Final Answers (9 page)

I
awaken in excruciating pain. It’s still dark, and very quiet, and I can hear the surf surging in the distance. It was well after midnight by the time we got home from Vegas, and I’ve been sleeping fitfully, if at all.

“What’s going on?” Nancy asks groggily, finally responding to my restlessness. “God, it’s not even five-thirty.”

“My arm. It’s killing me.” I sit up, turn on my reading light and begin unbuttoning my pajama top to get a look at it.

She pushes up onto an elbow and squints at me through sleepy eyes. “Well, you know what they say, tiger,” she teases in a voice dripping with sarcasm and sexuality, “every party has its price.”

“It’s not funny,” I protest, wincing in pain as I slip my arm out of the pajama sleeve. “It hurts like hell. Look.”

“Oh-oh,” she says, frowning at the sight of it.

On the outside of my left arm, midway between the shoulder and elbow, is a swollen blue-purple mass with pinkish yellow accents that resembles an early Rothko. Nancy’s expression becomes progressively more serious as she examines it, gently pressing here and there.

“Ow! take it easy.”

“I don’t like that at all.”

“Me neither.”

It’s midmorning before I can get in to see our internist. Dr. Marcel Koppel is a lanky, methodical man of Belgian descent with an easygoing manner and intelligent eyes that take on a mischievous
glint when I brief him on the incident in Las Vegas. Then he examines the bruise, which he calls a hematoma.

“They x-ray this when you were in the hospital?”

“No. It wasn’t bruised. Felt a little sore when I went to bed last night. Then this morning—”

“Delayed bleeding of some kind.”

“What causes that?”

“Usually a blood vessel weakened by trauma. It hangs in there for a while, then gives way and starts leaking.” He sends me down the hall to a radiology lab. About a half hour later, I return with the X rays and he slips them into the light panel on the wall of the examining room.

His brows raise slowly. “Never seen that before,” he muses, intrigued by what the X rays reveal.

“Seen what?”

“That right there,” he replies, using the point of a pencil to indicate a tiny, hard-edged, and totally black line. It’s about three quarters of an inch long. One end is cut at an angle.

“Know what that is?”

I shake my head no.

“A hypodermic needle.”

“Jesus.”

“You know, I’ve seen them bend in my day, but I can’t recall ever seeing one break. Whoever did that must operate a jackhammer for a living.” He continues studying the X rays and zeroes in on something, then nods with understanding. “That tends to explain it. See?” He uses the pencil to trace the path of a pale, squiggly line that ends in a microscopic crater. “The needle hit the bone, went scraping along it, then dug in right there and broke.”

I nod sagely; then it dawns on me that that’s my arm on the X ray, my arm that has the needle embedded in it. “What do we do about that?”

“Well, as they say, what goes in . . .” He pauses, takes hold of my arm, and presses down gently with his thumbs. It hurts like hell, but the tip of the needle soon emerges from beneath the bruised area of skin. He fetches a pair of forceps, grasps it, and slowly pulls the needle from my biceps. “. . . Must come out.”

I’m staring at my arm.

A tiny drop of blood seeps from the pinhole.

He’s holding the forceps to the light, staring at the needle, puzzled. “Wrong gauge.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, needles used to give subcutaneous or intramuscular shots are usually in the twenty to twenty-three range. The larger the gauge the finer the needle. This can’t be more than an eighteen, something you’d use to take blood.”

“You told me to stay out of hospitals once, remember?”

“Yes, I do,” he replies with a little smile. “But no professional would make that kind of mistake.”

“A guy in a hotel room might,” I say, as the once-hazy scenario starts to clarify. “I remember he had something shiny in his hand; I was struggling and this sharp pain ran down my arm. The sudden movement must’ve broken the needle.”

He nods in agreement, then as he disinfects and bandages the tiny wound, speculates, “I imagine they knew what they’d put in your drink wouldn’t last long enough to stop you from calling for help or perhaps even going after them. So they tried to inject you with something else to make sure you were out.”

“Try heroin and cocaine.”

The doctor questions me with a look.

“The hospital said I tested positive for both.”

His expression darkens. “I worked ER in an inner-city hospital when I was a resident. We handled a lot of drug overdoses. It sounds like they injected you with what in the vernacular is called a speedball.”

“A speedball,” I repeat slowly as a horrid memory dawns on me. “Isn’t that what killed John Belushi?”

The doctor nods gravely. “Might’ve killed you too, but I suspect you didn’t get the full dose.”

“Why not?”

He fetches something from a drawer, peels off the paper wrapper, and removes a hypodermic needle. “This is a three-quarter-inch eighteen.”

“Same as that.”

“Right.” He matches the fresh needle to the piece he removed. They’re the same length. He touches the point of the pencil to the plastic collar, the part that’s cast around the needle’s shaft, and screws into the syringe. “See? It broke right at the hub. Which means it broke above the surface of the skin.”

A chill goes through me at the thought of how close I came to being killed.

“It’s probably going to look worse before it gets better.” He prescribes an antibiotic and a mild painkiller, and sends me home. Before leaving, I ask him to send a copy of his findings to Sergeant Figueroa at Las Vegas Police Department headquarters.

Over the next couple of days, I go to work late and leave early, getting home just after Nancy returns from school. She’s in the family room, playing the piano, which she does every day for a half hour or so. Cole Porter, Gershwin, and the classics are all part of her repertoire. Today, what sounds like a Mozart sonata fills the house, though I’m a musical illiterate and am never certain. She plays for relaxation, for me, and occasionally for others when coaxed. She’s enormously talented and humble to a fault, which is part of her charm.

“Hi, hon,” she says brightly, finishing with a lovely, delicate run. She leaves the piano, kissing me on the move as she fetches the afternoon paper from the coffee table. “They got that burglar.”

“The one working the neighborhood?”

“Uh-huh. Caught him red-handed in a garage on Alta Vista.” I scan the article, then drift off in thought.

“What’s the matter?”

“Hang in there with me a minute.”

I cross to the phone and press the button that auto-dials the sheriff’s substation at the Malibu Civic Center. “Yes, this is Mr. Morgan up on Sea View. Oh, no, no problem. I just heard you caught that burglar. Yes, congratulations. If you don’t mind me asking, what was he driving?” There’s a pause. I hear some papers shuffling before he comes up with the answer. “Oh, okay, thanks.”

I hang up.

Nancy questions me with a look.

“Toyota van.”

Suddenly, I’m seeing flashes of the blue sedan, and the driver with the sunglasses, and the guy in the hotel room with the sunglasses, and the excruciating pain in my arm, and the tiny piece of needle, and I’m hearing the words
heroin, cocaine
—
speedball
—might’ve killed you . . . killed you . . . killed you—and then suddenly I hear myself saying, “Maybe they wanted to kill me.”

Nancy’s head jerks around as if I’ve just shouted an obscenity. “Wanted to kill you?” she asks, incredulously.

“Yes. What were those buzzwords that detective used?”

“Rolex ring?”

“No, the other ones.”

“Oh, kink-and-coke party.”

“That’s it. A kink-and-coke party gone wrong. A businessman goes to Vegas, buys himself that double header he’s always wanted, does a little coke, decides to go a little further, agrees to let one of the little girls put a needle in his arm . . .”

“I thought you said the idea was to make sure you were knocked out?”

“So did I, until now. But if you really think about it, why didn’t they just hit me over the head?”

She shrugs. “That’s like asking why you in the first place?”

“That was my next question.”

“A stroke of bad luck.”

“No, no way. There was a guy next to me at the blackjack table who had a cowboy hat in his lap filled with black chips; he was up over ten thousand bucks. Why not him? Why take the risk for a crummy five or six hundred?”

“I don’t know. Besides, no one knew you were going to Vegas.”

“They could’ve followed me.”

“And had the time to set up such an elaborate charade?”

“I don’t have all the answers. But if money wasn’t the target, you’re looking at all that’s left.”

“Okay, just assuming they were out to kill you, why go to all that trouble to make it look like an accident?”

“To keep the police from looking for a motive. So they wouldn’t ask ‘Why would somebody kill Cal Morgan?’”

She shakes her head, dismayed. “I’ll ask it. Why?”

“I don’t know. Why was that guy in the blue car watching the house?”

“What does that have to do with this? Come on, Cal, he could still be a burglar, or what’s her face’s lover, for that matter. You’re starting to see conspiracies everywhere.”

“Don’t start psychoanalyzing me, okay?”

“Hey, this is me, remember?” she says gently, stung by my tone. “I’m concerned. I don’t like what this is doing to you. You haven’t been yourself since we were in Washington. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. I mean, you don’t have an enemy in the world, yet you—”

“That I know of.”

“Honey, it doesn’t make sense. People don’t go around committing murder without a reason.”

“Chrissakes, Nance,” I snap, interrupting her. “You’ve got an answer for everything, just like those cops. Next you’ll be telling me you think I was partying.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“At least we agree on something.”

We stare at each other in silence. The electronic twitter of the phone breaks it. Nancy scoops up the receiver, then hands it to me. “Mr. Collins,” she says coolly.

“Jack?”

“Hi, I tracked down Bartlett, the mortuary guy.”

“Thanks, that’s great.”

“Not really. He’s at a VA hospital in Denver. They said he’s in pretty bad shape.”

“How bad?”

“He’s in the AIDS unit.”

I groan.

“Yes, I wouldn’t waste too much time. They said it could be a matter of weeks or even days.”

“Days?”

“Uh-huh. By the way, you have any luck with that guy Foster?”

“No. To make a long story short, nice man, good musician, no information, painful experience. I’ll tell you about it someday. You have an address on that hospital for me?” I jot it down, then hang up and head into the kitchen to get a beer. When I close the fridge, I notice Nancy standing in the doorway behind me. I pause and hold up the bottle. “Want one?”

She shakes no and folds her arms. “What’s going on?” she asks suspiciously.

I shrug nonchalantly, fetch an opener from a drawer, and methodically remove the cap, then take a long swallow. I’m stalling. I’ve been stalling since I hung up the phone. Nancy knows it, which is why she followed me. “I’ve got to go to Denver,” I finally reply apprehensively.

She lets out a long breath. “When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“We’re going to see
Phantom
tomorrow.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Really?” she responds facetiously.

“Come on, Nance,” I say calmly. “The guy’s dying. He’s my only link to the past. Probably the last chance I’ve got to identify that soldier.”

“You know,” she says wearily. “I really don’t think I care anymore.”

“You know what I think?” I shoot back sharply, heightening the tension. “I think you’ve misplaced your priorities.”

“No. You’re my priority. Can’t you see what this is doing to you?”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you gave me a little support instead of fighting me every step of the way.”

“God,” she exclaims in a throaty growl, her tone a mixture of disappointment and disbelief. “You sound just like you used to.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Paranoid, compulsive. You know what I mean. Look at yourself. One minute you’re telling me you think people are trying to kill you, the next you’re talking about dashing off to Denver tomorrow. You think that’s rational behavior?”

“Ohhhh,” I say, my eyes widening in a spooky stare. I can feel myself starting to lose control, feel the need to lash out coming over me like a long-dormant plague surging to life. “You know those wacko Vietnam vets. If they aren’t having nightmares about fire fights and nape, they’re stalking our cities and towns, blowing people away just for kicks.”

“Please, Cal,” Nancy pleads vulnerably, her eyes starting to glisten. “We haven’t done this in twenty years. I hated it then and I hate it now.”

I take a long swallow of beer, then another, trying to wash down the lump of in-country anger that’s rising in my throat. “Can’t hate it without hating me, babe,” I say, punctuating the remark with a flick of my forefinger that sends the cap from the beer bottle rocketing off the counter and across the kitchen like a miniature hockey puck. “Go ahead, Nance,” I taunt, knowing it will hurt her. I don’t want to but I can’t help myself and do it anyway. “Go ahead, say it, if it’ll make you feel better. I can handle it.”

“I don’t hate you, you know that. Seeing you like this is torture.” She sighs defeatedly, then, tears rolling down her cheeks, she comes around the counter and gently, comfortingly puts her arm around my shoulders.

My body is rigid and ungiving. I ignore her presence as I drain the bottle, then step away. “Yeah, well it’s torture for me too.”

“Don’t do this, Cal. I’ve been through it once, but as much as I love you, I don’t think I could handle it again.”

“Well, neither do I, dammit!” I shout, tossing the bottle across the room. It smashes into the stone wall that encloses the fireplace and bursts, showering us with beer and shards of glass.