Several hours later, Rick was sitting on the examination table at the ER near Karyn's apartment waiting to be discharged. The gash on the forehead had been cleansed and sutured. The left tibia had been broken in two places, but they were clean breaks and had required only a cast, no operation.
He had given a concise statement to the police, but the ER doctor and the nurses had shooed them away during the examination and the diagnostic tests. Consequently, A.J. and the insurance lady with a funny name had been fielding most of the questioning by the police leaving Rick out of the loop.
As he was disconnectedly wondering how much longer he'd have to wait, where his brother was and what had happened to the Hojnackis/Pattersons, a short, plump nurse walked in with some paperwork.
"Hi, my name is Anna." She made an unnecessary introduction—she was wearing a name badge on her smock. To Rick's amusement, her smock had some Looney Tunes cartoon characters on it. "I'm a registered nurse and will give you the discharge instructions."
Noticing that the patient, a Richard Simon, was eyeing the cartoon characters with an ambivalent smile, the nurse explained, "Oh, this. I've just discharged a little boy. Besides, I usually work in the pediatrics. We're kind of shorthanded here tonight."
Rick was glad that A.J. was not in the same room to seize this perfect opportunity to make yet another smart-ass remark on the older brother's arrested development.
After she routinely informed him on his medications, the signs and symptoms to watch out for and the discharge paper was signed and dated, Anna told Rick, "All right, you're almost good to go, but before you leave the hospital, a physical therapist will show you how to use the crutches."
"Nah, there's no need. This is not my fir…" Rick broke off as he lost the train of thoughts seeing a pretty young thing enter the room.
"I'm so sorry, Anna. I know I'm late but the things got really hectic around here!"
The petite young woman, a PT, was a burst of energy. The way she spoke—at sixty miles per hour—and flitted about made Rick think of a hummingbird, a pretty one with red hair that bordered on gold.
"So, are we ready for our session?" The golden hummer chirped, shifting her attention to Rick.
"I was born ready, darlin'," replied Rick with a drawl. What he was ready for, he did not say.
S&S S&S
A.J. and Leo were on their way back to the examination room to pick up Rick when they saw him hobbling up and down the hallway on crutches with a pretty young woman wearing a hospital garb in tow. She sounded more like a cheerleader than a medical staff member as she cheered him on. They walked back to the end of the hallway and stopped. Rick sat on an empty gurney, and the woman wrote something on his cast.
"Bye, Rick! Keep your weight off that leg!" She shouted as she trotted down the hospital corridor past A.J. and Leo.
"It's about time you showed up!" Rick griped to A.J. when he and Leo, pushing a wheelchair, walked up to the gurney he was sitting on.
"It looked like you were having the time of your life," rebutted A.J. pointedly looking at the phone number the young woman had scribbled on Rick's cast.
"Hey, I had to occupy myself—I was getting bored to death."
"Funny you worded it that way," said A.J., but there was no trace of humor in his voice or on his face. "That'd be your second brush with death tonight."
"Come on, A.J. Don't be so melodramatic. The doc said a head wound tends to bleed a lot, even a superficial one like mine. And I got no skull fracture, or brain hemorrhage. All the tests came back negative."
"Thank your lucky stars for that. The police sergeant who'd taken the statement from Karyn Hojnacki told me that you had cheated a coup de grace only because she had broken your leg first."
"What?" Rick stared at his brother and Leo uncomprehendingly.
"According to her sworn statement, as you turned around and came face to face with her, she hit your left leg with a tire iron like this." A.J. tapped lightly on the cast to show the angle of the blow. "She then raised the weapon to deliver a finishing blow on the top of your head, but, rather than pitch forward like she'd thought you would, you tipped to your left as your leg gave way. So, all you got was a glancing blow instead of a fatal crushing one she'd intended."
As the sobering account of the earlier event sank in, Rick swallowed hard, realizing how close he had come to an untimely demise. A.J. and Leo looked on quietly to let him absorb the news.
After several moments, Rick finally spoke haltingly, "I… She said that?"
It pained A.J. to break the news, but the truth would come out sooner or later. "Yes. Karyn and Brian are both singing like a canary to get a better bargaining position before the other does."
He looked up at his brother and blurted out. "God! I'm an idiot!"
"Now, Rick…"
"No, A.J. It needs to be said. You warned me about Karyn time and again right from the get-go, but I didn't listen…"
"Since when have you started listening to anyone's advice? You're not an idiot, Rick, just pig-headed, that's all."
"Same old difference," mumbled Rick. Then he looked Leo in the eye. "And…and I don't know what to say, or how to thank you…" Rick shifted his gaze back to A.J. "… how to thank both of you…"
"Don't thank me." A.J. interrupted his brother. "If Leo hadn't shown up at our office with the crucial information, I would never have figured out what was going on tonight."
"But you did put all the pieces of the puzzle together at the end. All I had was some background information," said Leo to A.J.
"Hey!" Rick demanded the other two's attention as they continued trying to credit the other for the successful rescue operation. "Will you two stop being so damn modest and decent and let me wallow in shame and self-disgust?"
That sounds like Rick's old self, thought A.J. grinning. I guess he'll be all right after all. "You can do all the wallowing you want on our way back home. Come on. Let's get out of here."
"Wait. Let me get you a cup of coffee or something at the cafeteria," said Rick getting off the gurney. He refused to sit in the wheelchair Leo offered.
"We can get coffee from the vending machine," suggested A.J.
"I'm kinda hungry. I haven't had anything since lunch. Come on—let me buy you guys a cup of coffee or whatever you like. You can fill me in on the case while I eat."
A.J. stared at Rick in part disbelief, part admiration. His older brother still possessed many child-like traits. One of them was short attention span; the flip side of it was remarkable resilience.
"In that case, I'll have to buy you dinner," said A.J. shaking his head.
"There's no way I'll let you do that after what you've done for me tonight."
"The cashier won't honor your hand-written I.O.U., Rick."
"Huh?"
"I signed the list of your valuables when you were admitted to the ER. You have exactly two dollars and fifty-six cents in your wallet. Don't you ever check to see how much money you have on your person when you leave home?"
Rick raised his eyebrow and shrugged. "Don't have to. Why do you think I let you tag along all the time?"
A.J. sighed as his brother chuckled.
"Leo, would you care to join me and my mooching brother for a non-alcoholic nightcap? If you're not up to it, I'll hail a cab for you."
"Oh, I'd love to. I heard some nurse raving about the cafeteria's peach cobbler: a dessert to die for." Leo, too, joined the comedy act, making Rick groan.
S&S S&S
Rick leaned on the crutches and limped along right behind A.J., who was carrying a tray laden with food and drinks to their table. The cafeteria was still half full with the night shift staff and the visitors for the in-patients.
Once Rick started digging into his food, A.J. asked him, "All right. How much do you know about this case?"
"Ben's real name's Brian Patterson, and Karyn knew it all along. She was having an affair with a guy named Dirk and planning to kill Brian. Brian found out about them and tried to kill them claiming self-defense. Since Leo here is an investigator for a major insurance company, I suppose they are, or were involved in insurance fraud. How am I doing?" said Rick between bites.
"Pretty good." A.J. nodded approvingly.
"There are some loose ends though. Like, how did Brian find out Karyn was cheating on him, things like that, you know."
"Before we get to that, I'll let Leo give you some background information."
Leo smiled and put down her cup of coffee on the tray.
"Brian Patterson and Karyn Engelmann met and got married in Bellingham, Washington about six years ago. That was his first marriage, her third. Because of the city's geographic proximity to the Canadian border, they often vacationed in Vancouver B.C. and knew the area well.
"According to Brian's confession, a year or two into the marriage, Karyn found a complete set of IDs for Benjamin Hojnacki hidden among his personal items and confronted him. He told her they'd belonged to a deceased friend of his."
"Bean…" Rick whispered. "Karyn said Ben, I mean, Brian called him Bean."
A certain look passed between Leo and A.J.
"We'll come back to that later," said A.J.
Leo nodded and continued, "Brian swears it was Karyn who hatched a plan to defraud our company with a fake accident to collect the life insurance benefits after finding Ben's IDs. But it was he who masterminded the whole thing.
"Before staging the kayaking accident, Brian took scuba lessons to be certified under his current name. Of course, at that time, we knew him only as Brian Patterson, so we didn't catch that."
"He put on his scuba gear, tipped over the kayak on purpose and swam underwater all the way back to the shore," Rick guessed easily.
Leo nodded. "He had scouted the area and picked a deserted beach only the local residents knew about. Just before faking the accident, he'd buried a plastic bag filled with a change of clothes, shoes, and other items needed for traveling in a hidden area of the beach behind a boulder."
"And that's when he became Ben Hojnacki," muttered Rick to himself.
"Yes. I've had doubts about the accident and kept tabs on Karyn over the years but I lost track of her for a while after she changed her last name to Hojnacki. By the time I tracked her down here in San Diego, Brian had disappeared, so I kept an eye on her hoping she'd lead me to him. I tailed her to Fairlane Motel twice, but it wasn't Brian she was seeing."
"Karyn started having an affair with Dirk Christensen soon after she and Brian moved here." A.J. took over the narrative. "Brian's a smart guy and picked up some signs like finding some items that didn't belong to either of them, Karyn's frequent night-outs… And she was careless and overconfident because she had a car, and he didn't. She thought he'd never be able to find out where she was going or whom she was seeing.
"Remember she told us he's a great mechanic? It so happens that he has worked as a mechanic as well as a repo man in the past and can pop open any car door in thirty seconds. He admitted he'd borrowed his neighbors' cars without permission to tail her several times."
"But they had to stay in a bad marriage because of the insurance money." Rick conjectured. "The money was legally hers, and Brian had no access to it. Karyn couldn't just pick up and leave 'cause he could implicate her in fraud."
"That's right," confirmed A.J. "Again, this is what Brian claims, but Karyn brought up a plan to stage another accident. Sure, having some extra money's nice, but he knew her ulterior motive was to really kill him off and make it look like an accident. He knew she was up to something and told her about his own scheme to disappear for a while and persuaded her to hire a private investigator."
"He did?"
"He told Karyn that it'd make her look like a concerned wife and might deflect the police investigators' suspicion. What he wanted though was to have someone find the clues of her infidelity to make sure that she wouldn't get away with murder and the blood money if something happened to him."
"Yeah, sure. But that's not all, is it?" asked Rick stony-faced staring at his brother unflinchingly.
"No." It was A.J. who looked away to avoid eye contact. "They both wanted another victim to make their versions of accident more plausible. In either way, you were to be killed in a non-existent love triangle along with Brian, or Dirk."
"Hey, don't feel too bad to tell me what I already know, A.J.," said Rick with a half smile. "Sure, I'm still smarting from…well, you know, but I'll be okay."
But A.J. knew his brother was more than just smarting. He saw certain emotions flicker past Rick's face. How would one feel when he realized he had fallen for a woman like Karyn?
Once he had embraced the truth, Rick was able to examine the case objectively. He was certain that Karyn had called Dirk right after he and A.J. had left for Ace Appliances to let him know where they were going; that Dirk had attacked him and stole the note with his own address from him in Todd's Tavern's parking lot; that Karyn and Dirk had staged a break-in to lure him to her apartment to get rid of him like a bag of garbage before he figured out what they were up to; and that she had handpicked him as her prey because A.J. was too smart and too popular among women to fall for her. Hindsight is always 20/20, thought he with a touch of bitterness and self-mockery.
"Did the police catch Dirk?" asked Rick as an afterthought.
"Yes. They found him alive in the trunk of his car where Brian had left him," replied A.J. "You know, this has been a strange case right from the start, but there was another bizarre twist no one could expect."
"Great. My head is about to burst at the newly-sewn stitches with so much information." Rick groaned.
"The SDPD contacted the authorities in New York to get more background data on Brian and Ben and were able to track down one of the caseworkers who'd been assigned to them when they were still minors. He's retired now of course, but he's still in his sixties, and has a mind like a steel trap.
"He says Ben and Brian were tighter than some blood brothers and looked vaguely alike. One of the things the caseworker remembers clearly is they were so rangy they were often called beanpole. They didn't mind that and after a while, they started to call each other Bean and Pole. They thought it was kind of clever because Ben is obviously of Polish heritage."
"Hey, hang on. Brian said his orphan brother was Bean, didn't he?"
"That's what I thought. So, I got the contact information from the police and spoke with the caseworker in person. He confirmed Brian's nickname was Bean, Ben's was Pole. He also told me Brian has sandy hair and blue eyes."
"And Ben has brown hair and hazel eyes? Like Karyn's husband?" asked Rick.
A.J. nodded. "The SDPD or Leo's insurance company will have to obtain a subpoena for the medical and dental record release in order to be absolutely sure, but we're convinced that the man Karyn's married to is Ben Hojnacki."
Rick's mind was getting numb. He was vaguely aware of the signs of an oncoming headache.
"Our guy, Ben or Brian, freely admits he has used both identities back and forth over the years. It's not that he has Dissociative Identity Disorder. He's as sane as you and I. Maybe it was his way to avoid some legal scrapes, or to keep Brian's memory alive after he died. According to the caseworker, Ben is a couple years younger than Brian and worshipped him growing up. It was only the luck of the draw—when he first met Karyn, he was assuming Brian's identity."
"And it certainly is our luck." Leo rejoined the conversation. "I'm sorry that you had to go through this ordeal, but because of you and your brother, I'll be able to finish the final chapter of this case with an added bonus."
Too tired to think, Rick blankly stared at Leo.
"I'm sure our company will be able to legally reclaim the remainder of the insurance payment paid to Karyn, but if we could prove the man who's in custody now is truly Ben Hojnacki, not Brian Patterson, the proceedings to seize the funds would be so much easier and faster without too much legal wrangling…"
"Karyn will lose control over the insurance money right away because she wasn't legally married to anyone at the time of the accident, definitely not to the policy holder because he'd been dead for years by then." A faint smile played on Rick's lips.
Leo returned his smile. "Ben is intelligent, and he turned out to be a shrewd investor. Our company may be able to recover up to ninety-five percent of the total amount paid to Karyn."
"Ain't that sweet?" Rick's smile turned into a grin. "This is what I call poetic justice at its best." Rick hoisted his cup of coffee like a glass of champagne and knocked it back to swallow a pain pill.
S&S S&S
It was well past 1:30 when Rick, A.J. and Leo left the hospital cafeteria. They were bone-weary and ready to hit the sack.
A.J. had accompanied Rick in the ambulance to the hospital, and Leo had followed them in the Camaro. A.J. volunteered to fetch his car and asked Leo where she'd parked it.
Rick watched his brother trot down the hallway and disappear into the night as he limped toward the hospital entrance with Leo by his side.
"So, you going out with him for a drink or something tonight?"
Rick asked without any preamble, catching Leo off guard.
"What? Who?" Blinking rapidly, she answered with a question.
"Did A.J. ask you out?" His tone clearly said, 'you can't figure this one out and still call yourself an investigator?'
Bemused, she looked him in the eye. "Mr. Simon…"
"Rick."
"All right. Rick. Your brother and I met only a few hours ago and discussed our cases briefly, but we spent most of the time we've known each other trying to save your life. We're just two investigators working together, nothing more."
"On your part, maybe. But believe me, he's definitely taken with you. You're his type, you know, real classy."
"I'm flying back home Sunday—that's tomorrow."
"You kids still have a whole day till then to get to know each other."
"Rick…"
"If you try hard enough to look past his quirks and annoying habits, you might be able to find something redeemable in him."
A.J. was fond of saying that about Rick.
"I'm married, Rick."
That stopped him in his tracks. His eyes fell on her bare ring finger, which was not lost on Leo.
"I don't wear my wedding ring when I'm on a case. I've already lost two rings while working on the past assignments."
"You're married, huh?"
Leo nodded.
"Happily married?" Rick was honest and sincere, but tactful, he was not.
"Very much so."
"Good for you." Rick paused for a moment. "Does A.J. know?"
"No. The subject hasn't come up; as I said, we had more important things to attend to."
Rick nodded. "If that's the case, when you break it to him, will you let him down easy?"
"Rick. Don't you think you're jumping the gun? But even if you're right about your brother, he is a decent and intelligent man. I'm sure he can handle it."
"Yeah, he's smart, but he can't handle rejections very well. He mopes around, getting on everyone's nerves."
"I suppose that's because he doesn't get turned down by women very often. I noticed some nurses here couldn't take their eyes off him." Leo smiled remembering.
Rick thought it was ironic that Leo hadn't noticed A.J. couldn't take his eyes off her.
"Actually, he gets snubbed more often than you might think." He often blames yours truly for the snubs, but that's another story. "But not as often as I do." Rick grinned as if to say oh, shucks.
"But you can handle it? Because you're a big brother?" asked Leo teasingly.
"Nah. Just thick-skinned."
Her head slightly tilted, she regarded him thoughtfully.
"You and your brother are what my parents call mensch," said Leo with a gentle smile.
"I hope it's not what I think it means." Rick smiled back, joking. "Or, does that mean we're okay?"
"Yes, more than that, and honorable." Her smile seemed to light up the drab interior of the hospital. "As I said to A.J., despite the outward and obvious differences, you two are very much alike deep down."
"Good to hear that, but knowing my brother, I bet he didn't appreciate it too much when you told him that though."
"You know him very well." Leo confirmed Rick's suspicion diplomatically.
"That little bugger!"
The timing and delivery of his feigned outburst was just too perfect, and she could not help but laugh out loud in the quiet hospital hallway.