This is Episode VI of "Doc" featuring consulting detective
Francie LeVillard in a Monterey Mystery. For previous episodes,
please go to the archives.
* * * * *
Francie called Doc Hardwicke to let him know what she was
doing and to have him fax a letter of authorization to Ariane,
which she could show to Doctor Barrett and Nurse Adler, to allow
her to install security devices in the medical offices. Ariane
went in to see them on Friday and informed them that she would
do the work on Saturday afternoon. Their operation would not be
disrupted because the office closed at noon. She was given a set
of keys.
Francie’s presumption was that Nurse Adler or her son would
want to go in Friday night. It should be, she told herself, a
piece of cake to make a bust. She got it partly right.
Ariane and Francie went in right after close of business on
Friday. They put in the two audio bugs, one near the front door
and one in the examining room where the drugs were kept. That
was where Ariane also placed the camera. It was a remarkably
simple operation that took only ten minutes because the devices
didn’t need to be hidden, and they were only expected to be
needed for the next twelve hours.
She got that part right.
Francie had made arrangements with a realtor friend who had a
vacant office space across the street where she could park
herself with her laptop, along with some coffee and sandwiches,
to monitor the set stage in the medical office fifty feet away.
Monterey being a fairly quiet town, at least afer five in the
doctor’s row area, she didn’t imagine that she would have to
wait until three in the morning, if they were going to be making
their entry at all.
She got that part right, too.
At eleven-thirty, she happened to be looking down Cass
Street, facing south, when along came a car, moving slowly. It
pulled over to the curb a block away, and after thirty seconds
or so, the driver’s door opened and Garry Adler emerged. He
looked all around and then walked quickly to the front door of
the doctor’s office. He had a key. He was in immediately. His
entrance was corroborated by the sound picked up by the first
office bug. Francie waited until she heard him on the second bug
and then made her way across the street.
She skirted the man’s car to make sure no one was in it; it
was empty. She had a copy of the key given to Ariane, but out of
curiosity she checked the doorknob and found that it was locked.
She didn’t know if the guy was covering his back. She suspected
that it was auto-locking. She noiselessly let herself in and
quickly checked to find that the latch was in fact auto-locking.
By the light of a fish tank in the reception area Francie made
her way to the examining room.
Garry Adler obviously wasn’t worried about being discovered.
She could hear him moving about and not far away. She eased down
the hallway and through the open door she could see a flashlight
working. There were only a couple of small windows high up, but
he wouldn’t have wanted to put on the room lights.
Francie did, closing her eyes first and then opening them
slowly. There was plenty of time. He wasn’t a deer, but the
lights had the same effect.
"Game’s up, Mr. Adler," she said, taking a step into the
room.
"Hey, what’s this?" He peered at her. There was a flash of
recognition on his face. "You’re that woman who was looking for
that house to rent back a coupla weeks." He was partly confused
and increasingly upset.
Suddenly he stood a little taller, and if she had had time to
realize it, his expression turned smug. But Francie didn’t have
time to realize what she was seeing. At that moment she felt the
cold steel of the muzzle of a gun under her left ear.
Most people using guns in nefarious fashion are amateurs.
They expect a person who has a gun pointed at them to freeze.
Francie was never one to fulfill expectations. Plus her years of
aikido training had taught her to react spontaneously. She
didn’t have to think about what was happening. Instantly she
pivoted to her right, bringing her right hand down on the arm
holding the gun. Her chop was so hard she could hear the snap as
she broke the ulna. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the
arm fall and then heard the gun clatter on the linoleum floor.
Francie didn’t watch it happen because she was following
through with her left hand. Slightly cupped she swung it against
the ear of the would-be shooter, shattering the ear drum. The
heel of her hand slammed against where the lower jaw connected
with the skull and disconnected them. The victim emitted a
strange scream that turned into a deep low moan.
Francie reached down to pick up the gun but was stopped by a
nasty voice.
"Hold it," said Garry Adler. He was pointing a small
snub-nosed revolver at her, but his attention was on the figure
crumpled on the floor moaning.
Francie had had no idea when she swung at the assailant who
it was, but after the flurry of motion and seeing her on the
floor, she recognized Eileen Adler. She must have come in
another car and seen her enter the office, she thought. Or she
saw the lights in the examining room come on. Actually those
thoughts came later. What her mind was dealing with at the
moment was a dangerous man pointing a gun at her, and leering.
Suddenly there was a shot from behind her. Francie’s first
realization was that she hadn’t been shot. Her second was
hearing a yelp from son Adler and seeing blood spurting from the
arm holding the gun, above the elbow. His forearm fell. The gun
dropped to the floor. Francie turned carefully saw, standing in
the doorway, Ariane Chevasse, holding a very unladylike
semi-automatic of the .40 caliber variety, a slight trickle of
smoke rising from the muzzle.
"Are you all right?" Ariane asked, her eyes shifting quickly
from the son holding his arm to the mother moaning on the floor,
and then to Francie.
"I’m fine," Francie said, knowing in very real terms the
meaning of understatement. She wanted to know how and why Ariane
was there, but the first step was to secure the room. While
Ariane held the gun on the young man, Francie went over and
pushed him away from his gun on the floor and picked it up. Then
she grabbed his mother’s gun and stood back.
"Glad to see you,"she told Ariane.
"What do you people say? We aim to please," she replied, her
gun held as steady as if it were sitting on a tripod.
Francie went over to a phone on the wall and dialed 911. A
lot of people do that on Friday nights, everywhere in the
country. Monterey County was no exception, but she only had to
wait for four rings before she heard "Emergency dispatch."
Sometimes the voice is even, maybe bored. Not on weekend nights.
It was a mixture of tense and tired.
"This is a code 45. I’m Francie LeVillard, a friend of the
force." That alerted the dispatcher that the caller was known to
the police and could be trusted. "Two wounded, one gun shot, not
life-threatening. Situation stabilized. We need an ambulance and
a squad car," she reported and then gave dispatch the location.
"I’ll be standing out front."
They didn’t get a lot of calls like that at emergency
dispatch so it took a few seconds for the operator to process
what he’d heard, but then he was right on it. He said, "On our
way. Do you need to stay on the line?"
"Negative. We’re all right here," she told him and hung up
the phone. It wasn’t thirty seconds later that they could hear
the sirens. The police station was four blocks away. Francie
patted down Eileen Adler and then her son. They had no more
weapons. She ordered the man to get down on the floor. Holding
his arm, blooding flowing through his fingers, he resisted with
a loud moan. She kicked him hard on the side of his right knee,
and he went down.
"You okay alone?" she asked Ariane.
"Yes, I am," Ariane replied, her voice tinged with excitement
and satisfaction. "Please go welcome the police."
* * * * * * *
"‘Girl friend’," Francie told Ariane, "it somehow seems cheap
to me." They were sitting at a table at Bellagio’s two hours
later, chewing on some gluten-free garlic-anchovy pizza and
sucking on Sierra Nevada’s. The only other place open at that
hour without loud music and raucous crowds was Denny’s, and
besides, the pizza was quite decent. That they were done with
the two women so quickly after a shooting said a lot about the
Monterey police. At Francie’s urging, the duty commander had
called the Chief of Police who vouched for her. They took
statements from both women, confirmed that Ariane’s gun was her
own, that it was properly registered, and that she had a
concealed weapons permit. They decided they could wait until
later in the morning to call Congressman Hardwicke. Francie and
Ariane would be back at ten to provide further details.
The Adlers, mother and son, made a trip up to the hospital.
Both were going to take some time to heal, but no one on the
white-hats’ side seemed the least bothered by the fact. There
would be time for the criminals to recover in the medical
facility at the county jail pending their trials. Ariane’s
equipment had done a surprisingly good job of capturing both the
picture and sound from the moment Garry Adler had entered the
examination room. He had gone right to the medicine cabinet. He
had a key to it. Both perps had guns but no carry permits, and
they had pointed them at Francie in a way that anyone – like
twelve people in a jury box looking at the tape – would have to
think they meant to kill her.
"How was it that you were monitoring your bugs?" Francie
asked Ariane.
"It made sense, non, what you said about that they
would make a last try for drugs tonight when they thought the
security would go in tomorrow. And I knew that you, ma chere
amie not hey-girlfriend, would be there for the collar. Only
I’m glad they didn’t kill you."
"Thanks to you." Francie shook her head, "I could have sworn
he was going in alone. I could see pretty well that there was no
one in his car."
"She was in another car. She must have expected him to do
this. And then she saw you going into the office. Voila."
"I also didn’t think he was someone who would have a gun.
That seemed out of character for him. He was a nasty punk, but I
couldn’t place him with a gun."
"I think the times are changing, my woman friend."
Francie chuckled, "They sure are. I need to sharpen my wits,
or find another line of work."
Ariane waved the notion away, "Bah, non. You are a
fine consulting detective. I think maybe you shouldn’t go in
without back-up, you know?"
Francie looked at this woman who had probably saved her life.
With that look of hatred in Garry Adler’s eyes, the man who
shouldn’t have a gun but did, she knew he would not have held
back.
"I think you’re right, Ariane." She looked at her with a warm
smile. "Would that be you?"
"Ah, no, that is not my work," she said leaving no room for
argument.
"That’s right," she appreciated, "You’re a spook. Not so
gritty."
"No, no, no, I didn’t mean it like that, you know that. I
will be with you whenever you need me." Her voice was as
poignantly loaded as Francie had ever heard. It resonated with
friendship, concern, and commitment.
"Ditto you, girlfriend," Francie managed, after she had
cleared her throat.
"I think fille amie is better," Ariane said. They
clinked their bottles together and drank them down.
Ariane drove Francie back to the empty office where she had
been keeping watch. Francie picked up her computer and other
items and returned to the street. Looking over at the doctor’s
office, where an hour earlier there had been an ambulance and
three squad cars, lights flashing, and yellow tape everywhere,
now everything was dark. The blood on the examining room floor
had probably dried already, Francie thought, and wondered at
where her mind sometimes took her.
"I will see you tomorrow at the police station at ten," she
told Ariane as they walked around the corner to where Francie
had left her car.
"Oui, d’accord," Ariane replied. "Now we get our
beauty sleep, I think."
"Good plan," Francie agreed, and put her things on the
passenger seat of her car. She stood next to the driver’s door
and looked at Ariane for a long moment. She reached for words,
but they didn’t come. It wasn’t that she was tired. It was that
there were no words for what she wanted to say. Ariane stepped
forward and put arms around Francie and held her. "Thank you,"
Francie said, but the words only scratched the surface.
"We are sisters, Francie," she said.
Francie let go of her, and holding back tears, she nodded.
She would have said goodnight, but she didn’t trust herself to
speak.
Ariane smiled, turned, and walked away.
Francie got into her car, and drove home, waiting until she
was in her house, all snug in my bed, before she cried.
* * * * *
Francie and Ariane face the Chief of Police in the Epilogue
of "Doc." And Francie reports to Congressman "Doc" Hardwicke,
who fills her in on some new details about the Adlers that he
had gotten from the District Attorney. All that and more in the
final episode of "Doc," right here on March 1st. And
March 15th starts a new story featuring, Francie
LeVillard, the world’s greatest consulting detective. You’re not
going to want to miss it!
