Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 03 - Trick Question (7 page)

Baxter had both arms around her now. He nibbled her neck and moaned softly into her ear.

She liked the warm feeling, the obedient feeling.

“I’ve got to see more of you,” he said gruffly. “Stand up.”

She did as she was told.

“Now take off that shirt,” he demanded.

She complied, and while she pulled it over her head he reached out and traced a circle around her navel with his fingertips.

She stripped off the rest of her clothes, in the order instructed, and twirled around naked, hands clenched in the air imitating victory.

“You ain’t quite won yet.” He grabbed her around the waist, and she thought her spine would crack when he pulled her on top of him.

He was rough, and did not even get out of his pants. His blunt fingertips left marks on her softest parts, but she was used to pain.

After he was finished she curled up on a chair and looked at him.

“I think it’s time I had a key to your place,” he said, staring above her head. “We’re starting to develop a relationship.”

Cherrylynn had spent the previous afternoon carrying discovery pleadings around the courthouse, finding a judge to sign them, and serving them on the DA. She waited while copies were made of those portions of the state’s files Snedley was willing to let the defense see; then she brought it all back to the office so that by Thursday morning Tubby could sit at his desk and begin to read.

He now had the police report, including the officer’s transcripts of his interviewees. They were Josef Malouf, the security guard who found Busters holding the frozen head; Dr. Charles Auchinschloss, the chief of the lab; and a Dr. Randolph Swincter, who worked there too. Tubby had the coroner’s report. He had copies of fingerprint cards, marked to show where they were lifted, and with a number on each which he interpreted as the number of points each had in common with the fingers of his client. The numbers ranged from 10 to 12, and that sounded discouraging. Then there was his client’s statement. Tubby settled back to read.

Malouf, the security guard, worked from four p.m. till midnight every night but Wednesday and Thursday. The body had been discovered on Sunday, and had presumably been converted from a physician into a corpse on the previous Friday, but Malouf had no light to shed on anything else. He had a desk by the entrance to the wing of the hospital that was occupied by the Moskowitz lab. Only authorized personnel were permitted past him. They had to show a plastic ID card, but they didn’t sign in. Almost every professional and most of the normal people who worked at the hospital had the requisite plastic pass.

People came and went all the time. The corridors usually thinned out after nine o’clock, and the guard would generally walk around the halls at that point looking for anything unusual. Other than doctors necking in the labs, or escaped rats or rabbits in the hallways, he never found anything unusual. Until one Sunday night when he opened the door to Lab 3 because he’d heard noises, and found a frozen corpse and a frightened Cletus Busters.

He didn’t remember when he had last seen Dr. Valentine. He didn’t remember who had been in the labs Friday, day or night. The usual crowd, he said.

Dr. Auchinschloss, forty-three-year-old Caucasian male, reported that Dr. Valentine had been a fine researcher and that there had never been a single murder in the lab before. The institution’s purpose, simply stated, was to identify diseases and toxins that threatened or killed people and to develop cures and antidotes. He may have answered the question about what projects Dr. Valentine was working on, but the cop interviewing him was way under water and summed it up with “poison research.” Valentine worked closely with Dr. Swincter on several projects. He could promise that Swincter and the other six doctors on the research staff would cooperate fully.

Dr. Randolph Swincter, thirty-five-year-old Caucasian male, was shocked by his colleague’s death. The two had collaborated on numerous projects and published several journal articles during their three years together. He had last seen Valentine Friday morning when they were both busy putting mice into the centrifuge to see what was on their brains. Tubby figured the police interviewer must have gotten that wrong. Swincter had left the lab at two o’clock, spent a couple of hours at the hospital library, then gone home to watch TV and eat takeout pizza. Vegetarian.

As far as he knew, no one disliked Dr. Valentine. Except maybe Cletus Busters, maintenance man, who Valentine thought might monkey with the mice after hours. Swincter had heard rumors that Busters swiped drugs from the hospital. He discounted them because, “If true, the guy would have been fired.”

The coroner’s report was only partly intelligible to Tubby, but it did eliminate the possibilities of suicide and accidental death. Valentine had been killed swiftly by a knife or other sharp blade stuck directly into the back of his head, severing the spinal cord, possibly just a few minutes before he was crammed into the freezer closet. This helped to explain the head’s separation from the body. No weapon had been found, but the coroner stated the obvious and speculated that it could have been a scalpel. He estimated that death had occurred, and the big chill had begun, between four and eleven o’clock on Friday night. Medical literature, it seemed, was limited on the means to tell how long a frozen person had been on ice, so he couldn’t be more precise.

Tubby sighed. He stood up and went into the tiny kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee.

“How’s it looking, boss?” Cherrylynn asked when he passed her desk.

“Complicated,” he replied.

He was getting a headache.

“Have you got any aspirin?” he asked her.

“Sure.” She fished a bottle out of one of her desk drawers.

He thanked her and knocked them back with a swallow from his cup.

“See if you can reach Flowers,” he instructed. “Ask him to come here first chance he gets.”

She reached for the phone. Tubby trod softly back to the office and sat down to read his client’s statement. It was the typed transcript of a taped conversation, recorded at 3:12 a.m. on the night the body was found.

He read again the story of the discovery of the corpse. There was nothing new, except when Cletus said, “It fell right on me like a mummy coming out of a coffin,” Tubby could feel some of his client’s fear.

Cletus knew nothing about nothing. He was just cleaning up, like he did every night.

Stapled to this was the transcript of a second interview with Cletus. It had been made two hours later, at five a.m., at police headquarters. It began with Detective Ike Canteberry giving Cletus the Miranda warnings. Cletus said he didn’t need a lawyer. He had done nothing wrong. Detective Canteberry repeated the warnings, and Cletus said the same and added that he didn’t like lawyers. The policeman got him to sign a statement agreeing that he understood his rights. There was a copy of the statement attached to the transcript.

The questions now were a lot more probing.

“Tell me again what happened, when you opened the closet door.”

“The man fell on me, like in a horror show. I jumped out of the way, and his head busted off on the floor.”

“You touched the body?”

“I sure did. I picked up his head and tried to put it where it was supposed to be.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you open the closet?”

“I don’t know. To clean it, I guess.”

“To clean it?”

“That’s my job.”

“Had you ever cleaned it before?”

“No.”

“Did you see the sign that said ‘Do Not Open. Authorized Personnel Only’?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You didn’t know it was off limits?”

“No.”

“Did you open any other cabinets or drawers when you were in there?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Have you ever been arrested, Mr. Busters?”

“No.”

“Ever been convicted of a crime?”

“No.”

“I’m holding a rap sheet here for one Cletus Martavius Busters. Says you’ve been arrested twice for possession of a controlled substance. One was dismissed. You were found guilty of intent to distribute over one ounce of cocaine. You were sentenced to three years at hard labor at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Then you were on probation. That was six years ago.”

“So?”

“You just lied to me about it.”

The transcript reflected “[No Answer].”

“Why did you lie about it?”

“I was set up. I didn’t do nothing alleged.”

“Nothing alleged, huh? Says here you did.”

“[No Answer].”

“Do you still deal drugs?”

“No, I never did.”

“Did you know that drugs were stored in the laboratories you cleaned?”

“No.”

“You mind if we search your house?”

“You stay out of my house. I thought you wanted to talk about Dr. Valentine. What’s all this drugs, drugs? That ain’t got nothing to do with anything.”

“Didn’t Dr. Valentine accuse you of taking certain types of drugs from the lab?”

“He didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t like me.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I took pity on his rats. I hated to see them treated like he did. He thought I was feeding them stuff from the vending machines.”

“Did you?”

“No. All I ever did was talk to them. Stupid stuff.”

“How did he know that?”

“He came in and saw me doing it one night.”

“Doing what?”

“Just playing with the little rat.”

“You had one out of the cage?”

“He had got out of the cage all by hisself. I was just putting him back in.”

“What did Valentine do?”

“He cursed me out and made a report.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Personnel people told me to stay away from them mice.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“No more trouble with Valentine?”

“No.”

“Where were you Friday night?”

“Me? Working.”

“You went into that lab?”

“Sure, I cleaned it.”

“What time?”

“I don’t know. Probably nine or ten o’clock.”

“Did you see Dr. Valentine?”

“No.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not in there.”

“Where?”

“I seen that security guard sitting at his desk eating potato chips.”

“Did you play with the rats that night?”

“No.”

“Did you open any of the drawers?”

“No.”

“How about the freezer closet?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“What you mean?”

“Why didn’t you open it to clean it, if that’s your job?”

“I guess I figured it was clean.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you did see Dr. Valentine on Friday night.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“I think you got in a fight with him.”

“No way. Maybe I do want a lawyer.”

“I think you stuck Valentine into that freezer.”

“No way.”

“What did you say about a lawyer?”

“I want one.”

“Okay by me.”

End of interview.

Flowers arrived, bustling as always. Cherrylynn tried to keep up with him, but he barely slowed down on his way to the inner office.

“What have you got?” Tubby asked without preamble.

“Hello to you,” Flowers said. “Okay. I can fill you in on our Dr. Valentine. I’ve spoken with a few of the other M.D.’s who work in the lab, including a Dr. Swincter, and nosed around his neighborhood some.”

“And?” Tubby leaned back in his chair. It creaked.

“Thirty-six years old. Highly regarded in his field. He’s published quite a few articles on unpronounceable topics, and I’m getting copies made for you. Most of them seem to deal with strange ways people die. Most recently he’s been investigating, with Dr. Swincter, the death of a woman who drove off the Highway 11 bridge into Lake Pontchartrain after suffering a heart attack for no apparent reason. Her condition looked much like an allergic reaction, but to what? It’s the kind of mystery that makes forensic pathologists happy to get out of bed in the morning. This I got from the head of the lab, one Dr. Charles Auchinschloss, a/k/a ‘the dean.’

“Valentine, according to the dean, was a workaholic – only a couple of years out of his fellowship. Now he’s a hot shot scientist and a consultant to medical instrument companies. In other words, he was poor as a blues singer just a little while ago, but now he makes lots of money to pay off all his student loans. He teaches at the medical school. He’s socially connected and rode in the Momus parade at Mardi Gras. He goes home to a very pretty wife in a condo in River Ridge. Her name, get this, is Ruby. She is a nurse, but in a different hospital. They met at a convention.”

“Kids?” Tubby asked.

“None. They’ve only been married for two years. She seems to have adjusted well to his demise. It’s been four months, of course, but she displayed no outward signs of grief. Sort of nice-looking. I could almost believe she was coming on to me.”

“A dangerous thing to do.”

“Aw.” Flowers looked hurt.

“Any impression of Swincter or Auchinschloss?”

“Swincter is your basic medical nerd. Looks decent enough. Cleans his nails. Has a difficult time conversing about anything other than his work. And when he talks about that you can’t understand him.

“Dr. Auchinschloss is the opposite. I mean, he can gossip just fine but doesn’t seem too plugged into what is actually going on in his labs. He projects the absentminded professor. He did mention that Valentine was recently on the search committee that selected him as the new assistant dean at the medical school. I get the feeling it was a controversial job.”

“Find out who got the job and who didn’t.”

“Not bad, counselor. What else do you want me to do?”

“We need somebody else to hang this murder on, so keep digging around the hospital. Have you talked to his students?”

“Not yet, but I’m getting some names.”

“Okay. And we’d better find out about our client. Take a look at the police report.” Tubby gave Flowers the rap sheet. “Let’s see what the hell he’s up to when he’s not opening freezer doors.”

“I’ll stay in touch,” Flowers said.