A Perfect Life (7 page)

CHAPTER 10

Scott was halfway up the steps before he realized he couldn't just rush in and order the police out of his home. The time for keeping the cops out of this was past. Cedris met him at the front door.

“What's the hurry?”

Scott pushed by him into the room. “Cold.” He glanced back. “How about closing the door?”

Cedris pushed the door shut. “We were getting ready to go back over your statement. If you wouldn't mind stepping into . . .”

Scott's mind raced. If he kept quiet and just let them find some kind of planted evidence, he was screwed. If he spoke up and told Cedris that he suspected the burglars of planting evidence, he was screwed with an explanation. The latter sounded better than the former. Not much, but still better. “Detective? My friend wanted to know what happened. It occurred to him that the burglar told me to call the cops for a reason.”

“Is that right?” Cedris smiled. “Well, did your friend have a theory? I'll take all the help I can get.”

“The burglar knew about Patricia Hunter's murder, right?”

The man looked at Scott like he'd lost his mind. “Uh-huh.”

“Guy even told me to call 911. So, my friend says, what if they came here to leave something, to hide something in all this mess they made? Doesn't that make some kind of sense? You know, maybe they planned to plant some kind of evidence to shift the blame to me or maybe just to shift it away from them. Then I woke up and popped one of them in the stomach with a bat. After that, they had to improvise, right?”

Cedris said nothing.

“I mean, the guy I hit went nuts and trashed my living room. And—”

“And the burglar you talked with through the door, he improvised admitting the murder of Patricia Hunter?”

Scott stopped short. “Hell, I don't know. Nothing about this makes sense.”

The lieutenant scratched his jaw. “So you're changing your earlier statement.”

“Hell, no. I'm just trying to help. I'm not changing anything. This just occurred to me, that's all.”

Cedris flipped back a page in his little notebook. “I thought you said this occurred to your friend.”

“Right.”

“Well, which is it, Mr. Thomas? Was this new theory your idea or your friend's?”

“I'm trying to be helpful, and you keep twisting my words.” Scott was beyond exhausted, and he could feel his face becoming flushed with anger and frustration. He pointed to the detective's notebook. “If you're writing in there that I've changed my story, then you're a liar.”

Cedris straightened up and took a step toward Scott. “Be careful who you're calling a liar, Mr. Thomas. You're the one who seems to be making it up as you go. Now, I suggest you calm down and—”

“I'm ready for you to get out of my house.”

“It's a pissant garage apartment, Scott. I don't think you could call this a house.”

Even through the haze of his exhaustion, Scott understood that Cedris was pushing to get him to say something stupid. When he spoke again, his voice was just above a whisper. “Leave.”

“One more thing. You said at the hospital last night that your parents died when you were a kid. Burned up in a house fire, I think you said. I was wondering. Did anyone else survive?”

Scott's breath caught up short. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It's a simple question. Did anyone else in your family survive the fire that killed your parents? A sister? A brother? Maybe a pet poodle that didn't get barbecued?”

Scott's stomach felt as though it had folded in on itself. He breathed deeply to calm himself, and the earlier flush of anger faded to something colder and emptier. When he spoke, his words were quiet and spaced out. “I told you to leave.”

Cedris locked eyes with Scott, then he glanced at a chubby cop wearing thick glasses and latex gloves. “We done?”

The chubby cop nodded, and Cedis said, “Let's go.”

Cedris lingered by the front door as the forensics team filed out behind Officer Tinelle and his partner. When Cedris was alone with Scott, the detective said, “Last night at the hospital I'd pretty much decided you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now. . . .” He sighed. “We got you reporting a stolen Land Cruiser that was found in your driveway. We got you showing up at the hospital following the murder of your patient, with no explanation as to why you knew all about a murder that no one had mentioned to you—”

Scott interrupted. “I told you. Someone from the hospital—”

“Yeah. I know. Some man-slash-woman with no name and no title called to tell you about Patricia Hunter's murder . . .”

“That's right. And whoever it was told me to come down to the hospital as soon as possible.”

Cedris opened the door. Freezing air pushed in. He said, “In addition to everything else, we now got you alleging one unreported burglary from days ago where they didn't take anything or, apparently, touch anything. And we got this burglary here today where the same two guys still didn't take anything. They just trashed your apartment, admitted to committing murder, and then taunted you into calling the police while they were still here.” Cedris buttoned his coat.“You know what I'm starting to think, Scott? I'm starting to think that I'm standing here talking to a murderer. And a stupid one at that.” Then he walked out and closed the door behind him.

Five minutes passed before Scott heard a quiet knock at his door and found Cannonball Walker standing on the stoop. Walker looked around. “Made a mess.”

Scott nodded.

Walker walked through the room, pushing at debris with the pointed toes of black dress shoes. “Po-lice do any of this?”

“Nope. This is what the burglars did. The cops
took
some stuff—evidence
or . . . whatever—but the mess was here when they got here.”

Walker stopped in the middle of the room, and Scott's eyes came to rest on the back of the old man's gray topcoat. Melting sleet had painted the shoulders with a black shawl that feathered down the outside of each arm. A halo of sleet hovered at the edges of his salt-and-
pepper hair.

Scott asked, “Why'd you come?”

“That girl, Kate, she asked me . . .”

“I know. It's not the
who
I'm asking about. It's the
why
.”

The wet shoulders of the old man's topcoat rose a bit and resettled. “You don't trust me?”

Scott studied the man who stood in the ruin of his living room. “I trust you.”

Walker turned. “Good,” he said. “Let's you and me take a ride.”

“Give me a minute.” Scott walked into the bedroom, picked up the telephone, and punched in his number at the hospital. When the mechanical voice answered, he entered his voice mail code and listened to a recording of mumbling overlaid with static. He punched 3 to replay the message, then pressed the
RECORD
button on his answering machine.

“Scott?” Canon Walker had walked into the bedroom. “You 'bout ready?”

Scott held up a palm while the message played out. “Ready as I'm going to get.”

Kate Billings was late to work. Something that never happened. Absolutely never. She had been expecting to face an inquisition—in her imagination, like some heavy-handed interrogation scene from
Law & Order
—the minute she appeared at the hospital, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Other than the high-pitched, palpable thrill of gossip that arced through the nurses' station, it was the same old psych ward where she'd worked as a nut nurse for almost three years. Murder, she thought, is shocking only to those it touches; the rest of the world just keeps humming along as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened . . . because it hasn't.

She lingered in the break room, thinking. At fifty-five minutes past noon—fifty-five minutes late—Kate clocked in and reported to the managing nurse. All Jill Meters wanted to know was “Are you okay?”

Kate nodded yes and learned that she had an appointment at police headquarters at three that afternoon. Jill smiled the way people do to make you feel better at a funeral. “Take a sick day. Nobody's going to care. It's not like you'd be letting anyone down, Kate. I mean, sorry to bring this up, but you're still on the schedule for private nursing duty, so it's not like anybody's going to have to take up your slack.”

“I'd rather work, at least until I have to go in for my interview with the police.” Kate hesitated. “But, Jill? I think maybe you should start looking for someone to come in and replace me. You know, for good.”

The senior nurse frowned. Experienced nurses like Kate had the luxury of choosing where and even what hours they wanted to work. Title IX had forced the good old boys to open up the nation's med schools to qualified women, which had drastically thinned the ranks of more than a few nursing schools. Keeping good nurses happy and in place was one of the toughest parts of Jill's job, but now she simply asked, “Too much to handle?”

“Just time for a new city.” Kate glanced out the window at a mix of snow and sleet swirling against the black-stained bricks of the cancer wing across the parking lot. “Somewhere
warm
.” Kate turned back to hold Jill's eyes and smile, just a little. “I won't leave you in the lurch. Just start looking. When the police say it's okay to move on, I'm probably gone.”

Jill reached out and squeezed Kate's shoulder. Kate placed her hand over Jill's and smiled more broadly.

Sleet and snow thickened throughout the afternoon into what now looked like a swirling sandstorm in the Caddy's headlights. Scott squirmed in his seat and reached up to adjust the blast of hot air coming from the dash.

The old bluesman asked, “Too hot?”

“I'm fine now.”

Walker reached out with those long fingernails and worked a chromed lever in the center of the dashboard. The spray of hot air moved from the vents to the defroster. “Wasn't thinkin' about it.” The old man flexed his hands on the steering wheel. A few seconds passed, and he nodded at the night as if making up his mind about something. He asked, “You're not on somethin', are you, Doc?”

“On something?”

Cannonball glanced over at Scott's dark profile. “You
seem
smart. Mostly. Go to Harvard and so on. But . . .” He paused. “You givin' them cops the run of your place like that.” The old man's voice trailed off as he searched for a decent way to ask an insulting question.

Scott said, “Pretty stupid, huh?”

“And—no offense, Doc—but you're slurrin' your words like you're stoned or drunk.”

The young shrink's eyes scanned the road ahead. “No sleep. Just, I guess, something like two or three hours last night—which would be okay, except that I spent the time when I'm usually sleeping being questioned by the cops about a murdered patient. Then there was the break-in. Waking up and hearing burglars in the next room. . . . Stress and no sleep is a bad combination.”

“Uh-huh.” Walker didn't sound convinced.

Scott needed this man's help. And, for reasons he didn't fully understand, he did not want Cannonball Walker to have a low opinion of him. He said, “Some researchers in Australia compared lost sleep to drinking. Their study showed that eighteen or twenty hours without sleep has about the same effect on your brain as a point one blood-alcohol level.”

“Same as the drunk drivin' limit most places.”

“Right. I don't know how much you know about stuff like this. But I'm slurring because the temporal lobe of my cerebral cortex is shutting down. It's where speech is processed in the brain. That part of the brain more or less flatlines after about eighteen hours of sleep deprivation. I can still talk because other parts of the brain take over. But I'm slurring because those other parts aren't as good at speech as the frontal lobe.” Scott knew he was overexplaining, overcompensating for a perceived failing, but he couldn't stop the words from coming. “And, uh, you know, I'd probably have trouble doing a math problem right now.”

Cannonball nodded, but he said, “You didn't seem to have any problem rememberin' all that stuff you just said.”

“It's all old information. Stuff I memorized a long time ago. Spitting out facts isn't the same as critical thinking.” Scott returned his eyes to the asphalt path before them. “I guess I could probably run a mile, too. Muscles and organs can repair themselves with simple rest. Speech and analysis require sleep. Neurons require sleep.”

Cannonball took a few seconds to study his passenger before returning his gaze to the highway. “You know, you're kinda babblin'.”

“Yeah.” Scott pushed his glasses up to massage his eyes. “I know.”

“Okay.” The old man nodded. “But I'm not sure I wanna know that some part of my brain's up there floppin' around useless just because I stayed up all night with a woman instead of sleepin'.” He sighed. “I guess everybody's different.” Some time went by before he said, “That girl Kate? She a close friend, a girlfriend or what?”

Scott took a few beats to change gears. “Nothing really. I work with her at the hospital. She was the private nurse for the Hunter woman.”

Oncoming headlights repeatedly magnified into blinding globes and then disappeared as cars heading toward Boston passed behind them. It was late afternoon, and outside it looked bright white and dark at the same time. Scott said, “Hard to see.”

“Yeah.” Walker reached up to turn down the heat coming through the defroster. “You're not screwin' her, are you? This Kate woman.”

Scott shifted in his seat. “No. I'm not.”

Walker shot a disbelieving sidelong glance. “You sure?”

Scott smiled. “I'm pretty sure I'd remember.”

“Got that right.” The old man moved his chin up and down. “Good lookin' woman.”

Scott didn't say anything.

“You know, maybe she a, uh, Christian type goes around lookin' for folks to help. Is that what you think? Maybe some kind of saint.”

Scott laughed. It felt good. “I'm not sure Kate Billings is a saint, Mr. Walker.”

“Call me Canon. And, no. Kate didn't seem like no saint today at lunch when she asked me to help you out.” They'd been outside of the traffic congestion surrounding Boston for over an hour. The men saw progressively fewer cars and more empty fields—a lot of nothing rolling endlessly across big frosted windows. Minutes passed before Canon Walker broke the silence again. “There's good people in the world. Good to their friends, good to their families. Even a few along the way who'll treat anybody they meet like he or she was God's own messenger sent down to find a perfect soul. But when somebody I don't know comes along askin' me for somethin' that don't seem to make sense—somethin' almost noble and smellin' of nonsense—well, I always figure I gotta ask myself, what's in it for them?