Ill Will Read online

  “So what am I supposed to do, wait until he actually starts a fire?”

  “Look, Micky, I agree, a fire threat does point to him. I can hunt him down and question him about it, but he’s going to deny it and then it’s your word against his.”

  “That’s all you can do?”

  “I’d take your word over his any day, but the legal system has to treat you both equally.”

  Maddening as it was, Joanne was right. He’d certainly implied that he was going to play with matches at my expense, but what proof did I really have? It was my word against his as to what he said. I didn’t know his voice well enough to be certain it was his—it could be a bizarre coincidence, a wrong number and the caller was threatening a total stranger. Even in my weird world, that was stretching it. “Okay, I get you—and understand that sometimes the rule of law lets scum get away with things.”

  “If he really wanted to get you, he wouldn’t have bothered with a phone call.”

  “Somehow that’s not very reassuring.”

  “He’s a con, not a fighter. He probably has to know you didn’t set the actual fire, but he’s angry and vents that anger with nasty phone calls. My bet is that he doesn’t have the guts to start an actual fire.”

  “How much money are you putting on that bet?” I asked.

  “If I lose the bet, you and CJ can hang out on our couch for as long as it takes to repair your place.”

  “Your couch isn’t long enough for Cordelia, and it wouldn’t fit both of us at the same time.”

  “We both hope this is a bet I don’t win.” She was gallant enough to hang up before I had to name what I’d wager if I lost.

  My next less-than-pleasant task was to call and re-call all the clients who’d hired me to track down Mr. Prejean, or whatever his real name was. They needed to know he was an angry slime bag and threatening revenge arson against anyone who might have burned down his house.

  “Can I shoot ’im if I see ’im?” was the first response. It was hard, but I put on my law-abiding hat and said that just seeing him wouldn’t be sufficient cause for gunplay.

  “You didn’t give him my name, did you?” was the second one. I had to remind him he had hired Prejean to renovate his house and that usually involves the exchange of names. I tried to reassure him that as Prejean didn’t intend to do any work, it was unlikely he kept the paperwork. Unless he was too lazy to throw it out, but I didn’t mention that.

  “You sure should have burned it down if that’s his attitude,” was number three. “Did you?” she ever-so-encouragingly asked. I explained that I had not and would not burn down anyone’s house, no matter how far afoul of the law he was. I didn’t like that she considered it possible I would commit arson.

  Especially for the amount they’d paid me.

  Number four told me, “You gotta call the police. Right now. Don’t waste time with me.” I made the mistake of telling him I did call the police and there wasn’t much they could do. That got me the diatribe on how bad the New Orleans cops were, they were corrupt, never came when you called, had all been cowards during Katrina. I had to pretend I was losing my cell signal. On my landline.

  And so it went. While their responses were different, there seemed an underlying theme: I was the professional, I knew how to deal with these things and so they were glad he’d come after me and not them. I could smell smoke; that was about all my professionalism afforded me.

  Those calls took what was left of my afternoon. Those calls, and because I procrastinated as I didn’t want to make the calls and it seemed that after every two, I had to check the weather online, which caused me to see a news story that I had to read, by which time I had to go to the bathroom and then make tea or get water depending on whether I was feeling cold or hot, which would ensure that I’d have to go to the bathroom again in time for another much-needed-and-well-deserved break.

  Because every call wasn’t just a brief “be on the lookout for” but a shared point of loss. This man had taken from them, their homes, their hopes of rebuilding, or at best the stealing of time and money that would take years to recover from. Now he had taken something from me as well. Every one of them told me to be careful and meant it. Even if Joanne was right—and I fervently hoped that she was—I’d have to be extra cautious, take extra time to make sure no vengeful man with a gas can was lurking about. A clear street at one moment didn’t mean he couldn’t arrive in the next minute or hour, the one time I wasn’t watching because it’s impossible to watch every second.

  At least we have groceries, I thought as I packed to head home. We could make up for the unhealthy shrimp po-boys of last night.

  Chapter Four

  When I got home, the house was dark and the cats hungry. I had skimmed out sometime after four, but well before five. I can do that since I work for myself, so it made sense that Cordelia wasn’t home yet.

  My procrastinating side debated whether to start dinner now or to wait until after Andy and Torbin came and went.

  Halos and horns. I started dinner and cracked open a beer to keep me company. There was a time in my life when I had a drinking problem—or what I considered a drinking solution to my problems. Not drinking at all had worked pretty well until I was hit with the double blast of Katrina washing away the New Orleans I’d known all my life, and my staid, sensible partner succumbing to the come-on of a famous lesbian doctor she was working with. I’d found out three days before the storm hit, when we all needed to be evacuating or writing wills. Katrina had thrown all our lives apart. And her affair had tossed me down a dark hole that I was still climbing out of.

  Cordelia had stayed in the hellhole of Charity Hospital. It was a week—less, five days—but the person who went there on Sunday wasn’t the person who came out on the following Friday. Whatever the affair had meant before the storm, the person afterward was too battered to build a new life with someone else, especially since that someone else didn’t seem interested in a new girlfriend who was falling apart.

  We had ended up back in New Orleans and ended up back together. On days like today, I had no regrets. I hadn’t been perfect and she hadn’t either. I mostly left it at that.

  But I had started drinking again and wasn’t able to quite stop. Now I just hoped I knew my limits, that I would keep it in the realm of social drinking, one beer while cooking dinner, that I had learned it could only blot out problems, not make them go away.

  I knew Cordelia was concerned, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe after she had fallen so far from grace she didn’t feel she could say anything.

  Garlic was chopped. As long as I didn’t cut my finger off, the one beer would be okay. Tonight would be lemon/garlic chicken with a side of broccoli and some sliced fresh fruit for dessert. I made enough so we could feed Torbin and Andy if need be or have decent leftovers for the next day or so.

  They live down the block from us, and must have been watching, because just as Cordelia parked her car, they were headed toward our house. Andy was cradling his hand and walking slowly.

  I put the chicken in as they met on our front step and entered together.

  “Smells good,” she said, ushering them in.

  Uncharacteristically Torbin did not comment on the food.

  Cordelia picked up on it and said to Andy, “Let me look at your hand.” She had brought what I thought of as her “doctor bag”—a roomy brown leather briefcase in which she stuck things as she needed them. She put the bag down on the kitchen table, grabbed a couple of clean dish towels, and created a makeshift hygienic space.

  Andy sat down, with Torbin standing behind him, a hand on his shoulder. Andy gingerly laid his arm on the towels, then started to undo the bandages.

  “Let me do that,” Cordelia said. “It’s easier with two hands.” She smiled to reassure him.

  People have different aspects of who they are. I’m used to Cordelia at home, as my partner, someone who has to be prompted to go through the stack of mail she’s left by the door, who favo
rs old jeans and a T-shirt sans bra at home. But she spent a good part of her day as a highly competent doctor who had to make important, at times life-or-death decisions. As I watched her gently unwrap Andy’s bandage, she was skilled and professional.

  It was a side of her I rarely saw.

  Just as she rarely saw me as a capable and intuitive investigator. Or a freaked-out idiot madly dashing down stairs to startle innocent bicyclists in the street. There can be advantages to not knowing everything there is to know about each other.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it?” she said as she looked at his hand.

  I glanced at it just long enough to convince myself that I needed to be careful with kitchen knives, then decidedly looked away. Unlike TV detectives, I try to stay as far away from gore and blood as possible. Especially my own, but other people’s as well. He had a deeply red cut around the base of his thumb.

  “How does it feel when you move your fingers?” Cordelia asked.

  “I try not to do that,” Andy said with a rueful smile. But he obliged her and wiggled his fingers. “Hurts some, but they feel okay.”

  “Is it infected?” Torbin asked.

  Cordelia didn’t answer immediately, picking up Andy’s hand gently and examining it. “Maybe a little. There is some redness.”

  “It stings a lot,” Andy said.

  She brushed her finger lightly outside the wound. “The hand is a sensitive area, with copious blood vessels and nerves. The same cut elsewhere wouldn’t hurt as much. There is just a little red around the wound opening. That could be your immune system at work rather than an actual infection. By tomorrow it should hurt less and the redness should be receding. If the inflammation spreads, the area around the wound gets tender—more than it is now, if there is pus or oozing blood or you run a fever, these are all signs of infection.”

  “What do we do if that happens?” Torbin asked. “The best we could get for a doctor’s appointment was a week from today.”

  “If it’s really bad, you need to go back to the ER. I can look at it tomorrow if you want,” Cordelia offered. “But that shouldn’t happen. Keep it clean, change the dressing often, and you should be good. Use soap and water, not anything abrasive like hydrogen peroxide.”

  “My mother used to swear by that,” Andy said.

  “It’s okay initially when you need to clean the wound, but after that it can do more harm than good. Plain old soap and water work fine.”

  “What about those stitches?” Torbin asked. “They look like something out of a Frankenstein movie.”

  Cordelia again looked at Andy’s hand. “It does look like you got someone with less-than-stellar sewing skills.”

  “It’s going to scar, isn’t it?” Torbin said.

  “Probably,” Cordelia admitted.

  “Can’t you do something?” he asked.

  “It’s okay,” Andy cut in. “It’ll remind me to always cut away from anything living.”

  “Like take out the stitches and do it again right?” Torbin said.

  “The wound is healing. Undoing the stitches could open it up again.”

  “No blood in your kitchen,” Torbin grumbled.

  I started to say something, but Cordelia spoke first.

  “Torbin, I can’t do surgery on our table.” Her voice was calm, reasonable, another professional side of her I rarely saw—she understood the pain and fear wasn’t about her, but about the cancer or the cut, the control disease or harm rips from us. “Andy is lucky, no cut tendon, the knife seems to have hit the fatty pad below the thumb. There will be a scar; even the best stitches probably wouldn’t prevent that.”

  “I guess this is what we get for medical care when we can’t make someone money,” Tobin complained.

  “How much are we charging you?” I retorted. He seemed to forget that he was getting free medical care right now, from someone who had already put in a long day.

  “It’s okay, Micky,” Cordelia said. “I know what he means. The system isn’t perfect.”

  “It’s designed to not be perfect,” Andy said quietly. “I’ve been doing a lot of work for one company, so I asked about a real job. The guy I talked to told me that they’re only using consultants now, independent contractors, to avoid the cost of benefits, like health insurance.”

  “This is crazy,” Torbin said. “We make enough money to do okay, but we both have to look for full-time jobs we might not want just to have enough insurance not to be stuck in the gangland emergency room.”

  “What if we didn’t know you?” Andy queried. “I’d be a home right now dousing my hand with hydrogen peroxide, hoping it would heal and I wouldn’t need any more medical care.”

  “People die, don’t they?” Torbin asked Cordelia. “They die because they’re too poor, unlucky, or just stupid. They get health care only when they’re desperate and when it’s too late.”

  “We try to have safety nets…” she started.

  “Shredded here,” he cut in. “Maybe better in other parts of the country, but I think Katrina washed ours away.”

  I could tell she was upset. Torbin had a point, a brutally sharp one. It was a flawed system, and Cordelia was a part of that system.

  “Katrina did damage,” she admitted. “It destroyed a lot of the infrastructure. Doctors left and didn’t come back. We’re short hospital beds, especially mental health ones. Plus the stress and upheaval have had tremendous health costs.” She paused as if gathering her thoughts. “But as bad as this is, there are places where it’s worse. At least New Orleans is still an urban center. You don’t have to drive a hundred miles to get to a hospital, or forty for just a doctor’s visit.”

  Before Torbin could add or argue, I cut in, “Medical care in America is screwed up, profit more important than health. But we can argue about that all night and I have slaved too hard over dinner to let the chicken burn while we wrestle about something that will take years of fighting on multiple levels to change. Now, dear cousin of mine, tell my girlfriend how much you appreciate her seeing Andy after her already long day. And you can thank me as well for arranging this free, personal health-care session for you—and for the time I’ve been deprived of her company.”

  “You have my humble apologies,” he said. But he knew he needed more than just his usual Torbin banter to get through this one. He put his arms around Cordelia and hugged her. “Thank you,” he said to her. “It’s…it means a lot to have people like you in our lives.”

  “You’re welcome.” Cordelia returned his hug.

  “And as I tell my dear cousin almost daily, she has the best girlfriend in the world,” Torbin added. He can’t be serious long.

  I invited them to stay for dinner, but they declined. Cordelia wrote Andy a prescription for antibiotics, but cautioned him to use it only if he developed signs of infection. Good doctor to the end, she explained if he did start taking them, to take the entire course to avoid helping to contribute to resistant bacteria.

  And then we were alone.

  I took the chicken out of the oven. It could rest while I threw the broccoli on to steam.

  Cordelia got a beer out of the refrigerator.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think Torbin would go ballistic on you about health care.”

  She took a deep pull of her beer, then said, “It’s okay. He and Andy spent a long night in the ER; they got adequate health care but not great health care. And it’s a warning sign. What happens next time? One of them could be in an auto accident tomorrow. It brings up a lot of complicated questions for them. Fear often comes out as anger.” She put her beer down on the counter, grabbed some knives and forks, and put them on the table.

  “Yeah, but it shouldn’t come out as anger at you when you’re doing them a major favor.”

  Cordelia came around behind me as I stood at the stove and put her arms around my waist. “It comes out at all times. It comes out when I’m about to stick a needle in their butt. You’d think that would make people play nice.”

/>   “Maybe they’re into good doctor/bad patient.”

  “Yuck. I don’t even want to think those kinds of thoughts.”

  “More likely they’re just stupid.”

  “Better thought.” She tightened her embrace. “I’m glad I could help. Damn, that sounds so Pollyanna, doesn’t it?”

  “It sounds like you.”

  “On my better days.” She quickly continued to avoid the weight of that, “Especially in this city everything is such a mess. At least I can make it less messy for my friends. And try to do what I can to make it better for everyone. It just feels like I’m part of a broken system. I earn decent money. Some days I wonder if it’s not literal blood money.”

  At the risk of overcooking the broccoli, I turned to her. “It’s like racism and sexism and homophobia. We’re all part of it and we can all just do a little bit, like water against stone. I will not let you beat up on yourself because you can’t walk on water and fix a vastly dysfunctional medical system.”

  “I am so lucky to have you.” She put her head on my shoulder.

  And started crying as if the weight of the world was on her back and she could no longer carry it.

  I discreetly turned off the water under the broccoli and just held her.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “Must be tired and hungry. So feed me.”

  I did. We flopped in front of the TV, both had another beer, and mentioned nothing more serious than picking up cat food the rest of the night.

  Chapter Five

  In the morning I remembered I’d meant to tell Cordelia to be on the lookout for gas can–wielding maniacs. By the time I’d remembered, she was already at work.

  It wasn’t likely, I told myself as I got in my car. He might be able to find where my office was. The card I’d given him had only a P.O. box as the address—I have a variety of cards for a variety of situations. But I was listed in the phone book, so only the truly lazy and inept couldn’t find me. However, it would be much more difficult to ferret out my home address. Besides, Carl Prejean was a con, not a fighter.