Tinkerton sat silently, staring at me, his eyes turning cold and malevolent.
“
I threw that one in blind, like tossing a hand grenade over a high wall to see what it might flush out. This time it flushed out plenty. Tinkerton came out of his chair sputtering. “Jimmy Santorini? You fool! What have you done?”
“Not much, not yet, but I will. See, for an amateur I catch on pretty fast.” I rose and held the white paper bag in front of me with two fingers, like you'd hold a mousetrap with a dead rat dangling from it, and backed toward the door. “I'm leaving now. Don't try to stop me. If you do, you'll have a bigger mess than you could ever imagine.”
That was when my curiosity got the best of me. I looked over at his little framed shrine and asked, “By the way, Ralph, “Zero Defects?” What's that supposed to mean? Some secret jarhead fraternity?
“It means we don't make mistakes. We can't afford any. And we don't tolerate people who make them.”
“Well, you just made a real big one,” I told him as I opened the door and let it swing wide. Edna and the two associate bouncers stood outside, looking very serious and very nervous. I paused in the doorway and turned back toward Tinkerton. “See ya later, Ralph. Let's do lunch again some time. Ciao.”
Holding the bag high, I walked out between the Troll and one of the bouncers. I dropped the paper Bouncing Bagel hat on her desk, tossed the white apron over the first partition I passed, and walked straight through the office to the elevators. I hit the first floor lobby in full stride. As I passed the security desk, I reached out and carefully placed the white paper bag with the bottle of Dr. Brown's on the security guard's desk.
“A delivery for Mr. Tinkerton on fourteen,” I smiled. “Can you see it gets there? Thanks.”
As I passed through the revolving doors, I wasn't sure what I had accomplished by going up there. Probably not very much, but I had rattled their cage and I felt damned good about doing it. I was alive and felt positively liberated for the first time in months.
A piece of cake, I concluded. And, I concluded one more thing, too. This snake had a head and that head was Ralph McKinley Tinkerton.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Personal preferences?
I was on a roll and decided to go for the knock out. The Varner Clinic was located in the small town of Delancy, Ohio, about five miles north of Greene's Funeral Home. How convenient, I thought. It was like one-stop-dying. In L. A., they could add a Brother Bob's New Age Feel-Good Church, a drive-thru liquor store with an ATM, and sell franchises, but things weren't nearly that progressive here in the Great Outback of Central Ohio.
Driving through town, Delancy appeared fairly prosperous. It was the County seat and featured a quaint ivy- covered college campus, a block or two of renovated Victorian shops, the courthouse, and no doubt the offices of that law enforcement giant Sheriff Virgil Dannmeyer. The town stretched out in each direction from the crossroads of Anderson Road and Main Street. Looking at the fronts of the stores, they specialized in antiques, residential real estate, books, and small restaurants that catered to the college crowd with vegetarian food, pizza, and too much coffee. I drove both streets and stopped at a BP station where I asked the attendant where I could find the Varner Clinic. He gave me a very odd look.
“East on Anderson Road about a mile. You can't miss it,” he chuckled. “If that's where you really want to go.”
He was right. I couldn't. The building was a sprawling low-tech affair that someone had cobbled together from painted cinder blocks, narrow casement windows, and the occasional panel of cedar siding. It had a center core with a peaked roof, and three long, one-story wings that thrust out to the left, right, and rear. The building stood on a slight rise well-back from the road behind a gravel parking lot. A large, well-manicured lawn, no doubt somebody's old bean field, dressed-up with tall hedges and curved flower beds of roses and geraniums, surrounded it. Beyond the nearly empty parking lot stood a dense buffer of big oak and pine trees.
It was about 2:30 when I turned into the clinic's driveway and parked the Bronco in the “Visitor's Parking” space. I knew I shouldn't be doing this. When I left Tinkerton's office I should have driven straight to the State Police Headquarters, the State Attorney General, or even the FBI, but I couldn't. After the stunt with the delivery bags, Edna the secretary, and confronting Tinkerton in his own office, I felt I was invincible. I'd taken on Dannmeyer, Greene, and Tinkerton and they hadn't laid a glove on me. All I needed was one solid chunk of evidence to wrap it up and tie a bow around it. I figured I'd find it in the Varner Clinic, since that was where the bodies started going cold. Besides, I was two steps ahead of them. There was nothing these clowns could throw at me I couldn't handle now. I was hot. What could Tinkerton do to me? A lawyer? Nothing.
By the same token, what could I do to him? The sad truth was, not very much. The obituaries? The newspaper stories? They were interesting, but not nearly enough to get an indictment much less a conviction. Without hard evidence or one of them talking, the State Police, the State Attorney General, and the FBI would laugh me out of town. Go up against a trio of local, stand-up guys like Ralph Tinkerton, Lawrence Greene, and Sheriff Virgil Dannmeyer on their home turf? The Michigan football team stood a better chance of getting a break here in Columbus than I would. Knowing they were dirty and proving it would be two very different things.
That's why I took a shot at Varner. He was a doctor, an M.D., for Chris’ sake. All the ones I knew were invariably risk averse and not nearly as smart as they thought they were once they got outside medicine. Ever watched a doctor invest in real estate? A bar, an office building, or a trendy restaurant? They could lose money faster in oil well scams, cattle, or thoroughbred horses than they could possibly make it. Got something you want to unload? Find a doctor. Better still, find a group of them. You can't lose. Yep, Anias P. Varner was their weak link, particularly if I could get him off balance and keep him that way. If he stonewalled me, I could try the State Police or give it up and turn the Bronco east, but I had to give it one last try.
The exterior of the clinic looked cheap and poorly put together. The siding was grooved, plywood paneling and the brick accents looked to be that cheap, glued-on, fiberglass stuff. As I walked across the lot, I saw a six-foot high chain link fence running around the perimeter of the clinic grounds. It was tucked discreetly into the wall of oak and pine trees and painted black to be nearly invisible. It was the glint of sun on the white electric insulators told me the fence was there and it was carrying some juice. There was also a row of small security cameras tucked up under the eaves of the building. Their overlapping fields of vision covered the entire perimeter, sides and rear. Interesting. With an electric fence and cameras, were they trying to keep people from breaking in, or trying to keep them from breaking out?
The clinic's front doors were those new pneumatic, motion sensor, no-hands models that pop open when you get within five feet. Inside, they had decorated the clinic's small lobby with the taste and sensitivity you'd find in the waiting room of a car wash. No Ethan Allen here, the walls were a practical light beige. There was thin blue carpeting, cheap faux-leather chairs, and framed prints of Impressionist paintings from Wal-Mart on the walls. The chairs looked empty and unused, arranged in small, intimate groupings. The clinic must be real private, I thought, so private that the patients didn't get very many visitors.
In the center of the far wall, I saw another set of double doors. They must be the entrance to the clinic itself. Through the small panes of glass, I could see a long, brightly lit corridor beyond. In the ceiling above the doors was another security camera, pointed right at me. I smiled. There was no sneaking up on these folks.
To my left was a large, U-shaped reception desk with a very large, blond-haired woman holding court behind it. She was dressed in a white nurse's uniform and she eyed me up and down like a St. Bernard in heat. It wasn't that she was unattractive, but she was far too heavily made up for my taste. And way too big. With her broad shoulders, long arms, and round, rosy- cheeks, she could easily fill the heavy weight slot on the Russian women's wrestling team.
I smiled. She smiled. “Hi, I wonder if I could see Dr. Varner.”
“And, you have an appointment?” She cocked her head coyly to the side and asked in a deep, husky voice.
“An appointment? Uh, no, I'm afraid I don't.”
