The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) (22 page)

I opened the door without enthusiasm, prepared to block his questions with whatever evasions I could muster on the spot.

Before I could get the door even a third of the way open, Megan pushed her way back in, slamming the door behind her. She grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me toward her, and we started up exactly where we had left off moments ago. It was as if she had never left except now we were standing by the door.

She broke away for one moment, leaning back against the door and surveying me as she took her hand and ran it through my hair. “Sorry about that. I had to plug my meter,” she said, a little out of breath.

“There are no meters on this street,” I countered as we returned to kissing with the intensity of teenagers.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s only a few steps from the kitchen to the living room. And from there, only a few additional steps to the bedroom. We made the trip in a record number of steps. Not that I was counting.

A short while later—wait, strike that. A reasonable amount of time later, by which I mean a respectable amount of time, nothing too brief and embarrassing, and yet nothing that drifted into the Tantric, we found ourselves wrapped around each other, fitting quite nicely, thank you, within the confines of a twin bed that I’d called my own since about age twelve.

A warm, yellow light dusted the room, courtesy of the streetlamp below my window and the marquee on the front of the movie theater next door. Megan played absently with the few sad hairs that called my chest their home. I looked from her to the red crystal that she had grabbed on our way into the bedroom. I picked it up off the nightstand and rolled it around my fingertips, enjoying the hard, smooth surface and watching as it picked up the dim light in the room.

“Well,” I said, holding the crystal up for her benefit, “I think it’s safe to say that this one works. I’ll put a little Inspected by #24 sticker on it and we can try the next one.”

“Sorry to say, I only brought the one,” she said. “But I have a feeling that this one will continue to work as the night progresses.” She took the stone from me and ran it, slowly and seductively, across my chest. “So, am I your first?” she asked as she peered up at me.

I wasn’t sure how to respond and the look on her face was giving me no help at all. And then she burst out laughing.

“My first what?” I asked as I laughed with her. “My first psychic? My first landlady? My first divorcee?”

“Actually,” she said, as her voice turned a bit serious, “I’m not yet a divorcee. I’m still technically a married woman.”

“Well, then, you are my first married woman,” I said. “With the exception of my first wife, but I don’t think that counts.”

She laid her head back on my chest. “It’s so sad,” she said quietly.

“What’s sad?”

“Divorce. Any divorce. Mostly my divorce.” She sighed. “I saw Pete the other day, brought him the divorce papers to sign. He was all set to sign them. And then he just started crying. I felt so bad for him.” I ran my hand across her back in what I hope would be perceived as a sympathetic move.

“So I said we could wait a bit,” she continued, more softly. She turned back and looked at me again. “But, as I think my actions tonight have indicated, I for one have moved on. At some point he’s going to have to do the same.”

“It’s hard,” I said. “I’ve been in his position, sort of. I’m sure it’s difficult to be the one who leaves. But, believe me, it’s no picnic being the one who’s left.”

She sighed again and we lay there in silence. “Pete and I started out so well. I just hope we can come out of this as friends. Do you get along with your ex-wife?”

“We’ve reached something of a friendly impasse. Basically, I try not to make fun of her husband, and she tries to keep me out of jail.” I took the crystal from Megan and set it on the nightstand. “Currently we’re each experiencing difficulty in our assigned tasks.” I leaned in to kiss her, but she was still looking at the nightstand. Her gaze moved from there to scan the entire room.

“This is almost exactly as I pictured it,” she said.

“You’ve fantasized about my bedroom?”

“No, well, yes. I mean, I just sort of wondered what it would look like.”

“Well, as the landlord, I believe you have the right to enter at any time for an impromptu inspection.”

“I may have to exercise that right on a more consistent basis,” she said. She reached over to the nightstand and I thought she was bringing the crystal back, so was surprised to see that she had grabbed the deck of cards that was lying there. “You play a lot of cards in here?” she asked. “Like solitaire?” she added with a wicked smile.

“Magicians always have a deck of cards within reach,” I said. “It comes with the territory. I mean, I’m willing to bet you have quite a few crystals scattered about willy-nilly at your place.”

“Willy-nilly,” she repeated, raising an eyebrow. “Well, yes, but those are for mystical, not practical, reasons.”

“Whoa, full stop. Let’s not underestimate the mystical qualities of a standard deck of cards,” I said, taking the deck from her and doing a quick fan of all the cards.

“The mystical qualities of a deck of cards?” she said with a note of doubt in her voice. “Such as?”

I squared the deck and then did a series of one-handed cuts while I spoke. “Well, you might be surprised just how interesting an average deck of cards actually is. There’s a lot going on in here,” I said.

“Such as?” she asked.

“Such as,” I said, mentally scrambling to remember all the arcane facts I knew about playing cards. “There are two colors…red and black…representing day and night.”

“Okay,” Megan said, sounding completely unconvinced.

“There are four suits, each representing one of the four seasons. There are fifty-two cards in the deck—”

“Just as there are fifty-two weeks in the year?” she suggested.

“Exactly.”

I pulled the top card off the deck, extended my arm and made the card first disappear from my hand, and then made it re-appear a moment later. “Each suit consists of thirteen cards, which corresponds to the thirteen lunar cycles in a year. And finally,” I said, returning the card to the deck and squaring it again, “If you add up the values of all the cards, you’ll get 364. Add one more for the Joker, and you end up with 365, or the number of days in one year.”

As I finished my recitation, I made one single card—the Joker—rise up out of the deck as a final flourish. Megan laughed and applauded.

“That’s all well and good,” she said, taking the deck from me and returning it to the nightstand, “but what sort of vibrational energies do the cards emit?

“Nothing like the red crystal,” I admitted. “So it’s a good thing you brought it along.” We started kissing again and I’d venture to say that we both forgot entirely about the cards and the crystals for the next few minutes.

Chapter 17

I awoke to music emanating from my cell phone, which by the sound of it was in my pocket in my pants somewhere on my bedroom floor. I recognized the ring tone as the latest one I had assigned to Deirdre, which I’d come to think of as a sort of musical early warning system.

If anyone ever wanted to chart it, the trajectory of the Eli-Deirdre relationship could be mapped entirely from the ring tones I had chosen for her calls.

I started with a Rolling Stones tune and have stuck with them ever since, each song acting as a mini-signpost of the state of our current emotional battlefield.

The first ring tone I used was
Honky Tonk Woman
—we met in a bar, although to set the record straight, she was not gin-soaked and we were not in Memphis. We graduated to
Let’s Spend the Night Together
and then settled in with
Loving Cup
for most of our marriage. You could tell things were headed downhill when I switched to
19th Nervous Breakdown
. That evolved into
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
, followed by
As Tears Go By
,
Sympathy For the Devil
, and finally my latest selection,
It’s All Over Now
. That one seems to be the one I’ll stick with.

I glanced at the alarm clock, which read 7:12 a.m. If she was calling at that hour, it could only be more bad news. I literally rolled out of bed onto the floor, doing a quick sweep with my hands until I found my pants.

“What now?” I said as I leaned back against the bed frame and rubbed something out of my left eye with the palm of my hand. I glanced over at Megan, who appeared to still be sleeping. Even with her hair a mess and with pillow wrinkles covering her face, she still looked amazing.

“Where are you?” Deirdre said. Her tone sounded edgy and a little ticked off. Business as usual.

“You know, when I was a kid, no one ever asked that question on the phone. You always knew where someone was when you called them.”

“Let’s explore the myriad changes to the daily fabric of our lives wrought by the electronic age at a later time,” she said as she cut me off. “There’s been another attack.”

I sat up straight. “Who? Where?”

“Your friend, Franny Higgins, in her house about three hours ago.”

“Franny,” I said, louder than I had intended to. Megan stirred and opened her eyes. “Is she...?” I asked, not quite able to say the words out loud.

“She’s in the hospital, alive but in a coma. I’d like you to come down here to talk to us.”

“And if I don’t, Homicide Detective Fred Hutton is going to come get me, right?”

“More than likely. We’re at Hennepin County Medical, in Intensive Care.”

“Give me thirty minutes.” I hung up and looked over at Megan, who was wide-awake now, her head propped up on one elbow, a concerned look on her face. “I’ve got to go to the hospital. It’s Franny. She was attacked. She’s in a coma.”

“I’m going with you,” Megan said. Before I could assemble anything resembling a decent protest, we were both dressed and in my car on our way downtown.

I left a note for Harry on our way out, and Megan called one of her store clerks about opening up without her.

Traffic was light and our conversation was sparse, due perhaps to the early morning hour, or the news about Franny, or the slight awkwardness that settles in after a first-time intimate encounter.

But she took my hand as we walked through the parking ramp and if I had any worries about the likelihood of a second encounter, those doubts vanished in an instant.

So, less than twenty-four hours after I had been discharged, I was back at the hospital, this time with Megan in tow. We made our way through the stark hospital lobby, into the elevator bank and up to the fifth floor.

When the elevator doors opened, I found myself face-to-face with Homicide Detective Fred Hutton.

Behind him was his tiny partner, Miles Wright, and across the small lobby was Deirdre, deep in conversation with a nurse. Two uniformed cops stood near the automatic door that led to the ICU. The doors swung open and an orderly came through—I could see two more cops on duty further down the hall.

Homicide Detective Fred Hutton glared down at me. He was holding his cell phone in his hand. “Marks,” he said flatly. “I was just going to call and send someone to pick you up.”

“Happy to save you the cab fare,” I said, moving past him and toward Deirdre. The nurse said a few hushed words to her as we approached, and then she slapped the silver panel to open the doors and disappeared into the ward.

“She’s still in a coma,” Deirdre said, anticipating my question. “She’s unconscious but stable,” she added, looking from me to Megan and then back to me.

“This is Megan, my landlord, er, neighbor. She’s a friend of Franny’s. And me,” I was finally able to sputter out. “What happened?”

Homicide Detective Fred Hutton and his partner joined our small group, standing like silent sentries behind me.

“Someone broke into her house around four this morning,” Deirdre said. “The intruder attacked and left her for dead, not realizing that she had managed to trigger the medic alert alarm that she wore around her neck.”

“It might have been triggered inadvertently in the struggle.” Homicide Detective Fred Hutton corrected.

“However it happened,” Deirdre continued, “when she didn’t answer her phone, an ambulance was dispatched. They found her alive, but unconscious.”

“And what makes you think this is connected to the other murders?” I asked.

Deirdre looked over at Detective Wright, who opened the manila folder he was holding and took out what had become a very familiar sight—a clear plastic evidence pouch containing The King of Diamonds.

“It was found on the nightstand. And once again, our killer is exercising his wit. I understand Ms. Higgins was a phone psychic?” Deirdre asked, delivering her question as much to Megan as to me.

“Almost exclusively,” Megan answered.

“Well, she was strangled. With a phone cord.”

It made sense, in a perverse way.

“And what’s even more interesting,” Deirdre continued, “is that Ms. Higgins had two phones in the house. Both of which were cordless.”

“The killer brought his own phone cord?”

“Apparently.”

“And where’s Boone during all this?” I asked.

“Still in custody,” Homicide Detective Fred Hutton said.

I turned and looked up at him. “But if he was in custody when this happened, obviously he’s not the killer.”

“We’re still not convinced that this is a one-man operation. Speaking of which, where were you at around four this morning?” He had just the slightest trace of a smile on his lips, like a cat that’s convinced that he’s cornered a mouse.

“He was with me,” Megan said suddenly. All eyes turned to her, surprised at this admission.

“At four a.m.?” Homicide Detective Fred Hutton repeated.

“All night,” Megan answered, a bit defiantly.

“And you can attest that he didn’t go out and come back?” Deirdre asked.

“He would have had to climb over me to do it.” Megan said. “And I’m a very light sleeper,” she added, looking up at Homicide Detective Fred Hutton. There was a long silence as the detectives and the Assistant District Attorney exchanged looks.

“Can we see her?” I asked, feeling that a change of topic was in order.

“For a minute,” Deirdre said. “The doctors are going to take her down for a scan in a few minutes, to see if there’s any brain damage.” She hit the plate on the wall and the doors swung open.

Deirdre led the way and we followed. I looked back to see Homicide Detective Fred Hutton glaring after me, and then the doors shut and he was gone.

Both of the times I had met Franny, I had been struck with how tiny she was. Now, seeing her in the hospital bed—with all the tubes and wires and the machines whirring and beeping—she seemed even smaller.

And certainly more frail.

We stood outside her room, the three of us looking through the window at the tiny woman who looked to be on the verge of being swallowed up by the large, white hospital bed.

Megan put her hand to her mouth the moment she saw her.

“I’ve never seen her be so still,” Megan finally said in a whisper. “Every time I’ve been with her, she’s always been moving. And moving and moving.”

“She’s a tough old bird,” a voice from behind us said. I turned to see Dr. Levine, the red-haired and red-bearded doctor from the day before. He recognized my face but I could tell he was having trouble placing me. I mimed being hit on the head and his face immediately brightened.

“Ah, yes, my unconscious friend from yesterday,” he said in a jovial, but appropriately quiet voice. “Have you avoided being hit on the head since departing the loving embrace of our care?”

“So far,” I said.

“That’s what I like to hear,” he said, as he looked from me to Megan and Deirdre and then through the glass at Franny.

“Under the circumstances,” he said, using an only slightly more serious tone, “she’s doing quite well. Breathing on her own, which is a good sign. No bones broken in the struggle. Pulse and blood pressure are both good. Brain activity is strong, but we still need to check for internal bleeding. The problem is, oxygen was cut off from her brain for, well, we don’t know for how long. And so we’re in wait and see mode right now.” He looked at the three of us and then patted Megan’s shoulder. “Don’t fret. I think she may still have a few surprises in her.”

“I hope so,” Megan said, her voice cracking just a bit.

He nodded at me and moved back to the large, circular desk that filled the center of the unit. Two cops leaned casually on the desk, conversing quietly. They took turns looking in our direction and keeping tabs on our location.

“What’s most distressing about this,” Deirdre said to no one in particular, “is that she probably saw who attacked her. She just can’t tell us who it is. At least not yet.”

We all watched the small figure in the bed for several more minutes, the only sound the hum of voices at the desk and the steady beep-beep coming from Franny’s room.

I anticipated another run-in with Homicide Detective Fred Hutton when we left the ICU, so I was pleased to find him in the midst of his own run-in as we exited the ward.

When we came through the automatic doors I could hear him arguing in a low voice with someone in front of the elevators and was surprised to see that his confrontation was with Megan’s soon-to-be ex, Pete.

Pete looked a little disheveled and certainly not up to going one-on-one with the iron giant. As soon as he spotted Megan, his face lit up. “That’s my wife, right there,” Pete said to Homicide Detective Fred Hutton, pointing in our direction. “She’ll vouch for me.”

Megan and I both stopped dead in our tracks, not certain why Pete was there or what Homicide Detective Fred Hutton may have said to him in our absence. In the momentary confusion of our arrival, Pete was able to sidestep both homicide detectives and make his way over to us.

“Megan, I called the shop this morning and Trina told me about Franny and said you were down here. Is she okay?”

“She’s still in a coma,” Megan said, taking a subtle step away from me. Pete looked over and seemed to see me for the first time.

“Oh, Eli, hi,” he said, clearly a little confused about what I was doing there.

“I gave Megan a ride down here,” I said by way of explanation.

“Oh, great, thanks,” he said, and then turned back to Megan. “Can I see her?”

Megan shook her head. “Like I said, she’s in a coma. They’re taking her down for a scan, but otherwise they don’t know much. I mean, they’re not sure when or if…she’s going to come out of it.”

Pete moved toward her and they hugged awkwardly. I turned to see Deidre looking at me from one side, and Homicide Detective Fred Hutton looking at me from the other. Their expressions were inscrutable.

“Well,” Pete said as they came out of the hug, “as soon as I heard, I thought I should be here. For you. And for her.”

“That’s great, Pete,” Megan said. “I know she’d appreciate that.” Megan looked at me but managed to make it look like she was looking at everyone in the group. “Well,” she said, “I guess we should be going. Call me if you hear anything,” she said to me as an afterthought.

“I will.”

Pete took her by the arm and they walked the short distance to the elevator. After a small eternity, the elevator arrived and they stepped into it. Pete threw me a small wave and Megan smiled weakly as the doors closed.