For Want of a Memory Page 9

  "Jess said it was a head wound," said Lou Anne. This felt all wrong, somehow. Why hadn't anybody asked him who shot him? Why hadn't they even told him he'd been shot? "You have a big bandage ... right there." She pointed to the left side of his head. He'd felt that bandage there, but there were bandages all over his head.

  "Jess?"

  "My best friend. She's a nurse. She's been taking care of you."

  "The cute black one," he said, intuitively. He couldn't see any of the other nurses hanging out with a woman who looked like this.

  "That's her," said Lou Anne. "Look. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything. Maybe they're wrong. I have to go, okay? Please don't tell anybody I told you about that ... the shooting, I mean. I don't want to get in trouble."

  His worries about her being somehow involved with law enforcement flew. If she was acting, she was a pro, and there was no way that she could be an actual law enforcement officer. Not with that haircut.

  "Anybody who tries to give you trouble will have to deal with me," said Kris, his voice strong. "You did me a favor, and I remember things like that."

  She looked at him oddly, as her head tilted. The hair completely covered her right eye. That would drive him nuts and he wondered how she stood it. The other dark eye stared right at him, and for some reason he noticed she wasn't wearing any makeup.

  "That's what they say about mobsters," she said softly. "They remember people who do them favors."

  "I'm not a mobster," he said firmly. "I write books."

  "Really?" She sounded excited. "I love to read." Then she jerked. "I have to go! I'll see you later."

  She was out the door, which sighed closed and then reopened suddenly. That amazing head was thrust through.

  "I will see you later," she said. "Bye!"

  Then she was gone again, and the door stayed closed.

  Chapter Six

  The news anchor's face lit up. Her perfectly coiffed hair didn't move, even though her entire face changed. Her bright red lips split into a cultivated smile and showed a row of perfect white teeth.

  "And we have an update on the continuing saga of the attempted kidnapping on Governor Custer's wife."

  She then went on to explain that the governor's wife was named Chantal, as if there actually might be some idiot in the viewing area that didn't already know that. That was followed by a recap of the same news that had been splashed on every airwave and in every newspaper for three days, as if maybe the same idiot that didn't know who Chantal was also might not know that somebody had tried to kidnap her.

  Oddly, perhaps, several million people who had heard it all before ... again and again ... leaned forward to listen carefully, instead if hitting the "Mute" button and talking with others nearby about something actually interesting.

  "Chantal announced today that a reward is being offered to the man who saved her life on that fateful day, when three armed men tried to force her into a van while she was visiting a childcare center."

  People leaned forward even farther and waved at others around them to hush.

  "Chantal and the governor are offering two hundred thousand dollars for her savior to come forward, so that she can thank him."

  The picture changed suddenly and there was Chantal, tall and lovely as usual, with a bevy of microphones almost obscuring her face as she spoke.

  "His car was damaged in the act of saving my life," she said dramatically. "We feel we owe it to him to offer some token of our gratitude. People who act so heroically are an example to us all that, no matter who you are, you can impact other people's lives in a powerfully positive way."

  The happy anchor took back over and, for possibly the hundredth time, told everyone listening that virtually nothing was known about Chantal's savior.

  "Please come forward," she intoned, staring intently into the camera. "All of us here at Channel 27 want to thank you as well."

  * * *

  Within a hundred and twenty seconds, the switchboard of every television station that had broadcast Chantal's offer - and that was all of them - was clogged with calls from people claiming to be Chantal's savior. Women even called in, insisting that Chantal had it wrong ... that it wasn't a man who had saved her, but a woman.

  911 was instantly clogged with calls as well. Over a period of fifteen minutes, while people continued to call the emergency number, fifty-four citizens who were in actual need of emergency medical response died. Thirty people had heart attacks. There were two fires, in which six people were trapped and burned to death before the firemen arrived, and fifteen collisions in which people were critically or mortally injured. Three people died of self-inflicted injuries - two who overdosed on medications and then decided not to end it all after all, and one who slit her wrists and then changed her mind as well.

  The administrative number at every precinct in the city wasn't immune either. The class of people who called those numbers was a bit elevated, by comparison to those calling 911, but the result was the same.

  Emergency services came to a screeching halt for half an hour, in a city with ten million people in potential need of those services.

  Nobody actually cared that all the media outlets were swamped. Stories would be written for days about the event and it would be weeks before the crush of people, all claiming to have been driving the car that saved Chantal from a fate worse than death, would be sorted out. Most of that sorting was done simply by asking the claimant what color car he or she was driving that day. Almost all the rest were discarded when they couldn't produce the car. Many couldn't produce any car at all and, in fact, according to the division of motor vehicles, didn't even own a car. Hundreds insisted that they had been worried about getting in trouble for some reason and had sold the car they'd been driving. Twenty five people said they'd dumped the car in the ocean, but none could remember where, exactly. One woman, in a fit of imagination, said she'd driven the car to California, where she'd sold it to a homeless man for ten dollars, because she'd felt sorry for him.

  There could have been a doctoral thesis done on the whole situation, which illuminated the kind of greed that no one would have believed could exist. Four cab drivers ... of yellow cabs ... claimed they were on duty when the incident happened and were owed the reward. At least two hundred said they didn't care about the money, but just wanted to meet Chantal, or be invited to the governor's mansion for dinner, or some similar thing. More than one said there hadn't been any car involved at all, and that they had wrestled Moe to the ground and then run away.

  Jim Harper's world almost collapsed. Captain Hildebrand was tearing his hair out, because Chief Hooks had dumped the mess in his lap. He had tried to dump it in Harper's lap, but Harper had said he couldn't work on finding the mastermind if he had to deal with all the imposters. Since Chief Hooks was asking Hildebrand three or four times a day whether the mastermind had been uncovered, he couldn't shit on Harper.

  Instead, he drafted almost his entire force of detectives to weed through the unimaginable number of liars, cheats and outright bums who were trying to cash in. It was catastrophic, in the sense that over the next week, while the crowd was being sifted through, three felony cases had to be dropped because of the speedy trial rule, setting the perpetrators free. Hundreds of other cases languished, while witnesses' memories faded, or they moved without leaving a forwarding address, or even died. Only the crime lab was happy, because they significantly reduced their backlog of examinations while new evidence was logged in, but no examinations of that evidence were requested.

  As much of an uproar as was created, though, unless you needed an ambulance, or the police, or for some reason needed to communicate with the media, life went on without a ripple.

  Two rather distraught businessmen did, in fact, need the police during that week, and their situations had interweaving ripples.

  One came to work on Monday morning to find that his warehouse had been broken into. His problem wasn't that anything was missing. His problem was that somebody had park
ed a hearse in his building, complete with coffin. None of the employees were willing to open that coffin to see what was inside it.

  Another was the owner of the hearse, who had rented it to Larry Higginbotham, though that wasn't the name Larry had used. The hearse hadn't been returned and it was needed for a funeral.

  Because of the uproar in the law enforcement community, neither man could get anyone in law enforcement to do anything about their situations. In the end, the owner of the warehouse got the name of the mortuary from the side of the hearse, called the funeral home, and basically said, "Get your fucking dead body out of my warehouse!"

  The only bright spot in that whole exchange was when the coffin was opened and found to be empty, except for a roll of duct tape, which the Higginbothams had planned to use to restrain Chantal Custer with.

  What was lost were the fingerprints that would have tied the Higginbothams to that hearse and the eyewitness testimony of the owner, who could have identified Larry Higginbotham as the man who had rented it.

  It would have played beautifully in a trial.

  * * *

  "I got rights!" squealed Curly.

  "I already read you your rights," said Harper patiently.

  "So where's my coffee and donuts?" whined Curly.

  "You don't have a right to coffee and donuts," said Harper.

  Curly turned to the young man, wearing the threadbare suit, sitting beside him.

  "You said I had rights," he complained. "Ain't I got the right to make them feed me?"

  "Um ... I don't think so," said the public defender. "Didn't they feed you in jail? If they didn't feed you in jail, I can file a motion."

  "Whose idea was it to kidnap Mrs. Custer?" asked Harper.

  "Don't answer that!" barked Curly's lawyer.

  "Where did the gun come from?" asked Harper.

  "Don't answer that either!" yelped the lawyer.

  "Look," sighed Harper. "You're in deep shit here, Curly. You're looking at life without parole, and if Moe dies, you could get the death penalty."

  "Hey!" yelled Curly. "I didn't do nothing to Moe."

  "Yes, but if someone dies in the process of a felony kidnapping attempt, then those responsible for the kidnapping attempt are also responsible for the death."

  "Don't try that bullshit with me!" yelled Curly. "You know I didn't try to kidnap my own brother."

  "Of course," said Jim smoothly. "You were trying to kidnap Mrs. Custer."

  "Don't answer that!" said the public defender.

  "He didn't ask no question," said Curly, looking at the man beside him. "He just said what we was trying to do."

  "I can't help you," said Jim, standing up. "You can help yourself, by cooperating with me, but if you don't care about going to prison for the rest of your life, that's fine by me." He picked up the file.

  "Hang on!" yelped Curly.

  "Don't answer that!" intoned the lawyer. Curly turned to him again.

  "You shut your pie hole. You couldn't even get me coffee and donuts, and there have to be a zillion donuts around this place somewhere, what with all these cops here."

  The lawyer looked hurt. "I'm advising you not to talk to this man," he said. "I already inquired about pleading to a lesser offense and I hit a brick wall. This detective can't do anything for you. He's just on a fishing expedition."

  "I hope your lawyer will be willing to bring you coffee and donuts in prison, Curly," said Harper softly. "Because nobody else will."

  He turned again, just as the door to the interrogation room opened. Harper wondered if anybody in the entire fucking world was aware of what a breach of procedure that was. You didn't just walk in on a formal interview. He was faced with a slim, athletic looking black man, in a suit. The man's hand slipped inside his suit and Harper tensed. He wasn't wearing his gun ... not for an interrogation. Displaying a firearm had been used more than once to get a confession thrown out on grounds that it was coerced.

  The man's hand came out with a small leather folder and Harper knew what that meant instantly.

  "Richard Jefferson, FBI," the man said.

  "The feds are taking this?" Harper was clearly unhappy.

  "We have primary jurisdiction in kidnappings," said the agent.

  "Yeah, if they cross state lines," said Harper.

  "The Department of Justice has determined that Mrs. Custer has special status," said the agent smoothly. "I'll take that file, please."

  He held out his hand. Harper placed the file folder in it. He wasn't actually all that upset, except for the principle of the thing. The Bureau only took cases like this that were solved, so they could claim the prosecution. It was chicken shit. But ... on the other hand, now the problem of the "mastermind" was someone else's. And all those gold diggers would be heaped on the FBI, too. He smiled.

  "Have a good time ... Dick," he said.

  "What the fuck is this?" asked Curly.

  "Shit, shit, shit," moaned his lawyer.

  * * *

  "Mommy had an adventure today!" said Lou Anne to the little boy secured firmly in the car seat behind her.

  "An adventure!" said the little boy excitedly. An observer would have heard distinct similarities between his voice and hers, and the way his repetition mimicked her original excitement.

  "Yes! When I was on my way to work, I found a hurt man and I took him to the hospital."

  "He was hurt?"

  "Uh huh. I think he was in an accident."

  "CRASH!" yelled Ambrose from the back seat, smashing his hands together.

  "Maybe you could draw him a picture when we get home, to make him feel better," suggested Lou Anne.

  "Okay," said the little boy.

  When they got home, Lou Anne went about fixing Ambrose something to eat and then checked the mail. She'd gotten the four hours of sleep that was usually all she seemed to need, and looked forward to spending time with her son.

  Ambrose, though not planned, was the light of her life now. It had been hard. The pregnancy itself had been difficult, for a number of reasons. Then trying to figure out how to be a mother had become the problem. Things just hadn't gone like she'd thought they would. She'd ached to breast feed, for example, but Ambrose had turned up his nose at her nipple. He'd drank the milk, but he'd wanted it from something he could wrap his mouth around better than what nature had presented him. Pumping her milk had been a pain too, at first, but had then turned into something much more convenient when she'd had to go back to work. She'd pumped enough for Roslynn to keep him well fed while she took care of him. If she'd had to go feed him two or three times a shift, it would have bankrupted her.

  She took him his food and saw that he was already bent over a piece of drawing paper. He was using a pencil to rough out the drawing, but had crayons ready to fill in the colors. He was making a surprisingly sophisticated drawing of a man, lying on a bed, all bandaged up. One leg was up in the air, suspended from an invisible point, and obviously had a cast on it. Ambrose surprised her like that all the time. She had no idea where he'd seen an image of a man in traction, but it had stuck in his genius little brain somewhere and had now come out to play.

  She just looked at him for a minute, her heart almost overflowing with emotion. He was so precious.

  His medium brown hair was cut in a bowl cut, because that made it easy to keep trimmed up. His skin was as fair as her own, though slightly paler. He had the same freckle pattern as she did as well-on his face, the tops of his shoulders, and along his arms. Also like her, his eyes changed color, depending on his mood and any number of other circumstances. Always some shade of blue, they were sometimes lighter and sometimes darker.

  He looked up, knowing she was there somehow. His long lashes blinked as he smiled. At four years old, the only trace of baby fat left on him was in his face. He had cheeks a chipmunk would be proud of and a little round chin below pouty lips, also like hers. Now she could see the faint freckles on his button nose and the little gap between his two front teeth. He loo
ked skinny, but she knew he had lots of muscle, to go along with a brain that routinely astonished her.

  "What's his name?" asked Ambrose.

  "Kris," said his mother.

  "With a C or a K?"

  "How did you know it could be spelled two ways?" asked Lou Anne.

  "I don't know. I just do."

  "Well this one is with a K," she said.

  She watched him scrawl the name at the bottom of the page. Then, quite possibly because he didn't know if the man in question was white, or black, or oriental, he simply colored him blue. He left the bed uncolored, but then scribbled an irregular border around the man and bed, using what appeared to be the first crayon that came to hand. She marveled at how detailed the pencil work was and how lackadaisical he was at using color. The tip of his tongue, none the less, was in the corner of his lips, as he intently finished his drawing.