Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (27 page)

I tried to nod between his hands and muttered through puckered lips, “Fine—a little tired.”

“I know you’ve been banged up before—even out like a light for a couple of days—but this time… I don’t know… You really had me scared. You actually died a couple of times, you know that?”

I tried shaking my head politely, with less success.

He glanced up at the machines crowded around me. “Hadn’t been for all this stuff—and all the people here—you would’ve been history.” He paused, his eyes gleaming brightly. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, said, “Don’t do it again,” and disappeared as magically as he’d appeared.

· · ·

My days became more normal after that. I woke up when most people normally do, I had conversations with beginnings, middles, and ends, and I began to feel more a part of, if not the regular world, then at least a highly regimented corner of it. Then I was moved from Intensive Care to a regular room and introduced to the far less pleasant realities of physical therapy—a harsh enough contrast to make me yearn for the good old days of suspended animation.

I was in the rehab gym, bathed in sweat from both exertion and pain, when I got my first news of what had been happening outside the hospital walls. Tony Brandt appeared on the threshold one day and came over to where I was sitting slumped on the bench of a Universal weight machine, trying to catch my breath.

He perched trimly on a barbell rack and smiled at me. “Lifting your own weight already?”

I answered with a short, exasperated laugh. “More like the weight of three gerbils—if that.”

He tilted his head and looked at me appraisingly. “You look pretty good. Some guys would kill to lose forty pounds in their sleep.”

I just looked at him sourly.

His voice softened subtly. “How are you?”

Ever since I’d woken up, that had been the topic—for me, for the doctors, nurses, therapists, for my friends. I spent so much time either responding to that question or pondering it myself—my fingers gingerly running along the long tender scar that extended from where Vogel had stuck me in the side, right across my belly to where the surgeons had gone in to patch me up—that I was beginning to wonder whether obsessions could be picked up like germs. I didn’t want to leave this hospital feeling like every bowel movement should be up for appraisal.

“I’m getting better,” I answered blandly and changed the subject. “I heard we got Vogel, but nobody around here knows the details.”

Brandt gave me a rueful glance. “Has Sammie been by?”

I reached back into my catalogue of mental snapshots. “Yeah, but before I was conversational. Why?”

“There’s some controversy about whether Vogel gave up before she nailed him with her flashlight, or the other way around. According to him, he thought just the two of you were behind him—that the rest were coming from the other end—and that he might be able to get around you. But he said after he knifed you, supposedly in a panic, by the way—hear the insanity plea coming?—that he realized you two had reinforcements, so he gave up, raised his hands, and then got nailed by Sammie. She put him in the hospital, too, but just overnight.”

I wiped my face with a small hand towel and straightened up, feeling a little stronger after my rest. “Tell her thanks when you see her. You realize the rest of his story is total bullshit. He knew we weren’t alone. Sammie shouted up the ladder to the others just before he stuck me. He heard them as clearly as I did. Is that how he’s trying to weasel out of this? That he gave up and we creamed him?”

Brandt pulled a face and shook his head. “That’s just his first line of defense. He also says he was innocent—another con framed by the pigs—and that he ran off because he was convinced we were going to persecute him. He said he’s never set eyes on Gail Zigman and that on the night in question his car broke down on his way back from work, and that he spent a couple of hours underneath it jury-rigging a repair.”

“What kind of breakdown?”

“Punctured oil pan. We checked the car out and found the repair, all right—he put a screw in the hole—but we also went to the place he said it happened, and the road’s clean as a whistle. According to his own testimony, there was oil all over when he was through.”

“Did he go for help anywhere?”

“Nope. Supposedly, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself or the illegal car, so he did it all on his own. He said it was a long time before he found out what was wrong, put the screw in, replaced the oil, and went on his way.”

“He had extra oil?”

“Yeah—says he uses almost as much oil as gas.”

I nodded in agreement. “Car smokes like it was on fire. And of course he happened to have the perfect screw for the job.”

“Naturally. And when we hit him with the discrepancies, he went stone cold on us. Told us we were a bunch of fuckers out to get him, and that he’d see us in court.”

“What?” I asked, surprised. The popular technique was to stall the process until damn-near all the principals were dead of old age. “Who’s his lawyer?”

“Tom Kelly—he got the nod from the state when the public defender’s office claimed conflict of interest.”

“Is Kelly playing the see-you-in-court angle, too?”

Brandt scratched his head. “I don’t know. It’s a little early—they haven’t even had the status conference yet. After the oil-in-the-road story blew up, Kelly approached Dunn with a plea, but he withdrew it in mid-negotiation. Now, no one knows what he’s up to. He asked for a change of venue, of course, but there was a wrinkle there, too. He said he’d accommodate Dunn by requesting an out-of-county jury instead of actually moving the trial. According to Kelly, that’s because he’s being sensitive to Dunn’s schedule, since Dunn’s out politicking every minute he can find. But according to the scuttlebutt, Kelly made the offer so he can humiliate Dunn on his home turf. Of course, that only works if Kelly’s got a secret weapon, and as far as any of us can see, all he’s got is the last deck chair on the
Titanic.”

“What was the plea they were working on?”

“Well, given the rape and the attack on you—not to mention shooting the power-company guy—he’s looking at a life sentence, easy. I think Dunn was offering fifteen to thirty on the rape alone before Kelly lost interest.”

“What’s Dunn’s attitude?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “He’s licking his chops. He knows damn well the case won’t come to court for a year or more, especially with Kelly acting so cagey, so he’s going around to every rubber-chicken banquet in town bragging about putting Vogel in jail in record time. He’s making hay off you, too, since your getting stabbed makes Vogel look guilty as hell. And it’s working. The press is buying it; Women for Women has said it was a job well done, although they’ve started a ‘justice watch,’ as they call it, to make sure Dunn doesn’t let Vogel off with a slap on the wrist. Jack Derby is trying his best to inject a little reality—pointing out that Dunn didn’t have anything to do with Vogel’s arrest—but that just looks like sour grapes. Dunn’s making out like a bandit in the polls. Kelly backing out of the plea process just made it sweeter.”

“You smell a rat?”

Brandt shook his head. “Oh, no. Tom Kelly’s a good guy, but this is a tough one for him. You built a strong case, and he’s got an asshole for a client. He’s going to have to come up with something awfully flashy to beat it. Far as I can see, it looks like Dunn’s been handed a prize bull at no cost. I think Kelly’s being secretive for his own sake, not because he has anything.”

From across the room, my physical therapist looked up from another of her patients and gave me a stern look. I sighed and shrugged apologetically to Tony. “I better get back to it, before she has me doing laps. One last thing, though—how did the power-company guy turn out?”

“Better than you. They pulled a bullet out less than an inch from his heart. He’s already back at work part-time, doing paperwork.”

I shook my head at the workings of fate. “I wonder why Vogel hung around after he shot him?”

Brandt made a face. “That much we did get out of him. Vogel thought the poor bastard had gone all the way down the Glory Hole—that he was dead and out of sight. It was going to be dark in a couple of hours. He doubted anyone would come hunting for the truck before it was due back in, so he was planning on waiting till nightfall and then hitting the road. Lucky for us.” He paused awkwardly and then smiled. “Well… lucky for some of us.”

He rose and patted me on the shoulder, I thought a little gingerly. “Speaking of which, I know what you’re going to say, but you’ve got a Medal of Honor coming your way.”

“Oh, please.”

“It’s not just for you. It makes the department look good, too. We can make it very low-key—a private ceremony.”

I made a face. “I’m really not interested, Tony.”

He looked down at me as if I was becoming more trouble than I was worth. “All right, here’s another argument for accepting it. James Dunn is organizing an award of his own for you—some sort of ‘outstanding achievement’ plaque from the State’s Attorneys’ Association.”

“Jesus Christ… ”

“If you’d agree to the Medal of Honor, it would steal some of his thunder, and you could insist that both awards be given at the same time, in private. Otherwise, he might just bushwhack you with a bunch of press people and slap you with it like a subpoena, whether you like it or not.”

I let out a deep sigh. “Let me think about it, okay?”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Sure—when do your doctors think you can come back to us, by the way?”

“A few more days here, then three weeks at home with my mother and Leo. They’re only twenty minutes away, and these folks want me back in every three days for a while to check me out.”

“Gail’ll be there, too?”

Gail had been a constant presence since I’d come out of my coma, keeping me company, bringing me newspapers and books, watching TV with me when I became too tired to do anything else, including sleep. She was commuting from Thetford, where she’d been staying with my mother and Leo, like some career-path traveling nurse, displaying much of her old take-charge stamina and making few references to her own troubles. Tony’s question made me realize how much I’d become used to her being continually nearby.

But distracted by that thought, and pondering the unaccustomed ripple it caused across my emotions, all I said to him was, “Yes, she will.”

· · ·

Tony had taken my self-assessed physical prowess as a joke. In fact, a bench press of three gerbils wasn’t far off the mark. Several days later, when I left the hospital under Gail’s supervision, I did so in a wheelchair—and not because of the hospital’s insurance requirements. I could only manage a few dozen feet before dizziness and exhaustion set me down. The septicemia had sucked my energy down to near empty. Tony may have been right about my having found the perfect diet, but I knew replacing the lost weight with muscle would be hard work, even if I was already brushing my own teeth.

My dread was compounded by the expression I’d seen on Leo’s face as the physical therapist outlined my training regimen earlier. He’d rarely been so receptive. I knew that, bighearted to a fault, he was going to fix me up as good as new in record time—or kill me in the process.

Which made him a co-conspirator with Gail, since she’d already told me that she’d cornered the hospital nutritionist and designed a diet for me. Notions of raw tofu and cold bean gruel filled what was left of my panicky imagination.

Initially, I’d planned to return to Brattleboro, transfer my records, my case, and my outpatient status to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, and recuperate at home on Spam and fruit cocktail. But that, it had been made clear early on, was out of the question. Not only did Leo use the excuse of a prolonged and long-overdue visit with our mother as a pretense to torture me—but Gail also had seemed eager to stay away from Brattleboro. I didn’t begrudge her the tactic; I also didn’t miss the irony that I felt more useful to her as an invalid than as a friend during her time of need.

As partners, however, Leo and Gail made a distinctly odd pair. As exuberant as Gail was thoughtful, as boisterous as she was quiet, and as physical as she was cerebral, my brother—on the surface—seemed made of the very stuff Gail was not. In addition, his passion for cars from the fifties and women with short attention spans were precisely those qualities which Gail tended to view with suspicion. And yet the two of them had hit it off from the first time they’d met, some fifteen years before.

Gail was not alone in her generous view of Leo. I think most people saw him in the same light that my mother’s generation had revered Will Rogers, he who’d never met a man he didn’t like. Leo was one of the world’s optimists. A butcher who ran his own shop far off the beaten track, just down the hill from where he’d always lived with our mother, he’d created such a reputation for honesty and goodwill that people drove dozens of miles to do business with him. To enter his shop was not only to be guaranteed good meat at fair prices, it was to have your anxieties momentarily washed away by his nonstop cheer and compassion. He greeted everyone equally, with enthusiasm and an eye for their troubles. He had an encyclopedic memory for names and, more important, remembered from visit to visit the course of people’s lives, which imbued in his customers the same trust they might have reserved for a respected psychologist. For a small-town, high-school-educated meat man, his was an impressive aura, all the more so since he was totally unaware of its effect.

So I was tucked under the wing of these two oddly compatible friends, and driven across the Connecticut River to the Thetford farm where I’d grown up.

It wasn’t a farm any longer, actually. The fields had been sold off to a neighbor after my father’s death. But my mother and Leo still owned the house and barn, and we all three still referred to it as “the farm.” It was located off the connector road between Thetford Hill and Thetford Center, where Leo had his shop, and despite its proximity to the new interstate, it retained for me all the isolated sweetness of my early memories. Before and during the Second World War, when I and certainly Leo were too young to enlist, we’d been the closest knit as a family—my youthful, vigorous, well-read mother, who’d injected in her sons a love of books and a respect for all people; my much-older father, soon slated to pass away—taciturn, hard-working, undemonstrative, and gentle; and the two of us.