Marietta fastened her seat belt. “Then let’s go.”
I backed out of the driveway and glimpsed the light glowing in Steve’s living room. Part of me wanted to pull over, pound on his front door and refuse to leave until he convinced me that I didn’t need to worry about Peggy Como becoming Virginia’s next victim. But I knew that would be a waste of time. He wasn’t going to tell me anything and I was going to suffer Lucille’s wrath if I didn’t show up in the next five minutes, so I hit the accelerator to put any hesitation I felt in my rearview mirror.
“Oh, I almost forgot. I’m packin’,” Marietta said, patting her Louis Vuitton tote bag.
I had a very bad feeling that she wasn’t talking about a midnight snack. “Packing what?”
“Just a Taser, but it’s better than nothing.”
Lord help me. “Says you.”
After all the coffee I’d sucked down, the last thing I needed was to come back from the bathroom and get tased by a mother with an itchy trigger finger. “Do you actually know how to use a Taser?”
“I had a training class a couple of years ago,” she said, looking at her reflection in the visor mirror as she fluffed her cropped hair. “Where are we going anyway?”
“The hospital. Keep that thing in your bag. We don’t want to have any accidents.”
“Sugah, I’ve never shot anyone accidentally in my life. Well, I did hit the instructor in the ass, but he was a jerk and had it coming.”
Criminy, it was going to be a long night.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“About damned time,” Lucille grumbled when Marietta and I found her sitting outside of Peggy’s hospital room. “I gotta pee.”
Marietta sniffed, scanning the speckled blue-gray vinyl. “It smells like someone else did, too.”
Lucille pushed herself out of her chair. “You get used to it.”
“I seriously doubt that,” my mother said under her breath.
“Just be grateful you were spared the play-by-play about Luther Purdy’s prostate.” Lucille scowled at the doorway across the hall. “I got to hear about his plumbing problems for two hours. Thank God Tina medicated him. At least the snoring helped keep me awake.”
“Tina?” As in Tina Norton?
Lucille jabbed her thumb toward the nurses’ station. “The little brunette down there.”
I glanced at the petite woman in blue who had been on duty just hours before Rose Kozarek and Jesse Elwood died. I hoped Tina didn’t have anywhere to run off to because she and I needed to take a stroll down memory lane.
“You brought your mom?” Lucille smirked. “What for, back up?”
“She wanted to help.” And I couldn’t get her out of my car.
“We’re tag-teaming on this one,” Marietta said, like it was a line from her old show. “And if there’s any sign of trouble, I’m packin’.”
Lucille’s eyes widened. “Me, too. Whatcha got?”
Marietta fished a black leather case out of her bag. It looked innocuous enough until she unsnapped the cover. “Fifty thousand volts, six ounces, laser sight, stun feature. It’s got it all.”
“Sweet!” Lucille said, nodding with approval at the metallic pink Taser aimed at my belly button.
“Whoa!” I ducked into Peggy’s doorway. “Careful where you point that thing.”
“Don’t be a wuss. Just look at what this baby can do.” Marietta took a shooter’s stance and shined a LED light into Luther’s room. “It doubles as a flashlight. Cute, huh?”
Anything that could fire fifty thousand volts at Luther Purdy wasn’t cute.
“I’ve got its daddy.” Lucille pulled out a heftier black Taser from her patent leather handbag. “I call it the Intimidator. Not quite as stylish, but pretty dang effective as a motivator.”
“The Intimidator—I like it,” Marietta said, giving Lucille a fist bump.
The sight of Marietta and Lucille bonding over fifty thousand volts gave me the willies.
“I don’t, and you need to put those things away before we get tossed out of here.” I peered over at the nurses’ station and saw that Tina Norton had a telephone receiver to her ear, no doubt with security on speed dial. “Now!”
Lucille waved the Intimidator in Tina’s direction. “Hell, you don’t have to worry about Tina. Her ex was the one who sold it to me. Said it used to be hers. He got it back in the settlement.”
Which showed how boring I was. The only weapon my ex ever got from me was a can of pepper spray I’d been too afraid to carry in my tote bag. “Just because she used to be a member of your Taser packin’ mama club doesn’t mean she wants anyone taking target practice in the hallway.”
Lucille holstered her Taser and dropped it in her handbag. “Will you relax? She’s good people, and she knows we’re here to get Peggy through the night.”
“You told her that?”
“Well, I’ve been sitting out here for the last four hours. I had to tell her something.”
“What did she say when you told her?”
“Nothin’ much. Said it made sense given everything that’s been going on lately.”
All the more reason for me to talk to Tina Norton as soon as possible, but first, I needed to complete tonight’s changing of the guard. “Other than that, how did it go?”
“Aside from Luther, it’s been real quiet the last couple of hours,” Lucille said.
I glanced into Peggy’s room. Illuminated only by the light from the hallway, it contained two beds, two chairs, and no husband—just a slumbering Peggy hooked up to a monitor silently displaying numbers and a steady, pulsing bright red heart. “How’s Peggy doing?”
Lucille shrugged. “Must be doing okay. They’re sending her home tomorrow.”
“Peggy Como?” Marietta whispered, leaning into my shoulder as she slipped her holstered Taser back into her tote. “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to hurt Peggy?”
“Or Trudy or Rose,” Lucille added.
My mother’s face screwed into a Botox-resistant frown. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Unless Virginia Straitham was responsible for five deaths in this hospital, and in the world according to Virginia, Bert Como deserved a wife upgrade.
“A lot of things don’t make sense right now.” Trudy, Rose, Howard, Bernadette, Mr. Elwood, my mother dating Barry Ferris.
Marietta patted my back, like that would make it feel better. Maybe it did. A little.
“What’s the game plan?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you what my plan is,” Lucille said, pulling on a white cable knit sweater. “I’m gonna go home and catch the last half of Law and Order, but first I gotta hit the head.”
I sat in one of the two chairs outside Peggy’s room and watched Lucille wave at Tina as she squeaked her way down the hall. With Tina alone at the nurses’ station and off the phone, it seemed like a perfect chance for me to take her pulse on what she thought was going on in her hospital.
My mother sat in the chair next to me. “Stay here,” I told her. “Watch anyone who goes into Peggy’s room. Any doctor, any nurse, any anybody.”
She patted the bulge in her tote bag and saluted.
“Please don’t shoot anybody until I get back,” I said, heading for the nurses’ station.
Tina looked up from the computer monitor she was sitting behind. The overhead florescent light didn’t do the little bags under her eyes any favors. I shuddered to think about what it was doing to mine.
She squeezed out a shy smile as she looked past me. “I’m sorry. I have to ask. Was that Marietta Moreau with you?”
“Yep.”
“I knew it.”
“Would you like her autograph?” I wasn’t above selling out my mother for some information. “When you have a couple of minutes, come on over and I’ll introduce you.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to impose.”
The wide-eyed spark of joy in her eyes told me Tina wouldn’t need much arm-twisting.
“She e
njoys meeting fans.” Understatement of the year. “And we’ll be here for a while, so you might as well say hello to her.”
I leaned on the counter separating us. “My name is Charmaine by the way.”
“Tina Norton,” she said with a pleasant smile.
“Could I ask you a couple of questions?”
The smile disappeared and she broke eye contact. “I suppose.”
“You worked the nights Rose Kozarek and Jesse Elwood died.”
“How do you know—”
“I’m a Deputy Coroner and I’ve been looking into the death of Trudy Bergeson. I’m concerned that the three deaths might be related.”
She pressed her lips together as if she dared not say what she was thinking.
“You also were here the night of Trudy’s death, weren’t you?” I asked.
Tina squinted at her computer monitor like she wanted to jump inside it and disappear. “I’ve already told the police everything I know about that night.”
It figured that Steve would have already talked to her. “I’m sure you have.” And Steve won’t share. “But if I could ask just a couple more questions it would really help with our investigation.” I tossed in an earnest smile for good measure.
“If this is about Dr. Straitham, I’m quite sure he didn’t have anything to do with those deaths,” Tina said with a flush creeping into her cheeks.
She was very quick to jump to the conclusion that I wanted to talk about Dr. Straitham. “Why do you say that?”
“He wasn’t here,” she said softly.
“Neither were you unless you worked a very long shift.”
“My shift ends at midnight.” Eyes downcast, Tina pressed her palms together as if she were offering up a prayer. “Neither one of us was here.”
The other woman. A small piece of this deadly puzzle clicked into place.
“I understand, but you may have seen something before you left.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything unusual,” she said.
“Your initials are on a log that indicates that you were one of the last members of the staff here to see Rose Kozarek and Jesse Elwood alive. Do you remember seeing anyone hanging around their rooms those nights?”
She shook her head. “We lock the main entrance at nine, so typically, aside from the staff, no one but immediate family is here that late.”
Marietta and I had no trouble getting in through the emergency entrance. A nurse even held the door open for us. There’s no way that Virginia would view a locked door as much of a deterrent.
“Did you happen to see Mrs. Straitham that night?”
“No, I’d remember that.”
I didn’t doubt for a second that Tina was telling the truth.
A light flashed on her computer monitor and she pushed out of her chair. “I’m needed by a patient. You’ll have to excuse me.”
I watched Dr. Straitham’s lover pass another nurse as she walked down the other end of the hall. Tina moved quickly, with quiet, compact steps—the kind of silent footfalls that would be perfect for darting in and out of a room without disturbing the patient. Especially useful in the wee hours of the morning if the situation warranted some stealth.
Virginia Straitham was a much bigger woman. In a pair of flats with crepe soles was she capable of stealth mode? Maybe. She had certainly snuck up on me at Norm Bergeson’s house. Add in the fact that there could easily be times when there was no one at the nurses’ station with line of sight to a patient’s room, and the killer didn’t need to be extraordinarily sneaky. She just needed the opportunity to get in and get out unobserved. And with the elevator just thirty feet away, she could probably slip in and out of any one of these rooms, administer a deadly injection, and be off the second floor in less than a minute.
I pulled out my cell phone as I walked toward Peggy’s room.
“Are you calling for backup?” my mother asked.
And Steve thought I watched too much TV. “No.” I looked to see if the coast was still clear, then I punched a button to start the stopwatch feature on my phone.
I didn’t want to give poor Peggy another heart attack, so I hesitated at the doorway for a moment to make sure that she was still asleep before moving closer to stand by her bedside. After waiting ten seconds I looked up and down the hallway from her doorway.
Marietta frowned at me. “What the heck are you doing?”
“Give me a minute.” Even less if my theory proved true.
I walked to the elevator and pressed the down button. When the door opened I checked the elapsed time on my cell phone. Forty-one seconds.
I looked up, expecting to see an empty elevator. Instead, I locked eyes with Virginia Straitham. The air vacated my lungs as if I’d just been punched in the solar plexus.
Stepping around me like I was no more significant than an ant invading her picnic, she surveyed the hallway with a determined set to her jaw. Her emotions seemed to be on lockdown, giving her the appearance of a matronly Marine on a reconnaissance mission. After her gaze landed on Marietta, Virginia returned to the elevator.
Mission over or aborted? I couldn’t read her.
She held the elevator door open. “Going down?”
“No, I … forgot something,” I croaked, my throat wound tight with adrenaline.
With a dismissive glance, Virginia pressed a button and the elevator door closed.
Holy crap!
No need to panic. Nothing happened. Breathe.
My heart pounding, I slumped in the chair next to my mother.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No ghost.” But I may have just seen a murderer.
* * *
My grandmother was standing next to her gurgling coffeemaker when Marietta and I stepped through the kitchen door around six the next morning.
“Thank God!” Gram said, slapping her palm to the collar of her pink chenille robe. “Where have you two been? I hardly slept a wink last night, I was so worried.”
I forced a smile. “If it’s any consolation, we didn’t get much sleep either.”
“Where’d you go?”
“The hospital,” my mother said, heading for the stairs.
Gram sharply inhaled. “Who died?”
“No one died.” Since I hadn’t been to work yet, at least no one that I knew of.
“We made sure of that,” Marietta called out from the top of the staircase. “And now I’m going to bed.”
Gram scowled at me. “This is about Trudy, isn’t it?”
And Bernadette, Jesse, Rose and Howard. “Sort of.”
Gram pointed an arthritic finger at my chest. “You need to let go of this thing about Warren Straitham. I don’t care what you and Alice think you saw at the funeral, he couldn’t have had anything to do with Trudy’s death.”
“I think you’re absolutely right.”
“Then what were you two doing at the hospital all night?”
“Lucille and I thought—”
“Lucille’s involved in this caper?” Gram rolled her eyes. “Did you know that crazy woman carries a Taser in her handbag?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandmother that her daughter had just schlepped one upstairs.
“No one was tased last night, and we’re all perfectly safe and sound.”
“Thank the good Lord for small favors. Promise me that you’ll never do anything like that again.”
“Sorry to worry you, Gram.” But until Virginia Straitham was arrested, I couldn’t make any promises.
“I’m going back to bed.” My grandmother shuffled to the stairs in her pink fuzzy slippers. “You should try to get some sleep, too.”
I should also try to stick to my diet, but that wasn’t going to happen either.
Since I had to be at work in less than two hours, I poured myself a cup of coffee and took it upstairs. After a fifteen minute shower, I dried my hair and did the flat iron thing, then crammed my
self into a pair of control top pantyhose. I felt like a pork link sausage, but at least I could fasten the waistband button of the black pantsuit I’d worn to Trudy’s funeral. I wanted Steve to take me seriously today and that required pants that weren’t held together by a safety pin.
I stepped through Duke’s kitchen door around seven-thirty.
Aunt Alice sat on her wooden stool and frowned at my pantsuit. “Who died?” she asked, sounding just like Gram.
“No one died. Can’t a girl dress for work?”
She grunted. “You must want something.”
Dang. Was I that obvious?
I grabbed an oatmeal raisin cookie from a cooling rack. “How do you feel?”
“Better,” she said without looking up from fluting the edge of the marionberry pie on the table in front of her.
I wanted to believe my great-aunt, but she looked as pale as the flour dusting her work table.
Lucille rounded the corner and grabbed a bowl. “Hey,” she said, “anything happen after I left?”
I didn’t want to light a match under Lucille by mentioning Virginia Straitham’s appearance at the hospital, so I shook my head. “It was a pretty quiet night. We left around six.”
“One of the girls told me Peggy will get discharged in an hour or two, so it looks like she’s out of the woods.” Lucille gave me a thumbs up sign, then squeaked away with a bowl of oatmeal. Since I could see Steve through the window over the grill, I had a good guess about that bowl’s destination.
That meant that I needed to lose the cookie. No one takes anybody seriously when they’re eating a cookie.
Duke turned to me as I reached for the plastic wrap he kept on a shelf across from the grill. I braced for a wisecrack about my breakfast choice, a Free Lunch remark, something. Instead, he glanced back at Alice, deep furrows carved into in his forehead.
“How’s she doing this morning?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She seems a little better. We got her something at Clark’s to help her sleep last night.”
Then, maybe she wasn’t lying. My brain was so weary of chasing red herrings that I was more than happy to trust Duke’s judgment when it came to my great-aunt.
Wendy Delaney - Working Stiffs 01 - Trudy, Madly, Deeply Page 21