Tell No One (28 page)

Fein glared some more. “I’m listening.”

“You’ve done one thing smart in all this. Just one, but maybe it’s enough. You’ve kept your mug away
from the media. That’s because, I imagine, it would be a tad embarrassing trying to explain how this doctor escaped your dragnet. But that’s good. Everything that has been reported can be blamed on anonymous leaks. So here’s what you do, Lance. You call a press conference. You tell them that the leaks are false, that Dr. Beck is being sought as a material witness, nothing more than that. You do not suspect him in this crime—in fact, you’re certain he didn’t commit it—but you learned that he was one of the last people to see the victim alive and wanted to speak with him.”

“That’ll never fly.”

“Oh it’ll fly. Maybe not straight and true, but it’ll stay aloft. The key will be me, Lance. I owe you one because my boy ran. So I, the enemy of the D.A.’s office, will back you up. I’ll tell the media how you cooperated with us, how you made sure that my client’s rights were not abused, that Dr. Beck and I wholeheartedly support your investigation and look forward to working with you.”

Fein kept still.

“It’s like I said before, Lance. I can spin for you or I can spin against you.”

“And in return?”

“You drop all these silly assault and resisting charges.”

“No way.”

Hester motioned him toward the door. “See you in the funny pages.”

Fein’s shoulders slumped ever so slightly. His voice, when he spoke, was soft. “If we agree,” he said, “your boy will cooperate? He’ll answer all my questions?”

“Please, Lance, don’t try to pretend you’re in any condition to negotiate. I’ve laid out the deal. Take it—or
take your chances with the press. Your choice. The clock is ticking.” She bounced her index finger back and forth and made a tick-tock sound.

Fein looked at Dimonte. Dimonte chewed his toothpick some more. Krinsky got off the phone and nodded at Fein. Fein in turn nodded at Hester. “So how do we handle this?”

I
woke up and lifted my head and almost screamed. My muscles were two steps beyond stiff and sore; I ached in parts of my body I didn’t know I had. I tried to swing my legs out of bed. Swing was a bad idea. A very bad idea. Slow. That was the ticket this morning.

My legs hurt most, reminding me that despite my quasi-marathon of yesterday, I was pathetically out of shape. I tried to roll over. The tender spots where the Asian guy had attacked felt as though I’d ripped sutures. My body longed for a couple of Percodans, but I knew that they would put me on Queer Street, and that’s not where I wanted to be right now.

I checked my watch. Six
A.M.
It was time for me to call Hester back. She picked up on the first ring.

“It worked,” she said. “You’re free.”

I felt only mild relief.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

A hell of a question. “I’m not sure.”

“Hold on a sec.” I heard another voice in the background. “Shauna wants to talk to you.”

There was a fumbling sound as the phone changed hands, and then Shauna said, “We need to talk.”

Shauna, never one for idle pleasantries or subtleties, still sounded uncharacteristically strained and maybe even—hard to imagine—scared. My heart started doing a little giddyap.

“What is it?”

“This isn’t for the phone,” she said.

“I can be at your place in an hour.”

“I haven’t told Linda about, uh, you know.”

“Maybe it’s time to,” I said.

“Yeah, okay.” Then she added with surprising tenderness, “Love you, Beck.”

“Love you too.”

I half crouched, half crawled toward the shower. Furniture helped support my stiff-legged stumble and keep me upright. I stayed under the spray until the hot water ran out. It helped ease the soreness, but not a lot.

Tyrese found me a purple velour sweat suit from the Eighties Al Sharpton collection. I almost asked for a big gold medallion.

“Where you gonna go?” he asked me.

“To my sister’s for now.”

“And then?”

“To work, I guess.”

Tyrese shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

“You up against some bad dudes, Doc.”

“Yeah, I kinda put that together.”

“Bruce Lee ain’t gonna let this slide.”

I thought about that. He was right. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t just go home and wait for Elizabeth to make contact again. In the first place, I’d had enough with the passive; gentle repose simply was not on the Beck agenda anymore. But equally important, the men in that van were not about to forget the matter and let me go merrily on my way.

“I watch your back, Doc. Brutus too. Till this is over.”

I was about to say something brave like “I can’t ask you to do that” or “You have your own life to lead,” but when you thought about it, they could either do this or deal drugs. Tyrese wanted to help—perhaps even needed to help—and let’s face it, I needed him. I could warn him off, remind him of the danger, but he understood these particular perils far better than I did. So in the end, I just accepted with a nod.

Carlson got the call from the National Tracing Center earlier than he expected.

“We were able to run it already,” Donna said.

“How?”

“Heard of IBIS?”

“Yeah, a little.” He knew that IBIS stood for Integrated Ballistic Identification System, a new computer program that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms used to store bullet and shell casings. Part of the ATF’s new Ceasefire program.

“We don’t even need the original bullet anymore,” she went on. “They just had to send us the scanned images. We can digitize and match them right on the screen.”

“And?”

“You were right, Nick,” she said. “It’s a match.”

Carlson disconnected and placed another call. When the man on the other end picked up, he asked, “Where’s Dr. Beck?”

B
rutus hooked up with us on the sidewalk. I said, “Good morning.” He said nothing. I still hadn’t heard the man speak. I slid into the backseat. Tyrese sat next to me and grinned. Last night he had killed a man. True, he had done so in defense of my life, but from his casual demeanor, I wasn’t even sure he remembered pulling the trigger. I more than anyone should understand what he was going through, but I didn’t. I’m not big on moral absolutes. I see the grays. I make the calls. Elizabeth had a clearer view of her moral compass. She would be horrified that a life had been lost. It wouldn’t have mattered to her that the man was trying to kidnap, torture, and probably kill me. Or maybe it would. I don’t really know anymore. The hard truth is, I didn’t know everything about her. And she certainly didn’t know everything about me.

My medical training insists that I never make that
sort of moral call. It’s a simple rule of triage: The most seriously injured gets treated first. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they’ve done. You treat the most grievously wounded. That’s a nice theory, and I understand the need for such thinking. But if, say, my nephew Mark were rushed in with a stab wound and some serial pedophile who stabbed him came in at the same time with a life-threatening bullet in the brain, well, come on. You make the call, and in your heart of hearts, you know that the call is an easy one.

You might argue that I’m nesting myself on an awfully slippery slope. I would agree with you, though I might counter that most of life is lived out there. The problem was, there were repercussions when you lived in the grays—not just theoretical ones that taint your soul, but the brick-and-mortar ones, the unforeseeable destruction that such choices leave behind. I wondered what would have happened if I had told the truth right from the get-go. And it scared the hell out of me.

“Kinda quiet, Doc.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Brutus dropped me off in front of Linda and Shauna’s apartment on Riverside Drive.

“We’ll be around the corner,” Tyrese said. “You need anything, you know my number.”

“Right.”

“You got the Glock?”

“Yes.”

Tyrese put a hand on my shoulder. “Them or you, Doc,” he said. “Just keep pulling the trigger.”

No grays there.

I stepped out of the car. Mothers and nannies ambled by, pushing complicated baby strollers that fold and shift and rock and play songs and lean back and lean
forward and hold more than one kid, plus an assortment of diapers, wipes, Gerber snacks, juice boxes (for the older sibling), change of clothing, bottles, even car first-aid kits. I knew all this from my own practice (being on Medicaid did not preclude one from affording the high-end Peg Perego strollers), and I found this spectacle of bland normalcy cohabiting in the same realm as my recent ordeal to be something of an elixir.

I turned back toward the building. Linda and Shauna were already running toward me. Linda got there first. She wrapped her arms around me. I hugged her back. It felt nice.

“You’re okay?” Linda said.

“I’m fine,” I said.

My assurances did not stop Linda from repeating the question several more times in several different ways. Shauna stopped a few feet away. I caught her eye over my sister’s shoulder. Shauna wiped tears from her eyes. I smiled at her.

We continued the hugs and kisses through the elevator ride. Shauna was less effusive than usual, staying a bit out of the mix. An outsider might claim that this made sense, that Shauna was giving the sister and brother some space during this tender reunion. That outsider wouldn’t know Shauna from Cher. Shauna was wonderfully consistent. She was prickly, demanding, funny, bighearted, and loyal beyond all reason. She never put on masks or pretenses. If your thesaurus had an antonym section and you looked up the phrase “shrinking violet,” her lush image would stare back at you. Shauna lived life in your face. She wouldn’t take a step back if smacked across the mouth with a lead pipe.

Something inside me started to tingle.

When we reached the apartment, Linda and
Shauna exchanged a glance. Linda’s arm slipped off me. “Shauna wants to talk to you alone first,” she said. “I’ll be in the kitchen. You want a sandwich?”

“Thanks,” I said.

Linda kissed me and gave me one more squeeze, as though making sure I was still there and of substance. She hurried out of the room. I looked over at Shauna. She kept her distance. I put out my hands in a “Well?” gesture.

“Why did you run?” Shauna asked.

“I got another email,” I said.

“At that Bigfoot account?”

“Yes.”

“Why did it come in so late?”

“She was using code,” I said. “It just took me time to figure it out.”

“What kind of code?”

I explained about the Bat Lady and the Teenage Sex Poodles.

When I finished, she said, “That’s why you were using the computer at Kinko’s? You figured it out during your walk with Chloe?”

“Yes.”

“What did the email say exactly?”

I couldn’t figure out why Shauna was asking all these questions. On top of what I’ve already said, Shauna was strictly a big-picture person. Details were not her forte; they just muddied and confused. “She wanted me to meet her at Washington Square Park at five yesterday,” I said. “She warned me that I’d be followed. And then she told me that no matter what, she loved me.”

“And that’s why you ran?” she asked. “So you wouldn’t miss the meeting?”

I nodded. “Hester said I wouldn’t get bail until midnight at the earliest.”

“Did you get to the park in time?”

“Yes.”

Shauna took a step closer to me. “And?”

“She never showed.”

“And yet you’re still convinced that Elizabeth sent you that email?”

“There’s no other explanation,” I said.

She smiled when I said that.

“What?” I asked.

“You remember my friend Wendy Petino?”

“Fellow model,” I said. “Flaky as a Greek pastry.”

Shauna smiled at the description. “She took me to dinner once with her”—she made quote marks with her fingers—“spiritual guru. She claimed that he could read minds and tell the future and all that. He was helping her communicate with her dead mother. Wendy’s mother had committed suicide when she was six.”

I let her go on, not interrupting with the obvious “what’s the point?” Shauna was taking her time here, but I knew that she’d get to it eventually.

“So we finish dinner. The waiter serves us coffee. Wendy’s guru—he had some name like Omay—he’s staring at me with these bright, inquisitive eyes, you know the type, and he hands me the bit about how he senses—that’s how he says it, senses—that maybe I’m a skeptic and that I should speak my mind. You know me. I tell him he’s full of shit and I’m tired of him stealing my friend’s money. Omay doesn’t get angry, of course, which really pisses me off. Anyway, he hands me a little card and tells me to write anything I want on it—something significant about my life, a date, a lover’s initials, whatever I wanted. I check the card. It looks like a normal white card, but I still ask if I can use one of my own. He tells me to suit myself. I take out a business card and flip it over. He hands
me a pen, but again I decide to use my own—in case it’s a trick pen or something, what do I know, right? He has no problem with that either. So I write down your name. Just Beck. He takes the card. I’m watching his hand for a switch or whatever, but he just passes the card to Wendy. He tells her to hold it. He grabs my hand. He closes his eyes and starts shaking like he’s having a seizure and I swear I feel something course through me. Then Omay opens his eyes and says, ‘Who’s Beck?’ ”

She sat down on the couch. I did likewise.

“Now, I know people have good sleight of hand and all that, but I was there. I watched him up close. And I almost bought it. Omay had special abilities. Like you said, there was no other explanation. Wendy sat there with this satisfied smile plastered on her face. I couldn’t figure it out.”

“He did research on you,” I said. “He knew about our friendship.”

“No offense, but wouldn’t he guess I’d put my own son’s name or maybe Linda’s? How would he know I’d pick you?”

She had a point. “So you’re a believer now?”

“Almost, Beck. I said I almost bought it. Ol’ Omay was right. I’m a skeptic. Maybe it all pointed to him being psychic, except I knew he wasn’t. Because there are no such things as psychics—just like there are no such things as ghosts.” She stopped. Not exactly subtle, my dear Shauna.