The Whole Enchilada

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “The lake—” I seemed incapable of finishing a thought.

  “Our guys found pieces of the deck floating in the lake. But no supports for the deck. We’ve got a certificate of occupancy on file from the architect, plus photos, so there used to be supports there. We’re thinking whatever had been cantilevering that deck out over the water had been removed. No easy task, but you could do it. And the lake there is very shallow. The rocky bottom hit your leg.”

  I tried to absorb this information, but could not. They found the envelope . . . the supports removed . . . the rocky bottom in shallow water . . .

  Wouldn’t someone have seen a person removing the supports? I wondered.

  “Julian,” I said.

  “If Julian had not been there,” Tom said, his tone matter-of-fact, “and had not been such a strong swimmer, you would have hit your leg, inhaled even more water than you did, and probably drowned.” He paused. “We don’t think you were the intended victim.”

  “I was wondering about that.”

  “It was probably either Holly or Drew.”

  “The envelope was addressed to Drew.”

  “Maybe he was a target. But it was a setup of some kind, no matter which of them was the target.” He waited a moment, then said, “We’re now treating Holly’s death as a homicide.” He lifted the warm blanket and touched my sleeve. “Hey!” he called in the direction of the curtain, using that commanding tone of his. “Can someone please get my wife another blanket?”

  “Tom,” I managed to say, “Drew said Holly recently had a break-in.”

  “A burglar? Did they report it?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever it was didn’t take anything valuable. Just . . . something about a file cabinet. Then Holly got the seller to install a security system. Ask Drew about it.”

  Tom nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Holly’s cell phone,” I said. “Drew had it. He must have forgotten . . . when he was on Marla’s street. It had a threatening text . . .”

  “A threatening text,” Tom prompted.

  I grasped back into the far reaches of my brain. “ ‘Not another cent. Don’t ask, or you will regret it.’ Something like that. I was holding the cell when the deck gave way.”

  “Miss G.,” said Tom. He squeezed my shoulder very gently. “This is very helpful. Please get some rest.”

  I finally succumbed to a half sleep.

  Sometime later, I was wheeled away. Nausea rolled through me. If I can realize these things, I thought, then my brain must be coming back. Did I want my brain back?

  My thoughts, such as they were, reverted to Holly. Tears pricked my eyes as I recalled her limp body on the road. Tom had actually used the word homicide. But there hadn’t been a shot, or stabbing, or . . . would the cops have talked to Drew already? Who, besides George, Lena, and George’s mother, didn’t like Holly?

  Oh, God, I had a headache.

  When I opened my eyes, Tom was sitting beside the bed, holding my hand.

  “Time?” I asked.

  “ ’Bout midnight. Arch is out in the hall with Julian. Do you want them to come in? Arch is asleep in a chair,” he added.

  “First,” I said. “Wait.” My mouth felt full of fur. “Cell phone. Holly’s.”

  Tom said, “Our guys found it in the lake. The lab’s working on it.”

  I said, “Drew?”

  “He’s with the foster family now. His aunt will be here today—it’s technically Saturday—in the afternoon. Then she’ll take him to Alaska. Julian gave Drew a check for a thou, to use as spending money? Said that was what you agreed?” When I nodded, Tom went on, “Drew and his aunt will be taking a flight together, changing planes at Sea-Tac. One of our guys will drive them to DIA. Get this: Drew wasn’t sure he wanted to leave. He was worried about you. Also, he confirmed your report about a break-in, the sixth of June. Holly did call the department, but the deputy who wrote down the details said nothing of value was taken. The only things that were busted were the back door, which the owner had repaired, and a filing cabinet. Holly told our guy she couldn’t tell if anything was missing. After that, the security system was installed. Oh, and she told Drew she was taking out an insurance policy. But the only thing she did was unpack some boxes and put out a bunch of religious statuary.” Tom gave me a puzzled look. When I nodded, he said, “So that makes no sense. We got a warrant, and our guys are going through her stuff now. So far, there’s no policy, nor anything else of interest.” Tom stopped talking, then fidgeted a bit in his chair.

  I said, “What?”

  “We just got an anonymous report that Drew and his mother had a big fight this week.”

  “An anonymous report of a fight between a teenager and his mother? Please. Arch and I have disagreements all the time.”

  “A friend of mine is an Alaskan state trooper. Used to be one here. He’s going to set up camp near the cabin where the aunt, uncle, and Drew will be.”

  “To protect Drew?” I asked. “That’s good. I’ll bet you’re right, that note was meant for—”

  “Yes, to protect Drew. But there might be something else,” Tom added tentatively.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s a long shot, Goldy.” Tom would not meet my eyes. “But we have to consider the possibility that Drew poisoned or otherwise harmed his own mother.”

  “That’s insane,” I said.

  “Really? One of our guys interviewed him at the foster family’s house, and couldn’t rule it out.”

  “Your guy must be new.”

  Tom ticked off points on his fingers. “Holly pulled him out of Elk Park Prep, where he had numerous friends and was a star athlete. She put him into a big Catholic high school, where he may or may not have been so adored. Going back to the divorce, Holly dragged Drew out of Edith’s mansion in Aspen Meadow, then moved to a place in Denver—”

  “You don’t know that she dragged him. He was a kid, for God’s sake. If you move, you move.”

  “But a while ago you told me he was all broken up about it.” When I did nothing but nod, Tom said, “Then she schlepped him back to Aspen Meadow, we don’t know why—”

  “I know why. She couldn’t take driving Drew back and forth to Elk Park Prep all winter. She slid her Mercedes into one too many snow-filled ditches. She bought a four-wheel-drive Audi. Elk Park Prep is in Aspen Meadow.”

  Tom spoke as if I hadn’t said anything. “She bought a big house in the country club, got a second mortgage and spent that money on God knows what, then subsequently lost the place to foreclosure. After that, the two of them moved into a house where the rent was kept low, because she’d agreed to put her nice furniture into it. She kept it neat in case someone decided to buy it. We don’t have all her financials yet, but we have to assume she didn’t have much money, or that she wasn’t giving Drew much money. And then they reportedly had a big argument.” His green eyes finally met mine, and they were resigned. “We have to keep an eye on Drew. Teenagers can, and have, come up with all kinds of reasons to kill their parents.”

  “I don’t believe it. Drew adored Holly.”

  “Maybe so. It’s just a possibility we have to consider.”

  “You’re thinking she was poisoned? You said her symptoms were classic for heart attack. Did anybody else from the party get sick?”

  “Not that we’ve heard.”

  I sighed. “What have you been able to find out about Holly?”

  “I ordered a full tox screen, but the medical examiner won’t be able to get to the autopsy before late Monday, possibly Tuesday. I wanted to know what kind of medication she was on, just in case what we’re looking at here is an adverse reaction that precipitated a heart attack. Aspen Meadow Drug cooperated, said they didn’t need to wait for a subpoena. Holly wasn’t on any meds. Her GP is in Hawaii, out of cell range, unfortunately. But we’ll get hold of him. Still, Drew insisted over and over that Holly hardly ever went to the doctor. He said she didn’t believe in them.” He paused. “Was th
ere anything else? That you noticed, I mean?”

  Tom trusted my powers of observation, and now that I knew I wasn’t going to be bawled out for splashing into the lake, I tried to focus on what I’d seen at Holly’s. Tom, I knew, would not want me to get overinvolved in this case. That only happens from time to time, I would have insisted. It happens all the time, Tom would have said. But Holly had been my dear friend. So I was going to get involved. But I would have to be careful.

  “There was a box,” I said. “On the front porch. Drew thought it was one of his mother’s collages, back from the framer.”

  “We have it,” said Tom. “The collage is of Patsie Boatfield. She’s wearing a blue-striped dress in a photograph in one of the squares, and some of the cloth is in another.”

  “Oh, I know that dress,” I said. “She used to wear it to the fencing meets, because she had this idea it was good luck for the team. Then she spilled bleach on it somehow, and she told me she couldn’t wear it anymore. What other materials were in the collage?”

  “Bits of jewelry, seashells, photographs of Colorado ghost towns, and some pressed flowers. Patsie said she had the collage made for her new husband, Warren Broome. Said we could keep it as long as we needed it.”

  “Was there anything else in the box?” I cocked my head at the wall in front of me. Did hospitals really think pale green was restful? The color was that of mold ruining a good piece of cheese.

  “Yup,” Tom said. “There was a note in the bottom, with a number on it. Typewritten, so it’s no help. It said, ‘Twenty-five K.’ ”

  “Twenty-five thousand? Dollars? For framing a collage?”

  “The collage wasn’t framed. It was in a Plexiglas container. Our guys are trying to track down who sent the carton it was in . . . What are you doing?”

  “I want to get out of here,” I said impatiently. I swung my legs over the side of the bed. Pain flooded into the left thigh. I pulled the IV out of my arm.

  “Goldy, don’t. You’ve had all the tests, but they want to keep you for observation.”

  “I’m fine. And if there’s one thing I learned in Med Wives 101, it’s that as long as you pay your bill, you can check yourself out of the hospital whenever you want.”

  8

  Alas, if only it had been that easy. Within forty-five minutes, I was ready to scream.

  Granted, I had physical aches. But waves of psychic pain—the memories of Holly; the regrets; the new information from Tom: We’re treating this as a homicide, we have to consider the possibility that Drew poisoned or otherwise harmed his own mother—threatened to engulf me. These were heavier, more tangible somehow, than my sore leg and throbbing head. They made me feel vulnerable. Any little thing—Tom’s absence while he dealt with the cashier, Julian’s disappearance to pick up my prescriptions, Arch locating Tom’s car and bringing it to the exit, then rushing off to get his Passat—threatened to put me over the edge. Sitting in the insisted-upon wheelchair by the exit, I stewed and considered hollering about the injustice of it all.

  One thing Tom had given me was my cell, which the nurse’s aide said I could use. I checked my voice-mail messages: three, all from Marla.

  “How are you?” said her disembodied voice. “I feel like hell. I need you to tell me it was all a bad dream.”

  The second: “Goldy? Where are you? Pick up your phone!”

  The third: “Okay, now I’m both worried and pissed, and I’m going to stay up until you call! And it doesn’t matter if it’s in the wee hours. Patsie Boatfield stayed and helped bring stuff in from outside. She never really knew Holly—”

  The message cut off. I checked the time on my cell: just after 1 A.M. My watch had magically disappeared. Even while reluctantly conceding that removing a patient’s watch might be hospital policy, or that my discount-store timepiece might not be working so well anymore, now that it had spent some time—Don’t start screaming, I told myself—underwater, I punched in Marla’s number.

  “Where in the hell have you been?” she demanded before the phone had even rung one full time.

  I gave her an abbreviated version of falling into the lake. Since Tom was ultrascrupulous about people listening, precisely because folks did gossip, and since the nurse’s aide was still at my side, I omitted any mention of being at Holly’s rental, or the note that had sent me into the water. I just said I fell off a deck . . . into Aspen Meadow Lake. I tried to put warning in my voice, and she caught it.

  “You’re somewhere you can’t talk.”

  “Yup.”

  “Call me when you’re alone. I’m making slow progress with these dishes.” She moaned. “The fencing parents all wanted to pitch in, but I said, ‘No, no, just wrap up any leftovers you want, and take your kids home. My cleaning lady will be here in the morning,’ and of course I forgot that the cleaning lady took off the entire month of June. Patsie was great, though—”

  “Wait,” I said. Tom was approaching from the end of the hallway. I bade Marla a hasty farewell with the promise, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, that I would call her as soon as I was free of the hospital.

  Which, unfortunately, I forgot to do, because Tom signaled for me to go with him. Arch and Julian were following in the Passat. I wanted to hear what Tom had in mind, although if it contained the news that they were indicting Drew for the murder of his mother, maybe I didn’t.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking about Drew,” I demanded as soon as we pulled away from the curb.

  Tom’s tone turned wary. “I sent another deputy over to question him in foster care.”

  I made an exasperated sigh.

  Tom flicked me a glance that I could just make out from the streetlights. “This deputy’s been an investigator for a while. He said Drew was very upset. He also said we shouldn’t rule him out yet.”

  It felt as if my throat was closing. I croaked, “Did he give a reason?”

  “Said it was just a gut feeling. He couldn’t ask Drew specifics about poisons, or anything like that, because we don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Do you have any idea what killed Holly? Do you have a theory about the note that sent me into the lake? Or the text message to Holly?”

  “No. But I need to know a couple of things from you. And maybe Marla.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “But Marla cannot talk to anyone else about this. I can trust you. I’m not at all sure about her.”

  “Tell me, will you?” I ripped into the bag of prescriptions Julian had solemnly handed me, to see if Dr. Smith had ordered a painkiller in addition to the antibiotic cream. He had not. My leg was burning with pain, so I clawed through the glove compartment of Tom’s car, landed on a bottle of ibuprofen, and took two without water.

  Tom said, “Gosh, Miss G., don’t you think we should turn around and go back to the hospital?”

  “No.” My voice was still cracking. “Bring me up to speed.”

  “Our guys are out canvassing the party guests and Marla’s neighbors. So far, almost everyone was willing to give up cell phones. We’re hoping someone snapped a picture of that stranger who showed up unannounced. I’m angry that I didn’t get his name. Would Marla have it?”

  “Nope, he wasn’t invited. But that didn’t stop him poking around in Marla’s kitchen.”

  “I remember. Do you have any idea who he was?”

  I paused. “Well, actually, he did look kind of familiar. But from a long time ago.”

  “Your banged-up leg messing with your memory?”

  “No,” I said crossly. “If a parent took a picture of him, and I see it, maybe it’ll jog something. But Holly was afraid of him. She said he was a son of a bitch, and she wanted you to get out your service revolver.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me this?”

  “I just—” I had to clear my throat. “I just thought she was being her usual dramatic self.”

  Tom exhaled. “Marla didn’t know him. But you think you do.”

  I closed my eyes
and saw the balding stranger, but could not come up with a name. “Maybe something will jog loose. What about Marla’s surveillance system?”

  “She says she turned it off before the party.”

  “You said almost everyone gave you their cell phones. Is that your way of saying someone refused to?”

  “One. Warren Broome. Alexander Boatfield’s stepfather? The guy who was caught with his pants down? The woman who exposed him—”

  “Tom.”

  “The woman who went public with his misdeeds said she was sure there were others like her. Okay, so Broome recently got back his license to be a practicing psychiatrist. I don’t know how many patients he has, but he said he had confidential messages from them on his phone. If he gave us the cell, he’d be violating privacy laws. Which I understand. We’d have to get a court order to find out his patient list, and we don’t have enough evidence to satisfy a judge that we would need that.”

  I said, “Womanizing Warren is full of it. If he just started working with patients again, he shouldn’t have that many confidential messages.”

  Tom lifted one of his large hands, a gesture of exasperation. “We don’t have enough for a warrant, Miss G.”

  “And Holly’s money problems?”

  “We’re still trying to dig into her financials.” Tom bit the inside of his cheek. “Did Holly and George have a tiff about child support?”

  “I don’t know. You saw how they fought. Maybe he cut her off for some reason, and she was retaliating by not inviting him to the party. But unless I’m a complete incompetent at judging character—”

  “Which you most definitely are not.”

  “George is devoted to Drew. He’s been a faithful father, coming to parent-teacher conferences, attending the fencing meets.” I paused. “The rest of what I know is old. I remember from Amour Anonymous that George was ordered to pay Holly a big settlement, plus support, for a long time. Until Drew was through college, I think. That’s what I don’t get—”