Promises of Steele
Part 4
By Myrtle Groggins
 
± 11 ±
 
"...and he’s not even out of the ICU yet!"
 
Detective Jimmy Jarvis stared at Laura Holt-Steele’s agitated brown eyes and knew that the LAPD homicide department was going to get her help whether they wanted it or not. She’d stormed into his office shortly after the lab report came out, and he supposed he should have expected it the moment this case crossed the line between the narcotics department and his own.
 
"Look, Miss Ho –– Mrs. Ste –– is it Ms. or Mrs. Holt-Steele?"
 
"Will you just dispense with the titles for now, Jarvis? What have you got on those fingerprints?"
 
"Can you at least sit down first?" Jarvis suggested. He watched his uninvited guest grudgingly oblige. "Thank you. Now, from what I know, the fingerprint check hasn’t come through yet. The lady doesn’t have a record with the LAPD but the prints are running through the larger police databases as we speak."
 
"What else? Did you find any other companies that have been victimized by Prescott?"
 
"We’re still working on it."
 
"That’s it?!"
 
"Look, Miss H— " Jarvis caught himself again, then gave up trying to get the name right. "I’m sorry about Mr. Steele’s condition, but believe me, we are doing our best. Now you have to understand that we can’t afford to be hasty right now and scare them off. We can’t really prove anything at this point."
 
"Can’t prove anything?" Laura said. "What about our surveillance tapes?"
 
"Circumstantial. Maybe we can get them for fraud, misrepresentation, impersonating a police officer – and we don’t know for a fact that he isn’t a cop – they never got their hands on the drugs so there aren’t any narcotics charges to speak of. All they’re guilty of right now is flashing a fake search warrant, and that’s not even worth the paper it’s going to be written on."
 
Laura could not believe what she was hearing. "How about attempted murder?"
 
"We have yet to tie the fingerprints of the woman back to Prescott and his goons," Jarvis answered. "Unless of course…" he trailed off, looking apprehensive.
 
"What?"
 
"We catch them making another attempt on Mr. Steele’s life."
 
Laura stood up and slammed her hands onto the blotter on top of Jarvis’ desk. "You’re not going to use him as a decoy!"
 
"Of course not," Jarvis said hastily. "We’ve already posted guards at the hospital. I’m merely saying that it is a possibility to consider."
 
"No, it is NOT. He’s not even off the critical list yet and I will not put him in any more danger than he’s already in." She raked her fingers through her hair in frustration and began pacing. "Damn it!"
 
"Why don’t you go home for now, get some rest, and we’ll contact you as soon as there’s anything worth reporting?" Jarvis suggested.
 
Laura barely heard him, but he expected that. "I can’t help thinking that the key to this is the judge," she said.
 
"Apart from the search warrant you saw in the bar, there really isn’t anything linking him to this whole thing. We still haven’t obtained a copy of that document," Jarvis reminded her.
 
"Of course not," she bit back sarcastically. "But you’ll have to excuse me if I see a crystal-clear cause-and-effect between following him around for two weeks and Mr. Steele lying in the ICU right now."
 
Much to Jarvis’ relief, someone chose that moment to knock on the door.
"Detective Jarvis? Here are the files you asked for."
 
Jarvis split the folders between himself and Laura. "This is what we’ve got on Vinnie Prescott and his minions." They went through the material together, emerging only slightly better informed for the exercise.
 
"Go home, Miss Holt—Steele," Jarvis said at last. "You take care of Mr. Steele and let us handle this."
 
Feeling exhausted, Laura nodded. "Sorry for biting your head off earlier. I – it’s just that the last 48 hours has been very… trying, to say the least."
 
"I understand," Jarvis said and escorted her out.
 
An hour after he returned to his office, the fingerprint check came through. The prints belonged to Mary Landers, a one-time nurse with a record for petty theft … and the ex-wife of the man the Steeles had identified as Agent Thomson.
±12±
 
In the darkened study of Terence Rothschild, a tiny beam danced on one section of the wood-paneled bookshelves. With a barely audible click, the hidden safe finally swung open and relief was evident on the lovely features of the lithe "burglar".
 
"Fifteen minutes!" she muttered disgustedly under her breath. It had taken her all of a quarter of an hour to crack a safe that would have been child’s play for her absent partner. He always had a talent for this aspect of their work, and never did she appreciate it as much as she did at this moment.
The safe contained the usual stash of money, jewelry and bundle of documents. Laura sifted through the last until she came upon a set of bank statements. It was for a numbered account in the Cayman Islands with certain transactions encircled.
 
She spotted the phone on the mahogany desk. After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the receiver and dialed.
 
"Mildred?" she whispered. "Never mind where I am..."
 
± 13 ±
 
The man in the white lab coat walked up to the nurses’ station and pulled out Remington Steele’s medical chart. He noted the room number again. So Steele wasn’t as sick as they were making him out to be – he was already out of the ICU and in the regular wards.
 
The man then made his way to the room. It was a private room, he noted; no nurse and no contraptions monitoring vital signs hooked up to the nurses’ station, just a blue oxygen mask covering Steele’s nose and mouth. Perfect.
 
The mask precluded suffocation, but then he never had patience for it anyway. He pulled out his gun and began screwing on the silencer.
 
± 14 ±
 
Laura was so engrossed with what Mildred told her that she didn’t hear the sirens until the police were practically in the Rothschilds’ driveway. She hurriedly hung up, but before she could figure out her best line of retreat, the study’s lights snapped on and Terence Rothschild walked in brandishing a revolver.
 
"Put your hands where I can see them."
 
Laura complied, backing away from the desk.
 
"Wait a minute," the judge said as his wife stepped into the study. "I’ve seen you before."
 
"What’s going on, Terry? Oh my!" Mrs. Rothschild exclaimed, seeing the black-clad young woman standing at the business end of the household gun.
 
Recognition dawned. "You’re the woman from the bar!"
 
"What woman?" asked Mrs. Rothschild. "How do you know her, Terry?"
 
"Yes, Judge, why don’t you tell her what’s going on?" Laura calmly suggested, noting with satisfaction that she threw both her captors off balance.
 
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," the judge bristled under his wife’s surprised, accusing glance.
 
"How original," the strange burglar goaded. "If I had a dollar for every time I hear that…"
 
"You have some nerve, breaking into my house and standing there accusing me of God-knows-what! " Rothschild lost his temper. "Good thing I had that silent alarm installed in the safe. When the police get here, you’ve got some explaining to do."
 
Right on cue, the housekeeper showed a pair of LAPD officers into the study.
 
"Officers, arrest this woman!" ordered the judge.
 
"You might want to reserve the sturdier pair of handcuffs for him," Laura said. "All you’ve got on me is breaking and entering – that is if Judge Rothschild here has time to press charges. The LAPD narcotics and homicide department can probably list the charges against him better than I can."
Even the cops were confused by now. They stopped halfway across the study, looking back and forth between Laura and the judge.
 
"Terry?!" Mrs. Rothschild interjected. "Narcotics, homicide – what does she mean?"
 
"I mean the cocaine smuggled inside shipments of coffee from South America, confiscated by the LA drug mafia using search warrants signed by one Judge Terence Rothschild. I mean the shootout outside the RCI warehouse two …" Laura paused. Was it only two days ago? It seemed much longer. "…two days ago that has my partner fighting for his life in the hospital right now."
 
"You can’t prove I had anything to do with the shooting."
 
"Maybe not. But I just cross referenced that bank statement in your safe with the shipping manifesto from the LA port authorities. Over the last year, you’ve encircled several deposits worth $50,000 and above, each one made a few weeks after a shipment of coffee from South America." Rothschild paled as Laura continued. "I’m sure if we approached these coffee companies one by one, we’ll find that they’ve met the same people and gotten served the same kind of search warrant that RCI Enterprises did two days ago."
 
"And you have a copy of these warrants I supposedly signed?"
 
"I believe the narcotics department turned over one of them to Lt. James Jarvis of Homicide, after an attempt was made on Remington Steele’s life today. Why don’t you ask these boys to give him a call?"
 
Hannah Rothschild turned a pair of horrified eyes to the judge. "Terry? It’s true, isn’t it? All those times that you wouldn’t explain where you went… why you said the less I knew, the better…"
 
"Hannah, I—"
 
"How could you have anything to do with bringing cocaine into this country?" her voice turned harsh.
"Jason, sweet young Jason, was just admitted to rehab for cocaine addiction. Our eldest grandchild! Terry, what could have possessed you to be part of this?"
 
The mention of Jason’s name hit Rothschild like a physical blow. He staggered, falling into one of the chairs.
 
"It was supposed to be a one-time deal," he told Hannah in a pleading voice. "I made some very bad investments that would have broken us financially; I needed the money. So I used my connections in the judicial circuit to find Vinnie Prescott and set the whole thing up with him. Then he realized how lucrative a scam it was and wouldn’t let me pull out of the game. He hinted at blackmail and the money… the money just kept coming.
 
"I never thought it would come to this, Hannah. You have to believe me! As for Jason," Rothschild shut his eyes, and Laura wondered if he was trying to picture his grandson or hide from the image. "Since we found out about his addiction, you don’t know how many times I’ve wondered if he’d used any of the cocaine I helped bring in. It doesn’t matter if he did or didn’t. I’ll always wonder. And I’ll never forgive myself."
 
His gaze fell on the revolver still clutched in one hand.
 
Hannah followed his gaze. Drawing on strength she didn’t know she had, she walked to her husband’s side and laid a hand on his shoulder.
 
"No, Terry," she said quietly. "There are other ways to make amends." She met Laura’s gaze from across the room.
 
± 15 ±
 
At 4:30 am, Laura she made her way back to ICU and marveled at how active the hospital continued to be at such an ungodly hour. She was bone-tired from the entire episode at the Rothschilds, but she was at that point of exhaustion where even sleep eluded her. She’d decided to check on Harry one more time before popping one of those sedatives everyone had been bugging her to take. Now that he was officially declared out of danger, she could afford to get some sleep.
The sight of his empty bed kicked any notion of sleep out of her system faster than having a bucket of ice water overturned on her head. She grabbed the arm of a passing orderly.
 
"The patient who was here...where is he?"
 
"Ow!" the young man winced. "Take it easy, lady. That’s my arm, and I like that it’s attached to my shoulder, you know?"
 
"Well, that was my partner," she indicated the hospital bed, "and I would like to know what happened!"
 
"Mrs. Steele?" one of the nurses recognized Laura, much to the relief of the orderly and his nearly dislocated shoulder. "It’s alright. We moved him to a private room sooner than planned because we needed the bed in the ICU. Dr. Wong approved it a few hours ago." She gave Laura the directions to the room.
 
Laura spotted the LAPD uniforms the moment she turned into the hospital corridor. One would think that it would be reassuring to see so many of them around, but alarm bells went off in her head. Then she saw Detective Jarvis and knew that something had to be wrong.
 
"Detective Jarvis!" she called out to the grim-faced policeman.
 
"Miss Holt! We've been trying to reach you for hours."
 
Her heart plummeted to her shoes. "What happened? Where’s Mr. Steele?"
 
"He’s alright," Jarvis quickly put in. "There was another attempt on his life, but I had him placed in the room across the hall and instead had one of my men waiting in Mr. Steele’s designated room. We caught the perpetrator red-handed."
 
Laura closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath. "Bless you, Jarvis. It’s over."
 
"We certainly hope so," the eternally boyish detective smiled. "The nurse who tried to inject Mr. Steele with morphine the last time was his ex-wife. There’s enough circumstantial evidence linking him to Prescott as it is and if he sings, we’ll get Prescott’s entire gang too."
 
"You will," she declared, enjoying his look of surprise. "I was at the Rothschild residence half the night. He will testify against Prescott and tell you everything he knows about their operations."
 
"How…?"
 
"You can thank a bank statement and a copy of a search warrant that you still don’t have. I bluffed. It worked. ‘Nuff said."
 
"I’m impressed, Miss Holt…Steele. Mrs—"
 
"Laura," she suggested with a grin. "Thanks, Detective Jarvis."
 
"Jimmy."
 
She nodded, looked at the door behind him and raised a questioning brow.
 
"Yes, he’s in there. Go on in."
 
"Thanks, Jimmy."
 
She entered the quiet hospital room, relieved to finally set eyes on her Harry. He seemed to be sleeping soundly. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, she dropped a kiss on a stubbled cheek and gladly noted that the tubes in his nose and mouth were gone.
 
A half-melted cup of ice stood on the side table. Almost mechanically, she fished a cotton bud out from its canister, dipped it in the cup and gently ran it against his dry, chapped lips.
 
His eyes opened.
 
"Hello gorgeous," she greeted. "Mildred said you woke again this afternoon. Sorry I wasn’t there. I was out harassing Jarvis to get a move on. Seems to have worked."
 
Knowing that his throat must be parched, she gave him some water to drink.
 
"Easy," she warned, supporting his head as he tried to gulp down the water in his thirst. "You’ve had more close calls in the last 72 hours than I care to count. I don’t want you choking on a glass of water now."
 
He looked up at her, the familiar twinkle back in his eyes.
 
"Funny girl," he said.
 
Laura felt a bit taken aback by the comment. "Well… it's not that funny, you know. You scared the hell out of me. Do you have any idea–"
 
"No," he interrupted. "‘Hello gorgeous’? From Funny Girl. Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Columbia 1968..."
 
She stared at him, unable to believe her ears, then burst out laughing. She threw her arms around him (as much as you can around throw your arms around someone on a hospital bed) and felt his free arm encircle her.
 
"I'm so glad you’re back!"
 
"So am I," he answered. Such puny words, he thought, and hopelessly inadequate to express what he was feeling.
 
Laura didn’t care. She finally got to kiss him properly... right on the lips.
 
To Be Continued . . .
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