A Garden of Vipers (9 page)

“A lot of politicos were there, too.”

“Political knees bend farther and more often.
She
was there, too, wasn't she: an older woman, white hair, chunky, aloof?”

“Yes. May-bell-line?”

“Maylene. Yes, she would have been. She'll always be there, in some way or another.”

I heard something off-key in Clair's voice, anger maybe, or resignation.

“Some way or another?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

She looked at her watch, frowned.

“I've got two pathologists down with the flu. I've got the day's second post in three minutes. Look, the Kincannons do a lot of giving to the community and the region. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for parks, health-care institutions, schools, law enforcement…an incredible amount of money.”

“And so?”

“The Kincannons…well, only some of the truly wealthy can give with both hands, Ryder.”

Her words seemed cryptic; Clair was rarely cryptic.

“You mean the Kincannons have so much they can shovel it hand over hand into the community?”

“Think about it. But elsewhere, please. I've got to get to work.”

I sucked in a breath, said, “How about Buck Kincannon?”

“Is there a specific question there?”

“No,” I admitted.
There are about a hundred.

Clair picked up the phone on the counter, asked for the body to be brought to the table. She turned to me.

“Buck Kincannon is the current golden boy of the family, forty-eight karats of flawless Kincannon breeding. Last month's
Alabama Times
magazine listed him as one of the top ten eligible bachelors in the state.”

Not what I needed to hear.

“Current golden boy, Clair?”

“Maylene Kincannon runs that family like a competitive event. Next month it may be Nelson on the pedestal. Or Racine, unless he gets blitzed and slips off. Race likes women and liquor, probably not in that order. Now, unless you're going to assist, it's time to skedaddle.”

I nodded, headed for the door. I was stepping into the hall when she called my name. I stopped, turned.

“The Kincannons, Ryder. They haven't stepped outside any limits, right? You're not investigating anything, anyone?”

“Just natural curiosity about a lifestyle I'll never know.”

She gave me the long look again. “It's mostly fiction. Stay away from those folks, Carson. There's nothing to be gained there.”

I picked up the report at the front desk, then stepped into a day more like August than May, heat rippling from the asphalt surface of the parking lot.

Stepped outside any limits?

Walking to the car I revisited Clair's phrase, a curious assemblage of words. And that throwaway line about staying away from the Kincannons…

Was that some kind of warning?

You're losing it,
I thought, slipping behind the wheel. The only warning here is to keep your imagination in check.

Ms. Kayla Rudolnick was the mother of Dr. Bernard Rudolnick, Harwood's victim. A thin woman in her late sixties, she wore a brown pantsuit and pink slippers, holding a cigarette in one hand, a glass ashtray in the other. She'd apologized for having her hair in curlers and led us to a couch with antimacassars on the back. The room smelled of Ben-Gay and nicotine. She switched off the television, a soap opera.

“It was just a phone call. But I recall her saying she was a reporter.”

“Taneesha Franklin?”

Smoke plumed from her nostrils. “The Taneesha is what I remember.”

“What did Ms. Franklin want to know?” I asked.

Ms. Rudolnick's eyes tightened behind a wall of smoke. “I told her to leave me alone. Bernie was gone. Never call me again.”

Ms. Rudolnick plucked a pink tissue from her sleeve, lifted her bifocals, and blotted her eyes.

“He was a good man, my son. Brilliant mind, good heart.”

“I'm sure.”

“He had his problems. But we all do, don't we?”

I shot Harry a glance. We'd come back to that.

“The doctor wasn't married?” I asked.

“When he was twenty-eight, again when he was thirty-six. Both marriages lasted under two years. He couldn't pick women, they both cleaned him out like a closet. Two times he started over.”

A photo sat on the table beside me: Rudolnick and Mama maybe a half decade back, his arms around her from the back. Like his mother, Rudolnick had sad Slavic eyes and a nose-centric face. His hair was black and thinning, brushed straight back. His white shirt was buttoned to the Adam's apple, the collar starched. He looked like he could have been dropped into the 1950s and no one would have noticed.

Harry and I had hoped a wife might provide insight into Rudolnick's behavior and patterns. But the good doctor had been five years gone from marriage and lived alone. I said, “So his last wife might not be able to tell us much about his life.”

“Shari, he met her at a bar. You don't meet decent women at bars. She moved to Seattle four years ago. Probably found herself a new bar and a new Bernie.”

“You mentioned Bernie having some problems, Ms. Rudolnick,” Harry said.

She tapped an ash into the tray and looked away. “You know, don't you?”

“No, ma'am, I never met your son.”

“It's in the records. You didn't look?”

“I don't know what records you're referring to, Ms. Rudolnick.”

“The records down where you work.”

I finally made sense of what she was saying. And maybe why she'd been spooked by a reporter.

“Your son was arrested?” I asked. “When?”

She looked away. “Four years ago. He had some problems.”

“Can you explain, please?”

“After Shari left he became depressed. Sometimes—not often—he took things to help him cope, calm down. He was always high-strung.”

“Drugs?”

“He was a doctor. He used it like medicine.”

“Of course.”

“One day he came here. He was crying and I was terrified. He said there was a hospital worker he'd been buying some of his medicine from, and the police had been watching the hospital worker. Bernie was purchasing something. He was sure it would come out in the papers, his career would be over.”

She looked from my face to Harry's. Though her son was dead, the episode printed fright and humiliation across her face.

“It's all right, ma'am. We don't need the full story.”

I figured we'd get it from the arrest report, save the poor woman the retelling.

She said, “He stopped taking those things. What happened with the police finally made him stop.”

“How was his behavior before the end?” I asked. “Normal?”

A grandfather clock in the hall chimed. We waited until it fell silent.

“About a month before…that day, he seemed depressed again. He came over to see me less. He was quieter, like he was deciding on something.”

“Could it have been something with his work? Unhappiness?”

She walked to the mother-and-son photo. Touched it with reverence. “He loved his work. He was born to help people get better. He consulted in the region's best facilities. Bernie was on the board at Mobile Regional Hospital. He had a private practice.”

It was a good place to take our leave, on the high note of her son's achievements. As we moved to the door, I asked one final question.

“Excuse me, Ms. Rudolnick. Did your son have a specialty?”

She exhaled a plume of smoke, spun a tobacco-stained finger at her temple. “He worked with tormented minds.”

Psychotics? A bell rang in my head. Had Rudolnick known Harwood earlier? I wondered. Did they have a history? What if Harwood had been a patient, or part of a study?

I said, “I don't suppose he ever mentioned patients by name.”

She crushed the cigarette dead in the ashtray, set it aside. “He was absolute about privacy.”

Harry said, “The records your son kept about his patients. All gone, right?”

“They were in his house and I didn't know what to do with them. I keep them in storage. I don't know why.”

“Would it be possible to look at them?”

She held up her hands, waving my words away. “No. It's all confidential, a bond of trust.”

Harry stepped close. Gathered her hands in his, held them steady. I could never do anything that simple and perfect. “It might be helpful, Ms. Rudolnick,” he said quietly. “It would never go further than Carson and me. And it might be our key to finding who killed your son.”

Her eyes shimmered with tears and her mouth pursed tight. “It was that filthy Harwood animal, scum. Piece of dirt…piece of
shit
.”

“I wish that was true, ma'am. But Leland Harwood was just a tool, a hammer. The man who swung the hammer is still out there.”

She shook her head. “No. It can't be. It's not right.”

“Detective Ryder talked to Leland Harwood an hour before he died, ma'am. He thinks Harwood was sent to harm your son.”

She looked at me. “Is that true?”

I nodded. “Leland Harwood was an enforcer. He always worked for others.”

Her face tightened in anger. She turned to Harry.

“You'll respect the confidentiality of my son's files?”

“You have our word on it,” Harry said.

Kayla Rudolnick looked into Harry's eyes until she found something she needed to see.

“The storage facility is on Cottage Hill Road. I'll get you the key.”

 

There were eight white boxes in the facility, rows of locked cages in an old warehouse; a guard had been alerted to our visit. We took the boxes from the cage rented by Ms. Rudolnick and stowed them in the trunk of the Crown Vic.

Picking up the last of the boxes, Harry nodded through the grid at the adjoining enclosure. I saw a crib, boxes of child's toys, stuffed animals, posters pulled from walls, the tape at the edges brittle and yellow. A small wheelchair. A red bicycle with training wheels. Even under dust, the bike looked unused.

I suddenly knew what used-up prayers looked like. Harry sighed, shook his head, and we tiptoed away like thieves.

We dropped the files at Harry's house, then returned to the station. I tapped
Rudolnick, Bernard,
into my computer, expecting an arrest record. Mitigating circumstances allowing Rudolnick to pay a fine, perhaps, slip past punishment if he enrolled in a program and stayed clean.

The computer whirred and beeped, and came up blinking:

NO RECORD
.

I tried again. Same effect. Harry stared at the screen.

“Either the bust never happened, or it got wiped clean. And the second option takes some doing.”

 

Ms. Verhooven gestured for Lucas to follow her. There was no furniture in the room and the Realtor's high heels banged on the parquet floor. Ms. Verhooven was as bright as a new trumpet: blond hair, yellow dress, white shoes. Bright teeth moving behind glossy pink lips. Long legs sheathed in silky hose, rising up past the knee-high hemline toward…Lucas felt himself hardening and looked away, knowing such notions had to be
sublimated
for now, to use a term from Rudolnick's world.

Ms. Verhooven pushed open a door and gestured grandly, like a woman on a TV game show.

“Ta-da!” she said.

Lucas stared at a toilet. “Ta-da?”

The fixture was cream-colored, just like the adjoining countertop. Ms. Verhooven bent over the counter, stroked it like it was a kitten.

“Quartz countertops in the restroom, Mr. Lucasian. Real, honest manufactured stone. Over at Midtowne Office Estates the counters are only Corian.”

Lucas nodded, though he had no idea what she was talking about. He was most interested in the sink.

Note to self,
he thought,
buy bath towels.

There was a faux-baroque gilt-framed mirror on the wall. Lucas glanced at a slender and clean-shaven man with a neat part in his short and trendy, red-highlighted hair. His suit was dark and conservative, like the blue shirt and muted tie. He looked young but affluent. A success-driven young man, a starry-eyed entrepreneur with backing from Daddy, ready to make it on his own in the world. There were plenty of them out there.

Lucas winked at the entrepreneur, then turned his attention to the sink, turning the hot water on and off.

“The neighborhood seems quite nice, Ms. Verhooven, a warren of free enterprise.”

“This is mid-Mobile's most prestigious mercantile complex, Mr. Lucasian. An address here has
cachet
.” She pronounced it
catch-hay
. “You're lucky. This location did have an interested party and a hold on the space for several months. But something fell through and it's now available.”

Lucas almost laughed. They used to be office parks, now they were mercantile complexes. With catch-hay, nonetheless. He looked through slat blinds at several small clusters of offices, redbrick buildings, the tallest four stories. The grounds were nicely landscaped, myrtle and dogwood. A few magnolia bushes, the ever-present azaleas.

“You're in a wonderful business community, Mr. Lucasian,” the rental agent chirped, seeing his eyes scanning the community of red boxes. “Accounting firms, brokerages, financial advisors, that sort of thing. Four or five doctors. Two corporate headquarters, three legal firms…”

Lucas wandered through rooms smelling of fresh paint and cleanser. He struck several poses he found particularly businesslike: holding his chin and nodding out the window, clasping his hands at his belt and arching an eyebrow at the ceiling, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall.

“It feels very businessy,” he said, pushing from the wall. “A place to call home.”

Ms. Verhooven beamed. “What is it, basically, that your firm does, Mr. Lucasian?”

“Basically, I'm in securities,” Lucas said. He chuckled at the wonderful double entendre:
insecurities
.

Lucas looked across the street at the nearest building, a hundred feet distant. The top floor, fourth, was large and sparsely populated offices, a quiet little kingdom of teak and brass. On the next three floors, cubicle drones could be seen shuffling papers and talking on phones. There were four levels, but only the top floor interested Lucas. The space Ms. Verhooven was showing was on the fourth floor as well, but the building was on a slight rise, putting Lucas a bit above the level of the fourth floor across the way. The small discrepancy allowed Lucas to look down on the facing building, which tickled him.

“Is the space to your liking, Mr. Lucasian?” the agent trilled. “Everything you need?”

Lucas cut a glance toward the building across the way, marveling at his luck. Or had this perfect location been arranged by the man upstairs, divine guidance?

“Yes, Ms. Verhooven,” Lucas said. “Everything is absolutely perfect.”

 

After catching up on paperwork and calls, we returned to Harry's. I was eager to look at Rudolnick's records, Harry less so.

My partner lived in a small enclave a couple miles west of downtown. The yards and houses weren't large, but compensated with charm. There were trees aplenty, old live oaks and pecans and thick-leaved magnolias. Whenever I pulled into the neighborhood in summer, the shade made my soul feel twenty degrees cooler.

Harry's house was a compact single-story Creole with a full gallery and a magnolia in the front yard. The paint was coral with mauve accents which, for Harry, showed restraint. In the setting, it looked just right, a contented house.

I felt as much at home as if I'd stepped into my own living room. Harry's walls were red, the woodwork a light green. He had several pieces of art on the walls, primitive paintings of musicians picked up at the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis. The art was my influence; I fell in love with art in college, passed my enthusiasm on to Harry.