It's a Crime (22 page)

CHAPTER
29

T
he nurse attendant, an oversize woman in oversize purple scrubs, pulled aside the curtain on the ER cubicle where Will lay on his side. “Put this on,” she said over the clatter of the rings on the metal rod. She tried to hand him a folded hospital gown. “Someone will be right with you.”

“Ah-h-h, no,” said Rose, who was perched on the edge of the green chair beside him.

The attendant gave her a hearty smile. “Your girlfriend is a little shy,” she said. “Come on, girl, let’s both leave, and he can change in peace. We can join this po-lice here.”

They both glanced at Will’s escort, who was leaning dispiritedly against the wall.

“It’s a possible punctured lung,” said Rose. “He has to be brought to X-ray immediately.”

Will was still lying down, the folded gown clutched to his chest.

“Calm down,” said the nurse attendant to him. “Take slow, even breaths. Okay, what happened?”

“Complainant’s bodyguard was forced to subdue him,” barked the cop.

“He kicked me,” said Will. “And kicked me.”

“I’m a first-year med student,” Rose lied as she pried the gown from his fingers.

His heart leapt straight to his head. “Rose,” he said, his voice thin and dreamy.

“I’ll be right back,” said Rose.

“Ruby. Always. Gets. Her. Way. Too,” he said, closing his eyes.

The next day Will awoke hazily to see Ruby standing over by the window of his hospital room. Because she was looking out, he could see only her back framed against the soft morning light, but he recognized her tightly combative posture. Then his eyes closed. When he woke again, the phone was ringing. It was Rose.

“I know you’re not supposed to talk,” she said, “but I wanted to know how you were.” She proceeded to have both sides of the conversation, stopping only to confirm the happy ending of the story she was relating. His left lung had collapsed because his chest cavity was filled with air, she explained. The pressure had started to affect his right lung. An intern inserted a chest tube and suctioned him out. The lung filled for the first time in hours.

Rose was trying hard to be cool about her role, but the story itself still carried her away. Will was quick to adopt this outside view of his experience. It was not that he didn’t remember the events of the evening before. But he’d gotten a peek at the abyss a person could tumble into. Any alternative was attractive, and Rose offered a powerful one. If she got to be the white knight, he remained solidly worthy of rescue. He had not led Ruby astray in his ignorance.

“Is Ruby okay?” he asked, his chest aching.

“Sure,” said Rose. Still voluble from her triumph, she told him that Ruby had simply walked into the Rumson house and grabbed some papers off Neil Culp’s desk. The document that excited her was confidential because it came from Culp’s attorney, but it was nothing more than a copy of the now infamous note, with a promise that an outline of possible interpretations would be forthcoming. In any investigation, the “smoking guns” are copied endlessly and referred to in many of the other documents. As long as Ruby had found anything from the case—as opposed to, say, household bills—she was not likely to come away without inflammatory material.

The light at the window seemed to dim, then darken. It was only now that he fully understood the insignificance of Ruby’s memo. He’d always thought that she was, at least in part, playing make-believe. But it turned out that he had been just as childish. And he’d had a real audience—cops, criminals, victims. What could be worse? There was no clue to unearth, no evidence to secure, no mission to pursue.
There was no mystery.

From where he lay, head elevated to ease his breathing, he could see through the window a gloomy green bough nodding, as if in agreement. He watched all of its different types of nods after getting off the phone. When another nurse attendant came in to take his temperature and blood pressure, he asked her what happened to the girl who’d been there that morning.

“No children allowed on this floor,” declared the attendant.

“She’s not a child, exactly,” said Will.

“No one at all allowed in the morning,” she said.

That would never have stopped Ruby, thought Will, turning away.

“Look,” said the attendant. “Here are some visitors.”

Pat and Lemuel were at the door.

“Will, my boy,” said his father. “Are you all right?”

“Mom and Dad will make everything better,” said the attendant.

When an embarrassed silence fell, Will realized that Pat and Lemuel had been uncomfortable even before the attendant had spoken. They had walked in uncomfortably. Partly that was because of the difference in size. Lemuel was big and swollen-looking, teetering a little in his ruined cowboy boots, and Pat was quite a bit shorter, with clothes that fit like a candy wrapper. But there was also a sort of shrugged-off intimacy between them. They were so pointedly not together.

“What happened to you?” said Will.

“To me?” said Lemuel.

“You weren’t in the car.”

“I went looking for you,” said Lemuel. “And I found a pay phone at a fancy grill a couple of miles away. The next thing I knew, I was waking up at a place called the Hide-Away.”

“That’s a motel,” said Pat. “Not too bad, either.”

“I spent the night alone, of course,” said Lemuel gruffly.

“Oh!” said Pat. “Well, I had to get the kids back to Hart Ridge.”

Will contemplated the two of them with a stone face. “What happened to Ruby?” he asked.

“She’s grounded,” said Pat, still hanging back. “For at least a dozen years. Which means no visitors.”

Will blinked. Visitors? Could she possibly be referring to
him
? He refused to believe it. Yet a shutter seemed to close at the back of her eyes.

“Hart Ridge may be a little lonely,” she said, sneaking a spooky smile at him. “It turns out that Virginia has to disappear to write a book about disappearing. But she’s still out there.”

“Out there?” Will repeated blankly. “Out where?”

“She’s on her way to New Zealand,” said Pat.

“You remember Lydia Bunting?” roared Lemuel. He was leaning against the bathroom door.

“Of course!” said Pat, perking up.

“She was on the cruise.”

“Wonderful!” Pat’s voice soared. “I thought she was supposed to kill herself!”

“If so,” said Lemuel, “she must have changed her mind in time. She was just married, and she stowed her husband in her cabin somehow. I guess they thought they could get a free honeymoon. He kept pretending not to speak English. Or maybe he really couldn’t, I forget. But it was a big ruckus.”

Will found this sudden joviality incredibly irritating. “You’re not supposed to be drinking,” he said.

“But I’ve given up so much already,” said Lemuel.

“Like what?”

Lemuel thought for a moment. “Crank,” he said. “Betting on football games. Running around with women.”

“The doctors told me you’re trying to kill yourself,” said Will.

“Come on,” said Lemuel. “I’m trying to have a good time. Though it might come to the same thing in the end.”

“I hate all these phrases like
dead to me, might as well be dead,
and
a living death,
” said Pat, her half circle of a smile unfaltering. “I don’t care whether you see a person or not. It all counts as life.”

What this meant, Will did not know, but Lemuel seemed to accept it.

“Virginia Howley didn’t kill herself,” said Pat.

“I guess the world is full of people who haven’t killed themselves yet,” said Lemuel.

Pat looked around the hospital room, then cried, “I nearly forgot! Look what I got for you!” She finally approached Will’s bed and handed him an iPod, still in its origami-like folded white box. “Isn’t it adorable?”

Will turned it over as if to read the back. The iPod, he realized, was a goodbye present. His stay in New Jersey was over.

“I still don’t know what you were doing at the Culps’,” said Lemuel.

Will did not look up. He didn’t have the heart to answer.

When Pat responded at last, she sounded like a windup doll: “The kids thought they’d look for…oh, you know, evidence at the CFO’s estate. Neil’s bodyguard attacked Will, which he didn’t even get in trouble for because supposedly Will was trespassing. I
tried
to tell the cops that I’d sent the kids down for an edger I left behind—”

“I’ll kill that Neil Culp,” said Lemuel.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Will. At least the nurse was long gone.

“What were you thinking?” said Lemuel.

“Uh…We thought we’d help,” said Will in a low voice.

“Who? Who were you trying to help?” Lemuel turned on Pat. “Was it that criminal husband of yours? Hasn’t anyone figured out yet that it was wrong of all those assholes to take hundreds of millions of dollars from his company? Or is that still up in the air?”

“He’s not exactly…,” said Pat. “It’s hard to know what that means…There are degrees…” She drew herself up, saying—and it was about time—“I suppose he is a criminal.”

“You did just what Bud Caddy would have done,” said Lemuel to his son.

“I wasn’t Bud Caddy,” said Will. “Ruby was.”

“You’re older, you’re the boy, you take responsibility.”

Will should have known that Lemuel would get everything wrong. His ideas of chivalry were so simple, so remote from what had happened. Will was not trying to avoid responsibility. He was giving out credit. Only Ruby was young enough to retain any dignity after the Boy Scout aspect of the evening in Rumson. Will was left scrabbling around in his own brain.

“How were the wind farms?” he asked Pat. It was not exactly a friendly question, though his tone was pleasant enough.

“We never got to see them,” she said. “You can’t do everything.”

CHAPTER
30

S
ome gas stations have walled-in lots. Maybe the law requires them to put up the ivy, the concrete barriers, the high woven-wood fences if they have neighbors. But most stations, especially in western Massachusetts, are out in the open for “high visibility” and “easy access,” terms that cannot mask the bleak vulnerability of the sites. These stations are not half repair shop but half convenience store and so are more likely to hire girls. And everyone knows that gas stations and convenience stores are the most dangerous places to work.

These were the thoughts that passed through Will’s mind as he waited to pay for his gas one late afternoon in October. A teenage girl with a pierced brow was trying to do something to the cash register—ring up the sale or key in the right code or figure out the exact change. Will wasn’t really paying attention. She was doing her best to look unfazed about her difficulty, but for some reason that made her discomfort all the more obvious, and he did not want to be a witness to it. Instead he turned to watch an overhead TV tuned to CNN and realized he was looking into a familiar face. It was Neil Culp, flashing a smile beside Riley Gibbs. White type appeared over their torsos: a
FEDERAL JUDGE DECLARED A MISTRIAL IN THE CASE AGAINST LINKAGE BIGWIGS RILEY GIBBS AND NEIL CULP TODAY. THE SURPRISE MOVE COMES AFTER DEFENSE ATTORNEYS CONDUCTED A BLISTERING WEEKLONG CROSS-EXAMINATION OF STAR GOVERNMENT WITNESS FRANK FOY….
Then Frank appeared walking alone up the endless steps to a courthouse, as skinny as a pogo stick, his stride jittery.

“He joined AA in prison.” These words were spoken aloud, by a real-life Lemuel, suddenly large and solid inside the jangly glass door to the gas station. “Now he goes to court every day and drives around New Jersey all night drinking coffee at four ninety-nine a pop. Even though they’re broke. They lost the civil trial, and the only thing they have left is the house.”

“You talked to Pat?” said Will. He had left Lemuel in the car, by the pump.

“The trial has been in the news for a while. I gave her a call.”

Will kept his eyes on the screen, still trying to make sense of what he saw. A photo of a page of the
Daily News
appeared. It showed a drawing of a juror standing in front of the jury box.
IN HIS RULING THE JUDGE SUGGESTED THE POSSIBILITY THAT JUROR NUMBER EIGHT, A RETIRED BUSINESSWOMAN, HAD MADE REASSURING HAND SIGNALS TO THE DEFENDANTS DURING FOY’S TESTIMONY. A SPOKESMAN FOR THE FEDERAL PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE SAYS THAT THE CASE WILL BE RETRIED AT A LATER DATE.

“Incredible,” said Lemuel.

Will silently accepted the change for the gas.

His father turned to walk heavily back outside, swinging his heft like an old buffalo. “Gibbs and Culp claimed that the LinkAge board signed off on all their shenanigans,” he said. “And the auditors okayed the accounts. So there was no crime. There’s nothing they could be guilty of. Incredible.”

He held on to the roof to ease his ponderous bulk into the front seat. He was not one for personal chitchat. It didn’t go with his idea of manliness. But now he chuckled and said, “You and Pat’s girl took on the whole lot of them.”

Will did not start the car. Instead he grasped the steering wheel with both hands. “She screamed,” he said.

“Nothing wrong with screaming,” said Lemuel, misconstruing the situation as usual. “The way things are going, you gotta scream.”

But Ruby’s scream wasn’t that sort, thought Will. It wasn’t strategy. It was fear.

“I don’t know why everyone isn’t screaming all the time,” said Lemuel. “The problem is, no one is even opening their mouth nowadays except to stick in a bottle of water like a big suckling baby.”

Will turned the key.

“The prosecution introduced evidence that the Culps were going to flee the country,” said Lemuel. “Was that your doing?”

“Oh,” said Will slowly, considering. “Yeah, they were going to go to Ireland. So maybe we did help.”

“Isn’t that something,” said Lemuel.

On the short drive home, Will wondered where Ruby was. At this hour, she’d probably be in school, devising another plot to save her family, maybe restore their wealth. Then he daydreamed about Rose. There was no telling what she might be up to.

Acknowledgments

With belated but heartfelt thanks to Roy Blount, Michael Frayn, Jamaica Kincaid, and Cathleen Schine. Also with thanks to horticultural experts Joyce Robins and Michele Eichler; to Ursula Abrahams; to Ursula Tomlinson, R.N., P.N.P.; to Alison Carey; to Craig Seligman; and to Josette Zielenski, Bobby Meeks, and Craig Apker of Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex.