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“Somehow there got to be bad blood between them and Miss Rawson. That’s what I think.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  A cicada started up, its unearthly buzz like a warning from outer space.

  Peter and I reflexively glanced to the trees, as if we could locate the source of the sound. “You never see them, do you?” he said. “A few weeks ago, Viv said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t let Abby in your house anymore. Don’t talk to her.’ I asked why, and she just got this look on her face and said something like ‘She’s up to no good’ or ‘She means you no good.’ I’m not the suspicious type, so I discounted that, but then she told me DeMedHo was suing them, trying to put them out of business. That alarmed me, because the Briggses do look after people, you know?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Sometimes lawsuits are just a bunch of bull, you know?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s true, Peter.”

  “People sue grocery stores all the time, for instance.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Slip-and-fall grape, slip-and-fall detergent. A person should be compensated for a legitimate injury, but some of them aren’t hurt at all. They get money just the same.”

  “Yes. Did you see Abigail Rawson after that?”

  “No. If she had come by, I’d have let her in.”

  Would the Briggses have offed Abby because of this lawsuit? Killing her couldn’t have helped, unless she was the only material witness, which hardly could have been likely—she wouldn’t have filed the suit personally, and there would have been some evidence before filing anyway. Could the Briggses’ own weird daughter, Christy, have done it, perhaps having misunderstood an overheard conversation?

  Was the Happy Van a pill mill? If so, it was a pretty well-kept secret, because if word got out, that van would be mobbed by every addict in the city. But it’s certainly true that docs can keep their customers well satisfied with the right pills.

  All possible. But the information I’d gleaned from this kind old man only helped solidify a much more reasonable scenario.

  I thanked Peter Allwood kindly, then drove home to pick up a couple of things. I returned to the neighborhood and pounded my coded pound at the Pomeroys’ door. It was about lunchtime.

  Flora came to the door looking gray.

  I guessed, “She’s not doing well.”

  She nodded, tears in her eyes. We went into the library. “I’m sorry, Flora,” I said. “Are you going to get her to the hospital?”

  “She doesn’t want to go.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “I’ve talked to all of them. Briggs has been here, and her other doctor came by yesterday, believe it or not. There’s always things that can be done, but to put her through it when she doesn’t want it?” Her lips trembled, and I put my arm around her and guided her to a leather couch.

  “She knows what’s best,” I said. “We all do, in the end.” I don’t know where that wisdom came from. “Are you going to get hospice help or something?”

  “Yes, they’re coming over in an hour to evaluate her.”

  “OK. Listen. I need you to remember the day before Abigail Rawson’s body was found.”

  “Lillian, I’m so tired.”

  “I know. It’s OK. Just please remember: Domenica was alone part of that day, right?”

  “Yes, I went to the store and the bank that afternoon.”

  “Did you get home sort of late?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it after dark?”

  She made an effort to focus. “It was getting dark.”

  “Was that car—Abby’s—parked in front of Blair and Donna’s house then? Did you notice it?”

  “The police asked me all that. I can’t remember.”

  “It’s all right. When was the last time the Happy Van came around, before that afternoon?”

  “That morning,” Flora said. “Viv came up to do upper-body conditioning with her.”

  “Were you with them the whole time?”

  “No.”

  “OK.” The picture was jelling. “Would it be all right if I saw Domenica for a few minutes?”

  “Of course, Lillian. I don’t think she could have seen anything, though. Do you think the Briggses killed that poor woman?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m just trying to understand some stuff. I brought Domenica a Coke.”

  Flora bent over and massaged her calves. “I need to lie down for a few minutes.”

  “You rest here. I’ll sit with her for a while, OK? Want me to fix you a little drink?”

  “No, thank you.” She swept her hair back and smiled faintly. “For once.” She was entering an emotionally heavy state, and she needed her wits about her.

  The staircase’s wide arms swept me upward to Domenica.

  She was seated in her throne, slumped but awake.

  “Lillian,” she said. Her normally strident voice was fuzzy and weak.

  “Heigh-ho, my lady,” I said gently. “How are you doing?”

  She shook her head.

  “Look what I brought,” I said, opening a tote bag that contained a cold bottle of Coke and a clean drinking glass from my kitchen. “How ’bout a little sip of the good stuff, for old times’ sake?” I carefully set the items on a nearby tray.

  She smiled in spite of herself and watched me open the bottle and pour some. I added a straw then lifted the tray so she could pick up the glass easily.

  “There, that’s it,” I encouraged.

  She held the glass with both hands and sipped on the straw. She coughed a little, but drank a half cup or so while I chatted about this and that.

  I set the tray aside, paused, and said, “Domenica, it’s time to talk about it.”

  She looked at me, peering upward with one watery blue old-lady eye, and she knew I knew. She shrank into her throne. Tears gushed forth. She looked so dehydrated I wouldn’t have guessed she had that much moisture in her. She shook her head, bending it to her lap, eyes down. The tears fell. “No,” she said.

  “Don’t be afraid, Domenica. There’s nothing to be afraid of now.”

  With a sudden gasp, she lifted her head, and her eyes locked on mine in surprise. She coughed, swallowed, and then her eyes changed. She looked through me without seeing me, and her lips turned pale. Her back arched as if she wanted to get up.

  I shouted for Flora, who rushed into the room in time to take her mother’s hand and tell her she loved her, one last time.

  19

  “Dr. Briggs, this is Lillian Byrd. I have to talk to you.”

  “You have my cell-phone number,” he said with surprise.

  “Yeah, Christy gave it to me at ball practice the other day.” I was sitting in the Crown Vic at a gas station on Woodward, about an hour after I’d left the Pomeroys’.

  “Well, how can I help you?”

  “Could I, like, stop over or something? Do you have an office location?”

  “No. I’ve pretty much gone mobile, you know.”

  “Then maybe I could catch up with you somewhere.” Three ragged kids were quarreling over a fistful of candy outside the door to the mini mart.

  “What’s this about?”

  I really hate it when people refuse to meet with you. It was hard enough to make this call in the first place. “OK. Well, you know, I’m kind of following the story of Abigail Rawson, and I’ve heard there was some kind of bad blood between the Happy Van and DeMedHo, or maybe between you guys and Abigail Rawson personally. Somebody said DeMedHo had filed a lawsuit against you, and I was wondering—”

  “A lawsuit? Mercy, no. We’ve had a fine relationship with DeMedHo. Great relationship, in fact. And Abby—well, you saw us at her funeral. We thought the world of her.”

  That made me feel a little better. I wasn’t going to press him, because then he’d ask who had told me there was a lawsuit, and I didn’t want to answer or evade that question. But I had to ask, “Did you give care to her dad, who lived in Palmer Woods?”

  A pause.
“I can tell you I met the man, but I can’t discuss anything else. Patient confidentiality. Fine old gentleman.” Briggs’s tone was upbeat.

  I waited silently, as I customarily do when interviewing someone and they seem to have come to the end. Often they’ll open up just a little further, and this time it happened. The doctor said, “Listen, Lillian. I’m going to be straight with you. I know what you’re asking about. Frankly my problem is with Shirlene Cord. I don’t think she’s running her department right. I confronted her and got shot down. I had a feeling she was in the process of corrupting Abby too, to cover for herself. I’m just angry about DeMedHo, and that’s that.”

  “Corrupt, how?” Now I was more intrigued than ever about Shirlene Cord.

  Dr. Briggs said, “All I can tell you would be hearsay, and I don’t want anything to come back and bite me.”

  He was right. I couldn’t promise him anything. “Can you give me a hint?” I asked.

  “It’s always about the money,” he said.

  “Dr. Briggs, if there’s bad rumors going around about you, I want to stop them. You were always so wonderful to me—almost like a father, in a way.”

  “You’re a sweetheart, Lillian. I’m proud of the woman you’ve grown into. I know your father and mother would feel the same way.”

  “Thanks. Thank you, Doctor. I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything else, OK?”

  “OK.”

  ----

  You know you’re coming up in the world when a police lieutenant says, “My Lord, Lillian, you cracked it.”

  Lieutenant Sorrel and I stood beneath Domenica’s window. It was five in the afternoon, and the shadows beneath the trees were just starting to deepen. He slapped a mosquito.

  “Flora was away,” I explained, “and Domenica couldn’t answer the door when Abigail Rawson came calling. Abby, being suspicious of Dr. Briggs and the Happy Van, and possibly even her own agency, DeMedHo, was checking on people being seen by the Happy Van. That made the Briggses nervous. Did they have something to hide? I don’t know. So they warned their clients away from Abby. Maybe they confronted her directly too; I don’t know. So anyway, Abby knocks and no one answers. Concerned about Domenica—perhaps based on things she was discovering about the Happy Van—she decides to go the extra mile to check on her. She goes around back, perhaps to try knocking here, at the kitchen.”

  “She sees an open window above; she sees the roofer’s ladder,” I continued, “and climbs up, thinking at least she might get a glimpse into Domenica’s room or even access to it. And now let us go to that room.” Sorrel and I went in through the kitchen.

  Flora was getting drunk, quietly and alone, in the library. We bypassed her and climbed the stairs. Domenica’s room was clear now: the body had been taken away, and the feeling in the room was, in spite of the waning day, light and open.

  “Domenica was home all right,” I continued, cranking open the window that overlooked the back lawn. “Abby’s face appears right here at this opening, and Domenica’s paranoia takes hold, and she grabs one of the Pomeroys’ famous improvised defense weapons, her great-nephew’s baseball bat, which he’d left behind after his Cranbrook days. See that pile of junk over there? The bat had to have been mixed in with it.”

  Sorrel looked. I went on, “Flora told me the Briggses were working with Domenica on her upper-body strength. Well, I guess they actually achieved something with her, because Domenica, believing Abby to be a hostile entity, whacks her on the head. Once.

  “Abby doesn’t fall, though; she’s stunned. She drops her purse but holds on to this stone sill. Remember her fingertips being abraded? It happened here.” The sandstone was rough. Sorrel reached out and touched it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The purse was directly below this window.”

  I said, “Come to think of it, she might have simply stashed her purse in the bushes before climbing up. No matter. Her skull is cracked, but she manages to regain her grip on the ladder, descend it, and stagger off that way.”

  Sorrel and I leaned out the large window. We saw Blair and Donna’s backyard, and we clearly saw the path Abby must have taken.

  “I read online how a head injury can produce a brain hemorrhage that takes a while to drop you,” I went on. “Abby, disoriented, walks or staggers for a few seconds or minutes until she loses consciousness, collapses, and dies on that patch of lawn over there. Meanwhile, Domenica, having successfully repelled her foe and instinctively feeling it might not be a good idea to keep a bloody bat around, leans out this window and flings it as hard as she can.”

  “Think that old lady could have thrown it that far?”

  “Yeah. I paced it off; it’s only fifty-five feet. If you wind up and just sort of helicopter it, it’ll go. I did an informal test from the bleachers at a ballpark I play at. I didn’t need a lot of thrust to get a fair amount of distance, even one-handed. The height helped.”

  “Hm.” Sorrel tried to digest that.

  I said, “I don’t think she was trying to hide the bat, I think it was more of an adrenaline-fueled impulse throw.”

  Sorrel looked to the raspberry patch where I’d found the bat. “Yeah,” he said, “the trajectory looks right.”

  “I’ll bet my life you’ll find the prints on the drinking glass I gave you match one set of those on the bat. I expect you might want to request a postmortem set to be taken from the body. The other set of prints on that bat doubtless belong to the young Cranbrook man, Timothy Pomeroy, great-nephew of Domenica, second cousin of Flora, and erstwhile houseguest here in Palmer Woods.”

  Sorrel said, “I’m going to wait until we get that fingerprint evidence. But it looks like this one’s in the books.” He looked at me, his eyes deep black and penetrating. “How did you figure it out?”

  “Just proximity. I’ve been hanging around here; I’ve gotten to know the women who live in this house; and I had plenty of time to chaw over the evidence. Everything fell into place once I heard the Briggses were warning people away from Abby. That’s it.”

  “Well…thanks.”

  I said, “Aren’t you curious about the shit going on between DeMedHo and the Happy Van?”

  He cut me a sharp look. “What’s your problem with DeMedHo?”

  Hastily, remembering he was very likely boffing Shirlene Cord, I said, “Nothing. Nothing, Lieutenant. I’m just wondering.”

  “Well, if you’ve got something specific, tell me. Otherwise you can get right back to your life. I do appreciate your help on Abigail Rawson. But that’s finished. I’ve got thirty-three open murder cases to get to.”

  Later I went online and searched Wayne County court records but could find no civil or criminal litigation against the Briggses, by anyone.

  I did, however, find a report of a pending purchase of a pharmacy in Inkster by Roland Briggs, MD. Well, he was a businessman, and if he was doing well in his practice, maybe investing in something like that made sense.

  ----

  Just before that night’s Grinders practice, I gathered my nerve and approached Carmen, who was suiting up in her body armor. The pads made her thick, short body look even thicker and shorter. I expected some mutt to come over and lift its leg against her.

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  Her bulldog eyes peered at me through her face mask. The padded mask squished her face, giving her already round cheeks the chipmunk look. Her shoulder-length, curly dark hair (her best feature, actually) bushed out from the back. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Would you take off your mask, please?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment—deep irritation—then stripped off her cap and mask. She already had hat hair.

  I said, “I want to apologize to you. I really thought you had something to do with Abby’s death. I thought your fingerprints were going to be on that bat, and when they weren’t, I still believed you might’ve had a part in it. But it was…somebody else. The police know. I’m sorry.”

  Completely taken aback, she thou
ght for a moment, then said, “Well, who did it?”

  “A stranger, one of DeMedHo’s clients in Palmer Woods. It was an accident, basically.”

  She considered that, then said, “I’ll be honest: I wasn’t sorry Abby died. I hated Abby, and I hate you. But I didn’t kill her.”

  “I know. Like I said, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not gonna be your pal. I wouldn’t be sorry if…something happened…to you.”

  A chill ran down my back, pausing slightly when it came to the remnants of the Carmen-inflicted bruise, then continuing on. I said, “What the fuck’s your problem? You like Jackie, right? Is that it?”

  She looked down.

  I went on, “But Abby and Jackie were just friends.”

  “They had a history.”

  “True, but—”

  “When she died, I thought, well, maybe that…door would open to me. Then you showed up.”

  I dug my toe into the dirt. “Well, hell, Carmen, that’s showbiz. I mean, jeez, we’ve all been rebuffed. I don’t think Jackie likes you in that way.”

  Her dark eyes flashed up at me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not even Jackie’s type. You’ll make a mistake. Then I’ll get another chance. I have dreams…I have dreams where Jackie comes to me and—”

  “Wait a minute—what did you say? Another chance?”

  She smiled, and it was not a nice smile. “She didn’t tell you?”

  My gut dropped. I refused to ask. Knew I wouldn’t have to.

  Grimly delighted, Carmen informed me, “I was Jackie’s first lover.”

  20

  I was so stunned that I didn’t talk to Jackie right away. Had to process this, get hold of my emotions, and not say or do anything I’d regret. I put that bit of information in my brain’s junk drawer for the moment.

  Flora kept to herself until Domenica’s funeral, which took place on Saturday at an upscale mortuary in the up-Woodward suburb of Birmingham. You wouldn’t believe the number of geriatric millionaires at that one. I guess the old friends close ranks, even if they haven’t kept in touch. Domenica looked surprisingly robust in her casket, as if she’d just fallen asleep under the tanning light after getting the works at the spa.