Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery) Read online

  “Meet you outside,” Izzy said, offering me no details. There would be time for him to fill me in along the way.

  I put my cheesecake in the refrigerator and checked in on my two cats, Rubbish and Tux, who were sleeping on top of my bed, oblivious to my presence or lack thereof. I then gave a pat on the head to Hoover, who more than compensated for the cats’ indifference by following me around and watching my every move with those big, sad, brown eyes that let me know he, at least, would miss me.

  I met Izzy outside and we climbed into the hearse. “Where to?” I asked.

  “The hospital. They have a death in the ER.”

  I made a face at this. I’d been avoiding the hospital because of the David-doing-surgery-with-his-penis debacle, and the recent job fiasco. “I really don’t want to go there,” I said.

  “Why? Because of that thing with David and Molinaro giving in to his blackmail?”

  I gave Izzy a duh! look.

  Izzy shook his head and sighed. “Mattie, you have to quit judging yourself based on other people’s opinions. Besides, in this case it isn’t you who looks bad, it’s David. The guy was a jerk to do what he did. And I’m guessing everyone at the hospital knows it.”

  “I suppose, but I’m still pissed that he and Molinaro got away with it.”

  “Not much you can do about it except stew over it,” Izzy said. “And all that’s likely to do is give you an ulcer. Wisconsin is an at-will work state, which means they don’t have to give you a reason for not hiring you. Even if you took them to court over it, you’d never be able to prove anything. It’s a he-said-she-said kind of thing.”

  I pouted and started up the hearse, knowing he was right, but still feeling the sting of it all.

  “Besides,” Izzy said, fastening his seat belt, “it worked out for the best, didn’t it?” He didn’t give me a chance to answer. “You were able to come back to work with me. In fact, I think we should thank David and Molinaro, because their timing was serendipitous.”

  “That still doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But I have to confess, I’m glad it happened. I missed you, Mattie. We make a good team.”

  There was the faintest hitch in his voice as he spoke, and I was genuinely touched by this rare show of emotion. Izzy has always been stoic, down-to-earth, and not prone to displays of affection—public or private. I envy his ability to keep his emotions so controlled and in check, and wish I could be more like him. But lately it seems my emotions are hanging on my sleeve like a collection of dangerously loose threads, constantly at risk of being snagged by the slightest provocation, after which they would unravel with terrifying speed, exposing parts of me I’d rather keep hidden.

  In fact, such was the case at that moment. My appreciation and affection for Izzy—for his friendship, support, and faith in me, and for everything he had done for me—bubbled up inside. Then the bubbles came out in a burst of tears.

  Izzy stared at me, looking concerned and confused. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No,” I blubbered, trying desperately to get a handle on my emotional surge. “In fact, you said everything right. I love you, Izzy.”

  I had a strong urge to lean over and hug him, and might have done just that if he hadn’t said, “You do know I’m gay, right?”

  I knew his comment was meant to break the tension and introduce some levity into the moment, and it worked. A chortle escaped me, and then my tears turned into riotous laughter. Izzy looked relieved but still a bit wary. “I’m sorry,” I said, struggling to rein in my laughter. “My emotions have been extremely labile lately.”

  “Yeah, I kind of noticed that, along with some other things. Are you okay to drive?”

  “I’m fine.” As if to prove my point, I shifted the car into reverse, backed out of my parking spot alongside the cottage, shifted into drive, and eased my way down the driveway, relieved to feel the emotional knot in my chest start to loosen up. As I pulled out onto the road, I saw a flash of headlights behind me, a car pulling out from the same place the earlier one had—David’s driveway.

  “Is it Hurley’s?” Izzy asked.

  I looked over at him with a bemused expression. “How could it be? He’s not even in town.” I was approaching the stop sign at the end of our road, so I slowed and signaled for a left turn. I stopped and waited longer than necessary given that no traffic was coming along the intersecting road, and I stared into my rearview mirror, trying to make out the face of the driver in the car behind me. The car stopped several feet back, its headlights shining into my window, so I couldn’t make out a face. But in the light reflecting off the car’s surface from my taillights, I could tell the edges of the vehicle were boxier than Hurley’s sedan. “Even if Hurley was in town, I’m certain it isn’t his,” I concluded. “I think it’s my father’s.”

  I turned left onto the main road and watched as the car behind us turned right. As I turned my focus back to the road in front of me, I slowly became aware of Izzy staring at me with a befuddled, slightly frightened expression.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “You think it’s your father’s?” he said, swallowing hard.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I told him. “I think he wants to try to start up a new relationship with me.”

  Izzy looked away for a few seconds, shook his head, then looked back at me. “What are we talking about?”

  “The car,” I said, enunciating slowly and casting a worried sidelong glance at Izzy. Was he having a stroke or something? How could he have forgotten what we were talking about just seconds before?

  “What car?” Izzy asked, looking even more confused.

  “The one behind us . . . or at least the one that was behind us. When we turned left, it turned right. I’ve seen what I think is the same dark car behind me fairly often lately, and twice now it has emerged from David’s driveway at a time of day when no one should be there. At first I thought it might be following me, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

  Izzy twisted around and tried to look out the rear window, but the seat back was too high for him to see. “You were talking about a car,” he said, with a tone of sudden comprehension. He chuckled and shook his head. “Thank goodness. Now your answers make much more sense.”

  I replayed our conversation in my mind and came out puzzled. “You asked me if it was Hurley’s car. What else could we have been talking about?”

  “I didn’t say car.”

  “You lost me,” I said, shaking my head. “What else could belong to Hurley?” In the millisecond before he answered, I got it.

  “Your baby, of course,” Izzy said, and that’s when the world began to spin.

  Chapter 4

  “Watch out!” Izzy yelled.

  I’d been staring gape-jawed at Izzy instead of at the road ahead of me. When I glanced back at the road, I saw that I was in the left lane and instinctively jerked the wheel to the right and slammed on the brakes, triggering a frightening fishtail. Had I been going any faster, we would have likely been the cause of a great deal of scrambling and chaos as someone tried to figure out who was going to do the autopsies for the accident that took the lives of the medical examiner and his assistant. But I was able to get the hearse under control, and in the wake of an angry blare from a passing motorist’s horn, I pulled the car off onto the shoulder and parked.

  After a few seconds of near-death silence in which the only sound was the quiet hum of the engine and the settling of the dust I’d kicked up, I looked over at Izzy. “You know? Who told you? Was it Gunther? Because if it was, I’m going to chain his legs into that exercise machine he keeps putting me on and spread that sucker until he splits like the wishbone on a turkey.”

  “Nobody told me. I’m gay, Mattie, not stupid. And while I realize that my patients are typically a little riper than most, I am a doctor.”

  I didn’t say anything for several seconds. I just stared out the windshie
ld. For lack of any better comeback I finally said, “What gave me away?”

  “A number of things. Your sudden interest in using all the personal protective equipment was one. I didn’t buy that lame excuse you gave about Jonas for one minute. I figured you either inherited your mother’s germophobia and it was just now manifesting itself, or you had some other reason for the sudden interest in your health. Then there was the vomiting, and having to pee all the time. Not to mention your boobs.”

  “My boobs?”

  “Yeah, your boobs. Hell, they probably qualify for their own zip code by now.”

  “I know, right? They’re freaking huge! No one I’ve talked to has looked me straight in the eye for weeks now, and that includes women. And they ache all the time,” I added, rubbing the side of the right one.

  “Well, they are rather hard to ignore,” Izzy said, and even he was staring at my chest with an expression of awe.

  I sighed and shook my head. “I should have known you’d figure it out.”

  “How far along are you?”

  “About sixteen weeks.”

  “I guess that means you’re keeping it.”

  I nodded.

  “And is it Hurley’s?”

  “It is. It happened when we . . . while . . . it was right after Christmas, when I quit my job,” I added quickly. This was the truth based on the dates the doctor came up with using what a one-time patient of mine, who was pregnant for the eighth time, had dubbed the wheel of misfortune, a little cardboard dial that calculates the date of conception and estimates the date of delivery. I didn’t want to tell Izzy that Hurley and I had rendezvoused several other times after that, and hoped my answer would keep him from asking, since such liaisons were forbidden if I wanted to keep my job. And now that I was on the verge of having two mouths to feed, I needed my job more than ever, not to mention the maternity and child-care benefits that came with it.

  “What does Hurley have to say about it?”

  “He doesn’t know yet.” I admitted, wincing.

  Izzy sighed and shook his head. “When are you planning on telling him?”

  “As soon as he comes back. He said he should be home on Monday.”

  We sat through several seconds of silence, both of us staring straight ahead, both caught up in our own thoughts.

  It was Izzy who finally broke the silence. “So what are your plans?”

  “My plans?”

  “With the baby.”

  “I intend to keep it and raise it. If it means being a single working mom, so be it. I won’t let Hurley marry me just because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “That’s all very heroic and noble,” said Izzy, his tone laced with sarcasm. “But what about what Hurley wants?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll deal with that when I get to it. I’ll have to wait and see what he says when I talk to him.” I turned and faced Izzy then, my expression imploring. “I’m determined to make this work, Izzy, whatever it takes. I promise you I will do whatever I need to in order to keep my job. I not only like it, I need it. I need the income, and I need the benefits.”

  Izzy gave me a solemn look. “We need to discuss this some more, but clearly this isn’t the best time. For now, let’s just keep it business as usual, and we’ll figure out a time to talk later, okay?”

  I nodded, too afraid to say anything.

  “We should get to the hospital.”

  I looked over my shoulder to check for oncoming traffic and waited as a single car passed. Then I eased the hearse back onto the road. Less than five minutes later, we were heading into the hospital. I hoped our case would be a simple, straightforward one that we could finish up within the hour. I forgot that my basket of hopes is overrun with forks.

  The ER was its usual bustling craziness. My good friend Phyllis—aka Syph to those of us in the know—directed us to the room that held our victim. Inside the room, behind a curtain, we found Bob Richmond standing at the bedside, one hand cupping his elbow, the other pulling at his chin as he stared at the dead man.

  Bob Richmond is a semiretired detective with the Sorenson PD who was covering in Hurley’s absence. He had gotten shot while working a case with me back in the fall, a case in which Hurley appeared to be the primary suspect. No cop wants to get shot, but in Bob’s case it turned out to be a good thing, in a way. At the time of the injury he weighed north of four hundred pounds and was a heart attack waiting to happen. But after getting gut shot, having several surgeries, and acquiring a new outlook on life and death, he had lost over one hundred pounds and counting. Prior to the shooting, his main form of exercise was shoveling food into his mouth, but nowadays he works out at the gym regularly. The change in him is so dramatic that many people who know him don’t recognize him anymore.

  Richmond’s desire to get healthy and his dramatic success inspired me. Back before he was shot I’d agreed to go to the gym with him in support of his efforts, and while I have taken a few short sabbaticals, the two of us have stuck with it, for the most part. Richmond is much more dedicated and determined than I am, however; there have been times when he has had to drag me along kicking and screaming. I hate hanging out with women who are thinner than my fettuccine.

  As Izzy and I entered the room, Richmond glanced over at us and nodded. Then he looked back at the victim without saying a word, letting us absorb the scene for a minute or two.

  The room looked like a tornado had blown through it. The floor was littered with torn wrappers from all the equipment and supplies that had been used, and a crash cart was parked nearby with several of its drawers partially opened. There was blood on the stretcher and the railings, and a smeared puddle of it on the floor, along with a trail of bloody footprints that meandered around the room. IV tubing, catheter tubing, and several types of monitoring cords snaked their way from various poles and machinery to the bed.

  After taking in the room, I let my gaze shift to the dead man, who was lying on his back on the stretcher, a sheet covering him from the waist down. The first thing I noticed was undoubtedly the first thing everyone else noticed because it was the elephant in the room. Sticking out of the man’s chest was a two-foot-long, wooden-handled implement, the base of which was wrapped in a huge bundle of white gauze. I glanced at an X-ray hanging on a light box on the wall and saw that the handle was part of a large barbecue fork, the tines of which, judging from its position on the X-ray, had ended up in the victim’s heart.

  The fact that a fork played a role in this murder should have been my first clue that this wasn’t going to be a quick and easy case.

  When I was able to take my eyes off the fork long enough to look at the dead man’s face, I saw thinning blond hair, blue eyes that stared sightless at the ceiling, and pale skin, though I couldn’t tell for sure if the coloring was due to nature or exsanguination. His nose was swollen, and there was dried blood crusted in both nostrils. His left eye had a dark purplish area beneath it, and I could see the start of a bruise along his lower left jawline. When I shifted my focus away from specific injuries and took in the whole face, I realized I knew him.

  “That’s Derrick Ames. I took care of him once in the ER when he cut his hand on a table saw. Isn’t he a math teacher at the high school?”

  “Correct,” Richmond said. “He also teaches German. His parents are German nationals who came over here just before he was born.”

  “What happened to him?” Izzy asked. “Aside from the obvious.”

  “Not sure,” Bob said with a shrug. “According to EMS, he came stumbling out of his house around seven-forty with the fork in his chest, and scared the crap out of two boys who were skateboarding in the street. One of the kids stayed with Ames, and the other one ran home and got his mother. She called 911 at seven forty-nine and then went outside to see if she could help.”

  “Was he still conscious?” I asked.

  “Barely. The woman said she could tell the fork was in his heart because it was jerking with every one of his heartbeats. Ames tol
d her to pull it out and tried to do it himself, but she wouldn’t let him.”

  “Smart woman,” I said. “Leaving the fork in there plugged the holes it made. Pull it out and you get uncontrolled bleeding and a swift death.”

  “Not that it made a difference in the end,” Richmond said, reaching over and pulling the sheet down. On Ames’s belly was a large wad of bloody dressing pads. Then Richmond, who was wearing gloves, lifted the pads and revealed a large stab wound about three inches below the sternum and a couple of inches to the right of Ames’s navel. “It turns out the fork was unnecessary. Ames was also stabbed with what was likely a large knife, judging from the size and shape of the wound. The doc says it nicked his aorta. He was bleeding internally even without the fork.”

  “You said he was conscious when the woman got to him,” Izzy said. “Did he say anything to her? Like who did it?”

  “Junior Feller is at the scene, and he’s been talking to the witnesses there. Let me find out what he’s got so far.” While Richmond took out his cell phone and stepped out of the room to make the call, Izzy and I took a closer look at Derrick’s body and snapped some photos. Then we took out a body bag in preparation for moving him to our morgue.

  Richmond returned just as we were zipping up the body bag—though we had to improvise some to work around the fork—and told us what he’d learned. “It turns out Derrick did say something to Janet Calgary, the woman who was with him in the street, though it wasn’t much. She said he muttered the word payday, let out a long sigh, and then went unconscious.”

  “Payday?” I said. “That’s an odd thing to say.”

  Richmond shrugged. “Maybe he was trying to say it was a payback of some sort.”

  “I take it the knife wasn’t in him when he came out of the house, or when he arrived in the ER?” Izzy asked Richmond.

  “Nope. According to the Calgary woman, Ames was covered in blood, but the only injury she saw was the barbecue fork.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t have another one,” I said. “That fork kind of rivets one’s gaze.”