It was loads of fun being back in the hospital. My playback of Fletcher’s death night became even more vivid. I walked down the hall, past the information booth, to the elevators, then rode up to the fourth floor. Instinctively, my ankle began to throb, as if the mere return to Horror Hospital brought with it an aura of pain.
I smiled once again at the irony of a doctor being murdered in his workplace. It was damn funny as long as you weren’t the doctor doing the dying. Hospitals are a good place to die, or so I’m told. As good a place as any, I guess.
I stopped briefly at the nurses’ station, where the same woman who’d been there two nights ago still sat in front of the computer terminal, punching in numbers while the green glow of the screen danced in front of her. She didn’t turn around; it was still early enough that there were visitors around. There was nobody else behind the glass with her just then, so I turned and walked down the same hall I’d been in the other night. The hair on the back of my neck crinkled.
Carts filled with plastic food warming trays lined the halls, mixed in with an occasional medication cart. Nurses buzzed around carrying sphygs, stethoscopes, clipboards. It was the busy part of the shift, before patients drifted off into oblivion and families left for the night. I was grateful for the activity and all the visitors milling around in the hallway; I’d stick out less amidst the chaos.
I casually scanned each person’s face as I walked by, trying not to be recognized, looking for the nurse in the hall, or anyone else who might have been there that night. I was sure the police had questioned everyone, but they still didn’t know what I knew. Not yet, anyway. Walking around these halls somewhere was a woman who shared the last moments of a dead man’s life. Maybe she killed him. Maybe she didn’t. Either way, I wanted to talk to her.
Only problem was, nobody I saw looked like her. I walked on. The bright red exit sign at the end of the hall still blazed like before. I struggled to recall which door I’d opened to find Fletcher. The last one, I believe. I was ten feet away from it when that door opened, and she stepped out.
We stopped dead in front of each other, our eyes meeting in a hint of recognition. She stared at me for a second, her mouth dropping open, her clipboard held tight to her chest.
“You-”
“Yeah, me,” I said. Then I realized she wasn’t the nurse I’d seen coming out of the room that night; she was the young one who found me in the hall after I’d been bashed in the head.
“Hey,” I said, holding out a hand, “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for helping me out the other night. If you hadn’t come along, I might have lain there for who knows how long.”
She lifted one hand off the clipboard, took mine loosely. Her nameplate read JACQUELYN BELL, R.N.
“No problem,” she said, her voice cautious. “How’re you feeling?”
“Lots better.” I smiled at her as pleasantly as I knew how. Maybe she could help me, but I had to warm her up a bit first. “The bump on the head’s almost gone. Say, Nurse Bell, I was actually looking for you. Is there someplace we could talk? Privately, I mean. This won’t take long. Honest.”
“Well,” she hesitated. Her voice was riddled with a deep drawl, the voice of a young girl who’d grown up in the country, gone to school in Nashville, and fallen in love with the big city. The kind of girl who drove an expensive car she couldn’t afford, lived in an apartment complex catering primarily to singles, and plastered her walls with hunk posters. “We’re pretty busy around here.”
“It’s important, Ms. Bell. You were one of the few people up here who actually knew what happened that night.”
“Wait a minute, I don’t have any idea what happened that night. I told the police that. All I did was find you and-”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Of course, you don’t know what happened with Dr. Fletcher’s murder. I’m talking about what happened after you found me in the hall.”
I paused awkwardly, trying to figure out how to articulate this. “Listen, Jacquelyn-may I call you Jacquelyn?”
She nodded her head.
“C’mon, is this room empty? Can we step in here for just a second?”
She looked around nervously, as if I were a dirty old man in a trench coat offering her a piece of candy just outside the school playground. “It would really be better if we talked alone. What I’ve got to tell you, nobody else should hear.”
That got her. Her curiosity primed, she opened the door next to us and led me into an empty hospital room. We stood in the dim glowing light of the fluorescent tube at the head of the bed.
“Jacquelyn, I’m Harry James Denton. I’m a private investigator.” I pulled out my license and flipped it open, with my impressive gold and chrome badge that I’d bought from a mail order supply house. The badge was damned impressive. And absolutely meaningless.
“A private detective?” she whispered, intrigued.
“Yes. I was up here that night trying to find Dr. Fletcher. I’d been hired by the family because they thought, well, they thought he was in some trouble. And they wanted me to help him out. Anyway, I was trying to track him down, but I was a little slow. Somebody got to him before I could, and they killed him.”
She nodded her head. “Yeah, I know that.”
“What you don’t know, though, is that I’ve got a … well, let’s say a friend, who let me take a peek at the autopsy results before they were released to the police.”
Her eyes widened, a young woman dying to be let in on something no one else knew. “Yeah?”
“Before he was killed, and just before he was killed, Dr. Fletcher had just … well, he’d just had sex, Jacquelyn.”
“No kidding,” she spewed, “you mean?” She pointed behind her.
“Yes,” I said. “In that room.”
“Wow! I knew he was a sleaze ball, but boinking somebody right here on the floor. Wow!”
“Well, you knew the kind of guy he was, right?” Talk about leading a witness.
“Oh, yeah. We all knew it. He hit on everybody. He was gutter slime.”
“Yes, Jackie, he was gutter slime. But his family loved him. Don’t ask me why. And they’ve hired me to keep digging, to try and find out who really killed him.”
“But what about the police?”
“Well, you know how the police are,” I said, fully confident that she had no earthly idea how the police are. “They have their own agenda, their own methods. Sometimes the interests of the police don’t jibe with the family’s. I’m involved in this to represent the family’s interests. To make sure they’re taken care of. You can understand that, can’t you? If something like this happened in your family, even if it was somebody you didn’t care for, you’d want your interests protected. Wouldn’t you?”
She thought for a moment. “Actually, I’ve got a cousin who reminds me a lot of Fletcher. If somebody killed him, yeah, I’d want the family protected.”
“So help me out here, Jackie. I’ve got to find whomever it was Fletcher was having an affair with, if you want to call it that. You know what’s going on up here. Who could it be?”
She backed off a couple of feet and laid the clipboard down on the bed. She was young, pretty, naive, thrilled to be the center of attention. “Well,” she cooed, “I’ve heard a few rumors.”
She was teasing me now, only I knew it, and I’m not sure she did. “Yeah,” I said, taking a smooth step toward her. Maybe she expected me to hit on her. Maybe I should. What is it about hospital rooms that make people so frisky? Then I remembered Rachel’s assertion about the amount of playing around that goes on when the patients’ backs are turned. “So what have you heard?” We were flirting now, big time.