A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1)

by Iden, Matthew

  The old man and I examined each other. Close up, he looked and smelled worse than he had from the door. His blue eyes were rheumy and unfocused. His face, which I remembered as being full and florid, sagged in gray folds now. The hand with the IV was heavily veined and I could see small white scars where numerous other needles had been inserted. He seemed to be enveloped by the chair, as if he were fading away into it and it would only be a matter of time before there would just be an empty robe lying there. With a shock, I remembered he was only ten years older than I was. I met his gaze and wondered what he saw from his point of view.

  "So," he said. His voice was barely more than a whisper. "Marty Singer."

  I said nothing.

  "You've caused me a lot of pain," he said.

  "Then we're even, " I said.

  "Really?" he asked. His hand pinched the lapels of his robe, then patted them down. The other hand gripped the arm of the chair, but I could see the tremor. "What the hell do you want?"

  "I need to know what's going to happen next."

  "I bet you would, Singer. You always wanted answers, but you didn't always ask so nicely."

  "I've mellowed."

  "Old age?" he said. "And cancer. That'll do it to you. Not the best way to have your clock punched, bleeding out your ass. Then again, there are worse ways to go. Take brain cancer, for instance. You forget things, you start talking funny, you can't move your arms. Then there are the headaches, the fucking headaches that make you want to kill yourself. Danny, over there, had to take my gun away, make sure I didn't self-medicate."

  I shifted in the seat. "You want me to feel sorry for you?"

  "Now, see, the old Jim Ferrin would've been in your face for that," he said. "But, you know what? I don't care. I really don't care at all."

  We sat like that for a minute. He looked off into space.

  "You shot him," he said suddenly, breaking out of his trance. "You shot my son. I told you I'd kill you for that."

  "He didn't give me much choice," I said. "And someone's got to pay for Kransky."

  "He's paid," he said. "When you gut-shot Lawrence--besides blowing that hole in him--you nicked his intestine and we all know that's bad news. It won't be long now. He might even go before me. The doctor did what he could, but the wound's septic."

  "He's in the hospital?"

  "No, he's in the east wing. My doctor swung by this morning, told me I had a few weeks to live, gave the kid a morphine drip."

  I sat, looking at him.

  "It's not worth lying about, Singer," he said. "Lawrence is dead, I'm dead, you're dead."

  "What were you going to do with him? If Taylor and Jackson hadn't screwed up?"

  "Do I have to spell it out?" Ferrin asked, leaning forward. His voice gathered strength, becoming clipped and vicious. "I was going to put him away. Forever. Lawrence is a psychopath. Normally, that wouldn't put him out of place on the force or anywhere else in this city, for that matter, but Lawrence liked to…possess people. Girls. Lock them up. Do things to them. That girl in Indiana that he took the ten year rap for. She wasn't his first, just the first one they found. I tried looking the other way, but it was going to catch up with him and, eventually, with me. I couldn't get that through to Lawrence. He was mentally incapable of understanding. Or caring."

  As he spoke, Ferrin's face tightened like the head of a drum and I saw him snatch at a small, white box by his side that had a line running up to the IV tube. He pressed the button and a few seconds later his features relaxed. Danny appeared and made a few adjustments, then returned to his spot by the door. Ferrin eased back into the chair, his breathing heavy. He cradled the morphine controller in his hand, but didn't press the button, as if holding it was comfort enough.

  "When…he was…in jail," he said, continuing. "He was under wraps. I could…control the situation. No contact, no problems. I tried to protect him. Erased his record. But when he got out, I knew he'd go berserk. It would get back to me, to my family."

  The room was quiet, the only sounds the crackling of the fire and the dying man across from me trying to catch his breath. I asked, "What started it all?"

  "You want the behind the scenes, huh?"

  I said nothing.

  Ferrin shrugged. "Wheeler...wanted the broad. Nothing more complicated than that."

  "What about Lawrence?"

  "Tagging along, night after night. When he saw the girl, he lost his mind. I didn't know anything about it until the night they shot the mother."

  "Why'd they do it?"

  "She was getting ready to press charges. Wheeler thought he was looking at jail time. Lawrence was in his own world, thought somehow that the girl would be his once the mother was out of the way. They drove over there, who knows what they planned. Idiots."

  "Then what?"

  Ferrin shook himself, sighed. He seemed tired, uninterested. "Lawrence shot her. They called me in a panic. Wheeler was a nutcase, wanted to kill the girl even though he'd already called dispatch and told them he was standing outside her goddamn house. They had that cockamamie story about the breakin, wanted to say some phantom crook shot her. The story would've fallen apart in two seconds. I told Lawrence to get himself together, plant his holdout gun on the body, and just blame it on the bitch."

  "But Wheeler took the fall," I said. "Why?"

  "I explained a couple things to him. Like how, if Lawrence was the one that got picked up for the shooting, I'd blame Wheeler for it. And doing life in lockup would look like a great option compared to what I'd do to him. That was the stick."

  "And the carrot?"

  "That I was Jim Ferrin. That I had connections. That I could make the whole thing go away if I wanted to."

  I thought about that. "Then I showed up and took the bait," I said. "I keyed in on Wheeler."

  "Why wouldn't you? Wheeler was the one always hanging around the house, trying to bang the mother, making an ass out of himself."

  "Then it went to trial and you got him off."

  He nodded.

  "I guess it was easy," I said. "You had an ace."

  "A couple of them," he said.

  "Landis?"

  "I had some dirt on him. People thought Don didn't have any ambitions, but they were wrong. He had his sights set pretty high, in fact. Wanted to be another Giuliani, but what I had would've buried him."

  "So he lost the tape?"

  Ferrin shrugged. "I didn't tell him how to do it. Just do it."

  "That's it? Don took a dive on the trial?"

  "He had some insurance. You don't need to know about it."

  I thought some more. Something didn't feel right. "Why Atwater for his attorney? You could've gotten anyone."

  Ferrin shook his head, impatient with me. "Why the hell do that? Wheeler can't afford shit and out of nowhere some big time lawyer walks in to defend him? People start following the money and my name comes up? Anyway, I didn't need to have Atwater on the payroll, it was Landis that was the problem and he was already in my back pocket. All I needed her to do was go through the motions. It was just a bonus that it was her third case ever. Landis tossed her softies and she did her part by the numbers."

  I sat there, my stomach churning. I'd put most of the story together already, but having it confirmed didn't feel as good as I thought it would. We stared at each other for another minute, then he said, "There it is, Singer. You have it all. Now, what are you going to do with it?'

  I blew out a breath and raised my eyes to the coffered ceiling. It was mahogany or some other dark wood, paneled and carved like a Renaissance parlor. It gave a certain monotonous order to the ceiling, like a chessboard above our heads.

  "What I want," I said, "is to hand all this over to a friend in Homicide and let him go to town on you and your son. I'd be doing myself, the force, and the world a huge favor."

  Ferrin said nothing.

  "But what I need," I said, bringing my gaze down to stare at him, "is to keep Amanda Lane safe. Safe from Lawrence, safe from you.
You have no reason to go after her. She doesn't know this side of the story, doesn't know who you are, doesn't know the MPDC like I do."

  "What else?"

  "I need to make sure Lawrence is dead."

  Ferrin shook his head. "You can kill him, Singer, but I'm not going to let you gloat over his body."

  "I don't want to gloat, goddamn it," I said, "I want to make sure he can't hurt anybody else."

  "He won't," Ferrin said. "He'll be dead in a week. And I don't give a shit about you, Singer. Or the girl. Not if you keep your mouth shut."

  "That's it? I take your word for it that Lawrence isn't a threat and you're not coming after me or the girl?"

  "And I believe you when you say you're going to keep this whole thing to yourself and let me and my son die in peace."

  I ran my good hand along a ridge in the big, wooden chair. "That's flimsy as hell."

  "I'm sure we've both taken precautions," he said and nailed me with those eyes. "I know I have."

  There wasn't much to say after that. I stood. I didn't want to shake his hand, but it seemed like something I had to do to close the deal. I could feel Danny's eyes on me from the door. Ferrin hesitated, then extended his hand. The skin was cool and smooth, the bones like straws, the knuckles knobby and prominent. We shook.

  He looked up at me. "I was a good cop once."

  I didn't say anything. I wanted to wipe my hand on my shirt. I walked across the parquet floor, feeling Ferrin's eyes on me the whole way. Danny opened the door and I slid past, trying to fit both my body and the prop through the door. My shoulder was hurting and I needed one of those Demerol badly, but I wanted to be safely back at home before I altered my state of consciousness. One of the suits was waiting for me in the drawing room and guided me back out of the kingpin's palace to the front steps. I breathed out as I walked down the steps and over to the taxi.

  Halfway there I couldn't take it anymore and scratched at the armpit of my broken shoulder like a dog going after its fleas. It wasn't the brace and cast that were the problem, though they were bad enough. It was the wad of medical tape holding the digital recorder that was driving me crazy.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I wouldn't call it a happy ending.

  Two days after my encounter with Jim Ferrin, the excitement was over. We sat through endless interviews with MPDC investigators, repeating our statements dozens of times. If I thought I was going to get any preferential treatment because I'd had a badge a year ago, I was wrong. Especially when I wouldn't budge about the missing link in our story, namely that there should've been a third body or at least another shooter at the scene. I hemmed and hawed and stonewalled and made a ton of cops angry at me. I told them everything up to the encounter with Ferrin, and then I clammed up. It couldn't have been more obvious that I was hiding something, but that was their problem.

  Julie spent the days back at her office trying to resuscitate her practice; there'd been no time to talk about a future, if there was one. Amanda was dealing with a new set of nightmares and coming to grips with the idea that her mother's killer was truly and forever gone. Again. As long as Jim Ferrin had been telling the truth. And some of the things that he'd said continued to bother me. I'd been picking at them like scabs since I'd walked out of that door.

  But there wasn't time to brood. I was gearing up for another round of chemo and the fears that went with it. The fact that I was still breathing was a positive sign. But planning for another tangle with the drugs was depressing. It brought the underlying reality of my life--disease--back to me in stark relief and made all the other recent events seem like circus sideshows.

  So maybe I should be grateful for the unexpected distraction of blacking out at the oncologist's office. I was told later that things were going swimmingly while Nurse Leah prepped me for some tests. Shortly afterward, I ceased to be conscious. The order of events was simple: I took a seat in the chair, I felt the antiseptic, icy cold swab on the inside of my elbow, and then I pitched headfirst into a yawning hole lined with black velvet. I think I tried to say "Not again!" as I checked out, but I ran out of time. Leave ‘em laughing. Or try to.

  . . .

  I woke up in the hospital groggy, covered in sweat, my eyes crusted shut. The titanium brace was still there, keeping my shoulder immobilized, but I was flat on my back in a hospital nightie and my mouth tasted like I'd sucked on a spoon for a week.

  Christmas wasn't over yet, that much I could tell from a single dopey glance around me. Green tinsel and glass ornaments were pinned to the wall at uneven intervals and a few candy canes had been hooked over door handles, shelf edges, and curtain rods. Out the window I could see it was dark, but the region's first snowfall was being blown at a steep angle under the sodium-tinted light of a streetlamp. I turned my head. It was dim in the room, but I could see Julie and Amanda hovering at the foot of the bed, talking to a guy in a gray suit, their heads close together as they whispered.

  "What's going on?" I tried to ask, but it sounded more like I was trying to spit out my tongue. The girls looked up and their faces brightened simultaneously. The guy glanced over with an appraising look, as though my recovery was unexpected and he wasn't sure what to make of it. Amanda propped me up in the bed and slipped a straw in my mouth that led to a cup of water. I emptied it and sagged back onto the pillow.

  "How you feeling, Marty?" Amanda asked. She had dark circles under eyes and her hair looked lank and greasy, but she smiled at me and reached for my hand.

  I said, "Like hell. What happened to me?"

  "You had an infection," Julie said.

  "An infection?" I asked. "That's it?"

  "That's what the doctor said. Quote, ‘Chemo kills a lot of blood cells that keep you safe from microscopic threats'," she said. "‘Like the kind you pick up after getting shot.'"

  "You passed out at the doctor's," Amanda said. "We didn't know what had happened until the next day."

  "What do you mean, ‘the next day'?" I said. "What day is it?"

  "The doctor's was Tuesday," Julie said. "Today is Friday."

  I took that in, then asked, "They mention when I can get out of here?"

  "They told us if your fever broke, it wouldn't be long. Probably another day or two," Julie said, then smiled. "You'll need a nurse."

  "I'll have to look into that," I said, but my eyes slid away from her face.

  The man in blue coughed and took a step closer to the bed. He was slim, with coffee-black hair and a scar over one eyebrow. He had the nervous look of a clerk pushed into a suit or a volunteer picked out of a crowd to be the hypnotist's dummy. I processed the tired face, the wrinkled suit from Marshals.

  "Mr. Singer, I'm Pete Michaels," he said.

  "Detective Michaels, I presume," I said.

  He smiled. "Yeah. I work under Detective Davidovitch. He wanted to let you know how things were going. Unofficially, of course."

  Michaels meant that Dods was involved with, if not in charge of, the shootings at the Lane house. If anyone higher up caught him fraternizing or, God help us, visiting me in the hospital, he'd be yanked off the case and probably replaced with some hard ass. If he kept his distance, he could make sure the corners were rounded, the edges smoothed. Especially if Jim Ferrin, despite our agreement, decided to throw his weight around. Of course, if it ever came to that, I had a certain recording on file if I ever needed it.

  Michaels made some sympathetic noises about my condition then let me know--obliquely--what Dods would be doing to shield me from the case. It sounded like I'd get away with skin intact, but I'd probably be dragged in for many more interviews, have to answer many more questions. I nodded. If anyone knew how the drill went, I did.

  With his message delivered, Michaels was obviously eager to leave. I told him to get out of there and give my best to Dods. He wished me well and left, promising to come back if he had more to tell me. Distant, tinny Christmas music floated in as he opened the door to leave, then stopped abruptly when it closed.

>   Julie was right behind him, saying she'd be back in a second. I looked at Amanda. She smiled, looking more weary and jaded than any twenty-four year old had a right to be. Her eyes still had that wide-eyed wariness I remember from the night of her mother's murder. She had a scar high on her cheek where Ferrin had hit her. That, and the ones inside, weren't going to go away soon. But there was also resolution and strength there.

  "How are you?" I asked.

  "I'm better," she said. "I'm still trying to get over how close it was. Real close." She was quiet, then said, "And I have to put the story back together. Again."

  "You know what really happened now."

  "Yeah," she said. "I told you, part of the way I come to terms with things is accepting what I know--or think I know--as fact. Immutable history. The be-all, end-all of the tragedy. Ferrin came along and took that away. But now I've got what I need to put the whole thing to rest. There won't be any more surprises, no more old faces from the past cropping up. You fixed it, Marty. Thank you."

  "You're welcome," I said. "For nothing. I screwed up from the start. I'd make the world's worst bodyguard."

  "Not true, and you know it," she said. She looked down. A moment passed. "I feel bad about Jim."

  "Me, too," I said. I pushed the bleakness away. No chance for reconciliation. No time to put a friendship back together. We were quiet for a minute, then I said, "What about school?"

  She made a face. "The board of directors and the president strongly encouraged me to take some time off."

  "Can you fight it?"

  "I've got the support of my department, though, and my students, so I may be able to pressure them into reinstating me. Just in time, of course, for the end of the semester and the holidays, so I won't be teaching for another couple of weeks anyway."