Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 01 - Last Call (26 page)

“Nine-thousand, actually. And yes. That’s what I’m saying.” She dropped her arms to her sides and gave me a cold stare. “If there’s nothing else?”

I raised a finger. “There’s actually one last thing. There’s something I was hoping you could help me get.”

“Mr. Rice has instructed me to help you in any way I can,” she said as if it hurt. “What do you need?”

The yellow-eyed guy I saw in front of the gas station on my first trip to Detroit stood to the left of the free clinic’s entrance. When I tried to pass him, he side-stepped into the doorway, blocking the way.

“Got the toll?” he asked.

“The toll?”

His yellow eyes snapped up and down in their sockets, scanning me from head to toe, lingering on the manila envelope I carried under an arm. “The toll. There’s a toll.”

“Where’s the bridge?”

He snorted, catching something juicy in the back of his throat. He spit the gob of phlegm at my feet. “Ain’t no bridge, sunshine. Just a toll.”

“If you wanted money, you could just ask for it.”

“That’s no fun. Man’s got to entertain hisself somehow.”

Amused, I slid a fifty from my wallet and handed it over. “That enough?”

He stuffed the bill into his pocket—the only one without a hole from the looks of it—without bothering to look. “It’ll do.” He stepped aside and hooked at thumb toward the entrance. “All aboard.”

At least he was grateful.

The clinic’s blacked-out glass door had a sheet of paper tapped to it, the paper curling and torn around the edges. Printed in a large font was the clinic’s hours, as well as a number for emergencies.

I pulled open the door and gagged on a smell I could only describe as burnt cheese. I stepped into a waiting room with plastic chairs lining the wood-paneled walls, the entire space no bigger than a small bedroom. A frosted sliding window guarded what I assumed was the reception desk. I could see a silhouette behind the glass.

Nearly every chair in the room held a waiting patient. One woman to my right bopped her head as if listening to music, but the room was silent except for chatter, and she didn’t have any headphones on that I could see. A man across the room stared at me from his chair, picking his nose. He wore a ratted Detroit Tigers cap, the cursive lettering on the front peeling off on one end.

I approached the glass and knocked. The shape on the other side bent as if putting something away, then slid the glass open. The wide black face that peered out at me lifted an eyebrow when she saw me.

“You get mugged or something?”

“I’m sorry?” I wasn’t sure what she meant until I remembered my face looked like a prune with eyes from all the bruises.

She slapped a plastic clipboard down in front of me and tapped the form clipped to it with a three inch-long, diamond-adorned fingernail. “Fill out the first two sections on the top sheet and all three forms underneath. Do you have any medical insurance at this time?”

“I’m not here to see a doctor,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Don’t mind the face. It’s old news.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What do you want?”

From the envelope I carried I withdrew a copy of Doug’s picture Autumn had let me borrow. I’d scanned the photo at a Kinko’s on the way over, making several copies to pass out. I set the photo on top of the clipboard, facing her.

“You ever seen this guy around here?”

She squinted at the photo, then gave me the same scrutiny. “You a cop or something?”

“I’m a private detective,” I said. Some people have seen enough
Spenser For Hire
episodes or read enough detective novels to at least act impressed when I told them this.

This woman puckered her lips, lifted a pair of reading glasses to her eyes, and gave me a “yeah, right” stare over the tops of the lenses.

“They got a badge for that or something?”

Of course, private eye’s didn’t have badges, they had licenses. I, unfortunately, had neither, and this lady was staring at me through her glasses like she wanted to see something before answering any questions.

I placed a fifty on top of the photo.

“How’s this?”

“That don’t look like no badge to me.”

I swallowed hard, ready for her to call security and have me booted out the door.

She pointed her flashy fingernail at the fifty-dollar bill, shook her head, then scratched behind her ear as if thinking hard about something. “Maybe that’s the wrong one. You got another badge in your wallet there?”

I let go of the breath I was holding. “I think I might.” I put a hundred down on the fifty and left them both there. This being a millionaire stuff would have helped my work a ton back in L.A.

The woman scooped up the bills and made them disappear, then adjusted her glasses and took a second look at the picture. She hummed, and I think she hawed, but I’ve never been sure what a
haw
sounded like.

“Yeah,” she said. “I got it. That’s the guy pretending he had a baby on the way.”

“Pretended?”

“Asked all sorts of weird questions in here. Kept coming around, pestering patients. I’m not sure what he was after. Kelly said she thought he was vice fishing for a bust, but cops usually don’t come ‘round here unless we call them, know what I’m saying?”

“Who’s Kelly?”

“She’s another girl works here. Supposed to be in today, but no-showed and now you get to look at my pretty face instead of hers.”

“Are there very many nurses that work here?”

She smiled, shook her head. “Honey, we ain’t nurses. We’re the pack mules, all right? Nurse practitioners deal with the patients here. Ain’t really any doctors, except once in a while. What do you expect from a free clinic?”

“Can you tell me anything else about this guy?” I asked, tapping the photograph.

She shrugged. “I never really dealt with him much. In fact, Kelly talked to him most the time. She’s good dealing with difficult patients, even though he wasn’t really a patient. But that girl’s got some arms on her. She does that kung fu stuff at the YMCA, I think. Only it isn’t really kung fu. She can’t like do all those flips or walk on water or nothing like that.”

I didn’t bother telling her that, while kung fu was a real martial art, it did not involve walking on water. Then I’d also feel obligated to give her the real skinny on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

“But Kelly didn’t come to work today?”

“Guess it’s her loss, huh?” She waggled her eyebrows at me. “She missed Christmas.”

I pulled another photo out of my envelope and set it on top of Doug’s. I didn’t ask any questions, just watched for her reaction, confident after talking with her that she’d recognize the face.

“You fooling around with me?” she asked. “Why you asking about Kelly if you already know her.”

The photograph before her was a blow-up I’d made from one of the series I’d taken at the rest stop, an 8 x 10 of Doug’s mystery woman.

“What’s Kelly’s last name?”

“You got her picture, but you don’t know her?”

“If you answer my next two questions, I’ll give you a look at another badge.”

She thought about it for a second and a half. “Let me see that badge.”

I put a second hundred dollar bill on the photo of Kelly. It didn’t stay there long.

“Her last name’s kind of funny. We always tease her about it. It’s Kelly Simple. A simple name for a simple girl is what we say.”

And a really crappy alias, if you asked me.

“The next question is the most important,” I said. “Where does she live?”

“You want …” She lowered her voice. “You want her address?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know about that.”

I leaned into the window. “I think two-hundred and fifty dollars gets me at least that.”

She sighed. “I have to look it up. Wait here.” The glass door almost took off my nose when she snapped it shut.

Several pairs of eyes in the waiting room stared at me. No one had been called in since I had arrived, and I got the feeling everyone blamed me for it by tying up the gatekeeper behind the glass window.

I tapped my foot while I waited for her to return.

Thankfully, the window opened before a riot broke out. She handed me a piece of letterhead from a pharmaceutical company with an address in Sterling Heights scrawled on it.

“You got to go,” she said. “Nurse Ratchet is on the prowl.”

“One more photo,” I said. “Real quick.”

She glanced over her shoulder, then rolled her hand in the air. “Come on, come on.”

I put down a photo of Lincoln, which I had also taken to Kinko’s and made copies of after Ms. Granthum was nice enough to give it to me.

The woman barely glanced at it. “Uh-huh. Never seen him.”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s kinda got that Sean Connery thing going for him. Sexy old guy. I’d remember if he came in here. Besides, no one dressed like that ever comes in here.”

I thanked her for her time and the address—even though I’d paid good money for both—and rushed out the door. The toll keeper tried to hit me up for more cash. I started to wave him off, then decided to try something.

“You want to earn your toll today?”

“Long as it ain’t hard or nothing.”

“Not at all.” I handed him one of my photos of Lincoln. “You ever see this guy come in here?”

His yellow eyes skittered back and forth as he examined the picture. He took his time. I almost gave up on him when he finally shook the photo and shouted, “Heyah!”

“Was that a yes?”

“Sure, sure. I seen this guy. Comes around all the time.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yeah. I can vividly picture him walking through the door.”

I eyeballed that very door. Had the woman at the window lied? Or maybe Lincoln had come in when she wasn’t there?

“I remember,” the toll keeper went on. “He used to give me a dollar to wash his windows. I hated that. Why couldn’t he just give me the fucking dollar. Do I look like a window washer?”

Or maybe this guy was nuts, and I was wasting another fifty bucks. Fifty dollars here, fifty dollars there, and pretty soon millionaire Ridley Brone would be collecting tolls himself.

I handed him the money anyway, figuring I deserved it for trying to yank Lincoln into this when I already had a perfectly legitimate lead. It was time I followed that lead and found the mystery woman, a.k.a. Kelly Simple.

Chapter 23

Finding Kelly Simple only made things more complicated, because she was dead.

Chills rippled through me, and my skin turned to gooseflesh, not only because I stared at yet another dead body, but because whoever had killed her—and I had my vote on the culprit—had jacked down the air conditioning to near meat locker temps.

I rubbed some warmth into my arms and examined the body. She sat at the kitchen table, face down as if taking a nap, except that her arms dangled below the table, hands almost touching the floor. Judging from the blood spatter over the kitchen counter behind her, I assumed the hole in her back was the exit wound. About four inches to one side of her head sat a coffee mug with a cartoon dog dressed in a karate gi and black belt. The mug still contained some coffee, but definitely qualified as half empty.

Across the table from Kelly, another coffee mug and a sugar bowl with a spoon in it was set out. This mug was empty, a brownish ring around the top suggesting it had recently been otherwise. Apparently Miss Simple had a visitor, and that visitor had finished his coffee then shot her in the chest.

I paced a circle around the table a couple times, giving myself time to collect my thoughts. Four dead, now. Four. Deep breath. I needed to search the house.

I abandoned the kitchen for the family room. Pictures of Kelly in her own gi lined the walls—Kelly breaking boards, Kelly kicking a guy in the face, Kelly punching through a cinder block, Kelly whipping around a pair of nunchaku.

On a set of shelves fastened to the wall she had arranged a shrine of trophies, all of them from karate tournaments, most of them first place, none of them under third. Also hanging on the wall was a sheathed Samurai sword, although I’m sure there was a more fancy word for it I didn’t know.

I scoped out a set of bookshelves by the television that contained mostly DVDs—she owned every movie Chuck Norris ever made an appearance in, as well as a number of Jackie Chan films, and a healthy Jet Lee catalog. The few books on the shelves either had titles with Japanese words in them or espoused some diet plan.

Even this rusty detective noticed a pattern.

I moved back through the kitchen into the front living room. With all the walls blank, and only a single chair for furniture, the room might have made even a Spartan want for more. A further tour of the house confirmed my suspicion that she probably hadn’t lived here long. One bedroom had a bed, a dresser, and some clothes in the closet, and that was it.

The second bedroom had a lock on the door. Nothing complex, but I broke the doorknob getting in. This room had more furnishings than all the others combined, though I doubted she entertained the neighbors in it.

Every wall was lined with glass cases displaying all manner of weapon—swords, throwing stars, axes, things with chains, spikes, or solid blunt edges, or all of the above. Things you could throw, swing, twirl, or chop, and a couple things you could shoot, like a crossbow, and what I could only assume was a blowgun. But no revolvers, or pistols, or shotguns.