Blood Lies

by Daniel Kalla

  Outside, I found a phone booth tucked behind the gas station. I checked my watch, which read 8:50. I waited five minutes, guarding the phone, and then I dialed my own cell number, collect.

  Alex accepted the charges. “Ben?”

  The sound of her voice grounded me. Affection welled. With longing, I pictured her reassuring smile and her warm almond-brown eyes. I fought off the emotion. “Alex, where are you?” I asked, businesslike.

  “A mall, in downtown Tacoma.”

  “Perfect. You know the drill?”

  “Yes,” she said impatiently. “I put you on hold, call the precinct, and then link you up to Helen using the conference call function on your phone.”

  “And at the first sight of anyone official, you press the number sign three times, then hang up and get the hell out of there. Right?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Alex, are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I didn’t drive an hour to this mall to buy iron-on-photo T-shirts,” she grumbled. “Hang on. I’m going to get her.”

  Twenty seconds later, the line buzzed and I heard Helen’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Helen.”

  Silence.

  “Helen?”

  “Benjamin?” she said slowly. “Where are you?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You can and you should, Ben,” she sighed. “You really should.”

  “So you can arrest me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And maybe also help you.”

  “Help me?”

  She was quiet again. I pictured Helen covering the receiver with a hand, as she barked out orders at her subordinates to start tracing the call. “Yes, help. Or at least try to help prove you didn’t do it.” She grunted a laugh. “God knows, you’re doing a piss-poor job of convincing anyone of that.”

  “But you’re already convinced I did do it.”

  “Never said I was convinced,” she said. “Everything I know about you tells me you don’t have those two murders in you. Problem is, all the evidence points to you.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Roll up our sleeves and get down to some old-fashioned detective work. Like Baretta, before he offed his wife.” Her tone turned dead serious. “But I can’t do any of that while we’re spending all our time and energy searching for you.”

  Her logic began to sway me. “How do I know you’ll keep looking for anyone else once you have me in custody?”

  “Ben, have you ever known me to do a half-assed job with an investigation?”

  I smiled at the phone. “No.”

  “So trust me on this one, okay?”

  “What about Mark Bellon?” I said, remembering the young seminary student she had told me about.

  “Forget Mark. Life’s not that cruel. A detective doesn’t get two Bellons in one lifetime.” She paused. When she spoke again her voice filled with empathy. “Ben, you have to know how badly I don’t want you to turn out to be our guy.”

  “But in your heart, you think I am.”

  “Listen, Ben, I promise you: If you come in on your own accord, I will do everything in my power to get to the bottom of this. Everything.”

  I wavered a moment. Then I heard three rapid beeps in succession—Alex’s warning—and I snapped back into focus. “Helen, I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Alex hung up the line before Helen could reply. I listened to the dial tone, hoping Alex escaped safely and that our little stunt might keep the S.P.D. off my trail for a while longer.

  With the receiver still dangling in my hand, I realized I had never felt so lost in my life.

  Chapter 19

  After checking into the YMCA, I spent the next two days adapting to the fugitive life, watching my five-o’clock shadow grow into the beginnings of a beard, and casing my new neighborhood. I found a local optician, where I bought colored contacts that tinted my hazel eyes brown. At a nearby liquor store, I learned that alcohol in Canada is taxed to the hilt and is almost twice the price compared to the States. I went as far as to walk a forty-ounce bottle of scotch to the checkout counter, but I wasn’t willing to dip that deep into my reserves.

  I unearthed some local eateries, including a tasty Singapore noodle joint that fit my five-dollar-maximum meal budget. Too many times I walked past the local bike shop, pining at the window like a kid who got sensible shoes instead of his dream ten-speed for Christmas. And I spent much of my time at a coffee shop I found, where for the cost of a three-dollar coffee I could surf the Internet for up to an hour on one of their terminals before being chased out of the shop by the impatient stares of the employees or other patrons.

  I followed the S.P.D.’s manhunt for me through online newspapers, though I was quick to close the sites if my photo ever popped up on the screen. I read that S.P.D. was actively looking for me in the Tacoma area, and I inferred that my call-forwarding ruse with Alex had paid off, at least temporarily. When not following the news stories on my escape, I researched NorWesPac developments and their failed Whistler property. My hunch kept growing that the development, which bound many of the people involved in my crisis, somehow played a role in what had happened to Emily.

  I also exchanged e-mails with Alex. Once we got past her concerns for my welfare, she shared more of the details of her marital implosion. Marcus had raised the subject of child custody. My heart ached for Alex. Talie was her Achilles’ heel. I had no doubt that was why Marcus, who had never struck me as a particularly committed father, pursued custody. Bastard. My dislike for him grew by the moment, but all I could do was offer Alex empty reassurances.

  Despite my frugality, Kyle’s money was thinning at an alarming rate. I knew that I needed to find a source of income. I was tempted to wander into St. Paul’s Hospital and offer my services as a replacement physician. While Ben Dafoe might have been a qualified Emergency physician, Peter Horvath, an internist, was not. But within the scope of either of my disjointed identities, I was qualified to work at a walk-in clinic.

  I scoured the yellow pages, focusing my search on the least desirable neighborhoods of Vancouver. There was nothing altruistic in my choice; I understood that the more itinerant and down-and-out the clientele, the less likely a patient was to recognize me from CNN or any other network that still covered my disappearance.

  I stumbled upon the East Hastings Clinic by accident while I was out looking for thrift shops to expand my limited wardrobe. Two storefronts down from a pawnshop and on a block beside a pharmacy with metal bars on the window, the clinic felt right to me even before I stepped in.

  Inside, the waiting room was jammed with patients, male and female, several of whom slumped in their seats. The intermixed smells of stale cigarettes, unwashed clothes, and body odor brought back memories of weekend overnight shifts at St. Jude’s. I wove past the outstretched legs and up to the desk.

  The tiny gray-haired receptionist eyed me with the look of someone who had stared down people twice my size. “Yes?” she snapped.

  “I’m Dr. Peter Horvath.”

  “So?”

  “I’m an internist from the States, but I have my Canadian license.”

  “And?” She held up her hand and a cluster of silver bracelets slid noisily down her arm.

  “I’m interested in, um…,” I said, faltering under her piercing gaze. “Finding part-time work.”

  Her expression shifted from disdain to shock. “You mean here?”

  I nodded.

  The wrinkles at the corners of her mouth deepened and then her bright red lips parted widely; I wasn’t sure if she was smiling or laughing. She hopped up from her chair, gaining little height. “Let’s go see Dr. Janacek.”

  She emerged from a small door in the hallway behind the waiting room. I followed her along the shabby and stained carpets to a closed door at the end of the hallway. She rapped on it like a woodpecker working overtime. “Dr. Janacek,” she shouted, “I got someone you have to meet.”

  “Let me eat my lunch, woman!” t
he deep voice barked back in a European accent.

  Ignoring the command, the receptionist curled her small hand around the door handle and opened it. “Go on in,” she said to me and then turned and walked away.

  I stepped into the small office with walls papered by degrees and certificates. I cleared my throat. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  In a crisp white lab coat that matched the color of his short-cropped hair, a distinguished-looking man with prominent cheeks and eyebrows and intense gray eyes stared at me from behind a worn oak desk. Dr. Jozef Janacek stopped in midbite and then slowly lowered his sandwich onto the wax paper in front of him. He reached for a napkin and wiped his fingers with it. “And you are?”

  “Dr. Peter Horvath. I am—”

  “Horvath? Hungarian, correct?” Janacek interrupted. “Never had much time for Hungarians. A very fatalistic group as a rule.”

  “And I’m not wild about the Czechs,” I said. “Always too blunt.”

  Janacek eyes narrowed and then he broke into a deep belly laugh. “Come, have a seat, Dr. Horvath.”

  “Peter,” I said and extended my hand, which he met with a crushing handshake.

  “Joe,” he said. “So what brings you to my world-famous clinic?”

  I sat down in the chair across from him. “I’m looking for work.”

  “Here?” His surprise wasn’t much less than his receptionist’s.

  “I am interested in inner-city medicine.”

  The humor drained from his face. “And your credentials?”

  “University of Washington med school, but I did internal medicine at the University of Toronto.”

  “I don’t mean to insult you,” he said, and I knew he was about to. “But to me you look more like the man who digs through the Dumpster behind us for soda pop cans than an academic physician.”

  I laughed. “How could I possibly take offense at that?” I lifted my knapsack and dug inside, pulling out copies of Peter Horvath’s medical licenses along with the two generic reference letters Alex had included in the package.

  Janacek glanced at the degrees and scanned the letters. He shook his large head. “All that academic training and now you want to work at a walk-in clinic on skid row?”

  Glancing at all the degrees on his walls, I wondered the same of him, but I didn’t ask. “I find inner-city medicine challenging,” I said, trying not to sound over the top. “Besides, I’ve just got back from the Far East. I’m trying to get a feel for the lay of land. Keep my options open.”

  “Ah, you’re still in that delusional stage where you think you actually have options in life.” He sighed. “Youth.”

  I was beginning to like Joe. “I do know that if I don’t pay off some of my student loans and credit card bills, bankruptcy might be my only option.”

  “We’ll split your billings sixty-forty,” he said without mentioning who got the sixty. “I’ll need you five mornings a week, but you can pick and choose your afternoons.” Then he flashed large white teeth that complemented his hair and coat. “Of course, on my schedule, mornings end at six P.M.” He rose from his chair. “Stay with me today, and I’ll show you the lay of our very arid land.”

  After borrowing a lab coat and an old stethoscope, I spent the rest of the afternoon shadowing Dr. Jozef Janacek. The experience was surreal, as if I’d been sent back in time to medical school. However, I hadn’t observed office-based medicine in years, so the refresher was helpful, even enjoyable. Despite Joe’s irreverent style, he treated his patients with dignity. And in turn, they worshiped him.

  The majority of his patients appeared to be intravenous drug users. Almost all of them had acquired hepatitis C, and the majority suffered from HIV. Pain was their most common complaint. Joe appeared to have a talent for distinguishing patients with a genuine need for painkillers from those who were simply seeking drugs. Between patients, I asked Joe, “How can you be so confident in deciding which patients truly need narcotics?”

  “Some doctors give people new hips or new hearts,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “I spend my days trying to sort the drug addicts with legitimate pain from the drug seekers.” He tapped his chest. “It’s my calling. Besides, I know my patients. But if I am unsure, I always give people the benefit of the doubt.” He paused and eyed me steadily. “Once.”

  We moved rapidly between the three examining rooms in the clinic. Joe never appeared to rush, but I realized that we still churned through a large number of patients. And yet, the number of people in the waiting room continued to steadily grow until it was standing room only and the grimy smell drifted to Joe’s back office.

  Halfway through the afternoon, Joe turned to me. “Is the little Hungarian ready to venture out from the nest on his own?”

  “I’ll take a shot.” I grinned. “I always know where to turn if things go wrong.”

  “Sure,” Joe deadpanned. “We call it the front door.”

  From the wall holder, I grabbed the chart that Edith—the diminutive tiger who manned Janacek’s front desk—had left out. I glanced at the name on the chart, Ian Roland. I walked into the examining room to find an emaciated young man with greasy hair and pimply skin huddled in the corner, twitching on the examining table. I didn’t need to ask a question to recognize the diagnosis: heroin withdrawal.

  He looked up at me suspiciously. “Where’s Doc Janacek?”

  “I’m his new associate, Dr. Horvath.” I nodded to the patient. “You’re heroin sick, huh, Ian?”

  Ian nodded vehemently. “I couldn’t afford any fixes for two days. I’ve been puking and shitting myself.” He held out a hand to me. “You got to help me, Doc. It’s bad.”

  “Let me have a look.” I palpated the racing pulse at his wrist. Then I checked his blood pressure, which ran low. After a quick physical exam, I knew he was suffering from severe narcotic withdrawal. Unlike alcohol, no one dies from heroin withdrawal, but the experience can be so unpleasant that many addicts, once they’ve gone through it, are unwilling to face it again, making it even harder to help them get off drugs.

  I pulled out from my coat pocket the prescription pad Joe had given me, scribbled out a prescription, and passed it to him. Reading the prescription, Ian’s face creased into a scowl. “What’s this?”

  “A combination of mild sedatives and clonidine. It should take the edge off the sickness.”

  He crumpled the prescription into a ball. “No, man! I need methadone.”

  “I don’t have a license to prescribe that.”

  “Okay.” He said nodding in rapid motion. “Then morphine or Demerol would do the trick.”

  “I’m not going to substitute one narcotic for another.”

  “It’s what Doc Janacek would do!”

  “Maybe so, but you’re seeing me today. And this is how I practice.”

  “Well, fuck you!” Ian threw the balled up prescription at my head. I dodged to the left, as it sailed past my ear. He hopped off the bed and stormed out of the room.

  Some start to my new job, I thought glumly.

  I was standing in the same spot when Ian came flying back in. He dropped to his knees and scoured the floor until he found the crumpled prescription. He smoothed out the paper and tucked it into his pocket. He looked at me with a sheepish grin. “Sorry, Doc. It’s the junk. Can’t even think straight no more.” Then he was gone.

  The patients who followed Ian were less dramatic. Eventually, I found my familiar ER groove of plowing through the volume, while still practicing satisfying medicine. For a while, the patients’ illnesses and crises even pushed my own troubles out of my thoughts. Not all of Joe’s patients had drug-related issues. And several had overcome their addiction, only to suffer from the complications of HIV or other illnesses related to their long-standing drug use.

  At 6:55 P.M., the waiting room had finally cleared. Pleasantly tired, I walked into the examining room to see my last patient: Malcolm Davies. Clean-cut and wearing a button-down shirt with a sleek silver watch, Malcolm s
truck me as different from the others the moment I saw him. When he looked up at me, his eyes widened and I thought he might do a double take.

  The anxiety seeped into my system. I assumed he recognized me from the media reports, but I decided to try to bluff my way out. “Malcolm, I’m Dr. Horvath.” I extended my arm and shook his hand, staring him straight in the eye. “You look as if you recognize me.”

  Malcolm shook his head. “Guess not. You remind me of a guy, that’s all.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A guy I used to know who disappeared a while back,” Malcolm said. “Just a coincidence, I guess.”

  “People tell me I have one of those faces.”

  “Guess so,” he said noncommittally and then nodded at the chart in my hand. “You can see Dr. Janacek usually refills my prescription every couple of weeks.”

  I flipped open his chart. Deciphering Joe’s scrawl, which wasn’t any more legible than mine, I saw that Malcolm did get his prescriptions refilled roughly twice a month. In the flap of the chart, I struggled to make out the list of Malcolm’s medications.

  “I’m a bipolar,” he said, referring to his manic-depressive illness. “Dr. J.’s got me on at least four meds.”

  Sure enough, I saw two antidepressants, lithium, a sedative, and another strong sleeping pill. Malcolm took more pills than most people three times his age.

  “And I need more painkillers.”

  Of course. “What for?”

  “I’ve been on them for over two years. You know,” he said as if I was being deliberately obtuse, “after the explosion.”

  Without prompting, he unbuttoned his shirt to expose his chest. Ragged scars and patches of skin graft covered most of his chest. I noticed that the scars extended to the base of his neck. “The pain just keeps getting worse, you know. I’m going to need a bunch more of those oxycodone pills.”