by Alex Dolan
“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.”
I’ve visited enough sick people that I should have felt right at home, but I was apprehensive as hell. Leland warned me she could be violent. If she was anything like her brother, she might lunge from her seat and slap me, stab me, shoot me. I checked her hands. Other than the remote control, she wasn’t holding anything. No weapons. I stepped within striking distance.
Her eyes puffed, and her lids were dotted with the pinprick moles I’d seen in the video. From the grainy footage I’d assumed they were chalazia, but I was wrong. They were milia, bumps built up by dead skin cells. They were linked to some dietary imbalances, so they wouldn’t be unusual to find on a diabetic either. Helena smelled sugary, or maybe I imagined it. The nose can smell what it wants sometimes.
She muted the TV and tugged at my scrubs. “You just get out of surgery?” Her usual nurse, if she remembered the man, probably didn’t wear these kind of OR scrubs. Helena wasn’t testing me now. She was trying to get comfortable with me, and had a gentle laugh that contrasted the brash tone she used when I first came in.
“Brain surgery,” I cracked.
“Is that right?”
“You got a drill? I can take care of you right now.” Gallows humor. It’s my favorite kind.
She remarked at my physique, accusingly. “You’re tall.”
“I get that a lot.”
“What are you, six feet?”
“Not quite. About five ten. But you add heels…”
She peeked at my shoes. “You’ve got clogs on.”
“That’s a kind of heel.”
“Look at me. When I was skinny, I was a tiny little thing. You could carry me in a change purse. I wanted to be tall like you.”
“It’s not as nice as you think it would be.”
“Says the tall person…” She shared Leland’s sharp wit. I liked it more on a person who wasn’t holding me captive. “You’ve got a cute figure.”
“Thank you.” I looked for a chair to sit and unpack my satchel.
Her attention drifted to the soap opera. “Jill had more curves, but you probably have a foot on her.” I didn’t know who she was talking about, and she nudged, “My usual nurse. You’ve met her, right?”
Leland prepared me for this. He had given the name of Helena’s regular nurse. “I know Dimitri.”
“Who the hell is that?” Either she was testing me or she forgot. I couldn’t tell.
“That’s your usual nurse.”
She laughed, “Says who?”
“The hospital, your medical records, and Dimitri.” Helena’s smile froze. She was trying to figure out if she’d forgotten. Then it came back to her, unless she was just faking recall for my benefit. “Dimitri—ass like a coconut. That’s why I picked him.”
“That’s him.”
Around the room, Helena’s belongings overflowed from cardboard boxes. A couple of previous clients had done this—packed up their possessions to make less work for their family. Like Leland’s staged home in Clayton, I couldn’t find any photographs on the walls either. No smiling Lelands looked on while I got to work. Normally a client’s house was full of family pics. Perhaps the Mumms weren’t sentimental. For all I knew, Leland and Helena hated each other, and he was tending to her now out of a fraternal obligation. Still, even in the most strained family dynamics I’d see photos of kids, parents, friends. Someone. I’d shrugged off the anomaly with Leland, but took note of it now. I told myself she’d just boxed them up with her other things.
The only thing hanging on the walls was a framed black and white poster of a half-naked woman who might have been a darker Josephine Baker, sexualized with long lashes and a fan of feathers obscuring her breasts and pelvis. If I could add a third certainty to death and taxes, I would add that the woman in the poster was not Helena Mumm.
Without a chair handy, I placed the pizza box on the floor and sat on the corner of the coffee table. Her scent cut through the gardenia fumes. Hygiene is as much social ritual as health, and most clients fall out of that ritual. They peed and pooped a little in their clothes, and you could smell it for miles. Hospitals did a better job at masking it by bleaching out the pores in the linoleum, but they never cleaned out the smell entirely. I used to snort a little perfume so I could sit next to a client and not look like I was sniffing the expired milk. Helena smelled a little of excrement, and I found it comforting, because it smelled the way someone who was dying should smell. She didn’t smell like FlyNap.
I almost liked her, as much as I could like anyone related to Leland Mumm. The empathy didn’t come easily this time, because I didn’t want to be there. Helena must have sens
ed it too. But we both faked it, and as I was faking it, I found her false smile assuring. Her contrived effort was still an attempt to put us both at ease.
On the edge of the coffee table, I unzipped my satchel. Leland’s black box waited inside, but I wouldn’t take it out yet.
While I stared into my satchel, Helena suddenly latched onto my wrist. She couldn’t see the gauze under my sleeve, but her hand clamped right where Leland had cuffed me. Indian sunburn.
My eyes went wide and I jerked my arm away. “That hurts!” I fumed, shaking out my wrist. “Why would you do that?” Kali didn’t get angry with clients. Not ever. But my fist balled up, and I pushed the coffee table away from her chair.
Helena withdrew her hand, stunned at my reaction. “Just trying to thank you for coming,” she said. “Just trying to show you affection.”
Neither of us spoke. We were both confused. For me, it wasn’t so much that she had held my arm, or that she had grabbed the tender part of it, but that she had so much power in her grip. For someone with an advanced disease—and let’s face it, at least another co-occurring disorder—she was stronger than I’d have guessed. Most clients don’t have much physical strength by our final meeting. I’d gotten used to quavering hands. Not Helena. She’d clamped down on my wrist like a lobster claw.
I wondered if she was healthier than I’d been led to believe. I wondered about the different ways Leland Mumm might have lied to me about his sister. People killed their relatives all the time. But he couldn’t be killing her for money, not unless she’d buried a pot of gold in the backyard.
“I didn’t grab you that hard.”
I rolled up a sleeve, “See the gauze? I’m hurt.”
She squinted at the bandages. “Did you try and kill yourself?”
“Of course not.”
“Because it looks like you slashed your wrists.” Abrasive like her brother. Often I wondered how I’d get along with a client if I met her when she was healthy. I don’t think I’d have liked Helena.
If this sort of interchange had happened with another client—which it hadn’t—Kali might have asked if that client was uncomfortable. Kali might even offer to leave. But there against my will, I couldn’t walk out. Bitch or not, I needed to get this over with.
