Myron called Esperanza. “Any word?”
“The hospital won’t say anything over the phone.”
“Okay, call me if you learn anything. I should be there in another ten, fifteen.”
It was fifteen. He pulled into the hospital’s full and rather complicated lot. He circled a few times and then just figured the hell with it. He double-parked, blocking someone in, and left his keys. He ran toward the entrance, past the huddled smokers in the hospital scrubs, and into the ER. He stopped at the front desk, three people back, bouncing from one foot to the other like a six-year-old needing to go potty.
Finally, it was his turn. He told her why he was here. The woman behind the desk gave him the implacable “seen it all” face.
“Are you family?” she asked in a tone that would need technological help to be any flatter.
“I’m her agent and a close friend.”
A practiced sigh. This, Myron could see, was going to be a waste of time. His eyes started darting around the room, looking for Lex or Suzze’s mother or something. In the far corner, he was surprised to see Loren Muse, head county investigator. Myron had met Muse when a teenager named Aimee Biel vanished a few years back. Muse had her little cop pad out. She was talking to someone hidden behind the corner and taking notes.
“Muse?”
She spun toward him. Myron moved to his right. Whoa. He could see now that she’d been interviewing Lex. Lex looked beyond awful, all color drained from his face, his eyes staring up at nothing, his body leaning limply against the wall. Muse snapped the pad closed and started toward Myron. She was a short woman, barely five feet tall, and Myron was six-four. She stopped in front of him, looked up, and met his eye. Myron did not like what he saw.
“How is Suzze?” Myron asked.
“She’s dead,” Muse said.
17
It was a heroin overdose.
Muse explained it to Myron as he stood next to her, vision blurred, shaking his head no over and over again. When he was finally able to speak, he asked, “What about the baby?”
“Alive,” Muse said. “Delivered via caesarean. A boy. He seems fine, but he’s in the neonatal intensive care unit.”
Myron tried to feel some kind of relief at this news, but the stunned and numb still won out. “Suzze wouldn’t have killed herself, Muse.”
“Might have been accidental.”
“She wasn’t using.”
Muse nodded in that way cops do when they don’t want to argue. “We’ll investigate.”
“She was clean.”
Another patronizing nod.
“Muse, I’m telling you.”
“What do you want me to say here, Myron? We’ll investigate, but right now all signs point to a drug overdose. There was no forced entry. No signs of a struggle. She also had a pretty rich history of drug use.”
“History. As in her past. She was having a baby.”
“Hormones,” Muse said. “They make us do stupid things.”
“Come on, Muse. How many women eight months pregnant commit suicide?”
“And how many drug addicts really go clean forever and ever?”
He thought about his darling sister-in-law, Kitty, another addict who couldn’t stay clean. Exhaustion started to weigh down his bones. Oddly-or maybe not-he started to think about his fiancée. Beautiful Terese. He suddenly wanted to walk away from this, right now, just give it up. He wanted to chuck it all. Screw the truth. Screw justice. Screw Kitty and Brad and Lex and whoever else and just grab the first flight back to Angola and be with the one person who could make all the madness disappear.
“Myron?”
He focused in on Muse.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
“You mean Suzze?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He wasn’t sure himself. Maybe it was a classic case of needing it to be real, of needing-and God, he hated that word-some sort of closure. He thought about Suzze’s bouncing ponytail when she played tennis. He thought about her posing for those hilarious La-La-Latte ads and her easy laugh and the way she chewed gum on the court and the look on her face when she asked him to be the godfather.
“I owe her,” he said.
“Are you going to investigate this?”
He shook his head. “The case is all yours.”
“There’s no case right now. She’s a drug overdose.”
They headed back down the corridor and stopped in front of a door in the delivery wing. Muse said, “Wait here.”
She slipped inside. When she came back out, she said, “The hospital’s pathologist is with her. He, uh, cleaned her up, you know, after the caesarean.”
“Okay.”
“I’m doing this,” Muse said, “because I still owe you a favor.”
He nodded. “Consider it paid in full.”
“I don’t want it paid in full. I want you to be honest with me.”
“Okay.”
She opened the door and led him into the room. The man standing next to the gurney-Myron assumed that he was the pathologist-wore scrubs and stood perfectly still. Suzze was laid out on her back. Death does not make you look younger or older or peaceful or agitated. Death makes you look empty, hollow, like everything has fled, like a house suddenly abandoned. Death turns a body into a thing-a chair, a filing cabinet, a rock. Dust to dust, right? Myron wanted to buy all the rationales, all the stuff about life going on, that an echo of Suzze would live on in her child in the nursery down the hall, but right now it wasn’t happening.
“So do you know anyone who’d want her dead?” Muse asked.
He offered up the easy answer: “No.”
“The husband seems pretty shook up, but I’ve seen husbands who could channel Olivier after killing their wives. Anyway, Lex claims he flew in on a private jet from Adiona Island. When he got there, they were wheeling her out. We can check his time frame.”
Myron said nothing.
“They own the building-Lex and Suzze,” Muse went on. “There are no reports yet of anyone going in or out, but the security is pretty lax in that place. We might look into it more if we feel the need.”
Myron approached the body. He put his hand on Suzze’s cheek. Nothing. Like putting your hand on a chair, a file cabinet. “Who called it in?”
“That part seems a bit unusual,” Muse said.
“How so?”
“A man with a Spanish accent made the call from the phone in her penthouse. When the paramedics got there, he was gone. We figured it was probably an illegal working in the building and didn’t want to get in trouble.” That made no sense, but Myron didn’t want to get into that. Muse added, “Could be someone who was shooting up with her and didn’t want trouble. Or even her dealer. Again, we’ll look into it.”
Myron turned to the pathologist. “Can I look at her arms?”
The pathologist glanced over at Muse. Muse nodded. The pathologist pulled back the sheet. Myron checked the veins. “Where did she shoot up?” he asked.
The pathologist pointed at a bruise in the crook of her elbow.
“You see some old tracks here?” Myron asked.
“Yes,” the pathologist said. “Very old.”
“Anything else fresh?”
“Not on the arms, no.”
Myron looked at Muse. “That’s because she hasn’t used drugs in years.”
“People shoot up in all different spots,” Muse said. “Even in her heyday, what with wearing tennis outfits, rumor has it Suzze shot up in, er, less conspicuous places.”
“So let’s check that.”
Muse shook her head. “What’s the point?”
“I want you to see that she hadn’t been using.”
The pathologist cleared his throat. “There’s no need,” he said. “I already did a cursory examination of the body. I did indeed find some old scarring there, near the tattoo on her upper thigh, but there’s nothing fresh.”