Line of Fire (16 page)

He mimed a lip-zip. Then he said, “I’m out of here. I have to get ready for my date. My pits smell like they defrosted too long on the counter.”

25

L
ate the next day, after my last appointment was over, Sam fell back onto my office sofa so hard the big piece of furniture slid a couple of inches as it absorbed the energy of his collapse. I had almost concluded he wasn’t going to show up.

By the end of most workdays Sam looks like he’s fought above his weight class for a few rounds. My impression was that he looked even more beat-up than usual.

I took the seat on the other end of the sofa and waited for him to start the conversation. I was waiting because the ruse I was using to convey privileged information to Sam left me no other choice. The choreography was complex. I was doing it the way I was doing it only because the alternatives seemed worse.

“Worse” meant possibly illegal. Definitely unethical. My chosen path? I didn’t think it was illegal. Technically, anyway. Unethical? Let’s say I wouldn’t have wanted to put it up for a vote to a jury of my professional peers.

My biggest fear was that my plan would prove ineffectual.

The awkward choreography required that Sam take the next step. He obliged. “Wow,” he said. “I admit I did not expect to see what I saw at three thirty.”

I was relying on Sam recognizing that my hands were tied, and that they were tied right over my lips. He didn’t disappoint.

He said, “I saw him. And I’ve been around you long enough to predict that from this point forward you are going to be of no help to me in the what-the-hell-does-that-mean part of this conversation.”

“Help with what?” I said, underscoring for Sam the determination of my feigned ignorance.

“I’m talking implications, not facts. You can talk implications with me, right?”

“Not really. But I will provide whatever vague guidance I can.”

“You’re worried about this asshole’s confidentiality?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m worried about being tricked into breaching it. That would be an unforced error on my part.”

“Gotcha,” Sam said. “Okay. Then this is going to be worse than I thought—and where you and your job and me and my job tend to collide, I usually find myself thinking of the worst right off the bat.” He stood. “There’s an ice-cold Hoss with my name on it over at the West End. Want to join me?”

A beer sounded fine. “Just one,” I said.

“One? In a fine bar, the first brew is there merely to make introductions to the second.”

• • •

By the time our butts were balanced on the two stools at the end of the long bar of the West End Tavern, the tension between us was easing. Coma Doe was a common adversary. We didn’t have energy to waste fighting each other.

Sam ordered me the promised Hoss—a local lager that earned its spiciness from a pinch of rye. I liked it. He also offered me some Beer Nuts that had been stashed in his sport coat pocket in a ziplock bag that was opaque from advanced age and, likely, some other prolonged abuse that I didn’t want to contemplate. My estimate was that he had stashed the bag, and the enclosed nut fragments, in the recesses of that coat during the extended investigation into JonBenét’s death.

I declined the snack. I asked about his Cherokee. “You never said—did the thief get anything from your car?”

“Nothing to get,” he scoffed. “He probably got scared away. Courthouse parking lot? Either he is really stupid, or my colleagues in blue are really bad at what they do.”

“Any video surveillance?”

“Useless. Shows a human-shaped blob next to my car. Big help. Why do surveillance cameras always have such crappy resolution? What’s the point?” He paused as though he thought I must have had the answer. I didn’t. “Just saying,” he said.

“How bad is the estimate on the window?”

He nodded. “Not too bad. Nice people. Thanks for the referral.” Sam was done with small talk. He said, “We should probably focus on this afternoon. Coma Doe.”

• • •

At the prearranged rendezvous I had made the short amble from my office to the waiting room to greet Rick Contreras, aka Coma Doe, the patient I had seen for the first time a couple of days before. In my hand I was holding a white business-size envelope containing a single sheet of paper. I nodded a quick acknowledgment to my patient before I walked across the room and handed the envelope to Sam.

I said, “This should be all you need. Thank you so much for coming by.”

Sam took the envelope without comment.

I turned. “Please come on back, Rick,” I said. I used his first name solely for Sam’s benefit. Rick tossed his magazine to the coffee table, stood, and preceded me down the hall. I was tempted to risk one more look at Sam’s face, but I didn’t.

• • •

Sam placed the bag with the vintage Beer Nuts between us on the West End bar. He then reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out the white envelope. He unfolded the solitary sheet of paper and smoothed it out on the bar top. “It’s either invisible ink,” he said, “or it’s blank.”

“Invisible ink is beyond my skill set. Consider it the latter.”

“The medium is not the message?” he said. “Damn.”

The McLuhan reference was welcome. Sam was a smart and witty man; it was one of the things I appreciated about his company. “If anyone ever asks, you will be able to explain—with complete honesty—that the reason you came by my office was to pick up an envelope.”

“And if someone asks—let’s say while I’m under oath—what was in said envelope?”

“‘It was so unremarkable that I don’t remember’ should describe the facts.”

He rolled his head as though he were stretching his neck. “Nice,” he said.

“I try to keep it simple.”

Sam laughed. “Since when?” He took a tiny sip from his glass, as though he were checking the lager for poison. “The guy? That’s a hell of a scar.”

I was determined not to respond directly to any question that might reflect on my patient’s identity. Technically, confidentiality forbade it. Practically, I was worried about a trap. Either way, Sam had the identity question nailed.

He raised the Hoss, exhaling with a long
ahhhhh
after he drank nearly half of it in one extended go. He replaced the glass on the bar with a
thunk
. I half expected the remaining beer to geyser up and fly out of the glass. It didn’t.

Sam ran his cold fingers over his Guinness record–sized forehead. It had been my friend Adrienne who had once pointed out to me that Sam’s forehead was the shape, and a good approximation of the size, of the state of Nebraska.

“Him? In your office? I did not see that coming. If I’d given it any thought, and I didn’t, I might have thought there was a minuscule chance he’d show up sometime, in some way. But I wouldn’t have guessed he’d show up that way, with you. Any chance this has to do with that old business card, and not with the conversation you and I had in his room at the ICU?”

I considered how I could reply. “If I were to guess?” I said. Sam turned his head to look at me. “I would guess that it had nothing to do with any old business card.”

He threw some Beer Nut debris into his mouth. He’d had to dig around among the dried-up peanut skins to retrieve enough meat to make the toss worth the effort. He mumbled a profanity describing a frank sexual improbability before he added, “Depending on what the guy knows, this could be . . . an awkward development.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s safe for me to assume that he did not introduce himself as Coma Doe?”

• • •

He did not introduce himself as Coma Doe.

My second session with Rick Contreras, the one that came immediately after Sam’s cameo appearance in my waiting room to receive the envelope, was less about subterfuge and more about threat.

I had already concluded that Rick had been taking my measure during the first visit. Going into that second session, I anticipated that the assessment phase was over and that something more provocative than the fact that he had identified me as someone who had visited his room in the ICU was coming my way.

I didn’t see any indication that Rick Contreras had recognized Sam in the waiting room before the session. If he had, it would have provided clear evidence that his investigation into what he had heard, or thought he had heard, during his comalike state was more advanced than he was letting on. When I had implored Sam to sit in the waiting room, I did so counting on the fact that there was no way that my new patient would recognize him. To the best of my knowledge Contreras had never seen Sam—Coma Doe’s eyes never opened while we were with him in his isolation room in the ICU—and although he may have heard Sam’s voice as we talked that night, he could not have matched it to Sam’s voice that day in my waiting room. Sam had adhered to my admonition not to speak in the man’s presence.

“Here’s the thing,” is how Contreras started that second meeting. “Do you mind if I cut the bullshit?”

He was working to control the mumbling. I was grateful for that. The content? My heart left its canter and started to gallop. I told him I didn’t mind. I preferred it.

“I know you were in my room in the ICU after the accident. Shit, man, you left your business card for me. And I know—I know, see, because I
remember
—that you were there with a cop. I know you guys talked while you were in my room. I don’t pretend that I remember everything, but I remember pieces, big pieces, here and there.”

I used every bit of my self-restraint to maintain therapeutic neutrality in my expression. Inside my head? Pure chaos. Moments-after-the-big-bang chaos.

“Important pieces. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t respond. It wasn’t tactical. I was incapable.

“You asked me last time how you could be of help. Well, I need you to tell me what you know about that cop you were with in my room.”

I continued to try to keep my cool as Rick slowly turned over the cards in his hand. Rick seemed to be interpreting my silence as strategic. The reality was more mundane; my vocal cords felt temporarily paralyzed by what I was hearing.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re wondering why you should help me? Here’s why—because if you help me, I’m not interested in you. You help me, you skate. I’m interested in him. The cop. And what he did . . . that thing you guys were talking about.”

“That thing”? Maybe he doesn’t really know.

Coma Doe smiled right then. I realized he’d suffered some damage to a cranial nerve in the accident. His smile was one-sided and kind of evil.

“I’m in legal trouble. Not your concern. But to make my legal trouble go away, I need to develop some . . . information that might interest the district attorney. What do I know so far? I know”—he pounded his chest with the thumb side of his closed fist in a way that startled me—“that if it turns out I can finger a dirty cop I will have me some top-notch scratch for negotiating my way out of my mess.

“So my offer to you is this: You tell me what I need to know about that cop friend of yours, and what he did, and I’m out of your face. And I’m out of your life.”

If only it were that easy,
was what I was thinking. I was also determining that my new adversary wasn’t Einstein, but neither was he a dunce. He’d come up with a plan that was, unfortunately, plausible. I didn’t think it would work, but I could see how he would think it would work.

“Listen, figuring out this puzzle of mine won’t be that hard,” he said. “Like I said, I heard important pieces that night. But I don’t remember every little detail. I’ve already followed up on some big pieces, done some investigating on my own.”

He stopped. I considered the possibility that he was waiting for me to fill in some blanks for him. I waited, too.

He wanted to know what I knew. I wanted to know what he knew.

The only good news? I was more experienced at enforced silence than he was. Outwaiting him was not much of a challenge. He said, “You know—just say, for an example of what I’ve learned—how many of what they call ‘unattended deaths’ there have been in the little town of Frederick, Colorado, in the recent past? Say, four years? That a good number?”

God, he isn’t bluffing.
At that moment all the doubt that had been supporting my denial evaporated.
He did hear us that night.

Contreras knew about Frederick.
Shit. Four years?
Had Sam or I mentioned a time frame in regard to Justine Brown’s death? I couldn’t remember.
Damn.
Had we mentioned her name that night? I couldn’t remember that, either.
Shit.

What precisely had we said that night in the ICU?
I couldn’t recall. Not to save my life. And saving my life, and Sam’s, seemed to be the stakes that were on the table.

For the next thirty seconds I didn’t move a muscle that wasn’t under control of my autonomic nervous system.

“Exactly seven,” he said. “Unattended deaths. In Frederick. Colorado. Lucky number, huh? Only three of those even required investigation.” He rolled his thumb into a tight circle with his index finger, leaving the other three fingers extended in case I was having trouble with the arithmetic.

I noted that he spoke the name of our state “Col-o-
rad
-o,” emphasizing the third syllable in a sound that rhymed with
sad
. That particular accenting was more common among new arrivals, visitors, and nonnatives. Rick Contreras was a transplant.

He folded his pinkie down. “One death was a fifty-one-year-old rancher who had a heart attack in his barn while he was loading hay bales into the back of his pickup truck. His body was found in the back of the truck by his wife. Tragic.” He folded his ring finger down. “The second was an elderly woman who died from a brain hemorrhage, perhaps while she was sleeping. She was in her bed when her daughter came by to deliver some groceries.” He paused, pursing his lips together in a way that caused his recent facial scars to whiten from tension. “Nice way to go. Just my opinion.”

The last finger to remain unfolded was flipping me off. It was intentional, I thought, and juvenile. “The third? The third death was the most interesting to me, and I mean that because of what I heard that night in the ICU. It was a woman who killed herself with a single gunshot to her head. Her body was found in a little rental house on a farm just outside of town. That death? For a while at least, it was the talk of the town. People still remember it. Turns out they’re eager to talk about it.”