Bitter Medicine by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online

thick forefinger stabbed the area around Broadway and Foster. “But the Lions, another Humboldt Park gang, say that’s their turf. So the Lions and the Garbanzos have been duking it out with each other, and some with the White Overlords. So maybe one of them thought Tregiere was siding with the other. Supplying them with drugs, that kind of thing.”
    “No,” Lotty snapped, dark eyes blazing. “Remove that from your mind. Do not insult Dr. Tregiere by wasting time and money exploring it.”
    Rawlings held up a conciliatory hand. “Just sharing my thinking with you, Doc. There isn’t anything specific to suggest—but I’ve got to think of everything.”
    He probably meant they hadn’t seen Malcolm’s name written upside down on the walls in spray paint. Always a worry to the cops, because it meant the owner’s time had come. In the years I had known Malcolm, I knew he had no connection with the gangs, other than fixing bullet wounds and ODs. But who knew what he’d done as a poor youth when his mother brought him from Haiti to Chicago’s streets? Maybe worth looking into.
    Rawlings was asking Lotty about Tessa Reynolds, the artist who had found Malcolm last night. Lotty continued to be angry and answered contemptuously.
    “They were friends. Perhaps lovers—it wasn’t mybusiness. Did they want to make a life together? Maybe. A resident is a terrible person to be involved with because their time belongs to the hospital, not to their friends or themselves. If she was jealous—which I for one never observed—it wouldn’t be of another woman—he couldn’t have found time for another one.”
    “You don’t suspect her, surely, Detective?” I pictured Tessa, tall, flamboyant, but focused as intently as Malcolm on her work. No person mattered to her as much as her metal statues, certainly not enough to go to jail.
    “She’s a very strong young lady—working with all that metal and stone builds big shoulders. And someone with a lot of shoulder muscle pounded that doctor.” He flipped some garish photographs across to us, a man with his brains battered out. Not Malcolm anymore, a corpse.
    Lotty studied them intently, then passed them to me. “A brainstorm,” she said calmly. If he’d meant to shock her, he’d picked the wrong method. “Whoever did this was mad with rage or inhuman. Not Tessa.”
    I didn’t have quite the lady’s nerves of steel when it came to battered corpses, although I used to see a lot of pictures defending accused murderers. I examined these carefully, looking for—what? The blown-up black-and-whites revealed in excruciating detail the back and left side of the head—a sodden mass—and the angle of the shoulders; also a blowup of bloody streaks on the uneven wood floor—Malcolm had a few throw rugs but no big carpets.
    “He was dragged into the living room?” I asked Rawlings.
    “Yeah. He was cooking dinner when they broke in. You know these apartments—you want to get into one, you break down the kitchen door. So that’s what they did.” He tossed over another sheaf, pictures of the smashed-in door, of rice flung over the floor and stove. No doubt Gervase Fen or Peter Wimsey would immediately have grasped the vital clue revealing the identity of the murderer. But to me it looked like wreckage.
    “Fingerprints? Any kind of indicators?” I asked.
    Rawlings revealed a gold cap in a wide, unamused smile. “The little creeps all wear gloves these days. They don’t know how to read, but they pick it up on TV. We’re sweating the snitches—they’re the only ones going to give us a lead if we find one.”
    “How many you figure were in the apartment?”
    “Two, by the looks.” He took the photographs back from me and pulled out one showing living-room carnage. “Punk One stood here”—he jabbed the right side of the picture with a thick forefinger—“in size-ten Adidas—left the logo on a big swage of rice he’d picked up in the kitchen. Punk Two had bigger