King City

Chapter sixteen

They took Ella to a booth in the back, got her a cup of coffee, and began by asking her for basic details, like her address and phone number, and her family history.

In Wade’s experience, going over the dull, mundane details had a calming effect on emotional individuals and helped them focus.

Ella told them that she’d lived in Darwin Gardens all her life. She and her three children lived in a bungalow in Belle Gardens, a few blocks from Mrs. Copeland’s place. Her children each had a different father, none of whom stuck around, which she saw as a blessing, since they were all shitbags, anyway.

She got by on welfare and by doing laundry for single men in the neighborhood she called “useless trash too dumb to know how to wash their own socks,” not unlike her own sons.

“Glory’s older brother is in prison for armed robbery. Her younger brother is in the gangs, so it’s only a matter of time before he’s in prison himself or in the dirt. But Glory isn’t like them,” Ella said, sitting across from Wade and Charlotte, who took notes. “She’s a good girl. A hard worker. Cleaning houses in Havenhurst every day and offices downtown every night.”

“When did she leave the house yesterday?” Wade asked.

“I don’t know, maybe eight. She took the bus to clean for the Burdetts. They’re rich folks, good people, bought her some nice clothes so sometimes she can work at their parties.”

“But you don’t actually know if she did or not,” Charlotte said.

“I heard her leave, but I didn’t get up,” Ella said. “I wish I had.”

“When does she usually get home?”

“After she’s done cleaning the offices, around midnight,” Ella said. “But she didn’t come home last night.”

“Has that ever happened before?” Charlotte asked.

Ella gave Charlotte a hard look. “She always comes home. She’s a good girl.”

“I’m sure she was,” Wade said. “But even good girls have boyfriends.”

Ella shook her head adamantly. “I told you, Glory is a good girl. She was getting out. She wasn’t supposed to die here.”

She looked down into her coffee cup and started to cry.

Wade decided not to press Ella any further for now. He could circle back to her later if he needed more information. So he expressed his condolences and promised to do everything within his power to find out what happened to her daughter.

The two officers got up and walked out, leaving her with her sorrow.

Wade let Charlotte drive again. It gave him more time to think.

“Did Fallon tell Mrs. Littleton to talk with us?” Charlotte asked.

“She wouldn’t have spoken to us without his OK. I get the feeling nothing goes on down here without it.”

“Except the women getting killed,” Charlotte said. “Do you think he really cares about them?”

“I know he cares about his authority being ignored and the message it sends if he lets anyone get away with it.”

“The same could be said about you.”

“Maybe that’s why Duke and I get along so well,” Wade said.

A yellow taxicab sped past them in the opposite direction, heading toward downtown. The light on his roof indicated that he had a fare, but his backseat appeared to be empty.

“He’s speeding,” Charlotte said.

“I don’t blame him,” Wade said.

“It’s brazen,” she said. “He sped right by us and we’re the police.”

“The law says he has to accept a fare to anywhere in the city. But now that he’s dropped off his passenger he wants to get out of here alive and with all of his money.”

“So we aren’t going to give him a ticket?”

“Nope,” he said.

“Maybe we should give him a police escort out of the neighborhood.”

“That would be overkill,” he said.

“Glad to know we’re drawing the line somewhere,” she said.

Something fluttered at the edge of his peripheral vision. He looked out the windshield and saw a woman staggering across the road, right in front of their car.

Wade yanked the steering wheel hard, sending the car up onto the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding the woman.

Charlotte slammed on the brakes and they stopped, a few inches short of hitting a streetlight, the car straddling the asphalt and the sidewalk.

Wade bolted from the car and rushed over to the woman. She was in a hospital gown that was hanging open in the back, exposing her naked, bruised body. Her feet were bare, calloused, and dirty, her knees scraped and bleeding. She was easily in her sixties and, from the looks of it, a homeless person.

“Ma’am?” Wade asked. “What happened to you?”

She looked through him as if he weren’t there. “Here, kitty?kitty. I’ve got tuna for you.”

Wade waved his hand in front of her eyes. She noticed him now.

“Yes, I’ll supersize that,” she said.

Charlotte joined him. “Should I call for a paramedic?”

Wade gently took the woman’s right hand and examined a yellow plastic band around her wrist. There were some numbers on it, the day’s date, the name “Jane Doe,” and the name of the hospital.

“No,” Wade said. “We’re taking her to Community General ourselves.”

“Blake Memorial is closer,” she said. “Community General is at least ten miles from here.”

“But just a short cab ride away,” Wade said.

He led Jane slowly by the arm back to the squad car and helped her into the backseat.

Community General was on the north end of town, where downtown slowly dissolved into Crescent Heights, a recently gentrified neighborhood of restored Victorian homes, small cafes and boutiques, art galleries, and several prestigious interior design and architecture firms.

The hospital was saved from bankruptcy and the wrecking ball by community activists eager to preserve its art deco architecture and to ensure that an urgent?care facility would continue to serve their neighborhood. Wade suspected that their idea of urgent care was a collagen injection to puff up a lip before a date.

The entire way there, Jane Doe babbled incoherently about grout, Pat Sajak, watermelon seeds, flatulence, and a hundred other things.

They pulled up to the ambulance entrance. Charlotte got out, found a wheelchair, and brought it to the car, and Wade helped Jane into it.

Wade marched into the ER and Charlotte wheeled Jane in behind him.

The ER looked more like an Apple Store than a hospital, all the surfaces gleaming and white, aglow from hidden lights. Flat?screen monitors and high?tech devices that Wade didn’t recognize were everywhere. The staff’s lab coats and scrubs all fitted as if they’d been tailored by fashion designers.

The young nurse at the front desk had the smile of a stewardess and the body of a fashion model. Her smile became a scowl when she saw Jane.

“She’s back already?” the nurse asked.

“You know this woman?” Wade replied.

“This woman doesn’t know this woman,” the nurse said. “She’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

“Then why did you release her?” Wade asked.

“You’ll have to ask Dr. Eddington,” she said and paged the doctor.

The doctor arrived a few moments later. His hands were in the pockets of his lab coat, his silk tie perfectly knotted, his sparse comb?over covering his bald spot with surgical efficiency. His eyes narrowed behind his octagonal glasses and his face puckered into a scolding sneer as he caught sight of Jane.

“Oh God,” Eddington said. “When will you people learn?”

“Which people are you referring to?” Charlotte asked tightly.

“You people,” Eddington said, waving his hand at Wade and Charlotte. “This is a hospital, not an elder?care facility.”

“She needs medical attention,” Charlotte said.

Jane bolted up from her wheelchair. “From Miami Beach, it’s The Jackie Gleason Show!”

Charlotte gently eased her back into her seat.

“She’s had medical attention,” Eddington said. “You people brought her in here three days ago. Apparently, she took a tumble in Riverfront Park. Her injuries were minor, nothing more than simple scrapes. We treated them and waited for someone to show up to claim her.”

“She’s not a piece of baggage,” Wade said.

“We made every effort to locate family or friends,” Eddington said. “And you people were no help. In the meantime, we fed her, cleaned her, and gave her a bed for three days. When she asked to leave, we had no authority to keep her.”

“You could have had her committed,” Wade said.

“She seemed perfectly lucid at the time.”

“Like she is now,” Wade said and gestured to her. Jane was playing a make?believe violin and humming to herself.

“She wasn’t a danger to herself or to others,” Eddington said.

But she was to the hospital’s bottom line.

Community General had barely avoided bankruptcy once already, so Wade was sure that the employees were under enormous pressure to cut costs. The staff knew that they would never be reimbursed for the medical care she’d been given or the bed that she’d occupied. They didn’t want to risk the potential of any further costly involvement with her that might arise from committing her to a mental institution. And since no one seemed to care about her anyway, there was a simple, low?cost solution to their problem.

“So you called her a cab,” Wade said.

“I even paid for it out of my own pocket,” Eddington said. “As a courtesy.”

“Aren’t you sweet,” Charlotte said.

Eddington shot her a nasty look.

“Where did you tell the cab to take her?” Wade asked.

“I didn’t,” Eddington said. “I gave the cab driver thirty dollars and figured that would take her wherever she wanted to go in King City. You’d have to ask her where she told him to go.”

Eddington turned to walk away. Charlotte stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Back to work,” Eddington said. “I’ve got patients.”

“And she’s one of them,” Charlotte said, pointing at Jane. “She’s suffering from some kind of dementia.”

Eddington snorted. “So now you people are doctors as well as police officers?”

Charlotte got right in his face, their noses practically touching. “If you call us ‘you people’ again, you’re going to need a fucking doctor.”

Wade bit back a smile.

“We are a hospital, Officer,” Eddington said tightly, taking two steps back from her. “We are not an Alzheimer’s treatment facility or an old?folks home.”

“The law requires you to make arrangements for post?release care before discharging any patients,” Charlotte said. “We didn’t find any medications or paperwork on her.”

“Obviously, she lost them,” Eddington said.

“Here’s what I think,” Wade said. “You stuffed a senile old woman wearing nothing but a hospital gown into a cab and told the driver to dump her in Darwin Gardens instead of back in Riverfront Park so she’d be Blake Memorial’s problem if anything else happened to her. You didn’t want to incur any more costs. The mistake you made was forgetting to snip off her wristband.”

Eddington shot an involuntary glance at the nurse, who immediately looked away. She was in for some hell once Wade left. The doctor focused his attention back on Wade.

“She wasn’t ill, she asked to leave, and we discharged her,” Eddington said. “What you think is irrelevant.”

“She was staggering through the streets, incoherent and disoriented, and was nearly run over, which makes her a danger to herself and to others. So you’re going to take care of her.” Wade stepped close to Eddington and lowered his voice to a whisper that only the doctor could hear. “And if you abandon her in Darwin Gardens again, I’ll pick you up, put your naked ass in a hospital gown, and leave you there too.”

Wade turned and walked out. Charlotte followed. They got into the squad car and they sat there for a moment in silence, Wade in the driver’s seat, thinking things through.

Darwin Gardens had become the city’s dumping ground for unwanted souls-whether they were homeless, criminal, delusional, or in his case, disgraced.

Wade knew it was why he was there, and Charlotte was smart enough to know that’s why she was too. There was no place for a smart, liberal, African?American woman in Chief Reardon’s department. Billy was probably the only one who didn’t know why he was there.

It gave Wade and Charlotte, and even Billy, a kinship with the people in Darwin Gardens. They were all discards.

“My mom is a lawyer,” Charlotte said. “I’ll ask her to look out for that old lady.”

“She’d do that?”

“She would for me,” Charlotte said.

“You can’t make it personal every time you meet someone who needs help,” Wade said.

“It’s just this once,” she said.

“It’s your second day,” Wade said. “You’re going to see more and you’re going to see worse.”

“Aren’t you optimistic,” she said.

“I’m just saying that it’s possible to care too much in this job.”

“It’s better than not caring enough,” she said, glancing back at the emergency room.

On the way back to Darwin Gardens, they stopped at a hardware store so Wade could buy some motion?activated outdoor floodlights.

While he was inside, Charlotte called her mom, who agreed to represent Jane Doe, and she talked to her father, the shrink, who offered to do a psychiatric evaluation of the old woman and have her committed to a mental hospital for treatment if it was necessary.

Charlotte told him all of that once he returned to the car. How convenient, Wade thought. One?stop service for the needy, the homeless, and the senile. He wondered how many times she’d make that call in the next few weeks and when her parents would finally stop answering the phone.

She motioned to the outdoor lighting that he’d bought.

“What’s all that for?” she asked.

“Mrs. Copeland,” he said, and then told her about arresting Terrill in the alley. “I’m going to swap her the bullhorn for the lights and install them over the alley. It will keep the junkies away.”

“Aren’t you the same man who just told me not to make it personal every time I meet someone who needs help?”

“It’s only a couple of lights.”

“You’re right. It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s not like you’re moving into her neighborhood.”

They drove back to the station in silence, Charlotte smiling to herself. She knew she’d won that round and that Wade knew it too.