“A whole year, huh?”
“Something like that.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Rumor has it that you’ve been out sick for a couple of weeks.”
“Yeah, so what? I’ve got months of sick leave coming. And that’s exactly what I told Harry when he called.”
“Well, you don’t have to chew my head off. We’re concerned about you.”
The phone went quiet for a long time. Gina began to think he’d hung up on her.
“Sorry, Mazzio, guess I sound like a nut, but just between you and me, I‘ve got an appointment with a doc tomorrow and I’m ... I’m kinda scared.”
“Oh, Mulzini! I’m so sorry.” She held her breath for a moment, trying to squash her own fears for her friend. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s going on?”
Another long silence.
Mulzini had always been pretty much up front with her from the first day they’d met four years ago, but now he was holding back. If the inspector in charge of Maria Benke and her mother’s murders hadn’t said something at the crime scene about Mulzini, she’d have been in the dark altogether. It had to be something big to keep that workaholic away from the job.
“Listen, you and I have been friends since I came to California,” Gina said. “You’re my go-to guy in law enforcement. When I heard you’d been out sick for two weeks, I was ... was worried. You can’t blame me for that, can you?”
“It’s my ticker.”
“Your heart? What about it?” She was fighting hard to remain calm, but she couldn’t help it—she was scared.
“Well, my doc had me on meds for atrial fibrillation—man, that’s some mouth full, isn’t it? Anyway, the meds aren’t working, in fact, it’s been getting worse. So I’m going to see a cardiologist tomorrow. See what he thinks.”
“How long has this been going on?” Gina‘s hands were shaking when she took a sip of her coffee. “You never said a word about it the last time I saw you.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been about a year. Give or take. It wasn’t long after I last saw you.”
“Will you do me a favor, please? Keep me in the loop. I know we don’t see each other often, but next to Harry, you’re my favorite guy.”
“I know you—that’s just talk. There is no next to Harry. Lucky dog!”
“Who are you going to see tomorrow?”
“I’ve got the guy’s name on the appointment card in my jacket pocket. The doc I was recommended to didn’t have any openings. I would have had to wait two more weeks to get in. They’re all alike to me. I got in almost right away with his partner.”
Gina’s eye started twitching and she was getting a weird feeling in the bottom of her stomach.
“Hey, Mulzini. I hate turning nurse on you, but would you mind getting that appointment card? I’d like to know who you’re going to see.”
“I swear you’re a bad as my wife. Marcia also has to know every single damn detail. Hang on a minute.” She could tell he was breathing heavily when he returned to the phone.
“Work a man to death. It’s a guy named Morton Tallent.
* * *
Gina hit Harry’s cell phone number and waited impatiently while it rang. She knew it was about to go to message mode when he finally picked up.
“Hey, doll, what’s going on? I’m kind of in the middle of something, got only a minute or two to talk.”
“I spoke to Mulzini.”
“Yeah, I called him, too,” Harry said. “What a bear. He practically tore my head off.”
“He wasn’t too pleasant to me, either. The poor guy is scared.”
“He told me about his atrial fib,” Harry said. “My bet is that they’ll do an ablation.”
“I’m really worried about him. You’ll never guess who he has an appointment with tomorrow.”
“I didn’t get that far with him,” Harry said. “Probably a cardiologist.”
“Yeah, but it’s with Mort Tallent.”
“Oh, shit!”
Chapter 16
Lolly had gone to work that day prepared to remain silent, not say a word about the deaths of Maria and her mother. But everyone at the offices of Tallent, Brichett, and Cantor already knew about it and were in a state of shock. Word had spread like wildfire after a couple of the staff members saw it online.
Lolly kept her thoughts to herself but when the doctors held a meeting with the staff to talk about it, she studied Mort Tallent’s face very closely. He seemed as pale and as shaken as every other person in the room.
Robert Cantor did most of the talking.
“This has been an awful shock for all of us,” Cantor said in a somber voice to those gathered in the reception area. “We can’t imagine why anyone would do something so awful to one of the nicest people I’ve ever known.”
“And her mother, too,” Jon Brichett said. “It’s beyond belief.”
“I wish we could close the offices today,” Cantor said. “And perhaps you may think this sounds insensitive, but most of the patients scheduled for procedures are already prepped and medicated. As you all know, this not a segment of the population that does particularly well with stress. Delaying their procedures would only make things worse. We simply can’t do that.”
Lolly kept watching Mort Tallent. He remained silent and constantly dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. But his face never lost its sheen of sweat.
“However, if anyone wants to take the day off, we’ll respect that request,” Brichett said. “If so, please raise your hand now.”
The room was deadly silent. Lolly could hear her own heart thrumming in her ears. Throughout the night, images of Maria and her mother’s naked, cut-up bodies kept flashing in her brain. Maria had been right to be frightened.
My, God! Tallent’s books must be horribly damaging.
And although there was nothing to pin him to the two women’s deaths, Lolly had no doubt that in some way Mort Tallent was behind the slaughter of Maria and her mother.
* * *
“You have to go with me,” Lolly said to Gina. “I can’t do this myself.”
“You want to break into the offices?” Gina squeezed the phone tighter, knew right then and there that she should hang up on her friend. “Lolly, we can’t do that.”
“I spent the whole day, like said I would, trying to get into the bookkeeping files without being seen. No deal. There was somebody around every minute. Besides, it won’t be a true break-in—I have keys that unlock everything. We just walk in, take a look around, and leave. Who’s to know?”
Gina took a long time to consider what her friend was asking.
“Are you still there, Gina?”
“Listen, Lolly, I’ve been in way too much trouble in the past. It’s really been nice spending this last year minding my own business, staying out of trouble, and having more time with Harry. Now you come along and start talking about breaking into offices in the middle of the night.”
“I guess that’s it in a nutshell.”
“Why? Just on the off chance we might find whatever it was that Maria found?” But the wheels started turning and her curiosity was kicking in. She could feel herself tapping one toe on a very slippery slope.
“The idea of that miserable man killing Maria, really gets my Bronx up, ya know?” Lolly said.
“Well, we’re not in the Bronx,” Gina snapped back. “Besides, I can’t buy Mort Tallent killing any one, much less two people.”
“I don’t really think Tallent did it. I think he probably hired someone to do it.”
Gina glanced toward the bathroom. Harry had been in the shower when Lolly’s call came in. She could still hear the water running as she sat on the edge of their bed and thought long and hard about Tallent and Lolly’s request.
She knew she should step back. This was definitely not the kind of thing she should stick her nose into. Instead, she said, “Okay, Lolly, I’ll go with you, more to keep you out of trouble than anything else.”
“Thanks, Gina. I ow
e you one. A big one.”
“Man, if Harry finds out about this, he’s going to kill me.”
* * *
Gina and Lolly decided to wear scrubs in case something went wrong—they could at least try to make it look like they belonged in the place.
Although Lolly had been a springboard for the whole thing, she admitted to Gina that she was terrified just by the thought that they were going to Tallent, Cantor, & Brichett at two in the morning. True to her word, though, she had the key.
“They gave it to me so I could get in and get things ready when one of them had an early case.”
While hospitals rigidly stuck to schedules, except for emergencies, private offices had to be more flexible for their patients’ convenience. Sometimes procedures started much earlier or later than they did in hospitals.
Gina had to force herself to climb into Lolly’s Honda Civic. “It’s a good thing Harry sleeps like there’s no tomorrow, or sneaking out would have been impossible.”
After that they were silent as they rode through the deserted streets. At this hour, San Francisco had a beauty that was difficult to resist. As she had done so many times, Gina recognized that she no longer had any regrets about leaving the Bronx. That chapter of her life was over and done with.
She’d enjoyed working for Jacoby Hospital all those years, but knew Lolly was here only to get away from all of the friends who were constantly chiding her about finding a guy and settling down. She obviously liked being independent and living on her own.
Lolly parked the car and used her key-card to enter the building. She had to use it again to activate the elevator to reach the offices, in-house procedure rooms, and the care unit in the penthouse.
“Everyone was a come-and-go case today, so the floor should be deserted,” she whispered to Gina.
They tiptoed through the silent reception area, with its scattered night lights, and went directly to Mort Tallent’s office. The door was open. They went inside and straight to his desk where a dim overhead spotlight illuminated the area.
His computer screen had a green caduceus icon dead center as wallpaper. “No doubt password protected” Gina said. “Know what it is?”
“Damn! I didn’t think about that.”
Before they could touch anything, Gina saw a back-and-forth moving light bouncing off the hallway rug. They both dropped to their knees behind the desk. Gina was hyperventilating; she concentrated hard on slowing down her breathing.
Whoever it was out there was whistling.
Security?
“Must be the building’s night watchman,” Lolly whispered.
“Oh, my God! Does he know you?”
“No.” Lolly could barely get the words out. “Don’t think we’ve ever run into each other.”
Gina shook her head and glared at her friend.
How could I be so stupid? Should have known someone would be checking the building at night. This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.
Chapter 17
The night light in the office was dim, but it felt like the brightest spotlight Gina had ever been under. They were both huddled together and Gina could feel her friend trembling when the whistling watchman’s light flashed briefly into Mort Tallent’s office before moving on.
The Beatle’s We All Live In A Yellow Submarine bounced off the walls of the hallway for another few minutes before everything was silent again. The two of them collapsed into each other’s arms before they stood.
“Okay,” Gina whispered. “Do you have any idea what his password might be?”
“Not a clue.”
“Let’s take a look in his desk drawer. Sometimes people will write it down on something in case they forget.” Gina pulled open the middle drawer while Lolly opened one on the left-hand side. “Look for accounting books, too.”
Gina picked up a red chip. Etched boldly in the middle were the words, Do it!
“I wonder what this is from.” She showed to Lolly, who only shrugged.
In the back of the drawer was a gold membership card to Time Out, a posh health club Gina vaguely remembered hearing about. Otherwise, the drawer was filled with an assortment of paper clips and Post-its. Tallent seem to be compulsive from the looks of this drawer and the top of the desk, where everything was stacked in several neat piles.
Lolly found a pad with columns of hand written numbers, but they looked like private accounting numbers—the long list didn’t look right for a pass word.
The rest of the drawers had neither accounting books nor much of anything else.
Gina tossed the health club membership card back into the drawer; it flipped over to reveal a small, pencil-written notation. She found a magnifying glass, with Zelint’s Pharmaceuticals molded into the plastic handle, and read:
ANNIE’S DOWN
“I wonder who Annie is.” Gina said. “Do you know?”
Lolly shrugged.
“I say we try it once. If that doesn’t work—that’s it. We need to get out of here. Security could come back at any time.”
Gina put a fingertip on the computer’s touch screen. There was an immediately request for a password. She tapped the keyboard with ANNIES DOWN, all caps. A menu of files jumped onto the screen.
They stared at each other, Lolly’s eyes bugged out.
Gina used the mouse to a link labeled: Caths. A spread sheet of numbers appeared. It looked confusing until she realized she was looking at a listing of various types of catherizations. Then she could see that the five-digit numbers following the procedures were all in the neighborhood of ten-thousand dollars.
“How many Caths does Tallent do on an average day?” she asked Lolly.
“Two to four, or at least that’s the way it’s been since I started working here.”
“Wow! With only two days of procedures per week, that’s close to a hundred and fifty grand a month.”
They heard the whistling again. This time it was the Beatle’s Yesterday getting louder and louder. From the way the light bounced, Gina could tell it was coming from the other direction this time.
“Damn!” Gina closed the files and a caduceus popped back on the screen.
They dropped to their knees and huddled together again.
The computer monitor was still glowing brightly—it had yet to go into sleep mode. With the whistling almost on top of Tallent’s office, Gina quickly stood and pushed the button to turn off the monitor screen, then dropped back down a second or two before the watchman’s flashlight beam went from wall to wall in the office.
Gina was ready to throw up from the bile burning the back of her throat. Lolly was squeezing her arm as though she was trying to strangle it.
The guard continued on his way, but he stopped whistling for a long moment, and then continued on. Yesterday came trilling out.
They waited five minutes, according to Gina’s illuminated watch dial, before retracing the steps they’d taken up to the office. Gina crossed her fingers as they stepped silently down the stairs to the first floor, then hurried out the front door.
When Lolly pulled out her car keys, a frantic look crossed her face.
“My ID tag is gone. It must have fallen out of my pocket.”
“Oh, shit!”
* * *
When Gina walked into the apartment, Harry was sitting on the sofa, facing the door. “Where have you been? I tried calling you but it went to message.”
She sat down next to him, rested her head on his shoulder. “Don’t be angry. I went with Lolly to Tallent’s office.”
“Gina!” Harry clutched her arm.
“Lolly was going to go alone. I couldn’t let her do that. I was afraid for her.”
“And now I’m afraid for you.”
Chapter 18
Gina and Harry were right on time the next morning, moving smoothly through traffic on their way to Ridgewood Hospital. The Fiat was behaving the way she was supposed to—no hiccups, no coughs, no indigestion. She sounded like she was in perfect health.<
br />
“You know, Harry, I feel so guilty for not telling Mulzini about my suspicions. You know, about Mort Tallent. But I can’t help it—it just goes against the grain to erode someone’s confidence in their doctor.”
“What could you say, doll? Hey Mulzini, don’t see that doc—he might be behind a couple of murders.”
“That man can be such a pain in the ass sometimes. He had an A-1 referral to Robert Cantor, but no, he would have had to wait to get an appointment.”
“Yeah,” Harry said, “waiting’s not exactly Mulzini’s style. Guess he wanted to get it over as soon as possible.”
“I can understand that. But, he’s going to Tallent! The man might be a crook, or a killer. I should have said something, or at least hinted at it.”
“Still time to call him.”
Gina found a parking place two blocks from the hospital.
“Well, how did I luck out like that?”
“Stick with me, babe—everything is coming up roses.” Harry licked the tip of her fingers, then looked up and smiled at her.
Gina leaned over and kissed him on the nose, pulled out her phone, and tapped in Mulzini’s home number. Marcia picked up on the first ring.
“Hi, Marcia. It’s Gina Mazzio. You remember me?”
“Who can forget the bombshell nurse from the Bronx?” She laughed. “How are you?”
“I’m good. I wonder if I could speak to your husband?”
“Sure,” Marcia said. “But he has a doctor’s appointment at ten and the man’s a nervous wreck.”
Gina shifted in her seat. “Well, it’s not important. Please tell him I was thinking of him and I expect a full report.”
“You know Mulzini.” Marcia laughed. “He’ll tell you what he wants you to know—that’s about the best you can hope for.”
And then she was gone.
Gina dropped the cell back into her purse. Harry’s eyes searched hers.
“I’m too late.”
* * *
Mort Tallent sauntered into his office, as he did every work day—then stopped. There was an unfamiliar scent in the room; his dark plush carpet had a double trail of fresh footprints crossing over to his desk. He followed the impressions to his computer. Whoever had been here had come after the cleaning crew vacuumed at 10 p.m.
Bone Crack: A Medical Suspense Thriller (The Gina Mazzio Series Book 6) Page 6