Brody

by Kathi S. Barton

  And she was beginning to understand why the man had been married four different times. He was not only a pig, but a hog too. He took most of the covers, and ate the biggest portions of anything that they had. It was mostly stolen by her, so she should have gotten the larger share, in her opinion. But she didn’t ask anymore. When she had asked just a few days ago, he’d taken her food too, and eaten it. The man was impossible.

  And then there was sex with him. When they’d been having sex at her home, she’d make him take a shower first. They took one together, usually, and that started the foreplay, which she’d discovered right away he didn’t do well either. So when they were in the bed, he smelled so fresh that she didn’t mind going down on him. But here, with the water being something that decided on its own if you had any or not, he’d given up on the simple civility of just washing his hands.

  “What have I gotten myself into?”

  It was becoming apparent to her that she’d not had it so bad living and being married to Brody. At least he wasn’t up in her face about food not being around. Nor did she have to remind him to clean up after himself. He’d reminded her most of the time.

  Her mom and dad were at the shelter. The morning of their last day at the hotel the police had come by and “helped” them out of the room. Their small bits of clothing were checked for towels and other things. Mom told her that the only thing they’d been able to take were the half-used bottles of shampoo and soaps. The coffee stuff, like filters, was taken from them as they made their way out the door. She said that she’d felt like a criminal, but was grateful for the few days in the hotel to have a place to sleep.

  Brody was really making it hard for Rachel to get what she needed from him. Pacing the small room, she looked around. It was nasty. She’d had no idea that Ralph only cleaned up to come to her house, and she figured that he only had a decent meal when she had the cooks feed him or she took him out. The man was a slob, and he didn’t seem to care.

  Rachel had wanted to leave him two days ago, when she’d simply asked him to clean up the bathroom when he was done and he slapped her. There was no tone in her voice—she had tried her best to not only keep her voice at a level, low tone, but not curse at him either. And when she hit her head on the counter, the hit had been so fast and brutal, he stood over her and told her that if he wanted to shit on the walls, then it was his home to do so.

  She had not just stayed out of his way, but she’d stopped talking to him altogether. No one hit her, she thought, and got away with it. Rachel would get back at him for it, she had to just time things right. Whenever that time would come was anyone’s guess, but she’d get him back.

  The police had been searching for her, Dad said. They’d come by the shelter where they were at least once a day. And there didn’t seem to be a pattern to their arriving at the place, so Rachel couldn’t just slip in and have herself a nice warm shower and a bed to sleep in that didn’t have Ralph in it. Nor would the hot meal go unnoticed.

  “How far I have failed when I had it all in my hand?” No, she told herself. She hadn’t failed at anything. She was simply between things. Getting to Brody was the thing that would get her on easy street—as soon as she found out where Jordan went to school, how he got there, and what time he got off. You know, she told herself with a sad smile, just little things.

  Jordan had been, and still was, her ticket. She had only decided to keep him at the last minute, when she realized that things were falling apart. It was to the point of her being without anything if Brody got a burr up his ass, which he had. Then he had to go and lock her out of the house, take her son, and do a test on him that would make sure that he wasn’t the father. With or without the boy, she doubted that she’d get anything from him. He might even make her pay him, it was that bad. Rachel just hoped that he never found out about the other brats she’d gotten rid of. That would be, as they say, the nail in her own coffin.

  Brody had really fucked up her life getting himself a set of balls. She’d been by the house twice now; once to tear the For Sale sign out of the yard, the second time a few days later to notice that the sign was back and it had a sold sticker on it. Of all the nerve. Again, she wondered if he’d found all her stash. More than likely. It wasn’t as if she’d hidden it all that well. Brody never entered their bedroom, so she thought that she didn’t need to bother. Fuck.

  Brody must have gotten a great deal of money for that sucker too. It was a beautiful home. The walls were all nice and cleaned. She would know that, she supposed, since she hadn’t been able to hang so much as a picture on the walls. Of course, she did have a man in their bed not three days after moving into the mansion. But she’d never forgive Brody for laughing at her on their wedding night.

  Rachel had spent three months going to the gym to tone up her body. Ate nothing but green food for the same three months. Not a drop of wine either. She’d not had any idea of the number of calories in just one glass of it. She’d not only gotten herself down three dress sizes, but she could swear you could bounce a fucking nickel off her abs. Even her breasts had toned up. Her ass looked fine, and she was really proud of her thighs and calves. Then he’d laughed when she came out in the skimpiest things she could find.

  It wasn’t until she went back into the bathroom after slapping the piss out of him that she noticed the long trail of toilet paper stuck to her foot. No wonder he’d laughed. Christ, she might have too if it hadn’t been their fucking wedding night. And staying in the bathroom all night had gotten her nothing but a kink in her back and a stiff neck.

  Brody really had tried hard to make up for it, she remembered now. She really didn’t care one way or the other, not then or now. She’d only married him for one thing and one thing only—to get at his money. To control it. To spend it and to be able to tell everyone she knew that she was a doctor’s wife.

  But it had done her little good. There wasn’t anything for her to control, because he did the controlling. She wasn’t able to spend money like she was rich and as fabulous as she always thought of herself as being. Not only did all her friends—which she’d had few of that she was close to—stop coming around, but Brody and his giant cock wouldn’t sleep with her.

  She supposed, now that she thought of it, that it had been stupid to fuck someone else in their house. His house, she meant. He’d not only caught her at it, but he’d not made a big deal out of it either—except, of course, to cut her off more than he already had. There wasn’t an account for her to use. All the stores had been told not to give her any kind of credit. The cards had suddenly dried up, and she wasn’t able to just pick up the tab for her own luncheon, much less the entire table of women whose group Rachel had shoved her way into.

  Getting out of the house, she was careful where she went. The police would pick her up for any number of things that she’d done lately just to get back at Brody. The hospital was the worst, she guessed. They wanted her to not only pay for what it took to get everything repaired the night she’d been there, but to also pay for several pieces of equipment that she supposedly broke on her rampage.

  In two days she had to appear before a judge to be told about the divorce and what she wasn’t going to get out of it. The list of things that she wasn’t getting was longer than the list of things that she wanted or was getting. Her parents had suffered too, her mom told her, when she’d been summoned, but Rachel didn’t care about them. They were old and would be dead soon, and she had a lot of life left in her. Life that wasn’t going to get her anywhere if she didn’t get some money soon.

  There was a big to do involving the police at the apartment building that she had wanted to move into when the courts took her home from her. The one that Ralph and she had planned on getting wasn’t as big as the one that Brody had, not even close, but it was going to be theirs. Really, when she thought of it now, she was sort of glad that she didn’t have a home with Ralph. It was bad enough in the three-room place
that he had that he’d trashed. She could only imagine what he’d do to an entire house. That was another thing they were going to tell her, no doubt—that Brody’s money had been used to secure the house, so she was shit out of luck. They’d probably be that rude about it too.

  Keeping an eye on the police, careful of where they were looking, Rachel watched them take a man out in cuffs. He had a sack or something over his head, but she didn’t care who he was. She was just curious about anything going on to break the boredom of Ralph and his dirty habits.

  Then a woman came out. As she stood there just behind a gorgeous man, Rachel tried to remember where she’d seen her before. Her body was willow thin, her face like that of an Irish china doll. Her pale skin and long dark red hair just added to her beauty. The color didn’t come from a bottle either—that was as natural as everything else about her. She looked like she could take on the world and come out the winner, especially with the man behind her.

  When she turned her face to the side to talk to the police, it hit Rachel hard. The woman from the mall—and her son had been with her. What they were doing there was still hard for her to latch onto. She couldn’t even remember what she’d been doing there. But the woman—she’d stood up from someplace, and Rachel had felt the need to move on. That—

  “She told me that it wasn’t Jordan. I asked her for him, demanded that she turn him over to me, and she was—”

  Rachel felt the blood come from her nose as she tried harder to reach the information that she needed. She couldn’t remember more, but Rachel did know one thing. The woman had her son, and she needed to get him to come home with her. At least until Brody decided to play ball with her on her terms.

  Walking back to the house of mess, she wasn’t paying any attention to things going on around her anymore. Rachel had a feeling that a great deal was riding on this woman. She was having an affair with Brody. No, that didn’t explain the man with her. Brother? Doubtful. He was too close to her for that. Something. He was her protector. For Brody.

  Stopping suddenly, she felt someone ram into her from behind. Before she could turn and tell the fucker off, her rights were being read to her and she was down on her knees. Crying because this wasn’t helping her plans, she begged the man to let her go. But all she got was a “shut the fuck up and listen” before she was not just put into a cruiser that she’d not noticed, but they’d knocked her head twice before she was shoved into it.

  Rachel had no attorney, and no money to pay one. There wasn’t anyone that she could call to come and help her out. No one that she even knew slightly would come to her aid. And her parents, they seemed to be happy living at the shelter for now. And soon, because of their age and Dad being a fucking drunk, they’d be out on their ass from there too. She did wonder for a moment where he was getting the cash for that, but the cruiser stopped and she was at the jail. Christ, nothing was fucking going to ever come out the way she wanted it to.

  The man in the cell two down from hers was sitting on the floor meditating. He looked like a pretzel sitting there, with his fingers in a circle like he was a stone god or something. Ignoring him, she sat down on the cot. At least the sheets were clean was her first thought.

  Lying down, she thought of her life so far. It was shit, she realized. It seemed to her that from the moment she had her fifth birthday—she could remember that she’d gotten nothing that she’d wanted—it had been going downhill. Even fucking her way through high school had gotten her nothing. Her grades were only mediocre, because giving her an A would have been out of the question. Rachel hadn’t wanted to go to college, which was good—there wouldn’t have been any money for it.

  When she’d met Brody and figured out what he did for a living, she thought finally her life was going to turn around. But even that had gone south with the fall. He wasn’t any fun, and acted like having money was something that you didn’t celebrate with—just invest it to make more of it.

  Now, here she sat in jail with nothing. Smiling, she did think that she’d not do a thing differently. While she didn’t have anything, Rachel sure had made it an entertaining slide from poor to poorer.

  ~*~

  “The money for the Mabel Little Scholarship is set up just the way you wanted it. And I hope you don’t mind, but I have hired an investor to make sure that the funding doesn’t deplete much over the years.” Brody nodded. He was distracted. “The cash that was found in the house when it was packed up is now set up too. I swear to you, I wish I had thought of setting up a fund with Rachel’s name on it. That is going to make her shit a brick when she finds out that there is money out there for people wanting to buy a house and needing help with the funding. You are devious. You know that, don’t you?”

  Brody looked at Forrest. They’d been working for the last few hours, and he was no closer to figuring out what he should do then he had been this morning when he’d gone out on a call with the police. Forrest asked him to tell him what was going on.

  “I’m a good doctor, I think. At least I hope so.” Forrest nodded—non-committal, just what he needed from him. This way he could bounce things off him and not worry about him talking him into something. “This morning I was called to a crime scene. The police don’t have a police physician on staff right now and I really am excited about doing— I’m off subject. Not only was I able to tell them things that they might not have seen, but I think I enjoyed it more than I should have.”

  “Why is that?” He told him. “Just because someone was killed and you helped out does not make you a monster because you had fun, Brody. It means that you’re a good person who helped solve their murder.”

  “I know. But when I got to my car, I was shaking about how much fun it had been. No, not fun—excitement. And that made me feel guilty.” Forrest asked him what he’d been guilty of. “That’s just it, I’m not sure. Was I giddy—and I mean, I was giddy—because they thought enough of me to call on me? There are several doctors in town that have been here longer than me. Was it because I found a couple of clues that I’m sure the coroner would have found? Or, as I said, am I a monster?”

  “Have you met the local coroner?” Brody said he’d not. “I think he was here when the building was built. For all I know, they simply found him and built the building right around him. He’s as outdated as the equipment he uses. Did you know that he still writes his notes down as he goes? Without removing his gloves first. Can you imagine the germs and cross DNA that he’s fucked up? How many cases might have gone the other way if he’d been a little smarter about what he was doing? Brody, the man smokes while he’s doing these things.”

  Brody laughed. But Forrest told him he was serious. “That’s not even right. I mean, other than the writing down, what if he dropped an ash or two in the body? Christ, no wonder they want him to retire soon.” Forrest didn’t say anything; again, just what he needed. “The thing is, how can I be a doctor, where I help people, if I stick with the job that they offered me today?” He asked if the pay was good. “Yes, I guess. That’s not the reason that I was considering it.”

  “All right. And that was the right answer, by the way. Why did you become a doctor, Brody? I don’t mean the motto that hangs in every office from here to Timbuctoo. I mean, why did Brody Downs become a doctor?”

  He thought about it for a moment then looked at Forrest. “I wanted to help people to feel like they could make it another day. To reduce the pain where I could—and you’d not believe how often that is simply all they need. And to be there for them when they’ve taken their last breath or their first. Bringing a child into the world is amazing. But just as amazing in an entirely different way is being there, holding the hand of someone that is just wanting to go to a place to rest.” Forrest said that was beautiful. “Thanks. I’ve been thinking about that too.”

  “So, you want to help people. Did you help the deceased this morning?” Brody asked him what he meant. “The person that was
murdered, you said you found a clue? Do you think that helped that person? Even a little?”

  He didn’t know what he meant for a moment until bam, it was like he’d hit him in the head. “I did help them—or their families in this case. I might not have eased their suffering when they were being murdered, but I might have been able to give their family some peace. Because when the police are able to use the clue to find the killer, the family will know he or she isn’t still out there.”

  “Right. Now, would you have felt any better if the same victim was to come to your ER and had died there? Do you think you might have been able to find the same clues?” Brody didn’t even have to think about it—no, he would not have. “Then all you have to do now is think which one you’d like to do. Because from where I stand. I’d rather have you out in the field than in a room where you can’t do anything for me.”

  Thanking Forrest, he started to leave. Brody had no idea where he was going, but when Forrest called him back, he realized that they still had things to finish up. Sitting down, he felt better than he had this morning, and much better than he had even a week ago. He and Aaron were having an amazing time just simply being together.

  “I have something that I’d like for you to read. I don’t think that it’ll burst your bubble of good mood, but I think you’ll love this.” He handed him the thick notebook. “That’s the book that your father told you about. And he’s come to see me a couple of times. He is having a grand time with Jordan too; did you know that?”

  “Yes. Dad came to talk to me before he talked to Jordan. He didn’t want to freak him out, so we went to talk to him the first time together. Jordan didn’t know him. I’d forgotten about that. He died just a few months before I got married.” He asked him how that had gone with his dad and Jordan the first time. “Jordan was so overwhelmed to have a real grandda and not one he had to borrow. Dad is even helping him with his homework and the décor in his room. Last night I told Jordan to go up to bed, and Dad asked to sit with him for a while. I guess Dad reads to him. I’m not sure how that works, but that’s what he does nightly.”