The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (178 page)

Why was she suggesting someplace a half-hour drive away? I told her I’d be there. Asked her again if my brother was all right.

Nothing bad had happened to him that day, she said. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore. She’d explain when she got there.

The coffee I’d bought her when I got to the doughnut shop was stone cold by the time she finally walked in. She sat and gulped it anyway. She looked like hell.

“How’s your daughter?” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “Jesse? Why? What do you mean?”

“Her ear infection?”

“Oh. Better. The doctor put her on Amoxicillin. Thanks for asking.” She fished out a pack of cigarettes. “Can you smoke here?” she said. “Is that a sin at this place?” I pushed the little tinfoil ashtray over to her side of the table.

I told her I was pretty sure I knew what she was going to tell
me—that I’d figured it out on the drive up there. “He’s positive, right? They got nervous and jumped the gun on the test. He’s got it.”

She shook her head. I was right about their jumping the gun, she said; they’d done blood work on Thomas that afternoon. But the results weren’t in yet. They wouldn’t know anything until Monday morning.

“So they’ll already
have
the results by the time he’s examined officially. Right?”

She nodded. Picked up her coffee cup and started shredding it. “Dominick?” she said. “What I’m going to tell you may not even
be
about Thomas, okay? Not directly, anyway. And maybe not even
in
directly. Just remember that.” Her face contorted a little, the same way Dessa’s did when she was struggling not to cry. She took a long drag off her cigarette. Exhaled. It was killing me, but I sat there and waited. Kept my mouth shut for once in my life.

She asked me if I recalled a conversation we had had several months back about one of the psych aides down at Hatch—a guy named Duane Taylor. I’d commented about him the day I’d stood at her office window and watched Thomas out on recreation break. It was before my security clearance had come through—before I’d won the right to visit my brother face-to-face. Did I remember?

I saw Thomas standing out in that rec area, waiting to get his cigarette lit while Duane Taylor entertained his pets. Ignored my brother’s existence. “Dude with the cowboy hat, right?” I said. Sheffer nodded.

There’d been an assault at Hatch a week ago, she said. On the night shift. The administration had kept it so hushed up that most of the staff hadn’t even heard about it. “Which is pretty impressive, given
our
grapevine,” she said. “But this was
top
secret.”

“Who got assaulted?” I said.

“Duane Taylor. He was attacked from behind in the men’s bathroom in Unit Four—garroted with a wire and left for dead.”

I waited. Sheffer looked up—met my eyes. “Taylor works
days,
” she said.

He’d been rushed to Shanley Memorial and then helicoptered to
Hartford Hospital. It had been touch and go for several days, but things were starting to look better for him. They weren’t sure yet about permanent damage: oxygen deprivation to the brain.

She took another drag. Gave her cigarette a dirty look and stubbed it out, half smoked. “I gave these things up on Jesse’s last birthday,” she said. “She wanted two things: for us to go to Disney World and for me to stop smoking. I couldn’t exactly swing the Magic Kingdom, so I got her a Carvel cake and a Rainbow Brite doll and let her flush my cigarettes down the toilet to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday.’ A whole carton of them. And now, tonight, I’m going to go pick her up smelling like cigarettes.” She started to cry, then stopped herself with a laugh, a shrug. “Oh, well, my credibility’s shot to hell, anyway. Right?”

“Did my
brother
assault the cowboy? Is
that
what you’re telling me?”

She shook her head. “Oh, god, no, Dominick. Is that what you . . . ?
No.
”

The guy who’d strangled Taylor confessed that same night, she said. A patient in one of the other units—she couldn’t tell me his name. It was probably all going to come out in the papers, anyway, though. Unless the hospital could keep it hushed up, there was going to be so much garbage flying around, people would have to duck. The “official version” of Taylor’s assault—the one the administration was now circulating—was that the vendetta had started over a pint of tequila. Taylor and a friend of his—a guard named Edward Morrison—had apparently been running a black market business. Alcohol and cigarettes. Pills. “That much the hospital’s willing to cop to,” Sheffer said. “According to the version the hospital’s floating, Taylor had collected money for the tequila and then reneged. But it
wasn’t
about booze. It was about sex. . . . Well, power. Rape.”

The word made me tense up. “What’s this got to do with Thomas?” I said.

She rested her chin against her propped-up hand. Looked at me with defeated eyes. “Hopefully, nothing,” she said. “From what I heard today, it was mostly the younger kids that Taylor went after—guys in
their twenties. But I don’t really know the whole story yet, Dominick. I don’t think I know anything anymore.” For the next several seconds, we sat there, saying nothing, Sheffer’s cigarette smoke swirling around us.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “How many times over the past several months would you estimate I’ve reassured you about your brother’s safety? Twenty-five times, maybe? Thirty? Now multiply that number by my caseload. Twenty-five or thirty reassurances times forty prisoners’ families. . . . God, I just can’t believe how naive I’ve been. How
stupid
.” She thrust her tiny, shaking hand across the table. Grabbed my hand and shook it. “How do you do?” she said. “I’m Lisa of Sunnybrook Farm.”

She drew cigarette after cigarette out of her pack—snapped each in half, throwing the refuse into her mangled coffee cup. “Guess what else I found out today?” she said. “Through the grapevine, of course—not through our ever-responsible leadership. I found out that as much as a quarter of the population at Hatch may be HIV-positive. That we’ve got an
epidemic
down there, Dominick, and the administration’s just been looking the other way. Sitting on the statistics. Can’t have any bad PR now, can we?”

Dr. Yup accompanied me to Hatch on Monday afternoon, examined my brother, and drew blood samples which she transported personally to the testing lab her clinic used. The results of both the hospital’s and Dr. Yup’s tests were the same: Thomas was HIV-negative. But Dr. Yup’s report also cited the presence of anal warts, contusions, and other indicators of rectal penetration.

As a result, my brother was wanted for questioning in the ongoing state police investigation of Duane Taylor and Edward Morrison. I asked to be in attendance during these interviews and was, at first, denied. But Thomas dug his heels in and insisted to both the police and the hospital administration that he would speak to no one unless his brother was there. The cops met his condition. During the four interviews that followed, I sat by Thomas’s side.

This
was weird: one of his inquisitors—the head of the investigation, actually—was State Police Captain Ronald Avery. I recognized
him immediately: one of the two cops who’d caught Leo and me smoking reefer out by the trestle bridge that night and hauled us in for questioning. Avery had been young back then—dark-haired and lean, probably not even thirty. He’d been the most decent of the three cops who’d grilled us that night. Now his hair was gray, his body droopy. Looked like he was maybe four or five years away from retirement. But he’d held onto his decency—his sense of fair play. He was patient with Thomas throughout the interviews—as nonthreatening as possible, given what the cops needed to find out.

Thomas’s account of his involvement with Morrison and Taylor kept changing. Morrison had assaulted him but Taylor never had, my brother said. Then he claimed
both
had. Then, neither. During the last interview, Thomas insisted that Taylor had smuggled him out of Hatch one night and flown him in secret to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with the CIA. Vice President and Mrs. Quayle had attended. The Quayles had been involved in Taylor’s cover-up from the beginning and were also behind the lacing of Sudafed with cyanide that had killed those people out in Seattle. Now that he was letting
that
cat out of the bag, Thomas told Captain Avery, he was probably a walking dead man.

As I sat there listening to Thomas, exchanging looks with Avery and Dr. Chase, the hospital liaison, I thought about something Dr. Patel had said several months before.
Two brothers are lost in the woods. One of them may be lost forever.

But lost or not, Thomas could still walk. Could still be sprung from Hatch.

The second unexpected phone call I received from Ralph Drinkwater came a few weeks before the story about Morrison and Taylor hit the papers. “I have something for you,” he told me. “Something you might be able to use.”

“Use how?” I said.

“That’s up to you. Just keep my name out of it. You coming to see him in the next couple days?”

I told him I could get down there by midafternoon the next day.

“That works,” he said. He told me I should park at the far end of the visitors’ lot. Leave my car unlocked.

What was this—Watergate? Drinkwater as Deep Throat? Why was he
doing
this?

After my visit with Thomas the next afternoon, I got back in the Escort. Looked in the glove compartment, under the seats. Nothing. But on the drive home, I thought of the sun visor. And when I flipped it down, a piece of paper fell into my lap: a memo from Dr. Richard Hume to a Dr. Hervé Garcia, stamped “Confidential.”

He was a cynical bastard, Hume. That much was obvious. Whatever his reasons had been for entering the healing profession, he’d lost
his
way in the woods, too. In the memo, he advised Garcia against Hatch’s “trumpeting these numbers to Hartford” but asked, rhetorically, whether “John and Joan Q. Public” wouldn’t silently approve of the HIV stats if they ever
were
released—the “weeding out of the population,” courtesy of AIDS.

Social Darwinism, I thought. Mr. LoPresto rides again. Jesus. I was beginning to understand, I thought, how Drinkwater fit into all this. Future casino millionaire or not, Ralph still needed to take a whack at the oppressor. He was
still
looking for justice.

Well, for whatever reason Ralph had stuck that stolen memo under my visor, I
had
him now: Hume. If I played it right, that confiscated memo was the key that could spring the lock. Get my brother out of there.
La chiave,
I thought. Here it is, Ma. This is what we’ve been waiting for.

The first two attorneys I talked to declined to represent me on ethical grounds. The third one didn’t seem to understand what I needed. “We’ll sue as a group,” he said. “The families of the infected inmates. They might pay
millions
to make this go away.”

“My brother’s not infected,” I reminded him.

He nodded. I’d be an “unofficial” member of the families’ group, he said. A silent partner. The terms could be discreetly hammered out beforehand. He wouldn’t be representing me
per se,
but because I’d provided the memo, he’d make sure I ended up sitting just as pretty as the rest of them.

I stood up, shaking my head. “You know something?” I said. “You’re like every sleazy lawyer joke I ever heard rolled into one. Go fuck yourself.” For emphasis, I kicked his wastebasket on the way out of there, sent his trash flying every which way but loose.

“Constantine Motors. Leo Blood speaking. How may I help you?”

I asked him if he still had that fancy suit of his.

“My Armani? I’m wearing it as we speak, Mr. Birdseed. Why do you ask?”

“Because I need an actor in a fancy suit.”

He was resistant at first: Leo, who had taken stupid risks his whole life. Who’d
thrived
on asshole stunts like the one I was proposing. It was illegal, wasn’t it? Posing as an attorney? What if this Dr. Hume recognized his picture from the car ads?

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Like you’re some big celebrity.”

“Well, what about Gene? If he ever found out about a bag job like this, he’d fire my ass on the spot, son-in-law or no son-in-law.”

“Best thing that could happen to you,” I said. “Come on, Leo. You don’t have to
say
you’re an attorney; you just have to
imply
you’re one. This is the role of a lifetime.”

“I don’t know, Dominick. I’d
like
to help you out, but—”

“Look, I
need
you, man,” I said. “Tommy needs you. This is our only shot.”

It was the first day of April when we finally “communicated directly” with Hume. I’d made three appointments by then; his secretary had called at the last minute and canceled every one of them. “Fuck it,” Leo said after he stood us up the third time. “Let’s ambush the prick.” By then, I think he’d convinced himself he
had
passed the bar exam.

We waited across the highway from the state hospital’s main entrance. “I just hope it doesn’t backfire on Thomas,” I said.

Life
had backfired on Thomas, Leo reminded me. All we were trying to do was start a little
forward
motion for the guy.

When Hume’s silver Mercedes left the grounds, I started the car,
pulled into traffic behind him. Tailed the lead-footed bastard down the John Mason Parkway, onto 395, and then to I-95. “This asshole related to the Andrettis or something?” Leo said.

“I just hope we’re not making a mistake,” I said.

Leo told me to stop thinking and just follow the bastard.

Hume exited the highway in Old Saybrook, drove along Route 1 for a couple of miles, and then pulled into the parking lot of some little seafood restaurant. Soon as he got out of the car, the doors of a red Cherokee parked a couple of cars away swung open. A young couple approached Hume—early twenties, maybe. The girl was a dead ringer—
had
to be his daughter. There were hugs and kisses, a slap on the back for what looked like the boyfriend. “So how’s Yale treating you two?” I heard Hume ask.