  “What’s going on back there?” I asked.

  Sue Mie grabbed one of Dr. Kwan’s arms and pulled him from the wall, catching the other and bringing it behind his back, using the nylon cord to bind him. Only after she finished binding him to the chair did I relax my gun hand and turn to look behind me.

  Matilda held her cane up like a weapon as Hardy and Thomas held Otis between them.

  “Hurry up, Tish,” Momma said. “I’m hungry.”

  EPILOGUE

  We’re home now. I’m snuggled down in Maple Gap with a mocha in my hand, satisfied to have another solved mystery under my belt. Hardy is on the sofa stirring the air with his snores, and both Matilda and Darren are out back sipping tea and enjoying a game of Scrabble.

  Everything came out in the following two months. The elderly man with terminal cancer who was in such terrible pain that evening at the singing, had been pressing his button and dispensing nothing more than water, not the morphine he’d so desperately needed. Dr. Kwan had forgotten to take the old bottle of prescription tablets from Mitzi’s room, which was a huge mistake since Darren had discovered the empty capsules.

  Confronted with the evidence I’d gathered from the handles of the treadmill—the powder turned out to be digoxin as Sue Mie had suspected—along with the colored sugar pills and empty capsules I’d gleaned from the bathroom in the back hall, served to pull the rope tighter around the necks of Dr. Kwan and Otis Payne. They finally confessed to stealing narcotics and other drugs to sell for profit.

  Otis’s huffing and puffing when I went back to ask if I could see Polly’s body was because he’d just finished dragging T61 upstairs. He’d asked Chester to make sure not to let anyone into that room, even offering Chester a bonus, though Chester said he had no idea about Polly’s fall resulting from the poison on the handles.

  And it was Otis who’d come into the bathroom that day Hardy and I got caught in the shower. Seems he was trying to cover Dr. Kwan’s slip in leaving Mitzi’s old medication bottle with the empty capsules behind. Hardy and I congratulated Darren on noticing the bottles after Dr. Kwan’s and Otis’s arrest.

  Louise Payne knew of their dealings and was blackmailing Otis to get a cut of the money. Otis dragged Hilda into the scheme with promise of a cut of the money and asked her to mislabel some snacks dispensed to diabetics on the second floor. His thought had been to lay the blame of Polly’s death on whatever CNA happened to be on the floor that evening handing out thesnacks. He would report the mistake, say it caused Polly to get dizzy and fall, leading to a heart attack. Knowing she didn’t have family to order an autopsy made him feel sure her history would help the police swallow that.

  Otis Payne did indeed let Polly into the gym that evening and directed her to the treadmill Dr. Kwan had already laced with digoxin, telling her to get started, promis
ing Dr. Kwan would be in shortly for her evaluation. He knew all along the exercise and sweating would help the poison absorb through her skin that much faster. He’d waited just long enough in the room to know she was falling for the scheme. So the fall didn’t kill her. Digoxin did. Just in case, Dr. Kwan had been prepared to finish her off with a syringe full of the stuff, and had waited in the back hallway to make good and sure she was dead.

  Polly had stumbled on Dr. Kwan’s narcotics stealing scheme, neither Otis nor Dr. Kwan knew exactly how, but she tried to blackmail Dr. Kwan with what she knew. Getting closer to Otis was her way of making Kwan think she was going to tell unless he paid up. Of course, she didn’t know Otis was in on the whole thing. Playing her games with Kwan only prompted the two villains to hatch their dastardly scheme to kill her.

  Sue Mie was proud of her part in busting the scheme. She’d admitted to having a grudge against Otis for the “accident” that had occurred to her uncle, and took the job as CNA in hopes of finding proof that Otis Payne cut corners. Her frustration with Otis was also the reason she called the police after Polly’s fall, to get back at him for her uncle’s fall that, in her mind, was no accident. We keep in touch now, and I send her care packages for her two little boys.

  Mitzi’s poems had been scarily on target. I wondered just how much she truly had seen, and figured Otis and Dr. Kwan probably didn’t pay her much attention even if she had spied them since they knew she wouldn’t be a reliable witness.

  Hardy and me found a new place for Matilda and Darren, who both wanted to move from Bridgeton Towers. Can’t say that we blame them. Being that Momma and Darren have become such good friends, we made sure to find a place they both loved.

  We’re still not sure what will happen to Thomas since he admitted to pulling the emergency key. Hardy and I promised him we’d help him out if we could. Gertrude will no doubt prove a character witness for him, should the need arise.

  As for me, the results are in. Test results, that is. Seems I’ve got me a good case of Diabetes. It almost killed me to hear those words. The doctor reassured me I could control it without insulin for now, but I needed to think about changing my diet. Hardy chuckled at that one, until I banged him on his leg with my purse. But the sparkle was still in his eyes. When I let loose that a diet for me meant none of his favorites anymore, he sure lost the sass. I dragged him along to some support group meetings where we learned all kinds of useful information.