machines. There was a big TV there, too, mounted up near the ceiling and on mute. Somebody was playing a baseball game somewhere, but the uniforms didn’t look familiar.
The waiting room contained over a dozen people. About half of them were sitting. The other half were at the vending machines or milling around.
Jody broke stride in surprise.
Among those milling around was a familiar figure in a chalk-stripe gray suit, white shirt, yellow silk tie.
Jack Enders.
And he was looking right at Jody.
“What are you doing here?” Enders asked. He seemed not to know whether to smile or frown. Some of the others in the waiting room seemed to have stopped what they were doing and were staring at Jody. Waiting.
“I got this idea I might be able to do the firm some good if I dropped by here and talked to Mildred Dash.”
“Do the firm some good?”
Jody shrugged. “I guess it sounds crazy.”
Enders looked dumbfounded and tentatively angry, as if someone had unexpectedly punched him on the arm and then run away. He didn’t quite have this sorted out yet. “Jesus, does it ever sound crazy! You’re an intern, Jody.”
“I’m trying hard to use my initiative and become something more than that. I thought that was one of the purposes of the internship.”
Jody was working intently at this line of bullshit, but it didn’t seem to be impressing Enders.
“To begin with,” Enders said, “you wouldn’t be able to see Mildred Dash anyway because this part of the hospital is the intensive care unit. Almost everything is kept sterile beyond this point. You can’t even leave flowers.”
“I tried to buy some downstairs,” Jody lied.
Enders blew out a long breath and shook his head. What, oh what, were they going to do with Jody?
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “Mildred Dash is no longer in Intensive Care.”
Jody felt a stirring of cautious hope. “She’s been released?”
“She left the hospital two hours ago at the request of her family and under supervision of Hospice. I hadn’t known that when, like you, I came here to visit her.”
Jody knew her bullshit was now drawing bullshit in return. She cocked her head to the side and fixed Enders with a stare. “And?”
He put on a long face. “I got a call ten minutes ago saying she died shortly after returning home.”
77
R enz had his assistant send in Jim Tennyson immediately.
News of Olivia’s death weighed heavily on Renz’s overworked heart. And alongside it, anger.
Tennyson was in undercover garb and looked like a dope peddler. He had a two-day growth of beard, greasy unkempt hair, and was wearing grimy jeans and a black T-shirt. He also had on one of those vests with a couple of dozen pockets. Everything looked as if it had just been bought at Goodwill. He was wearing a long face that didn’t fool Renz.
“I figured you’d want to see me,” he said to Renz, “after I heard.”
“Where’d you hear?” Renz asked.
“Word gets around on the street. ’Specially about somebody like Olivia. She was one of Harry Primo’s stable.” Tennyson shrugged in his many-pocketed vest, as if to say, These things happen. It made Renz mad, this blase attitude toward someone he… something that had been his.
“Why would you think Primo had her killed?”
“Christ, I didn’t say I thought that. Did somebody have her killed, you think?”
“We both know she was killed,” Renz said.
“In a legal sense? As in homicide?”
“That’s a good question.”
Renz had given it some thought. Olivia had been sleeping with the police commissioner, which had been good for Olivia. And in fact good for Tennyson, who was holding the information over Renz’s head so he could convince Renz to use his influence to Tennyson’s advantage. Olivia-Renz had finally come to accept-had gone deeper and deeper into heroin and had been getting mouthy and untrustworthy. She’d become an increasing danger to the status quo. Tennyson had known that. So had Olivia’s employer, Harry Primo. Love being blind, Renz hadn’t.
The way Olivia had died made Tennyson’s information even more potentially damaging to Renz, who could easily fall into the category of suspect. And of course Primo might have killed her to silence her.
Renz knew he hadn’t killed Olivia, so almost surely it was one of the other two men. Or, unlikely as it seemed, her overdose really had been accidental.
So here Renz sat, uncertain.
One thing was for sure. It was in all three men’s interest that Olivia’s affair with Renz should fade into the past with Olivia.
“It’s a damned shame, what happened to her,” Tennyson said. Pushing already, as if he was clean and without motive in Olivia’s death. He’d catch on soon enough that the game was mutually assured destruction. That’s what would tamp down the danger of the dead woman in the hotel room.
Renz understood that Olivia’s death would remain a mystery. Everyone involved had to understand that. Everyone but her killer.
“Her death should go down as accidental,” he said, not looking directly at Tennyson.
“Wasn’t that what happened? Women like that, sometimes they just get enough of the business, and there’s no other way for them to quit. Shit bums like Primo see to that.”
“That’s God’s truth,” Renz said. “What’s Harry Primo think of all this?”
“Not much one way or the other. Primo loses an Olivia or two every year.”
Renz suppressed a surge of grief and anger. “I suppose.” It was amazing, he thought, the way the truth could be bent and the past revised.
“I was thinking it’d be nice to work plainclothes.” Tennyson smiled. “I’m getting tired of dressing like a bum and not showering. Of course, nobody’s ever completely clean.”
“Nobody’s ever out of danger.”
“That’s not quite the same thing.”
“I’ll see about the plainclothes assignment,” Renz said. “Over in Queens. Plenty of white-collar investigations there.”
“That’d be fine. Maybe you could replace me with Weaver. I been seeing her around lately, out of uniform, almost like she was tailing me. She’d make a great decoy, playing the whore. If you could keep her from actually screwing the suspects.”
“It’s a thought.”
“I was onto her from the beginning and she knows nothing,” Tennyson said. “I guarantee that.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“For all of us.” Tennyson hitched his thumbs into his vest and moved toward the door. Before going out, he turned. “Sorry again about Olivia.”
Renz didn’t move for a while, thinking about Tennyson. His suggestion about Weaver was worth considering. Weaver as a decoy hooker. Like typecasting.
78
