3 The Case of Tiffany's Epiphany Read online

  I rattle off everything from asphyxia to shin splints and Tiffany responds with a resounding, “I better not.”

  I finish the form, take out my last twenty dollars and clip it under the first page on the clipboard. I return the form to the desk, am told to wait, and in less than ten seconds what I suspect is a real nurse comes out of an opposite door. Every eye in the waiting room, including the pink ones, looks up in hope. The nurse calls out “Miss Richmond.”

  Moans all around. Money talks. Bullshit walks--or in this case, sits and suffers.

  “The doctor will see you now.”

  The four of us rise.

  “You’re all Miss Richmond?” the nurse asks.

  Three of us sit back down.

  Tiffany, who did take off her shoes after my nagging, follows the nurse into the inner sanctum of medicinal repair. Once the door shuts and locks from the inside, Kelly immediately takes off her shoes and puts on Tiffany’s. “These are, like, so totally rad.”

  Kelly gets up and tries to walk. “Watch me, Dad.”

  “Kelly, sit down,” I say. “You’re going to break an ankle.”

  “I was like born to wear Christian Louboutin’s.”

  “Sit down. You don’t belong in those shoes.”

  “What do you mean? They’re perfect, they look great … on … me. Whoa-a-a-a …!”

  Kelly keels over to her left like a new felled tree, and crashes right into the guy with the broken arm, who screams out in his displeasure, “I think you broke my other arm.”

  “Sorry, mister,” Kelly apologies, “but at least you’re in the right place to get that fixed.”

  I jump up, lift Kelly to her feet, give the guy a quick, “Kids, these days,” and deposit my oldest back into her chair. “Take those shoes off right now.”

  “I will in a second, Dad.” Kelly hands her cell phone to Care who snaps shoe shots of her sister for fashion posterity.

  I use my cell to call Tiffany’s dad, Jamison Wentworth Richmond III. And he, as usual, doesn’t take my call. I leave a detailed message. I know he won’t call back. His usual custom.

  For the next fifteen minutes my kids play with their cell phones. I take a dog-eared magazine off the rack and read an article about President Bush’s new tax plan, George H.W., not George W. The other patients continue to moan.

  The nurse emerges again from the inner sanctum. The moans stop in anticipation of hearing their names, but only until the nurse says, “Mr. Sherlock.” The moans return--louder than before.

  “Dad, can we come with you?” Care asks.

  “No.” I hand Care the magazine I was reading. “Here, brush up on some history.”

  I hurry through the door held open by the nurse. One foot inside, she admonishes me, “Why didn’t you tell us she was Tiffany Richmond?”

  “I filled out the form.”

  “Her father owns this place. And if you don’t think we’re going to hear about this, you must be in the middle of a brain freeze, mister.”

  “Sorry.”

  I am led down a short hallway to an exam room. Tiffany sits on the exam table, one hand holding a mirror, the other one patting blush on her face. An IV line runs into the vein in the crook of her arm. It’s dripping a clear liquid into her system.

  “I’m Dr. Omagalla Nehru.”

  At the sound of the voice, I turn to my left and peer down at the balding head of a guy who couldn’t be more than 5 foot 3; the perfect Doc for a Doc in the box. His hand is outstretched for me to shake. I take it. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Miss Richmond must have ingested some type of narcotic that had a decided effect on her system.”

  “What” I ask.

  “I have taken blood, urine, and DNA specimens. We have called the lab, they’ll pick it up immediately and they’ll have the tests done, STAT. As soon as possible.” He raises his index finger to further make his point.

  “Good.”

  The doc added the customary prescription, “Have her drink lots of fluids to allow system flush itself out, and make sure she gets plenty of rest.”

  “Will do, Doc.”

  As the nurse removes the IV from Tiffany’s arm, Dr. Nehru pulls me toward him and speaks softly so that Tiffany can’t hear him. “And please tell the owner of company what good care we take of patient.”

  “Next time we chat, I’ll be sure to mention it.”

  Tiffany hops off the table, hands the mirror back to the nurse, smiles, and says to me, “They pumped my stomach, Mr. Sherlock.”

  “Did it hurt? Are you okay?”

  “What I wouldn’t have done for one of those machines when I was on a purge diet,” she tells me.

  Outside the clinic, a limo so big it could double as a troop transport vehicle awaits.

  “It sure didn’t take long for Daddy to go into action,” Tiffany says.

  “He called you?”

  “Of course he called me, he’s my daddy.”

  “I want you to go home, get some rest, and keep drinking fluids, Tiffany.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Sherlock.”

  “Bye, Tiffany,” Care and Kelly say in unison.

  “Ta-ta, little dudettes.”

  The driver holds the rear door waiting for Tiffany to climb inside.

  “When do we start, Mr. Sherlock?” she asks me.

  “Start what?”

  “Finding out who did this to me.”

  I sigh. “Tiffany, just do what the doctor said.”

  “Mr. Sherlock, the best revenge is a cocktail served warm.”

  CHAPTER 2

  It’s late. The kids finally go to bed. They made me watch this TV show where the world has been taken over by zombies and the only people left are muscle-bound, buffed-up bad actors and well-endowed, equally bad actresses. They all spend their time blowing the heads off the undead dead, while they’re busy pairing up with each other in typical soap opera type relationships. Think All My Children meets The Curse of the Living Dead.

  The door buzzer buzzes. Someone downstairs wants to get in. It’s probably one of the buddies of the drunk that lives on the second floor who regularly punches the wrong button or all the buttons on the residence doorbell panel.

  I get up off the couch, which will soon be my bed, go to my front door, push the respond button, and growl, “Go away.”

  “Oh, Mr. Sherlock.”

  “Tiffany …”

  “Buzz me in.”

  I scream back through the tiny speaker, “You’re supposed to be home resting.”

  “Mr. Sherlock, I got tired of resting. Let me in.”

  I push the door release button, hear the click, and in the time it takes to climb three flights of stairs, Tiffany enters my apartment.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” I ask.

  Care and Kelly pile out of my bedroom. “Can we go too?”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I tell everyone.

  “What should I wear?” Kelly asks.

  “We got to get there while the clues are still fresh,” Tiffany says.

  “Get where?”

  “To the club where I got roofied.”

  ---

  “Did you have to wear that?” Tiffany asks.

  I have been scolding her all the way down the block to where she parked her Lexus 450. “Don’t change the subject. You’re supposed to be home recuperating, Tiffany.”

  “Really, is that jacket the coolest thing you have to wear?”

  She is referring to my faux leather jacket.

  “It’s about as hip as a hip replacement.”

  “I try to buy clothes that are fashion timeless.”

  “I would have hated to be around when that thing was in fashion,” she tells me.

  “Sorry, you didn’t give me a lot of time to plan my wardrobe for the evening.”

  “I’m telling you, Mr.
Sherlock, getting you in this club is not going to be easy.”

  I take a deep breath. These conversations are extremely tiring. “We’re supposed to be talking about your health, Tiffany.”

  “I feel fine,” she says pulling out onto the street.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “I don’t?” Tiffany jams on the brakes, comes to a stop in the middle of the road, and leans over to see her reflection in the rear view mirror. “Is there something wrong with my make-up?”

  “The doctor said you have to let your system clear itself out.”

  “There’s no system in the world faster than mine. I lost four pounds in one weekend by eating only bran cereal,” Tiffany says. “That’s why I passed out on the bar right away. Most chicks just get woozier and woozier when somebody roofies them. They pass out an hour or two later. My roofie smacked me like an iron skillet to my skull. Boom!”

  Why do I even bother trying to reason with her? She doesn’t listen.

  In a few minutes we’re speeding down Lakeshore Drive. I yawn. I’m tired. It’s way past my bedtime. “Couldn’t we do this tomorrow?” I ask, exasperated.

  “Mr. Sherlock, you always tell me that if you don’t solve the case in the first seven-point-two hours the case goes into cold case hibernation.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Well, you said something like it.”

  Tiffany cuts over three lanes, and exits the Drive like Dale Earnhardt coming in for a pit stop. She zooms down Wacker Drive, through the Loop, and over the river near Greektown.

  The club is named Zanadu, a possible clever misspelling of Xanadu, the palatial home of Charles Foster Kane, but I seriously doubt if any of the revelers have ever heard of Citizen Kane. If it’s not a video game or Smart Phone app, the millennial generation has little use for it.

  The club is in the West Loop, in a converted warehouse. Twenty years ago this neighborhood was filled with low-life drug addicts and loose women; today it’s filled with a much better classes of drug addicts and loose women.

  Tiffany pulls the Lexus up in front of the long line of people waiting to get in. Every eye, male and female, watches her flip her keys to the valet. Next, they get a glimpse of yours truly and, no doubt, wonder what a girl who looks like she does could be doing with a guy who looks like me.

  I start to walk to the back of the line. Tiffany grabs me by the arm and pulls me back. “Where are you going?”

  “End of the line.”

  “Line? I haven’t waited in a line since grammar school.”

  I follow her as she zips by the “little people”.

  “Now, don’t say anything. Let me do the talking,” Tiffany says as we’re about to reach two black, bald, humongous slabs of intimidation manning the velvet rope.

  “Hi, Arson.” Tiffany greets the first man, then the second. “Hi, Sterno.”

  “Good evening, Tiffany.”

  Sterno unhooks the rope and Tiffany passes through. The rope is immediately clipped back before I have a chance to enter.

  “He’s with me,” Tiffany tells the pair.

  “Tiffany, we can’t let your chauffer in.” Arson’s voice does not match his size.

  “He’s not my driver.”

  “Well, we can’t let your servant in either,” Sterno says.

  “He’s not my servant.”

  Close, but no cigar.

  “Then what is he?”

  “He’s with me,” Tiffany explains.

  “Oh my God,” Arson says, as his hands go to his face like the kid in Home Alone. “You two are an item?”

  Sterno consoles Arson with a hug. It’s obvious not only do these two pair up at the door, but they pair up everywhere else.

  “Gross,” Tiffany says. “He’s like old enough to have kids smarter than me.”

  Arson, whose bicep is the size of my waist, leans over to Tiffany. “We can’t let anybody in who dresses like an exterminator from Cleveland.”

  “You have to let him in.”

  “We could lose our jobs lettin’ some guy in who uses a 2-in-1 shampoo,” Sterno adds.

  “He’s Mr. Sherlock, a detective who is here to find out who roofied me last night,” Tiffany tells them in her I’ve got more money than God tone.

  “You got roofied last night?” Sterno asks incredulously.

  “You didn’t hear?” Tiffany replies.

  “No,” Arson says.

  “So, let him in,” Tiffany repeats.

  “No can do,” Sterno says.

  “Let Mr. Sherlock in,” Tiffany says, “or I’ll put on my Facebook Page that the two of you are bald because you can’t grow your own hair and you both wear chin straps when you sleep.”

  The rope comes off its mooring. I step forward, suddenly proud to be a member of such an exclusive group. I fluff up my faux leather jacket and my button down collar shirt and tell the not-so-dynamic duo, “I just want you to know that I don’t follow the fashion trends, I set ’em.”

  As I pass through the portal, I hear a bewildered comment from the waiting peanut gallery behind me, “You letting that guy in?”

  I follow Tiffany up a few steps and down a short path to huge metal door, which looks strong enough to keep Attila and his Hun buddies out. A slimy-looking guy in a slimier-looking suit steps forward to block our path. He takes one look at me and says to Tiffany, “Let me guess, you’re on a scavenger hunt and you found the Forgotten Nerd?”

  Tiffany stares him straight in the eye, “This is Mr. Sherlock, Chicago Police Department, Detective First Class.”

  Slimy Guy sashays to the left like a matador, “Welcome to Zanadu.”

  The metal door slides open and a blast of hip-hop music hits me like a tornado hits a trailer park. I step inside and my entire body begins to violently shake to an over-dubbed backbeat mixed with an incessant string of garbled rap lyrics that must be in some other language.

  I take a whiff. My hearing might be gone, but my sense of smell still works. The place smells like a perfumed sweat sock. I look around the enormous, nearly unimpeded floor space. People are jammed together like pickles in a jar. The dance floor is packed with bodies twisting and turning like a bucket of snakes. The scene is so intense, so loud, and so overwhelming; the only way you could communicate is by texting, which I don’t do because the letters are too small to push on my flip phone. The DJ, who’s on a platform above the crowd working two turntables and I can’t see how many tape decks, wears a huge pair of earphones, which makes him the only one in the place that doesn’t have to listen to the awful music he’s playing.

  Tiffany pulls me through the throng as if she’s walking an unruly St. Bernard. She’s screaming something at me, but I can’t hear her, or read her lips because the place is vibrating faster than a motel bed with magic fingers. It’s probably a blessing I can’t hear her. We end up on the other side of the club, in a bar area the size of a basketball court. Thankfully, the area is cordoned off by a glass wall, which makes it somewhat easier to hear.

  “This is where you go to have fun?” I ask Tiffany.

  “No, this is where you go to be seen having fun,” she tells me.

  Tiffany leads me to what would be about half court at the bar. She butts in between two guys who have enough mousse in their hair to be a matching oil slick. “This is where I was sitting when I took a sip and my head hit the bar like a tree falling on the moon that you can’t hear.”

  I stop, look up to my left and then to my right. I see exactly what I suspected.

  “Then I must have slid off the barstool and landed here on the floor.” Tiffany shows me by spreading her hands over the small area.

  “How would you know that if you were already passed out?” I ask.

  Tiffany ponders my question. “That’s a good question, Mr. Sherlock. I just figured that’s what happened.”

  “First rule of life, Tiffany,” I tell her. “Assume nothing.”

  “No,” Tiffa
ny says. “The first rule of life is never use soap on your face. It dries out your pores.”

  Once again, I stand corrected.

  I make some mental pictures of the scene, having a photographic memory does have its advantages. Next, I count the bartenders and barbacks behind the bar. In about a sixty-foot space there are eight, six tenders who take orders and mix cocktails with incredible speed and two helpers who keep the ice wells filled and lug the clean and dirty glasses in and out. I lose track of how many waitresses come into the bar station empty and leave with a tray full of cocktails. I’m always amazed how they seldom spill a drop while navigating through the jungle of pulsating flesh.

  Whoever owns this Zanadu is going to be able to build his own Xanadu in no time at all. The place is a gold mine.

  “Do you remember which bartender served you?” I ask Tiffany.

  “Bruno.”

  “Bruno, the bartender,” I say for effect. “Is he here tonight?”

  Tiffany looks up and down the bar. “Nope, I don’t see him.”

  “Do you remember where you woke up?”

  “In the back.”

  “Show me.”

  Tiffany leads me to a break in the bar and down a slight hallway. We go past the men’s and women’s facilities and stop at a door labeled No Admittance. Tiffany knocks. I watch the spy camera above the upper doorjamb switch on. We wait. A buzzer buzzes. I hear a click. Tiffany opens the door and enters. I follow.

  It’s an office with two desks, one much smaller than the other. There’s a couch against the wall to my left between two identical doors, both closed. Behind the smaller desk, a behemoth of a man sits reading a comic book. Seeing Tiffany, he puts The Fantastic Four down and I spot a large semi-automatic bulge out of the coat of his ill-fitting suit. He doesn’t speak.

  But the man seated at the larger desk does, “Tiffany, how are you?” he says.

  “I’m good,” Tiffany answers with a smile.

  The man, who could double as a GQ model, rises from his chair and comes out and around to greet us. “You gave us quite a scare last night.”

  “This is no place for a beauty nap,” Tiffany tells him.

  The guy takes a look at my jacket, takes a step back as if I have the cooties, and says, “And you are?”

  “This is Mr. Sherlock, he’s a detective,” Tiffany informs the man.