The Pain Nurse (18 page)

She twitched and huddled into herself. “He told me he’d kill me if I told you the truth.”

Will told her she would be safe, and that moment he thought he could leap up and dance along the Serpentine Wall. She had come right out and said it.

“I had to cover for him, don’t you understand?” She hugged herself tightly, staring down at the sidewalk. “He got me my stuff. I woulda died without it. He said he had a dealer under his thumb, that’s just how he said it. And if I didn’t do what he said, he wouldn’t bring me my fix. Then when you guys called, he said he’d kill me if I didn’t say things happened his way.”

“So he wasn’t with you that night?”

She shook her head.

Will asked her again and she nearly shouted “No!” then reached back in her coat pocket, pulled out the pack, and lit another cigarette. She was crying now. “Are you gonna arrest me? Take me to jail? I’m clean now. I got a baby now, Detective Will, please, God, don’t…”

“Just tell me the truth, Darlene.”

“It’s going to be all right,” Cheryl Beth said.

Darlene rubbed her nose and scrunched her face. “Who are you, girl? You don’t have a cop face.”

Will intervened. “What if I told you she was a witness.”

Suddenly Darlene seemed to age another ten years and her face turned bright red before losing its color entirely. Even the veiny damage from her boyfriend’s fist seemed to drain of blood. “Wha…? How is that possible? Oh, fuck. Bud said nobody could…” Her words became an unintelligible blubber with the occasional “they’re gonna take my baby” coming through. Will put his hand on her arm and she fell into his shoulder bawling. He fought not to tilt sideways into Cheryl Beth.

“Tell me how it happened, Darlene. This doesn’t have to go badly for you if you tell the truth.”

“He just told me to tell you that he was with me. He said the bosses were after him, trying to fire him. I never knew anything about his wife being killed…”

“So you covered for him.”

She nodded, kept crying. She was shivering and her teeth chattered from the cold. “But he said nobody would know, nobody would see us. I didn’t know what he was going to do. I swear to God, I swear to God…”

Every nerve tensed in Will’s body. He had used the word “witness” to describe Cheryl Beth. It had opened all the doors. He said, “So you didn’t think anybody would see. Don’t you want to tell your side of the story?”

She sat back up, miraculously avoiding leaving cigarette burns in Will’s overcoat. She leaned out again to stare at Cheryl Beth.

“Bud brought that boy home. Bud was a kinky one, you know? We did some weird stuff, you know? He really liked it. But no way was I goin’ to fuck some street nigger, much less a retard. Poor thing, looked scared as hell. Bud could do that to you. But he told us what to do.” She gently touched her black eye. “I’m cold, Detective Will.”

“Just tell it the way you remember it, Darlene.”

She spoke slowly, the mist from her breath and cigarette smoke wreathing her head. “Bud told me to take off my clothes and get in bed and play with myself. ‘Put on a show for him,’ he said. And he had that boy sit in a chair and watch me.” She hesitated, then continued. “Bud told him to jerk off in this plastic bottle he gave him. That’s what we did. That’s all we did. And Bud let the boy go. I just thought it was weird shit, you know? I said, ‘Why you keeping his come in that bottle?’ He didn’t answer. Nobody was gonna get hurt.”

She had pulled him through a door he didn’t even know existed. He had a dozen questions, but didn’t dare ask them. She believed Cheryl Beth had seen this. Will couldn’t let her think otherwise.

Suddenly Darlene was talking rapidly, trying to purge it from her memory. “I never knew what Bud was going to do. I swear to God. That morning, he come by, all agitated. He said he found her body, Theresa. He swore to me that he didn’t kill her, but he said he had to put that boy’s come on her body because the other cops would frame him, say he done it because he was the husband and she had a restraining order against him and all. He told me what to say. God, I was scared! Fuck, it was hard keeping my head straight.”

“So,” Will said, “just to be clear, did you know who Bud brought home that night?”

“I never seen him before. Just said his name was Craig.”

“The one we arrested for murder, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“And when did Bud bring him home to you, when did you do this?”

“It was two nights before the killing.”

“How do you remember that, what with the meth and all?”

She smiled, sniffled loudly. “It was my birthday.”

Will stared into the opaque river and said nothing. The day was cold and dying. At last he spoke through the chill, “Darlene, you’re going to have to give a statement. Are you willing to do that?”

“Yes. Yes, I am…just let me keep my baby.”

He patted her arm and told her she could go. She stubbed out the last Camel, tossed it into the growing pile of cigarette filters on the sidewalk, and stood. She walked two steps and turned.

“I always liked you, Detective Will. Always thought you were fair. I never believed what Bud said about you.”

It was a moment of premonition, the nanosecond where the bullet leaves the rifle and strikes a target even before its sound is heard. But Will asked, “What did Bud say?”

“That you killed Theresa.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Cheryl Beth was relieved for the physical effort of folding the wheelchair and lifting it into the back of her car. When she almost lost control of it, nearly tossing it into the air, she knew the level of her emotions. Yet she could say nothing once she was in the car. Will was on his cell phone, obviously talking to Detective Dodds. She could only hear his end of the conversation.

“Darlene gave it all up…calm down…never mind why I’m not in the hospital…”

She could hear the angry percussions of Dodds’ voice coming through Will’s phone, interrupting nearly every sentence, but she couldn’t make out the words.

“Are you done now? She admits he wasn’t with her the night Theresa died, and she explained how he planted the DNA evidence…of course, I Mirandized her…She’s got a kid now, so you’ve got leverage…He turned her into a tweaker but she says she’s clean now…She’s in the same crappy little house, yes, she’s there…You’ve got to get over there now and take her statement, get her protected, and get a warrant out on him. Pull him in for anything, just get him and hold him…I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job…Because somebody had to…You know where to find me.”

She listened to Will talk, such enthusiasm in his voice. Her emotions were lava under pressure.

“Will Borders, you’d better the hell tell me what’s going on because there’s nothing I hate more than being lied to.” She turned in the seat to face him, refusing to break eye contact, talking as adamantly with her hands as with her voice. “I’ve watched you these weeks as you’ve struggled and worked, and I’ve admired you. I never would have let you hurt as long as you did if I’d known and I stopped it. And then I got you out today, you go and get a damned gun, and this trailer girl talks about this man saying you killed that woman, and, God, you’d better stop lying to me right now! I’m sick of people lying to me! You’d better tell me what’s going on right now!”

She threw it out as the words boiled out of her mind. One of the docs used to make gentle fun of her when she was that intense, the exclamation points shooting out of her, calling it “running hot.” She was running hot. She stared at Will as he meekly put his phone away and reached down to rearrange his left leg. His eyes were wide.

“What do you want to know?”

“Did you kill her?”

“No.”

“Then why did that girl say you did? Why did Lennie think you were the devil?”

“You think I killed Christine Lustig? That would be quite a trick.”

“Don’t play games with me,” she snapped. “You know exactly what I mean.”

“I didn’t kill Theresa.”

“How do I know that?” she demanded.

“I was with Dodds that night.”

“But he said you lied to him. I heard you two, fighting in the morgue. He said you left homicide because he fired you, because you lied to him.” She pushed herself back into the seat and stared out at the park. “What did you lie about?”

He sighed and adjusted his tie. “Theresa.”

Something in the way that he said her name crashed against Cheryl Beth’s anger and mistrust, leaving her off balance. She said, “Were you sleeping with her?”

“Yes.”

There it was. Cheryl Beth looked straight ahead. The park was becoming a faded dream as their breath fogged over the windshield. It was growing cold inside the car, but she didn’t make a move to turn the key.

Will’s voice was drained of its previous excitement. “It was three years ago. I walked into a bar downtown. It was a slow evening and there weren’t many people there. I walked between the tables and knocked her purse over, and I bent down to help her. We talked for a minute. She looked so sad. I’d never seen anyone look so sad. But there was this beauty, this grace, hidden behind it. So I sent a drink over to her table, and in a minute she came and joined me…”

“You were cheating on your wife?” She noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, but his chart showed a contact, Cynthia Holland, as his wife.

He gave a sour laugh. “We’d separated, again. She was seeing a man on the side. Or was it two?”

“So you and this woman…”

“Her name was Theresa.”

His voice sounded as if it had hit a sandbar.

“She didn’t want to get involved with a cop again,” he said. “But we did.” He spoke more slowly, pausing, his mind far from the cold inside of the car. “She’d never had anybody be good to her. Never had flowers sent to her. A car door opened for her.”

“Her husband, Bud, he found out?”

“They were separated. I knew Bud Chambers years ago, on patrol. We weren’t friends. The more I heard about the way he had treated her, I hated him. I checked him out. He was still a patrolman, never even made sergeant. He had a load of brutality complaints. But he was part of the ole-boy network on the force.” He shook his head. “She deserved so much better. But it was, like, I don’t know, once Cindy realized I was involved with somebody she suddenly said she wanted me back. I knew better, but it was hard. Cindy was the woman I’d married. But Theresa…”

He huddled deeper in his coat. “Her daughter kept pressing her to reconcile with Bud. The girl was, maybe, sixteen then. She didn’t know any better, wanted mom and dad together. Theresa was very guilt-ridden about it. She said she was probably doing the wrong thing, making the biggest mistake of her life. But she told me she’d decided to try again with Bud. I didn’t hear from her for almost a year. Then, the week before…” He swallowed hard. “Before she was murdered. She called and said he had moved out again. She’d thrown him out and gotten a restraining order. She said she didn’t want for me to have to get involved in it. But she said she’d come over soon. We made a date. It was for the day after…after…”

He took a gulp of air. “We were the primaries. The first detectives called to the scene. It was a beautiful day. Like the first real spring day. I prayed she had moved, that someone else was at that address. But I knew. I knew.” His voice slowed as he seemed to struggle to get the words out. “I knew he did it. I swore to her I’d make him pay, but I never did. I got him off the force, but he got away with it. And with those other girls he killed to cover his tracks. And now with Christine. He’s a killer. Who knows why? Who cares?”

She asked why he didn’t tell Dodds that he had been involved with Theresa Chambers.

“I knew how he’d react,” Will said. “It would be a distraction, too. I knew Bud did it. And command might take me off the case—too close to the victim and all that. So I didn’t tell him for two weeks, when the next woman was killed. When I did, he said he didn’t want to work with me anymore. He never told anyone. We stayed together until Craig Factor was convicted and everybody said we were supercops. But our friendship was over. I transferred to Internal Investigations, to try to get some of these dirtbag cops off the streets.” He paused. “That’s what I told myself. I just kept seeing her face, seeing her dead…”

Cheryl Beth felt light enough to float away, felt wetness at the edges of her eyes.

“Did you love her?”

Will didn’t answer. She could see him struggling not to cry. Men were funny that way. Most never knew the release of a good cry. She fought the impulse to take him in her arms. He was just a patient. She had hugged and comforted hundreds of patients. Why was she struggling? What was she struggling with? He leaned away from her, against the car door.

“Weepy Borders,” he laughed and half-sobbed.

“What?”

“Long story.”

Cheryl Beth tried to lighten her voice. “Did you have fun with her?”

“Oh, yeah,” he rasped. “I never knew it was possible.”

She started the car and drove slowly out of the park and into the downtown streets. As the defroster cleared the windshield, rain began pecking at the glass.

“You blame yourself.”

He was staring out the passenger-side window as they passed Fountain Square, decorated for Christmas, an impressionist painting as umbrella-shrouded office workers and shoppers scurried across, the buildings dissolving in the rain. He stared past her into Garfield Park, magically lit by the ornate streetlamps. It was five thirty and full dark. Cincinnati still had the bones of the major American metropolis it once was.

“Let’s just say when the tumor was found, I figured that God had given me what I deserved.”

“How can you say that?” Cheryl Beth gripped the wheel tightly. “I grew up with that crap, and that’s not the God I worship. Stuff happens, Will. Some gene betrayed you. It’s not the Lord’s punishment for anything you did or didn’t do with Theresa. You’re not to blame for what happened.”

He laughed mordantly. “Well, I haven’t had an erection since the surgery, so let’s say I don’t have to worry about women anymore.”

They were stopped at a traffic light. Cheryl Beth turned to him. “Stick out your tongue. Go ahead, I’m a nurse. Stick out your tongue.”

He did.

“You’ve got everything you need to make a woman happy.”

The light changed and her tires spun on the pavement. She could feel herself turning bright red. That was a routine she had done before with spinal patients, a little bit of fun, strictly professional. Now she was burning with embarrassment. It faded only slowly as she drove up the hill on Vine Street and the windshield wipers revealed the sleet that was now coming down hard. She drove with extra care. The sleet clung to the hood of the car, slathered the street. If it froze… But she also drove slowly because she didn’t want the day to end.

“Did you miss being a homicide detective?” She felt herself talking nervously, to break the spell that had fallen into the car.

“Some days,” he said. “I loved my job. That may be different from a lot of cops. They start out loving it, showing up at work early, everything’s new, they work past their shift without even thinking about filing an overtime slip. Later, it changes. A lot of them get bitter, hate everybody, marriages fall apart. Then they wait for their pensions. The best ones get in a zone. They know the job, the politics, how to put a case together and testify. They make friends off the job.”

“Internal affairs must have been hard. Other cops don’t like you.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But there’s a freedom to it, if you do it right. There are two kinds of Internal Investigations cops—the yes men, and the ones who believe in getting the facts and serving the public and your fellow officers. You want to make the bad cops go away and make sure the good ones stay. You have to be willing to ask important people embarrassing questions sometimes, and that upsets the bosses. But the chief has had my back.”

Cheryl Beth gave him a gentle laugh. “You sound like an idealist.”

Will laughed and shook his head. “An idealist and a philosopher. And a realist. That’s a good cop. Dodds is that way, I give him that. But you can never let the idealist or philosopher part show, because you’re surrounded by colleagues who believe the world is fucked. Pardon my language. They’re the realists.”

“That’s too bad. Have you ever shot someone?” She was instantly sorry she had asked.

“I have no problem killing bad humans.”

He said it dispassionately, then quickly asked about the politics of her job. “Me? I fight the bureaucracy, but mostly I try to put people at ease, make them laugh. Get them to trust me. I ask myself, ‘How do you get people to do things they’ve never done before?’”

“You mean the bosses?”

“Bosses, patients, doctors, nurses.”

Finally the neuro-rehab entrance became unavoidable, and she pulled under the overhang.

“Thank you,” Will said. “I had…”

“I know.”

“Tomorrow’s Christmas eve. I couldn’t get out to buy you a Christmas present, so this will have to do.”

He reached in his pocket and handed her a piece of white paper. It was folded into the shape of a card, and on the cover were pencil sketches of a decorated tree and a pretty good likeness of Cheryl Beth in her lab coat and scrubs. “My best gift this Christmas…” was written in block letters. She opened it and read, “is no pain.” It was signed, “Thank you, Cheryl Beth—Will.”

“You drew this?”

He nodded.

“You’re quite an artist.”

“My dad said it was a waste of time. It’s come in handy on a crime scene or two.”

Now she was the one fighting back tears. “Thank you.”

She unbuckled her seat belt and then undid his. “I can’t let you take that inside.” She pointed to the gun.

“There’s a killer on the loose.”

She gave a slight smile and shook her head.

“I’m a police officer.”

“Well, right now the pain nurse is pulling rank.” She opened the glove box and he reluctantly slid the holster and pistol inside. She closed it carefully and locked it.

“Do you trust me, Cheryl Beth?” He turned as much as he could to face her. He looked drained and yet still handsome. She leaned over and kissed his cheek.

“I don’t know,” she said, and opened the door to get the wheelchair.