The Euthanist (9 page)

We stopped along the curb and Leland pointed to a building. His sister’s house shared a similar anonymity as the ranch house in Clayton, which made me doubt whether any of this was on the level.

“Your sister’s in there?”

“She’ll be in the living room. She doesn’t use the bed much anymore.” Leland lost his sense of play. He turned somber, almost fearful.

I wanted to clarify about her condition, so I asked, “How delusional is she?”

“She forgets who I am. She forgets where she is. She might ask about a guy named Walter. I think he was some crush she had as a teenager.”

“Was she ever married?”

“She has an ex-husband. It didn’t end well, and now she doesn’t even remember the guy. They didn’t have kids.”

I tried to think about what I would say to her. Because Leland didn’t allow me to wear a more theatrical costume, I looked more like myself. And that meant I felt more unsure of what role I should play. My job flowed so much easier in disguise.

“Does she have guns?”

Leland snorted, “No. Why?”

“I don’t want to be shot as an intruder.”

“Pretty white girls don’t get shot.”

“They do when people with guns are delusional and a stranger comes into their homes.”

“She doesn’t own a gun.” He pointed to the glove compartment. “And you’ll be using what’s in there.”

We hadn’t discussed this. Inside the glove compartment, a black leather case snuggled against his electronic toll sensor. Flat and long, the right size for a necklace, it revealed a preloaded hypodermic needle.

“What is this?”‘ The syringe was much larger than mine. A cook could baste meats with it. “Are we dueling with needles?”

“Do I honestly have to explain it?”

“We covered every inkling, and you never mentioned this.”

He said, “It slipped my mind. Sometimes the most obvious things do.”

“I have my own tools. And I don’t know what’s in this.”

“First of all, your syringe is broken. We crushed it when we scuffled.”

“I remembered. I packed extra supplies.” I raised my satchel, restuffed and fully packed with my usual gear.

“You’ll use this needle and only this needle. My sister’s a big woman. I needed to size the dose appropriately. Did you ever hear about Tookie Williams?”

The name was vaguely familiar, but I didn’t want to entertain this strand of conversation. “He was a gang leader. Who gives a crap?”

“He cofounded the Crips. But for the purposes of this story, he was a bodybuilder on death row. Big guy—used to lift down at Venice Beach. When it came time for him to get the needle, they screwed up the dose, because they didn’t account for his size. The nurse botched it a few different ways, actually. He woke up in the middle and died in agony. I don’t want that happening to my sister.”

“You don’t think I would have considered that?”

“I’ve had more time to consider it. That’s the right dose.”

“What’s in here?”

He frowned to tell me it was none of my business. “Saline solution.” When I registered that he was being a wise-ass, he said, “It’s sodium thiopental, same as you use. The same thing you gave Maxine Jook. And Burton Ott. And Carlotta Vieira. I could go on.” He’d done his research—all three had been clients. “I consulted my own experts to assess the proper dosage.”

“You mean the illusory Dr. Jocelyn Thibeault?” I quipped.

“The San Sebastián execution team. They know their thiopental.” If he meant the prison, the team had been called incompetent for botching a number of executions in the same way he’d described the last moments of Tookie Williams. “You only need one large dose of this. You don’t need two needles. The dose you have here could put a lion to sleep.”

“I have a system. Two doses. My doses. That’s how you do it right.”

“This needle and this needle only. You’ll leave your other equipment in the car with me, so I know you won’t use it.”

Crafty SOB. This was the most important aspect of the process, and we had ample time to talk it through. He’d skirted the issue and led me to his sister’s door, because he knew if he got me this far I wouldn’t balk. Captive or not, I would have raised a one-woman riot if he’d sprung a syringe swap on me earlier.

He tried to soothe me. “It’s not just the dosage I’m worried about. I told you she forgets things. She forgets a lot of things. But she knows she gets a visit from the nurse. She expects it. A nurse comes each week and gives her one single injection, from a needle just like this one. Helena will expect that single injection. I don’t want to deviate from that pattern. I want her last moments to be peaceful. She sees a second needle and she’ll react. Badly. She might become violent. Don’t let her roundness fool you—she’s strong, like me. She can be mean if she wants. I don’t want that to happen with my sister, nor do you want that happening to you.”

“She forgets who you are, but she’ll remember what the needle looks like?”

“The mind’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”

My stomach churned. I couldn’t fathom why he would insist on his own needle, but by now Leland had convinced me that I would be leash-led to freedom. I was too tired to argue on a point like this. What needle and the specific drug and dosage used to end his sister’s pain were minor decisions compared to my decision to collude.

The engine murmured as we hovered at the curb. Not a head slipped into a surrounding window to inspect us.

“What happens afterward?” We’d covered this, but I needed to hear it again. It was my version of checking the mail drop twice to make sure the envelope slid down the postal chute.

He fumed out his nose before repeating himself. “You walk out of the house and pick up your car—no taxis. You walk all the way to the parking spot and pick up your rental car. Burn the clothes.”

“And you and me?”

“We never see each other again.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Why would I want to see you? It puts me at risk to be in contact with you. You move on, and I move on, and we both know we were silent partners. You’ll have helped give my sister some peace, and I’ll be grateful.”

“What happens to your case on Kali?”

“Goes cold. I can’t say whether someone else will pick up where I left off. I can’t control the rest of the police department. But I can promise that I would let the investigation dead-end.”

“What about your partner, Dr. Thibeault?”

“I can guarantee that she forgets about this. You have my word on that.”

“Do you still think I’m a killer?” I shouldn’t have taunted him when I was moments from stepping out of the car, but the thought came to me like a hiccup. Without rest, my brain operated under the governing assumption that it was drunk.

“Kali. Point of fact, you do kill people. I believe that you have deluded yourself into believing you’re helping them, but deep down you know it’s wrong. I’m willing to overlook that because your clients seem to want the services you provide. Make no mistake, if these people didn’t consent to your services, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d bring you in or put you down. And my sister’s values aren’t my own. If I were dying, I wouldn’t want you to call on me. But I’m trying to fulfill someone else’s wishes. Because of what Helena wants, I’m willing to trade favors and let you go. Doesn’t make me innocent, and it doesn’t make you innocent. We are complicit in an ill deed to help ease someone’s pain. For that, I can forgive myself and forgive you.”

I removed my own syringe and wedged it into the glove compartment, and then slipped Leland’s jewelry box into my satchel.

Chapter 5

Leland motored off in my rental car, leaving me on Helena’s driveway in my lime green scrubs. Barely used, the fabric creases poked at me through my knit top. A chill from the Pacific wind crept under both my layers and prickled my shoulders.

The doorbell ding-donged some church hymn on brass pipes. Despite his fake prayer in Clayton, Leland didn’t strike me as religious, but maybe his sister was. Helena didn’t keep her door unlocked like her brother. The chimes knelled a few more times with no answer. Eventually I stage whispered, “Helena, it’s your nurse. I’m here for our appointment.”

Leland had given me keys, but I didn’t want to use them. I imagined that mammoth of a woman behind a shotgun. Don’t ask me why. Something in the video made her seem volatile, and if violence ran in the family, she could be ready to fire that canon as soon as I entered.

When I rode the rig—sorry, the ambulance—I’d gotten weapons pulled on me. If the police were involved, the paramedics would park the ambulance in a safe area, and we only came in once the suspect was restrained and the cops had made a sweep. Still, stuff happened. Suspects struggled free and found hidden weapons. One guy waved a knife around like a conductor’s baton; another aimed a gun at the bridge of my nose. All it took was someone off kilter who felt threatened.

“Helena?” Louder now. “Helena?” I hoped she might actually have died. Suspending my compassion, I imagined a cadaverous lump in repose. I heard the faint jabber of daytime television in there. Possibly she passed on while watching her stories, death grip on the remote.
Deus ex miracle
. I’d never felt so callous toward someone I’d considered a client, but Helena Mumm wasn’t a client. She was an appendage of the man who had just treated me to an express Guantanamo sojourn.

Leland had color-coded the keys, and the purple one turned the bolt. I was supposed to drop them in the cactus on the porch when I left.

The house was filthy. A heap of unlaundered clothes stewed up musk in the entryway. The ranch house in Clayton had reeked of decay, but this smelled of human underarms and unwashed feet. To be sure, I checked for traces of staging in the foyer—price tags behind the picture frames, that sort of thing. On the entry table, I found a handwritten Post-it reminder for “knee-highs for right,” whatever that meant. Someone had spilled water on it, blurring the ink and drying the paper to the consistency of a thin potato chip. Someone lived here and rarely left.

Piles of yellowed
Time
magazines and
San Francisco Chronicles
towered as I passed down the center hallway. Like the Post-it, their pages warped and dried crinkled. Wine stains from ancient celebrations ghosted the beige wall-to-wall carpeting. If Leland had manufactured this setup, he’d done a more meticulous job than back in Clayton. A stack of mail fanned out on the table with Helena Mumm’s name printed on a few shutoff warnings from the utilities.

“Helena!”

“What?” She bleated from down the hallway. I’d probably just woke her up.

Helena Mumm reclined in a leather TV chair in a small room at the back of the house. The way the black lounger bent under her body made me think she might sleep in it. She appeared heavier than in the video. Since paramedics are in the business of hauling bodies, I got pretty good at judging what people weighed. Helena probably weighed around 280 pounds, just north of what I could squat. I’m not sure if I could have carried her out of a burning building by myself. Hard to fathom how this woman and stickman Leland came from the same DNA, but genes can get divided up in strange ways.

Her reading glasses slipped halfway down her nose, so she could alternate between the book in her lap and watching the television above the rims. The TV was set to a soap, and a blonde with ironed hair presently slapped a chesty man across the cheek. Helena wasn’t dressed for company. Her hair grew in matted seaweed tangles. A moth-ravaged T-shirt damped at the pits. Matching navy sweatpants unveiled one bare swollen foot, and a black knee-high sock stretched over the other foot and outside the pant leg. She hadn’t showered recently, but compensated by spraying floral air fresheners around the room. An invisible cloud of synthetic gardenias only added to the funk.

Her eyes were still dreamy from napping. “I thought you were the pizza delivery guy.” An open pizza box monopolized the coffee table. Were this a chart it would have told me that only 25 percent remained uneaten.

“Looks like the pizza guy was already here.”

“I thought he forgot something.” Her voice sounded richer, more buttery than Leland’s, and lacked his rasp. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m your nurse.”

“No, you’re not.” At least she knew that a nurse was supposed to visit her. That was something.

“Well, I’m not the pizza guy.”

“If you were the pizza guy I’d know why you were in my living room.” She seemed lucid, more so than I’d expected. Remembering how fragile she seemed in Leland’s computer video, I’d imagined someone more docile.

I stumbled through my practiced lie. “I’m a substitute. My name is Kali. We talked on the phone.” She looked past me at the wallpaper to try and remember. Wallpaper was a rare find, and for good reason. Customarily hideous and a bitch to scrape off, I only found it in homes left to disrepair. Helena Mumm patterned her walls with red rocking horses like a baby’s room.

Eventually Helena drifted back to me, and I saw the telltale twinkle that she was too ashamed to admit she’d forgotten. “That’s right. Thank you for coming.” She’d lost her self-certainty, and it relieved me that she showed the symptoms her brother described. I tried to feel a kinship with her, because we were both sisters of broken will. “Come closer.”