Janet Evanovich - Notorious Nineteen

I looked over at the closed door behind Connie that led to my cousin Vinnie’s private office. “Is Vinnie in?” I asked her.

Connie looked up from her computer. “No. He’s downtown bonding out Jimmy Palowski. Palowski’s neighbor caught him watering her flowers without a watering can, if you get what I mean. He got arrested for drunk and disorderly, and indecent exposure.”

I sunk into the molded plastic office chair in front of Connie’s desk. “My car got blown up.”

“I heard. Same old, same old.”

“I need money. Anything good come in?”

“Do you remember Geoffrey Cubbin?”

“Yeah. He was arrested last month for embezzling five million dollars from Cranberry Manor.”

Connie handed me a file. “The judge set a really high bond, and Vinnie signed on the dotted line. Cubbin didn’t seem like much of a risk. No prior arrests, and he was claiming he was innocent. Plus he had a wife and a cat. Men with cats are usually good risks. Very stable.”

“And?”

“He’s gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth, along with the five million. There’s an article in the paper this morning. He was at home awaiting his trial, he woke up in the middle of the night with pain and fever and went to the ER, and four hours later he was minus his appendix. That was three days ago. When his wife arrived at the hospital yesterday to take him home, he was gone. Vanished. No one saw him leave.”

“Is this our problem?”

“It’ll officially be our problem on Monday. If he doesn’t show up for court we’ll forfeit the bond. Personally, I think it sounds like he skipped. His court date was right around the corner, and he panicked. If he’d gotten convicted, he’d be looking at a good chunk of prison time. You might want to poke around before the trail gets cold.”

I took the file and leafed through it. Geoffrey Cubbin was forty-two years old. Wharton business school graduate. Managed the Cranberry Manor assisted-living facility. I studied his photo. Pleasant-looking guy. Brown hair. Glasses. No tattoos or piercings noted. His height was listed at 5'10". Average weight plus a few extra pounds. He had a wife and a cat. No kids.

The hospital was the logical place to start. It was also the closest. Cubbin lived in Hamilton Township, and Cranberry Manor was a thirty-five- to forty-minute drive when traffic was heavy in downtown Trenton.

“No,” Lula said.

“No what?” I asked her.

“No, I’m not goin’ to the hospital with you. I saw that look on your face, and I know you figured you’d start by goin’ to the hospital. And I’m not goin’ on account of I don’t like hospitals. They smell funny, and they’re filled with sick people. Last time I was in a hospital it was depressin’. And I think I might have picked up a fungus. Lucky for me I got a high resistance to that sort of thing, and it was one of them twenty-four-hour funguses.”

St. Francis Hospital is about a half mile down Hamilton Avenue from the bonds office. It’s on the opposite side of the street from the bonds office, so it’s officially in the Burg. The Burg is a close-knit, blue-collar, residential chunk of South Trenton that runs on gossip, good Catholic guilt, and pot roast at six o’clock. It’s bordered by Chambers Street, Hamilton Avenue, Broad Street, and Liberty Street. I grew up in the Burg and my parents still live there, in a small two-family house on High Street.

“Not a problem,” I said. “I can walk to St. Francis.”

“He wasn’t at St. Francis,” Connie said. “He went to Central Hospital on Joy Street.”

“You never gonna walk there,” Lula said. “That’s way off Greenwood.”

“Drive me to the hospital,” I said to Lula. “You can wait in the lobby.”

“I’ll drive you to the hospital,” Lula said, “but I’m not waiting in no lobby. I’ll wait in my car.”

Central Hospital had been built in the forties and looked more like a factory than a hospital. Dark red brick. Five floors of grim little rooms where patients were warehoused. A small drive court for the ER. A double door in the front of the building. The double door opened onto a lobby with a standard issue information desk, brown leather couches, and two fake trees. I’d never been in the OR, but I imagined it as being medieval. The hospital didn’t have a wonderful reputation.

“Hunh,” Lula said, pulling into the parking garage. “I suppose I’m gonna have to go with you. If you don’t have me watching out for shit, you’re liable to not come out. That’s how hospitals get you. You go in to visit and before you know it they got a camera stuck up your butt and they’re lookin’ to find poloponies.”

“Do you mean polyps?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that what I said? Anyway my Uncle Andy had that done, and they said he had them polyps, and next thing they took his intestines out and he had to poop in a bag. So I’m here to tell you there’s no way I’m poopin’ in a bag.”

“I’m not crazy about this conversation,” I said. “Could we move on to something else?”

Lula parked her red Firebird on the second level and cut the engine. “I’m just sayin’.”

We entered the hospital through the front door and I approached the woman at the desk.

“I’m investigating the Cubbin disappearance,” I said to the woman. “I’d like to speak to your head of security.”

“Do you have ID?” she asked.

Here’s the deal about doing fugitive apprehension for a bail bondsman. I have all sorts of rights to apprehend because the bondee has signed them over, but I’m not a police officer. Fortunately most people aren’t clear on the technicalities. And most people don’t look too closely at my ID. Truth is, I bought my badge and my laminated ID on the Internet. Seven dollars and ninety-five cents plus postage. They look pretty genuine. Not that I’m lying or anything. They say Bond Enforcement Agent, and they have my name on them. Not my problem if people confuse me with a cop, right?

I flashed her my badge and my ID, her phone rang, and she moved me along.

“First floor,” she said. “Room 117. Down the corridor to the right. If no one’s there you can page him on the intercom at the door.”

I mouthed thank you and Lula and I went in search of Room 117.

“I’ve only been here a minute, and already I can feel myself getting hospital cooties,” Lula said. “I itch all over. I got the hospital heebie-jeebies.”

The door to Room 117 was closed. I knocked and someone inside grunted acknowledgment. I opened the door and was surprised to find Randy Briggs in a tan and blue security guard uniform.

I’ve crossed paths with Randy Briggs on several occasions, and some have been more pleasant than others. Briggs is single, in his early forties, has a small amount of sandy blond hair and a narrow face with close-set eyes. He’s three feet tall, and he has the personality of a rabid raccoon.

“Whoa,” I said. “What’s with the uniform?”

“What’s it look like?” Briggs said. “I’m head of security.”

“You were always a tech guy,” I said. “What happened to the computer programming?”

“No jobs. The shit’s made in China and the tech support comes from Sri Lanka. The only reason I got this job is because they were afraid I’d pull a dwarf discrimination suit.”

“They let you have a gun?” Lula asked.

“Yeah,” Briggs said. “I’m real good at shooting guys in the nuts, being they’re at eye level.”

It was a small office furnished with a desk and some uncomfortable-looking chairs. There was a dinosaur computer, a phone, a stack of files in manila folders, and a couple walkie-talkies. There were a bunch of handwritten notes and several photographs tacked to a bulletin board behind the desk. It looked to me like one of the photographs was of Geoffrey Cubbin.