doctor?” I ask. My brain starts to race. I point toward the kitchen and lead him that way. Jason and Remo stay tight-lipped and where they are at the door. “What about the doctor?”
“She’s dead,” Malloy says, almost matter-of-factly. “Someone bonked her real hard last night with a blunt instrument. Receptionist found her when she came in this morning. Place was a mess.”
“No kidding,” I say. Then, because it’s still early and I’ve only had one cup of coffee, “so how exactly does that bring you to my apartment?”
He shrugs, accepts my silent offer of hospitality, pulls up a chair at our kitchen table, clasps his big meaty hands together, and stares at me for the longest time with those Irish blue eyes. “You were probably the last person she talked to, Amos.”
“I was?”
“We traced her phone calls. She—or someone—dialed your number just after midnight from her office.”
“I’m an old guy, Bill. I go to bed early. By midnight I’m already a pumpkin.”
“Granted. But you still picked up the receiver. So my question is, what’d she have to say?”
I rub a small knot at the back of my neck. “She said something was strange, if I remember correctly. That’s all.”
“What was strange?”
“Hell if I know. Anyway, she didn’t say.”
“Uh-huh.” Now it’s Malloy’s turn to be silent. The wheels are turning in his head. His hands are still cupped together.
“You don’t think it could just be a coincidence, do you? The rabbi, then the rabbi’s doctor?”
“Could be,” he says. He has a fat, even tone to his voice. He’s a fair man, a thoughtful man. He could have been a priest. He could have been an umpire. Instead he ended up a cop. “The lab guys are still going over the place. There are lots of prints, but it’s a doctor’s office, people come and go. Whoever killed her broke in through a side door, they said. Used some kind of pry bar. So maybe she interrupted a burglar. It happens, I guess.”
“That what you think?”
“Nah,” he says after a while. “That’s not what I think.” He scratches the sleepy dirt out of one eye. “You wanna know why? Because the burglar didn’t take much of anything.”
“Really?”
“Well, he cleaned all the Schedule II drug samples out of a locked cabinet. But that’s pretty small potatoes for that kind of effort. Oh yeah, and he took one other thing, I suppose.”
“Let me guess: Ezra Diamant’s medical file?”
Malloy nods. “It’s curious, you can’t find a single scrap of paper there with Diamant’s name on it. Like he never existed.”
“What about her computer? He wasn’t on that, either?”
“Her computer is missing, too.”
“It doesn’t add up, Bill. What about that receptionist, Magnolia. Did you show her a picture of the rabbi?”
“We did, actually. She said she recognized him from the newspaper, but claims she doesn’t remember seeing him in the flesh. He’s not in her files. Never sent him a bill, she says. Now what does that mean?”
“Could mean a lot of things. Could mean Dr. Ewing never treated the real rabbi. Could mean that someone else pretended to be Diamant, and she dished out lethal samples to that guy. Or it could mean the rabbi only came by to see her after hours. Either way, what Magnolia said would be true.”
Malloy fusses with his tie, tightens it up around his throat, plays with the knot. It’s an old green silk tie with a little Japanese bamboo pattern. Most folks at his level don’t wear ties anymore, but Bill is old school. “That’s a lot of ambiguity to deal with, Amos.”
“You’re telling me.”
He pushes himself away from the table. “Right now, I’m going to treat these cases as related. We’re making some inquiries into the doctor’s past. And I’m going to check with the forensic pathology people downtown. See if we can dig up the rabbi and do an autopsy.”
“So it’s not an accident anymore.”
“One person dies, maybe it’s an accident. Two in a row? Between you and me, I’d call that murder. One murder for sure. Also time for an autopsy.”
“His family’s not going to like that. They’ll probably block you in court.”
“Yeah, well, you do what you can.” He turns toward Jason and Remo. Jason is jiggling his car keys in his pocket, itching to leave.
At the door, the lieutenant gives me a final look. Not a warning exactly. We’ve known each other too long for that. “I think you should maybe stay out of this from here on out,” he says.
“I’m being paid, Bill. You know me, I’m not a quitter.”
“No, indeed. But this isn’t an old man’s game, Amos.”
Jason and Remo file out. Neither has said a word. I catch the outline of the holstered pistol inside Remo’s jacket. Malloy pauses one last time and puts his arm on my shoulder. Brotherly love.
“I’ll be good,” I promise.
“You be careful,” he says. “I don’t give a fuck if you’re good.”
Chapter 5
A LOT OF PEOPLE act surprised when I tell them I own a gun. Nice Jewish boy, they ask, what the hell’s he doing with a gun? Good question. I haven’t fired it in years, but it sits in my underwear drawer just in case. I’m pretty sure it still works fine. It’s a 9mm Glock. I admit I had some qualms when I bought it because, you know, it’s German, and as a nice Jewish boy I have vast quantities of leftover luggage in my head about Germany and Germans. What they did and all that. A therapist would take one look at me and see a gold mine. Ka-ching, ka-ching. This could go on forever. Dad was even worse than me. I remember after the war he wouldn’t buy so much as a toaster if he believed it was made in Germany. That was his way of punishing them, though I think we suffered more than the German toaster company ever did.
I pull the Glock out of the drawer and slip in the magazine. Six rounds are all it takes. That’s enough, I guess. It feels familiar and—how can I explain it without sounding too weird—exciting. Maybe even a little bit sexy. Like when I was fourteen, and Rosie Abramowitz and I were fooling around on the living room couch. And a couple of buttons on her blouse came loose, and who can say whether she meant it to happen, but it was the first time I ever reached in and touched her breast. That kind of exciting. Not that one is quite the same as the other. But I figure if I’m gonna be coming out of retirement now, I ought to keep it ready in the glove compartment at least. You never know.
Carmen is in the kitchen making herself breakfast. She’s a small, sturdy, dark-haired woman who came here on a leaky boat from Havana. Even though she’s been in this country for years, her English is
