Losing Odds
“Sorry to pull you away from dinner, Doc.”
“No, you’re not,” I grumbled good-naturedly, shooting Lee Prestwick, police chief of Kurgan’s Point, a wry grin as I firmly shut the door of my Jeep Sahara. “So don’t lie,” I challenged my best friend, who at 35 had been an inseparable part of my life from the time we were three-year-old bratty little girls. That point made, I turned my attention to the grim task at hand.
“Under the circumstances, Dr. Triano, I’m being polite.” Lee inclined her head of short dirty blonde hair in the direction of the male body lying motionless on the parking lot pavement between the two paramedics. “Your patient?”
Eying the beefy, middle-aged man, I nodded. “My sometime patient.” Kneeling beside the paramedics, who edged back to give me room, I examined the corpse. “Heart condition, high blood pressure, borderline diabetic.”
“Bess Chandler said to tell you,” Lee gestured toward my 93-year-old, thankfully healthy and alive patient, and the best source of gossip in town, “that she saw Sammy here clutch his chest right before he tumbled to the ground.”
“Angina and high blood pressure account for a probable heart attack, Chief, though I did prescribe medication,” I murmured, inspecting first Sammy’s swollen eye, then the bruise on his hairy arm, evident since he was wearing a short-sleeved tee-shirt. “But these recent black and blue marks tell a different story.”
“He probably got into a fight. Look at that shiner.”
“Maybe,” I kept my voice reasonable, “but the bruise on his arm wasn’t caused by a fistfight. There’s a puncture wound,” I said, pointing without touching, “under all that discoloration.”
Lee bent closer to see what I was talking about. “You said he was borderline diabetic. Could he have messed up the insulin shot?”
“He wasn’t injecting himself with insulin. At least, not with any prescription I ordered.” Struggling to my feet, the on-again, off-again ache in my thigh adding thirty years to my age, I shook off Lee’s outstretched hand in annoyance. Not aimed at her, but the troublesome humidity on Long Island this summer that was making me feel decrepit. “He was a handyman, Chief. He might have accidentally stabbed himself with a sharp tool.”
“Handyman, Doc? Sammy was a bookie.”
I slowly turned to face my friend. “He was a what? No, don’t tell me. That’s why you’re a police chief and I’m only a doctor.”
Lee’s smile was half smug, half affection. “I know all sorts of secrets about people you’d rather naively believe innocent.”
“Why didn’t you arrest him?”
“Hearsay, no real proof. But now, I’ll get a chance to search his place. Want to come along and check out his medicine chest? You being an honorary deputy and all,” she drawled, reminding me of the recent murder case that resulted in the scar on my thigh. “Maybe you’ll find something other than what you prescribed.”
“Not only in the medicine chest, but his body, Chief. I think you should have the county medical examiner do an autopsy.”
“I intend to.” Lee gave orders to the paramedics before guiding me toward Bess Chandler, who had, remarkably, a cat on a leash. “Bess said the animal was protesting rather loudly in Sammy’s car.”
“On a leash?”
“Sammy just came back from Annie Smitt, the veterinarian. There’s a receipt in his car. I didn’t touch anything, Chief,” Bess quickly cut off Lee’s protest. “Just read the bill through the open window.” The old woman didn’t miss a thing, particularly my limp, prompting a frown that made me feel as though I were the patient and she the doctor. “Chief, did you know Sammy broke off his long-time romance with the vet a few weeks ago?”
“Annie Smitt was his girlfriend?”
“Hot and heavy. And then, God knows why, Sammy got bored.”
“I’ll file that away, Bess, thanks.”
I couldn’t resist baiting my friend. “So you don’t know everything, Chief?”
Lee crossed her arms, ignoring me, her cool gray eyes considering the cat. “Do you mind holding onto him for a day or two, Bess? I’ll send some cat food along.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. Ok, Doc, let’s go snoop.”
Following the police car, I parked the Jeep in front of a garden apartment a few blocks from the center of town, just north of the eastern section of Long Island that splits in two like an alligator’s jaw. Lee unlocked the first floor apartment with Sammy’s keys and tossed me an extra pair of rubber gloves. The place was a mess. Not vandalized, simply cluttered with old newspapers, most of them open to the sports pages. While Lee rummaged through Sammy’s drawers in the bedroom, I inspected the medicine chest, found the high blood pressure medication and blood thinner I’d prescribed, both of which looked as though they’d been half used.
“He bought the pills.” I joined Lee and handed over the bottles, “and actually took them.”
“Some of your patients listen,” Lee murmured absently, intent on an inspection of papers and notes stashed in Sammy’s sock drawer, layered over a ziplock bag filled with stacks of 20-dollar bills.
“I gather those aren’t tax receipts.”
She snorted, placing the papers in a small duffel bag that had been lying on the floor. “It’ll take a while to go through them, but Bobby Campos’ name shows up quite a bit with awfully big bets.”
“He’s one of my patients, too.” I pictured the forty-something man in my mind, thought for a moment about his rare visits. “Lee, the guy always—” I fumbled for the right diplomatic word. “There’s always an odor that clings to him, no matter how much cheap aftershave he bathes in.”
“Body odor?”
“Horse odor.”
“Horse odor?” Gray eyes searched mine for signs of humor.
“I’m serious. He works down at one of the horse farms heading back toward the city.”
“So what are you saying, Dani?”
“You’d better get that autopsy report.”
“Sammy’s blood glucose levels were dangerously high, Doc,” Lee read from the autopsy report two days later. “I thought you said he was borderline diabetic.”
“He was.” I handed over Sammy’s medical file. “I ran blood tests a month ago. Unless he drastically changed his eating habits, there’d be no reason to support what the medical examiner found. Anything else dodgy?”
“You said you only prescribed the blood pressure medication and what was the other? A blood thinner, right? The medical examiner found dexamethasone in his blood. I looked it up on-line before I came here. It’s a steroid for arthritis.”
“Taken orally, yeah, and too much can affect blood sugar,” I explained, meeting her eyes, “but I never prescribed it to him.” On a hunch, I booted up my computer and ran a search for dexamethasone, narrowing my request to the same steroid used for animals. “Ah.”
“Ah?” Lee peered over my shoulder, quietly reading the on-screen text, “administered by injection, inappropriate use can cause life-threatening hormonal or metabolic changes. To a horse or dog. Dani—”
“His ex-girlfriend is a vet.”
“And his biggest betting client, also his biggest losing client, works at a horse farm.” Lee stepped around to the front of my desk and leaned back against the credenza. “Sammy wouldn’t just sit still and let a veterinarian, particularly one he’d just broken up with, jab a hypodermic needle in his arm. Besides, she’d inject it with a little more professionalism to avoid the bruising. Well, maybe not,” she grinned, “under the circumstances. I can still remember that blood sample you took from me when I’d pissed you off two years ago.”
“You deserved it. Something’s not right,” I said slowly, trying to zoom in on the source of my unease. “Even with that dose of steroid in his body, if Sammy was taking his medication, he should have been better able to fight the effects.”
“Meaning?”
“Sorry,” I shrugged. “Not a clue. Who gave Sammy the black eye?”
“According to Bess Chandler,” Lee scratched her head, looking as stumped as me, “she heard that Bobby and Sammy were fighting behind the bowling alley over the weekend.”
“What about?”
“Don’t know, Doc. That’s my next puzzle to solve.” Lee eyed the toy tin star scotch-taped to my computer monitor. “You’re earning your keep. I might just put you officially on my payroll.”
After house calls that afternoon, I swung by the police station, found Lee on the phone, just finishing a call. Gray eyes met mine as she waved me into the guest chair of the spartan police station, hung up, scribbled some notes, and shot a predatory look my way.
“I am so afraid to ask.”
“That was Dr. Annie Smitt, the veterinarian. Seems a thief broke into her supply cabinet and took an assortment of medicines, steroids among them.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“I never did. And here’s a prime example as to why not. When I asked her who had access to the cabinet, she said absolutely no one but herself. She runs a lean and mean office.” Lee glanced down at her notes, though I doubted she needed to refer to them. “However,” the cool, calculating smile was back, “Bobby Campos occasionally came to her office for a pickup when the horse farm ran short of supplies.”
“Meaning?”
“You tell me. You’ve got the tin star.”
“She’s try to implicate him somehow, present him as a guy who knows where she keeps the drugs. Besides,” I added, thinking out loud, “since she’s a vet and has a medical background, she’s smart enough to know you’d probably have an autopsy done, which means the steroids will become a known fact.”
“But, and this is a big ‘but,’ Dani,” Lee hedged, “if we assume Annie had something to do with Sammy’s death, why the botched-up injection and resulting bruise that would draw our attention?”
“You know the answer, Chief. Just in case you became suspicious, thinking it couldn’t be a heart attack, and ordered an autopsy, she needed a cover, needed to make it look like a nonprofessional job. And here’s something else to consider,” I continued, “why would she murder him? Just because he broke up with her?”
Lee gazed at me for a long time in silence, then shook her head. “I don’t mean this in a negative way, Dani,” she said softly, and I knew she was telling the truth, “but everyone’s not like you. People have ugly emotions.”
“So do I.”
“Yeah, but your ugly emotions aren’t comfortable for you. When they happen, you get all bent out of shape that they actually exist. You believe in your work, your friends, and your family. You’re solid, Dani. There are a lot of unstable people out there, who have serious self-esteem and behavioral problems.”
Unhappy with the truth, I sighed. “You think Annie really is guilty?”
“I think it’s possible. And—” Lee leaned over to pick up the ringing phone. “Chief Prestwick. Yes. Hey, Bess.” Blonde eyebrows shot up. “My deputy’s here, too. Right. About that night. Got it. Thanks.”
When she hung up the phone, Lee busied herself writing a note.
I grabbed the pen from her hand. “No way, Chief. Forget the notes. What did Bess say?”
“If you let me write it down, I won’t forget it.”
“You don’t ever forget a thing. Come on.”
“Did I tell you that when I interviewed Bobby Campos, he admitted that he and Sammy were fighting the other night about a wager?” When I shook my head, she continued, “Seems he wanted to bet on a race at Belmont. Big money. According to Sammy, there wasn’t enough time to place the bet, so he returned Bobby’s money, like a polite and honorable bookie. Unfortunately, Bobby would have won a lot of money if the bet had been placed, so he was really angry and they came to blows behind the bowling alley. With me, so far?”
“Sure.”
“Bess just told me that one of the bowling alley employees, who knows her niece, told that niece that she overheard Bobby say that Annie Smitt told Bobby that Sammy purposely delayed making the wager for Bobby.”
“Which means what?”
“I’m not sure. Seems that, if it’s true, and I need to find that out, then Annie was causing trouble, provoking the fight.”
“To get Bobby mad enough to knock Sammy out? So she could inject him with the steroid?” Something wasn’t right. Lost in thought, I stared at the wall, until Lee tapped my arm.
“What are you thinking?”
“Sammy’s bodily reaction still doesn’t make sense. Lee, humor me, will you? Ask the county lab to analyze the pills in those prescription bottles we took from Sammy’s apartment.”
“Why?”
“They may not be what they seem. Annie’s got a medical background. If she knew Sammy was on certain medications—” I shrugged. “Sorry. It might be a wild goose chase.”
“Worth a shot, Doc. I’ll let you know.”
The phone rang at midnight the next night, just as I’d fallen off to sleep, the latest AMA journal flung across my chest. “Dr. Triano.”
“Sorry to wake you, Doc.”
“You are not. Don’t lie.”
“I am. Really. Anyway,” Lee interrupted my protest, “just thought you wanted to hear the report from the drug lab. Those pills were placebos.”
“They—”
“Were enough to get a confession from Annie Smitt. You know, Doc, maybe I really will ask the town council to put you on the payroll.”
“You couldn’t afford me, Chief.”