11th hour

Chapter 92

I brought Martha with me to breakfast at a great neighborhood bistro out in Cole Valley called Zazie. Zazie had scrumptious food and a patio garden out back. We came through the front door and the hostess told me she was sorry, but dogs weren’t allowed.

“Martha is a police dog,” I said.

“Is she really?”

The hostess held on tight to her menus, looked down at my small, shaggy border collie, and showed by her dubious expression that she couldn’t believe Martha was in the K-9 Corps.

I’ve got to hand it to Martha. She looked up, made direct eye contact with the hostess, and conveyed professionalism and sharp canine wisdom with her deep brown eyes.

I backed her up.

“See?” I said, holding up my badge. “I’m a cop. She’s my deputy dog.”

“Okay. She’s a drug sniffer, I guess. I shouldn’t touch her, right? Kinda cute, isn’t she? Should I bring her some water? Sparkling or flat?”

I had my first grin of the week, then had another when I saw Claire waiting for me at a table at the back of the long, narrow garden enclosed by ivy-covered walls.

I hugged her. She hugged me. I just couldn’t get enough of that hug. When we finally broke apart, Claire bent and kissed Martha on the nose, making my little pal all waggle-tailed and squirmy. Martha really hearts Claire.

We sat at the nice long table in the corner of the patio, and Claire moved her newspapers out of the way — but not quick enough.

“Hey, let me see those.”

I read the headlines.

The Post: “Another revenge killing at Zeus,” by Jason Blayney. The Chronicle: “Suspect held in House of Heads mystery,” by Cindy Thomas.

“It’s true: you can run but you can’t hide.” I handed the papers back to Claire, who said, “So what’s the latest with you and Joe?”

“You go first, butterfly. I can’t talk until after I’ve had hot chocolate and gingerbread pancakes.”

“I haven’t been to bed,” Claire said. “Can you tell?” Now that she mentioned it, I realized that she was wearing scrubs.

I said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Where should I start? Yesterday, seven p.m. We’ve got a full house, of course. Among my other patients, I’ve got a seventeen-year-old boy on the table. Contact muzzle stamp on his temple and soot in the entrance wound. It’s a clear suicide, but his parents aren’t accepting it. Everything I say, they come back with ‘No, Davey would never do that.’”

“The doors show any signs of a break-in?”

“I asked the same thing. They said, ‘No, but maybe someone came in through the window.’ He’s got GSR on his hands, Lindsay. I took a sample for testing, just to be safe, but the windows are locked from the inside. It’s obvious and it’s heartbreaking — and then, here comes Mr. Dickenson.

“He’s got a history of high blood pressure; he starts to feel lethargic and blacks out. His wife gets him to the hospital, and he’s two minutes from a CT scan, which would confirm he’s having a stroke, but no, he codes in the hallway.

“So now Mr. Dickenson is coming in through the back door of the morgue and I have to do an autopsy he wouldn’t have needed if he’d coded two minutes later. Meanwhile, Davey’s family won’t leave, still insisting that their son was murdered.”

We took a time-out to order breakfast from our waitress, then Claire picked up where she’d left off.

“So, I do Mr. Dickenson’s post. I can find nothing wrong with his brain. Hey, where’s the stroke? So I keep going. He didn’t get hit with a stroke. I find a dissecting aortic aneurysm. See, I learned something. Again. Never jump to conclusions.

“About then, midnight or so, Edmund calls. Rosie is running a really high fever. I say, ‘Take her to the hospital. Go. Now,’ and before I hang up with him, here come new patients through the ambulance bay. Two cars in a head-on collision on Henry, both drivers are DOA.”

Claire’s phone buzzed on the table and spun like a june bug on its back. She looked at the faceplate, shut off the ringer.

“How’s Rosie?” I asked as the waitress brought our coffee.

“She’s fine. Temperature back to normal. Edmund said she’s sleeping now. Both of us panicked, and that’s what you do when you have a little one — as you are about to find out, girlfriend. After the check, I’m outta here, and I’m not going back to work anytime soon. Swear to God. Now, sweetie. Talk to me about Joe.”

I put down my coffee cup, said to my friend, “He’s called me a hundred times and apparently he’s sleeping in his car, sometimes right outside the apartment. I haven’t said a word to him since I found out about his girlfriend. Not one fucking word.”