A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) (33 page)

"And I believe you when you say you're going to keep this whole thing to yourself and let me and my son die in peace."

I ran my good hand along a ridge in the big, wooden chair. "That's flimsy as hell."

"I'm sure we've both taken precautions," he said and nailed me with those eyes. "I know I have."

There wasn't much to say after that. I stood. I didn't want to shake his hand, but it seemed like something I had to do to close the deal. I could feel Danny's eyes on me from the door. Ferrin hesitated, then extended his hand. The skin was cool and smooth, the bones like straws, the knuckles knobby and prominent. We shook.

He looked up at me. "I was a good cop once."

I didn't say anything. I wanted to wipe my hand on my shirt. I walked across the parquet floor, feeling Ferrin's eyes on me the whole way. Danny opened the door and I slid past, trying to fit both my body and the prop through the door. My shoulder was hurting and I needed one of those Demerol badly, but I wanted to be safely back at home before I altered my state of consciousness. One of the suits was waiting for me in the drawing room and guided me back out of the kingpin's palace to the front steps. I breathed out as I walked down the steps and over to the taxi.

Halfway there I couldn't take it anymore and scratched at the armpit of my broken shoulder like a dog going after its fleas. It wasn't the brace and cast that were the problem, though they were bad enough. It was the wad of medical tape holding the digital recorder that was driving me crazy.

I wouldn't call it a happy ending.

Two days after my encounter with Jim Ferrin, the excitement was over. We sat through endless interviews with MPDC investigators, repeating our statements dozens of times. If I thought I was going to get any preferential treatment because I'd had a badge a year ago, I was wrong. Especially when I wouldn't budge about the missing link in our story, namely that there should've been a third body or at least another shooter at the scene. I hemmed and hawed and stonewalled and made a ton of cops angry at me. I told them everything up to the encounter with Ferrin, and then I clammed up. It couldn't have been more obvious that I was hiding something, but that was their problem.

Julie spent the days back at her office trying to resuscitate her practice; there'd been no time to talk about a future, if there was one. Amanda was dealing with a new set of nightmares and coming to grips with the idea that her mother's killer was truly and forever gone. Again. As long as Jim Ferrin had been telling the truth. And some of the things that he'd said continued to bother me. I'd been picking at them like scabs since I'd walked out of that door.

But there wasn't time to brood. I was gearing up for another round of chemo and the fears that went with it. The fact that I was still breathing was a positive sign. But planning for another tangle with the drugs was depressing. It brought the underlying reality of my life--disease--back to me in stark relief and made all the other recent events seem like circus sideshows.

So maybe I should be grateful for the unexpected distraction of blacking out at the oncologist's office. I was told later that things were going swimmingly while Nurse Leah prepped me for some tests. Shortly afterward, I ceased to be conscious. The order of events was simple: I took a seat in the chair, I felt the antiseptic, icy cold swab on the inside of my elbow, and then I pitched headfirst into a yawning hole lined with black velvet. I think I tried to say "Not again!" as I checked out, but I ran out of time. Leave ‘em laughing. Or try to.

. . .

I woke up in the hospital groggy, covered in sweat, my eyes crusted shut. The titanium brace was still there, keeping my shoulder immobilized, but I was flat on my back in a hospital nightie and my mouth tasted like I'd sucked on a spoon for a week.

Christmas wasn't over yet, that much I could tell from a single dopey glance around me. Green tinsel and glass ornaments were pinned to the wall at uneven intervals and a few candy canes had been hooked over door handles, shelf edges, and curtain rods. Out the window I could see it was dark, but the region's first snowfall was being blown at a steep angle under the sodium-tinted light of a streetlamp. I turned my head. It was dim in the room, but I could see Julie and Amanda hovering at the foot of the bed, talking to a guy in a gray suit, their heads close together as they whispered.

"What's going on?" I tried to ask, but it sounded more like I was trying to spit out my tongue. The girls looked up and their faces brightened simultaneously. The guy glanced over with an appraising look, as though my recovery was unexpected and he wasn't sure what to make of it. Amanda propped me up in the bed and slipped a straw in my mouth that led to a cup of water. I emptied it and sagged back onto the pillow.

"How you feeling, Marty?" Amanda asked. She had dark circles under eyes and her hair looked lank and greasy, but she smiled at me and reached for my hand.

I said, "Like hell. What happened to me?"

"You had an infection," Julie said.

"An infection?" I asked. "That's it?"

"That's what the doctor said. Quote, ‘Chemo kills a lot of blood cells that keep you safe from microscopic threats'," she said. "‘Like the kind you pick up after getting shot.'"

"You passed out at the doctor's," Amanda said. "We didn't know what had happened until the next day."

"What do you mean, ‘the next day'?" I said. "What day is it?"

"The doctor's was Tuesday," Julie said. "Today is Friday."

I took that in, then asked, "They mention when I can get out of here?"

"They told us if your fever broke, it wouldn't be long. Probably another day or two," Julie said, then smiled. "You'll need a nurse."

"I'll have to look into that," I said, but my eyes slid away from her face.

The man in blue coughed and took a step closer to the bed. He was slim, with coffee-black hair and a scar over one eyebrow. He had the nervous look of a clerk pushed into a suit or a volunteer picked out of a crowd to be the hypnotist's dummy. I processed the tired face, the wrinkled suit from Marshals.

"Mr. Singer, I'm Pete Michaels," he said.

"Detective Michaels, I presume," I said.

He smiled. "Yeah. I work under Detective Davidovitch. He wanted to let you know how things were going. Unofficially, of course."

Michaels meant that Dods was involved with, if not in charge of, the shootings at the Lane house. If anyone higher up caught him fraternizing or, God help us, visiting me in the hospital, he'd be yanked off the case and probably replaced with some hard ass. If he kept his distance, he could make sure the corners were rounded, the edges smoothed. Especially if Jim Ferrin, despite our agreement, decided to throw his weight around. Of course, if it ever came to that, I had a certain recording on file if I ever needed it.

Michaels made some sympathetic noises about my condition then let me know--obliquely--what Dods would be doing to shield me from the case. It sounded like I'd get away with skin intact, but I'd probably be dragged in for many more interviews, have to answer many more questions. I nodded. If anyone knew how the drill went, I did.

With his message delivered, Michaels was obviously eager to leave. I told him to get out of there and give my best to Dods. He wished me well and left, promising to come back if he had more to tell me. Distant, tinny Christmas music floated in as he opened the door to leave, then stopped abruptly when it closed.

Julie was right behind him, saying she'd be back in a second. I looked at Amanda. She smiled, looking more weary and jaded than any twenty-four year old had a right to be. Her eyes still had that wide-eyed wariness I remember from the night of her mother's murder. She had a scar high on her cheek where Ferrin had hit her. That, and the ones inside, weren't going to go away soon. But there was also resolution and strength there.

"How are you?" I asked.

"I'm better," she said. "I'm still trying to get over how close it was. Real close." She was quiet, then said, "And I have to put the story back together. Again."

"You know what really happened now."

"Yeah," she said. "I told you, part of the way I come to terms with things is accepting what I know--or think I know--as fact. Immutable history. The be-all, end-all of the tragedy. Ferrin came along and took that away. But now I've got what I need to put the whole thing to rest. There won't be any more surprises, no more old faces from the past cropping up. You fixed it, Marty. Thank you."

"You're welcome," I said. "For nothing. I screwed up from the start. I'd make the world's worst bodyguard."

"Not true, and you know it," she said. She looked down. A moment passed. "I feel bad about Jim."

"Me, too," I said. I pushed the bleakness away. No chance for reconciliation. No time to put a friendship back together. We were quiet for a minute, then I said, "What about school?"

She made a face. "The board of directors and the president strongly encouraged me to take some time off."

"Can you fight it?"

"I've got the support of my department, though, and my students, so I may be able to pressure them into reinstating me. Just in time, of course, for the end of the semester and the holidays, so I won't be teaching for another couple of weeks anyway."

I smoothed the edge of the blanket. "You're welcome to stay as long as you want, you know."

She smiled wider. "Thanks, Marty. Maybe until after New Years, if you don't mind."

"That'd be fine. I don't think Pierre would tolerate anything less."

"Ohmygod," she said, bringing her hands to her face. "He hasn't been fed all day. I've got to run."

"Don't spoil him too much, okay?" I said. "I'm not going to be able to pick him up with just the one arm, pretty soon."

"Quit worrying, Marty," she said. "I've got him eating out of the palm of my hand."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

She shook her fist at me, then followed it with a peck on the cheek. A quick wave and she was gone.

I lay there, empty-headed. The TV was on, running an endless stream of holiday specials, but the sound was muted, and I watched the flashing images blankly, without comprehension. Julie found me like that ten minutes later, staring at the TV like it was trying to tell me something, but failing.

"What was that about?" I asked.

"I caught up with Detective Michaels, asked him to keep me in the loop," she said. "No way am I going to let them pin anything on you or me or Amanda just for trying to keep ourselves alive."

"Thanks," I said and looked away.

"What's wrong?" she asked, moving closer.

I didn't say anything.

She sat on the edge the bed. "Are you feeling weird about us? If you are, we can go slow. Once you get out of here, get through chemo…" Her voice trailed off as she saw my face.

I cleared my throat. "You know when you run your hand along a smooth piece of wood and you feel a snag but you can't really see it? A little imperfection that you can't ignore? Everything looks good, but there's something wrong and you have to look close to find it."

Julie said nothing.

"When I was out there, talking to Jim Ferrin, sitting in that madhouse, he said something. I was focusing more on what he had to say about the night Brenda was killed, but later I realized something else he'd said didn't add up. He admitted he had Landis in his pocket during the trial. That much I could guess. But then he said that Don was scared, that he wasn't sure he could sandbag the whole trial convincingly. Ferrin said he'd given him some extra insurance, something that would seal the deal. It's bothered me since then, but I wasn't sure why. It was that snag in the wood that I couldn't find. But now I think I know what it was. What Don's insurance was."

I stopped talking and stared at her but it was her turn to look away, out at the night where the wind was whipping the snow in mad flurries past the window. She plucked at the blanket at the foot of my bed. I thought she would stay like that forever.

She started to speak, so softly I could barely hear her. "It was my first real case. I was good and smart and I knew you had nothing solid on Wheeler and that, in the end, it wouldn't matter. Once the jury heard that tape or put the picture together from all the complaints she'd made, it would be over. Who was going to listen to me drone on about burden of proof after they heard that woman screaming into the phone?"

Julie got up, hugging her arms to her chest, and walked over to the window. "I remember thinking to myself that I'd put up a good fight and try to move on to the next one, if there was one. Then Don called. Told me he thought a grave injustice was being done to my client, that he couldn't live with himself if an innocent man went to jail. A real line of bullshit. After the first minute, it was obvious he was scared out of his mind, that someone was leaning on him."

I said nothing.

"He fed me everything. What his strategy would be, how he'd question the witnesses, the gaps he'd leave. But we both knew it wouldn't be enough. I told him he'd have to get rid of that tape or all the cross-examination in the world wasn't going to get Wheeler off."

"So he ditched it," I said.

"I didn't ask. Then the trial came along and I tore him to pieces. With his help. It wasn't easy. I knew Don from my time in the DA's office. It didn't feel good to see him put on a brave face while he waited for the next knife in the gut. While I dismembered his career."

We were both quiet for a moment. I felt hollow inside. "Did you know it was Ferrin pulling the strings?"

"No. Don never told me who it was."

"Were you curious when Don wound up dead?"

She shot me a look. "Of course. But, whatever it was that Ferrin had on him was bad enough to break him. Add on the secret that he'd thrown the trial, and the public knowledge that he'd lost a landmark case, and suddenly it's not too hard to imagine Don walking out in front of a train."

"Whatever lets you sleep at night," I said.

She opened her mouth, then shut it. I waited for her to say something, wanted her to say something. When she didn't, I went on.