The Big Exit (22 page)

“I’ve seen it,” he says to Gattner.

“Seen what?”

“The app. Beth showed it to me.”

“What’d you think?”

“I actually thought it looked pretty good.”

He then begins to critique it, making sure to keep Gattner looking in the direction of the exit rather than behind him toward
the pen. The more kind words he has, the more Gattner is drawn in. He talks about the interface, points out what he likes
about it and mentions a couple of things he thinks could be improved. As he gives his two cents, he catches a glimpse of Bender
walking back toward them. He then disappears, presumably checking into Gattner’s office, which is out of Richie’s line of
view.

Come on, asshole
, he thinks, listening to Gattner rationalize one of the design choices they’ve made.
Hurry up
. He wonders how long he can hold his attention. Every time Gattner turns to look in the direction of his office, he quickly
reels him back with a compliment.

As Gattner starts to swivel around again (he’s obviously started to wonder where Bender is), Richie reaches into the barrel
one more time, scraping bottom.

“To me, it’s just a scalability issue,” he says. “Like all this stuff, it’s live or die on that. You need to ramp up the users
at warp speed or it just isn’t going to work. I know you have a big social element, but I’m just not sure how viral this thing
can be without better incentives. It doesn’t seem to lend itself to building organically through search engines, so I think
you’re going to have to market the hell out of it in pretty traditional ways, and you know, then it comes down to money and
good ideas.”

Gattner seems to have forgotten whom he’s talking to. It’s not Richie, accused killer. It’s like the old days, the two of
them talking shop—or shit—as the case often was.

“You know, here’s the fucked-up thing,” he says. “I told Mark to bring you back. You know he was so fucking paranoid about
you and what you were going to do to him, I said Mark, you know the old saying, ‘Keep your enemies close.’ Well, I said bring
Richie back. We could use him. No one else is going to give him a shot with a decent title and all that. Ask him. I bet he
goes for it. And he kind of looked at me like I was crazy at first but then I could see it hit home. He said, ‘You know, that’s
not bad idea. I’m going to think about it.’ And I said call Richie, feel him out, because frankly I didn’t know if you’d be
interested. I’d heard the Sinatra stuff was going pretty well. But at least he could get a sense of where things stood. I
just said, fuck, confront
this shit directly. I know he tried to contact you when you first got out and to offer to help you out with some cash and
you blew him off. But who knows, maybe things had changed.”

Richie looks down, absorbing Gattner’s little speech, no longer concerned about Bender.

“Well, I wouldn’t have done it, Don. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Mark.”

Just then, over Gattner’s shoulder, behind the receptionist, he sees Bender reappear, smilling as he flashes a quick V for
victory signal with his fingers.

“Maybe he would have made you an offer you couldn’t refuse,” Gattner says.

“He wouldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would’ve killed him to do it.”

C
AROLYN IS PEERING INTO HER REFRIGERATOR, COMTEMPLATING
cracking open a bottle of white wine, when she hears the familiar
ding
of a text message from her phone in the other room. Her text communications have been in the unpleasant camp, so the sound
makes her apprehensive. But this time when she goes to look at her phone, she’s happy to discover the message is from Cogan,
who’s simply written: “Shot up yet?”

“Nope,” she responds. She’s just just come back from having dinner with Beth Hill and is still wearing her work clothes, a
blue pants suit and white blouse. “Long day,” she adds. “Against doctor’s orders staring longingly at unopened sauvignon blanc.”

She watches the phone’s screen, waiting. It has been a long day. In the morning, she and Beth met with McGregor’s estate attorney
about the will and spent the better part of the day going over finances, which she’d used as an excuse to keep stiff-arming
Madden. Meanwhile, Richie Forman had posted bail and Lowenstein was busy filing discovery motions. She’d been trying to keep
abreast of all of that and more.

Ding
.

“Want some help? With shot, not bottle. But can help there 2.”

Shit yes
, she thinks. Then, mustering every reserve of willpower, she writes:

“I’m ok. Thx for offering.”

His reply takes a little longer this time, but not much.

“Saw you on TV today. Looked and sounded good.”

She’s gotten similar messages from a dozen or so other people.
She’s about to type another “Thx” when he tacks on another sentence:

“Have some info for you.”

“About what?”

“Ok if I stop by?”

“When?”

The next text that comes through is actually a picture. It’s thumbnail sized and while she can see that it’s a picture of
him, she taps on it to enlarge. The background looks familiar despite the poor lighting.

She goes to the door and opens it, and there he is, standing there with his phone in his hand.

“Oh, hello,” he says.

Expressionless, she stares at him a moment, then looks down at her phone and types: “Not amused.”

After the message arrives, he types back, “Don’t be a hardass. I know you’re happy I’m here. I saw you smiling through the
window when you were reading my texts.”

“Really not amused now,” she types. “Spying on me?”

“Yes,” he writes back. “But not in a creepy way.”

She struggles to suppress a smile. To stifle it, she looks up and says:

“What’s the info?”

“Let me shoot you up and I’ll talk to you about it.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Cogan,” she says, then turns and walks back inside, leaving the door open behind her.

“Ass or arm?” he asks, following her into the living room.

“What?”

“Where do you want it?”

She ignores the question, giving his appearance a more thorough inspection. On second glance, his clothes seem neater than
usual. His hair is combed, too, which leads her to believe he’s on his way out rather than returning home.

“You work today?” she asks.

“Was off. But I went in. For you.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“You were curious about McGregor’s health so I poked around a bit. For the record, let’s just say I overheard a couple of
nurses gossiping in the courtyard over coffee.”

“Cheeky. What’d you hear?”

“Like you said, the guy had some tightness in his chest, so he went to the emergency room. Told the attending that he had
some pain in his arm, some light-headedness and shortness of breath. You know, classic heart-attack symptoms. So they do an
EKG and some blood work and he seems okay. It’s most likely a GI issue because GI issues end up presenting a lot like cardio
issues, which can cut both ways. You get people thinking they have heartburn when, in fact, it’s a much more serious issue.
Anyway, you’ve got to run the blood test a few times over a twenty-four-hour period to get an accurate reading. There’s this
enzyme called CKMB—it’s a form of creatine kinase—whose levels rise if you have any damage to your heart muscles. Usually
if the levels aren’t elevated on the first test you haven’t had a heart attack, but that isn’t always the case. To be safe,
the attending decided to keep him overnight for observation and to run the follow-up CKMB the next day, along with a stress
test.”

Usually, she likes hearing all the medical terms, which is why he went into the detail he did. But tonight she’s tired and
impatient.

“Okay,” she says. “That’s it?”

She’s kind of hoping it is because that would mean he’d used this pathetic little report as an excuse to get to see her.

“Come on,” he says. “You know I’m better than that.”

“What’d you get?”

“How ’bout we do the shot first?”

“Don’t worry about the shot. I can do it. When you’re genetically involved, you can do the shot.”

He looks at her, his eyes boring into her, their sudden intensity startling her.

“Just let me do the goddamn shot for you, Carolyn,” he says testily and suddenly it dawns on her that something’s a little
different. Something’s changed.

“Okay, okay. Geez.”

“Ass or arm?” he asks, his voice calm again.

“I’ve been doing it in the stomach,” she says, leading him to the bathroom, her heart beating harder. “I’m supposed to pinch
the skin, get a little hunk to jab into. But I’m such a baby.”

The capped, preloaded syringes are in a box on a shelf in a small
linen closet next to a syringe disposal container that has a biohazard warning symbol on its label. She fishes a syringe out
of the box and hands it to him along with a couple of alcohol swabs.

“Drop your pants, Counselor,” he says nonchalantly, tearing open one of the alcohol swabs.

She knows full well she can just expose the top of her rump and that’ll be enough. But with a little glint in her eye, she
decides to take him literally. She unbuttons her pants, pulls the zipper down, then tucks her thumbs under the elastic band
of her panties and slowly slides both layers to her knees, leaving her blouse dangling there, providing a bit of coverage.
Turning away and bending forward slightly, she rests her left hand on the counter and then lifts the back of her blouse from
the bottom with her right hand.

“Don’t miss,” she says, looking back over her shoulder.

She watches his eyes drift downward and his Adam’s apple rise, then fall, as he goes to work with the alcohol swab on a spot
just below her hip on the right side. He pulls the syringe’s cap off with his teeth, and jabs her with the needle, causing
her to wince. It’s over in a second. He sets the syringe aside, applies some pressure to the pricked area with the second
swab, then guides her blouse back down her ass, conveniently managing to brush the back of his hand against her skin.

She turns to face him and they stand there for a moment staring at each other. But before he gets too many ideas she reaches
down and slowly and deliberately wiggles her pants and underwear up her legs. When everything’s back in place, she goes to
the closet and gets the container for the used syringes and hands it to him.

“So what’d you hear? Or were you just bullshitting me so you could stick me?”

“Come on.”

She heads back to the kitchen and decides to open the bottle of wine after all. She needs something to do with her hands,
afraid what they might do if they’re not occupied. But just as she’s about to give the screw cap a twist he says, “Hold up,”
and takes the bottle from her.

“Here’s the deal,” he says. “The guy was in the hospital almost two years ago. I pulled his chart. Nothing too exciting. They
prescribed antacids, referred him to a GI, told him he might consider getting
an endoscopy for piece of mind. Who knows, it could be severe heartburn, an ulcer, maybe even an anxiety attack. Whatever.
They discharged him the next afternoon. I figure I’m going to leave it at that but then I decide what the hell, I know one
of the nurses, Janie, who did the blood work on him the next day, maybe she remembers something.

“I find out she’s on duty so I swing over to have a chat with her,” he continues. “And I say, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you noticed
but this guy McGregor who got killed the other night and who’s been in all the papers spent the night in the cardio wing about
two years ago. And I figure she’d draw a blank but instead, you know, her eyes open wide and she asks me whether the police
have talked to me. I shake my head, and playing it dumb I say, ‘Uh, no. Why, have they talked to you?’

“She kind of mumbles something and I can’t quite tell what she’s saying, so I ask her to say it again. And then she tells
me she put in a call. They had some sort of tip line and she put in a call. And, you know, I’m a little surprised. I say,
‘Why would you do that?’”

Now Carolyn’s the one with the wide eyes.

“She spoke to the police?” she asks. “Why?”

“I’m getting to that.”

He says Janie didn’t want to talk about it in the hospital so he met her a little while later for a cup of coffee outside
in the courtyard. That’s when she told him why she remembered the guy: He’d said some things in the hospital that had concerned
her at the time. She didn’t know if he was joking or exaggerating but he said a few things that were a little disturbing.

“To her? What, did he try to pick her up or something?”

“Actually, no. He wasn’t talking to her. She just overheard him talking in the room.”

“To whom?”

Cogan explains that McGregor had apparently asked for a private room but they didn’t have one so they stuck him in the bed
they had available, which was in a room with this guy in his thirties who’d tried to commit suicide. He’d gone to a motel
and taken a bunch of sleeping pills and if a maid hadn’t seen him through the drapes lying there on the bed, he probably would
have succeeded.

A nurse was sitting in a chair in the room near the door when McGregor got there. He noticed the woman sitting there and asked
Janie about it when she came in to give him some dinner. She quietly explained that his roommate had tried to harm himself
so they had to keep a nurse on watch to make sure he didn’t try it again. It was the manifestation of the term “suicide watch.”

McGregor seemed impressed. It suddenly occurred to him that he was in a real hospital with real people who were really sick
and that he wasn’t in some convalescent home or something like that. And he was joking around about the seriousness of the
place when he said, “What if someone is trying to do harm to you, would you get a nurse like that?”

What did he mean, someone? Janie asked.

“Like another person,” he said.

And she said no, you’d probably get an actual police officer. And he said something like, “Oh come on, you look tough, you’d
protect me, wouldn’t you?”

“So he was hitting on her,” Carolyn interrupted. “What’s this Janie look like?”

“She’s fine. She’s married and has two kids.”

“Never stopped you.”

“Please.”

“Sorry. That wasn’t nice. Go on.”

“Well, the guy wakes up the next day, and they bring in a psychiatrist to speak with him. That’s standard procedure.”

Because there was only a curtain divider in the room, McGregor could hear the whole conversation. Janie came back later that
morning and heard the two of them talking. McGregor was asking the guy about what it was like to wake up and find out he wasn’t
dead. And then he said something to the effect of “Well, at least you don’t have your wife wanting you dead.” And Janie realized
from the way he said it he might not be joking. Innocently enough, she asked:

“Where is your wife, Mr. McGregor? Has she been here to visit you?”

“I didn’t even tell her I was here,” he said. “I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. She’s probably hoping I drove off
a cliff.”

She vividly remembered him saying that, which really got to her.
I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction
.

“But she didn’t say anything to anybody at the time?” Carolyn asks. “There’s no formal record of this? No police report or
anything?”

“I don’t think so. I think she just called this tip line now because she saw the number in the paper.”

She’d heard from Madden that they’d received several hundred tips about people who’d either seen Richie Forman with Beth Hill
the day of the murder or claimed to have information related to the murder. She somehow doubted a conversation in a hospital
room nearly two years ago would have made it high on their call-back priority list. But chances were good one of the detectives
would eventually speak with Janie to check whether there really was anything to the tip.

She’s asking herself that question now. So what, the guy spouts off about his wife two years ago in his hospital room. If
it had happened a week or two ago, even last month, it would have carried more weight. But a couple of years? Big deal. People
were always spouting off about their spouses. She had a friend who said she could never have a gun in the house because she
was afraid she’d shoot her husband. She was completely serious, though that hadn’t stopped her from being married to the guy
for twenty-one years. They were mostly good years but he sometimes pissed her off so much that she didn’t know what she was
capable of.

“If McGregor thinks his wife wants to kill him, he doesn’t leave her most of his estate,” she says to Cogan, thinking aloud.
“That just doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe it was a rough patch. I’m just telling you what I overheard and how it relates to your new
client. But you figure that if he’s saying this stuff to a nurse in the hospital, he’s probably told other people the same
thing. That’s the way it usually works.”

He has a point, she thinks, her mind drifting to what Beth told her back at the hotel.
That drug is incredibly intense and wonderful for about twenty minutes. It’s awesome. But the side effect, the hangover, whatever
you want to call it, is just brutal
.