by Jodi Compton
Deborah and Doug Lowe were Gen’s sister and brother-in-law. Gen had lived with them at their farmhouse in Mankato after her daughter’s death, and it was to their place that we’d returned, late at night, after Stewart’s death. Naturally, they’d be of interest to an investigator.
“I asked Deb his name, but she couldn’t remember.” She listened for a response. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “Look, everything will be fine. They can’t put Stewart’s death on me. I didn’t kill him.”
“That’s faulty logic and you know it,” she said.
“Let me handle it,” I said. “Promise me you won’t worry.”
“I can’t promise that. This is-”
“Gen,” I said, “I’m really not going to discuss this anymore.”
The silence on the other end of the line suggested something repressed, a sigh or a sharp word. Finally she yielded. “You sound hoarse,” she said. “You’re not getting a cold, are you?”
“I’m never sick,” I told her. “I’m probably hoarse because I just woke- oh, wait.”
I was thinking back to a day ago, the time I’d spent shivering in the cool early-morning air, soaking wet.
“What?” Gen prompted.
I explained to her about the boys and drainage canal.
When I was finished, she chided me. “What is it with you? You’re like a dog. Always this headfirst impulse to rescue people.”
I smiled, because she sounded like the older sister and teacher she’d been in the days of our partnership. I, too, fell into my role. “Not true,” I said. “I went in feetfirst.”
“Go back to sleep,” Genevieve said gently. “Call me sometime when you’ve got a day off.”
“I will,” I said.
***
That evening I made a very convincing streetwalker, wan and surly. My throat felt raw and wet, and I knew Gen’s words, You’re not getting a cold, are you? were true. But my sullenness seemed to have an aphrodisiac effect on the men on the street. I would have beaten my record for busts in one night if I hadn’t taken a half-hour break for a prearranged meeting with Ghislaine Morris.
On the way there, I tried to recall what it was that Shiloh had said about her. I did remember that he’d hesitated before handing off Ghislaine’s number.
“I don’t really talk to her much anymore,” Shiloh had said, sorting through the cardboard box of his things, long legs kicked up on the coffee table.
“Why not?” I said. “Is she not useful?”
“No, Gish is a sponge,” Shiloh said. “She hears everything.”
“So what’s the story?” I’d said.
He’d shrugged. “No story. Something about her just bothers me. I don’t know what, exactly.”
I’d pressed him to elaborate, but he wouldn’t, and when Shiloh doesn’t want to talk about something, it’s over.
So I’d met with Ghislaine personally, a month or two later- I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t who’d showed up.
Ghislaine Morris was 22, not thin, but not fat either. She had a sweet, open face and full hips. Her blond hair was cropped in a short, boyish style, and her brown eyes were friendly. She was pushing a stroller, with a then six-month-old baby in it. He had curly brown hair and cinnamon skin and huge eyes that took in the world like documentary cameras.
Over an inexpensive meal, Ghislaine told me about her life, about Shadrick’s father, who was “no longer in our lives,” and about her parents in Dearborn, Michigan, who’d kicked her out of the house when they’d found out she was pregnant with a child whose father was black, so that Ghislaine had to come to Minnesota to stay with a friend. She had a shoplifting bust on her record, but had gotten probation. She told me she wanted to go back to school as soon as she could.
It was a meeting that I’d left rather confused. I had no earthly idea what it was that Shiloh saw in her that he didn’t like. Shiloh was a preacher’s son; if he had a flaw, it was his judgmental streak. Maybe he couldn’t overcome a Puritan’s disapproval of single motherhood at such a young age. For my part, I’d found her chatter infectious and her devotion to her son palpable. If her ambitions to go back to school and “make something” of herself were somewhat generic, who was I to judge?
Tonight, she was late to our meeting at an unassuming little diner. I ordered a mug of herbal tea and sucked on a eucalyptus cough drop. My throat had started to stiffen up when I swallowed.
“Holy shit,” Ghislaine said when she arrived, pushing Shadrick in his stroller. “I didn’t even recognize you.”
She settled into the booth across from me, her eyes widening guilelessly. “So this is what you look like when you’re undercover?” I’d already warned her on the phone about my vice-detail look.
“Undercover’s a strong word,” I said. “This is just soliciting busts. It’s not a complicated sting operation.”
“Wow,” she said, and opened the menu.
The waitress, approaching on crepe-soled shoes, set a mug of tea down in front of me. “You ready, sugar?” she asked Ghislaine.
“I’d like a cheeseburger with curly fries, and a strawberry milk shake,” Ghislaine said, folding up the menu and handing it to the waitress.
“We’ve got booster seats, if you want one for him,” the waitress told Ghislaine.
“No, that’s okay,” Ghislaine said.
“He’s a handsome little guy.”
“He sure is,” Ghislaine agreed.
As if he knew he was being discussed, Shad squealed, a surprisingly loud sound. Ghislaine leaned out of the booth and put her hands on the sides of his face, on his cheeks. “That’s right, you’ve got a fan club, don’t you!” she said cheerfully.
The waitress disappeared into the kitchen. I cleared my throat, and Ghislaine straightened up. “So what’s up?” she asked, turning to business.
“Like I told you on the phone,” I said, “I need some information.”
“Really?” Ghislaine said. “How much?” She was asking how much it was worth.
“Let’s wait and see if you know anything,” I said. “We’ve been hearing some things about a guy who’s practicing medicine without a license,” I said. “Out of a private residence, maybe in one of the projects.”
Ghislaine’s expression turned sour. “Oh, him,” she said. “Cisco.”
Jackpot. That was fairly easy, I thought. I’d only had to ask two informants.
“Cisco who?” I said.
“I don’t remember his last name,” Ghislaine said.
“You’ve seen him?” I asked her.
The waitress reappeared at our side, setting down the burger and fries, then a long tulip-shaped glass of strawberry milk shake and the extra in the silver tumbler. A curly fry fell from the plate.
“Anything else?” she said.
“No,” I said for both of us. The waitress moved off.
“You’ve been to see this guy?” I asked Ghislaine. “In a professional capacity?”
Ghislaine picked up the fallen french fry and leaned out of the booth, handing it down to Shadrick.
“By professional, you mean medical?” she said. “Yeah, I did. I had this thing that wouldn’t go away. In my lungs, like bronchitis.”
I was curious. “Why not just go see a doctor?”
Ghislaine shrugged. “I heard he was good,” she said.
I heard he was good. That was something people said about someone they were looking at for an elective surgery, not someone working for cash under the table. But I let it slide. “Did he help with your bronchitis?”
“I don’t know,” Ghislaine said. “It went away. But I wouldn’t go back and see him again.”
“Why? Did he seem incompetent?”
She shook her head.
“Was his behavior toward you inappropriate?”
She shrugged unhelpfully. “I don’t know, I just didn’t like him.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I just didn’t. Are you going to
bust him?” Ghislaine applied her rosebud mouth to her straw.
“If this guy’s doing what people say he’s been doing, then yes, we will,” I said. “Where does he live?”
“You know where the towers are, right?” She named a main thoroughfare in South Minneapolis, referring to a pair of public housing buildings that stood there.
“Sure, I know them,” I said. “What’s the apartment number?”
“I forget,” Ghislaine said. “But he lives on the very top floor. You just get off the elevator and it’s the second door down on that side of the hall.”
“Top floor of which building?”
“The one closest to the street,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
“Don’t I need to call first?”
Ghislaine shook her head, drank a little more of her milk shake. “He’s drop-in, all hours,” she said. “This guy’s an agoraphobic or something, never goes out.”
“Thanks,” I said. I laid several bills on the table. “That should cover the tab, and the help.”
4
Lust may never sleep, but Sunday night is a slow night in the sex trade, too slow to waste a detective on a prostitution-decoy sting. It left me free to pursue “Cisco.” I even had an excuse to see him: my cold was in full bloom. I was coughing incessantly, congested and sniffling.
Now my problem was this: Cisco might take one look at me and see, if not an undercover cop, a middle-class individual who didn’t need to seek doctoring in a housing project late at night. His clientele probably ran to people with little money and few options in medical care- the poor and disenfranchised, illegal immigrants, maybe criminals.
Maybe hookers, too.
That’s how I ended up, on a Sunday night, wriggling into my vice-decoy clothes: this time, a shiny, sleeveless pink top and tight calf-length black pants. After applying the usual makeup, I looked at the mirror, at my artificially pale face, and felt a chill of anxiety down my spine.
A SWAT veteran had lectured my Sheriff’s academy class about on-the-job nerves. When you feel fear, try to determine its source, he’d said. Sometimes it’s not coming from where you think it is, and sometimes if you know what the fear is really about, you can defuse it.
Was I afraid of Cisco because he was, supposedly, a doctor?
My medical phobia was a specific one. I wasn’t afraid of paramedics, and I gave blood when the blood bank set up shop downtown, in a reassuring nonmedical setting. But I hated going to the doctor: that powerlessness as you waited behind the closed door, with the overhead light bouncing off the instruments and the creepy anatomical posters hanging on the wall. Down to the second, I could identify the worst part: the moment when you heard the door handle start to turn.
But Cisco’s as-yet-unseen apartment wasn’t that place. According to Prewitt, Cisco probably wasn’t even a real doctor. To us, he was a suspect.
Was that in itself frightening? This was undercover work, which is always potentially dangerous.
I nodded, as if someone were here to share my revelation. I’d located the source of my nerves: I was afraid of the unknown Cisco, of being alone with him in his apartment. Maybe I should ask for some kind of backup.
All Prewitt asked you to do was check this guy out, I reminded myself. You don’t even have to identify yourself. You’re just going to go over there and see what’s what. You want help for that?
What I was doing needed to be done. Whoever Cisco was- a med-school washout or a con artist faking it from having worked in a medical office- he was clearly fooling enough people to have a small clientele, which meant he was bleeding money off the poor and uneducated just when they were at their most vulnerable. If he hadn’t screwed up badly enough to cause permanent injury or death yet, well, it was probably just a matter of time. This guy needed to be taken off the playing field, and Prewitt had trusted me to get the job started. I couldn’t go back to my lieutenant now and tell him I wanted backup to go see a suspect armed only with a stethoscope.
***
The elevator in the north tower took a long time to come. There were no lighted numbers above the doors to mark its progress downward, and I whistled quietly as I waited. Such behaviors were Method acting for cops, keeping the nerves at bay.
A faint ping sounded, but for a moment nothing happened. A long moment. Then the single-panel door slid to the side. I stepped into the car and pressed number 26, for the top floor. After a moment the door slid shut, and again, nothing happened.
I pressed the 26 again. The car lurched upward. From above me, the other side of the elevator’s roof, came an odd groaning sound I’d never heard an elevator make, and underneath that sound, a squeak of cables working: screek, screek, screek. Inside the car, there were lighted numbers to allow passengers to watch their progress. For an inordinately long time the 2 stayed lit. Then 3. More rumbling from above; 4… 5… 6…
If I’d known it was going to take this long, I’d have brought something to read, I thought. The mental complaint was bravado. I rode elevators all the time at work, but this one was bothering me.
At 26, the car lurched to a halt. But for a moment, nothing happened. The door stayed closed.
“Come on,” I said under my breath. The elevator’s balky performance seemed like a bad omen for my whole visit here.
The door slid open and I stepped out into the hallway, walked down to the second door, and knocked.
What if Ghislaine misremembered which apartment this guy lives in? I thought, in the wait that followed.
The door opened about two inches, just to the end of a security chain. A slice of masculine face appeared in the gap, but about two feet lower than where I expected it. When I understood why, I found myself momentarily at a loss for words.
“Can I help you?” the man said, finally.
“Are you”- I coughed to clear phlegm from my throat-“Cisco? Ghislaine Morris gave me your name. I need to get looked at.”
Cisco closed the door in my face. Behind the wall the chain scraped, and the door swung wide. As he let me in, Cisco rolled backward in his wheelchair to give me space.
Height was hard to gauge, but he was a long, lean form in the chair, dressed in a dark-gray sweatshirt that revealed a little bit of white from the collar of the T-shirt he wore underneath. The same white T-shirt peeked out from under the sweatshirt at his hips, over his dark-blue workman’s trousers. His feet were bare. He had a lean face, with black hair that brushed his shoulders, feathery at the ends.
He certainly wasn’t hiding what he did. Beyond him, I saw low shelves lined with texts on medicine and anatomy. On the wall was a framed diploma, and where most people would have put the couch stood a long table lined with a sheet of tissue paper. It looked almost like a doctor’s examining table, except that it was lower, reflecting the level from which Cisco had to approach the world. The table was positioned just under a hanging light fixture. At the foot of the table was a chest, like a footlocker, and a little beyond that was a two-drawer filing cabinet.
“What’s troubling you?” Cisco said.
“I have a bad cold,” I said, “or the flu.”
“Mmm,” Cisco said noncommittally.
“How much do you charge?” I asked him.
“Let’s not get to that just yet,” Cisco said. “Most colds run their course within a week,” he said, “even without any kind of treatment. I’m not sure why you’re seeking help.”
Maybe this guy had the most sensitively tuned radar for cops I’d ever run across. Still, it was hard to be scared of him, given the situation. Unless he had a gun tucked under that fringe of T-shirt.
I sniffled again. “I’m never sick. That’s why this is tripping me out. I want to be sure nothing’s behind it.”
“Did your friend Ghislaine suggest I could prescribe something for you, something stronger than over-the-counter meds?” Cisco asked.
“No,” I said honestly.
“Because I can’t,” Cisco
went on. “I expect Ghislaine didn’t pass along what I told her when she came to see me, so I’m going to tell you what I tell everyone. I don’t know what brought you to me in a city full of doctors’ offices; I don’t ask people that,” Cisco continued. “But this is not the ideal situation in which to get your medical care. If you have another option, you should seriously think about taking it.”
If he thinks that little speech is a disclaimer that’ll protect him from criminal charges, he’s got another thing coming.
“Understood. How much do you charge?” I said flatly.
“To look at you?” he said. “Forty.”
That’s all? I thought. It surprised me that he’d put himself at risk by doing something this illegal, and then charge relatively little for it. On the other hand, his clientele probably didn’t have much money to spare.
“Do you want me to look at you?” he asked.
“I didn’t come this far to just go away,” I told him, thinking of Prewitt.
“All right,” Cisco said. “I take the money up front. Why don’t you set it on my bookshelf over there, then take your shirt off and get on my exam table. I’ll be with you in a minute.” He rolled backward, turning the wheelchair toward his kitchen.
The money first. Cisco might be reasonably priced, but he certainly wasn’t naive. I laid two twenties on the top of the bookshelf as I’d been directed. Water ran in Cisco’s kitchen. He was at the sink, his back turned to me.
It was the first moment I’d had to regain my mental footing. The fact that he was a paraplegic had thrown me, but only momentarily. It was his behavior that I continued to find unusual. Normally, criminals, particularly con artists, are hyperalert when meeting strangers. They hide it well, but you can sense it, a kind of power-line hum that radiates off them. But Cisco didn’t seem so much alert as aware. He wasn’t nervous, and he wasn’t drunk or on anything, either. He was simply relaxed, and that was the thing that didn’t add up.
I turned to study the living room. Virtually nowhere were any personal touches. I drifted over to look at the framed diploma on the wall.