3 The Case of Tiffany's Epiphany (2 page)

---

“Tiffany, are you okay?” Care asks.

“You can’t have anything wrong with you,” Kelly says just as worried as her sister. “Who's going to take me shopping if you’re sick?”

My oldest is a bit more self-centered than her sister. She gets this from her mother, no doubt.

“Girls, leave her alone,” I tell them. “Let her get her breath back.”

“I’m in this club, sipping on a Cosmo,” Tiffany says as best she can.

“Which one?” the detective in me immediately asks.

“Kumquat,” she answers.

“There’s a club called, Kumquat?” I again ask.

“No,” Tiffany says. “A kumquat
cosmo
.”

I stand corrected.

“All of a sudden, my head starts spinning faster than a strobe light in a disco.” Tiffany takes another water bottle from Care and sips. “I try to get up and, let me tell you,” she says. “It’s tough enough to balance on four-inch Christian Louboutin’s when you’re sober, but doing it with your head spinning like a break dancer on speed, that’s impossible.”

“Tiffany, we should really get you to a hospital.”

“No, Mr. Sherlock, the first thing we have to do is find out if anyone snapped my picture when I was down. If an Instagram of me sprawled out against a bar rail goes out, and shows up on somebody’s Facebook Page, I’ll never live it down.”

“What’s an Instagram?”

“Dad,” Kelly says, “you are so lame.”

I admit I’m a bit behind the times when it comes to technology. I still use a flip phone.

“Don’t argue with me,” I say in no uncertain terms. “You’re going to get checked out and checked out right now.”

Tiffany half-collapses back into the chair.

“You two stay here,” I tell my kids. “I’m going to go get the car and bring it around. And don’t let her get up.”

Tiffany pops back up and uses what energy she has left to plead, “Oh, no. Please not that.”

“Tiffany you’re going to the hospital. That’s final.”

“Fine,” she relents. “I’ll go to the hospital, but do we have to go in your car? I hate that yucky car.”

---

We’re driving down Western Avenue. Tiffany is wearing my sunglasses and has a towel draped over her head like a burka in her effort not to be seen. “My head is, like, pounding,” she complains. “All I can hear is, put, put, put, put.”

Actually, the sound isn’t inside her head. It’s a stuttering from beneath the Toyota. I’ve got a bad muffler that I can’t afford to fix. “It’ll get better as soon as we get to the hospital,” I tell her.

“Why don’t you get a new car, Mr. Sherlock? An illegal immigrant wouldn’t be caught dead driving over the border in this one.”

“I can’t get a new car.”
“Why not? I get one every year,” Tiffany says.

“Because I, unlike you, have children instead of money, Tiffany.”

“You can’t have both?” Tiffany asks.

“I certainly haven’t been able to swing that.”

We’re about a block from Martha Washington Hospital, but I settle for a Doc in the box on Western Avenue. MWH is a major Northside treatment center, and that means the ER room will have at least a three- day wait.

At the Doc in the box, I get Tiffany and the girls seated before I approach the sour and surly-looking admittance person at the desk. She’s dressed in scrubs, but I don’t think she’s a nurse. She immediately asks if Tiffany has insurance. I could tell her, “When it comes to insurance, not many have as much as Tiffany,” but I don’t. Instead, I sift through Tiffany’s stack of credit cards until I find her insurance card and hand it over. She hands me a clipboard with a pen attached by a metal string. I take it to where the three are seated, which is between a broken arm and bleeding knee, behind a guy who can hardly breathe, and in front of a very bad case of pink eye. I begin to fill out the form. The top part is easy. The bottom part is a little more personal. “Tiffany, do you have any of these diseases?”

Tiffany gives me her “That is, like, totally gross” look.

I rattle off everything from asphyxia to shin splints and Tiffany responds with a resounding, “I better not.”

I finish the form, take out my last twenty dollars and clip it under the first page on the clipboard. I return the form to the desk, am told to wait, and in less than ten seconds what I suspect is a real nurse comes out of an opposite door. Every eye in the waiting room, including the pink ones, looks up in hope. The nurse calls out “Miss Richmond.”

Moans all around. Money talks. Bullshit walks--or in this case, sits and suffers.

“The doctor will see you now.”

The four of us rise.

“You’re all Miss Richmond?” the nurse asks.

Three of us sit back down.

Tiffany, who did take off her shoes after my nagging, follows the nurse into the inner sanctum of medicinal repair. Once the door shuts and locks from the inside, Kelly immediately takes off her shoes and puts on Tiffany’s. “These are, like, so totally rad.”

Kelly gets up and tries to walk. “Watch me, Dad.”

“Kelly, sit down,” I say. “You’re going to break an ankle.”

“I was like born to wear Christian Louboutin’s.”

“Sit down. You don’t belong in those shoes.”

“What do you mean? They’re perfect, they look great … on … me. Whoa-a-a-a …!”

Kelly keels over to her left like a new felled tree, and crashes right into the guy with the broken arm, who screams out in his displeasure, “I think you broke my other arm.”

“Sorry, mister,” Kelly apologies, “but at least you’re in the right place to get that fixed.”

I jump up, lift Kelly to her feet, give the guy a quick, “Kids, these days,” and deposit my oldest back into her chair. “Take those shoes off right now.”

“I will in a second, Dad.” Kelly hands her cell phone to Care who snaps shoe shots of her sister for fashion posterity.

I use my cell to call Tiffany’s dad, Jamison Wentworth Richmond III. And he, as usual, doesn’t take my call. I leave a detailed message. I know he won’t call back. His usual custom.

For the next fifteen minutes my kids play with their cell phones. I take a dog-eared magazine off the rack and read an article about President Bush’s new tax plan, George H.W., not George W. The other patients continue to moan.

The nurse emerges again from the inner sanctum. The moans stop in anticipation of hearing their names, but only until the nurse says, “Mr. Sherlock.” The moans return--louder than before.

“Dad, can we come with you?” Care asks.

“No.” I hand Care the magazine I was reading. “Here, brush up on some history.”

I hurry through the door held open by the nurse. One foot inside, she admonishes me, “Why didn’t you tell us she was Tiffany Richmond?”

“I filled out the form.”
“Her father owns this place. And if you don’t think we’re going to hear about this, you must be in the middle of a brain freeze, mister.”

“Sorry.”

I am led down a short hallway to an exam room. Tiffany sits on the exam table, one hand holding a mirror, the other one patting blush on her face. An IV line runs into the vein in the crook of her arm. It’s dripping a clear liquid into her system.

“I’m Dr. Omagalla Nehru.”

At the sound of the voice, I turn to my left and peer down at the balding head of a guy who couldn’t be more than 5 foot 3; the perfect Doc for a Doc in the box. His hand is outstretched for me to shake. I take it. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine.”

“What happened?”

“Miss Richmond must have ingested some type of narcotic that had a decided effect on her system.”

“What” I ask.

“I have taken blood, urine, and DNA specimens. We have called the lab, they’ll pick it up immediately and they’ll have the tests done, STAT. As soon as possible.” He raises his index finger to further make his point.

“Good.”

The doc added the customary prescription, “Have her drink lots of fluids to allow system flush itself out, and make sure she gets plenty of rest.”

“Will do, Doc.”

As the nurse removes the IV from Tiffany’s arm, Dr. Nehru pulls me toward him and speaks softly so that Tiffany can’t hear him. “And please tell the owner of company what good care we take of patient.”

“Next time we chat, I’ll be sure to mention it.”

Tiffany hops off the table, hands the mirror back to the nurse, smiles, and says to me, “They pumped my stomach, Mr. Sherlock.”

“Did it hurt? Are you okay?”

“What I wouldn’t have done for one of those machines when I was on a purge diet,” she tells me.

Outside the clinic, a limo so big it could double as a troop transport vehicle awaits.

“It sure didn’t take long for Daddy to go into action,” Tiffany says.

“He called you?”

“Of course he called me, he’s my daddy.”

“I want you to go home, get some rest, and keep drinking fluids, Tiffany.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Sherlock.”

“Bye, Tiffany,” Care and Kelly say in unison.

“Ta-ta, little dudettes.”

The driver holds the rear door waiting for Tiffany to climb inside.

“When do we start, Mr. Sherlock?” she asks me.

“Start what?”

“Finding out who did this to me.”

I sigh. “Tiffany, just do what the doctor said.”

“Mr. Sherlock, the best revenge is a cocktail served warm.”

CHAPTER 2

It’s late. The kids finally go to bed. They made me watch this TV show where the world has been taken over by zombies and the only people left are muscle-bound, buffed-up bad actors and well-endowed, equally bad actresses. They all spend their time blowing the heads off the undead dead, while they’re busy pairing up with each other in typical soap opera type relationships. Think
All My
Children
meets
The Curse of the Living Dead
.

The door buzzer buzzes. Someone downstairs wants to get in. It’s probably one of the buddies of the drunk that lives on the second floor who regularly punches the wrong button or all the buttons on the residence doorbell panel.

I get up off the couch, which will soon be my bed, go to my front door, push the respond button, and growl, “Go away.”

“Oh, Mr. Sherlock.”

“Tiffany …”

“Buzz me in.”

I scream back through the tiny speaker, “You’re supposed to be home resting.”

“Mr. Sherlock, I got tired of resting. Let me in.”

I push the door release button, hear the click, and in the time it takes to climb three flights of stairs, Tiffany enters my apartment.

“Let’s go.”

“Go where?” I ask.

Care and Kelly pile out of my bedroom. “Can we go too?”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I tell everyone.

“What should I wear?” Kelly asks.

“We got to get there while the clues are still fresh,” Tiffany says.

“Get where?”

“To the club where I got roofied.”

---

“Did you have to wear that?” Tiffany asks.

I have been scolding her all the way down the block to where she parked her Lexus 450. “Don’t change the subject. You’re supposed to be home recuperating, Tiffany.”

“Really, is that jacket the coolest thing you have to wear?”

She is referring to my faux leather jacket.

“It’s about as hip as a hip replacement.”

“I try to buy clothes that are fashion timeless.”

“I would have hated to be around when that thing was in fashion,” she tells me.

“Sorry, you didn’t give me a lot of time to plan my wardrobe for the evening.”

“I’m telling you, Mr. Sherlock, getting you in this club is not going to be easy.”

I take a deep breath. These conversations are extremely tiring. “We’re supposed to be talking about your health, Tiffany.”

“I feel fine,” she says pulling out onto the street.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I don’t?” Tiffany jams on the brakes, comes to a stop in the middle of the road, and leans over to see her reflection in the rear view mirror. “Is there something wrong with my make-up?”

“The doctor said you have to let your system clear itself out.”

“There’s no system in the world faster than mine. I lost four pounds in one weekend by eating only bran cereal,” Tiffany says. “That’s why I passed out on the bar right away. Most chicks just get woozier and woozier when somebody roofies them. They pass out an hour or two later. My roofie smacked me like an iron skillet to my skull. Boom!”

Why do I even bother trying to reason with her? She doesn’t listen.

In a few minutes we’re speeding down Lakeshore Drive. I yawn. I’m tired. It’s way past my bedtime. “Couldn’t we do this tomorrow?” I ask, exasperated.

“Mr. Sherlock, you always tell me that if you don’t solve the case in the first seven-point-two hours the case goes into cold case hibernation.”

“I never said that.”

“Well, you said something like it.”

Tiffany cuts over three lanes, and exits the Drive like Dale Earnhardt coming in for a pit stop. She zooms down Wacker Drive, through the Loop, and over the river near Greektown.

The club is named Zanadu, a possible clever misspelling of Xanadu, the palatial home of Charles Foster Kane, but I seriously doubt if any of the revelers have ever heard of
Citizen Kane
. If it’s not a video game or Smart Phone app, the millennial generation has little use for it.

The club is in the West Loop, in a converted warehouse. Twenty years ago this neighborhood was filled with low-life drug addicts and loose women; today it’s filled with a much better classes of drug addicts and loose women.

Tiffany pulls the Lexus up in front of the long line of people waiting to get in. Every eye, male and female, watches her flip her keys to the valet. Next, they get a glimpse of yours truly and, no doubt, wonder what a girl who looks like she does could be doing with a guy who looks like me.

I start to walk to the back of the line. Tiffany grabs me by the arm and pulls me back. “Where are you going?”

“End of the line.”

“Line? I haven’t waited in a line since grammar school.”

I follow her as she zips by the “little people”.

“Now, don’t say anything. Let me do the talking,” Tiffany says as we’re about to reach two black, bald, humongous slabs of intimidation manning the velvet rope.