by Lia Matera
I felt a twinge of pity. No room at the inn for alcoholics and not much sympathy from paramedics. Now, someone—please God, not my client—was dousing them so they’d freeze to death.
With the director’s permission. I wandered through the shelter. A young woman lay on a cot with a blanket over her legs. She was reading a paperback.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. I’m working on the case of the homeless men who died in the parks recently. Do you know about it?”
She sat up. She could use a shower and a makeover, but she looked more together than most of the folks in here. She wasn’t mumbling to herself, and she didn’t look upset or afraid.
“Yup—big news here. And major topic on the street.”
“Did you know any of the men?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve heard.” She leaned forward. “It’s a turf war.”
“A turf war?”
“Who gets to sleep where, that kind of thing. A lot of crazies on the street, they get paranoid. They gang up on each other. Alumni from the closed-down mental hospitals. You’d be surprised.” She pushed up her sleeve and showed me a scar. “One of them cut me.”
“Do you know who’s fighting who?”
“Yes.” Her eyes glittered. “Us women are killing off the men. They say we’re out on the street for their pleasure, and we say, death to you, bozo.”
I took a backward step, alarmed by the look on her face.
She showed me her scar again. “I carve a line for every one I kill.” She pulled a tin St. Christopher medal out from under her shirt. “I used to be a Catholic. But Dirty Harry is my god now.”
I pulled into a parking lot with four ambulances parked in a row. A sign on a two-story brick building read “Central Response.” I hoped they’d give me their records for the four dead men.
I smiled at the front-office secretary. When I explained what I wanted, she handed me a records-request form. “We’ll contact you within five business days on the status of your request.”
If my client got booked, I could subpoena the records. So I might, unfortunately, have them before anyone even read this form.
As I sat there filling it out, a thin boy in a paramedic uniform strolled in. He wore his medic’s bill cap backward. His utility belt was hung with twice the gadgets of the two men I’d talked to earlier. Something resembling a big rubber band dangled from his back pocket. I supposed it was a tourniquet, but on him it gave the impression of a slingshot.
He glanced at me curiously. He said, “Howdy, Mary,” to the secretary.
She didn’t look glad to see him. “What now?”
“Is Karl in?”
“No. What’s so important?”
“I was thinking instead of just using the HEPA filters, if we—”
“Save it. I’m busy.”
I shot him a sympathetic look. I knew how it felt to be bullied by a secretary.
I handed her my request and walked out behind the spurned paramedic.
I was surprised to see him climb into a cheap Geo car. He was in uniform. I’d assumed he was working.
All four men had been discovered in the morning. It had probably taken them most of the night to freeze to death; they’d been picked up by ambulance in the wee hours. Maybe this kid could tell me who’d worked those shifts.
I tapped at his passenger window. He didn’t hesitate to lean across and open the door. He looked alert and happy, like a curious puppy.
“Hi,” I said, “I was wondering if you could tell me about your shifts? I was going to ask the secretary, but she’s not very … friendly.”
He nodded as if her unfriendliness were a fact of life, nothing to take personally. “Come on in. What do you want to know?” Then, more suspiciously, “You’re not a lawyer?”
I climbed in quickly. “Well, yes, but—”
“Oh, man. You know, we do the very best we can.” He whipped off his cap, rubbing his buzz cut in apparent annoyance. “We give a hundred and ten percent.”
I suddenly placed his concern. “No no, it’s not about medical malpractice, I swear.” He continued scowling at me. “I represent a young man who’s been falsely accused of—”
“You’re not here about malpractice?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Because that’s such a crock.” He flushed. “We work our butts off. Twelve hour shifts, noon to midnight, and a lot of times we get force-manned onto a second shift. If someone calls in sick or has to go out of service because they got bled all over or punched out, someone’s got to hold over. When hell’s popping with the gangs, we’ve got guys working forty-eights or even seventy-twos.” He shook his head. “It’s just plain unfair to blame us for everything that goes wrong. Field medicine’s like combat conditions. We don’t have everything all clean and handy like they do at the hospital.”
“I can imagine. So you work—”
“And it’s not like we’re doing it for the money. Starting pay’s nine-fifty an hour; it takes years to work up to fourteen. Your garbage collector earns more than we do.”
I was a little off balance. “Your shifts—”
“Because half our calls, nobody pays the bill. Central Response is probably the biggest pro bono business in town. So we get stuck at nine-fifty an hour. For risking AIDS, hepatitis, TB.”
I didn’t want to get pulled into his grievances. “You work twelve-hour shifts? Set shifts?”
“Rotating. Sometimes you work the day half, sometimes the night half.”
Rotating—I’d need schedules and rosters. “The guys who work midnight to noon, do they get most of the drunks?”
He shrugged. “Not necessarily. We’ve got ‘em passing out all day long. It’s never too early for an alcoholic to drink.” He looked bitter. “I had one in the family. I should know.”
“Do you know who picked up the four men who froze to death?”
His eyes grew steely. “I’m not going to talk about the other guys. You’ll have to ask the company.” He started the car.
I thought about trying another question, but he was already shifting into gear. I thanked him and got out. As I closed the door, I noticed a bag in back with a Garry’s Liquors logo. Maybe the medic had something in common with the four dead men.
But it wasn’t just drinking that got those men into trouble. It was not having a home to pass out in.
I stood at the spot where police had found the fourth body. It was a small neighborhood park.
Just after sunrise, an early jogger had called 911 from his cell phone. A man had been lying under a hedge. He’d looked dead. He’d looked wet.
The police had arrived first, then firemen, who’d taken a stab at resuscitating him. Then paramedics came to work him up and transport him to the hospital, where he was officially pronounced dead. I knew that much from today’s newspaper.
I found a squashed area of grass where I supposed the man had lain yesterday. I could see pocks and scuffs where work boots had tramped. I snooped around. Hanging from a bush was a rubber tourniquet. A paramedic must have squatted with his back against the shrubbery.
Flung deeper into the brush was a bottle of whiskey. Had the police missed it? Not considered it evidence? Or had it been discarded since?
I stared at it, wondering. If victim number four hadn’t already been pass-out drunk, maybe someone helped him along.
I stopped by Parsifal MiniMart, the liquor store nearest the park. If anyone knew the dead man, it would be the proprietor.
He nodded. “Yup. I knew every one of those four. What kills me is the papers act like they were nobodies, like that’s what ‘alcoholic’ means.” He was a tall, red-faced man, given to karate-chop gestures. “Well, they were pretty good guys. Not mean, not full of shit, just regular guys. Buddy was a little”—he wiggled his hand—“not right in the head, heard voices and al
l that, but not violent that I ever saw. Mitch was a good guy. One of those jocks who’s a hero as a kid but then gets hooked on the booze. I’ll tell ya, I wish I could have made every kid comes in here for beer spend the day with Mitch. Donnie and Bill were … How can I put this without sounding like a racist? You know, a lot of older black guys are hooked on something. Check out the neighborhood. You’ll see groups of them BSing and keeping the curbs warm. Passing around a bottle in a bag. Or worse.”
Something had been troubling me. Perhaps this was the person to ask. “Why didn’t they wake up when the cold water hit them?”
The proprietor laughed. “Those guys? If I had to guess, I’d say their blood alcohol was one-point-oh even when they weren’t drinking, just naturally from living the life. Get enough Thunderbird in them, and you’re talking practically a coma.” He shook his head. “They were just drunks, I know we’re not talking about killing Mozart here. But the attitude behind what happened—man, it’s cold. Perrier, too. That really tells you something.”
“I heard there was no chlorine in the water. I don’t think they’ve confirmed a particular brand of water.”
“I just saw on the news they arrested some kid looks all poofy, one of those hairstyles.” The proprietor shrugged. “He had a bunch of Perrier. Cases of it from a discount place—I guess he didn’t want to pay full price. Guess it wasn’t even worth a buck a bottle to him to freeze a drunk.”
Damn, they’d arrested Kyle Kelly. Already.
“You don’t know anything about a turf war, do you?” It was worth a shot. “Among the homeless?”
“Sure.” He grinned. “The drunk sharks and the rummy jets.” He whistled the opening notes of West Side Story.
I got tied up in traffic. It was an hour later by the time I walked into the police station. My client was in an interrogation room by himself. When I walked in, he was crying.
“I told them I didn’t do it.” He wiped tears as if they were an embarrassing surprise. “But I was getting so tongue-tied. I told them I wanted to wait for you.”
“I didn’t think they’d arrest you, especially not so fast,” I said. “You did exactly right, asking for me. I just wish I’d gotten here sooner. I wish I’d been in my office when you called.”
He looked like he wished I had, too.
“All this over a bunch of bums,” he marveled. “All the crime in this town, and they get hard-ons over winos?”
I didn’t remind him that his own drunken bragging had landed him here. But I hope it occurred to him later.
I was surrounded by reporters when I left the police station. They looked at me like my client had taken bites out of their children.
“Mr. Kelly is a very young person who regrets what alcohol made him say one evening. He bears no one any ill will, least of all the dead men, whom he never even met.” I repeated some variation of this over and over as I battled my way to my car.
Meanwhile, their questions shed harsh light on my client’s bragfest at the Club.
“Is it true he boasted about kicking homeless men and women?” “Is it true he said if homeless women didn’t smell so bad, at least they’d be usable?” “Did he say three bottles of Perrier is enough, but four’s more certain?” “Does he admit saying he was going to keep doing it till he ran out of Perrier?” “Is it true he once set a homeless man on fire?”
Some of the questions were just questions: “Why Perrier?” “Why did he buy it in bulk?” “Is this his first arrest?” “Does he have a sealed juvenile record?”
I could understand why police had jumped at the chance to make an arrest. Reporters must have been driving them crazy.
After flustering me and making me feel like a laryngitic parrot, they finally let me through. I locked myself into my car and drove gratefully away. Traffic was good. It only took me half an hour to get back to the office.
I found the paramedic with the Geo parked in front. He jumped out of his car. “I just saw you on TV.”
“What brings you here?”
“Well, I semi-volunteered, for the company newsletter. I mean, we picked up those guys a few times. It’d be good to put something into an article.” He looked like one of those black-and-white sitcom kids. Opie or Timmy or someone. “I didn’t quite believe you, before, about the malpractice. I’m sorry I was rude.”
“You weren’t rude.”
“I just wasn’t sure you weren’t after us. Everybody’s always checking up on everything we do. The nurses, the docs, our supervisors, other medics. Every patient care report gets looked at by four people. Our radio calls get monitored. Everybody jumps in our shit for every little thing.”
I didn’t have time to be Studs Terkel. “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss my case with you.”
“But I heard you say on TV your guy’s innocent. You’re going to get him off, right?” He looked at me with a confidence I couldn’t understand.
“Is that what you came here to ask?”
“It’s just we knew those guys. I thought for the newsletter, if I wrote something …” He flushed. “Do you need information? You know, general stuff from a medical point of view?”
I couldn’t figure him out. Why this need to keep talking to me about it? It was his day off; didn’t he have a life?
But I had been wondering: “Do you always carry tourniquets? Even if you know a person’s not bleeding?”
“That’s not the main use. We tie them around the arm to make a vein pop up. So we can start an intravenous line.”
I glanced up at my office window, checking whether Jan had left. It was late, there were no more workers spilling out of buildings. A few derelicts lounged in doorways. I wondered if they felt safer tonight because someone had been arrested. With so many dangers on the street, I doubted it.
“Why would a tourniquet be in the bushes where the last man was picked up?” I hugged my briefcase. “I assumed a medic dropped it, but you wouldn’t start an intravenous line on a dead person, would you?”
“We don’t do field pronouncements—pronounce them dead, I mean—in hypothermia cases. We leave that to the doc.” He looked proud of himself, like he’d passed the pop quiz. “They’re not dead till they’re warm and dead.”
“But why start an IV in that situation?”
“Get meds into them. If the protocols say to, we’ll run a line even if we think they’re deader than Elvis.” He shrugged. “They warm up faster, too.”
“What warms them up? What do you drip into them?”
“Epinephrine, atropine, normal saline. We put the saline bag on the dash to heat it as we drive. If we know we have a hypothermic patient.”
“You have water in the units?”
“Of course.”
“Special water?”
“Saline and distilled.”
“Do you know a medic named Ben?”
He hesitated before nodding.
“Do you think he has a bad attitude about the homeless?”
“No more than you would,” he said. “We’re the ones who have to smell them, have to handle them when they’ve been marinating in feces and urine and vomit. They get combative at a certain stage. You do this disgusting waltz with them where they’re trying to beat on you. And the smell is like, whoa. Plus if they scratch you, you can’t help feeling paranoid what they could infect you with.”
“Ben said they cost your company money.”
“They cost you and me money.”
The look on his face scared me. Money’s a big deal when you don’t make enough of it.
I started past him.
He grabbed my arm. “Everything’s breaking down.” His tone was plaintive. “You realize that? Our whole society’s breaking down. Everybody sees it—the homeless, the gangs, the diseases—but they don’t have to deal with the physical part. They don’t have to put their hands right on it, get
all bloody and dirty with it, get infected by it.”
“Let go.” I imagined being helpless and disoriented, a drunk at the mercy of a fed-up medic.
“And we don’t get any credit”—he sounded angry now— “we just get checked up on.” He gripped my arm tighter.
Again I searched my office window, hoping Jan was still working, that I wasn’t alone. But the office was dark.
A voice behind me said. “What you doin’ to the lady?”
I turned to see a stubble-chinned African-American man. He’d stepped out of a recessed doorway. Even from here, I could see his clothes were stiff with filth. I could smell alcohol and urine.
“You let that lady go. You hear me?” He moved closer.
The medic’s grip loosened.
The man might be drunk, but he was big. And he didn’t look like he was kidding.
I jerked my arm free, backing toward him.
He said. “You’re Jan’s boss, aren’t ya?”
“Yes.” For the thousandth time, I thanked God for Jan. This must be one of the men she’d mother-henned this morning. “Thank you.”
To the medic, I said. “The police won’t be able to hold my client long. They’ve got to show motive and opportunity and no alibi on four different nights. I don’t think they’ll be able to do it. They were just feeling pressured to arrest someone. Just placating the media.”
The paramedic stared behind me. I could smell the other man’s breath. I never thought I’d find the reek of liquor reassuring.
“Isn’t that what your buddies sent you to find out? Whether they could rest easy, or if they’d screwed over an innocent person?”
The medic pulled his bill cap off, buffing his head with his wrist.
“Or maybe you decided on your own to come here. Your coworkers probably have sense enough to keep quiet and keep out of it. But you don’t.” He was young and enthusiastic, too much so, perhaps. “Well, you can tell Ben and the others not to worry about Kyle Kelly. His reputation’s ruined for as long as people remember the name—which probably isn’t long enough to teach him a lesson. But there’s not enough evidence against him. He won’t end up in jail because of you.”