Lie Still (50 page)

It was obviously convenient for Western to book me here in Hooker, but I asked Adrienne to keep me moving; half my time has been splattered at Western Acute’s various ERs around Nebraska and Kansas and South Dakota and Colorado. All in towns like Hooker—they’re everywhere—“nice quiet little ERs where nothing ever happens.”

I make enough to live on and even save a little. I’ve been able to pick up some of the things that naturally got away from me moving from school to school—photography, fishing, hunting, skiing.

At least once a month I get junk-mail job offers. “Exciting midsized city in America’s Heartland, 45 minutes from a major university . . .” I called on a few of them. Theirs is a unique code; “three hours from the heart of Colorado skiing” means it’s in Kansas, and the “three hours” assumes you own a rocket sled.

Adrienne told me when she pitches Hooker to any of her other charges, naturally she tells them it’s “a quiet little ER

where nothing ever happens.” We laughed conspiratorially.

Just a few days ago, right here in Hooker, an anorectic dopehead with jailhouse tattoos pulled up with his two little LIE STILL

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kids in the back of the station wagon. One of the Wattle brothers I’d spent much of junior high school avoiding. He said he thought they needed antibiotics and he would take

’em on home. He was partly right.

The admitting nurse went out to the car, took one look at the blisters running from their feet up to a very cleanly demarcated line around their lower chests, realized they’d been forcibly dipped into very hot water, and called me for approval to send them straight to Lincoln to the Burn Center. We were standing, I knew, beside the perpetrator.

I said in my best simple-country-doctor aw-shucks drawl that we oughta bring ’em on in and get ’em some IV fluids going. The look I gave the nurse said this was not negotiable.

The burns were forty-eight hours old. Both children—

ages two and three—were massively infected, fevered, and dehydrated, bordering on shock. Dad said the kids splashed the hot water on each other while the tub was filling and he was called away to the phone. They all say that. We summoned the transport helicopter and the police.

ER work is mainly swollen ankles, twisted knees, belly-aches and backaches, coughs and anxieties. Lots of anxieties.

It is surprising how often saying “You don’t have anything that needs surgery today” or “Your pain almost certainly is not cancer” will melt the anxiety off faces.

Occasionally there’s the life-threatening to keep your adrenal glands in shape. About once a year I save someone’s life. Mostly, though, it’s triage—sorting out the incoming.

The well I send on their way and the sick I send to someone else, but it’s not a trivial role.

It was never what I had in mind, though.

Which makes this new job in the Othello clinic intrigu-ing. I’ve now done five consecutive Wednesdays there, and it’s beginning to click. Annie Parrott is teaching me her routines for age-specific screening tests, what to tell people about vitamins C and E, and which smoking cessation programs sometimes get some traction with the locals.

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The Henry Rojelio debacle came in the middle of Mary Ellen’s third and final year of residency. That was about the time she admitted to herself she was an acuity junky: We had talked about it before I ever met Henry Rojelio. She did not want what many pediatricians want—a “general practice for children”—an office full of kids of all ages, colors, sizes, and degrees of wellness. Mary Ellen wanted the sick ones.

She wanted a daily fight with Death even if losses were guaranteed.

Such a commitment is akin to religious vows. Most ICUs put an intensivist “on” for a week at a time. While on, your life is not your own. You can spend hour upon hour with a single child, doing bedside exams and procedures, checking esoteric lab values and adjusting your orders until your pen runs dry, explaining to parents and grandparents the limits of knowledge about the workings of the body and summoning whatever ghost of philosophy you like best to describe the whims of fate, then pronounce the child dead.

You maintain a veneer of professional detachment and melt down at home. You cannot do children’s intensive care if you don’t take it entirely seriously, but you can’t survive if you take it too seriously. You live by finding balance, though the fulcrum is ever moving with the caseload and the caseload is unpredictable.

Then you get a week off to try to be normal.

I asked her if she knew what inside her made her want that kind of practice.

She said, “Does it matter?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Regardless, they’ll be lucky to have you. You’ll be God’s gift.”

She applied for and got a fellowship in Pediatric Critical Care—children’s ICU medicine—in San Francisco. From there she took a position as a staff intensivist at the Children’s Hospital of Colorado in Denver. Two years later she was made the Director back at Maricopa.

Mary Ellen Montgomery is as good as they get. I know this by bits and pieces of intelligence from the little contact we had, from what I have heard from my other remaining LIE STILL

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friends in the area, and because I know Mary Ellen could not do it any other way.

She lives alone in a ranch-style house on the slope of Camelback Mountain in Scottsdale. She has never married, surviving on work and a long-distance affair with an archi-tect in Portland.

H E N RY, DAY S E V E N ( C O N T I N U E D )
The Rest.

After saying my final goodbyes to Henry Rojelio, I was a bedraggled mix of sorrow and agitation. With the help of the Inderal, I had managed to hide my state from Mary Ellen.

After she left for work I tried to sleep, but only lay and watched the streaks of sunlight creep down the west wall.

I wanted to call Will Borden promptly at 8:00, tell him I had some puzzle pieces for him. But I pictured sitting before Borden and May, bouncing on my chair, laying out my tale, my theories, my explanations, with the real corpse over in the Maricopa PICU, lying still, but not yet dead, at least by the universal definition, as Mary Ellen’s team did their tests, blissfully ignorant of my addition to Henry’s IV nutrition. It was unlikely the detectives would pick up on something I did or said and drop everything and run over and stop the process, but I didn’t trust myself to leave out exactly the right parts of the story.

So I had to wait. The town house felt like a cage.

Just before noon Mary Ellen called to let me know it was over.

I called Detective Borden. I told him I had some answers. I said, “You know, I guess, that Robin is a man.” I told him about my phone call to Charlene through Cynthia and Monica.

He laughed. “Yeah. We know. Come on out. We’ll go through it all when you get here.”

I went for a long run, took a slow shower, and made myself sit down for lunch—table, chair, place mat, napkin, sil-verware, the whole bit. I put on dressy pants and shoes. I 382

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got my envelope with its adrenaline syringe from the refrigerator. I drove to Mesa, slower than usual. The Salt was receding.

I made myself walk and talk slowly, too. Will got me coffee. He and Ken looked surprisingly fresh. Another day at the office.

Borden handed me copies of the Board of Nursing file, then sat on the front of his chair, leaning on his knees, face close in. I stared at the blotchy xerox of the photo in the file; it looked like a broad, ruddy, grinning man with light hair and thin eyebrows. Will said, “An Englishman. Born in Bath, moved here eleven years ago. My guess is he was seeking the, shall we say, freer lifestyle of the ‘confirmed bachelor’ here in the U.S.”

“Dead?”

“Two years ago. Cause of death listed as Kaposi’s sar-coma. Along with a secondary diagnosis of some kind of cystic pneumonia.”

“Pneumocystis pneumonia.”

“Yeah, sounds right.”

“AIDS.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” He shifted in his chair to an upright posture. “Basic, unglamorous police legwork fills in a lot of blanks. The morning after we met you at your condo, we went knocking at the State Nursing Board. The photo and description pretty much speak for themselves. License lapsed about eighteen months ago, no response to renewal notices. Then it was renewed. No big deal. New address, new phone number. About three months ago. All back fees and penalties paid with a cashier’s check.”

“Not traceable.”

“Not traceable.”

May added, “I went over to the County Clerk’s Office.

Death certificate on file, dated, signed, et cetera, et cetera.”

I nodded as I pictured Mimi, daughter of law enforcement, cooking up this, surely her most spectacular “cover story.”

“You knew this when I was here for the polygraph.”

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They nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Ken said, “We’re here to get information. Not give it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the answer.” I rubbed my eyes. I reminded myself to talk slowly and take pauses. Silences wouldn’t kill me. “I don’t know who she was. But I know why she did it.” I felt them looking at me harder.

I explained in detail my affair with Professor Lyle, my attempts to have her professional deficiencies dealt with, my failed residency. I detailed her apparent campaign of revenge, right down to the bubble as a barrier, handing them the syringe of epinephrine as I did. They listened. Halfway through it Detective May started scribbling notes. They put on gloves before picking up the syringe. “It’s only got epinephrine in it.” I explained my “bioassay” in the dog lab.

“You put half the evidence into a dog?”

“Uh-huh.”

Will said to his partner, “I told you doctors think they know everything.” Ken nodded. “You doctors may know a lot, but you don’t know shit about criminal evidence.”

I nodded ruefully. “It seemed pretty important to know what was in the syringe. And it wasn’t really a criminal case. Yet.”

They smiled. Ken asked, “Couldn’t the bubble have come into the syringe after it was used on Henry?”

“Well, it’s possible. In theory,” I said. “But in reality it’s almost impossible. As it gets handled the incidental pressures that might move the plunger are always pushing it in, not pulling it out.”

He said, “Mmmm. Not exactly something you could use in court.”

I nodded. “There’s more, though,” I said. I explained exactly where in Henry’s chart they could find a sample of

“Robin’s” handwriting and directions to a certain mountain hideaway. Ken wrote it down. I gave them every detail of our drive up toward Globe, the adobe cabin, Mimi’s landmarks to find it, our confrontation, my ultimate escape, and where the bullet casings had fallen.

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They listened, but didn’t look excited. Ken scribbled some notes and rubbed his eyes. He repeated back to me for clarification the landmarks. “We’ll be checking it out.”

Borden said, “You said your ‘Robin’ drove an old Camaro?”

“Yeah.”

“Black?”

“I thought it was dark blue, but I only saw it the one night.”

“Because they found a black Camaro in the Salt River last night. Few miles out west of Tempe. Somebody saw the roof sticking out of the water. The river’s falling. Not much in it but mud. No papers. The plates, though, are registered to Robin Benoit.” He paused. “There was a leather jacket in the backseat.”

I stared at him. “My jacket?” I said.

“So it would seem. There were some notes from the Glory Hospital in the pocket. It’s in our evidence room,” Ken said.

“Caked with mud, but there’s still traces of blood smeared on it,” Will added. “Whoever your ‘Robin’ is, she’s very good at disappearing. No one who knew her has been able to give us a clue. Nothing from her phone bills or bank records, either. Just a chain of the normal type stuff that abruptly stopped five days ago. Though it was a really thin chain. Hardly any calls. No long distance. Not but about twenty-five checks written since the account was opened. And no final withdrawal, no forwarding address, no nothing.”

We sat and stared at each other.

I said, “Seems they thought of everything.”

May said, “Except the Nursing Board file.”

I looked from face to face. “So let me guess what got you to knock on my door so fast. I mean, she hadn’t been gone long when you guys paid me a visit.”

“No, she hadn’t,” Borden said, “but the doc in the ER said you were fighting. Said it sounded like you were threatening her. The nurse said you wanted directions to her house.”

“I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

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“Maybe not. But they don’t know that. And then

‘Robin’s’ neighbors hear crashes and swearing from her house, and write down the license plate of a Datsun that came and went in the night.”

I gave him a rueful smile.

Will smiled back. “I told you, when someone is reported missing we send a uniformed officer to the door. If there is no answer we gain entry, maybe break out a small window—they’re cheaper to repair than door jambs—then look around. In this case the Uniform didn’t find anything at first, but he thinks he’s a hotshot so he looks all around and finds blood under the bathroom sink. We went back with Foren-sics. They found traces of broken glass on the kitchen floor and traces of blood all over the kitchen and bathroom.”

Ken said, “The semen and spermicidal jelly on the sheets were good, too.”

I nodded again. “But no ‘toy box.’ ” I said.

“No. Whoever this phony ‘Robin’ is, she took her cash and contraceptives and left everything else there, even the money in her checking account. All to let suspicion fall on you.”

“So who’s the floater?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet.” A pause. “Like I said, those show up from time to time.”

“Are the breasts made of silicone?”

Will smiled. “No.”

“Not her,” I said.

“We didn’t think so.” A pause. “And the victim?” Borden asked. “The kid? Where is he?”

“In the morgue at Maricopa. He died today.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry.”