Practice to Deceive

by David Housewright

  “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.

  CYNTHIA GREY 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.”

  WHEN 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.

  STEPHANIE 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.

  ANNE SCALASI 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?”

  She smiled and held up three fingers.

  “But who would have motive to kill us both?” I asked. “Who is your primary suspect?”

  “Who is always our primary suspect?”

  “The spouse. Amanda Field.”

  Anne grinned. “We always kill the ones we love.”

  “She had motive to kill Levering. He was cheating on her. But why hire someone to kill me? What did I do?”

  “Gee, Taylor, I don’t know. Think maybe you might have done something to piss her off?”

  I closed my eyes, rubbed my face, refused to answer.

  “‘O what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!’”

  I tried to ignore the remark and changed the subject. “When he killed Field, Zilar picked up two hundred and eighty-seven thousand untraceable dollars. You have that kind of money, would you hang around for a couple of days to shoot someone else for ten thousand more?”

  “No,” Anne admitted.

  “He did.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Don’t you just hate conscientious hitmen?”

  TOMMY SANDS, NO relation to the singer, was tall. He had to lower his head when he walked into my hospital room to avoid bumping the top of the doorframe. And he was wide. You could play handball against him. Yet he had the softest hands I’ve ever felt. He wrapped one around each ankle, pulling my legs gently apart and pushing them in again.

  The way Tommy explained it, the bullet caused only minor damage to my quadricep muscles, the muscles that lift the leg. Most of the damage was done to my adductors, the muscles that bring the legs together—but not so much that reconstruction was necessary. After scar tissue formed on the muscle where the bullet went through, it should heal up and be as good as new. But it was going to take a while.

  “The body heals in its own time, and if the mind wants to argue, it’ll act like a pissed off auto mechanic,” Tommy said. “The body will find a few extra problems. Understand? It’ll take every day of six weeks. If you push it, it’ll take longer.”

  I didn’t want to hear that, but I took his word for it.

  We started with range-of-motion exercises. First Tommy put me in the correct anatomical position—flat on my back, arms straight out, palms up; legs straight, toes pointed—just the way da Vinci drew it. Then he slipped a folded towel under my knee and told me to bring the knee gently to my chest.

  “Not all the way,” he cautioned. “We’ll start with about seventy-five degrees. If it’s too painful, stop.”

  Next, he helped me bring my leg out to the side, about twenty degrees. He slipped a bread board underneath it to lessen resistance, but he claimed a large garbage bag would do as well. I winced at the movement.

  “Where does it hurt?” he asked.

  “Where I was shot, where do you think?” I answered.

  We worked like that for an hour.

  The next day, too.

  I wondered when he thought I would be ready for outpatient therapy.

  “Funny you should ask,” he said, taking a typed sheet from his clipboard. “I’ve prepared a schedule—the exercises you should do, when you should do them.”

  I read the list carefully. It began with straight leg raises and terminal knee extensions the first week, then graduated to adductor exercises against resistance in weeks two and three.

  “You should be walking without crutches by week four,” Tommy told me. “Maybe sooner.”

  “AM I RESPONSIBLE for this?” my father asked me.

  “What do you want me to tell you, Dad?” I replied.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “Yeah, you’re responsible. Indirectly, anyway. But no more so than any client who’s ever put me in harm’s way. I take the money, I take the risks. I’m not bitter if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “But I’m not paying you,” he reminded me.

  “Let me rephrase what I said about being bitter.”

  “I still feel responsible,” Dad confessed. “Your mom sure as hell blames me for getting her little boy shot.”

  “As well she should,” I said and smiled. It was nice of him to take the trouble to fly up and visit me. My brother and sister-in-law had neglected to make an appearance, and they lived only across town.

  “Well, at least it’s over.”

  “Not exactly,” I told him, then explained about Michael Zilar and the fact that he was probably still out there. And then there was whoever had hired ol’ Mike in the first place. You couldn’t let people get away with such things, I told him. It was bad for business.

  “What have I started?” Dad asked, sorrow in his voice. I admit I liked seeing him that way. For too long I’ve thought of him standing on a pedestal, carved from marble.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “At least come home with me.”

  “I am home.”

  “I mean to Florida, to Fort Myers.”

  “No, this is my ground. I’ll have a better chance here. I won’t see him coming in Florida.”

  “You think he’d follow you to Florida?”

  “I know nothing about the man except that he likes to finish what he starts.”

  Dad began to pace, his hands clasped behind his back, his head down.

  “Besides,” I told him as he walked back and forth at the foot of my bed, “I haven’t gotten Mrs. Gustafson’s money back yet.”

  Dad stopped at the window and looked through the blinds. “I haven’t told her about any of this,” he said.

  “No reason why you should.”

  He was silent for a few moments, then told me, “Your brother said he was sorry he couldn’t come. He was busy.”

  “Screw him,” I announced. He didn’t visit the last time I was in the hospital, either.

  Dad continued to stare out the window. After a few moments he said softly, “My sons, so different,” like he was speaking to himself. “Your brother was the best student, the best athlete—never in trouble. But he was always so needy. Always needed help and advice, always needed someone to tell him what to do. I worried about him all the time.

  “You, on the other hand, you were always in trouble for one prank or another, like putting the assistant principal’s Volkswagen on the school roof; I still don’t know how you managed that. And your grades—A’s if you cared, C’s if you didn’t, and mostly you didn’t. But you never asked for help. Not even for a ride to hockey practice or to your job at the car wash. You always took care of yourself. And that’s why I never worried about you. That’s why I n
ever had long talks with you like I did with your brother. Why I didn’t say anything when you quit college to become a cop and your mom went bananas. I figured you would be all right.

  “Even now,” he added, “your brother is safe in his big, beautiful house, with a nice job and a thick bank account and a caring wife while you’re in a hospital with a bullet hole in your leg, telling me that a paid assassin is hunting you. Yet I’m more worried about him than I am for you. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him, without adding that I’d always been jealous of the attention he showered on my brother.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, just continued to stare out my window. Finally he said, “I don’t think I ever told you how much I love you.”

  “Sure you have,” I said, although if pressed for times and dates I doubt I could supply them.

  “I do, you know,” he added, still looking out the window, a catch in his voice.

  “Let it go, Dad,” I said, interrupting him. I decided I liked him up on that pedestal after all.

  He took a deep breath and moved away from the window. “I met your girl,” he said. “Spent time with her in the cafeteria while you were getting your therapy.”

  “Cynthia? What do you think.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “She is that.”

  “Smart, tough. Very confident.”

  “That, too.”

  “She’s the kind of woman I would have been involved with—except they didn’t make them like that when I was young. At least not many.”

  “Do me a favor. Tell Mom that.”

  He looked shocked. “Are you crazy?” he asked.

  LOOKING AT FREDDIE’S large, bulky winter coat I observed that it must be pretty cold outside.

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s more like lukewarm.”

  Then he handed me a Summit Pale Ale, easily hidden in the right pocket of the coat. He took another from the left pocket.

  “This is strictly forbidden,” I reminded him, twisting the top off the bottle.

  “Yeah, I know,” Freddie said. “The nurses find out, they might throw me out of here—and you know how much I like visiting folks in hospitals.”