The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) (20 page)

The name ‘Dupree’ immediately caught my eye. Arianna Dupree, former lover to Boone’s current lover, Nova. Assuming, of course, that Boone and Nova were still a couple—given the way they were arguing at the reception, they could easily have since broken up.

And now he’d waited all day to come down here and had even swallowed a pint of whiskey to get up the nerve to do whatever he was about to do.

I yanked on the front door without really believing that it would open, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was about to pick up the phone and call Arianna’s number when salvation came in the form of two yippy little dogs.

“Princess! Duchess! Princess! Duchess!” The dogs’ owner, a blue-haired woman of a certain age, perfectly tailored and coiffed, was doing her best to negotiate the lobby. For their part, the two little pedigree mutts were doing their best to head in completely opposite directions. Although their combined weight may have been pushing four pounds, their antics were overwhelming Mrs. Blue Hair. She pulled and tugged and cajoled and begged her way across the lobby. When she finally made it to the front door and hit the latch to open it, I was standing by at the ready. I swung the door open for her with one arm, and with the other reached across the small foyer and opened the outer door as well.

“Thank you so much,” she said, barely registering my existence as she cooed and pleaded with the two little squeaky furballs. “Come on now, girls. Time to go tinkle before we go to bed. Time to go.” I could hear her voice as she struggled to maneuver the two dogs to a small patch of green directly in front of the building.

Before the front door had even closed, I was in the elevator and on my way to the twenty-third floor.

It was a quick ride up, so fast that I didn’t really have time to come up with a plan of action before the elevator came to a smooth stop and the doors slid open. I stepped out of the elevator and into a quiet hallway.

  I stood for a moment, listening for voices, hoping that would give me a clue as to where to head next, but the only sound was the elevator as its doors closed behind me.

I looked to my left and saw four highly-polished wooden doors, two on either side of the hall. A look to my right revealed a mirror image of what I had just seen on the left. The only difference was that one door, at the far end on the right, appeared to be slightly ajar. It might have been a trick of the light, but I moved toward it anyway. The hall was deathly quiet and my shoes made virtually no sound on the thick carpet.

The door was open a crack and a slim sliver of light shone through in the space between the door and the doorframe. I knocked on the door softly, pushing it open as I did.

“Hello?” I said, my voice cracking from lack of use. I consciously lowered it an octave so as to sound less like a teenager. “Hello? Anyone home?”

The apartment was dark, lit only by the ambient light from the skyline, visible through the large picture windows in what I guessed to be the living room. Something stirred to my left and I turned quickly, only to realize that it was merely the sheer white curtains that hung on either side of the sliding door to the terrace. The door was open and an intermittent breeze lazily swirled the curtains.

I took another step forward and my foot hit something hard.

At first I thought it might be an ottoman, but I quickly realized that the dark lump at my feet was Boone, crumbled over in his dark wool coat.

I knelt down to check his condition, resting my hand on the carpet for support. The carpet seemed to slide out from under me, and I realized that the spot was warm, wet and sticky.

I brought my hand in front of my face and in the dim light I could see that it was covered with what looked like blood.

Then something hit me, very hard, in the back of the head. I could hear what sounded like sirens off in the distance. And then everything went black.

Chapter 15

The blackness was like a deep hole—easy to fall into, but much, much harder to pull myself out of. However, that didn’t stop me from trying.

Each attempt seemed to bring me closer to something resembling the real world, and then the fingers of my consciousness would lose their grip and I’d slide back down into the warm and comforting blackness. The state I was in was just this side of dreaming, but my battered brain made no attempt to construct a story out of the random images that flickered by.

If this was my life flashing before my eyes, it was doing so in a very disorganized manner—someone seemed to have left out all of the good parts. I resigned myself to this feeling and floated in a field of nothingness for what seemed like a long time.

And then, like a movie projector popping on after a power blackout, I suddenly opened my eyes and found myself staring at ceiling tiles that were whiter than white. I turned to my left and was blinded by the sun coming through an unfamiliar window.

I squinted involuntarily and turned to my right, where I was surprised to see Deirdre, seated in a chair, casually flipping through a magazine. Her blonde hair was nearly blinding in the bright light that flooded the room. She looked up at the sound of me rolling over.

“Hey, you’re back,” she said cheerfully, setting the magazine aside.

The intensity of my squinting must have registered with her, because she immediately walked to the window and adjusted the blinds. This, mercifully, brought the light level down to a more manageable, cave-like environment. “I was just sitting here, doing my impression of the last line of your favorite book,” she said as she returned to her chair.

“
To Kill a Mockingbird
?” I said, puzzled by the reference.

“Good. Your brain is at least working a little bit. And what’s the last line?”

I thought about it for a moment.
“’He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.’”

“Bingo.”

“So,” I asked, my mouth dry and my voice raspy. “It’s the next morning?”

“Yes, it’s about…” she paused, glancing at her watch, “about twelve hours since you walked into Arianna Dupree’s apartment and got clonked on the head.”

“Who hit me?”

“We’re still trying to work that out.”

I glanced past her around the room, recognizing that I was in some sort of medical setting. I was clearly in a hospital bed, that much was certain. I was wearing a hospital gown that, now that I was on my side, was affording a comforting breeze up my backside. There was an IV in my wrist and a heart rate monitor clipped on my index finger.

And my head hurt like hell.

The door to the room stood open a crack, and I could see the unmistakable blue uniform of a cop seated right outside the door. I looked back at Deirdre.

“The cop guarding the door… Is he here to prevent me from leaving the room or prevent someone else from coming in?”

“A little of both.”

We looked at each other for a moment. There was a lot more going on than she was telling me. “Arianna?” I asked tentatively.

Deirdre shook her head. “Dead,” she said.

“How?”

“She jumped…or was pushed…off her balcony. Twenty-three stories.”

I lay back on my pillow, which felt as hard as my head. I stared at the ceiling for several seconds, then looked back toward Deirdre. “Was there a playing card?” I asked, not really wanting to hear an answer.

“The King of Diamonds,” she said. “They found it in her pocket. It was pretty messed up, as you can imagine, but they found it.”

“So Arianna, the full-body healer —”

She cut me off, finishing my sentence for me. “Broke every bone in her body. Yeah, we put that one together right after we found the playing card. Someone has a very sick sense of humor.”

“And I suppose Homicide Detective Fred Hutton is still convinced that someone is me,” I said, my voice cracking from the dryness in my throat.

“Well, let me put it this way… You may have been unconscious, but you’ve had a busy night,” she said, getting up and handing me a cup of water from the tray near the bed. It must have been sitting there a while, for it was the epitome of room temperature. I didn’t care. I took a long sip that began the process of lubricating my Sahara-like throat.

“As the night has gone on,” she continued, “you’ve progressed from the possibility of being charged with first-degree murder and assault, down to accessory to a first-degree murder, down to attempted murder, down to perhaps just assault. If you’re lucky. They’re still mixing and matching your options even as we speak.”

“No wonder I’m exhausted,” I said, as I handed the empty cup back to her. She refilled it from the Styrofoam pitcher, and I was glad to hear the sound of ice cubes dropping into the cup along with the water. She gave the cup back to me, and I held it against my forehead for several seconds, enjoying the cold, numbing feeling it produced.

“So why do the charges keep changing?” I asked before taking another long sip.

“As more facts come in, they adjust the charges to fit the facts,” she said. “For example, originally they thought that you and this fellow Boone were in on it together and that after you both pitched Ms. Dupree off the balcony, you got into a fight and knocked each other out.”

“Interesting,” I said. “What particular fly soiled that ointment?”

“They looked at the security tapes. Turns out you got in the elevator at just about the very moment that Ms. Dupree went off the balcony. The tapes are time stamped. If you’d been outside a few seconds earlier, you might have actually seen the fall.”

“I’m glad I missed that. So what theory popped up after they looked at the security tapes?”

“They considered accessory to first-degree murder, but Boone is insisting he’s only met you once before. He seems adamant about it, although he refuses to tell us why he was at Ms. Dupree’s apartment. The last I heard, they’re leaning toward sticking the murder charge on Boone and sticking you with some sort of attempted murder charge or accessory after the fact, or at the very least assault on the person of Mr. Boone.”

“How do you feel about that plan of action?”

She sat back in her chair and gave me her most serious look. “I’m withholding judgment until you tell me what you were doing in that building and that apartment in particular last night.”

“I was following Boone.”

“Why?”

“I’m not entirely certain. Where’s Boone now?”

“They gave him ten stitches, bandaged his head and took him in for questioning. He spent the night in jail. Apparently his head is much harder than yours.” She leaned forward toward me. “So, why were you following Boone?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got all day and you’re not going anywhere until the doctor signs you out. And in order to sign you out, he has to get by the cop at the door. So, let me ask you again…Why were you following Boone?”

My head was pounding and this conversation wasn’t helping. However, it was clear that I had few options before me, perhaps even none.

I gave her an abbreviated version of my conversation with Arianna at Akashic Records. Then I told her about my meeting with Franny, leaving out only those key details that might—if misconstrued—tie me even closer to the current roster of murders. Details like Franny seeing my image connected to the killings.

“So you followed him around town all day and into the night on the advice of a psychic?”

“It sounds less reasonable when you say it. All I can say is that it felt right at the time.”

She leaned back and stared at a point on the wall for what felt like a long time. Then she turned back to me. “Eli, tell me, honestly, do you have any idea why you’re mixed up in all this?”

“Deirdre, I honestly don’t know. I can’t figure it out.”

She looked at me for a moment, then reached for her purse and pulled out her ubiquitous tube of lipstick. “Well, let’s see what we can do about getting you out of here,” she said as she began to apply a new coat to her lips.

Before I could go, I had to wait to be officially discharged. While I waited, a nurse insisted that I eat my breakfast, which had been sitting on the tray by my bed for what tasted like a long time. It was just about as delectable as you might imagine. Finally I received a visit from the attending physician, a good-natured transplanted New Yorker, with thinning red hair and a bushy red beard.

“Back from the dead, are we?” he said with a laugh as he entered the room and started to page through my chart.

“So far,” I said.

“Stick around here long enough and we can take care of that.” He finished with the chart in record time even for a speed reader, set it back in its holder and turned his attention toward me. “I’m Dr. Levine, I was on call last night when they brought you in. You had quite the smack on the head,” he said as he ran a hand over my skull, stopping when I winced. “You’ll have a bump for a few days. But, not to worry. We did an x-ray of your head last night and found nothing.”

“Rim shot,” I said, tapping out a quick drum roll with my fingers on the bedside tray.

“Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week.”

“Try the veal.”

“To be on the safe side, I’d recommend staying away from the veal in our cafeteria, unless you truly want to be here all week.” He peered into my left eye, shining a small penlight at my pupil. “Seriously, it’s uncommon for someone to be unconscious for as long as you were after a hit on the head. That’s why you spent the night in the hospital while your friend got stitched up and went home.”

“Actually, went to jail.”

“Well, yes, there is that.” He peered into my right eye. “However, what they do to you once you leave here is outside of my sphere of influence. And, my friend, by the looks of things, you’re ready to leave my sphere right about now.” He put the penlight into one pocket of his lab jacket and pulled a prescription pad out of the other. He scribbled quickly on the pad and tore the top sheet off, handing it to me. “Here’s your discharge notes,” he said. “Follow these instructions and you should be fine. Take care of yourself.”

He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder and with that he was gone. I could hear him as he entered the room across the hall. “What,” I heard him say in mock surprise, “don’t tell me you made it through the night. Well, I just lost five bucks.” His voice receded as the door swung shut. Deirdre got up and opened the closet, pulling my pants and shirt off the built-in hangers.

I looked at the prescription in my hand. Although he had the typically poor penmanship universally attributed to all physicians, I was able to make out what he wrote with no trouble.

It read simply, “Don’t get hit on the head anymore.”

It would have been nice to go home and crawl into my own bed, but that was not to be.

Instead, I was transported, in handcuffs no less, from the hospital to the downtown police station, the same squad room Homicide Detective Fred Hutton and his partner had brought me into after Grey’s death. The transporting officers didn’t take my personal effects this time, just sat me on a bench and told me to stay put.

There was a general bustle in the room, a buzz of activity, and I was surprised that no one paid the least bit of attention to me.

From where I sat, I could see the enclosed interrogation room they had put me in during my last visit. The door to the room was open and through it I could see Boone, looking even worse than he had the day before, slumped in a chair.

Homicide Detective Fred Hutton was pacing behind Boone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but whatever it was, it wasn’t getting any response from Boone, who had a sullen, glassy look plastered on his face.

Deirdre, who had driven herself from the hospital, arrived at that moment. She sized up the mood in the room quickly, immediately establishing my position and its relation to her current husband, like a dog owner who’s always on edge trying to prevent two disagreeable mutts from biting each other’s balls off. Assured that we were a safe distance apart, she crossed the large squad room.

Homicide Detective Fred Hutton saw her coming and made a beeline toward her. He grabbed her elbow and steered her away from the interrogation room, in the process putting them within eavesdropping distance from me. I looked away and did my best to give the impression that I couldn’t hear them.

“Get anything out of Boone?” Deirdre asked. 

Homicide Detective Fred Hutton shook his head. “He still insists he walked in the apartment and got clonked on the head. Refuses to say why he was there.”