The Lies We Tell

by Theresa Schwegel

  On TV, the chef is showing the host how to debeard a mussel. I think I hear Iverson gagging.

  I guess I could go the other way: wake up, remember nothing, quit the case.

  But. I can get to you anywhere. To you, or to Isabel.

  With that threat, where could we ever feel safe?

  I’m about to wake up and get Iverson to put out an APB when I hear another someone come into the room.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Tacker. You are?”

  “Her supervisor,” Iverson says. “But I’m here as a friend. A good friend. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I’m sorry. I can only share medical information with her next of kin, or with the investigators handling her case.”

  “Those idiots outside?”

  Tacker doesn’t answer. Probably wise.

  Iverson clicks off the TV. “I couldn’t stand them in here, their thoughtless talk. Gina needs rest. She needs support.” I feel her hand on my arm. I try not to flinch.

  “Well, I’m glad to know she has someone.” The way Tacker says someone makes me think he thinks Iverson is my partner the same significant way Kitasaki thought Andy was my partner. It’s certainly something she can clarify.

  She doesn’t. She says, “I’m just really worried.”

  “Well,” Tacker says, “I can tell you that she looks worse than she is. She did lose a lot of blood, but she was struck in the head, which is very vascular. The knife wounds themselves, though? They are completely—amazingly—superficial. There is no arterial injury, or sign of complication in the leg—”

  “What about her back?”

  “Well, we were worried about that. Multiple muscles were involved. But the MRI shows no injury to the spinal cord. She is lucky.”

  Lucky. Just like he said.

  “And her face?” Then Iverson actually touches my face. Either she’s putting on quite a show, or I really look like shit. Or both.

  “She’ll have a scar,” Tacker says, “but it will fade. Probably sooner than the residual trauma.”

  “Are you kidding?” That’s Andy asking, from where I think the door is. At first I assume the question is for Iverson—caught pretending to care—but then he says, “Gina’s not going to be traumatized. She’s going to be pissed.”

  “Dr. Tacker,” Iverson says, “this is Gina’s partner. Officer Kanellis.”

  “Hello,” they both say.

  Thank Christ! is what I wish I could say.

  Andy asks, “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Positive,” Tacker says. “She’ll be immobile for a bit, and she’ll need physical therapy, mostly for her leg—”

  “How come she’s asleep?”

  “Everyone reacts differently to anesthesia. She should be coming around soon.”

  “She’s going to be pissed.” I can hear Andy’s smile.

  I bet Iverson is glaring at him.

  Tacker says, “This will be easier for everyone once she’s coherent and we can speak with her directly. Right now, though, I’ll put the wheels in motion for recovery. I’ll get her file over to our rehab center—”

  “Can they rehab her attitude?”

  “You’re beating it dead, Kanellis.” Iverson leans against the bed. “Doctor, will she have to stay here, for rehab?”

  “We do have a number of excellent programs. We’re also contracted with independent clinics, as well as in-home services. She’ll have a liaison to help her make those arrangements.”

  My stomach drops. Immobile. Long-term. In-home. I can’t believe he’s talking about me.

  A pager buzzes and Tacker says, “If you’ll excuse me?”

  “Of course,” Iverson says. “Thank you.”

  I’m not sure Tacker has both feet out the door before Iverson shifts gears, back to low and grinding: “Kanellis. This place is a shithole. How did she end up here?”

  “I don’t know. It’s close to her house?”

  “That doctor was all right, but seriously? I asked one of the nurses a question and she acted like I was holding a gun to her head. I have to pee and I’m holding it, because in the bathroom, I was sure I’d contract something. And Jesus, the smell. It’s everywhere—like someone mopped with a week-old chicken carcass—”

  “Nice hospitals are just nicer places to die.”

  “Aren’t you a big bright shiny light. Did you get anything from the idiots out in the hall?”

  “No. But I just got off the phone with Cam Janssen—he’s the lead. He thinks the perp is the same one they’ve been looking at for a string of thefts in the area, a guy with a pattern of hitting gentrified homes.”

  “Simonetti lives in a nice house?”

  The silence tells me Andy’s letting the joke die. “Janssen talked to Gina’s neighbor, who was talking with her on the street right before the attack. So it could be Gina didn’t have the alarm system armed, and she went in and surprised the guy. That fits with the perp’s M.O.—he hadn’t had any contact with his victims until now. It also fits with what the doc told Janssen about the knife—he said it was short and thin bladed—a lock or a sheaf of some kind—a tool more than a weapon. That makes the attack seem unplanned.”

  No, I think. This was planned.

  “What about prints?” Iverson asks. “DNA?”

  “They found a partial shoeprint and a couple latent handprints. A lot of blood—likely all Gina’s. The scene is a mess, though. I guess the medics were more concerned with saving her life than they were preserving evidence.”

  “So they don’t know what they have.”

  “They can probably figure the brand of shoe, the type of glove.”

  “What about the suspect? They have a description, at least?”

  “Black, six foot, one-eighty, wears a hood. Janssen says they’re trying to pull an image from a surveillance tape outside the last hit, a few weeks back, a few blocks over.”

  No, no, no, I think. That can’t be him.

  Iverson says, “Sounds like a matter of time.”

  Until they find the wrong guy?

  I want to object, to wake up and tell them what’s what, but finding the wrong guy is exactly what has to happen if I want the right one to think he’s immune.

  “You okay?” Andy asks Iverson.

  After a moment, she says, “I hate that one of ours gets hurt and I’m stuck on the sidelines. I hate that my job is not to do police work, but to justify it. I can’t justify this.”

  “You shouldn’t have to.”

  “Yet my instinct is to downplay. Honestly, I don’t know how I went from catching cases to squashing them. To checking the most benign boxes so the bosses won’t get anxious. Pandering to civilians so they won’t police us. Pretending I don’t give a shit—”

  “You’re really good at that.”

  “Funny. Do you know I had to release Gina from the Marble case because she was actually doing the job?”

  “Aren’t you glad there are still police like her? Police who want to know who did what, instead of who wants what?”

  The silence is long enough for me to want to peek.

  Then she says, “I’m jealous.”

  “Why not say fuck it, then? Go back to the street?”

  “Because I have two kids and I want them to be better than me.”

  So her heart does beat for more than the blue. I hope they don’t catch me smiling.

  Andy says, “I’m not solving anything standing around here. I should get back—”

  No.

  “No,” Iverson echoes. “I want someone here when she wakes up.”

  “You got three uniforms outside.”

  “I mean a friendly face.”

  “What about you?”

  “I said friendly.”

  “C’mon, Sarge. I still got two cases pending—”

  “They can wait. Marble’s forty-eight is coming up and Pearson’s got nothing. I need to find a mental-health facility other than the jail.”

  “Hey: that’s giving a shit.” />
  “No, that’s the superintendent up my ass about the sister’s lawsuit.”

  “Okay,” Andy says, “I’ll stay.”

  “Good. Call me when she wakes up.”

  I wait until it’s quiet a moment and then I open my eyes to slits to get a bead on Andy, who’s by the door, thumbs going, a text.

  When he’s through, I open my eyes all the way and I say, “Kanellis.”

  Right away, he looks suspicious.

  That means I must look guilty.

  “Listen,” I say. “I’m not going to tell you what happened because you’ll either feel obligated to help me, or guilty for refusing. And I’m not going to lie, because you’ll know if I do, and then you’ll be worried. So I’m just not going to tell you anything. And I need you to trust me. And, I need your phone.”

  He comes toward me. “Can I say something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “You’re right,” I say, because arguing that point would require details I can’t give him.

  “Can I call the doctor?”

  For all I know, the doctor could be the threat. But I can’t let on. “Yes. First, please, I need to make one call.”

  Andy goes over to the window where someone left a white plastic bag labeled Patient’s Belongings and roots through it. “The medics brought some things from your place. Maybe your phone is”—he finds it—“here.”

  “Thank you.” I missed a call from Dialup this morning. Seeing the nickname—Walter’s tease—is no joke: I’d be a fool to use my unprotected phone, especially for this call. I switch it off.

  “It’s dead,” I say, stuffing it into where my bed inclines. “What if I use yours while you go find the doctor?”

  He doesn’t want to.

  “Just one call.”

  “I guess you got thick skin and a hard head.” He hands me his phone. “I’ll be right back.”

  Before he goes I say—“Kanellis? Where am I?”

  “The hospital.”

  “I got that, thank you. Which one?”

  “St. Elizabeth.”

  “The patron saint of bakers.”

  “Yep: a hard, real weird head, baby.”

  When he’s gone I scroll through his contacts. I’m looking for the one guy I never thought I’d talk to again. The one guy I need now. I find him and call and when he answers I say—

  “Weiss. It’s Simonetti. I’m at St. Elizabeth Hospital. I’m in deep shit. I need your help.”

  24

  I’m polishing off the fries Andy picked up from Sam’s Red Hots—another errand I sent him on after he couldn’t find Dr. Tacker or drinkable coffee—when Weiss shows up.

  “Wow” is what he says.

  “Are you talking about my appetite or my face?” They’d used glue on my forehead instead of stitches, and when the nurse showed me a hand mirror, it looked like they’d given me a second mouth up top, the lips pinched shut.

  Weiss says, “I like an appetite. What’s the doctor say?”

  “Haven’t seen him yet. Apparently the attending left for the day, and I’m still waiting for the new one.”

  “You feel okay, though?”

  “I’m in my right mind, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “I heard you rallied the guys from Fourteen.”

  “I gave them the information they wanted.” When Detective Janssen and his team came in to inquire about my attacker—or rather, to confirm their theory about the local thief—I fed them the description I heard Andy tell Iverson, thereby giving them the go-ahead to find the man they wanted to find in the first place. I wanted them to leave here—all of them—with no blanks to fill, and no one concerned for my safety.

  Weiss glances over his shoulder at the door. “What about Andy?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. Except that I was starving.” I take the last handful of fries. I eat them all at once.

  “He’s got to know something’s up. You called me from his phone—”

  “And then I deleted the call.” I put the greasy bag aside and say, “I can’t fuck around. Someone has me cornered here, and he threatened to hurt Isabel. I don’t know who he is, but he is not a six-foot-one black man in a hoodie. He is not a smash-and-grab thief. And he is not after my television. He wants me off St. Claire’s case.” I put the bag aside and say, “He is who you were looking for when you found me.”

  Weiss comes over to the bed. “So you trust me, now?”

  “I don’t have a choice. You’re the only person who … knows.”

  Weiss goes around to the daybed. He sits facing the door, leans forward, and says, “How about you tell me what else it is I need to know?”

  I guess I don’t have a choice there, either. “Johnny Marble didn’t attack me. I chased him and I fell. I fell on top of him and he fought me off, and then he took my gun and ran. I didn’t know he was mentally ill, but I lied about what happened to protect my job, and to protect Isabel. And to protect myself. I’m not an addict. But I am sick. And the lie … I’m afraid it’s made things much worse than the truth ever could have.”

  Weiss looks relieved. “The truth isn’t for everybody.” Could be, I told him or, more likely, he’s relieved I told him what he knew.

  I do wonder if it was Soleil who told him.

  He says, “The last undercover case I worked? I wound up busting unfortunates like Marble. Addicts. Lowlifes. And a poor-schmuck cop whose work-related injury got him caught up in a Ponzi scheme for painkillers that parlayed into a big-time hard-drug trafficking operation. That case, I worked from the bottom up—”

  “Is that where you picked up Soleil? From the bottom?”

  “I was in that world a long time. I felt something for her. I don’t now. But I also don’t want her blood on my hands, okay?”

  “She’s not a victim.”

  He sits back and looks out the window, somewhere way off. “She doesn’t have to be a victim to destroy herself.”

  I feel like he’s talking about someone else. I wonder if it’s me.

  “When I got the assignment, to find Marble, it was clear pretty quick that St. Claire was one of the unfortunates. And you—well, you know what I thought about you. So I had to see where Rosalind Sanchez fit in.”

  “You found her?”

  “I caught up with her at her boyfriend’s place. A penthouse in the West Loop. The guy’s older—older than she is, anyway. And real pretentious. Pictures of himself all over. The kind who wears linen pants and sandals to the office. I felt like he was waiting for me to ask about his sailboat.”

  “A sugar daddy?”

  “I guess, except he wasn’t very sweet with her.”

  “What did Sanchez say? About Marble?”

  “Not much. Captain Yacht Club did most of the talking. He wanted me to know that he was half out the door to find the motherfucker when Rosie, he called her, wouldn’t let him. When I tried asking her what happened, he commandeered the conversation. Said Rosie didn’t actually know who attacked her. That she was too embarrassed to admit she was walking down the street Facebooking when she got smashed in the face.”

  “That falls in line with what her boss said about her—she’s tripped over her technology before.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s twenty. What tripped me up was the way she looked at the captain when I asked her if she could have misidentified Marble. She admitted as much, but when most people fess up, they don’t look so anxious. I got the idea she was protecting him.”

  “You think he beat her up?”

  “Maybe. But he wasn’t the one who did St. Claire or you, either. I thought there’d be a connection among the three of you. The only connection I could figure was you.”

  “Because I stuck to my story.”

  “And because you were adamant you’d testify.”

  “You thought I was covering my ass.”

  “It did stand to reason.”

  “Until I found him.”


  “No. Until I found you.” Weiss sits forward again, hands between his legs. “When I figured out what was going on with you, I took a step back. I took a wide view. And I realized it wasn’t you—or St. Claire, or Sanchez, for that matter—who wanted to crucify Marble. It’s the people around you who made you do it—who made your lives hinge on your secrets. St. Claire’s daughter. Sanchez’s boyfriend. Your brother—”

  “My brother never made me do anything. I chose to help him.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be working out very well for you.”

  He’s not wrong. But. “What about St. Claire? You think she gets to choose anything, anymore?”

  “No—and that’s what’s got her daughter up in arms. Up until recently, Christina Hardy thought her inheritance was accruing profit in a trust fund to be given to her in full when St. Claire dies.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that day we went to Berwyn? I did pay a visit to her husband afterward, out at that motel in Elgin. Matt Hardy. Nice guy. Not at first. Not until I showed him how a shower cap can be a weapon, and promised I’d sooner handicap him than put his mentally handicapped brother-in-law away. He got straight with me after that.”

  “Why’d you go see him if you already had Marble?”

  “You said you thought Christina was hiding something. I guess I … wanted to believe you. So I wouldn’t have to suspect you.”

  “What did the husband tell you?”

  “He said Christina had been executor of the trust, but in one of St. Claire’s recent realities, she thought Johnny should get a say. She opted to open a new trust. Christina threw a fit; she said her mother didn’t have the capacity to make decisions, and Marble didn’t have the capacity to handle money. That her family was about to blow her millions on soda pop.”

  “Christina told me that money had been her dad’s. I’ll bet she didn’t expect she’d have to split it with her half brother.”

  “Matt said it’s not the money. She just thinks she deserves the control.”

  “Makes her would-be lawsuit look like an attempt to make up with Kay, and get control.”