Deadly Care, page 18
part #3 of Joanna Blalock Series
“And he didn’t leave a suicide note,” Jake concluded.
Joanna snapped on a pair of latex gloves and examined the head of Alex Black. She saw the entrance wound just below the right temple, its edges blackened and burned. The exit wound on the left upper parietal area was bigger and more ragged. She stepped back, tilting her head to one side and imagining the path of the bullet once it exited. Her gaze went to the far wall where the charts were. Then she turned her attention back to Alex Black’s head. The entrance wound was anterior, almost to the frontal area. She made her hand into a gun and pointed her index finger at the anterior edge of her own temple. It felt awkward and she had to strain to squeeze an imaginary trigger. She glanced down at the weapon on the floor. A .32. Alex Black’s outstretched hand was almost touching it. “Have you found the slug?”
“Not yet,” Jake said. “Farelli figures it’s somewhere in the wall lined with files and folders.”
“Probably,” Joanna agreed. “But sometimes bullets that go through skulls don’t travel that far. You’d better check the carpet carefully.”
“We already did,” Farelli told her. “All we found was some kind of pill.”
“May I see it?”
“Sure.” Farelli took out a plastic envelope and emptied it onto the receptionist’s desk.
Joanna studied the triangular-shaped orange pill with her magnifying glass. On it she saw the letters SKF and the number E I 9. She went over to a bookshelf and took down a volume of Physician’s Desk Reference. Quickly she flipped through the pages until she came to the product identification section that showed photographs of pills. “It’s Dexedrine, a form of amphetamine.”
“Speed?” Jake asked.
Joanna nodded. “But probably bought at a drugstore.
It’s made by a very reputable pharmaceutical company-SmithKline and French.”
“Maybe the doc was using it in some kind of experiment,” Farelli suggested.
“No,” Joanna said at once. “It’s a controlled substance and besides Alex Black didn’t do any research in this office.”
“Well, someone in this office was using it,” Jake said.
“Yes,” Joanna said, smiling thinly, “someone was.”
Jake tried to read the expression on her face, but couldn’t.
Joanna leaned over and examined the corpse’s neck and throat, looking for bruises. There weren’t any.
With her magnifying glass she checked for skin and blood under his fingernails. Nothing. His hands were clean, the knuckles free of cuts or abrasions. There was no evidence that Alex Black had fought or struggled before he died.
Jake broke the silence. “Does the absence of a suicide note bother you?”
Not really,” Joanna said, still lost in her thoughts.
‘Most of the upper-class suicides I’ve seen left notes,” Jake argued.
“Right,” Joanna said, slowly circling the corpse.
“How well did you know Dr. Black?”
“Like I told you on the phone, I met with him and his wife on two occasions to discuss the deaths of the Health First patients.”
“So you didn’t know him socially?”
“Not at all.”
Jake rubbed at his nose, now smelling the stale odor of the vomitus on the floor. “I’m still bothered by the absence of a suicide note. It should have been there.”
“Maybe,” Joanna said as she measured the size of the exit wound with a small ruler. “But I think you should know that Alex Black disliked his wife. There was no love lost between them. I think he disliked her enough not to leave a suicide note.”
Jake smiled to himself. Only a woman would think of that. It was the best type of revenge. Kill yourself and don’t leave a note. Your wife-no matter that she no longer cares for you-will always wonder if she drove you to it. Guilt! Imagined guilt! Always there, eating away at the wife. Son of a bitch! He must have really hated her.
“I’m going to turn the lights off for a moment. I can visualize better in darkness.” Joanna walked to the door and switched off the lights. The room went dark and quiet. Joanna waited a moment, then let her mind go back to the night before. She envisioned Alex Black returning to his office. He switches the light on. Joanna switched the light on. He walks to the receptionist’s desk and sits. Joanna walked over to the desk and sat beside the corpse. He takes out his gun and-No! No!
The weapon wouldn’t be in the receptionist’s desk. He would have gone to his office to get it. Unless he carried it in with him.
Joanna turned to Gupta. “What time did he die last night?”
“Between six p.m. and seven p.m.,” Gupta answered promptly.
Joanna asked. “Do we know where Alex Black was between five p.m. and six p.m.?”
Farelli took out his notepad and flipped through the pages. “According to his secretary, he had an appointment with Dr. Brian Hummer at five p.m.”
“Who is Brian Hummer?”
Farelli shrugged. “We’re checking that out now.”
So, Joanna reasoned, Alex Black met with a doctor at five p.m. and was probably wearing the long white coat that he had on when he died. The coat had no place in which to conceal a weapon. And he wouldn’t have been carrying one around with him anyhow. So he came back to the suite and went into his private office, got the gun and then returned to the receptionist’s desk, where he-Joanna shook her head. That can’t be right. Why return to the receptionist’s desk?
“Peculiar, peculiar,” Joanna said, more to herself than to the others.
Jake’s ears pricked up. “What?”
“Little things that aren’t right. Little things that bother me.”
“Like what?”
“Like the location of the bullet wound where Alex Black supposedly shot himself.”
Jake gestured with his hands. “It was in the temple.
That’s where most people blow their brains out.”
Farelli nodded firmly. “Everyone I’ve ever seen.”
“Everyone but doctors,” Joanna said. “Doctors know better than to aim for the temple. Your hand might slip, you may be an inch or so off. And what happens then?
Well, you destroy the frontal lobe of your brain and instead of dying you become a vegetable. Doctors who commit suicide with a gun always place the gun in their mouths, pointing it straight back to the midbrain.
That way the bullet hits the vital brain centers and you die. Most doctors would do it that way, and a bright one like Alex Black almost certainly would.”
“How many doctor-gunshot-suicides have you seen?” Jake asked.
“Six.”
“And how many of them put the gun in their mouths and pulled the trigger?”
“All six.” Joanna pointed to the site of the entrance wound on Alex’s head. “And look where he supposedly shot himself. At the anterior most aspect of his temple. Empty your gun and point it at the very front edge of your temple.”
Farelli removed the shells from his revolver and aimed it at his temple.
“Even more forward,” Joanna told him.
Farelli had to twist his head awkwardly to get the correct position.
“How does it feel?” Joanna asked.
“Clumsy as hell,” Farelli said. “I’d have trouble pulling the trigger.”
“If this is murder,” Joanna said slowly, “our killer made an obvious mistake. He shot Alex Black in the wrong place.”
“Maybe he came in looking for drugs,” Farelli thought out loud.
Jake shook his head. “Naw. If that was the case the office would have been trashed.”
“Well, how do you figure the amphetamine pill got on the floor?” Farelli asked.
Jake thought for a moment, then shrugged.
“Maybe the killer brought it in with him,” Joanna said carefully. “Maybe he was popping pills just before he did the job and maybe one fell to the floor,” Jake nodded. “That works. And it would also explain why he did some things so sloppily.”
Farelli made a face. “It’s hard to make a case for murder just because the doc got shot in the wrong place.”
Joanna watched Farelli reload his weapon and holster it. “There are other things too. Like the area of the office where he shot himself. At the receptionist’s desk. Why? That makes no sense. He had an appointment with some doctor at five p.m. and returns here, say, at six p.m. He’s not carrying his gun with him, so he goes to his private office, where he’s got the weapon hidden. Why didn’t he shoot himself in the private office? Why come back to the receptionist’s desk?
It doesn’t make sense.”
“And then there’s the absence of the suicide note,” Jake added.
“And it may have been the killer who turned up the volume on the Muzak system to cover the noise of the gunshot.”
Jake thought for a moment, tapping his finger against the copying machine. “There’s a lot of things wrong here. Little things, but nothing substantial.”
“I think there’s some reasonable doubt about this being a suicide,” Joanna said.
:,Would it hold up at a coroner’s inquest?”
‘It’s hard to say.”
Jake strummed his fingers against the machine again, deliberating, then looked over at Farelli. “Call the Crime Scene Unit.”
Farelli took out a handkerchief and reached over the corpse for the telephone on the receptionist’s desk. His elbow hit the chair, rocking it, and the corpse slid off, going to the floor in a sitting position.
Farelli and Jake lifted the body up by its arms. Alex Black’s long white coat came up to his waist and his unzipped pants slipped down to his knees.
Joanna stared at the corpse’s buttocks. “Hold him!
Hold him right there!”
Jake and Farelli had to strain to hold the corpse up.
Alex Black didn’t weigh all that much, but now he was dead weight.
Joanna took out a magnifying glass and carefully studied the figure on Alex Black’s buttock.
:‘What is it?” Jake asked.
‘A tattoo. A tattoo of a bluebird.”
“So?”
,‘my man with no face. He also had a tattoo on his butt.”
“Of a bluebird?”
“A butterfly. But the colors are the same. Blue and gold. And the design is very similar with oversized eyes and little feet.”
“You figure the guy and the faceless stiff are somehow connected?”
Joanna shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. But I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that whoever did this tattoo also did the one on the faceless man.”
Jake nodded, now grasping her line of thought, “So, if you can find out who did this guy’s tattoo, maybe the artist will remember doing the butterfly on the other stiff.”
“You got it.”
“And he might just come up with a name.”
“He just might.” Joanna placed the magnifying glass in her purse and started for the door.
Jake came over and took her arm. “If the Crime Scene Unit comes up with anything, I’ll give you a call.”
“Fine, but only at my office.” Joanna abruptly pulled her arm away and left the room.
Amanda Black looked more shocked than saddened.
She stared straight ahead without blinking and spoke in a monotone. “Are you saying that my husband did not take his own life?”
“We’re just investigating his death,” Jake said.
“Your question made it sound …” Amanda’s voice trailed off. She brought a cigarette up to her lips and puffed on it absently. She had a faraway look on her face, her mind obviously elsewhere.
“Do you feel up to answering more questions?” Jake asked.
Amanda nodded briefly. “I’m fine.”
But Jake could see she wasn’t. She was obviously trying to be calm and collected, but he could sense that she was straining to hold herself together. He felt for her, his mind flashing back to Eleni’s funeral and the awful emptiness that had consumed him. But he knew that now was the time to ask the widow questions. Her answers would be more honest, less guarded. “Can you think of any reason why your husband would kill himself?”
Amanda nodded slowly. “My husband suffered from depression. At times, severe depression.”
Jake leaned forward. “How long had he had this depression?”
“Off and on for years. But it had gotten much worse recently.”
“Was he seeing a psychiatrist?”
Amanda nodded.
“Could we have his name?”
“Brian Hummer.”
Jake took out his notepad and flipped pages until he came to Brian Hummer’s name. Alex Black had seen the psychiatrist at five p.m., an hour or so before his death. So maybe it was suicide after all, Jake thought.
A nutty doctor who blew his brains out for God knows what reason. And maybe that was why he didn’t leave a note behind. Like Farelli said, the real nut cases usually didn’t bother with suicide notes.
The phone rang. Amanda glanced at it briefly and let it ring. She looked away and stared blankly into space.
They were sitting in the conference room on the tenth floor of the Health First Tower. The drapes were open, the day outside gray and gloomy, another storm threatening. The heat in the room was turned up and it felt muggy and close.
Amanda puffed on her cigarette and a shower of ashes fell onto her white coat. She studied them for a moment, then slowly brushed them off. While Amanda was distracted, Jake glanced over at Joanna and signaled with his head for her to pick up the questioning.
“How severe was your husband’s depression?”
Joanna asked.
“At times it was totally incapacitating.”
“Had he ever attempted suicide?”
‘No.
“Did he talk about suicide?”
“Not to me.”
“Were there any suicide gestures?”
Jake scribbled down the term “suicide gestures” and underlined it.
Amanda gave the question thought. “Once in medical school, I think. He swallowed a handful of Valium tablets, then had second thoughts and called the paramedics.”
“Was your husband taking any antidepressant medications?”
“For a while, but I don’t think he took them regularly. He complained that they made him feel drugged and dopey and interfered with his thinking. He hated that.”
And that might have cost him his life, Joanna was thinking. So stupid to try to regulate the dose of drug you’re taking. But she knew that when doctors were patients they did it frequently. So stupid. “Did Alex own a gun?”
“God no!” Amanda blurted out, her voice showing emotion for the first time. “He didn’t even want to be around them.”
Jake quickly leaned forward. “Was he frightened of them?”
Amanda shook her head. “No, it wasn’t that. When he was a boy he used to hunt with his father. One day his father shot at a deer-or what he thought was a deer. It turned out to be another hunter. The man lost a leg because of the gunshot wound. From that day on, Alex never touched a rifle or gun again.”
“But he was familiar with firearms?”
“Oh, yes. I’m certain of that.”
Jake leaned back and Joanna resumed the questioning. “Did you know that your husband had a tattoo?”
A hint of a smile crossed Amanda’s face and rapidly faded. “No, I didn’t. That must be new.”
Shit, Joanna grumbled to herself. She had hoped that Amanda could tell her the name and location of the shop where Alex had gotten his tattoo. “Forgive me for asking, but when was the last time you and your husband shared the same bed?”
Amanda’s eyes narrowed noticeably. “Is that really important?”
“Yes, it is.”
Jake smiled inwardly. Of course, it’s important. Tell us when you screwed him last and we’ll know when you saw his ass last. And we’ll know that the tattoo was done after that.
“Almost a year,” Amanda said softly, as if she was conceding defeat. “It was no secret that our marriage was over and that we were going our separate ways.
But we still cared for each other.”
“Why not divorce?” Joanna asked.
“I think we were reaching that point.”
“Do you think the prospect of a divorce might have tipped your husband over the edge?”
“I don’t know,” Amanda said quietly, but her face lost color. She began to say something else, but decided not to.
“Was Alex dating anyone?” Joanna asked.
Amanda hesitated, her eyelids fluttering for a moment. “Not that I know of.”
Jake saw the fluttering lids and knew from experience that that was a sure sign the person was either lying or holding back information. But why? What difference would it make now? “Would anyone benefit from your husband’s death?”
“You mean, financially?”
“Yes.”
“No one really. He was not a wealthy man. His largest asset, to my knowledge was the shares of stock he had in Health First.”
“How much was that worth?”
“I would guess somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars.”
“And you would inherit?”
Amanda nodded. “Unless he changed his will during the past year.”
Jake wrote himself a note. “Check the will.” See if he’d changed it and made a bequest to some little honey he was fucking. Maybe she persuaded him to get the tattoo. Older men do stupid things when they’re screwing young women. “Let’s go back to your husband’s social life this past year. When there were social affairs at the hospital, did he bring a date?”
“He never showed up for those types of gatherings.
He thought that doctors as a whole were very boring people.”
“When he was away from the hospital, did he go to clubs or bars?”
“Occasionally he went to clubs in Santa Monica and in Hollywood. Although he was not a social person, he was a very good dancer, Lieutenant. A very, very good dancer.”
“I see,” Jake said, thinking about Hollywood. Not the Hollywood of movie stars and bright lights that no longer existed. But the Hollywood of today. A small area in the middle of Los Angeles that was filled with crime and whores and pimps and drugs. A sleazy piece-of-shit area where everything and everybody was for sale. “Did he mention any clubs he went to by name?”
