Head Case

by Michael Wiley

  ‘I told you that,’ Kelson said. ‘A week ago, I told you.’

  ‘It’s how it comes out of your mouth. It sounds like crap. But I checked. Give yourself that much credit – I looked into it because of what you said. Then there’s the fact that the ambulance took him to Clement Memorial. No sense in that – the ambulance had to pass two other hospitals.’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Crap. It sounded like crap. But I admit, it was interesting crap. Then Deneesa Smithson died. Now it was seriously interesting crap. We did the background checks, personal histories, everything. And we found out Deneesa Smithson handled Scott Jacobson’s case when he got sent away for what they called behavioral issues but I prefer to think of as offing his mom. And we found out Scott and Deneesa didn’t work out so well. She had pictures of her boy Josh in her office, and she came in one afternoon to meet with Scott, and he’d broken the pictures out of the frames. Do you want to know what he was doing to them?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I’m not supposed to know either. Medical records. Confidentiality. But you can’t put photos in the wash, and some images you never get out of your memory. There was a blowup, and they held some meetings with the clinic directors and Scott’s dad. They decided Scott could stay but with a new set of counselors and therapists. There were further incidents between Deneesa Smithson and Scott, though the people who assessed him thought he’d resolved everything before they discharged him.’

  ‘Yeah, they were wrong.’

  ‘We think Suzanne Madani gave Scott the epinephrine he used to kill Josh, Patricia Ruddig, and Daryl Vaughn – most likely without any idea why he wanted it. She was running that little operation on the side, taking in patients she shouldn’t have been. Scott lurked around the hospital without anything better to do than watch the goings-on. Maybe he blackmailed her for the drugs – his silence, her epinephrine. We’re also checking the signature on the order to transfer Daryl Vaughn to Clement Memorial. We expect Scott forged it.’

  ‘Huh,’ Kelson said.

  ‘That’s what I said too – about a hundred times in the last week. You satisfied now? Did I tell you everything the curious little part of your pinprick brain wanted to know?’

  ‘You’re a good person,’ he said.

  ‘In spite of what they say?’

  ‘I’ve never heard anything different.’

  ‘Get out of here before you make me cry – though more likely I’ll break your balls.’

  He stood up. ‘What do the doctors say about Scott now?’

  She stayed in her chair, looking tired enough to sleep there. ‘He’s stable. They’ll transfer him to jail in the next twenty-four to forty-eight. Suicide watch. I hear his daddy has lined up about ten lawyers.’

  ‘Are you going to release Wendy Thomas?’

  Johnson managed an exhausted smile. ‘She rode out of here with her bull rider an hour ago.’

  ‘I’ll bet that made the bull rider happy.’

  Johnson shrugged. ‘Yee-haw.’

  Kelson went home.

  He vacuumed the carpet under the hole where Scott Jacobson shot the ceiling.

  He fed Payday and Painter’s Lane.

  He stood in the shower for an hour.

  In the chaos of the afternoon and evening, he’d missed dinner.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said.

  At 9:15, he climbed into bed.

  The reporters started calling a half-hour later. The police statement about Scott Jacobson’s arrest barely mentioned Kelson, but he’d been a human interest story in the past – the badly wounded cop who reinvented himself as a private investigator – so the reporters were alert to his name.

  When the first one called, Kelson said too much, as he always did – answering every question, as he always did. Eventually he started talking about Payday, who was sleeping on his chest as he talked, and the reporter ended the interview. When the second called, more or less the same thing happened. After the third called, Kelson said, ‘Enough.’ But before he could turn off the phone, it rang again.

  It was Frida.

  ‘Wow,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘I mean …’ She didn’t say what she meant.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so. Tired. Real tired.’

  ‘I want to be with you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said.

  She said nothing.

  He asked, ‘Are you working?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Can you come over?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said.

  Forty-five minutes later, Kelson buzzed her in.

  He was exhausted, close to breaking. They slept in each other’s arms.

  FIFTY-TWO

  In the morning, after kissing Frida goodbye and promising he’d find a way to call her even if Venus Johnson locked him up again, Kelson drove to Kovacic’s apartment. He touched the buzzer on the intercom outside, and Kovacic answered with a thick ‘Da?’

  ‘You’ve got to cut that out,’ Kelson said.

  Kovacic dropped the accent. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Let me in.’

  ‘Do you have a gun?’

  ‘I’m stripped naked and harmless,’ Kelson said, ‘and it’s freezing out here.’

  Kovacic buzzed him in.

  The apartment smelled like sweat. ‘You were going to kill Scott?’ Kelson said, when Kovacic closed the door.

  ‘I wanted to talk to him, but I would’ve killed him before I let him kill me. He tried once. I wouldn’t let him try again.’

  ‘At first, you thought DeMarcus and Marty tried to shoot you in the alley. You only figured out Scott did it when I came here for them, didn’t you?’

  Kovacic did something noncommittal with his lips, then turned away and went into the kitchen. ‘Would you like tea?’

  Kelson followed him. ‘Why would Scott even try to shoot you?’

  Kovacic filled a metal teapot at the kitchen tap, set it on the stove, and turned on a gas burner. ‘Revenge? The same reason he killed the others? He must have known Dr Jacobson fired me because I checked the drug supply records – and that’s when this thing started to break open.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kelson said. ‘You know the police will want to talk to you. Sooner or later they’ll track you down.’

  ‘Not if no one tells them who I am.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ Kelson said.

  When the tea was ready, they carried their cups back into the living room. Kovacic sat on the couch, his revolver on the couch cushion next to him. He didn’t touch the gun – didn’t seem to notice it was there.

  Kelson took a worn armchair across from him and frowned at the weapon.

  ‘No,’ Kovacic said, ‘you’re no threat to me. You aren’t especially brave. Or strong.’ He gave Kelson the thinnest smile. ‘You aren’t even good-looking. But you mean well.’

  ‘Damning praise,’ Kelson said.

  ‘You helped me find Caroline. That’s something.’

  ‘You’d already found her. You just didn’t know it.’

  Kovacic’s big round shoulders looked soft, comfortable. ‘We’re all fools,’ he said. ‘Amazing we don’t fall off the end of the earth.’

  FIFTY-THREE

  Over the next three days, the story came out in pieces.

  Scott Jacobson was conscious and recovering from his suicide attempt in the medical ward at the Cook County Jail. At the advice of his lawyers, he wasn’t speaking. But the police believed he ran Josh Templeton into the guardrail on Lake Shore Drive. Then he reported the accident to the AZT ambulance company, telling them to take Josh to Clement Memorial, where he gave him a fatal dose of epinephrine.

  According to new witnesses – rounded up from the subterranean streets where the homeless camped through the winter – the teenagers who beat Daryl Vaughn seemed to think they’d killed him. The police believed Scott hired the kids for the job. Dar
yl Vaughn’s survival and transportation to Northwestern Medical were mistakes Scott tried to fix by transferring him to Clement Memorial. The police were publicizing pictures of a bat broken in the attack and asking for help from the public as they tried to identify the teenagers.

  Reporters followed Jeremy Jacobson through the public areas at Clement Memorial and once – when he parked on his driveway instead of in his garage – from his car to his front door. Then the hospital announced he would take a temporary leave from his medical duties as he dealt with his family crisis.

  The police reclassified Suzanne Madani’s death as a homicide. Wendy Thomas admitted – only to Jose, who told Kelson, who, in spite of himself, told anyone who’d listen – that on the day before Madani’s death she swiped the doctor’s key to the pharmaceutical supply room so she could return the fentanyl she found in her work locker. She was planning to come clean to Madani about swiping it on the evening when Kelson found the doctor’s body. Admitting she had Madani’s key after the police charged her with Deneesa Smithson’s death seemed like a terrible idea.

  The police believed they had a lead on the bicyclist who ran down Patricia Ruddig on New Year’s morning – a man who hung out with the crowd at Club Richelieu.

  Scott seemingly had decided to kill off people related to the trauma of his mom’s death – and then Suzanne Madani when the doctor threatened to expose him – and then Alex Kovacic because he saw Kovacic as a threat or he already had momentum or just for fun or who really knew when dealing with the insane logic of a man like him?

  On the night after Scott’s arrest, Kelson had dinner with Sue Ellen. While he waited for her to come downstairs, Nancy said, ‘We’ve been watching you on the news.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Again.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Sam.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Sue Ellen looks up to you. Are you trying to wreck that even before she gets there on her own?’

  ‘I’m doing my job.’

  ‘You’re impulsive. You’re reckless. How can someone with a hole in his brain be so headstrong? You know the word for a man who acts the way you do?’

  Kelson said, ‘Frida says it’s sexy – and frisky.’

  ‘Frida.’ As if the name was a turd. ‘The word is idiotic.’

  ‘I try to be smart.’

  ‘A man who thinks he’s being smart by doing idiotic things? That’s doubly idiotic. How many times do you have to get hurt before you stop? You stick your fingers in a spinning blade. It cuts off your fingers. So you stick in your hand.’

  Sue Ellen came down the stairs two at a time, looking as if she’d leap into Kelson’s arms. But she skidded to a stop. She smiled at him.

  ‘One day that smile’s going to be dangerous,’ Kelson said.

  ‘It already is. Logan thinks so.’

  Kelson and Nancy asked at once, ‘Who’s Logan?’

  ‘Gotcha.’ Sue Ellen’s smile broadened, and she was a little girl again. ‘Mom and I saw you on the news.’

  ‘I know,’ Kelson said.

  ‘Mom says you’re being idiotic.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I think you’re being … admirable,’ she said.

  ‘Then you’re idiotic too,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Can I have guacamole?’ Sue Ellen asked Kelson.

  ‘Always,’ he said.

  ‘Tres leches for dessert?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And flan?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And coffee?’ she asked as she and Kelson went out the door.

  ‘No coffee,’ Nancy shouted after them.

  The next morning, at his therapy appointment, Kelson told Dr P, ‘Nancy says I’m idiotic.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Dr P asked.

  ‘I think I make mistakes. Bad ones. But I fix them when I can. Everything seems to work out OK.’

  ‘OK for everyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Even for you?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe not completely.’

  ‘But you seem pretty content anyway.’

  ‘Is that strange?’

  She set down her pen and notepad. ‘For some people, every moment of happiness is also a loss. It’s a moment they’ll never experience again. You aren’t one of those people. For you, it’s mostly more and more. You don’t look for subtraction. Whenever you can, you see extra. That’s nice. Enviable even.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘But dangerous too – if you don’t recognize the damage you do to yourself and others.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s all too much.’

  ‘You’ll know when it is,’ she said.

  On the third evening after Scott Jacobson’s arrest, Kelson held a gathering of five couples in his studio apartment.

  Frida came early to help clean and set up.

  Rodman and Cindy came next, with bags of empress chicken, Yu-Shang pork, bok choy, and Hawaiian fried rice from the House of Wah Sun. ‘And this is for the two of you to share later,’ Cindi said, handing Frida a bottle of red.

  Marty and Janet came at seven o’clock on the dot. ‘It’s the fucking accountant in me,’ Marty said, and Kelson explained to Frida that the little man used to keep books at Westside Aluminum until he got rich not exactly legally.

  ‘But always while maintaining my principles,’ Marty said.

  He and Janet also brought wine – six bottles of it, which Marty said he got off a friend of a friend, as if that made it better than buying it from a store.

  Jose and Wendy came twenty minutes later. ‘You look reborn,’ Kelson told them when they came in, and everyone agreed they seemed to sparkle.

  Jose gave Kelson a bottle of champagne. ‘A celebration,’ he said. ‘Thank you, amigo.’ He kissed Kelson on each cheek.

  Wendy kissed his cheeks too, then said, ‘What the hell,’ and kissed him on the mouth.

  They all laughed and popped the corks and were half-drunk by the time Kovacic and Caroline Difley arrived.

  With Rodman limping from Kovacic’s mistaken gunshot, the couple were a last-minute invitation – made only because Rodman himself insisted. Still, Caroline looked spooked.

  Rodman gave them his gentle smile and said, ‘No hard feelings.’

  She said, ‘No, no …’ She wasn’t afraid of him. She worried because she felt certain a car had been following her for the past two days. Four times her phone had rung, and when she answered, no one was there.

  ‘Telemarketers,’ Frida said. Which seemed right to the others.

  ‘Drink,’ Marty said, filling the wine glasses, ‘and the world’s a beautiful place. Drink more and you’ll pass out and won’t see when it turns ugly.’

  Kovacic and Caroline drank – taking a wine bottle each and swallowing away their fears.

  ‘Good news for me,’ Wendy said then. ‘Northwestern Medical called. I start training in the MRI department tomorrow.’

  So everyone drank to celebrate her new job.

  They partied until the building super came with a noise complaint from Kelson’s next-door neighbor. Frida invited the super in, Rodman loaded a plate of empress chicken and fried rice for him, and Kelson poured him a glass of wine, then talked with him about patching the hole in the ceiling.

  Then the neighbor knocked too. Frida invited her in, Rodman put together a plate, and Kelson poured wine.

  The party broke up at two a.m. The super and the neighbor stuck around to scrape plates and carry the garbage to the trash chute.

  Then Kelson and Frida locked the door, turned off the lights, and fell into bed.

  They got up the next day at noon, showered together, then found themselves in bed again. At three in the afternoon, they decided to have breakfast at the Golden Apple Grill.

  They rode the elevator to the lobby, holding hands. Holding hands, they crossed to the door, which, in the bright winter-afternoon sunlight, glared like a portal to another world. Out on the sidewalk, the freezin
g air had a scraped-blood smell, so clear and harsh it took their breath away. They gasped, and laughed together.

  Laughing, Kelson didn’t hear the gunshot.

  They were stepping from the sidewalk on to the frozen grit of the parking lot – hand in hand – and then Frida dropped to the pavement.

  Kelson thought she was joking – thought she pretended the cold air swept her feet from under her.

  Which – he realized later – made no sense.

  Still, a laugh escaped from his mouth – even as he saw the blood.

  It sprayed through the afternoon sunlight.

  Its liquid warmth stung the skin on his face.

  The joke wasn’t funny.

  In his confusion, he thought the blood was his own. A half-formed thought passed through his head – not again – and he felt he should fall to the ground – again. But gravity kept its fingers off him.

  And Frida was already crumbling, already lying on the pavement. Her blood. The thought formed – half-formed – and the sound that came out of his mouth was incoherent. It was a whine, a groan, a sound that registered that he’d fucked up and fucked up badly, or maybe he had nothing to do with it – and that made it worse – maybe the world, the whole universe, was fucked and fucked forever. He could laugh all he liked – he could see beyond the loss-after-loss and could love what remained – but everything was totally fucked.

  He sank to the pavement by Frida – he let himself sink, which was worse than having his legs blown out from under him – and the noise from his mouth stopped. He touched Frida’s bloody forehead, where a bullet – fired from an unseen point between the parked cars or from the window of a neighboring building or from somewhere else – had cracked through her skin and her bone, blasting the inside of her skull, exiting from the back. He felt her heat, her amazing heat. But she had no miracle to match his own from when he took a bullet in his head on a night as black as this day was bright.

  She was dead.