Notorious Nineteen Read Free

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