No Accident (32 page)

At the tenth-floor landing, Alex cautiously opened the door to the interior hallway. His lungs felt like he’d inhaled burning smoke, and his thighs felt like clay. He panted while he walked toward Sheila’s apartment, trying to recover his breath. As he neared the middle of the hallway, the light above the elevator doors lit up and a bell chimed. The doors opened, and Alex was shocked to see Luke, standing in front of a cop in body armor and a helmet.

Luke was as blasé as ever. “You should really try the elevator on the way down,” he said to Alex.

“How did you—”

Luke and the cop stepped out of the elevator. “When we spotted you entering the building, I made the lieutenant see that the only way to stop you from making a mess of things was to send me up to talk with Crash. So, thank you, I guess.” Luke turned to the cop. “See you soon.” Then Luke walked quickly toward Sheila’s apartment.

Alex muscled his way even with Luke, which Luke seemed to expect, and they walked as a pair to the apartment door.

“By the way,” Luke said, “how long
have you been screwing my wife?”

“Not as long as you’ve cheated on her.”

That made Luke laugh. At Sheila’s door, Luke knocked loudly. “Crash, it’s me,” he called. “I’ve got Sheila’s boyfriend with me. We’re coming in.”

Luke opened the door slowly, and they both entered. The lights were off inside the apartment, but the sun was beginning to rise and everything was visible in grays that were starting to warm into color. Alex saw Crash standing in the living room. Sheila sat on the couch in her pajamas. She wasn’t tied up. Crash was relying on fear to keep her in place. She sure looked afraid.

“Crash,” Luke said. “I can get you out of this, but you’ve got to listen to me.”

“I want my son,” Crash said.

Sheila unexpectedly began crying, and the others turned to watch her. “You see this, Luke?” she said between sobs. “This is all your fault.”

“My fault?”

“Yes, take responsibility for once, will you? If you hadn’t gone back on the settlement I’d be”—she sniffled loudly—“in Switzerland by now.”

“Christ, Sheila, that was your choice. Don’t put that on me.”

Alex watched Luke and Sheila with wonder and mild embarrassment at the spectacle of them squabbling at a moment like this.

“Oh, you’re impossible,” Sheila said, sniffling again. “Crash, hand me my purse, will you? I’ve got some tissues in there.”

Crash brought her the purse from across the room. Sheila dug through it, pulled out a tissue and blew her nose loudly. “That’s better,” she said. Then she turned to Luke. “So how are you going to get us out of this one, genius?”

Luke ignored her and looked at his friend. “Crash, ever since Petra died, I’ve been trying to find you, so I can protect you from the police. I’ve talked to lawyers, Crash, the best in the business, and you’ve got a great basis for an insanity plea.”

Crash’s eyes flashed with anger. “I’m not crazy.”

“Be practical, Crash. You can’t be with Dmitri if you’re in jail for the rest of your life. And that’s where you’re headed, unless you listen to me.”

Crash put his hand on the pistol lying in a holster at his waist. “You’re trying to trick me.”

Luke lifted his palms in innocence. “No, I’m not. That’s why I hired Al Franks”
—Luke cocked his head toward Alex—“to try to find you.”

“You mean Alex Fogarty?”

“Right,” Luke said. “Him.”

“You’re lying to me. You don’t even know his name.” Crash drew his pistol and pointed it at Luke.

“S-stop,” said Luke. “Think about Dmitri. If we’re both gone, who will take care of him?”

“I won’t let my son be raised by you.”

“He’s telling the truth,” Alex heard himself say. Crash looked at him, and the pistol dropped a few inches. “Crash, you know my real name. I lied to Luke because I thought he’d committed a crime and I was trying to find the evidence to take him down. But Luke thought I was a regular employee. He was always trying to help you—he told me so.” Alex’s heartbeat felt like a skipping CD. By speaking, he had delayed the slaughter—and he hoped it was for more than a few seconds.

Crash’s eyes narrowed. “You’re lying, too,” he said. “All I know is, Les Frees talked with you and a few days later he was dead. I can’t prove you killed him. But I don’t need to.”

Crash’s gun was pointed at Alex now. From the corner of his eye Alex saw Sheila pull something small and silver from her purse—Beto’s gun. She squeezed her eyes shut and fired at Crash. The sound from the little gun was like a balloon popping, and off to the side a window blew into bits. Crash’s eyes widened with rage, and he swiveled toward Sheila.

Alex saw what was coming next and without a moment’s thought reached for his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, which he pointed at Crash like a gun. “Crash!” he yelled. Crash’s head turned toward Alex, and the pistol followed. Alex saw the gun pointing at him, the dark hole of the barrel staring at him like a dead eye. He saw Crash’s finger on the trigger, moving.

Sheila fired an instant before Crash did. Her bullet hit Crash’s shoulder just before Crash’s own gun went off. Alex’s left leg flew out from under him and he fell down sideways onto the floor. Only after reaching the floor did he start to feel the pain from the gunshot wound in his thigh.

The SWAT team was already breaking in through the windows, men in black armor with black guns, ready to shoot. Alex saw Luke race across the room and tackle Crash to the ground. The cops put their guns down and swarmed the two, pulling Luke away from Crash and beating Crash into submission.

Alex tried to stand up but couldn’t. He saw he was bleeding a lot. He thought he should do something about that, but couldn’t think of what. As he felt himself pass out, he looked up and saw Sheila’s face above his. She was stroking his hair. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “In spite of yourself.”

Mealtime again. The nurse was different than the one at breakfast, but her manner was the same. Hurried and brusque, she made “good morning” sound like an insult. Alex hated hospitals. He picked indifferently at the food, and then the nurse returned. “I’m not finished yet,” Alex said.

The nurse eyed him wearily and uttered one word before retreating: “Visitor.”

Zeke entered, slowly and quietly, as if he were approaching a sleeping bear.

“Zeke?”

“Hi, Alex. You look upset.”

“No, I was just expecting someone else. Come on in. Gunshot wounds aren’t contagious.”

Zeke smiled at that. “You warm enough?”

Alex said that he was, and Zeke sat down.

“Well?” Alex said.

“I’m sorry.”

Zeke said he was sorry about everything that had happened to Alex, from losing his job at Rampart to
—Zeke just pointed at Alex’s injured leg to indicate the end of the story.

“If I hadn’t gotten you fired, all the rest of it probably wouldn’t have happened,” Zeke said.

You don’t know the half of it
, Alex thought.

“Look,” Zeke said. “When I wrote that story about you and Rampart, I was stuck writing feature articles and I knew my job was in jeopardy. And then, after all that, this week I finally got laid off, if you can believe that.”

“I believe it.”

“I was just trying to write something with zing, maybe get another chance to do investigative work. I didn’t mean to ruin your life.”

“I’m gonna live, you know,” Alex said. “You don’t need to get sappy.”

“About that
 . . .” Zeke said.

“Getting sappy?”

“No—living. Have you thought about what you’ll do when you get out of here?”

“I’m still thinking about that.” When Alex thought about his future, he saw more uncertainty than anything else. He had no job and, after burning bridges at Rampart, no great prospects of getting an investigator’s job at another insurance company. So in a way, he had wide course ahead of him, though no map. The only certainty was his five houses, and five mortgages.

“You’re not going back to Rampart Insurance, are you?”

“No way.”

“Not going to work for your uncle’s—what is it, an accounting firm?”

“Not in a million years.”

Zeke’s face slipped into a grin, then he forced his features back into a more serious expression. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’m out of a job, right? And so I thought, why not keep doing what I do best, but just become my own boss?”

Alex was mystified. “Did you buy a printing press?”

Zeke let himself grin again. “No. I’ve been kicking around this new idea—private journalism.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s simple. If someone wants to know something—they need an investigation or whatever—they hire me, and I find the answer and tell them.”

“It sounds like being a private detective,” Alex said. “Where’s the journalism?”

“Ah, that’s my special twist,” Zeke said, wagging his finger eagerly. “I’ll do the investigations, but I’ll also have a blog where I write about them.”

“Huh,” Alex said. The idea sounded half-baked
—people who needed private detectives generally also wanted privacy. “Private detective plus public blog. Sounds like it could get complicated.”

Zeke waved a hand in front of his face as if shooing a fly. “I’m still working out the details,” he said. “Anyway, you interested?”

“In becoming a private journalist?”

“In becoming my partner,” Zeke said. “In the investigations.”

Alex considered the idea. As he’d thought in the past, working for himself would certainly be more appealing than working for another bureaucratic company. And having a partner could be an advantage. “Are you flexible on the blog aspect?”

Before Zeke could answer, the nurse poked her head in the room again and announced, in the same tone as announcing a change of his bedpan, “A woman’s here to see you. Says her name is Sheila.”

Alex nodded at the nurse. “Zeke, I’ve got to see her.”

Zeke stood up to leave. “Like I said, I’m still working out the details, but think about it, OK?”

Sheila swept into the room, ignoring Zeke and the nurse and walking straight to Alex’s bed, where she wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed him tightly. “I tried and tried to get in before, but they said family only for the first two days.” She released the tightness of her embrace and sat down next to his bed, with her arms still draped around his neck.

“That’s all right,” Alex said breezily. “I hardly remember the first two days. Thanks for the flowers.”

He could tell from her bearing that she was back to being the peremptory Sheila—simply assuming that the world was as she wished it to be. And after Alex had drawn gunfire from Crash in order to save her, it was natural for her to assume that Alex loved her. That’s what Alex expected her to think. That’s what he wanted her to think.

“Oh, I wanted to see you in person,” she said. “After the paramedics took you, I drove straight here, to the hospital, and waited for word. They wouldn’t tell me anything because I’m not family. Finally, yesterday, one of the nurses took pity on me and told me you came through surgery all right. They say you’ll heal well?”

“I’ll limp for a while, but hopefully, yeah.”

“I’m just so glad you’re alive.” Sheila turned to the large vase of flowers by the bed and rearranged them. “I’ve been thinking that some good will come out of all this. For us, I mean.”

“Oh?”

She didn’t seem to notice his wry tone, and continued in earnest. “We started off wrong, Alex, and there wasn’t a lot of trust. I wondered if you loved me, and I even wondered if I loved you. But in the apartment with Crash, you took a bullet for me
—that was quick thinking, pulling out your wallet like a gun.”

“I didn’t really think about it, I just did it.”

“See? That’s what I mean. It showed your true feelings.”

“Yes,” Alex said.

“That you love me.”

“I do, Sheila,” he allowed. That was true. But it didn’t change what Alex had to do. “I know I’ve fought that, but I do. And you fired at Crash first, to save me.”

“Sorry I missed.”

“You got him the second time, and I’m still alive, so that’s all that counts,” Alex said. Seeing her so emotionally open and vulnerable was torturing him, knowing what was coming next. So that he wouldn’t lose his nerve, he
leaned forward. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. Sheila’s eyes brightened with curiosity. “I was thinking about Les Frees, dying in that motel room. You know, I just couldn’t figure out why he was spending the night in a motel in his own town. So after he died, I went there, to his motel room. I found this.” Alex took Frees’ cell phone from the table next to his hospital bed and held it up for Sheila.

“It shows all the phone numbers Frees had contact with on the day he died,” Alex said. “Including all the calls to and from your cell phone.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she said. Her expression showed that she was touched, that she thought this was Alex looking out for her again.

“I figured it was better for you to have it than for the police to find it. Though I’m surprised that you left it in the motel room
—I mean, I assume it was you.”

She nodded her head uncertainly.

“Just for me, just so I know, was it really an overdose?”

She sighed, then came back to his side and squeezed his hand. “He was going to hurt you, Alex. He figured out who you were and that you could identify him as Beto’s killer. I knew he was diabetic, and I had him get a motel room where we could talk and no one would spy on us. I put something in his drink and then injected him. I had to stop him.”

“That’s what I figured.”

She shook her head as if trying to banish the memory. “It’s so ugly, Alex. How long have you known?”

“Since the night Crash came to your apartment. I looked at the phone when I was in the stairwell, and I recognized your phone number in Frees’ call log. I figured the only way it made sense for a grease monkey like Frees to be calling you was if you and Frees were the ones who killed Beto. And the only reason to kill Beto was if Beto really did have evidence of who caused the van to explode. Tell me, Beto’s little slip of paper with the instructions to Jorge Ramirez, the paper I tried to buy from him—it had your handwriting on it, didn’t it?”

“Let’s not speak about it.” She squeezed his hand harder. “Let’s never speak about it.”

“I’d rather not,” he said with a little half smile. “But before I limp off into the sunset with you, I want to know why you did it. The van, I mean.”

“Oh, Alex, it doesn’t matter anymore. And, anyway, it was Frees who actually planted the explosives in the van.”

“But Frees didn’t have the brains to invent a scheme like this. No, the only reason I can see for you to blow up the van and the five employees in it is the same reason your lawyer figured out in Luke’s deposition—the eighteen million dollar bonus, which you and Luke would have kissed goodbye without the life insurance proceeds from the accident.” Alex noticed his voice rising. He quelled his anger. He wasn’t finished. “You needed Luke to earn that bonus so that you could take your share when you divorced.”

Her eyes were filling with tears. “Why are you doing this? Stop this.”

“I just need to know two more things, and then that’s it.”

“OK,” she said. She took a deep breath as if preparing to dive underwater.

“Two little things. First, I need to know there aren’t any other loose ends out there.”

“Loose ends?”

“Like Frees, or Beto. I don’t want us to be looking over our shoulders the rest of our lives. Is there anyone else who was involved in the accident?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “Jorge Ramirez was the only other one, and he’s gone, of course, which was always the plan.”

“OK,” Alex said. “So that gets to the second thing, and after this, we’ll never discuss it again.” Sheila looked at Alex with a mix of hope and fear. The answer to Alex’s first question was enough, legally speaking, and in later years Alex often thought that what he next said to her, and let her say in response, was the most vindictive thing he ever did. Alex gazed into Sheila’s eyes with the most soulful, entreating look he could muster. “Sheila, can you be happy with me now that Luke’s money is gone?”

“Yes.” She responded without hesitation.

“Even though I’m the one who lost it for you.”

“Yes, Alex, I don’t care.”

“Really? Don’t just think about today, how will you feel years from now? After all”—Alex lowered his voice—“you were willing to kill for money.”

“I didn’t kill Jorge and the others. Frees did that.”

“And now the money’s gone. All gone. And take a look at me, Sheila, I’m not the guy who can get that back for you.”

“Oh, Alex, I only did all that because I was focused on Luke, on getting everything I deserved for all the years of his crap that I put up with. But now I don’t care about Luke. I don’t care if he’s rich or poor, or dead or alive.” She leaned toward him and stroked his hair. “I care about you. I’m ready to start over with you.” Tears rolled off her cheeks onto the sheet of Alex’s bed. She gave a little hopeful smile. “So those were your two things?”

“I just thought of another.”

She stood. “Alex, please. This is killing me.”

“When I met with Beto in the park, I almost died too. You sent me to meet Beto knowing that Frees was going to plant a bomb. You sent me into a trap.”

Sheila’s face became sad and tired and pained. “Oh Alex, I hoped you would make it. I hoped and hoped.” She grasped Alex’s wrist. “And I called you, remember? I called you right after I called Frees, to tell you to leave, to save you, and that was before I even loved you. Now the thought of us being apart is
—it’s unbearable, Alex.”

Three men entered the hospital room
—a middle-aged detective in a sport coat followed by two uniformed police officers. The detective said, “Sheila Hubbard, you’re under arrest for murder.”

“What?”

“Ma’am, do not resist.”

“Alex, stop them. Do something, Alex.” She looked pleadingly at Alex as one of the officers cuffed her wrists. Then her expression changed. “You lied to me!” she yelled.

“I told you the truth,” Alex yelled back. “I told you I’d solve this case. I told you.”

“But you love me!”

“Some things matter more,” Alex said, softly but firmly. She snapped her gaze away from him—cold once more, cold now forever—and let the two officers lead her from the room. Alex let his head drop to his chest. The detective stepped over to Alex’s bed and removed the small microphone that was taped to his chest underneath the hospital gown. Before leaving, the detective squeezed Alex’s shoulder. “Feel better,” he said.