Terminally Ill Read online

  He bowed and pointed to still more ads peppered across the room. “As you can see.”

  I still thought it was a piss-poor idea that his doctors should have vetoed. Sure, Elvis wouldn’t be underwater, but he could still panic and bang his head in the coffin. He’d only be a week out from almost dying of hypoxic-anoxic encephalopathy. “All right. But if you’ve got all your equipment here, shouldn’t someone stay in and make sure no one sabotages it?”

  Elvis tilted his head to one side, considering.

  “We still haven’t caught the perpetrator,” I added. I had no idea what Tucker had managed, but I figured he’d call me to brag if he cracked the case himself.

  “Okay,” he said finally.

  Ryan glanced at me, and I knew that he was impressed that I’d managed to corral Elvis without wrestling him back in the room.

  Elvis hopped over to the corner. “You want to see me break out of the chains?”

  “I do, but you might want to save the show for the show. You know what I mean?”

  He paused while he absorbed his own words coming back at him. “Hey, good point. I got some more nurses and doctors asking ‘cause they missed it on rounds, but Archer told them to wait ‘til tomorrow. I’ll tell them to hold it ’til the show. You’re coming, right?”

  “Ah…” I glanced at Ryan. I’d sworn to spend my birthday weekend in Ottawa, but I did want to see Elvis.

  “Aw, come on. You’re my doctor, you’re taking my case. How can you not make it? Are you working or something?”

  Ryan stepped forward. “She’s supposed to come back to Ottawa.”

  “You can go after. Seriously! I’ll be done within the hour. This one’s a quickie. You can miss the traffic that way. And you should come too, dude.” He smiled at Ryan. “I’ll get you guys free passes, you know? You’re part of the team.”

  “Thanks, man,” said Ryan.

  “So you’re coming?” said Elvis.

  “We’ll talk about it. Oh, hey.” My phone buzzed in my pocket. I flipped it open. Ryan winced at my phone’s ancient-ness, but it worked, and I bought $100 pay-as-you-go minutes that lasted up to a year so I didn’t have to indenture myself further for a cell phone. “Archer and Lucia are ready for us. Catch you later, Elvis.”

  “See you on Friday,” he said. “Come early so you can get good seats.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. Trying to escape the hospital early is a bit like an insect trying to detach itself from a spider web. You can manage it, but you have to be both very good and very lucky.

  When we sailed down the hall, out of Elvis range, Ryan said, “Smooth.”

  I grinned at him.

  “You’ve definitely gotten smooth.”

  I thought of a few double entendres, and he said, “Probably that way, too. But you handled him really well.” He stopped. “Now I’m doing it.”

  I laughed out loud at that one. Freudian slip much?

  Ryan shook his head. “I’ll just keep my mouth shut on this one so I don’t dig myself a bigger hole.” He paused, watching the elevator light indicator slowly climbing toward the ninth floor. “Did that sound bad too?”

  “A little,” I said, slipping my arm into his. “But only because I’m a giant pervert.”

  Of course, at that moment, the other elevator bumped to a stop and peeled its doors open in front of me.

  I turned bright red and we filed in beside a guy in a stretcher with an IV, his nurse, and a guy holding a fruit bouquet.

  Ryan grinned at me and pressed his elbow into his side, which meant he was squeezing my hand against him, and we both laughed. If nothing else, we were perverts together.

  We found Archer and Lucia at the Tuck Shop, where they were sharing some hot dogs and fries. She’d practically wiggled on to his lap, pressing her platinum blonde head close to his while he dipped a fry in ketchup and held it to her lips. She bit into it, staring deep into his eyes.

  Ew. I know that Ryan and I had probably caused about three more coronaries at St. Joe’s with our own PDA’s, but these two could easily get a room. If I tried to get Ryan into a room, he’d run right back out again. I sighed.

  Lucia noticed us and pulled the French fry out of Archer’s fingers, saying something that made him laugh. Then she turned toward us with a smile that displayed her bleached white teeth, but her eyes remained watchful.

  “Hi, Hope,” said Archer, standing to meet us. He shook my hand. “This must be Ryan. Thanks for coming.”

  “My pleasure,” said Ryan. They shook without doing the alpha dog squeeze, and Ryan turned to Lucia, who was still sitting, but with my guy’s eyes on her, she set the fry down and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. She didn’t look demure, exactly—I didn’t think she could pull it off—but she uncrossed her legs and stood up. She was almost as tall as Ryan. She was wearing a low-cut white shirt and turquoise pants with thigh-high white stiletto boots.

  “Hello, Ryan,” she said, all husky, and then she leaned forward and kissed him on each cheek, leaving a red lipstick imprint behind.

  “Hi,” he said, taking a step back.

  She chuckled softly. “You’re not from Montreal.”

  “I’m from Ottawa,” he said, turning back toward me. “So. We’re going to find someone named Hugo.”

  From the set of his shoulders and the dark look he gave me, Lucia did not impress. Good. I guess that’s one good thing about Christian guys: they may not approve of the slatternly approach. “That’s right. Archer’s got his address, and he said we can follow him over.”

  Lucia ran her hand through her hair. “I don’t understand why we should go through all this trouble. Archer and I were going to go have a party.” She pouted and hung on to his shoulder.

  Archer grinned and let his hand sink low on her hip, so it was just barely riding her ass. “We can still party. But Hope’s right. I owe the guy money. He said he needed to pay his rent. I feel bad that I never got it to him. Even if he’s not there, we can just drop it off. You still have his spare key, right, Lu?”

  “Maybe. I might have given it back to him before Elvis’s show. Everyone was running around so much.” Lucia sniffed, which somehow made her breasts stand out even more. Was there a class for that kind of thing? Boob Moves 101? If so, I needed a remedial course. Even Ryan froze over for a second before he pointed toward the parking garage. “Where can we meet up so I can follow you?”

  Archer said, “I’m on C2 in the parking garage, so we can meet behind the hospital. I’ll wait for you on Montcalm.”

  “Okay. That’s the little street north of here, right?” said Ryan. “But why don’t you give me the address in case we get split up? I’ll program it into my GPS.”

  I’m spatially disoriented, but I managed to decipher their guy talk enough to figure out that Hugo lived east of St. Laurent, like Lucia, but farther north of her.

  While we walked toward the parking garage and they sorted it out the directions, I asked Lucia, “How did you end up with a key?”

  She glanced at Archer, who answered easily, “Oh, he had more room in his apartment. He said he could fit the coffin in his living room. You know, if we wanted to keep it out of the limelight or whatever. I said okay.”

  “Wait a minute—Hugo had your coffin?” Elvis thought his coffin had been sabotaged. Hello?

  Archer shook his head and held open the door to the parking garage stairwell. The smell of urine greeted us immediately. “We never ended up storing it there. We got the key and loaded it into my truck, but then he started hinting about a storage fee. He wanted, like a hundred bucks. I told him to forget it. We could practice with it more on-site, anyway, and it was actually good publicity to have that big coffin.”

  “So the coffin was never unsupervised?”

  “No, it was with us the whole time.” Even so, their security sucked. I tried to think of a careful way to phrase it, but Ryan beat me to it.

  “Good thing, especially if someone might have wrecked his stunt. You never know who’s out
there and who could have accessed it in someone else’s apartment,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Archer said, drawing his eyebrows together. Since he was the manager, I guess that was his big oops. He steadied Lucia, whose heel almost missed a step, but she’d already grabbed on to the iron railing. He said, “Okay, this is our floor. See you on Montcalm Avenue.”

  After the door closed behind us, and we were left alone on the concrete stairwell, Ryan squeezed my hand. He didn’t say a word until we were back in the car, with the doors closed around us, but then he said, “Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “That would have been a major security breech. I have to wonder how well Archer’s looking out for his brother.”

  I opened my mouth to object. Archer had always seemed top notch on Elvis’s behalf, driving with him from Winnipeg and persuading me to come to the hospital post-call. But now that I thought about it, his actions hadn’t been too intelligent: hiring Lucia and Hugo basically sight unseen, and then he’d almost shipped the coffin off-site as well. “Hmm,” I said finally.

  Ryan waited for another car to circle the lot before he reversed out of the space. “What are you thinking?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Just that whenever someone’s killed, they always check the spouse first, because that’s the most common. Elvis doesn’t have a spouse, but maybe I should have checked his brother first instead of getting excited about Hugo.”

  Ryan shrugged. “It’s kind of like a multiple choice test. You can choose ‘all of the above’ and treat everyone suspiciously. But you’re not the police. You’ve got limited resources.” We waited in line to pay for parking. He pulled a twenty out of his pocket.

  “They’ve got limited resources too,” I said, thinking of Inspecteur Rivera.

  “Right. So you pick one person to go after at a time. For tonight, we’ll talk to Hugo. We can always ask him about Archer at the same time.”

  “Good point.” I leaned back in the car seat, still thinking it over, while Ryan paid the bored parking lot attendant and we waited for the mechanized arm to release us from the lot.

  Ryan had programmed the address into his phone, but he didn’t bother checking it before he took a right out of the parking lot and homed in on Archer, who waved at us and nudged out of his street parking space to lead us east.

  “How do you do that?” I asked finally.

  “What?” He braked to let a guy parallel park in front of us before he caught up with Archer at the next light.

  “Drive like you know where you’re going, even though you’re not from here.”

  He glanced at me, surprised, before he bit off a swear word and slammed on the brakes, since a chick in a red convertible had decided to take a left hand turn from the right hand lane, cutting us off. I’m used to that kind of thing now, so I guess that’s one way I’m up on Ryan for Montreal driving.

  He said, “I looked at the map. We’re heading southeast.”

  “And I hadn’t really considered Archer before tonight.” I sighed. “I guess I do suck as a detective.”

  Archer gunned it through a yellow light, which is the norm in Montreal. Ryan stopped to squeeze my hand. “Hey. Don’t knock yourself. How many people solve two murders? And you’re not even on the case.”

  “Now I am.”

  “For tonight,” he said. His stomach rumbled. I laughed. The light changed, and we set off again in search of Archer and Lucia. “What’s the deal with Lucia, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does she work for them, or is she Archer’s girlfriend?”

  “Both, I guess. He said he hired her off a TripTalk forum, and they’ve obviously hooked up since he got to town.”

  “Hmm,” he said, but then we caught up with Archer’s truck again, and he concentrated on following them and finding a parking space. We had to circle the block five times, each time increasing my guilt about fossil fuel emissions, before Ryan squeezed himself into a space ahead of a fire hydrant. “I hope that’s legit,” he said, frowning at the No Parking street sign.

  “It says not between 1 and 2 p.m. on Fridays, December to April, so we’re good,” I said, hardly glancing at it.

  He smiled and took my hand. “City girl.”

  “I guess,” I said, and then he led me down a few one-way streets until we saw Archer and Lucia slipping inside a run-down brick building called La Camélia. By the time Ryan held open the door for me, Lucia was pressing on the buzzer and shaking her head. “He’s not answering.”

  “I’ll call him,” said Archer. He pulled out his phone and punched on the keypad. After a minute, he shook his head. “Voice mail again.”

  Lucia shrugged her shoulders, freely bouncing around her assets. “Ah, well. We tried.”

  “Just a minute,” said Ryan in a voice that I recognized. His look at me, I’m a nice Christian man, so you can trrrrust me voice. “Did I hear that you might have a key to his apartment?”

  Lucia glanced at Archer, as if asking him a question.

  Archer cleared his throat. “Yeah, he said you had the extra key on Saturday, in case you needed anything. You still got it?”

  Lucia pressed her lips together. “I might have. I never enter someone’s apartment without asking. Look. I can send him a text message, ask him a good time to meet up. I never just barge in on him without warning.”

  True, we live in an age where you practically have to text to warn someone that you’re calling them, let alone just dropping by, but we were right here. It seemed nuts to just throw up our hands and say, No one’s home. I turned to Archer. “What if you left the money in his apartment for him? I bet he’d appreciate that.”

  Archer looked uneasy. “I’d rather give it to him.”

  “Yeah, I totally understand that. I still think it’s weird that he hasn’t answered you since Saturday, though. Maybe we’d better check on him and make sure he’s okay.”

  I could tell they didn’t like it, but I said, “What if he’s hurt? Can’t we just enter the building and knock on his door, at least?”

  Lucia finally dug through her purse. “I don’t even know if I have the keys. It was so chaotic on Saturday.”

  Archer draped his arm around her shoulders. “What are you talking about? Saturday was great. Oh, aside from my brother almost dying. Yeah.”

  She made a face and held up a key ring, just a rusty silver circle with two silver keys on it. Hugo was obviously not a guy who appreciated doo dads. She inserted one key into the apartment door and struggled to turn it before Archer gave it an extra jiggle.

  Like my old apartment, Hugo’s didn’t have an elevator, but luckily he was just in the basement. Unluckily, the stairs were dimly lit and the concrete floor looked damp in places. I stepped carefully, and I noticed Ryan watching out for me, too. This was worse than the Mimosa Manor, even without the stench of marijuana drifting out of one apartment (with a Rasta flag on the door) and the sound of French folk music blasting out of another.

  Hugo’s apartment was at the end of the hall, right under a flickering fluorescent light. Lucia and Archer led the way, followed by me and Ryan. He looked expressionless, which meant he really wasn’t liking this.

  Neither was I. At this end of the hall, the music and smoke had died down, but it still didn’t feel right.

  Lucia unlocked the door. Since I was the shortest, I got up right behind her and reached forward to keep the door open.

  The smell hit us first. My hand flew up to my nose.

  I’ve smelled a lot of terrible things in my medical career. Pilonidal abscesses—pockets of pus around the anus, so disgusting that surgeons often pack a bottle of clove oil in their pockets to sprinkle on the inside of their surgical masks to mask the stench. And melena, meaning stool coloured black with digested blood, with a horrible sweet, yet feculent reek. But this smelled like something different.

  Rotten.

  Stale.

  Heavy.

  Lucia squeaked and recoiled, near
ly trampling me with her stiletto boots.

  “Hey!” I said, before I was brutally reminded that forceful talking and thereby inhaling was a Bad Idea. I backed up as much as I could without creating the domino effect with Ryan.

  Ryan stepped around me and pulled the door closed. “We better not go in there. We better call the police.”

  He was right. My brain immediately recognized his logic. If something had happened to Hugo, or if he’d committed a smelly crime in his apartment, we should walk away now and leave any forensic evidence intact for the professionals.

  On the other hand, the irrational part of me still wanted to bust into that apartment. Isn’t that a mandatory Hollywood scene? Especially if Lucia and I were bouncing around in bikinis. Well, Lucia, anyway. Maybe I could get away with a miniskirt. We’d stroll in, calling, “Hello?” and waving our pom poms, just before a guy with a chainsaw tackled us. One of us would bite it instantly. Probably me, as the shorter, darker, less conventionally attractive one. Then he’d hack Lucia to death, but not before she got in One. Last. Scream.

  Back in real life, I glanced at Archer to see how he was taking this. He’d been the furthest from the door and the smell. His body language still leaned forward, like he wanted to barge in too. But from the look of stunned disgust on his face, he’d obviously gotten a belated whiff. He nodded agreement at Ryan and headed toward Lucia. She was now leaning against the hallway wall on the right, fanning her face. Archer wrapped his arm around her shoulders and spoke low in her ear before he said to us, “We’re getting out of here.”

  So Lucia wouldn’t bring her bootylicious into the apartment any time soon. The Hollywood scene fizzled before it started.

  Also, did I mention the stench?

  I paused for only a second. “Okay. But shouldn’t we lock the apartment, to make sure no one else goes in?”

  Lucia shuddered from across the hall. “I am not touching nothing!”

  Archer moved around her protectively. “That’s all right, Lucia. Don’t touch anything. We can go outside.”

  “Yes, yes!” she said, almost pushing him away in her attempt to break for the stairs.