Twice Dying (8 page)

Recognition came to her with sick shock. He was Caymas Schulte, one of the phony NGIs, released a few months after she had started working at Clevinger; the only one she had personally known.

Her fingers felt rough edges on the photo’s back. She turned it over.

Another picture was glued on that looked like it had been cut out of a book: a small pretty bird, with a red head and yellow and black markings. A cartoon-style balloon was drawn in ink, issuing from its mouth. It contained musical notes, as if the bird were singing.

Heart hammering, she swiveled to look around, as if the message-bearer might still be
standing there. As if it might be the phantom lover from her childhood, whom she knew had touched her once, but she had no memory of.

Her twelfth summer, at the family’s country home. An older cousin, Gerald, a gentle boy who teased her in a way she was beginning to understand.

Another boy who lived nearby: Earl Lipscomb, quiet, polite, but with something frightening in his eyes. She would see him in the distance what she was alone: feel him around her edges.

One early fall day, the two young men gone hunting together. Gerald shot, mistaken by Earl Lipscomb for a deer. The death ruled accidental.

A crowded cemetery on a muggy afternoon. The coffin about to be lowered. Men opening the lid to tuck in a bit of shroud.

Inside the blackness, a glimpse of white: Gerald’s face.

Her gaze rising from there, of itself, to meet the eyes of Earl Lipscomb, far at the fringes of the crowd.

In that instant, the truth seared into her mind: that her cousin had taken her place.

Herself, dropping like stone in a dead faint.

Later she learned that she had been unconscious for several minutes. She remembered only the distant sense of a vast barren landscape, with herself on it. Far away at the horizon stood a sort of beacon, endlessly searching. She remembered it sweeping closer, the electrifying instant before contact, and then nothing more.

But whatever had happened during those lost
moments made the next months of her life unreal, a shadowy existence that she had reentered like an amnesia victim. And she knew that whatever had touched her had been looking for her ever since. It had colored everything: career, men, life.

She leaned forward to start the car. Her gaze caught the pale oval of her own face reflected in the rear-view mirror. Her hazel eyes, which a man had once told her caught sunlight and reflected it back in bursts, looked feverishly bright.

From another car, another pair of eyes watched the Mercedes back out and drive away. A band moved to the ignition key, but then stopped.

It was so delicate a matter, one that no texts addressed: the purification of a vessel, laying to rest the one who was there and bringing forth the one who waited.

But clearly, they were already coming together.

O
n his way home, Monks stopped to buy groceries and liquor at a small store run by an extended Portuguese family, a quiet place with scarred wooden floors and counters and a fine pall of dust hanging in the air. It was a biweekly ritual, more expensive than the bigger supermarkets, but they kept a fine butcher counter and a wealth of other delicacies: toothsome sausages, pungent cheeses, and jars of tart pickled vegetables.

Moreover, there was the feeling that they had come to depend on his trade, ordered in Finlandia vodka especially for him, and that the family would dwindle in some obscure but significant way beyond money if he failed them. The elderly beret-wearing padrone, or his sturdy black-dressed
wife, would thank Monks with a heavy accent, dark eyes seeming to measure his vice as he lifted the vodka bottles into his arms.

From there the journey was on two-lane roads, traffic thinning and pavement narrowing as he drove farther west toward the north Marin coast. The drizzle had thickened to rain. He paused at his mailbox, tugging free the usual accumulation of journals and junk. The house was seventy yards farther up a graveled drive, isolated from the road and neighbors by a thick second growth of redwood, live oak, and twisted snakelike madrones, their slick bark glistening in the wet.

Inside, he went straight to the cat food cupboard. A whirl of rumbling fur erupted across the kitchen, the skirmishing of children inside too long on a rainy day: the little calico his daughter had named Felicity, and Cesare Borgia, a scarred old black-coated felon who had been feral until Monks gradually won his trust. Omar, a blue Persian the size of a beagle, watched from the couch like an emperor for whose entertainment the battle was being staged. By all indications he had lain there since Monks’s departure, without moving or noticing that his human was gone.

The fight ended with Felicity crowhopping across the floor, tail held stiffly down, while Cesare sat on the contested ground licking a paw. Monks noted that everyone had ended up closer to the food bowls. It was sheer extortion; a neighbor had fed them hours earlier. His ex-wife
had been able to hold out against them, but he had long since stopped even pretending. He considered the selection and chose the Kultured Kat Kidney Entree, feeling it was appropriate to tomorrow’s ASCLEP business, and divided two cans into three clean bowls, an arbitrary assignment since everyone stole from everyone else’s.

Then he made his first drink. Finlandia vodka steamed as it spilled over ice, with a twist of just enough lemon to bring out the flavor. The taste was somewhere between a sweet kiss and a bite. He took drink and bottle to the shower, and later poured a second while he toweled dry. He dressed in a worn flannel shirt and jeans and refilled his glass.

The rain was drifting through the trees in sheets now. He started a fire in the wood stove. Then he flipped through the San Francisco phone directory until he found the number for Tierney’s Pub on Taylor Street.

A voice heavy with brogue answered.

Monks said, “Dennis O’Dwyer, if he’s in.”

The background noise brought him a vivid picture of the long, copper-covered bar lined with men drinking pints of Guinness, reading newspapers, playing darts, arguing politics, conspiring for the IRA. Whatever they did for a living, it was their real business to know what was going on. Dennis’s specialty was the insurance end of medicine. He had been a claims adjuster
with ASCLEP for more than thirty years.

“It’s Carroll Monks,” he said when Dennis’s whiskey voice came on.

“How are you, me boy?” It came out sounding like
buy.
At Tierney’s, Dennis became more Irish with the hours. He was white-haired, thick-bodied, with a purplish nose, cheeks mottled with broken veins, and a vast lexicon of memory for people and events.

“I need to chat a minute,” Monks said. “Is this a good time?”

“None better.”

“Do you remember a big case, maybe twelve years ago? The Vandenard heir, they called him Robby, shot a man.”

“Indeed I do.”

“I’m interested in the psychiatrist who evaluated Robby. His name’s Jephson.”

“A Brit, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Dennis coughed expressively.

“He got Robby ruled mentally incompetent,” Monks said. “There’s reason to think the proceedings weren’t straight. Did you hear anything like that?”

“It was no secret that Robby got preferential treatment. Like anything else with that kind of money, Carroll. A whiff of trouble, and there’s experts flying in from all over the world, with price tags on them.”

“Like Bernard Capaldi?”

“Like Bernard. He’s retired now. Not in good health, I hear.”

“Was there any suggestion that Jephson was bought too?”

“I’m trying to remember the context I heard his name in. There was a lot of buzz in the insurance game about that incident.”

“There’s a gold mine in your head, Den.”

“More like a peat bog these days. Defense liability exposure, that was it. Fear of a wrongful death suit. But it never materialized.”

“The Vandenards bought off the victim’s widow.”

“Say what you like, it’s a good way to turn a witness friendly. I can’t recall anything specific about Jephson. I’ll nose around first thing tomorrow.”

“Den, she, the widow, told us Robby was suspected of murdering his sister.”

“There was speculation. People who knew the family. It was kept very quiet, of course. He was only a child.”

“What about the rest of the family?”

“A grim story, lad. Robert Senior, Robby’s father, had a stroke not long after. His wife died in the mid-eighties. It was given out as heart failure, but the rumor was an overdose of drugs and alcohol. She’d been in treatment centers. Heart-
break,
more likely.

“And that was the end of them, the main-line Vandenards. They were the darlings of the city
when those children were young. There’s a branch, cousins I believe, who’ve inherited the interests.”

Monks was silent.

“This Jephson,” Dennis said. “Is he in trouble with ASCLEP?”

“No.”

“Shame. You’ll be at the meeting tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

Monks rang oft, then got out his address book and called Alison Chapley, his fingers seeming to remember her number as he punched the buttons. Her machine answered.

He said, “I have news. Give me a call.”

He refilled his glass, noting that the bottle was approaching a quarter empty: filtering through the microscopic labyrinths of liver and kidneys, alcohol molecules separated out and carried by the bloodstream to the hypothalamus to produce a temporary euphoria, followed by mass cell destruction high and low, a fast-forwarded kaleidoscope of frames to the body’s dissolution. He considered the necessity of a kidney transplant, picturing donor organs like shy mollusks in the sea caves of the peritoneum, hiding from predatory human eyes and the rubber-gloved hands that probed to scoop them out, and wondered again if the malaria was coming on. He refilled his glass and went to check his supply of Plaquenil, a marginal remedy almost as bad as the disease.

When he came back, he paused at a photograph on the living room shelf: himself, his ex-wife Gail, their daughter Stephanie and son Glenn. Gail had remarried, to a professor of environmental studies at UC Davis. Stephanie was the good child, in her last year of pre-med there, staunch member of the swimming team. Glenn had last been heard from in Seattle, where he seemed to be making a career of skateboarding, panhandling, and drugs: a world of predators, with Glenn on his way to becoming one of them, or perhaps a victim.

They had been twelve and nine when the photo was taken: just about the same age spread as Robby Vandenard and his sister Katherine.

They were the darlings of the city when those children were young.

Sixteen years as husband and father, nine of them as chief of Emergency Services at the major trauma center of Bayview Hospital in Mann. The change seemed to have happened fast, but in fact it had been building for years: pressures that had grown subtly, pushing him into a series of decisions that were not major in themselves, but led him along until, like an electron forced from its orbit, he had made a quantum leap.

An incompetent internist whose negligence had allowed a man to the of a heart attack. A deep-pockets malpractice suit that named the Bayview ER and Monks as codefendants, although their performance had been exemplary.
The hospital administration’s agreement to settle—a settlement which would have tarnished Monks’s name, linking him with the negligence—which he refused to accept. A growing reputation as “not a team player,” to which he responded militantly against the good-old-boy system of uncredentialed procedures. A growing alienation from staff, colleagues, even felt by his wife and children in the community.

Then one night a tense radio contact with a team of paramedics in the field, attending an elderly seizure victim. The senior of the medics assuming it was a coronary, and preparing to give a shot of adenosine—which Monks expressly ordered
against,
fearing it would eliminate the heart block that might be keeping the patient alive. Argument. The sudden loss of radio contact for eight minutes from the medics’ end.

Then the panicked report that the patient had died.

The medics claiming that Monks had ordered the shot.

And some time within the next twenty-four hours, the radio tape—the only hard evidence of what had actually happened—disappearing.

Monks stepped out on the deck and drank from the bottle, a long pull that burned his mouth and insides. With the rain slashing his face, he stood at that too-familiar point of wanting never to stop, to keep riding on the back of that fire-breathing mount of alcohol that he had realized long ago he
would never entirely break, but could only fight a lifelong battle to keep in check.

The phone rang. Most nights, he would have let it go.

“Tell me your news,” Alison said.

Monks told her.

She said, “There was nothing in Robby’s file to suggest he’d murdered his sister. I’d have spotted that, trust me.”

He stepped close to the wood stove so that it warmed the backs of his thighs.

“I see two possibilities,” he said. “Jephson genuinely didn’t know about that. Or he knew perfectly well that Robby was a dangerous son of a bitch, and he faked the diagnosis. Maybe that’s how the whole thing got started. It worked so well with Robby, he kept going.”

“I’m glad you found something. I kind of stuck my neck out today.”

“How so?”

“Jephson offered me a bribe, or wanted me to think so. Administrative director of JCOG. I more or less threw it back in his face.”

Monks massaged his temples with his fingertips.

“I’d advise a little more caution, Alison. This might make Jephson look foolish, but there’s no evidence of anything criminal.”

“Somebody knows something. They left a message in my car.”

Monks said, “A
message?”

“A photograph of one of those missing NGIs: Caymas Schulte.” She described the incident with adolescent breathlessness.