Crime Plus Music (10 page)

Okay, that wasn't true, but before I might have fantasized about manufacturing an encounter. It was that song, looping through my head, that prompted me to actually do it. The edgy sound of the drum hammered in my head, driving me forward.

I couldn't focus on my workout, but I did catch up with Steven after my shower. He must have been running late because he was coming into the locker room when I was on my way out. He had a good six inches on me, and he was broader in the shoulders. He had a full head of blond hair and a wispy soul patch that he thought made him look youthful and cool. In fact, it made him look like a moron.

He nodded at me as he passed. That was how it was with us. He figured I was into his wife, so he regarded me with polite contempt. Ours was a battle he had already won, and he liked to swagger past me in a fog of perpetual conquest. I usually let him get away with it.

“Hey, Steven,” I said. I stopped, forcing him to stop. I was taking command of the conversation, not letting him call the shots.

He looked at me, puzzled.

“I saw Carla today,” I told him.

He cocked his head. “Yeah? She works in your office, so that doesn't seem like such a big deal.”

“No, what I'm saying is, I
saw
her. You know what I mean?”

He was now staring at me. He took a step closer. “No, what do you mean? What exactly are you trying to say about my wife?”

“I'm not saying anything about her,” I said. “I don't think she's the subject of this conversation at all.”

He was now moving his head back and forth, like he was studying some kind of oddity he couldn't quite figure out. “I don't know what you're talking about, man.”

I shrugged. “Okay, Steve.”

He walked away, not bothering to correct me about his name. He'd gotten the message, I decided. He was on notice.

I sat in the car after, my hands trembling so badly I could barely work my phone as I synched up the Beat Happening song to the sound system. The music washed over me while I thought about doing things that, just a few weeks ago, would have been unimaginable. I was a doctor, I told myself. I make decisions of life and death. I am untamed.

C
ARLA
DIDN
'
T
SAY
ANYTHING
TO
me at work the next day, but she was much less walled off. The bruise was barely visible under her makeup now.

Before the onslaught of patients began, she came into my office to talk about nothing in particular, and laughed at some jokey things I said, maybe more loudly than they deserved. The next day she asked me if I wanted to go to lunch, and while we were waiting for the check, she brief ly put her hand on mine.

Talking to Steven had somehow shaken things loose. All my life I'd avoided making enemies, avoided conflicts that weren't necessarily my own, but now I began to wonder how much I might have missed by not sticking my neck out more. I'd always liked being low-key and laid-back. Maybe I liked being untamed even more, and that meant I needed to consider taking things to the next level. It was one thing to think about doing something that had once been inconceivable. It was another to make a plan, to figure out how to cover my tracks.

Carla's touch, that fleeting brush of her fingertips against the back of my hand, seemed so full of promise. What was she doing with a guy like Steven, anyhow? Even if he hadn't been the kind of person who hit his wife, he would have been beneath her. She needed to move on, find someone more worthy, and I wasn't afraid to help her.

I was sure she was prepared to help me, which was why I was surprised when she asked me if I wanted to go out that weekend with her and Steven and a woman she thought I might like. Were my attentions making her uncomfortable? Was this her polite way of getting me off her back?

More likely, I decided, it was her way of spending time with me outside of work in a way that would be acceptable to her husband.

We met on Friday night at a Thai restaurant. The woman, whose name was Patti, seemed nice enough. She was closer to my age than Carla's, and pretty in a generic best-friend-on-a-sitcom way, but she didn't seem terribly interesting.

“I like trying lots of different things,” Steven announced after we sat down. “I'm for sharing.”

This was not the first time I'd had to have this conversation with him. He did it to get on my nerves, to see if I would push back. “Sharing's fine with me,” I said, “but remember that I don't eat meat.”

“You want to make all of us eat tofu?” Steven asked, squinting at me.

“I don't want to make you do anything,” I told him. “I'm just letting you know that if you order food with meat, I won't have any.”

“Less for you then!” Steven said with a laugh.

“I can order something vegetarian,” Carla volunteered.

He turned to her. “You want to change how you live for this guy? Let him be flexible for once and eat meat.”

“It's not really the same thing,” Patti mused. “I can get something vegetarian too.”

The three of us ended up sharing. Steven ordered something with pork, maybe because it was the most offensive meat he could think of—at least two major meat-eating religions shunned it.

The ordering debacle was the highlight of dinner, but the rest of the meal didn't go as well. I tried to steer the conversation to politics, mostly because I knew Carla followed current events closely and Steven did not, but Patti wasn't very skillful at hiding her boredom.

“I don't keep up with that stuff,” she said to me. “It's so depressing!” She mostly wanted to talk about the popular reality shows—the ones with the singers and the people who are competing to get married—but I didn't follow those. Everyone else did, so I checked out while they talked.

When Carla reached for some hot sauce, her sleeve rode up, and I noticed a dark bruise on her forearm. Maybe it had been there a while, but it looked raw and new. Her eyes met mine for a moment, and she looked away.

Steven was watching us. He grinned at me with a
What are you going to do about it?
look. I stared right back, hoping to convey that I knew precisely what I was going to do about it even though I had not the foggiest idea. I dared a look over at Carla, and her eyes met mine, only for a second, but I knew she was begging me for help. She needed me to do something. She couldn't leave him without my help.

We went our separate ways after the meal. It was pretty clear I hadn't clicked with Patti, and it seemed easier to end things. I needed some time to figure out my next move, anyhow. Or, at least, I had to go over the details of my next move, which had been taking shape in my head. I knew what I had to do, and I'd been preparing to do it. I just had to pick my time.

It turns out the time picked me. The next day Steven called me up. He said Carla was going out of town to visit her sister, and maybe I wanted to come over for a few drinks. He said he wanted to clear the air between us. I did not want to have some sort of confrontation with him. In Steven's mind, this was going to end with a fight or with a bro hug, and neither of those appealed to me. The old me would have refused, but I had Beat Happening grating discordantly in my head, so I told him it sounded like a great idea.

He told me to come by at five. He said he'd crack open some beer and order up some pizza. I had no doubt the pizza would come with pepperoni. I wasn't going to eat pepperoni to show I was a good guy, and I wasn't going to pick the meat off daintily like a bitch. I had a third option in mind.

He was wearing workout clothes when he answered the door, but he didn't look sweaty. Maybe he just wanted to show off his muscles.

I came in and he put a bottle of beer in my hand. There was a college football game on the television, and I pretended to make small talk but Steven wasn't even trying, and after a few failed attempts I gave up. I finished my beer, and when Steven didn't offer me another one, I went to the refrigerator and helped myself.

A few minutes later, the pizza came, and of course it was sprinkled with pepperoni. “Help yourself,” Steven said.

I smiled. “I'm okay.”

“What? You watching your girlish figure?”

“I don't eat meat,” I told him, like we'd never had this conversation.

He shrugged. “You can just pick them off and give them to me. I'll eat them.”

“I'm fine,” I said.

He grinned at me. “Not eating meat. Does that help you get pussy? Because the only other explanation is that you are a pussy.”

I set down my beer. “Steven, you're being hostile.”

“I love the fancy talk,” he said.

“I'm not being fancy, I'm being straight. You were hostile last night, and you're hostile today. You said you wanted to clear the air, so go ahead and clear it.”

“Fine,” he said. “Let's talk about how you're looking to fuck my wife.”

“Hold on,” I began, but he cut me off.

“Don't try to deny it. Your own wife fucked around on you, and now—what? You're looking for some cosmic payback? Do it on your own time. Play your games somewhere else. You and Carla have to work together, and we can be chums, but I want you to stop trying to get her into bed with you, because it's not going to happen. Your flirting is embarrassing to you and insulting to me. I can't let it stand.”

“I'm not looking to sleep with Carla,” I told him, not knowing if this was true or not. “I'm trying to protect her.” This was definitely true.

“From what?” he sneered. “Life with a meathead?”

I held up my hands. I was about to excuse myself, say that this was none of my business and get the hell out of there. That's what I wanted to do, and it's what I knew I should do, but I had that song telling me I couldn't stop. This was me untamed, not the old me. So I lowered my hands and I got ready.

I'd thought about this, played it out in my head over and over again until it felt like a memory. It was what I intended to do, but I never really believed it would happen. Yet the moment was here. Wheels were turning and gears were grinding, and I had to go forward. It was like the first time I operated. I knew, on some level, that I could walk away, but I also knew I couldn't retreat and live with myself. Carla needed me to step up.

“I know you're hurting her,” I said.

His face went red like I'd slapped him. Maybe no one had ever dared to speak it aloud before. Maybe it was a dark secret, even between the two of them. He took a step toward me. “I'm doing what?” he demanded. He tossed his beer bottle against the wall. It exploded in a spray of glass and moisture. “I'm doing what?”

“You think people don't know?” I stood my ground. I wasn't going to be intimidated by a wife beater.

“I'm going to give you a chance to walk this back,” he said through clenched teeth. “Because what you're saying is not something I can let you get away with, so you damn well better unsay it.”

“You think somehow it's not obvious?” I asked. “You think I'm the only one to see it?”

“You'd just better shut the fuck up,” he said through clenched teeth. “My father beat my mom, and as a kid, as a little kid, I vowed I would not hurt a woman. So let me tell you that what you're saying is complete and utter bullshit.”

“This sort of thing runs in families,” I said “That's probably why you're doing it. You can't help it. It's like hardwired in your DNA. Isn't it, Steve?”

He took a step toward me, his fist curled into a ball, and this was where things were going to get tricky. If I made a mistake, I was going to get worse that beaten, I was going to get caught. This would be the end of everything. I'd put my life on the line for Carla. It's what she needed from me.

Steven was coming at me, ready for me to run or face him or try to talk him down. I don't know what he was expecting, but it wasn't that I would drop and leap forward, tackling him by his legs.

He didn't fall, and he didn't need to. I only needed a second to get the hypodermic out. It was in my hand, with the cap off, in a second. I rammed it into his Nikes, getting him in the side of the foot, and I plunged the lethal dose of succinylcholine into his blood. Maybe it would leave a mark, maybe not, but I doubted anyone would be hunting for signs of foul play.

Steven glanced down at me. He looked at the needle in my hand, trying to comprehend what I was up to. Did he think that I was just trying to calm him—that doctors carried sedatives at all times in case of emergency—or did he begin to realize how far I was willing to go to protect Carla? He staggered back, the drug already taking effect, or maybe it was just the shock. If the succinylcholine hadn't kicked in yet, it would only be a few more seconds. I collected the cap for the needle and then went out went out back with the kitchen garbage. I knew they kept their trash in the alley behind the house, along with the rest of the neighbors. I put the needle in a tangled mass of aluminum foil and placed the trash bag in a neighbor's can. It wasn't a foolproof plan, but succinylcholine is hard to detect, especially if no one is trying to find it. If they figured out what got him, then I was pretty much toast anyhow. They wouldn't need the needle to pin it on me. Putting it in the neighbor's can was more to soothe me than cover my tracks.

By the time I got back to the house, Steven was dead. I performed CPR on him to make things look good, and then I called 911. I stood in the quiet house, Beat Happening pounding in my head, thinking about how it had been a pretty serious mistake for him to hurt someone I cared about.

T
HE
COPS
SUSPECTED
NOTHING
. S
TEVEN
was young for heart failure, but he ate badly and drank a lot of beer and while these things were unusual, they weren't unheard of. Cops saw this sort of thing every day. Carla was called back from visiting her sister, but I was long gone by then. I left a few messages on her phone, but she never called me back. She texted and said that she couldn't see anyone right now, but she knew I'd done all I could. I guess that was her way of saying she knew it was me. It was her way of thanking me.