White sister

Chapter 31

Where the Hell are you, Dad?" Chooch sounded angry over the speaker on my cell phone.

"Son, is Lex still there?"

"Yeah, but the other doctors all had to go."

"Put him on."

"Where are you?"

"Put him on, Chooch. Stop arguing with me." Anger flashed. Why was I taking it out on him?

After a few seconds, Luther came on the line. "Shane?"

"Luther, I'm sorry I missed the meeting."

"There were two cops here. They had a warrant for your arrest." His voice was guarded now.

"I think that was just an Internal Affairs charge sheet, not a warrant," I said. "It's a interdepartmental document. They have to serve you with a notice of the I. A. complaint. It's just their way of trying to get me to stop looking into this. But I can't stop, Luther, and you wouldn't, either."

He didn't say anything, so I asked, "Are the cops still there?" "No."

It wasn't easy for him, given all the pressure coming from the chorus of black activists. I knew what they were accusing us of on TV.

"I didn't kill David Slade," I finally said. "Neither did Alexa."

"It's not my job to judge you, Shane. My job is to bring Alexa out of this coma."

"Will you still meet with me?"

"You mean become an accessory after the fact in a murder?" he said coldly.

"Luther, I know this isn't fair. I know what I'm asking is tough."

"I owe you for Levonda, but let's be straight. Even though you went way beyond what was normal there, you were still only doing your job. I didn't ask you to put your life's work in jeopardy by harboring a murder suspect."

I wasn't technically a murder suspect. Last time I checked, I was just a Person of Interest, but that was quibbling.

"Alexa needs surgery," Luther said. "The blood flow to parts of her cerebral cortex is low. In time, brain cells will die. I've scheduled her for Monday at ten a. M. This is a risky one, Shane. She's not too strong, and she's not responding to stimuli. Frankly, I have my doubts, but if we're going to have any chance at all of bringing her out of this, I need to go in and fix some things. As her next of kin, I need your signature on a surgical consent form. I had it with me and was going to get you to sign it at our seven-thirty meeting but you didn't show."

"Luther, I can meet with you now. I can set this up so it will be clean, so nobody will know. Put Chooch back on."

A moment later, Chooch was on the line. "Yeah?" he said.

"You know that place where we had dinner after the Servite football game last year?"

"Yeah."

"I'm worried about the department putting a cell phone track on this number, so don't say the name of the restaurant. Meet me there in forty-five minutes. Try to make sure you're not followed and bring Luther."

After I hung up, I headed toward the Valley. I knew there was a BOLO out on me, and any patrol car that spotted my plate could pick me up. To avoid that, I drove on residential side streets across the Valley, and forty minutes later, pulled into the parking lot at Dupar's on Thousand Oaks Boulevard. I locked my car and went through the back door of the restaurant into a flurry of activity inside the busy kitchen.

"Is the manager here?" I asked a harried waitress who was retrieving orders.

"That guy," she said, pointing out a bald man in his forties, wearing dark slacks and a company shirt with dupar's inscribed over his heart.

I walked up and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and I showed him my badge.

"I'm a police detective," I said, not giving him my name. "I'm working a case undercover and I need to borrow an apron and one of those paper hats. My guy is coming in here in a few minutes."

"This better not turn into some San Diego Denny's-style shootout," he said, warily.

"It's a tax case, all very nonviolent and boring," I assured him.

He crossed the room and grabbed a Dupar's apron off a hook on the wall. Then he handed it to me along with a paper hat. I put them on and looked at myself in the shiny refrigerator door. My theory is that anybody in a restaurant wearing a paper hat and apron, standing next to a tub of dirty dishes, instantly becomes invisible.

"What's your name?" I asked the manager.

"Howie Lent."

"Okay, Howie. Just act normal, don't call attention to me. Everything's gonna be fine."

I pushed through the swinging door of the kitchen, and entered the busy restaurant. It was around nine o'clock Saturday night. The Cineplex up the street had just let out, and there were a lot of kids eating and clowning around in the dining area. I'd chosen Dupar's because there were high partitions, which created difficult sight lines. The din from the customers permeated everything. I took a position beside a serving station and stood there in my paper hat and apron, watching. Nobody paid any attention to me. I knew if the PSB dicks were serious about picking me up they would have a tail on Luther and Chooch. But I had a way to defeat that.

Ten minutes later Chooch's Cherokee pulled into the parking lot followed by a midnight blue Chrysler PT Cruiser, which I knew was Luther's.

I watched Chooch and Luther enter the crowded restaurant and look around, trying to find me. Like everybody else, they looked right past the guy in the apron and paper hat standing by the bus tray. They found a table, sat down, and waited. If there was a tail, it would come inside soon. I continued to watch the parking lot through the window. After five minutes, I was pretty sure they hadn't been followed. But I still didn't want to take a chance and be wrong. I turned and walked out of the dining area without talking to Luther or Chooch. Once back in the kitchen, I stripped off the apron and handed it to a very relieved Howie Lent and left.

Out in the parking lot, I pulled out a spiral pad, wrote Chooch a note, and put it on his dash. Then I went to the far side of Luther's PT Cruiser and knelt down behind his passenger side rear fender.

Twenty minutes later, Luther and Chooch came out of the restaurant. Both looked at their watches and frowned. This was two meetings in a row I'd missed. Then Luther shook Chooch's hand, they said good-bye, and each headed to his separate car.

As Luther chirped the lock on his PT Cruiser, I stood up.

"Open the back door."

Luther jumped in fright. "Shit!" he said. Then he regained his composure, glared at me, and chirped the key lock again. I opened the door and slid into the backseat while he got behind the wheel.

"Let's go," I said. "Turn right and park anywhere in the middle of the street, on Moorpark. It's right up the hill."

"This ain't workin' for me, Shane."

I didn't answer because, of course, he was right.

Luther pulled out and I saw Chooch's headlights following us. We climbed the hill to Moorpark and pulled to the curb. My son parked behind us, then got out of his Cherokee and climbed into the front seat of the Chrysler. His face was strained as he looked back at me.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi back at ya." I tried to grin, but he wasn't having any.

"I'm gonna make this quick," Luther said. There wasn't any sympathy in his voice. He started right in. "The skull acts as a protective covering or helmet for the soft cells of the brain, which are made of neurons. These neurons form tracts that route through the brain, and those tracts carry messages to the various parts of the brain."

"Luther, I don't need a course in Neurology One-Oh-One. I need to know what her prognosis is."

"Shut up." He was angry and almost took my head off with those two words. "You don't know the first thing about any of this, okay? You think the brain is just a big bowl of gray jelly that we only use like ten percent of. You think since we only use a fraction of it, if Alexa loses a few neurons, what's the big problem? She'll just compensate with what she has left."

"I didn't say that."

"I've been talking to people like you for ten years, man. You don't have to say it. Since she's breathing and has a heartbeat, you think time is gonna heal this."

"And it's not?"

"She's in bad shape, okay?"

"Calm down."

"Right, of course. Calm down. What's got into me here? I'm only sneaking around in the middle of the night, having clandestine medical meetings with the prime suspect in a racially charged cop murder. What am I so upset about?"

"Hey, Luther, Dad didn't do it," Chooch said softly.

"You don't know that," Luther said. "It's bad enough what's going on here medically, but now we've got this other angle this race thing. I'm talking a load of incoming fire in my community. I'm trying to pay my debt to you, Shane, but do you have any idea how far it is from One Hundred and Sixth Street to the Neurosurgery OR at UCLA?"

"A long way," I said.

"He didn't kill that guy, Luther. I know my dad. He didn't do it." Chooch's voice was shaking with passion or anger, I couldn't tell which.

It suddenly got very quiet in the car.

Chooch went on. "That means this is an injustice. It doesn't matter what all those people on TV say. Mom didn't shoot that guy and neither did Dad. Is it always just science for you? Don't doctors ever have to deal with what's right and wrong?"

Luther looked over angrily. "I don't need a lecture on ethics from you, Chooch."

"You told me in the restaurant, just a minute ago, that my dad solved Levonda's murder for you and your wife. But you're wrong. He didn't solve it for you. He did it for Levonda. He always says that he's the last one to speak for the dead. That's why he never quits. He was doing it for Levonda, and he kept speaking for her until he caught the guys who killed her. Don't do this for me or for Dad, because it's not about us. It's your turn to step up, man. You need to speak for Alexa."

Luther put his head in his hands and sat very still for a long moment. When he finally looked up, something had changed.

"I'm gonna try," he said. "I'm going to do everything in my power, but I'm not God."

"If anybody can save her, you can," I said.

He shook his head sadly, then handed me the consent form. I signed it and handed it back to him. When I saw his face, I knew I had pushed him too far. Our friendship was close to over.