by Alex Dolan
My jaw sawed on its hinges before I responded. “What is it?”
“What if I told you all you had to do was see another client?”
Suddenly he was calling them clients instead of victims. “Who?”
“There’s a woman. Her name is Helena.” His face tightened into a triangle. I couldn’t identify the emotion, but it shooed away his jolliness. “She has an advanced stage of pancreatic cancer, and she’s also diabetic. Only a few months left. She’s toyed with suicide, but she can’t work up to it. All the ways you can kill yourself, there’s still no real dignified way to go. I think that’s what she wants—some dignity.”
This I understood. “There’s always the helium tank method. You could be with her.”
“I can’t be with her. I’m a cop.”
I found it hard to suspend my skepticism since Leland had fooled me once already. “That’s what this is about?”
“You said it yourself. It’s mercy.”
“You don’t think it’s mercy.”
“But she does.” Leland retrieved his laptop from the floor and scooted to the bedside. Sitting right next to me, I could feel warmth from his body. Overnight on Leland smelled horsey, but at least he didn’t reek of FlyNap. “I’ll show you.”
My arms tensed against the cuffs, but I didn’t move.
He rested the computer on my stomach, apparently unconcerned that I might buck it off.
A video window popped up and played.
On the screen, an obese black woman with the face of a Shar-Pei sat in a pink hospital gown. The woman wept violently. She rocked rhythmically, trying to face the lens head on but having difficulty. Her bulk creaked the joints of her folding chair. The microphone distorted her weeping into a tinny trumpet. She might have been Leland’s age. The camera caught her with a murky frog eye, rendering her slightly grainy but clear enough to see dark dots of pigment around her eyes from various chalazia, consistent with diabetes.
None of my video good-byes had felt like this. Sure, some of my clients cried. But this woman sounded ashamed. Having just bawled shamefully in front of the detective, I knew what this kind of shame sounded like. She couldn’t get a hold of herself. If I’d been filming this, I’d have stopped the camera to give her some air.
The woman moaned to the camera, “I want to die,” but that’s all she could get out. Seconds later the video ended.
“Sometimes she forgets who she is. Who I am. She doesn’t remember why she’s in pain sometimes, and if I’m there, she thinks I did something to her. Like I’m torturing her.”
It was such a weird thing to hear from this man with my hands still in cuffs.
I listened, but all this felt wrong. Kali would never consider a client under duress. I wasn’t thinking about the woman’s needs. For a typical client, I needed to speak to them personally. But I considered Leland’s trade for the selfish reason that I wanted to get free of him. A manhole opened a passage out of the sewage, and I monkeyed up the ladder. So Kali pretended to be attentive when all I gave a poop about was my freedom.
“I have medical records,” he assured me. I nodded, even though I would have accepted his trade without them. His face loomed so close to mine. His eyes boldly earnest, he pleaded with me, even though he had stolen my will to resist. “She’s suffering.”
This I believed. There was no disguising that woman’s genuine suffering on the video. Without a doctor, I couldn’t be sure what kind of suffering she was enduring. Whatever the woman had, she seemed to be going through something awful. But what most compelled me was how badly Leland wanted my help.
“Who is she?”
“My sister.”
Chapter 4
Leland had planned my encounter with his sister before we met. As her health deteriorated, he plotted out how to find me and coerce me into granting his sister a merciful death. She only had a few months left now, maybe a few weeks.
After he uncuffed me, we reviewed a printed agenda on how I should tend to Helena Mumm—prepared lines to say if she got delusional, emergency phone numbers in case it all went kabluey, that kind of thing. We role-played at the ranch house in Clayton, me as Kali and Leland Mumm as his sister, while I gobbled PB&Js and ibuprofen for the dehydration headache. The polymer pistol in his armpit reminded me I couldn’t act up.
He led me to my rental car. Both a courtesy and an indignity, Leland placed a towel on the passenger seat so my pee didn’t soak into the fabric. He slid back the seat to make room for his long legs. Then we drove back to my apartment for a change of clothes and supplies. I didn’t want to bring him home, but he already had my address, and I had no choice.
There wasn’t much to my apartment in Bernal. A top-story flat in a two-floor salmon stucco box, my bed lounged by the windows. The one thing the place had going for it was the peekaboo view of Bernal Hill. If I craned my neck, I could see the round green lump rise out of the city thatch work like a blister.
A baby grand piano proudly hogged most of my living room. This had been passed down to me from my dad. My stepfather, Gordon Ostrowski, had wanted to sell it off or junk it, but my mom placated him by sticking it in storage, which is the only reason it was still intact. The instrument was horribly out of tune, but I didn’t really play it. I treated it like a valet stand. But I loved it. I kept the shades up, even at night, because I liked seeing sunlight and street lights cascade off the black lacquer. Admiring the piano from the bed, I reconstructed memories of my father playing back when I was dazzled by the gong of felt hammers hitting the wire.
“I thought you had money,” Leland remarked.
“Did you expect a champagne pyramid?”
“I expected more than a phone booth.”
I really didn’t want Leland Mumm near my stuff. Other than the few hours I’d lost in Clayton, I hadn’t slept. I didn’t feel rested. On my best day I wouldn’t have welcomed an armed stranger into my apartment, but today I was edgier than usual, and I felt downright twitchy with him in there.
Leland made himself at home, beelining to the piano. Two urns sat on top of the lacquer, one brass and the other wood. He guessed, “Mom and Dad, right?”
I didn’t correct him. When he lifted the lid on the brass urn—my father’s—I said something, just to interrupt him as he peeked inside. “I can’t trust myself with ceramics.” Leland smiled and secured the lid back over my dad’s dust.
He found the ziplocked bags of ash from inside his suit jacket and laid them beside one of the urns. “These belong to you.” This show of kindness should have comforted me, but I felt more agitated that he was so close to my parents’ cremains.
He sat down at the piano and plunked. His fingers on my dad’s keys felt like catching a stranger reading my diary. Everything was manipulation with Leland. By invading my home, he must have known that he was spurring me on to help him that much faster, so I could push him back out of my life. He didn’t want to give me any time to get cold feet.
Leland fingered the whites while I went to shower. “Keep the door open,” he instructed. I tried not to let this creep me out.
“Do you play?” I asked.
“Not a lick.”
This didn’t stop him from pecking out a few chimes while I rinsed off. The tuning made the piano sound like an antique toy. Leland’s playing didn’t help. At least his plunks told me how far he was from the shower stall, just like a cat with a bell collar.
When I passed back through the room in a towel, he barely looked. “Don’t worry about getting dolled up. Just wear normal stuff. Helena will flip out if you look like you just stepped out of a Broadway musical.”
“Your wish is my command.” I pulled some clothes from my closet and retreated to the bathroom.
As much as my wrists stung back in Clayton, the soap made it worse. The skin around my left wrist had inflated, soft as a marshmallow. Where the metal had sliced through the skin, I dabbed rubbing alcohol and wrapped gauze from my medical kit. If a cop weren’t in my living room, I
might have shrieked.
Dry underwear never felt so good. While I slipped them on under my towel, Leland crossed the room and gawked at my bookshelves. Without a divider to duck behind, I was grateful he kept his back to me. “Lots of textbooks.”
“I like to study.”
“Ever think about medical school?”
This felt like he was taunting me with hopes of a limitless future. In fact, I had considered medical school. But I answered, “I think about a lot of things.”
He lost interest in the books and combed over my wall photos. “This your dad?”
Hopping around on bare feet as I slid on corduroy pants, I was concentrating on minimizing the exposure of bare skin. I dropped my towel for a flash and wriggled into a knit top before he could catch a glimpse of nipple. Long sleeves covered the gauze. After the regular clothes, I added a second layer of loose-fitting scrubs while he stared at my father’s photograph, close enough to steam the glass.
“He’s a good-looking guy. Tall like you, too.”
In the photo I was six years old, sitting on my father’s lap. An orchestra surrounded us, brass viscera everywhere. It had been taken while he was recording a score for a blockbuster alien movie. My dad dressed like he was clamming at the beach, boat shoes with no socks, and a light cotton sweater. My smile jagged all over because of the baby teeth worming through my gums, and I was too lost in awe of my dad and the musicians to face the camera.
Leland remarked, “You were a cute kid.” The way he said it implied, what happened? “Who are the boys?” He’d moved on to another photo, a shot of me with a group from the firehouse.
“Firemen.”
“Good-looking guys. I guess firemen usually are. Any of these your boyfriend?”
“No.” In truth, I’d dated two of them briefly. Mistakes, both times.
“So, none of these guys knows how you spend your off-hours?”
“Absolutely not.” I toweled my hair dry and skipped off this subject. “I’m done.”
“You’re wearing scrubs.” Leland seemed surprised.
“You wanted me to look like a nurse.”
“I didn’t think you’d own scrubs.”
“I have a whole closet full of clothing.”
“It just doesn’t seem like something Kali would wear.”
“She wears what she needs to wear. Let’s get going.”
On the drive to Helena Mumm’s house, Leland and I rehearsed the plan some more. Occasionally he made eye contact to make sure I’d digested the details: how long to wait before I administered the first dose of thiopental (so he had enough time to be somewhere else with witnesses), the lot on The Embarcadero where he’d leave the rental car, specifics on where she didn’t like to be touched—for Helena, it was anywhere around the collarbone. Despite the peanut butter sandwiches and the hot shower, my blood sugar plunged. My kingdom for a candy bar. I squeezed the gauze around my left wrist so the pain would keep me alert.
“You’ve really charted this out, haven’t you?”
“I’m a planner. I get my Christmas shopping done by Halloween.” He added, “It’s my sister. I want to make sure it’s done right. And she doesn’t have much time, so it needs to be done right and right now.”
Helena Mumm lived in the Excelsior District, not far from Bernal. Cutting through the southern half of San Francisco didn’t take long, even if we stopped every other block.
Leland said, “It’ll feel remote, like the house in Clayton. Police don’t hang around there. Or if they do, they’ll patrol it at night. You can basically come and go as you please. After everyone leaves for the morning commute, it’s a ghost town. So no nosey neighbors to worry about.”
He was right. When we crossed into the neighborhood, ours was the only moving vehicle on the street.
“Since when are you so concerned about my safety?”
“Since it could be traced back to me.”
Even though we’d covered each triviality, I asked out of habit, “You sure you don’t want to be with her?” Families went both ways. Some wanted to say their good-byes but didn’t want to watch their loved one expire. Out of loyalty, others wanted to stay until the last breath.
“I’m a cop. I can’t be part of this. If someone thinks I’ve helped kill my own sister, that’s the end of my career.” He omitted the threat of jail time. Maybe he thought a detective would be impervious to imprisonment.
“So, you’re going to drop me off and drive. What makes you think I won’t just run?” Leland was putting a lot of faith in me by leaving me alone with his sister. I wondered if everything I’d endured back in Clayton was his way of ensuring that he could trust in my compliance.
Leland said, “Anywhere you go, unless it’s the Marianas Trench, I can find you. And you won’t like what happens when I do.” He continued, “You understand that I’d find you again, right?”
“You seem sure of it.”
“I’m very good at my job.”
I tried to add some levity. “Would you smother yourself in FlyNap next time?”
Leland eased the car to a standstill. He took his eyes off the road so we could lock pupils. “Next time, I won’t detain you. From here on out, you would link me to a crime. If I arrested you, I’d open myself up to legal action, definite disgrace, and possible prison. So if there’s a next time, I will kill you.” To make sure I took this in, he asked, “Do you understand what I just said?”
I nodded, but this took the wind out of me, so I didn’t immediately say anything. I shrank in my seat. To protect myself, I asked, “Won’t I be a liability if I tend to your sister?”
“No. Then we’d be equally culpable for the same crime. We’d be bonded together by mutually assured destruction. You couldn’t touch me without hurting yourself. We’d have reached a détente.” He shifted back into drive, and we rolled on. I caught myself holding my breath.
I hadn’t spent much time in the Excelsior, a forgotten neighborhood. When people thought of San Francisco, they didn’t think of these hideaway enclaves, where the paint peeled and the wood moldered in the salty fog.
According to the GPS, we were almost there. I started to imagine Helena. This would be the first time I’d complete a terminus with a client I’d never met. I thumbed through her medical records in the car. They seemed legit, but then again so did Leland’s X-Rays.
“Your sister knows I’m coming,” I confirmed.
“She knows. We’ve discussed it in the same detail as I have with you. Once the doctors gave her the final prognosis, she planned it out with me. But she won’t remember everything. That’s the trick. She was lucid when we made that video, but she goes in and out.”
“So she may not remember she’s expecting me.”
“That’s correct. She’ll expect a nurse though. Even if she forgets the rest of the plan, she’ll remember that a nurse pays her a regular visit.” He repeated what he told me earlier, “She gets a weekly house call so she won’t forget to keep up her regimen. It makes it easy for you, because she’ll be expecting an injection anyway.”
“And I won’t overlap with her real nurse.”
“I called her regular nurse and canceled for today.”
“You can do that?”
“I should be able to. I’m paying for it.”
Helena lived on Urbano Drive, which looped in a giant ellipse. Some of the guys I rode with in the department were amateur history buffs, and one of them told me Urbano Drive used to be the Ingleside Racetrack. When the track turned into residential housing, people raced their cars until the city installed street humps and roundabouts. Now the street was a stretch of road no one really wanted to live on and no one really wanted to develop. The homes were rashly constructed white stucco buildings, what my dad would have called gingerbread houses.
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.”
