Remote Control

by Stephen White

  Alan asked, “So was Emma home tonight?”

  “Erin’s witness says not. Says she saw her leave about an hour before the shooting. Never saw Emma come back home and the old lady says she only left her post by the window to go to the bathroom and to check on someone named Arnold.”

  Alan said, “Well, we know Emma’s not at home, and she doesn’t appear to be at Ethan’s flat. I’m not sure I know where else to look. Lauren might have an idea on who else to call.”

  “Lauren needs her sleep. One thing at a time.” Cozy tapped in another number. “Listen to this; this should be good.” He pointed at his phone, which was ringing.

  “Wake up, Mitchell, it’s Cozier Maitlin. We should talk about your colleague, don’t you think?…Yes, Lauren, who else? How many members of your staff have you arrested tonight? Sure, I’ll hold on.” Turning to Alan, who was driving east on Arapahoe about a quarter of a mile behind a pair of snowplows operating in tandem, Cozy said, “You know Mitchell Crest, the chief trial deputy, don’t you? He’s moving to another phone so his wife doesn’t get homicidal. I’m glad I woke him up; I don’t know why the hell I should allow him to get any sleep tonight. I want this playing field to be somewhere close to level when the starting gun goes off tomorrow afternoon.”

  Alan wasn’t fond of “the gun going off” metaphor.

  Mitchell resumed the conversation.

  Cozy listened, then said, “Yes, you heard right, I’m co-counsel with a sharp lawyer from JeffCo, a friend of the accused…. What do you mean, Mitchell? ‘Humble’ is my middle name…. But once again, your information is accurate. She’s a bulldog, Mitch, and she won’t be cutting you any slack and she’s not going to fall for any of your tricks. You’re going to end up happy to have someone as even-tempered as me around. Listen, I assume you’re going to be wanting to move on a warrant soon and we just wanted to offer some cooperation…yes, that’s me, always accommodating to the authorities…. What makes you think I heard something? I didn’t hear anything, I just know the way you think, Mitchell; you’re the one who sounds suspicious…. What’s the deal? Basically, we help you out. We disarm the burglar alarm for you and—”

  Cozy covered the mouthpiece and said to Alan, “You have a dog?”

  Alan nodded.

  “And we’ll get their vicious watchdog…what do you mean?…I don’t know—a Doberman or a Rottweiler or something, attack-trained I think I heard Lauren say once. And we’ll agree to secure the residence in its current state if—are you still with me here, Mitchell?—if you get the police to permit us to observe the search and if you get the local constables to agree not to rip the place apart. That’s it, that’s all we want. We have nothing to hide.”

  Cozy covered the mouthpiece again and faced Alan. “The warrant’s been issued. He thinks the police may already be at your house executing the search. I don’t think he knows about the second shooting or the delays it’s causing. Well, since I want to keep him from sleeping anyway…”

  He turned his attention back to the phone. “You haven’t heard about the second shooting, then, have you, Mitchell, the one on Pearl Street, on the Mall?” Cozy listened for a moment and raised his eyebrows to Alan. He raised a gloved thumb to indicate victory. “No. I don’t know the details. Ran into it by accident, it’s right by my office, a big police response, I can tell you that…. Yes…. I assumed that might slow them down…. That would be great. If you would make those calls, Lauren’s husband and I will go right back to their house and wait for the police to show up…. I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow, Mitchell…. Of course, of course, I assumed you would want to postpone filing charges…yes, yes, we know there’ll be a special assigned. I’ll miss seeing your pretty face every day. Remember, though, I’m co-counsel here, Mitchell, I can’t make any commitments before I talk with my client and my colleague…. You know, I hadn’t thought of that: It is kind of like being married. We’ll talk tomorrow. Try and get some rest. Bye.”

  “We’re still going to my house?”

  “Yes,” answered Cozy. “I think we should. I would really like to be certain there isn’t a schematic of Emma’s neighborhood tacked up on your living room wall. That would complicate Lauren’s defense considerably.”

  Alan didn’t respond.

  “There isn’t one, is there?” After half a heartbeat, Cozy continued, “Alan, the swagger is an act. I could use some reassurance here.”

  “No, Cozy. There’s nothing I know of in the house to worry about.” But then again, Alan mused, he hadn’t known that his wife carried a gun in her purse.

  Once he turned from the recently plowed surfaces of South Boulder Road onto the country lanes of Spanish Hills, Alan had to feel his way gingerly to his home. In places, the snow was so deep that it challenged the clearance of his big 4×4.

  He half-expected to see a convention of police and sheriff vehicles already mustered along the gravel lane that separated his modest house from Adrienne’s renovated farmhouse, which was just up the hill. But the wide lane was devoid of vehicles—unless you counted the John Deere mini tractor with the snowblower attachment that Adrienne was driving to and fro with fervent resolve.

  She was dressed in an electric pink snowboarding suit, and from a distance looked like a neon rabbit making a battery commercial.

  Alan checked the clock on the dashboard of his car and shook his head. Cozy raised his voice and said, “What on earth is that?”

  “That’s Adrienne. The urologist from the ER? She’s my neighbor. She loves driving that stupid tractor, will use almost any excuse to get on it. Although the hour is a little odd, even for her.”

  “She’s plowing snow now? Couldn’t this wait until morning?”

  “By the time morning rolls around for most of the human race, Adrienne’s already in the OR.”

  “She does this routinely…in the middle of the night? One of these houses is yours, I take it? And you put up with this—racket?”

  Adrienne had already cleared a wide swath from her double garage all the way to the lane. She had also cleared space for Alan and Lauren’s two cars near their front door. For some reason Alan couldn’t determine, she was now completing a third diagonal by clearing a pedestrian-size path from Alan and Lauren’s house to the distant doors of the old tackhouse on the south side of the property, a building that had most recently been Adrienne’s recently deceased husband’s, Peter’s, woodworking studio.

  “Which house is yours?”

  “The little one.”

  “Good view up here?”

  “You can see heaven from up here, Cozy.”

  “I should hang around until morning, then. It will probably be my only opportunity for that particular vista.”

  Alan pulled to a stop in the cleared space near his front door, once again feeling some gratitude for Adrienne’s hypomania.

  She had completed the path to the old tackhouse and was heading back toward Alan and Cozy, the little headlights of the tractor dead in their eyes. Her entire outfit was frosted in tiny ice crystals. Her eyebrows were as white as spring clouds.

  No one bothered speaking until she turned off the roaring tractor engine.

  “Thanks for clearing the snow, Ren. You remember Cozier Maitlin from the hospital? Are you planning to get any sleep tonight?”

  Adrienne smiled at Cozy but her lips were so cold she wasn’t sure she could manipulate them well enough to risk speaking without embarrassing herself. She indicated to Alan with a nod that she wanted to go inside.

  Alan unlocked the door and silenced the warning on the alarm. He led Adrienne into the small kitchen.

  Cozy had been following but stopped at the doorway, removed his snowy shoes, and said, “I’m going to take a quick look around before the authorities arrive. Make certain that there are no surprises.”

  Adrienne felt the muscles in her face begin to thaw and looked to Alan for an explanation. “What did he say he was going to do? Does he need to use the john?”

  “The poli
ce are coming to do a search of the house.”

  “In the middle of the night? You’re kidding? What the hell are they looking for, a bloody glove?”

  “Cozy thinks the cops are on a fishing expedition.”

  Alan suddenly realized that he didn’t know who was watching Jonas and that his dog hadn’t greeted him when he came in. “Who’s with Jonas and where’s Emily?”

  “I took her over to my place. I have some company who’s keeping an ear out for Jonas for me, and Emily’s doing her watchdog thing at my house.”

  “Why were you clearing a trail to the studio? Was that for Emily, for tomorrow?”

  “No, I was obliterating footprints.”

  Alan thought she was joking, getting into the spirit of the felonious themes of the night.

  “I’m serious. When I got home, I discovered that we who live here on the Ponderosa have a visitor who broke into the studio to get out of the storm.”

  “Emma?”

  “Bingo.”

  “She’s all right?”

  “She’s not hurt.”

  “Thank God, where is she now?”

  “My place, asleep I hope, listening for Jonas.”

  “Does she know about Lauren, the shooting?”

  “Yes, I told her. She’s real sorry that Lauren was caught up in this.”

  “Does she have the disc back?”

  “No.”

  “Did she tell you the whole story?”

  Adrienne shrugged. “Bits and pieces. She’s not terribly effusive and she doesn’t look much like the celebrity right now.”

  “Things are a mess, huh?”

  Adrienne nodded. “She convinced me that somebody might really be looking for her, so I moved her car into my garage, got out John Deere, and obliterated her trail.”

  Despite the events of the last twenty-four hours, Alan was still having trouble believing that such precautions were necessary. He said, “Thanks, I guess,” and wondered if Adrienne had broken any laws. Emma wasn’t a suspect in anything, so her footprints and tire tracks couldn’t be considered evidence.

  Could they?

  Casey Sparrow made the offer sound as generous as possible.

  Scott Malloy tried to judge the proposal objectively, but the sheer volume of Casey Sparrow’s red hair was distracting him. He leaned back against a mobile x-ray machine and focused his attention on her eyes, trying to avoid the crimson halo.

  He said, “Let me make sure we understand each other.”

  A window across the corridor reflected his image back at him. Scott’s left eye was much more bloodshot than his right, his beard was growing in unevenly the way it did sometimes, and he was trying in vain to control a muscle twitch that had started erupting in the corner of his mouth. He thought the twitch was a sign that he might be getting a cold sore.

  Figured.

  “Fine, understanding each other sounds great,” replied Casey Sparrow. She knew she looked a lot better than he did. Hell, she thought, most of the patients upstairs in the intensive care unit probably looked a lot better than he did. She had stolen a minute in front of the mirror in Lauren’s treatment room to add some blush to her cheeks and to apply some fresh lipstick. She couldn’t have cared less how attractive she looked but she recognized the strategic advantage of making sure Scott Malloy was negotiating with someone who appeared immune to the consequences of pulling an all-nighter.

  Scott explained how he understood the arrangements Casey had proposed. “We wheel Lauren upstairs to recovery or ICU or wherever this John Doe is, she looks sideways or upside down or however she has to look at him and sees if she recognizes him. You and she go somewhere private and have a tête-à-tête about the reliability of her vision. Then maybe you tell me what she saw, and maybe you don’t.”

  “Yes. That’s my offer.”

  “I want your guarantee that I can talk with her afterward.”

  “Then we withdraw our offer.”

  He looked at his feet. “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “No.”

  “Assuming your good faith…” He paused. “I accept. Is your client awake yet?”

  “For a few minutes now, yes.”

  “What about the IV?”

  “The first course of medicine is complete. They’ve removed the tubing. She still has some ugly plug in her arm.”

  “Let’s go see John Doe then. God am I tired. How come you don’t look as tired as I feel?”

  “Clean living and good genes, Detective.”

  Malloy was so exhausted he actually looked down to see what was so damn special about her jeans.

  The smells of the hospital, the sterile antecedents of hope and despair, seemed stronger in the corridor outside the operating rooms than they had in the ER. The emergency room had begun to come alive with the stirrings of minor catastrophe but the operating rooms still husbanded their middle-of-the-night silence like a mausoleum.

  At the nurses station outside the recovery room, a scrub-suited nurse wearing brand-new cross-trainers was finishing up a twelve-hour shift.

  She raised her head at the procession of strangers entering the recovery suite and yawned, covering her mouth with her hand.

  Malloy saw her sleepy eyes and told himself he wouldn’t yawn in response. He could control that. He could. He failed. He yawned, too.

  Detective Danny Tartabull’s chin was on his chest when he heard the sounds of the approaching posse. Tartabull tried to look alert. Instead, he ended up acting like someone who had just been woken up by a phone call and was trying to pretend he’d been awake the whole time.

  Trying to mask his disdain, Scott said, “Hey, Danny, morning. Why don’t you take five? Go to the can and splash some water on your face or something. Get some coffee.”

  “Sure. Thanks, Scott. What’s up?” He rubbed his eyes with one hand, pushed his hair from his forehead with the other. His shirttail was puffing out of his trousers. Casey didn’t know Tartabull, and thought he looked like a guy auditioning for a part as a derelict.

  “I’ll fill you in later.”

  Malloy’s badge was hung over his belt. He faced the nursing station and pointed at it.

  “We need to take a look at the shooting victim. Our John Doe. Your John Doe.”

  The nurse was tall and thin and her sandy hair was cut shorter than Scott Malloy’s. She had four earrings on her left ear, none on her right. She said, “I thought this was all worked out with Dr. Hassan. He told me you promised you wouldn’t disturb his patient. Please don’t make me page him for this, not at this hour.”

  “We’re not here to talk with the guy. We’re just here to look at him. This lady in the wheelchair may be able to ID him for us.”

  The nurse manufactured a smile for Lauren. She hadn’t read the chart of the man still in recovery, but heard he had been run over in addition to being shot. She wondered if he and Lauren had been in the same traffic accident. Her instincts caused her to be skeptical of the request that was being made; she figured this was some cop trick that was going to get her in a peck of trouble with Dr. Hassan.

  “You just want to look?” The nurse’s tone conveyed the kind of overt skepticism that a sorority girl might employ to question a fraternity boy who said he only wanted a peek.

  Casey Sparrow stepped forward and held out her hand. “Hello, I’m Casey Sparrow. I’m an attorney. The police officer is telling the truth. My client,” she touched Lauren on the shoulder, “may be able to recognize your patient. As I’m sure you are aware, we need to know his identity in order to notify his family of his injuries. And I’m sure Dr. Hassan would love to learn his patient’s medical history.”

  “How many of you?” As she asked the question the nurse’s eyes focused on the uniformed officer standing five feet behind the other three.

  Before Malloy had a chance to invite himself along on the look-see, Casey replied, “Two. My client and myself. It should only take a moment.”

  “We’re going to transfer him to th
e ICU after shift change. Can’t it wait till then?”

  Scott Malloy exhaled, decided to ignore the nurse’s lame protest, pointed at the recovery room, and asked, “How many doors go in there?”

  “Two. One here, one on the other side.”

  “Would you mind showing the officer here where the door is on the other side?”

  “There’s already a cop there.”

  Malloy wondered why everybody except for Danny Tartabull insisted on arguing with him. He said, “Then how about you humor me and show him anyway?”

  The nurse made a clucking sound with her tongue and the roof of her mouth that really irritated Scott Malloy, before she marched off with a loud, “Are you coming with me?” directed to the officer in uniform.

  Scott pinned Casey Sparrow with his glare. “Two minutes, Counselor. Two minutes. Clock’s running.”

  Casey mimicked the nurse’s disdainful tongue cluck. “Are you always this charming, Detective?”

  Lauren had started to sense the rank infusion of energy she always felt along with an intravenous gram of Solu-Medrol. The first day the energy boost was invigorating. The house would get cleaned, spotlessly. Her bills would get paid; her checkbook balanced to the penny. The dog would get the longest walk of her life. On subsequent days, though, as gram was added to gram, the stimulant qualities would go into overdrive, and she would have the equivalent of a Pratt and Whitney engine powering her Cessna body. The drug would steal her sleep and sour her mood. By the end of the week, depression and anxiety would replace euphoria.

  The night’s traumas had rendered Lauren’s sable hair limp and stringy, and it fell in inelegant strands to her shoulders. She wore a hospital-issue gown and had a hospital blanket spread over her knees. She smelled of hospital soap. The area around the buffalo cap on her left wrist was stained bronze with Betadine.

  Casey pushed Lauren’s wheelchair into the recovery room. Only one bed in the big room was occupied. Casey wheeled Lauren’s chair toward it.