by Greg Dinallo
The entire room is reflected in the mirrored headboard. My vision is blurred, but I can make out shapes and forms. There are three figures, not two. One of them is definitely a man, a man wearing sunglasses. The man in the blue car?! I can’t tell. He has something shiny in his hand. A gun? A knife?! I lunge sideways trying to roll free. He shouts an expletive. A sharp pain erupts in my upper arm, deep in the bone. What feels like a surge of electrical current goes down into my hand. The tips of my fingers crackle, then the pain races up the side of my head, making my skin crawl. Suddenly, they release me. The door slams and they’re gone.
The deafening thump of my heart trying to tear open my chest is the only sound now. I crawl off the bed onto the floor then, grabbing fistfuls of carpet, drag my limp body to the door. Somehow, I manage to reach the knob, and with what little strength remains in my limbs, I get to my feet and try to open it. I’m bathed in sweat and my hand slips off the polished brass. Then the world dissolves into a series of white flashes that are followed by an oddly pleasant euphoria. I stumble backward across the room, and crash to the floor.
The last thing I remember is the reflection in the mirrored ceiling of a half-naked man sprawled on a scarlet rug. He looks just like me.
11
A strong, antiseptic odor that burns my nose is the first thing I’m aware of, then the sounds: people scurrying, rapid-fire conversation, equipment rolling. But I sense none of it has anything to do with me. I remain in this state of semiconsciousness for a while, finally awakening to the painful glare of a bank of fluorescents directly overhead. As my eyes adjust to the light, a green haze gradually sharpens into the folds of a hospital curtain. I’ve been here before. Only this time my legs aren’t wrapped in bandages, and the world isn’t painted in shades of khaki and brown camouflage. I lie here for a long time, baffled and disoriented. Occasionally a nurse or doctor comes by and takes my pulse and blood pressure. “Good,” one finally says. “You’re going to be fine.”
I don’t feel fine. As a matter of fact, I feel absolutely hideous, like I’ve got a hangover that’s never going to go away. Shadows fall across the curtain, as some people approach and stop just outside it, carrying on a conversation. At least two, maybe three men, and a woman. Her voice sounds very familiar. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was Nancy. God, it is Nancy.
“There has to be some mistake,” she says sharply. “My husband doesn’t use drugs.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Morgan,” a man says in a gravelly voice. “But Vegas does strange things to people. They come here to gamble and end up doing all kinds of other stuff.”
“That’s not why he was here,” Nancy protests, her voice starting to take on an edge.
“Maybe that’s what he told you.”
“Look, I know my husband.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Mrs. Morgan, but if I had a five-dollar chip for every time I’ve heard that, I could bail out the S&L crisis single-handed. People think they know their spouses, but believe me, they really don’t.”
“Well, I know mine,” she snaps.
“I’d prefer you don’t make this too long,” I hear another man saying. His voice is authoritative and smoother than the others, and I assume he’s my doctor. Finally the curtain slides back and Nancy is standing at the foot of the bed. She looks shaken and worried as she crosses toward me, followed by two men in J.C. Penny ties and sports jackets.
“You okay?” she says, leaning over the bed and hugging me tentatively almost as if she’s afraid I might break if she squeezed too hard.
“Yes babe, I guess. How long have I been here? How long have you been here?”
“About a half hour. They called me at school. I got the first flight I could. I was so worried.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” I say, my temples throbbing with pain. “I don’t know what happened.”
“According to the police,” she says, indicating the two men behind her, “a maid at the Stardust went to make up a room and found you on the floor, unconscious.”
I shiver at the thought. My mind is a tangle of fractured images. “I don’t know, I kind of remember stumbling and falling . . .” I pause, and finish it with a confused shrug. “What’s this drug stuff?”
“I don’t know. They want to know if you use them.”
“They what?”
“I told them you didn’t. They still want to talk to you about it.”
I shrug resignedly. “Okay.”
She steps back from the bed and nods to the two detectives. They exchange looks before the short, tired-looking one with the moustache leans to Nancy. “You might want to wait outside, Mrs. Morgan,” he says in a tone that suggests he’s trying to spare her some kind of embarrassment.
“I’ll stay with my husband,” she replies without hesitation.
The detective’s head bobs in a “suit yourself” gesture as he fetches the remote control for the articulated bed. “I like to be able to look people in the eye when I talk to them, Mr. Morgan,” he explains as the motor whirrs, slowly raising me into a sitting position. “I’m Sergeant Figueroa, this is Detective Wallach,” he continues, gesturing to his younger, clean-shaven colleague. “We’re with the Las Vegas Police Department. Before you say anything, I want to advise you of your rights.”
“Why?” I ask, bewildered. “Am I under arrest?”
“No, sir. Just a precaution.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Nancy sigh with relief. “I know my rights,” I grumble, starting to feel a little annoyed.
“Good,” he says, going on to read them to me anyway. “Now, do you know what happened to you?”
I shrug and splay my hands. “I was sort of hoping you could tell me.”
“Sure,” he says, swinging an amused look to his colleague.
“Well, for openers,” the clean-shaven one says, with an apologetic nod to Nancy, “several people at the hotel said they saw you leave the blackjack table with a couple of hot-looking young women. That refresh your memory any?”
“God,” I groan, nodding as it starts coming back. I glance to Nancy, wishing I could disappear. “Yes, yes, it does,” I reply, going on to tell them about almost passing out in the casino and the two women coming to my rescue. “They pretended to know me. I’m not sure, but I think they sized me up in the lounge. I figured they probably slipped something into my drink so they could, you know, rip me off or something, but I was too weak to stop them.”
The two detectives exchange skeptical looks. They told me their names but I can’t remember them. They’re just moustache and clean-shaven to me.
“What does that mean?” I challenge angrily.
“Mr. Morgan, we handle a couple dozen of these a week,” moustache says, taking over. “People come here looking to party, sometimes they get a little more than they bargained for. Now, if you’ll cooperate there’s a chance we might be able to—”
“Party?!” I explode, infuriated by what he’s insinuating. The exertion and anger fill my head with pain. I lean back against the pillows until it subsides. “I wasn’t partying,” I explain, calmly, deliberately. “I told you these two women drugged me and took me to a room; then they—”
“We know,” he interrupts, smugly. “It was registered to you.”
“To me?”
“Yes. We found your clothes scattered all over the place; lines of cocaine on the coffee table, bottles of booze, porno tapes, video camera, all the standard good-time Charlie toys.”
“That’s ridiculous. Besides, I wasn’t in that room for more than a couple of minutes.”
“From the time you left the tables until the maid found you?” he scoffs. “Try a couple of hundred.”
“Three hours?” I say in disbelief.
“Damn near.” A thin smile raises the corners of his moustache. “You tested positive for both cocaine and heroin, among other things, so we know you weren’t in there taking a nap.”
I’m angry and stunned, and the words
are sticking in my throat. “That’s, that’s even more ridiculous. I don’t use drugs. I had two drinks. One with the piano player in the lounge, the other at the blackjack table. Ask the cocktail waitresses, they’ll—”
“Come on, Mr. Morgan, the doc says you were higher than a kite when they brought you in.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, I was drugged and robbed? I don’t know what they gave me, but I remember them going through my pockets. They took my watch, my wallet—”
“They always do.”
“I’m telling you I came here on personal business. I wasn’t looking to party.”
“Somehow these hookers got the idea you were.”
“Wait, wait, hold it,” I say, starting to see hazy flashes of the mirrored headboard, followed by reflections of shapes and figures. “I think there was a man. Yes, yes,” I continue as the image clarifies. “Two women and a man.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Positive. He was the one holding me down. Really hurt my arm.”
They exchange looks again, uncertain looks, which suggests they’re reconsidering their initial verdict.
“Well, that might change things a little,” clean-shaven says grudgingly, circling to the other side of the bed. “I mean, the guy might’ve been their pimp; but flesh peddlers rarely set foot on the playing field, so there’s a chance you’re right. There are a number of Rolex rings working the city. If that’s the case, the guy was probably their Fagin.”
“Yeah, sometimes they make it look like a kink-and-coke bash,” the moustache chimes in. “So the mark doesn’t report the theft. We see a lot of that.”
“You sure could’ve fooled me,” I say angrily.
“Can you describe them?” he asks coolly, ignoring the insult.
“Well, sort of,” I reply, taking a moment to regain my composure. “Everything was pretty hazy. I remember the guy was wearing glasses and . .” I pause, drawing a blank, and shrug. “That’s it. Like I said, I really didn’t get a very good look at him.”
“What about the ladies?”
“Tall, blond, sexy,” I reply, splaying my hands. “Very sexy.”
Moustache emits an amused chortle. “I’m sure we’ll have no trouble finding them,” he says in as sarcastic a tone as he can manage.
I realize I’ve just described half the women in Las Vegas. “What happens now?”
“That’s up to the prosecutors. Go home. Get some rest. We’ll file our report and send you a copy.” He slips a business card from a shirt pocket and flicks it onto the bedding in front of me. “If you have any questions, that’s where you’ll find us.” He hitches up his pants, nods to Nancy, and shoulders his way through the opening in the curtain, then he pauses, turns back to me and adds, “Of course, if it goes any further, we know where to find you.”
12
I awaken in excruciating pain. It’s still dark, and very quiet, and I can hear the surf surging in the distance. It was well after midnight by the time we got home from Vegas, and I’ve been sleeping fitfully, if at all.
“What’s going on?” Nancy asks groggily, finally responding to my restlessness. “God, it’s not even five-thirty.”
“My arm. It’s killing me.” I sit up, turn on my reading light and begin unbuttoning my pajama top to get a look at it.
She pushes up onto an elbow and squints at me through sleepy eyes. “Well, you know what they say, tiger,” she teases in a voice dripping with sarcasm and sexuality, “every party has its price.”
“It’s not funny,” I protest, wincing in pain as I slip my arm out of the pajama sleeve. “It hurts like hell. Look.”
“Oh-oh,” she says, frowning at the sight of it.
On the outside of my left arm, midway between the shoulder and elbow, is a swollen blue-purple mass with pinkish yellow accents that resembles an early Rothko. Nancy’s expression becomes progressively more serious as she examines it, gently pressing here and there.
“Ow! take it easy.”
“I don’t like that at all.”
“Me neither.”
It’s midmorning before I can get in to see our internist. Dr. Marcel Koppel is a lanky, methodical man of Belgian descent with an easygoing manner and intelligent eyes that take on a mischievous glint when I brief him on the incident in Las Vegas. Then he examines the bruise, which he calls a hematoma.
“They x-ray this when you were in the hospital?”
“No. It wasn’t bruised. Felt a little sore when I went to bed last night. Then this morning—”
“Delayed bleeding of some kind.”
“What causes that?”
“Usually a blood vessel weakened by trauma. It hangs in there for a while, then gives way and starts leaking.” He sends me down the hall to a radiology lab. About a half hour later, I return with the X rays and he slips them into the light panel on the wall of the examining room.
His brows raise slowly. “Never seen that before,” he muses, intrigued by what the X rays reveal.
“Seen what?”
“That right there,” he replies, using the point of a pencil to indicate a tiny, hard-edged, and totally black line. It’s about three quarters of an inch long. One end is cut at an angle.
“Know what that is?”
I shake my head no.
“A hypodermic needle.”
“Jesus.”
“You know, I’ve seen them bend in my day, but I can’t recall ever seeing one break. Whoever did that must operate a jackhammer for a living.” He continues studying the X rays and zeroes in on something, then nods with understanding. “That tends to explain it. See?” He uses the pencil to trace the path of a pale, squiggly line that ends in a microscopic crater. “The needle hit the bone, went scraping along it, then dug in right there and broke.”
I nod sagely; then it dawns on me that that’s my arm on the X ray, my arm that has the needle embedded in it. “What do we do about that?”
“Well, as they say, what goes in . . .” He pauses, takes hold of my arm, and presses down gently with his thumbs. It hurts like hell, but the tip of the needle soon emerges from beneath the bruised area of skin. He fetches a pair of forceps, grasps it, and slowly pulls the needle from my biceps. “. . . Must come out.”
I’m staring at my arm.
A tiny drop of blood seeps from the pinhole.
He’s holding the forceps to the light, staring at the needle, puzzled. “Wrong gauge.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, needles used to give subcutaneous or intramuscular shots are usually in the twenty to twenty-three range. The larger the gauge the finer the needle. This can’t be more than an eighteen, something you’d use to take blood.”
“You told me to stay out of hospitals once, remember?”
“Yes, I do,” he replies with a little smile. “But no professional would make that kind of mistake.”
“A guy in a hotel room might,” I say, as the once-hazy scenario starts to clarify. “I remember he had something shiny in his hand; I was struggling and this sharp pain ran down my arm. The sudden movement must’ve broken the needle.”
He nods in agreement, then as he disinfects and bandages the tiny wound, speculates, “I imagine they knew what they’d put in your drink wouldn’t last long enough to stop you from calling for help or perhaps even going after them. So they tried to inject you with something else to make sure you were out.”
“Try heroin and cocaine.”
The doctor questions me with a look.
“The hospital said I tested positive for both.”
His expression darkens. “I worked ER in an inner-city hospital when I was a resident. We handled a lot of drug overdoses. It sounds like they injected you with what in the vernacular is called a speedball.”
“A speedball,” I repeat slowly as a horrid memory dawns on me. “Isn’t that what killed John Belushi?”
The doctor nods gravely. “Might’ve killed you too, but I suspect you didn’t get
the full dose.”
“Why not?”
He fetches something from a drawer, peels off the paper wrapper, and removes a hypodermic needle. “This is a three-quarter-inch eighteen.”
“Same as that.”
“Right.” He matches the fresh needle to the piece he removed. They’re the same length. He touches the point of the pencil to the plastic collar, the part that’s cast around the needle’s shaft, and screws into the syringe. “See? It broke right at the hub. Which means it broke above the surface of the skin.”
A chill goes through me at the thought of how close I came to being killed.
“It’s probably going to look worse before it gets better.” He prescribes an antibiotic and a mild painkiller, and sends me home. Before leaving, I ask him to send a copy of his findings to Sergeant Figueroa at Las Vegas Police Department headquarters.
Over the next couple of days, I go to work late and leave early, getting home just after Nancy returns from school. She’s in the family room, playing the piano, which she does every day for a half hour or so. Cole Porter, Gershwin, and the classics are all part of her repertoire. Today, what sounds like a Mozart sonata fills the house, though I’m a musical illiterate and am never certain. She plays for relaxation, for me, and occasionally for others when coaxed. She’s enormously talented and humble to a fault, which is part of her charm.
“Hi, hon,” she says brightly, finishing with a lovely, delicate run. She leaves the piano, kissing me on the move as she fetches the afternoon paper from the coffee table. “They got that burglar.”
“The one working the neighborhood?”
“Uh-huh. Caught him red-handed in a garage on Alta Vista.” I scan the article, then drift off in thought.
“What’s the matter?”
“Hang in there with me a minute.”
I cross to the phone and press the button that auto-dials the sheriff’s substation at the Malibu Civic Center. “Yes, this is Mr. Morgan up on Sea View. Oh, no, no problem. I just heard you caught that burglar. Yes, congratulations. If you don’t mind me asking, what was he driving?” There’s a pause. I hear some papers shuffling before he comes up with the answer. “Oh, okay, thanks.”