Stress Test (29 page)

Sandra almost dropped her cell phone when her call was answered. “Rick, this is Sandra Murray. I’m Matt’s attorney.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Rick said. “What’s up?”

“Can you be at the courthouse at eleven o’clock? Sorry for such short notice, but Matt’s being arraigned, and I need a character witness to testify that he has ties to the community, a steady job, and such.”

There was silence on the line for so long Sandra wondered if the call had been dropped. She was about to check her signal strength when Rick said, “Sure. I’ll be there. Do you think he’s going to be in jail long? I mean, I don’t mind working a double shift occasionally, and some of the other docs would probably do it once or twice, but . . .”

“That’s the second thing I wanted to mention. I’m going to do my best to get him released on bail, and it would help if you made it clear that he has a steady job.”

Rick’s forced exhalation was like a north wind in her ear. “Sandra, I’ve stuck my neck out for Matt so far that I look like a giraffe. The hospital administration has gone along with me to this point, but this arrest might be the last straw.”

“He’s being framed, and I think we have a pretty good chance of proving it. But it’s going to take time, and I’m trying to keep him a free man while I do it.” She wondered what else she could say to convince Rick. She settled for, “Just do what you can for him today, will you? We’ll figure out tomorrow when it comes.”

“On your feet.”

The voice of the guard startled Matt. This one was a burly African-American, his shaved head glinting in the pale light of the corridor. If Matt had been tempted to try to overpower his earlier
escort, no such thoughts crossed his mind now. This man looked like an offensive tackle who’d just been released by the Pittsburgh Steelers and was angry about the experience.

Matt backed up to the cell door and held his hands behind him. “Where to this morning? Does Detective Grimes want to talk to me again? Is it my attorney?”

“Nope, you’re headed to court.”

“Am I going to be tried? Already?”

The guard shook his head, apparently amused at how little this jailbird knew. “You must be new at this. This is your arraignment. They tell you what you’re charged with. You enter a plea. They talk about bail. I’m betting I’ll see you back here before my shift ends.”

Matt stumbled through the routine of transport to the courts. There he exchanged a few words with Sandra before he was herded into the courtroom and seated in the front row along with a number of other men and women in prison garb.

He’d told her that if the judge set bail at anything over a few hundred dollars, he wasn’t going to be able to meet it. As he waited, he ran through the problem once more. Was there someone he could call? Thinking about that depressed him even further. His parents were dead. His brother was a missionary whose life exemplified the phrase “poor as a church mouse.” Friends or colleagues? Aside from Rick, no one he’d ask to put up bail. And Rick had already done too much for him.

When Matt first entered the courtroom, he didn’t see Sandra, and he felt panic building in his chest. Had she been called away? Was something wrong? Did this mean he was going to be sent back to jail and brought back tomorrow? He wasn’t sure he could tolerate another night in that cell. More bologna sandwiches. Hours of trying to sleep despite the noise all around, intensified at times by someone
beating on the bars of his cell or yelling incoherently.
“Get used to it,”
the trustee had said when Matt asked about jail food. He wasn’t sure he could get used to any of it.

When Sandra slipped in through a side door, stowing her cell phone in a large purse, Matt relaxed. He tried to anchor his emotions to the smile she gave him, but couldn’t do it. Sandra would try, but he knew things were hopeless.

Matt listened to other prisoners being arraigned, but kept losing his concentration. He heard a door close at the rear of the room, and turned in time to see Rick ease into one of the back seats in the courtroom. His colleague flashed him a tentative thumbs-up and winked, but it was obvious to Matt that Rick’s heart wasn’t in it.

When Matt’s name was called, the bailiff tapped him on the shoulder and motioned him to step forward and stand by his attorney before the bench. The judge asked questions in a bored monotone, and Sandra answered as though she’d said the words hundreds of times—which, come to think of it, she probably had.

“Do you understand the charges?”

It took Matt a moment to realize the question was addressed to him. He looked at Sandra, who gave him an almost imperceptible nod. “Yes, sir.”

“How do you plead?”

This time Sandra answered for him. “My client pleads not guilty, Your Honor.”

“We’ll set the date for trial. Do you have a motion for bail?”

“We ask that my client be released on his own recognizance. He has a spotless record, has roots in the community, and I have a witness in the courtroom who is prepared to testify that my client is of good character and holds a responsible position with a major hospital here.”

A middle-aged man in an ill-fitting gray pinstripe suit rose from
his seat at the table behind Matt. “Your Honor, the prosecution opposes bail. This man is a person of interest in two murders. The victims were found in his car and his home respectively. It would be a travesty—”

The judge rapped his gavel twice. “Your objection is noted, Mr. Everett. However, I believe the matter before us is possession of narcotics, not suspicion of murder.”

The prosecutor eased back into his chair, but not before casting a look at Matt that would have melted ice.

“Your Honor—” Sandra began.

The judge steamrolled right past Sandra, who clamped her lips shut. “I believe I’ve heard enough, Counselor. I will grant bail in the amount of—” He paused and stared off into the middle distance, as though the sum were written on the far wall of the courtroom. “One hundred thousand dollars.”

Matt’s heart sank. He could handle one hundred dollars, even a thousand. But a bail bondsman charged 10 percent of the amount of bail, and ten thousand dollars was out of the question.

The next words out of Sandra’s mouth caught Matt’s attention like a cold towel to the face. “Your Honor, we’re prepared to meet that. Shall I make arrangements with the clerk?”

She took Matt by the elbow and herded him to a small desk at the side of the courtroom. He opened his mouth, but she silenced him with a look.

Sandra bent over the desk and whispered to the man there as she pulled her cell phone from her purse. “We’re prepared to put up surety in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. I’ll need to make one phone call, and I can let you speak with a banker who will provide that guaranty.”

In an hour, Matt—now dressed in his own clothes, including a
new shirt Sandra had purchased and brought him—walked beside her toward her car. “Okay, now tell me. How did you manage that?”

“Hang on.” Once they were inside the car, she turned so she was half-facing him. “As I was about to enter the courtroom, I got a call on my cell phone. I didn’t recognize the number, but the caller ID said Hargrave and Banks. That’s one of the most prestigious law firms in the city—maybe in the whole Southwest—so I decided to take the call.”

She started to put her key in the ignition, but Matt stopped her. “Hold on. If this has to do with why I’m free instead of eating a bologna sandwich and listening to the guy three cells down rattle the door to his cell, I want to hear it all.”

“Well, it gets better from here,” Sandra said. “It was Ernest Banks himself calling—Hargrave is long deceased, by the way—asking if I represented you. When I told him I did and explained you were about to be arraigned, he said, and I quote, ‘My client is prepared to guarantee his bail, and if we can offer any assistance to you as you prepare his defense, simply call me.’

“I was stunned, but had the presence of mind to ask how high they’d go on your bail. You’re not going to believe what he said.”

“I’m not believing any of this,” Matt said.

“He said, ‘Up to a million dollars. If it’s higher than that, call me, and we can probably arrange it.’”

Matt’s brain was doing loop-the-loops. “Who would do this for me?”

Sandra smiled at him. “Let me test your memory. Do you remember a patient that came into the ER with blood in the sac surrounding his heart? You did an emergency procedure to decompress it—probably saved his life.”

“Sure. I was scared to death at the time because I’d never done a pericardiocentesis, but there was no other option.”

“Well, whatever that long word means, you clearly saved the man’s life. But the clincher is that you showed you cared about him. You visited him in the hospital the next day. You talked with his mother, answered her questions, tried to comfort her.”

“You mean—”

“Apparently news of your arrest reached Mrs. Penland. She picked up her phone, called her lawyer, and told him to find out who was representing you and offer assistance, including getting you bailed out.”

Matt didn’t know what to say. This was truly an answer to prayer—a prayer that he’d offered not totally believing God had any interest in hearing him. “I still can’t believe she’d go to such lengths . . .”

“Again quoting my new best friend, Mr. Banks—who now insists I call him Ernie—Mrs. Penland said you weren’t the kind of person the police said you are, and you didn’t belong in jail. She thought you should be in the ER, saving lives.”

TWENTY-ONE

Matt had assured Sandra there was no need for her to drive him home. When the taxi pulled up at the curb, he saw shreds and balls of yellow crime scene tape scattered about the lawn, but there were no cars and no people around. He let himself in the front door, and his eyes were immediately drawn to the area rug in his living room, where a rough body-shaped chalk outline circumscribed an irregular blot of dried blood. As Matt skirted around the spot, he wondered if he could ever get his home restored to normal. And even though his lawyer said he could start the cleanup process, he worried that anything he might do would cause problems for him later with the police.

Matt half-expected to find drawers left open, clothes and books on the floor, but other than dust left behind by fingerprint technicians, the remainder of the house looked pretty normal. He vaguely recalled that there were companies that specialized in cleaning up crime scenes. Not that he could afford it. For now, all he wanted to do was wash away the scent of jail that clung to him like a blanket. The house would come later.

But first he had to get back on his medication. He hadn’t had any more petit mal seizures, even though he’d missed several doses, but he couldn’t take any chances. He’d left his pill bottle tucked away behind glasses in his kitchen cabinet between bottles of Tylenol and Motrin. But when he looked, all of them were gone. Had the police taken them for analysis? With the drug charges against him, it made sense, he guessed.

Since Matt was a physician, it wasn’t an insoluble problem to replace the Ethosuximide, although it was a definite inconvenience. He made a trip to a drugstore, gave the pharmacist a prescription, waited impatiently for his medication, and drove home, all the while expecting to wake up finding that he’d suffered another absence spell.

In the kitchen, Matt spilled one of the red capsules into his palm and washed it down with a few sips of tap water.
Please let the medicine
keep working
.

Matt took a long, hot shower, lathering and rinsing several times. The clothes he’d worn went into the laundry hamper. He liked the new shirt Sandra purchased for him. It was something he might have picked out for himself, and he’d definitely keep it. He made a mental note to pay her for it.

He hadn’t slept well in jail, so he decided to stretch out for a nap. When he woke, he looked through the window of his bedroom and saw lights going on in the deepening twilight.

He dressed in a clean golf shirt and jeans, and padded in his bare feet into the living room, giving a wide berth to the reminder of the murder that had taken place there less than two days ago.

He lifted the phone and heard the stutter dial tone that told him he had voicemail. The first two messages were hang-ups. Then he heard a familiar voice. “Matt, this is Rick. I’m assuming you won’t be able to work your ER shift tonight. I’ll cover it, but I’m worried. I’ve
caught some flak already about hiring someone who’s under suspicion of murder. The whole time I was in the courtroom this morning I hoped I wasn’t going to have to get on the stand, because I didn’t know what I’d say. We need to talk. Call me.”

He erased the messages and looked at his watch. There were almost five hours to go before the shift Rick was working for Matt ended. Matt wanted desperately to crawl back into bed, pull the covers over his head, and try to forget the ordeal he’d just gone through. But Rick was a friend, and Matt wanted—no, he needed to make things right with him.

Half an hour later, Matt walked into the ER and looked around. As he figured, the place was abuzz with activity. He finally spotted Rick coming out of a cubicle, flipping off his gloves and reaching for a clipboard held out by a nurse. Behind the curtain, adult voices were bickering.