But I didn't leave the hospital.
Just inside the wide revolving door that led to the parking garage, I paused and looked behind me. No little men in white coats. No Dr. Cho. Satisfied that at least for now I wasn't headed for the loony bin, I got my bearings and thought back to the times I'd met Dan at his office. I knew that if I crossed the lobby and went upstairs at the next bank of elevators…
Before I knew it, I was standing outside Dan's office.
There was no one around, and when I knocked on Dan's door, no one answered. I turned the knob.
The door opened easily, but not all the way, and I tried again, bumping the door with my hip. When that didn't work, I mumbled a curse, reached around the door, and felt along the office wall for a light switch. With the light on, I could peek inside and see what was holding things up.
What was holding things up was a bucket and a mop. The big, industrial-strength kind.
Weird?
I thought so. After all, the last time I'd been here, Dan's desk was along one wall, and another was filled just about floor to ceiling with diplomas. There was a credenza behind his desk where he kept the file folders for his study. And in front of his desk, the chair where I'd sat the day I came in and he hooked me up to some machine that measured brain waves and proved—at least to Dan—something about that whole high-propensity-for-hallucinatory-imaging thing.
And now…
I pushed the bucket and mop out of the way and stepped into the room.
The desk and credenza were gone. Instead of the bookcases that should have taken up most of the wall on my left, there were metal shelves. They were filled with cleaning products, rolls of paper towels, boxes of latex gloves.
"Can I help you, please?"
The voice from behind me brought me spinning around. I found myself nose to nose with a young guy in gray pants and a matching shirt. His name badge said he was Jose and part of the housekeeping staff.
"No, thanks. Really." I stepped across the bare cement floor and back into the hallway. "I was just looking for Dan. You know, Dan Callahan. This was his office. I mean, before they turned it into a utility room."
Jose shook his head. "You're lost maybe? This is the room where we store things. You know, soap and such."
"Yeah, I know. I saw. But… " I took another look around just to be sure. "I know I'm in the right place. I've been here before. Why just a couple of weeks ago—"
Jose scratched a finger behind one ear. "I have worked here six months," he said. "And for six months, this is where I come to get my mops and my brooms. This is where I put them away when I am done with them. You are mistaken, I think, senorita."
I was almost afraid to ask the question and it almost didn't make it past my lips, anyway. My mouth was suddenly dry. My voice was tight in my throat. "And Dan?" I asked.
Jose shrugged. "Callahan, you say? Nobody named Dan Callahan ever worked anywhere around here."
Chapter 15
So, was I crazy?
Hell, no.
At least not in the way Dr. Cho thought I was crazy.
Utility room or no utility room, I knew what I knew, and propensity for hallucinatory imaging aside, I knew that Dan Callahan was not a figment of my imagination.
No figment could possibly be as good a kisser as Dan.
My mind made up, I decided I'd deal with him the next time he stuck his cute little nose into my not-so-cute little business, and I put the problem of Dan on the back burner. There seemed no better way to prove my sanity than to get back to work and accomplish something.
But like I said, I wasn't crazy. When I talked about accomplishments, I didn't have Merilee's gala invitations in mind. Or even trying on the gown Ella had brought me to wear to the event. (Though I will admit to being curious about the dress and a little worried, too, since Trish was originally supposed to wear it and Trish was…
well, I didn't want to speak unkindly of the dead, but let's face it, Trish was not exactly a role model for the fashion conscious.)
When I said accomplish, I was talking about solving Didi's mystery.
With that in mind, I was determined to make the most of the afternoon. Lucky for me, there were plenty of phone books near the pay phones in the hospital lobby. Even luckier, Susan Gwitkowski had never changed her name.
I jotted down her address, but I didn't call and ask if I could stop by. If I'd learned anything from my association with the local mob, it was that there was a certain value in catching people off guard. After all, Susan Gwitkowski must have been just about the same age as Didi, and if Didi were still alive…
I did a couple of quick mathematical calculations.
The woman I was going to talk to was by now a little old lady, and believe me, after dealing with two fussy grandmothers and the countless senior citizens groups that came through Garden View on tours, I knew all about little old ladies. I didn't want her to have too much time to think about the past and realign her memories. Better to shake her up a little and see what fell out. About Didi. About swimming upstream in the steno pool. Oh yeah, and about fifty-year-old office gossip, too.
Did I say little old lady?
The woman who answered the door of a grand old mansion with turrets, a slate roof, and leaded glass windows that winked at me in the afternoon sunlight was short and slim, and her hair was curly and cut stylishly short. No way was the mahogany color real, but hey, I had to give her credit for trying. She was clad in leopard-skin capris and a skin-tight black shirt, and the whole presentation was accented by her gold lame sandals and the gold that glittered from the dozens of chains around her neck. They skimmed breasts that weren't anywhere near as lush but were certainly as perky as mine.
I couldn't help myself. I wondered if she was one of my dad's patients.
"I'm sorry to bother you." Even if she didn't look old, I figured Susan would appreciate a show of old-fashioned manners. "I wonder if I might talk to you for a minute."
She looked me up and down. "About… ?"
"Well, it's kind of awkward. You see, it's about Deborah Bowman."
"Didi?" The name was the magic open sesame. Susan loosened her grip on the front door and stepped back to let me inside. "Nobody's mentioned Didi's name to me in a long time. Come on in, honey. Have a seat."
She led me into a living room that was twice as big as my apartment, with windows that overlooked a garden where red and white tulips bobbed in the spring breeze. The last of the daffodils brightened up the spaces between lilacs that looked like they were ready to pop.
"It's beautiful," I told her, and I wasn't lying. What I could see of the garden was breathtaking. The house itself…
I tried not to stare, but let's face it, I'd never been known for my self-control. Susan's living room was a cross between a Pier I store and a cheap bordello. There was purple gauzy fabric draped across the windows and mosquito netting over the bloodred fainting couch where I sat down. There were sequined pillows on the matching couch across from me, candles everywhere, and incense burning on a nearby table.
It smelled like pine needles.
I sneezed.
"This place is amazing," I told Susan, because I figured amazing pretty much covered the gamut. I touched a tissue to my nose. "You must have done really well for yourself in the steno pool."
Until then she had been giving me the kind of hollow smile that said she really didn't understand why I was there. The smile never wavered, but there was suddenly a spark of something more than just curiosity in Susan's dark eyes. "Wise investing," she said, and I could tell from the tone of her voice that it was the last we'd talk about it. She dropped down onto the couch across from mine, and her perfectly plucked and shaped brows dipped into a vee. "You said something about Didi. You're not—"
"Related?" For the second time, I denied any familial connection to the Bowmans. "Not me. But you know, she did have a daughter."
"Judy." Susan reached for a pack of cigarettes and the gold lighter within easy reach. She
lit a cigarette, took a drag, and sat back. "I know her, all right. I ought to. I raised the little bitch."
This was news to me, and I could have kicked myself for not thinking about it sooner. Any private investigator worth his (or her) weight in salt would have thought to ask what had happened to Judy after Didi's death. "I just assumed that Merilee had—"
"You're kidding me, right?" Susan blew out a stream of smoke along with the words. "When Didi got knocked up, her family just about disowned her. They didn't want anything to do with Judy. What's she up to these days?"
I wasn't sure if she was talking about Didi or Judy. Then I realized it didn't matter. My answer applied to both. "She's dead," I said.
"Is she?" Susan didn't look particularly upset by the news. "Haven't heard a word from Judy since the day she turned eighteen. Do the math. That was a hell of a long time ago. She up and walked out of here and that was that." She stabbed her cigarette into an ashtray shaped like a camel. "And after all I did for that girl."
"Then you don't know she had a daughter."
Susan lifted one shoulder. "Don't know. Don't care. Hey… You didn't show up here because you expect me to be responsible for her or anything, do you? Why don't you ask Merilee for help?" On the coffee table draped with a paisley shawl was a copy of the morning's Plain Dealer, and Susan sneered at it and at the story on the front page. I craned my neck to see the headline. So Far the Dawn Museum Set to Open.
"With all her money, you think she could have done something for the kid. But no. Didi dumped Judy with me the night she… Well, you must know the story if you know about Didi. That was that. Never talked to any of the Bowmans again. I applied for legal guardianship of Judy and nobody opposed me. Nobody ever sent me a red cent to pay for her care or her education, either. And what did it get me? Nothing but grief. That girl was just like her mother. A liar and a tramp."
"But I thought you were Didi's friend?"
"Did you?" Susan studied me through the haze of cigarette smoke that hung in the air between us. "Who told you that?"
"I talked to Thomas Ross Howell." Not a lie, even if it wasn't exactly an answer to Susan's question. "Was he Judy's father?"
She barked out a laugh. "I worked for Tom Howell for nearly forty years, and if there's one thing I know about the son of a bitch it's that he'd never bare his soul. Not to friends. Not to family. And certainly not to a stranger. Not even a pretty one like you. No way did he admit he was Judy's father."
"But you always thought it was a possibility."
"Why do you care?" She lit another cigarette. "And what difference does any of it make now? Didi's been dead for fifty years. You say that Judy's dead, too. You trying to foist Didi's granddaughter off on Howell?"
"I'm not trying to foist anybody on anybody. I'm trying to find out more about the book."
At the mention of the word book, Susan froze. One heartbeat. Two. I shifted uncomfortably against the hard-as-nails couch and wondered what I'd said to offend her. Before I could come up with the right words to apologize, she shook herself free of the reaction and aimed a laser look across the coffee table at me. "You are talking about So Far the Dawn, aren't you?"
"As far as I know, there is no other book." Not precisely true. There was the sequel (such as it was) that Merilee was working on. I didn't want to muddy the waters with all that, so I stuck to the subject.
"Yeah," I told her. "I'm talking about So Far the Dawn. I think maybe Didi wrote it."
Susan paused as she was about to take a drag on her cigarette, the filter just barely touching her carmine lips. She tipped her head to one side. "Really? You think that? Than you're as stupid as I was. Because there was a time I thought she wrote it, too."
"Then why didn't you say anything?"
"I said a time. Believe me, it was a very short time. Didi used to show up at work every morning all excited about what she'd written the night before. We'd sit in the lunchroom together and she'd give me the play-by-play, you know, tell me what was happening in the story and what she planned to do next."
"So when the book came out and Merilee's name was on it…"
She took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled a long stream of smoke. "I used to hang out with Didi a lot back then. Even had dinner with her family a time or two. I met Merilee. I knew she was a librarian. I listened to her talk about the Civil War and, hell, I didn't know anything about it, but I could tell she sure knew what she was talking about. So tell me, who would you have believed. A scholar like Merilee? Or a tramp like Didi?"
"And she'd lied to you before."
"All day long and twice on Sundays." Susan laughed. "Not that I held it against her or anything. It was just Didi, you know? She had a heart of gold and an imagination that wouldn't quit."
"Is that why she thought Thomas Howell was in love with her?"
Susan set her cigarette on the lip of the ashtray. Right near the camel's butt. "I'm not sure where you're getting your ideas," she said. "You keep coming back to Judge Howell, and what I don't think you understand is that he was—and is—a good and honorable man. His record is impeccable. His reputation is unassailable."
"I understand all that. But Judy had to come from somewhere."
Susan grinned. "How about from anywhere?"
"Meaning… "
The phone rang, and Susan popped up to answer it, grumbling when she couldn't find it anywhere nearby. She headed out of the living room. "Come on now, honey. You're old enough to know what I'm talking about. Didi had plenty of lovers. Any one of them could have been Judy's father. Excuse me, will you."
She must have found the phone somewhere because the ringing stopped, and as I sat there and wondered what to ask her next, I heard the purr of her voice.
"Psst." The sound came from across the room. I looked that way and found Didi standing in the doorway.
"Where the hell have you been?" I asked her. I popped out of my chair and went to stand close to her so I could whisper. "And what are you doing over there? Get in here and help me out. Susan isn't giving me anything to go on."
"Wanna bet?" Didi crooked a finger at me. I could still hear Susan's voice from another room somewhere toward the back of the house. The coast was clear, and I followed Didi.
I found myself in the library. There were windows along one wall and a desk in front of them. Didi looked that way.
"Take a gander at that," she said.
I hesitated. "I can't just go snooping through another person's things."
"Sure you can." She was in her social call gear, and she marched over to the desk and pointed at it with one gloved hand. "If there's something in that person's things that's a thing that doesn't belong to that person."
Rather than try and figure out the sense of the sentence, I went over to see what she was talking about.
An address book sat in the center of Susan's desk next to a stack of unaddressed envelopes. Like she'd just been getting ready to use it.
The book was small, maybe eight inches tall and half as wide. The cover was black, and it was bent and worn. No doubt it was pretty old.
"This is what you wanted me to see?" I could still hear Susan on the phone, so I dared a closer look at the book. "It's junk."
"It's mine."
Maybe the sneer I aimed Didi's way told her I wasn't exactly buying the story.
"Go ahead," she said. "Open it. You'll see. Check the inside cover. My name and address are written there along with the words This book belongs to Didi."
I did.
It did.
"If you need more proof than that," Didi added, "I bet I can recite every name in the book, too. Look for Anderson, James. Antonucci, Tony. Barkwill, David."
Rather than listen to her go through the whole list, I flipped through the pages. There were James and Tony and David, just like she said.
"So why would Susan have your address book?" I asked Didi. "Why did she ever have it? And why would she still have it? What is she doing with—"
"What
difference does it make?" With the wave of one hand, Didi urged me to get moving. "Just take it! Quick! Before Susan gets back."
My eyes widened with horror. My stomach clenched. Being a private investigator was one thing. But burglary…
"Oh come on, Pepper," Didi hissed. "I'd take it myself if I could, but you know I can't. You're the only one who can do this for me. Somewhere along the line, Susan must have lifted it out of my desk drawer at work because that's where I kept it. It's not like you're stealing anything."
"But she'll know I took it."
"So?" We heard what sounded like Susan getting ready to wind up her conversation, and both Didi and I looked at the door. "It's mine," Didi said. "I want it back."
"But—"
"But think about it. There must be a reason she has the address book. A reason she still has it. It doesn't look like she's kept it as a memento. If she did, it would be on a shelf or packed away in a box or something. It's out on her desk. She's using it. That's not just coincidence. You know that and I know that. There has to be a reason, and the reason has to have something to do with me. I have every right to find out what that reason is, and that means you have every right to take the book so we can look through it later and figure out what Susan's up to."
I may have mentioned that I hate it when ghosts are right. I hate it even more when them being right results in me being a felon.
Was it any wonder I hesitated?
"I dunno," I said, and I probably would have gone right on hemming and hawing if not for the fact that I heard Susan say goodbye to the person on the other end of the phone.
"Sorry!" Her cheery voice echoed through the hallway. "Had to take that call. I'll be right with you."
I'd just run out of shilly-shally time.
When I took the book and tucked it into my purse, my hands shook. When I hurried back to the living room, my legs were rubbery. By the time Susan showed up, I was right back where she'd seen me last, sitting on the couch. The moment she was in the door, I jumped to my feet.
The Chick and the Dead Page 17