Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (20 page)

“Turn over,” she said.

That was it! That was how he wouldn’t see it; she’d give him the shot in his ass.

Jessie turned over and Carol pulled his pajama bottom down, exposing buttocks the size of two large hams. She swabbed a little alcohol on his soft skin and plunged the needle in. He didn’t wince. He was used to it.

Slowly, Carol pushed the plunger down. It was like her hand was doing the work and she couldn’t control it. She watched the solution flow from the syringe and into her husband’s body.

When it was done, she pulled the needle out. Out of habit, she cleaned the injection site again with the swab. It never occurred to her that the last thing she had to worry about now was infection. Nor that he wouldn’t be eating, because Carol Giles’s first thought after the injection was to go downstairs and begin making breakfast.

Before she could finish cooking the eggs, he called out to her.

“I don’t feel good,” Jessie said weakly.

She bolted upstairs. He looked really sick.

“I’m so hot,” he said.

Carol went into the bathroom and came back with a washcloth to cool him off. As she was applying it, Jessie began to retch. Quickly she brought the trash can over; Jessie threw up into it. He leaned back, apparently okay; then suddenly, another bout of nausea hit, and he moved his massive bulk to the edge of the bed and put his head in the can again.

What was going on? Carol began to feel paranoid. Tim had said it would work within fifteen minutes; he would go into a coma in fifteen minutes. And there was Jessie, thirty minutes after the injection, alive and throwing up!

Jessie kept retching until there was nothing left to retch. And then he turned and, with the coldest expression she had ever seen, asked:

“What did you give me in my insulin?”

“I didn’t give you anything else,” Carol answered, frightened he might hit her, even more so that she would cave and blurt out the truth. “Just your insulin, that’s all I gave you, just your insulin,” she said as convincingly as she could.

By that time, Jessie was catching his breath in short gasps. He tried getting up. He was fighting for his life but didn’t know it. Carol didn’t know what to do except maybe take him to the hospital. She pulled out some clothes and put them on the bed to dress him.

Yeah, that was it; she’d dress him and take him to the hospital. She had to. Tim was wrong. The stuff wasn’t working like he said it would. Jessie had a chance to live if she got there in time.

Fifteen

Carol put Jessie’s sweater on him and pulled on his pants. She figured to walk him to the car, but as soon as she got his shoes on, he slid off the bed and onto the floor.

Jessie landed between the dresser and the bed. Carol reached down and put her hands under his arms. She tried picking him up. But that was about as futile as anything she had ever done. Jessie outweighed her by over 300 pounds. She had as much chance of moving him as a boulder.

Jessie said nothing. His eyes closed and his breath came in short, wheezing gasps. Carol didn’t know what to do. Her mind raced. She picked up the phone on the nightstand and called Collier.

“Tim, what do I do now?”

Carol looked down at Jessie.

“He’s still alive! You said it would take fifteen minutes!”

“You gotta remember he’s a big man,” Tim reminded her. “Where did you give it to him?”

“I gave him his insulin in the butt so he wouldn’t be able to see the color of the liquid in the needle.”

“That’s why it’s taking so long,” Tim answered, sounding like Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery. “Because you gave it to him in his butt, which is farther, you know, farther from the heart than if you had given it to him in his arm. And then there’s his fat tissue.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s thick,” she answered, relieved at the explanation for her husband’s continued presence on this earth.

“You have to remember,” Tim continued, “that he’s over four hundred pounds, that it’s going to take longer.”

“Damn, Tim, it shouldn’t take this long,” Carol said anxiously.

“Don’t panic, don’t panic; it will be all right,” Tim said soothingly. “The guy that I got the heroin from is right here at my house. Let me talk to him.”

Tim’s buddy Alphonso Roland had thought, from the cock-and-bull story Tim fed him, that the heroin had been for some guy who lived halfway across the state. Roland had no idea that a man living in a home across town was dying, at that moment, from the heroin he had supplied.

Collier held the receiver in his hand and turned to Roland, who sat across from him. He told Roland what the problem was.

“Okay, Alphonso wants to know what’s happening?”

Carol looked down.

“Nothing. Nothing’s happening. He’s still alive. For crissake—”

“Carol, calm down.” Tim interrupted her hysteria. “Alphonso wants to know if his eyes are open or closed?”

Carol looked again.

“Closed,” she answered.

Carol heard muffled talking and then Tim was back.

“Yeah, Alphonso says that’s normal; he’s in the coma now. See, Jessie’s a diabetic and Alphonso says that he’s in the diabetic coma now. What’s that, Alphonso? Hold on, Carol, Alphonso is telling me something.”

Carol waited a minute; then Tim was back.

“He says you just have to wait for the heart to get tired. He goes into the diabetic coma and then it’s just a matter of his heart stopping. Now, look, one other thing.”

Tim wanted her to stay out of the room where Jessie was dying; even though Jessie was in a coma, he could hear everything.

Carol looked down at her husband.

“Jessie, I’m sorry, you’ll be all right.” Carol bent down and kissed his forehead; showing her continued concern, she left the room.

Downstairs, standing in the garage on the portable phone, she called Tim again. He wanted to know what she was doing. She said she was going to go back and check on him, to see if he was breathing.

“Don’t!” Tim hissed. “Every time you go back in the room and he hears a noise, the longer it will take before he dies. When he hears a noise, he will want to live longer, because he will stay with the noise.”

Without telling him, Carol defied Tim. She just didn’t think it was right that Jessie should have to die alone. Jessie was probably scared already because he didn’t know what was happening to him. For her to leave him there like that, it just wasn’t right.

Tim didn’t care. He didn’t want her going back in. But Carol did.

“It’ll be all right, Jessie,” she said, looking down at the pathetic hulk of a man. “It’ll be all right.”

She must have waited there a good half hour. At about 12:30
P.M.
, he stopped making breathing noises. She went out and phoned Tim.

“He’s probably dead,” she said.

She was going to take his pulse, to make sure.

“Don’t touch him! Just get out. Now,” Tim warned her.

As she was about to leave, she remembered Jessie had his customers’ drug stash right in the house. Taking one of the cellophane bags with a snow-white powder in it, she drove over to Tim’s in her Plymouth Sable. Tim was extremely happy to see her.

Alphonso had split, but two of Tim’s other friends had come over. He cooked up the powder Carol supplied and made it hard, into a rock. Then he distributed pieces of the rock to everybody and they all began smoking the crack, all except Carol. Tim took a couple of deep hits, savoring the high.

Carol stayed for about an hour and then went back home because she didn’t know for sure if Jessie was dead and she didn’t know what would happen if somebody came over and just, sort of, dropped in.

“When you get back, call 911,” Tim said before she left. “They’ll tell you what to do. Tell them you just got home from shoppin’. Tell them that Jessie told you to go shoppin’, so you went shoppin’. You came home and you found him on the floor and that’s when you called 911.”

Carol got back a little after two o’clock. The only change in Jessie’s position was that his elbow was now on the floor. She touched him; he was cold. She looked out the window and saw the landlord in the backyard with his son, so she ran out into the backyard and told him to come on; something’s wrong with Jessie.

The landlord and his son followed her inside and Carol called 911. The three of them tried to lay Jessie on his back.

“He’s so cold,” Carol told the operator. “I think he’s, you know, I think he’s already dead. He’s cold.”

“Well, just lay him on his back the best you can,” the operator repeated for the third, or was it the fourth, time.

Finally they were able to get Jessie, all 468 pounds of him, on his back. The operator told her to start CPR. Carol held his nose, opened his mouth, and almost threw up.

There was something really gross in his throat. She couldn’t be sure what it was, maybe some sort of puke.

Carol heard sirens. Squealing brakes. Heavy feet pounding on pavement. The cop seemed to be by her side not more than a few seconds later.

“My name’s Officer Barch,” he said.

“Carol Giles. That’s my husband,” she said, and Barch knelt down next to “a large black male lying on his back on the bedroom floor.”

Carol stopped the CPR and told the operator that the police were there. A moment later, the paramedics ran in, put their equipment down, tore Jessie’s pajama top open, and attached EKG leads. While checking the digital readout, a medic asked Carol the last time she saw him conscious.

Carol told them that the last time she’d seen Jessie alive was eleven o’clock. She had gone out shopping, and when she returned, she had found him unconscious and propped up on one elbow beside the bed.

Bending down, the paramedics checked Jessie’s vital signs, quickly noting the lack of blood pressure and heartbeat. His body was extremely cold to the touch.

Carol appeared to be in shock as Officer Barch led her out to the living room. He pulled out his notebook and pen and prepared to take notes.

“Did your husband have health problems?” Barch asked.

Quickly, Carol filled Barch in on Jessie’s poor health history.

“He had been under the care of Dr. Richard Cohen, out of POH.”

“When was the last time you saw your husband alive?”

“I left at eleven to go shopping,” Carol related, watching Barch carefully to make sure he wrote it all down as she said it. After all, what he was writing was her alibi.

“Jessie told me to go shopping,” she continued. “I had errands to do. And Jessie, he planned to watch football,” which made sense since it was a Sunday right in the middle of the football season.

Barch looked around and found an open package of crackers on the bed and a package of luncheon meat. It looked like the victim was snacking.

“Anyway, I got home at two o’clock and found him on the floor in a sitting position with his back against the bed. I called 911 and then tried to start CPR.”

On further reflection, it seemed to Carol that Jessie seemed like he was going to have a heart attack and he wanted her to leave the house. He wanted to be alone. The implication was he knew the end was near and wanted to die alone, with dignity.

A medic came out of the bedroom. He explained that Jessie had no vitals. They didn’t even try the defibrillator to shock his heart. It was clear to the paramedics that Jessie had been dead for quite a while and that any CPR at that point was absolutely useless. The guy looked down at Carol and said sympathetically, “Looks like he’s been dead for a while.”

The medic called North Oakland Medical Center and relayed Jessie’s health information to a doctor on duty, who declared Jessie officially dead.

“Was there anything out of the ordinary in your relationship recently?” Barch asked Carol, who looked him straight in the eye, like Tim advised, and answered with an unequivocal no.

Barch looked around again. There was certainly no evidence to indicate that foul play had occurred. It looked like what it was—a sick man who had succumbed to his illnesses.

Barch gathered up all Jessie’s medications to list in his report, then called the medical examiner, which was standard procedure in Michigan whenever a police officer arrived at the scene of a death. It didn’t mean an autopsy, of course.

“Nothing found to indicate that a crime was involved. Death appears to be by natural causes,” Barch wrote in his report.

Carol watched as the death professionals shared the information about Jessie’s health history and medications. An hour later, the man from the medical examiner’s arrived. He was the ME on duty. He did an examination of Jessie’s body, still on the floor where he had fallen. He announced that, coupled with what they knew about his medical conditions, Jessie had died from a heart attack.

The state released the body. Carol had to call to have the body picked up. That was a detail she hadn’t thought of, not to mention how she was going to break the news to her kids.

She looked through the phone book and found the name of a nearby funeral home, Sparks-Griffin. They said they’d be right by to pick him up.

“The best way to get rid of your pain was to get rid of your problem,” Tim had said.

It was dark by the time the guys from the funeral home arrived. They were big, strong men and were able to pick Jessie up and transfer him to a rolling table, the kind with legs that collapsed as soon as you pushed it into an ambulance. Or a hearse.

Since the house was a ranch, they didn’t have to worry about steps. If they had, they didn’t know what they would have done. They wheeled Jessie out and down the driveway to their black van. They opened the door and lifted him up; the legs collapsed and they pushed him in. With a satisfying
snap
, they closed the door and got into the cab.

Carol pulled the drapes aside and watched from an inside window. The van drove down the street. After a few seconds, it was out of view. And just like that, Jessie Giles’s life ended.

Carol picked up the phone and dialed.

“It’s done,” she said.

Carol was still concerned. What if they did an autopsy and the toxicology screen showed the heroin in his bloodstream?

In that case, all Carol had to do, Tim advised, was tell the cops that Jessie was a drug dealer. He just sampled some of his own merchandise and it was his misfortune to use a little too much. Miles away at his apartment in Pontiac, Tim hung up the phone.