Too Many Crooks Spoil the Plot Read online

  “You think so?” Her voice settled down into a soft southern drawl with French highlights that was music to my ears. Her full name was Lurleen du Trois. I never knew if that was her given name or something she created. I did know her French accent had never seen France, or Quebec for that matter. It was pure Lurleen. “C’est vrai. I can be very amusante when I try. But kids—I’m not sure what kids find amusing. Maybe we could play badminton or croquet or charades. I’ll make a list. And what shall I feed them? Do they eat regular food or do I need to buy something special—like those little fish crackers and alphabet soup?”

  “Regular food will be fine,” I said. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, Lurleen. Do you have time to stop by tonight and meet them?”

  “Bien sur. Anything for you, chérie. When you make your chocolate chip cookies, will you save some for me?”

  “Of course. How did you know that was next on my list?”

  “My dear girl, you always bake—when you’re happy, you bake. When you’re bored or upset, you bake. I think today you’re worried about your friend Ellie.”

  “I am.”

  Lurleen said she’d stop by around seven.

  I picked the kids up at five in a run-down section of Little Five Points. They didn’t know I was coming and there was no Ellie or babysitter in sight.

  “It’s okay,” Lucie told me. “We don’t need a babysitter. I can look after things.”

  Ellie and I would be having a long discussion about this when I saw her next. We gathered up the few things they had. Jason brought his action figures and Lucie brought her stuffed monkey but only when I insisted. “I’m really too old for that, Aunt Di,” she told me.

  “Well, I’m not,” I said and tucked it in her book bag.

  Lurleen arrived on the dot of seven.

  “I hope I’m not late,” she said and grinned at me. Lurleen was never late. She wore a jaunty beret that sat atop her massive auburn curls, and she stooped to kiss me on both cheeks. Lurleen was six feet tall, slender—a sharp contrast to my five feet of well-rounded flesh.

  “Bon soir,” she said to Lucie and Jason. She knelt down beside them and shook each of their hands with great solemnity. They looked at her as if she might be from another planet.

  “That’s French for good evening,” she explained. “Ah, I see you have the latest action figure, Jason. The Transformer, isn’t it?”

  I could imagine how Lurleen had spent her afternoon—searching the Internet for what little boys liked to play with. That was all it took to hook Jason. He showed her the intricacies of the Transformer, changing it around from human to machine and back to human again.

  Lucie was equally enthralled with her. “I took French once in school,” she said shyly. “But only for a few weeks until we had to move.”

  “Ah, no problem. Or should I say, pas de probleme. We’ll speak French every day, and you’ll catch on in no time.”

  Lurleen’s first encounter with the kids was a glowing success. I had no doubt it would be. Lurleen could charm a cow into giving more milk, a coop full of chickens into laying more eggs, a judgmental mother into being kind to her daughter. When my mother came for my med school graduation—after Lurleen called her and insisted she come—I never heard one word of criticism. Lurleen entertained her, sang my praises. She had my mother laughing out loud, something I’d never heard before. That had been a good visit, two weeks before my mother died of a massive stroke.

  After Lurleen left us, I ran a bath for Jason, who insisted he needed no help in the tub.

  “I’m five years old in two days. I’m big now.”

  I left the door ajar, so I could keep an eye on him.

  I got them tucked in bed by eight and kissed them each good night.

  “Can Her My Only sleep with us?” Jason asked.

  “Of course. Hermione would love to sleep with you. She may jump up on the bed and want to sleep there.”

  Jason grinned.

  “Is that okay?” Lucie asked.

  “Fine with me if it’s fine with you.”

  I closed the door, poured myself a glass of wine, and gave way to my frustration with Ellie. Where was she? She was supposed to call this evening. She’d left her children in a terrible place. Lucie was resourceful but she was an eight-year-old child, not an adult. No child should be left in that flea-bitten apartment alone at night.

  I must have dozed off on the couch. It was midnight when I got the call.

  I grabbed the phone so it wouldn’t wake the kids. “Ellie?”

  A detective corrected me and asked if I knew an Eleanor Winston. Then he asked if he could come over. He already had my address.

  I met him on the porch, so he wouldn’t ring the bell and start Hermione barking.

  “I’m Mason Garrett,” he said. He showed me his credentials and waited patiently while I examined them.

  “I have the kids inside. Can we talk here?” I nodded to the swing, but he remained standing. He suggested I sit down.

  “Something’s happened to Ellie,” I said.

  He nodded. He was a kind-looking man, in his late forties, with a bald head and a sturdy build. His gray eyes said he’d seen it all and didn’t care for most of it.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this. We found a dead woman we believe to be Eleanor Winston, shot in the head on a street in midtown. She had your address in her purse and a message that said you were to take care of her kids if anything happened to her.”

  Chapter Two

  Every word felt like a bullet slamming into my own brain. I sat very still on the swing, staring at my hands, determined not to cry. Not until I was alone. As a doctor, you learn to put your feelings to one side. You don’t help a mother struggling with the serious illness of her child by breaking down in front of her.

  “So she knew she was in danger,” I said.

  “What information do you have about that?”

  “Ellie had some scheme to make money. She said she’d worked for Sandler’s Sodas, and they were going to make her a nice settlement offer. I hadn’t seen Ellie for two years until this afternoon when she asked me to watch the kids. I tried to get her to tell me what she was up to but she wouldn’t.”

  “You knew her well?”

  “We grew up together in Iowa and then lost touch for a few years after high school. I’ve seen her off and on since then, mostly when she had a problem. She always wanted to make it big. First as an actress in Hollywood and later in whatever way she could to get rich.”

  “Did that include drugs or other illegal activities?”

  “No drugs. They killed her brother. As for the illegal part—I can’t say for sure. She liked the good life and could never seem to afford it. Took up with some questionable guys and did some stupid things.”

  “I see.” The detective was jotting notes in a small notebook. “Is there anything more she said to you this afternoon that might help us find her killer?”

  I shook my head. “She asked if the kids could stay with me for a few days. Said she had an errand to run and wouldn’t let me take her where she needed to go. It started to rain, and I made her take my umbrella.”

  “We didn’t find an umbrella near her.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it stopped raining.”

  “No, not in midtown. A pretty steady rain all evening.”

  “It was an unusual umbrella, sky blue with a carved wooden handle. I’d recognize it if I saw it again.” I didn’t add that it was a gift from my father before I left for college or that it was carved from the branch of a linden tree that shaded our house. “So you won’t forget us, no matter how far you travel,” my father had said. He meant him.

  Even then it was clear the cancer was working its way through his body. His hands shook, but he didn’t stop carving that handle until it fit my grip perfectly. And he wouldn’t hear of
my postponing college to stay home with him. My father. As if I ever could forget him.

  The detective must have thought I was still in shock. He waited until I looked up at him. “You never know what might help,” he said, referring to my description of the umbrella. He closed his notebook and looked at me intently. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ll need you to identify the body.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “We can send someone to stay with them.”

  “Some stranger? No. Let me see if a friend can come over. Will the children be allowed to stay with me for now?”

  The detective gave me a concerned look. “As far as I know. That’s what Ms. Winston requested. We’ll check with Family and Protective Services. Do you know about her next of kin and how we can reach them?”

  I went inside, got out my old address book, and jotted down the name and number for Ellie’s mother. I didn’t know if it was still accurate, but it was all I had. I handed the address to the detective and told him the name of the children’s father, John Winston. No address. No phone number.

  Detective Garrett sat on the swing while I called Lurleen. She was at my house in five minutes. She looked shocked, of course, but she didn’t pepper me with questions.

  The detective drove me to the morgue in his Jaguar. It was an old Jaguar, but it was still a Jaguar. Nicely maintained. He saw me examining his mahogany dashboard.

  “I have a thing for old cars,” he said. “It’s how I spend my spare time, when I have any. Life can get pretty hectic with my job. Yours too I’m sure. You’re a physician?”

  I nodded. “A pediatrician.”

  “Where do you work? You have a private practice?”

  I tried to focus on his questions, anything to keep me from thinking about Ellie. “I work in a refugee clinic. For many of the families it’s their first exposure to Western medicine and a doctor who has time for them. What I do feels important, and the parents are always so grateful.”

  “Must be hard when you lose a patient.”

  “It is. Fortunately that doesn’t happen often. We can usually send them to the hospital if that’s where they need to go. Most of these kids are survivors. That’s how they made it to our clinic in the first place.”

  Detective Garrett nodded.

  “Your work must be hard for you too,” I said.

  Again he nodded. “Sometimes it’s very hard.” He looked at me. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  That was all it took. I could feel the tears coming, and I couldn’t stop them.

  Detective Garrett handed me some tissue as he turned into the parking lot. “It’s okay,” he said. “We can wait as long as you want before I take you into the morgue.”

  Well, that really set me off. A kind cop and the mention of the morgue. I sat in the car and sobbed silently for five minutes. Then I wiped my eyes, blew my nose, and we went inside. We walked through a metal detector operated by a policeman in uniform.

  “Hi, Mason,” he said while he searched through my purse. He gave the bag back to me and nodded.

  The morgue was in the basement. Detective Garrett and I waited for an elevator that took us into the bowels of the building. It was cold and dark with minimal lighting. A city tightening its belt, he informed me. The morgue itself was brightly lit with overhead fluorescent lights that would have given me a headache in five minutes. At a small desk, a young woman checked us both in and walked ahead of us into one of the rooms. She looked at a number on her roster and pulled out a metal gurney. The whole experience was surreal. Not the morgue part. As part of my training, I’d been in morgues, witnessed autopsies. It was the fact that a friend might be lying there, a friend I’d known all my life. A sheet covered the body, and Detective Garrett asked if I was ready to see her. I nodded.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be Ellie.

  The unveiling happened in slow motion. The attendant turned down the sheet inch by inch until I saw the face with a terrible, horrible hole in her left cheek. An exit wound.

  The face was disfigured, but it was Ellie’s. Eyes closed. Hair matted around her head. So dead.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s her.”

  “I’ll take you home,” Garrett said. He must have thought I was about to faint because he put his hand under my arm and steadied me as we walked out to his car.

  We were at my house in ten minutes. There’s not much traffic on the road at two in the morning.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” he said after walking me to my door. “Here’s my card. If you think of anything that might be helpful, call me. And if any . . . problem arises, call me as well.”

  “Problem?” I could feel my skin start to prickle. “What do you mean? Are the kids in danger?”

  “We don’t know anything about the person who did this. He dumped the contents of Ms. Winston’s purse on the street, but he didn’t take her money. We don’t know what he was looking for or if he found it. I can’t say if the children are in danger. I’ll call you when I have more information.” He briefly touched my hand. “Feel free to call me anytime.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I went inside and sank onto the sofa with Majestic by my side and Hermione at my feet. Lurleen sat on my other side, one arm around me, handing me tissues with the other as I cried and told her what had happened. She teared up when I told her about seeing Ellie in the morgue and as I wondered aloud about what would happen to the children.

  “Will they let you keep them?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. They’ll be looking for Ellie’s mother. She wasn’t much of a mother to Ellie, but perhaps she’ll want the kids. I have them for now—that’s all I know.”

  “I can help you with them every day. I want to help you and them.”

  I squeezed her hand. “What would I do without you?”

  Lurleen smiled. “Oh, chérie, I’m not going anywhere.” She handed me a tissue and kept one for herself. We sat together silently for several seconds. Lurleen squeezed my hand every time I sighed. I didn’t have to explain to her how I was feeling; she understood.

  I decided I would let the children sleep. It would be the last innocent sleep either one of them would ever have. As it turned out, I couldn’t keep that decision. Lucie came padding out to us. I’d made her wear socks to bed. Old houses can be drafty.

  “I heard the policeman come and go. I waited until you came home. It’s about Mom, isn’t it? Something’s happened to Mom.”

  I took Lucie in my arms and sat her on my lap. “Something terrible has happened. I’m so sorry, Lucie.”

  “My mother isn’t coming back, is she?”

  “No, Lucie. Your mother isn’t coming back. She died tonight.”

  Lucie buried her head in my neck. I could feel my top becoming wet with her tears.

  “I knew something terrible was going to happen,” Lucie cried. “I knew it. This time it wasn’t going to be okay, no matter what Mommy said.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said and rocked her back and forth. I was crying too. I stroked her head, and we sat together in silence for a few minutes.

  Lucie finally sat up and looked at me with dark blue eyes that reminded me of her mother’s. “How did she die?” she asked me.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Lucie nodded.

  “She was shot, Luce. She probably died instantly.”

  Lucie nodded again. “What will happen to Jason and me?”

  “Your mother wrote a note saying she wanted you to stay with me. That’s where you’ll stay until the police find your grandmother or your father.”

  “I don’t want to live with them.” Lucie started crying again. “Or with anyone else. I want to live with you, Aunt Di. Jason and I won’t be any trouble. I promise.”

 
I hugged her tighter. “It’s not about being trouble, honey. You couldn’t be any trouble if you tried. I’d love you to stay with me always, but I may not have that right. Let’s just take it one day at a time. For now, you’re both safe with me.”

  I hoped that was true.

  Chapter Three

  Lurleen stayed with us that night. She insisted I go to bed, and she slept on the couch. She had coffee brewing in the kitchen when I woke up.

  “Is there anything else I can do?”

  “You’ve done plenty,” I said.

  We heard stirring in the bedroom, and a moment later Lucie walked out slowly with her monkey in one hand. She looked embarrassed when she realized she was clutching it and started to go back to her room.

  “Wait, wait,” said Lurleen. “May I see it?” Lurleen took it tenderly from Lucie. “This looks like a sad little monkey,” she said.

  With that, Lucie burst into tears and let me gather her onto my lap.

  Lurleen knelt beside her. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She kissed her on top of her head and gave her back the stuffed animal. “Maybe you can comfort each other.”

  Lurleen reached over Lucie and hugged me. “Call me later. Right now the children need to be alone with you.”

  I nodded a thank you, and she let herself out.

  Saturday was rough.

  Lucie understood what had happened, but it’s hard to explain to a four-year-old that his mother is never coming back. I tried to comfort them both and answer Jason’s repeated questions about when his mother was coming home. Lucie said their mother was in heaven but was watching over them.

  “Will she come home for my birthday?”

  “No, Jason,” Lucie explained patiently. “She can’t come home for your birthday. She’s too far away.”

  “I will bring her back from far away. I’m Superman. I can find her in the sky.”