Detective D. Case (11 page)

          Martin
fumed. Steam came out of his ears like in the cartoons Ray used to watch. “For God’s
sake, Ray, aren’t you be the least bit scared that you just ran over someone?”

           A soft
pause came between the two. It could have been part of a trailer for a comedy where,
after the title credit, there would be a pause when the joke would come into
being to take the viewers into watching a poorly-made film.

          “Not really.”

          “You’re
insane.”

          “That’s
fear talking,” Ray said. “You know I’m not insane when I’m not high.”

          “Ha-ha,
now let’s get out of here before someone –”

          Martin’s
faced flashed a bright red. Sirens were flaring but they weren’t coming from an
ambulance or firefighter truck. None of them from this part of the city had red-and-blue
coming out of their sirens.

          Ray didn’t
want to look at Martin before, much less now. The man was practically crying.

          “Oh shit
oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit,” he babbled. He rested his head on the
wheel, sobbing like a goddam two-year-old.

          “Take it
easy, they won’t suspect us. Come to think of it, how did the police find us? Out
of all the places . . .”

          “Who gives
a damn?” Martin’s furious tears continued and they showed no sign of stopping. “We
need to hide, to get out of the car before they –”

          Somebody’s
finger tapped on Martin’s window glass.

          Martin’s
face twisted into a frightful look mixed with pain. He mouthed, “I don’t wanna go
to jail.”

          “If you
don’t want to, then open the window,” Ray said.

          Martin
obeyed. He rolled the window open, his arm cramping the lever as if he had suffered
through five years of child labor. “Good evening, officers.” He would have sounded
all right if he hadn’t repeated it until it wore off. The officer had to tell Martin
to quit it before he did. If only Ray could get in and do the talking . . .

          “Names?”
asked the officer.

          “Uh, well,
okay . . . I’m Martin Shaw and this is . . . this . . . this is uh . . . my friend
. . .  yeah, my friend Ram . . . I meant Ray – yes, Ray – and we were just . . .”

          “Just
what
were you two doing so early this morning?”

          “Driving,”
Ray said. “Well, he was not me.”

          “He was
not you?”

          “I mean,
he was driving, not me. Well, if that’s all right with you, officer, of course.”
Ray smiled to sell the idea.

          “And do
you happen to know where you two were going so late – or should I say early?”

          Martin
was at a loss. “I don’t know, officer, but it could have been a nice place if you
hadn’t stopped us.”

          Ray could
have sucker punched Martin if the officer weren’t standing there watching them both
with those eyes of an eagle. At times like these, the officer would have brought
Ray out of the car and pinned him to the ground, gun clicked to his head. Bastard
would be yearning for more than a happy-go-lucky college girl receiving her paycheck
to bring out them handcuffs and slack ‘em on Ray’s wrists. Send the delinquent to
the state prison, he’d say. But, and he wasn’t sure if he was unfortunate about
this, he was stuck with this poor, poor son-of-a-bitch. Ray couldn’t keep himself
from thinking about Martin’s stupid act that, if successful, would cost them their
lives.

Ah,
Martin, you son-of-a-bitch, and I mean it.

The
officer eyed Ray. “You said something, Ray?”

Ray
stumbled on his words. “No, no I didn’t officer.”

The
officer paced a few feet. Hopefully he wanted this to be over soon, too. “May I
see your driver’s license?”

“Whose?”
They said this simultaneously.

“I
prefer the driver’s,” the officer said.

Martin
chucked his license in the officer’s face – another misfire. They needed the police
officer on their side and every single thing Martin did burned their chances into
rubble and ash! If Martin couldn’t shut himself up, then Ray had to do it.

The
officer checked Martin’s license, every goddam detail; he might as well analyze
it for next week’s book club. Hell, his eyes were thinner than pennies! “Uh, what
seems to be the problem, officer?” Ray asked.

Clearing
his throat, the officer glanced off into the night. “It appears you ran over that
poor man over there down the road.”

That
was it for Martin. He started sobbing his head off. Ray felt a little bit like crying
as well, but he wouldn’t show that to the officer.

“Get out of the
car,” the officer said. He jiggled the car door.

Ray
kept his tone venomous. “No.”

“Get
out of this car, both of you.”

“Who
gives a damn what you say?” Ray cried.

“I
do, and so should you.” He, the policeman, leaped inside the window, doing an
arm lock on Martin with a revolver in the same hand. A wild shot and the
windshield cracked like a spider web. Amidst crying, Martin also choked for
help, trembling and pulling the insane man off him to save his life.

Ray
pried the gun off the officer’s fingers. The size of those meaty, hairy fingers
outmatched any wrestler he’d seen during matches, much less an officer on the
night job. He almost pushed away, but then he remembered that Martin had his
airway clogged. Another shot broke off from the barrel, sending a bullet
through Ray’s side of the car and into his window. He didn’t turn back to
admire it since no one ever did that, but he needed the gun. While he had the
gun in his hands, the officer’s fingernail bit deep into his flesh. Ray refused
to cry out and shot – he didn’t know where for his eyes blinded him. Blood
showered them, the after feeling a warm bath. He didn’t dare open them when he
spoke to Martin, fearing for his life. His lungs ached when he tried to
breathe, so he kept his breath in slow paces. It would come back to normal, he
promised himself. It would heal.

“Ray
. . .?” Martin’s voice wobbled like the poorly-made chair Ray had in his
apartment.

“Yeah?”
he said, not sure what Martin wanted. “What is it, Martin, say it.”

“Thanks.”

Ray
opened his eyes. He had to. Martin, still in the driver’s seat, erupted in
sputtering coughs, getting all of it out. He then rubbed his throat and then
his Adam’s apple. Remainders of the police officer’s blood trailed from
Martin’s door. “Martin – don’t thank me,” he told his friend. “Look at what the
hell I just did!”

“What
was it? You saved my life. I don’t see anything wrong about that.”

Ray
glared. “Do you realize I probably killed a police officer? Can you imagine how
many years I could spend in prison?”

Martin
didn’t say “oh” like he did many times before. Ray thought he was smart enough
nowadays to know
that
whatever idiotic thing came out of his
mouth was told incorrectly.  Slowly he leaned toward the outside of his window,
Ray peeking over him.

“Is
he dead?”

“I
don’t think so.” Martin opened the car door and jumped outside. Looking over
the policeman, Martin examined him. He checked the man’s pulse, finally going
back to Ray who was still in the car.

“He’s
fine, might be unconscious, though, so we might need to take him to the
hospital. Although he does have a wound near his arm . . .”

Ray
sputtered in disbelief. “What do you mean? How will we explain ourselves?
‘Excuse me, but we’re bringing in a dead man because one of us accidently shot
him but didn’t cause him that much harm. Did we mention it was an accident?’
You’re mental, Martin.” He then looked ahead of them, even more worried. “What
about the old man over there? Do you think we can come up with an explanation they’d
buy for
two dead people?”

“We’ll
just have to deal with it,” Martin said in a simple manner.

“Deal
with going to jail? Nice one, Martin.”

“Better
than leaving them here – the cops would be all over it and
then
we’d be
in trouble. Once they know this officer’s gone missing, they’ll track it down
to us. He has a radio and everything connected to the police department. I’m
afraid we’re in a tight corner right now, but like I said, let’s just make do.”

Negotiations,
thought Ray, it was all in the negotiations when it came to the two of them. If
you saw their car, you might have thought it came out of the depths of hell.
And they both knew it, so they drove the police cruiser to the hospital. Martin
worried about his driver’s license and its fate, but Ray told him that he’d get
him a new one at the DMV later. What mattered most now was the old man, who
tumbled in front of their car, and the policeman Ray had nearly killed. Like
they planned, both men were in the back row of the cruiser. Old detective D.
slept – they supposed he slept – soundlessly which softened their worst fears.
None of them spoke during the drive to the city hospital. What they had spoken
to the old man they never mentioned once, and it would be forgotten for the
remainder of their lives. The world needn’t hear about the strange old man
Martin almost killed, so they didn’t need to go over it multiple times until
they wished to kill themselves rather than hear it again.

While
they made their way to the hospital, Ray had horrible past memories of eighth
grade English. Everyone who had survived (or at least those who tried to make
their day-by-day living through that exhausting course) would know he meant the
plays teachers made them do. Horrible, pretentious plays written from men who
favored dead language and the words belonging to such disasters. No wonder they
got rid of such nonsense and replaced it with the new English! Ray thought this
a good thing, but it was not the tragedies he had gone through that reminded
him of the class. It was Martin, actually, who told their story to the doctors
again and again until Ray’s head began deforming from its original shape.
Martin, like the old playwrights before him and like ancestors giving dead
knowledge to younger generations, forced Ray to recount lines and to say them
like cues.

The
story went like this: a police officer stopped both of them for speeding (they
still weren’t sure what the officer wanted from them, but they decided to keep
it at that) and required a driver’s license. They complied, but suddenly a gang
of men began shooting wildly; they thought them delinquents and, at their
worst, delirious mad people. Ray had to thank Martin for coming up with that
one after his friend explained about the men hiding out in the woods. As the
story went on, one of those men might’ve hit the police officer while as he was
checking the license. They heard the gun and went to see what happened. You
know, like regular people? And then they saw the officer bleeding. In the back
of his car there was some old man in a long trench coat. Neither Ray nor Martin
knew the man but took him to the hospital anyway just to make sure he was all
right.

They
thought the story sounded pretty real, and they’d tell the authorities, too, to
make themselves even less suspicious for the events that had happened. Ray
thought this was swell. If only this would work and everyone would believe them
. . . as you know, it didn’t matter how immature and irresponsible they acted
while on their own (especially Ray, in this case, but he didn’t like to admit
it). They weren’t children to be trusted with such honesty. Haven’t you heard,
Ray told himself, of not trusting anyone? Some people applied it to themselves,
and then put Martin and Ray in the picture. He hoped the consequences weren’t
as harsh as he expected. At least the two of them looked like heroes – no,
saviors – when you put the story like that. Everyone trusted heroes no matter
how unexpected they may seem.

Two
(or was it three?) weeks were set back for old detective D. because of the
accident. Much, much later in the recovery stage, D. learned what happened to
him and about the two bozos that knocked him over while men with arms were
ready to kill in cold blood when the time came. The last few moments D. could
remember were blurred and too subtle – like being stoned and trying to
understand two young men’s weepy confessions. Most of the words were also
blurred, unintentionally, to be heard in a smeared-up version that would make
anyone want a dictionary or some kind of deciphering for assistance. One of
them was crying, and that was it. Bright lights of red and other colors melted
in his closed-eye vision, a portal that he would never enter.

Lucky to be alive was one thing, but that had its own
consequences. It reminded him of the white man’s backlash and betrayal when
you, the black, trusted him. Every day questions arrived at his door, and, no
he was not being metaphoric in his language. The press came in for interviews,
and although they were nothing big, they sure made a racket; and in D.’s
already depressed state, he wanted to yell them out of the room. Nurses calmed
him down with medicine and needles – of course they would. That was all they
could do to him since treatments beyond that were ahead of their time. Either
it was that or they banned such treatments. Hospitals, like asylums and public
school buildings, were dangerous places. Also add to the mix the pain that he
lived with thereafter. Both legs were working, but his bones were broken in one
arm; he assumed that was because of the safety guard he tried to hold onto. His
shoulder ached when he moved, but the doctors told him it would be better soon.
What wasn’t better, of course, was the money he needed to pay when he was released
from the hospital. He expected this so there was no surprise, but his heart sank
even so. They might save your life, but you needed to pay for it. Who knew you
had to pay in order to have your life saved?

D. wondered where Chief Advert was right now. He knew that he
asked himself the same question before, and forgotten where, but still he
wondered. Adding to this question was the whereabouts of Oliver Henry, but he
didn’t put much thought into it. The man nearly killed him, but he only thought
about it to figure out how to take him out of the equation. Oliver Henry
claimed friendship and a business partnership with McDermott, but how was he
supposed to believe this? Even he could claim such a thing without evidence,
and there were no files on this person Oliver Henry either as an acquaintance
or a friend. Lots of choices were brought out, which made the mystery thicker.

A female doctor came in one day, but during the latter half
of D.’s stay in the hospital, nurses and doctors showed up at very few parts of
the day. It made him think whether he was staying at a hospital or a mental
institution. The room’s color scheme and equipment were, to his sake, quite
mistakable if you weren’t informed well enough. Despite the mind-rumbling, the nurse
who came in had a brisk pace to her walk. Her hair had been cut to the
shoulder, straight, so it bobbed when she walked. He suspected her to be Asian
from her thin eyes, but nothing else stood out for any nationality or heritage.
She carried a yellow clipboard, almost matching the golden glitter in her
eyelashes. “Hello. It’s nice to see you again.”

“Yes it is,” D. said. “It’s a pleasure to see you, too.” The
last time he met he could not recall, but he suspected a couple of days or so.

“How have you been feeling?”

He told her he felt better than before, at the very least.

“That’s good to hear.” She crawled closer to the bed.

In his opinion, too close.

She began stroking his hair. D. glared – he wasn’t a child to
be pampered.

“Do you know how long it will be before releasing me?”

The nurse put a finger to her lips, but she wasn’t signaling
him to be quiet. She was toying with him, thinking up of an answer. Didn’t this
lady know the schedule and time of recovery more than the old detective did?
“How about a few weeks from now?” she said.

Hellish screams came from a room not too far away. Old D.
might have thought a couple of rooms, maybe three or four down the hall. The
screaming had the quality of a grown man, but the doctors wouldn’t want to harm
their patients now, would they? Even from the room they were in, the screams
were easy to hear; it might have been because of the easy-to-hear walls they
built in the place. Or the facility just liked to eavesdrop on their patients
before entering their rooms. However, when the old detective saw the young woman,
she didn’t seem to mind it. She’d gotten use to the deadly screams that broke
eardrums.

She noticed his uncomfortable reaction to the screaming.
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “He’ll get better.”

But D. listened closer. The man surely used the word “liar” a
lot. Well, that and something to do with lasers and light rays? It sounded
cryptic.

D. pushed himself to the back of the wall. “What is this
nonsense?” Then with his attention full on the young nurse: “Don’t you know
when the treatments end? What kind of nurse are you?”

“A very nice one,” she said,
almost breathing the words into his mouth. Her breath smelled of cheap mints at
a convenience store muddled with hospital equipment. D. tried moving back, but then
he realized there was no other place to go. The nurse, shrinking back like a predator
refusing to kill, tilted her head down. “I wasn’t being too . . . close, was I?”

D. pushed her out of the
bed. “Way too close for my taste. Do you mind fetching me a drink? My throat is
parched.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed.
“I’m not some filthy servant, old man!”

D. winced. Her words stung
deep.

But then she softened. “But
I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

She twiddled with her thumbs,
some kind of child not wanting to tattle on their friends or sister. “Well, see,
the thing is . . . they put me here.”

“Who did?”

But he already knew the
answer. “They did,” the nurse said. “It was their idea to put me in here and never
let me out.”

“Until . . . until when?”
he demanded. They could not be stuck here forever.

“I don’t know.”

D. grabbed the nurse’s collar.
“Don’t lie to me!” he screamed. “Tell me when they’re letting me out! I have to
know!” He searched around the room as if the place held hidden answers if you looked
hard enough. “I can’t live here forever . . .”

Already she was crying,
staining her uniform and D.’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered.

“There’s work to do,” he
said. “I need to find out who…”

“You mean who killed McDermott?”
The young woman took off her coat. Underneath it looked like what belonged to a
Halloween party: a provocative version of what a medical uniform should be. D. shut
his eyes. “I know about it.”

Still keeping his eyes closed:
“Apparently everyone knows about it except me.”

“That’s not true,” she said,
caressing his face as worried mothers do. “Many people don’t know about him. Sometimes
they wonder if he’s a ghost . . .”

          “Please!” D. pushed her hand away. “I don’t want to
hear that word –”

          “What, ghost?”

          D. turned and fell over the bed, all his bones ready
to break again. He screamed, tried to use his hands to break the fall, but none
of them succeeded. He lay shivering in cold despair, reaching up to the bed rail
at least to get back up. The nurse didn’t help but stared.

          “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

          Of course she didn’t. “Could you please help me up?”
He groaned, clutching his leg. She went over and picked him up.

          “What kind of nurse are you?” he asked. “I remember
you before but  . . . you were different.”

          “This is my first time, actually,” she answered. “I’m
just . . . disguised. But they found me.”

          “Then where do you really work?”

          She covered her face. “It’s a small place, nothing too
big.”

          “Yes, okay, but
what is it?”

         
She buried
her face now, avoiding a veil of tears. Then she muttered something nobody would
be able to understand even at the closest range, much less if you were on a bed
after crashing to the floor like what had happened to D.

          “What was that? Speak up!”

          The young woman said something: the word girl, probably.
She said it three times while mumbling through her hands and tears. In some way,
she was silencing herself. “Don’t tell anybody.”

          “I won’t,” he promised. “Not yet.”

          “What do you mean not yet?” She looked up now clearly
showing fresh tears stained on her cheeks and a mouth like salty rain. “You won’t
tell on me, will you?”

          “Am I a child to you? There are much more mature ways
to deal with this situation.” He paused. “Why are you here anyway?”

          “West Lake sent me. He wanted a message given to you,
and he told me this while he was at the place I worked. Specifically he hired me
to do his bidding.”

          West Lake . . . that man, one of the contenders for
McDermott’s disappearance – he existed? This couldn’t be possible. D. thought the
man was only a suggestion. Why did the man he was chasing after want him? “Well,
what was the message?”

          The young nurse sniffed. “He said you will try to stop
the police department from going away. You will not realize it but the department
will be forever gone in everyone’s memory. It will be too late when you want to
stop the event, and you’ll do nothing. Trying to plan things out won’t help; he’ll
think of something else.” She sniffed again. “Lake has been haunting that place
for years, he told me. Ever since . . .”

          “Haunting the police department?” D. noticed. “So he’s
the one responsible for the constructed web in the locker room?”

          The young woman nodded. “We helped.”

          “What do you mean ‘we’? Are there more people working
at that place of yours?”

          Her voice rose. “That place isn’t mine! A woman owns
it, but us girls helped with the journals and cutting out the newspapers and everything
. . .” She trailed off.

          “Oh.” He pressed a hand to his forehead, then rubbing
his eyes. “I suppose he didn’t want you telling me this?”

          “I’m not sure if he cares or not.”

          “He might.” He touched her arm. “Tell me, since when
has he been doing this?”

          “Lake won’t allow me to say it.”

          “But he won’t notice,” D. promised. “Just tell me, it’s
important.”

          And then she mouthed,
cameras.

         
But of
course the young lady was correct. D. didn’t need to do a check; in fact, why did
he forget about the damned cameras? He should have looked around before releasing
any tidbit of information that spewed from his mouth like germs. And like germs,
words spread. Well, not the words but the information. How was he to talk with high
security like this?

          And then . . .

          “Come with me,” he ordered the young woman.

          She stared at him with doe eyes. “Where to?” she wondered.

          “Here” . He pointed to the bed. “Sleep with me. It seems
like you wanted it so badly when you got here. You must remember.”

          “’Course I do.” She approached him, crawling into the
hospital sheets with her hands like cats’ claws. “And what would we do in bed?”

          “Exactly what you wanted when you arrived.”

          She may have been naïve, but the young lady wasn’t
telling the truth.

*****

Winnie the Doll was priced for over one thousand two hundred dollars.
Its delivery to the desired person’s home had cost extra, according to the service
that provided the doll and its expensive sale. For the toy company, it had been
a rare case for them to sell a Winnie the Doll to customers; with prices that high,
who would? The last time they sold the doll was to the McDermott family. Their youngest
daughter, Winnie, still relives the day her brother came back home to see them,
bringing gifts in a bag like St. Nick. He had doling out presents to everyone jolly
as he could be, giving the perfect Winnie the Doll to, well, Winnie. When she tore
the package open, it took a few moments before she gave up asking herself why her
brother bought a doll that had the same name as she.

          “Why Winnie?” she said, which was her exact words.

          Her brother, Paul, knelt down and whispered in her ear
so only she and he knew why. Everyone else had been busy with their own things,
so it made it even more special to Winnie. “So that you’ll always remember who you
are.”

          At first it hadn’t made any sense to her. She always
knew who she was, no matter what. Her name wasn’t that easy to forget – their parents
chose the name for the very same reason. Until now, Winnie hadn’t forgotten the
wish Paul had made to her that day, when a week later it would be Christmas Eve
and then the holiday afterward.