Practice to Deceive (18 page)

“Not what I had in mind,” I told her.

She removed the blanket and asked me to move my leg. I did. Wiggle my toes. I did. She noted my small successes on a chart. “You have good color,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Yeah.”

She set the chart down and went to a cabinet where she fixed a shot.

“What is that?”

“Morphine,” she said. “A small shot to relieve discomfort.”

“How come I have bandages on both my legs? You guys didn’t cut on the wrong leg?”

The nurse replaced my blanket. “The doctor will come by later to explain everything.”

Fine
, I told myself, closing my eyes.

I wasn’t happy about being in a hospital. Hospitals are dangerous places. Sick people stay in hospitals; sick people with contagious diseases. And people in hospitals made mistakes—oh, man, do they make mistakes—with blood and diagnoses and test results and charts that are all screwed up. I heard of a guy in Florida whose right foot was amputated when they were supposed to cut off the left. I reached under the blanket and ran my hands over the bandages on both legs. As far as I was concerned, all hospitals were made-for-TV movies just waiting to happen.

And doctors? Don’t get me started on doctors. They might appear pleasant and charming at first meeting, but give them time. I have yet to meet one who doesn’t eventually turn into an arrogant, see-all-know-all asshole. The way most doctors figure it, the MD following their names endows them with a deep knowledge on all subjects great and small, knowledge that is far superior than that possessed by us lowly, unlettered patients.

I was lying there, feeling sorry for myself, when the doctor came in. She blew in the way most doctors enter a hospital room: without knocking. She was the doctor, I was the patient; her patient, like Ogilvy was my rabbit. My privacy didn’t mean shit to her.

She said, “How are you feeling today?” but did not wait for an answer, didn’t seem to notice when I didn’t answer. Instead, she unwrapped my legs, both of them, spending most of her time with the left—the one with the bullet hole. It was swollen and discolored. I had to turn away for a moment. But she was pleased. “No bleeding,” she noted.

“Want the good news or the bad news first?” she asked me, leaving the nurse to rebandage my legs.

“The bad news.”

“You’ve been shot in the leg.”

“So I’ve been told. What’s the good news?”

“There are no permanent injuries. At least none you can’t walk away from.”

“Very good news.”

“I told you in the OR you weren’t in trouble.”

“That was you?”

“That was me.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dr. Stephanie Sampsell.”

I offered her my hand, “Pleased to meet you,” careful to avoid calling her “Doctor.” “I’m Holland Taylor.”

“Pleasure,” she said, shaking my hand. “Call me Sam.”

I decided right then and there that I wouldn’t.

When the nurse finished her task and left the room, Stephanie found a perch on the edge of my bed.

“I have a few questions,” I told her.

“I figured,” she said.

“Why do I have bandages on both legs?”

“I operated on both legs.”

“Uh-huh.”

Stephanie smiled. It was a good smile. “What happened was this,” she said. “The bullet—”

“I want the bullet,” I interrupted her.

“The police have it,” she said.

“Even better,” I replied.

“The bullet entered your upper thigh and partially transected your superficial femoral artery—that’s a major artery, by the way. You came dangerously close to bleeding to death.”

I had nothing to say to that. Instead, I said, “‘Partially transected’?”

“The bullet didn’t sever the artery. One wall, one side of the artery was torn away. To repair it, we had to cut away the damaged part of the artery and splice in an undamaged vein. Question is, where do we get six inches of undamaged vein.”

“My right leg?”

“Yep,” the doctor replied. “We took a length of saphenous vein from the inner part of your right thigh. Don’t worry about it,” she added when she saw the concerned expression on my face, “you don’t need it. The saphenous is a superficial vein; it’s usually stripped out of people with varicose veins. Anyway, we took six inches and used it to resect the artery above and below the injury. Simple.”

“What happens now?”

“Your blood pressure is a little high for me, so we’ll keep you in intensive care for a while longer, until it drops to about one-twenty over eighty. Then we’ll move you into a semiprivate room. You heal, you go home.”

“Just like that?”

“In a couple of days you’ll lose the IV, and we’ll put you on pain pills. By then you should be ready for therapy—leg lifts, exercises. You should be out of here in a week and walking normally in four more.”

“Good news again.”

Stephanie smiled some more. “That’s why I get to use MD behind my name.”

Yeah, right.

She went to the door, promising to look in on me from time to time. Before she left, I told her, “Next time you enter my room, knock first.”

Stephanie seemed genuinely surprised by my demand. The surprise lasted maybe two seconds; then it turned to indignation, her mouth twisting into an “or what?” expression. But she let it go and left the room.

C
YNTHIA
G
REY SMELLED
sweet. I took a good pull on her perfume after she kissed my mouth and laid her head on my chest. But it wasn’t a scent I could place, so I asked her, “What is that you’re wearing?”

“Calyx,” she answered. “Like it?”

“Absolutely,” I said, noting that it was not a scent found in nature.

“So, how are you doing?” I asked. It was the first chance I’d had to see Cynthia since I was shot. My blood pressure had finally met Stephanie’s criteria, and I was transferred from ICU to a semiprivate room, which turned out to be all private since the other bed went unoccupied. No cable, unfortunately, just local stations. Hell, I was better off in jail.

“I’m fine,” she said, then quickly added, “They told me you would be all right, that there wouldn’t be any permanent damage.”

“I’ll be dancing at First Avenue in a week.”

Cynthia smiled. I hated the music at First Avenue and she knew it.

She gave me a pile of magazines she had collected—
The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Inside Sports, Hockey Digest, Golf Digest
, and
Vanity Fair
, which had Nicole Kidman on the cover. I like Nicole a lot, but I put that magazine on the bottom just the same.

“Tammy is taking care of Ogilvy,” she told me. I nodded. Tammy Mandt was the little girl next door who had given me the rabbit in the first place. She’d made me a present of it after my wife and daughter were killed—“So you won’t be lonely,” Tammy had said. Then Cynthia told me, “I was so frightened. I didn’t think it was possible to be that frightened.”

“I don’t think they were shooting at you,” I said.

“I wasn’t frightened for myself,” she said, then lifted her face toward the ceiling, gently shaking her head, sighing deeply. I recognized the sigh from past encounters. It said, “What a jerk.”

“Did you see anything?” I asked.

“Saw nothing, heard nothing. You started to fall, and I didn’t know why, and then I saw the blood.”

“It looked worse than it was,” I assured her.

“No, it didn’t,” she insisted. “I tried to stop the bleeding,” she added. “I didn’t do a very good job.”

“You did fine.”

“I thought you were going to die,” she said. “I almost had a drink because I thought you were going to die and to hell with AA. Went to Gallivan’s after the paramedics took you away and had them pour me a double. But I couldn’t do it.”

“Good.”

“Want to hear why? Two reasons. First, I didn’t want to be drunk when they told me you were dead.”

“And the second?”

“I didn’t want to die with you.”

W
HEN
I
WAS
in high school, I broke my wrist playing basketball. Other than that, all my injuries have been job related. I’ve been knifed several times, shot in the back, had my head cracked open twice, lost three teeth when a perp hit me in the mouth with a hammer, and have been beaten up more times than I will ever admit. Now I’ve taken a round in my leg. Yet there I was, more or less in one piece. If I didn’t hate disco so much, I would have broken into the old Gloria Gaynor song, “I Will Survive.” I was actually pleased with myself. “Yep, survival of the fittest,” I heard myself proclaim aloud. And then I went searching through the magazines Cynthia had supplied, looking for something, anything, to occupy my mind so I would not linger on the cold hard truth: I was a lucky sonuvabitch, and one of these days my luck was going to run out.

S
TEPHANIE WAS CLEARLY
still angry. But she knocked on the door and asked permission to enter as I had requested. She examined my leg without comment, then told the nurse, “Get him up slowly. And get him a walker. I want him to keep moving, but I don’t want any weight on his leg. I’ll send Tommy down tomorrow.”

“Who’s Tommy?” I asked.

“Physical therapist.”

I nodded in agreement. It was time I was up and about.

“No restrictions on food,” she told the nurse and headed for the door.

“Hey,” I called, stopping her. “Thanks for knocking.”

She didn’t reply.

“Mr. Taylor,” the nurse said before exiting herself, “Dr. Sampsell is probably the kindest, friendliest, most generous doctor in this hospital. And you, sir, are a jerk.” And then she was gone, too, leaving me alone to ponder my prejudices.

A
NNE
S
CALASI STOOD
at the foot of my bed. “I was going to make you squirm for a while, but I think I’ll just come out and tell you,” she said.

“Tell me what?”

Anne made a production out of looking at her watch, then announced, “The bullet they took out of your leg was a thirty-two caliber. It was fired from the same gun that killed Levering Field.”

She smiled, watching me watch her. Finally, I said, “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Something else,” she added. “The Chicago cops got a line on Storey’s friend, Mike,” Anne added. “His full name is Michael Zilar. His sheet reads like the table of contents to a volume on criminal statutes: arson, assault, bookmaking, theft by credit card, drug trafficking …”

“Murder?”

“Questioned twice, released twice.”

“Mob?”

“Chicago doesn’t think he’s connected, but you never know.”

“Where is he?”

“Witnesses told Chicago PD that he left town, that he left immediately after he learned what happened to his friend.”

“He’s here,” I said.

Anne supported my supposition when she told me, “We did a search of the downtown loop after you were shot; we found a plastic two-liter pop bottle stuffed with rags, a hole in the base.”

“A bullet hole?”

“Jam a barrel of a gun into the neck, you have a homemade suppressor, good for two, maybe three shots with a small caliber. Chicago found the same kind of homemade suppressor at the scene of both murders Zilar was questioned about. That’s awfully thin, I know. You can learn how to make a suppressor watching
NYPD Blue
on TV but—”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I told her.

“Neither do I.”

Anne glanced at her watch again.

“Are you in a hurry?” I asked.

She smiled in reply, folded her arms, leaned against the wall, and waited. She was waiting for me.

“You never found the money?” I asked.

“You mean the two hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars he withdrew from his bank earlier that morning to pay you off?” Anne shook her head. I wasn’t surprised by how well informed she was. Anne Scalasi was, after all, a trained investigator. But I wondered who had told her.

“Cynthia?” I asked.

“Monica Adler,” Anne answered. “She’s scared silly. She claims she and Levering didn’t set you up at Rice Park. She claims she was there to offer you half the money Field allegedly stole—an honest offer, she said. After the assassination attempt, she said Field decided to pay it all because he thought that you thought that he tried to have you killed—which he didn’t, or so she claims.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I protested. The facts were coming a little too fast for me. I paused to catch up. Anne looked at her watch.

“If Zilar came here to shoot me, to pick up the contract where Storey left off, he’d have no reason to shoot Levering,” I said, thinking out loud.

Anne shrugged.

“If he killed Levering for the money, he’d have no reason to shoot me.”

Anne still refused to speak.

“If he came here for revenge because of what happened to his buddy Storey, he would have shot Freddie.”

Anne glanced at her watch again.

“Which means he came here for the both of us, Levering and me. The money was just a bonus Zilar lucked into.”

“If it was Zilar,” Anne cautioned.

“Yeah.”

Anne looked at her watch, said, “And it only took you four minutes and forty-one seconds to figure it out.” She smiled.

“How long did it take you?”