Read Online Bad to the Bone by Stephen Solomita - Free Book Online Page B

kid.”
    “Exactly.” Betty opened the door and stepped out onto the curb. “What I can’t figure out,” she said, closing the door, “is what the Hanoverians want with a five-year-old kid.”
    She was walking down the street before Moodrow could answer. The question had already occurred to him and the answer, given a little thought, was obvious. If Hanover House (or Davis Craddock) was responsible for Flo Alamare’s condition, denial was the only way to save the commune from an intense police investigation. The Lower East Side, long a haven for the city’s freaks, had seen its share of communes. Moodrow didn’t know of one that could stand close scrutiny.
    He looked around for a coffee shop. Though the books about cops are filled with alcohol, it’s coffee that fuels the department. There was a small candy store up the street that looked promising, but even as he started to get out of the car, Moodrow spotted a brown Plymouth slowly cruising down 30th Avenue. He didn’t have to look for the word TRAFFIC on the doors. New York City’s third major source of revenue, after real estate and the income tax, is traffic. If he left the Mercury, the Brownie would wait until he was out of sight, then write him a thirty-dollar ticket. A year ago, like every other cop, he’d had a restricted parking permit…
    Moodrow shook his head. Why was he thinking about the cops so much? He rolled the window down and watched the human parade. Astoria is primarily a Greek neighborhood and the widows, in their shapeless black dresses, were out on the street. There was a fair sprinkling of Asians, too, as there seemed to be in every New York neighborhood. Most of the Asian women pushed strollers and a few were obviously pregnant. The scene was as close to bucolic as the city ever got.
    Moodrow stepped out of the car, then leaned back against the door. The Brownie was ticketing a Toyota by an expired meter, and Moodrow wondered if he’d have enough time to run over to the candy store for a container of coffee. But the Brownie was already giving him a speculative look. Tickets were expensive and if you got too many of them, the state wouldn’t renew your registration. He waited until Betty came back, then left her to guard the Mercury while he fetched coffee for both of them.
    “There’s something I think you should do,” she said when he got back. She was sipping at her coffee while Moodrow, one-handed, headed off to Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. “I think you should save the blood and urine. If it’s still there.”
    “Say that again?”
    “When Flo Alamare was in the two hospitals, they took blood and urine samples. For testing. If the samples haven’t been destroyed, you should have the hospital hold onto them. I got somebody off on that, one time.”
    “You’re still thinking it’s poison.” Moodrow shook his head.
    “I had a client about two years ago. I don’t even remember his name. That’s how many there are. Anyway, his wife goes in the hospital with severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and dehydration. She starts running a fever and, for a day or two, the doctors think they’re going to lose her. Then she recovers. Six months later, the husband gets drunk in a bar and brags to his pal about how he poisoned his wife with bug poison. It turns out the pal is a cop informant, and he repeats the story before the husband gets out of the bar. The cops investigate and make an arrest, but all the blood and fluid they took when the wife was in the hospital had been destroyed. Meanwhile her body metabolized whatever he gave her. I don’t have to tell you the rest.”
    For a quick moment, Moodrow felt a rush of familiar male annoyance. Where did Betty get off—a woman and an amateur—telling him how to operate? Then he came back to the professional cop, the capital ‘D’ detective willing to accept any help from any source, especially when the suggestion was eminently reasonable. He recalled a time when he’d jumped