A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) (5 page)

I asked him to give me the short version. He told me he had spotted someone creeping through backyards in the direction of the Lane's house and had believed there was a breakin in progress. He called it in, then proceeded to enter the home, believing the Lanes' lives were in danger.

"Looks like you were right," I said. Wheeler flushed. "What happened then?"

"I ran upstairs assuming Ms. Lane and her daughter were asleep and in possible danger. I had my service revolver drawn. I approached Ms. Lane's bedroom to investigate and saw she had a pistol pointed at me. Fearing for my life, I reacted instinctively and shot her."

"From the hall?"

"Yes, sir. Just outside the doorway."

"Not in the room itself?

"No, sir."

"Because then there would've been too much time for her to point the gun and you to react without thinking."

"Detective?"

"If you'd gone all the way into the room, it would've given her enough time to realize that you were a cop and not a burglar."

He hesitated, then said, "I don't know, sir. All I know is that she was about to shoot."

"You believe Ms. Lane thought you were a burglar?"

"Yes, sir."

"And did you find any evidence of the burglar you thought you saw earlier?"

"No, sir. Officer Ferrin and I searched the area, but didn't find anyone."

I stared at him, waiting for him to say more, but he simply looked back at me, expressionless. Finally, I said, "Okay, I got what I need. Keep yourself available. I'll need to talk to you in the next day or two."

He turned to go, stopped, and looked back at me. And said something that set my skin crawling. He said, "Thank you, Detective, for making the right decision in this justifiable and defensible shooting."

I stared at him as he walked to his cruiser, got in, and pulled away.

. . .

I've thought a lot about that night.

Cops say and do strange things after they shoot someone. There might be tears, or anger, or silence. They might talk it out or they might take it in stride. Some guys act flippant, make jokes. Others pray. Whatever the reaction, they're all trying to keep themselves from thinking about the terrifying, momentous thing they've done. None of them will ever be the same cop they were when they started. Some aren't ever the same, period, and they turn in their badge a month later.

But rarely do they sound victorious. Smug. Certain. And that's how Michael Wheeler sounded that night. Like he'd gotten away with murder.

Which he had.

I was bent over the file, my nose almost touching the page, when my cell phone rang. Habit made me pick it up and glance at the number without thinking. The bottom dropped out of my gut when I saw who it was, but I answered anyway. The receptionist introduced herself and said, "Mr. Singer, Dr. Demitri had a cancellation this morning. Can you come in for your exam today?"

"What time?"

"As soon as you can get here," she said. "Three o'clock at the latest."

I glanced at the stack of papers spilling out of the Lane case folder. "Do we have to do this right away?"

"I think in this case, Mr. Singer," she said, "everything's always as soon as possible."

"See you by three," I said, and hung up.

I showered, then put on some comfortable clothes. For all I knew, the doctor was going to be performing some fairly intrusive tests and I'd rather cinch the drawstring on a pair of sweatpants than put on a pair of jeans afterward. I straightened up the office, checked the stove, and did a few other things until it was obvious I was stalling, then left.

Demitri's practice was tucked away in a cozy, two-story colonial brownstone in historic Old Town Alexandria, a small burg on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Where Arlington struggles to find itself amongst the chain stores and twenty-something bars and its live music, Old Town is smirkily certain of its identity. It has cobblestone streets that suck to drive on and period taverns where the staff tart themselves up in Colonial-era costumes. You can almost believe George Washington left a minute ago to take his carriage back to Mount Vernon. It's so cute it almost can't stand itself. Almost.

The office was on the second floor. I signed in, exchanged my insurance card for a clipboard and pen, then took a seat. The waiting room was like doctors' waiting rooms everywhere. Chairs were strategically placed to allow people to sit in ones or twos with an empty in between. One other person occupied the room, an older black woman who was asleep or pretended to be. The tables were littered with magazines that satisfied the standard spread of interests: golf, finance, current events. Nothing on vacations or travel, I noticed. Too optimistic. Or cigar smoking. That seemed prudent. One table had a plastic holder for a bunch of pamphlets entitled "Your Illness and You." The top one was tattered and seemed to have been read and put back more than once. I guess most people would prefer not to take one, as though putting it in your pocket would confirm the diagnosis.

I'd flipped through two magazines and was starting in on a third when a young Asian nurse in pink scrubs and a name tag that said "Leah" opened the magic door and called my name. She led me through a maze of desks, scales, and racks of sterile supplies, past laminated cutaway diagrams of the human body, around strange beeping machines on rollers. We stopped at an examining room with the temperature of a meat locker, where Leah told me to undress and put on something she called a gown, but seemed to me like a large piece of toilet paper with drinking straw wrappers for strings. The gown ended at mid-thigh. If it were meant to hide anything, it would've been more effective if I wadded it up and wore it like a diaper. Then again, there was less of me to hide since most of my body parts were shrinking inward at an alarming rate.

After I'd changed, I glanced around. All the surfaces were smooth, shiny, and freezing except for the examining table, which had a roll of butcher paper drawn down its length. They'd want me up there, anyway, so I hopped up and tried to tug the giant paper bag over the important parts.

Then I waited for someone to show up and tell me about my cancer.

. . .

I think I knew when I saw the blood. There was a lot of it.

Not flung on the walls or pooling in an alley doorway. Not the result of a late-night, urban squabble or a meth deal gone instantly and terrifically wrong. Not the consequence of an accidental shove or revenge thirty years in the making or a love triangle violently reduced from three to two. These were all things I'd seen after thirty years with DC Homicide. But that was blood where I'd been expecting it, situations I'd almost come to consider normal.

This blood was mine. It was in my toilet.

Seeing it was embarrassing, horrifying. I tried to clean it up, forget about it, move on. I took a shower and washed myself a half-dozen times, running the cold water until the spray had teeth. I scrubbed the bathroom, then examined myself in the mirror, looking for outward signs of sickness or weakness, not sure how I felt when I couldn't find any. I made some coffee and stared at a wall.

I thought. I thought about the consequences of what had happened and what it would mean. About the fact that an hour ago, I didn't have this problem and now I did. That I didn't smoke, barely drank, had hardly had a cold in the last year. I was as healthy as an ox. All of it, irrelevant.

Inane things my father used to say--for almost any occasion, good or bad, happy or tragic--popped into my head. Like,
Well, there you go
. Or,
It is what it is
. And,
Well, what can you do?
I suppose these one-offs are less idiotic than they seem on the surface. They're all a way of saying the same thing, that shit happens and you have to deal with it. You can try to ignore it, wait for it to go away. Maybe that works, but sometimes the knot won't untie itself and your attention is required. A thing you never expected, could not have predicted, suddenly becomes the foremost event in your life and no amount of wishing it away will work. In some cases, the event is small and the ramifications manageable.

In my case, it affected everything. Forever.

In thirty-one years on the MPDC, I'd clawed my way up from beat cop to detective. I received honorable mentions and awards. Straight police work was something I liked and was good at, passing on opportunities to work in Vice, Internal, even SWAT when I was still in shape. I refused management positions, trapped in the perpetual problem of, if you're good at what you do for long enough, eventually you get kicked upstairs. Like it's some kind of reward. My indifference was noted and the promotions and invitations slowed down to a trickle, then ceased altogether. The fast track to the top slid over the horizon. Which was fine with me, tucked away as I was in the recesses of Homicide, where I took each case as it came along, did my best, then moved on to the next one.

I was a typical cop and got the typical cop divorce. It was tough at the time, but it made my life easier in the long run. I could go about my job guilt-free. I could talk and drink with people who understood the life. Have casual relationships and one-night stands. Go home at night and feed my cat. The troubles in my life stayed with me and were only as big as I chose to make them. The rest I could ignore. Until I found blood in the toilet bowl.

I didn't get bounced off the force, exactly, but with thirty-one years in and a diagnosis of localized colorectal cancer hanging around my neck--a situation soon known to everyone around you--options were limited.

Maybe I was ready to get out anyway. Three decades is a long time to poke around people who have been beaten, stabbed, shot, poisoned, run over with a car. That kind of thing rubs off on you. And I like the idea of escaping the daily grind as much as the next guy. But I would've appreciated controlling the how, why, and when of it instead of having the terms handed to me. It was sudden and impersonal, like getting fired by telegram or having a note slipped under the door.

I didn't have to retire. I considered staying in, fighting the cancer all the way. But I read up on the symptoms. Nausea, fatigue, weakness, vomiting. Then I read up on the side-effects of chemotherapy. Nausea, fatigue, weakness, vomiting. Is that how I wanted to show up to work every day? Did I want to back up the other guys on the squad, not knowing when I might keel over or give up chasing some crook down the street because I was too
tired
? In the end, I called it and walked out. I pretended not to notice the relief on everyone's face when I told them.

There were a lot of unanswered questions, like how long I could've kept going or what more I could've accomplished. Cases literally lying open on my desk had to be closed and handed off to someone else on the squad. And there were the unsolved, the pending, and the soon-to-be-committed crimes that I would never get to tackle.

The transition was sudden and disorienting. From diagnosis to resignation took four weeks. Ten days after that, I was walking down the steps of the MPDC building on Indiana Avenue, hugging the clichéd cardboard box. There was a nice departmental bash with cake and soda, almost comically subdued as people carefully avoided toasting to my health in their we'll-miss-you speeches. Some of my buddies wanted to go out to a bar afterwards, but I could see them wondering if it was kosher to take a guy with cancer out boozing. In the end, I was the one that dragged them to Morrison's steakhouse and got everybody bombed. The waitresses didn't quite know what to do with a dozen armed, drunk cops raising their glasses to "Marty's ass cancer." It was swell.

And then the ride really took off. I saw my personal doctor, who sent me to a gastro-intestinal specialist, who shuffled me off to a surgeon, who in turn referred me to an oncologist. It was a confusing, intimidating process. I was awash in professionally flavored understanding and sympathy, but no guidance through the system,
per se
. Each doctor simply did their part, pointed me in a new direction, and shoved.

I filled out more paperwork than I'd ever seen in my life and for a cop with thirty years in, that's saying something. I had insurance forms, releases, waivers, living wills, real wills, surveys, pension forms. I exchanged my service revolver, my badge, and my uniform for comfortable clothing with drawstrings and elastic waistbands. Clothes I could sit around in. Clothes I could get out of in a hurry if I had the uncontrollable and unstoppable need to crap.

One doctor disapproved of my diet, so I bought a lot of bananas and orange juice. I cut out donuts and bacon. The steakhouse binge was the last red meat I ate for a while and the last bottle of booze I drank, though it seemed a futile gesture. As if what I put in my mouth would have any effect on cancer fifty-three years in the making. Like it would shoo it out of me.
Bad cancer! Go away!
I suppose it made people feel better if they thought they were doing something positive. That's fine. It couldn't hurt and might do some good in other ways. Imagine the irony if you keeled over from a high-cholesterol heart attack in your oncologist's waiting room.

I was surgically fitted with a mediport near my collarbone, a handy device that lets the medical staff hook you up to the right machines without wearing out a vein from constant injections. It itched and got snagged on my shirts.

Then I was told to sit around and wait. There were batteries of tests to be conducted, samples still to be taken. Chemo was probably on the docket. Maybe surgery, maybe multiple surgeries. That's if the prognosis was good.

If it was bad, well, at least I had a new pair of sweatpants.

. . .

Demitri was a solid-looking guy in his late fifties with an olive-oil cast to his features and thick mason's hands. After introducing himself and glancing over my chart, he put on his doctor's face and started talking.

"The purpose of this visit, Marty," he said, "is to give you an idea of your staging and how we're going to treat it. Some people think of cancer as an all or nothing proposition, but like most diseases, there are certain milestones we pass that help us determine what kind of treatment you should be getting, how aggressive we can afford to be, how aggressive we have to be. You may have recently had cell replication start or you might've lived with cancer for twenty years."