Mike and Paul looked up when I returned. “No luck?” Mike said.
I shook my head and dropped into the vacant chair. Two sets of eyes cut downward. From where Paul was sitting, he could see right up my leg. I rolled my eyes and sat up, putting my drink down on the coffee table.
“Sorry,” Paul said. “You’ve got legs that draw the eye.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a burden.” Over Paul’s left shoulder a door opened as someone came out and someone else went in, neither of them very tall. As the door closed, I could read the word Gentlemen stenciled onto the large pane of pebbled glass in the door.
“I wonder if he’s in there,” I said.
“Your witness?” Paul stood up. “I’ll check it out for you. Make it up to you for looking up your dress.”
I glanced at Mike as he moved away. “At least he pays his debts,” I said.
Mike shrugged. “Paul says what’s on his mind. He doesn’t have much of a filter between his brain and his mouth.”
“I guess there’re pluses and minuses to that,” I said.
“It can make things interesting.”
Paul came back. “Two people in there,” he said. “A little blond guy standing at one of the urinals, and somebody sitting in one of the stalls, breathing like he’s going to explode.”
“What do you mean, ‘breathing like he’s going to explode’?”
“I mean he’s got some kind of breathing problem. A bad one.” He sat down, looked at me curiously. “Why? Does your guy have a breathing problem?”
“He didn’t forty-five minutes ago. What can you tell me about his feet?”
“His feet?”
“Come on. You’re not living up to Mike’s testimonial. I’m sure you noticed his feet.”
Paul glanced at Mike. “Sneakers,” he said. “Fairly new, but I didn’t recognize the logo. Faded blue jeans.”
“Pulled down on top of the sneakers?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. They must have been.”
“But you could see the logo.”
Paul looked momentarily doubtful. The little blond guy came out of the restroom, and I stood up. “I’m going to check it out.”
Mike and Paul stood with me. Mike’s smile was incredulous. “What are you going to do, look over the top of the stall?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Paul said, “Because the guy on the pot will see you and raise holy hell?”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good reason,” I conceded. “On the other hand, just three-quarters-of-an-hour ago my witness arranged to meet me here, and he hasn’t shown.” I picked up my purse and started for the men’s room. Paul and Mike looked at each other.
Mike said, “That is one compulsive female.”
Paul said, “Yes, isn’t she great? We can stand guard.”
“You stand guard. I’ll just kick back here and enjoy the fireworks.”
Outside the men’s room, I glanced back and saw Mike with one foot on the coffee table and his thumb and forefinger loosely around the neck of his beer bottle. Paul stopped next to me and turned outward, folding his arms across his chest like a bouncer in a bad movie. He gave me a nod of encouragement.
I took a breath and pushed through the door.
Paul was right. No one at the sinks or urinals. A lone pair of off-brand sneakers in one of the stalls. The jeans only reached to the top of the sneakers, which suggested the man was sitting on the pot with his pants up. Even from the doorway, I could hear the rasp of his breathing.
“Hello?” I said.
The cadence of the harsh rattle of breath through the man’s throat seemed to increase a fraction, but there was no other reaction. I moved up against the wall of the stall and went up onto my toes. Below me I could see the top of a bald head, bent forward. The head jerked, and the back hitched with each labored breath.
“Are you all right?”
The hitching continued, but the man did not look up.
I stepped back.
“Well?” a voice said behind me, and I whirled. It was Paul.
“I thought you were standing guard,” I said.
“I got curious.”
“Okay.” I put my hand on top of the stall door and shook it. “Hey,” I said. “You in there. Are you all right?”
The breathing stopped suddenly. Something hit the side of the stall—once, twice, and then there was silence.
“That’s weird,” Paul said.
He didn’t need to tell me.
He said, “There’re a lot of people out there drinking a lot of beer. You don’t have much time.”
That was true, too. I bent over and looked under the wall of the stall. Though I was able to see that the man did have his pants up, I still couldn’t see his face.
“Hey,” I said. Still bent over, I located a dry piece of floor to set my purse on. Judging by my admittedly limited observations, there are always puddles on the floor of men’s restrooms. My impression is that men only wait to get into the vicinity of a toilet or urinal before taking aim in its general direction. Hands free, I bent down further, putting my hands to the top of my head to keep my hair off the floor.
Despite my best efforts, the top of my head was brushing the floor before I got a glimpse of the face of the man on the pot. What I saw was a fat, swollen neck and a face dark and bloated with suffused blood.
I stood abruptly. “We’ve got a problem here,” I said.
“What?” Paul said. The door of the men’s room opened, but it was only Mike.
“I think he’s dead,” I said.
“He can’t be,” Paul said. “We just heard him breathing.”
“He’s dying then.” I jerked violently at the door of the stall, trying to shake the bolt free of the lock, but to no avail. Crouching, I considered going under the door on my belly and coming up between the knees of the stall’s purple-faced occupant, but didn’t like the idea much.
I stood, looking up. The restroom had twelve-foot ceilings, and there was lots of room over the frame of the stall. Reaching up, I put my hands on the top of the frame and jumped. The stall wobbled as I pushed up until my arms were straight and my hips were against the top of the frame. The head below me flopped back, showing an upturned face with bulging eyes and a desperate expression.
“He’s alive,” I said. I started to swing my foot up to the top of the frame, but my skirt was too tight. I tried again. My skirt rode up on me as I swung my leg, but not enough. “Little help.”
“Here,” said Paul, behind me.
I felt his hands on my legs, sliding up onto my hips and pushing the skirt with them, and his breath on my bottom even through my panties.
“Thanks,” I grunted, though possibly it was a case where helping others was its own reward. I kicked my feet to lose the pumps, then swung my leg up, placing a bare foot on the top of the frame, lifting my other leg over the top of the stall and dropping down inside, nearly catching my chin on the top of the bald head, which again had fallen forward.
“Hey, Mister,” I said, gasping. There was no reaction. I put the heel of my hand on his forehead and pushed his head back. His eyes had glazed over, and a thick tongue protruded from his mouth.
I dropped his head and turned to fumble with the catch on the door, pushing at it in a sudden desperation to escape the confined space. On the other side of the door, Paul pushed against me, and the door came open enough to make me remember that I had to pull instead of push. I stepped back, slipped past the edge of the opening door, and tripped over one of my pumps. Paul caught me, cradling me against him. I looked over his shoulder at Mike.
“We’ve got to call an ambulance. There may still be time.”
Mike looked past us into the stall and grimaced. Taking a step backward, he pulled a cell phone from the side pocket of his jacket and slid his thumb over the screen. I recovered my balance and let go of Paul.
“He’s choking on something. We can save him,” I said.
“How?”
>
“Heimlich maneuver. He’s choking. Help me get him up.” We pressed into the stall, one of us on either side of the toilet. I had no idea where to take hold.
“Mike, get in here,” Paul called.
Mike appeared in the doorway, flipping shut his cell phone. “The police and an ambulance are on their way.”
Paul said, “You’re going to have to put your arms around this man’s chest and lift him off the pot so she can get in behind him.” As Mike hesitated, Paul said to me, “Your arms are longer than mine. As big as this guy is, you’re the best candidate to perform the Heimlich.”
“Okay,” I said.
Mike overcame his squeamishness or whatever was making him hesitate. He took two steps into the stall and bent his knees in front of the man on the toilet, keeping his back straight. Putting his arms around the man’s chest, he heaved up and backwards. As the man came up, Paul and I pushed at his back.
Mike staggered backwards out of the stall, clutching his massive burden, and fell. He landed on his back, his head missing the edge of the porcelain sink by less than an inch. He grunted as the air gusted out of him and pushed at the man on top, rolling him off and onto his side.
“Crap,” I said. I pushed at the unconscious man’s shoulder to roll him onto his back, then straddled him, pulling my skirt up to my hips for the necessary freedom of movement. Mike got up and crouched beside me, the shoulder of his jacket dark with what I hoped was water, since my bare knees were in it. I put the heel of one hand on the man’s upper abdomen between his sternum and his navel and put my other hand on top of it. I drove downward, and the man jerked beneath me. I drove downward again. The man’s head was back, thrashing feebly. I did it a third time.
There was still no rise and fall of his chest, no sound of breathing.
“It’s not working,” I said, panting. I rested a hand on the man’s swollen neck, which was puffy with air beneath the skin. The sharp point of the Adam’s apple wasn’t there, but I could feel the hard cartilage at the base of his throat and the indentation above it. “Get me my purse. Do either of you carry a pocketknife?”
Paul opened one and handed it to me. I’d been afraid I was going to have to use my nail file.
“I need a plastic tube. Get my purse and take one of my pens apart.” I turned my attention back to the man beneath me. His eyes had rolled back in his head so that only the whites were exposed.
Once, at age fifteen or sixteen, I had seen my father save a German shepherd from choking by opening an alternative airway in its throat. He had jabbed a short, sharp tube through the thin membrane between the thyroid cartilage, which housed the larynx, and the smaller cartilage below it. The membrane, my father told me, had no arterial blood supply and was the only easy place to penetrate the trachea in an emergency. “It would work on people, too,” he told me. “The throat’s constructed the same way.”
Dad wasn’t here, and I didn't have a short, sharp tube like the one he had used. What I had was Paul’s pocketknife and myself to wield it. I put the point of it against the man’s throat, feeling for the indentation above the lower ring of cartilage.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Mike asked me as he unscrewed the pen he had found in my purse.
“Not really.” I took a breath, and, with a silent prayer or perhaps just a strong sense of my father looking on, I pressed the point of Paul’s knife into the swollen throat, bearing down hard. The knife punctured the skin and sank into the cartilage. I gasped, unsure whether I had killed the man beneath me.
Mike extracted the ink-filled tube from my pen and handed me the lower part of it. I pushed the narrower part of the pen along the edge of the blade as I drew the knife out of the neck. Blood bubbled around the edge of the incision as the air trapped beneath the skin escaped. The man’s chest between my knees did not move.
Bending forward, I blew two quick breaths into the tube. I felt a slight movement in the chest beneath my palm. I looked up blindly at the men around me, counting silently: one-hippopotamus-two hippopotamus…When I got to five, I bent down and blew into the tube again, feeling pressure in my face and neck as I tried to force air through the narrow tube, down the man’s trachea and into his lungs. When the blowing got suddenly easier, I felt elated until I realized that my own breath was coming back at me around the outside of the pen. I tried to pinch the incision shut and hold it as I blew again.
I gave up, gasping. The tube of the pen was too narrow given the limited amount of air pressure I could muster. What I needed was an air compressor. I got off the man and knelt by his head, thinking. He had been without air for a couple of minutes, maybe more—a couple of minutes going on eternity. I stuck my finger into his neck as I extracted the pen, then shoved another finger in beside it to stretch the incision. It created an opening, something to work with. I inhaled, then bent forward and put my mouth on the bleeding neck. I blew, a long, sustained exhalation that lifted the man’s chest, but only marginally. I lifted my head a few inches and felt the warm breath coming up from the gaping throat as the lungs deflated. Tasting the coppery blood on my lips, I put my mouth back over the opening. I blew and saw the chest rise at the edge of my vision. I lifted my mouth and felt warm breath on my face again. I put my mouth back to the neck-hole and blew.
The man’s chest hitched on its own. Raising my head, I saw some of the darkness leave his face. There was a faint whistling sound as the man’s chest rose. I watched avidly as the chest fell and rose, fell and rose, making a whistling sound as air flowed around my fingers. I pushed the tube back into the incision and extracted my finger. The man kept breathing, the whistle accompanying each inhalation.
“You did it,” Mike said, awe in his voice. What I felt was not awe, exactly, but a strange sense of camaraderie with my absent father.
The door of the men’s room pushed open, and a man with red hair and a round face came in. He stopped dead at the sight of us crouched around the man on the floor, me looking up at him with a bloodstained mouth.
He screamed, his voice high and shrill like a woman’s.
I cringed. “Stop that,” I shouted at him.
He stopped screaming and started sucking air as he backed out of the restroom. Mike rose and followed him to the door.
“He’s going to attract a crowd,” he said. “I’ll keep them out until the ambulance gets here.” He pulled open the door and went out. As the door closed, I heard him saying, “You can’t go in. There’s been an accident. The police…” The closing door cut off the rest of it.
The big man on the floor continued breathing on his own, though laboring to do it, his chest working and his head moving spasmodically. The color of his face was returning to normal.
Paul crouched beside me and handed me a wet paper towel. I wiped my mouth with it, and Paul handed me another one.
“Get the phone out of my purse,” I said. “There's a girl on the line who’s probably calling 9-1-1.”
He fished my phone out for me. I jerked my head at him. “Tell her what’s going on.”
He put the phone to his ear. “Don’t call 9-1-1,” he said. “Robin is fine. Here.” He held up the phone in my direction.
“I’m okay,” I called. “Call you later with details.”
He put the phone back to his ear. “Okay?” he asked. “Uh oh. Well, we’ll deal with it.” He put the phone back in my purse. “She already called the police.”
“This is going to be a circus.”
“Yep. He your witness?” He jerked his head at the man on the floor.
“I don’t know.”
“Look, his wallet fell out.” Using the side of his finger, Paul pushed a long, leather billfold from behind me to where I could see it. He put the back of his fingernail beneath the top fold and flipped it back. A driver’s license showed through a window of clear plastic. The picture was that of the man beneath me, though without the pen sticking out of his neck. The name was Mark Thomas Walker.
I nodded. “He’s my witness
.” I got up stiffly and went to the sink. Bending over it, I got a mouthful of warm water, swished it around in my mouth and spat. My next mouthful of water was hotter. I gargled with it, swished, and spat. I got another mouthful of water and gargled some more.
When I turned back to Walker, Paul Soldano was holding up several sheets of copy paper, folded lengthwise and stapled at the corner. “This was in his back pocket.” I took the papers from him and opened them. The document was a promissory note bearing the signature of Michael Dillon in blue ink. Michael Dillon had showed me a similar document himself, standing in his living room with Brooke and me while his wife and kids had breakfast in the kitchen. Dillon’s copy had been stamped paid, the stamp signed by Mark Walker for Derek Nolan. This one was not stamped paid; if it was the forgery, then Mark Walker must have taken it when he killed Nolan, which made it difficult to understand why he was carrying it around in his pocket.
Abruptly I refolded the paper and reached around Walker to work it back into one of the back pockets of his jeans.
“Useful?” Paul asked me.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What happened to him, do you know?”
I looked back down at Mark Walker. “Somebody hit him in the throat, smashed his larynx.”
“Any idea who?”
“I saw someone going out as that little blond-headed guy was going in, but I didn’t pay much attention because I was looking for a big, bald guy.”
“So whoever did it was wasn’t big and bald.”
“And that’s about all I can say.”
“How did this short, hairy assailant get out of the stall?” Paul asked.
“Crawled out. It’s the only way.”
“You went over the top.”
“Not everybody would have done that. I’m unusual.”
Paul nodded, but he said, “I would have said exceptional.”
I smiled at him, put out my hand. As he took it, I said, “You’ve been great. I’m Robin Starling, by the way.”
He smiled back. “Pleased to meet you, Robin Starling,” he said.
Juggling Evidence (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 13