A lot of it came out of the military men stationed there. Sometimes their girlfriends would get pregnant and they were shipping out or didn't want to get married, so Langella made arrangements for them to have the baby, then sell it to an unsuspecting couple. A lot of them coming into the fort from other bases around the country or even from aboard would run drugs for him. Langella was into everything. Hasan always wondered why he did the law practice out of Denver, but that was to appease his grandparents it seemed. The family had pretty prominent at one time in Denver society, so he kept up a 'respectable' practice there for appearances’ sake but he made his money in the Colorado Springs.
Hasan cleared his throat with another gulp of ‘coffee’ and continued on after rasping out a dry cough. “At first, I had just been a customer, but once I got my license to practice medicine he asked me for some help on the adoptions. I couldn't say no, I was afraid he'd turn me into Immigration. I didn't know what kind of connections he had, so I went along with him. Besides I needed the money, the state doesn't pay well. I liked living like a doctor, so I needed to get paid like a doctor.”
Most of the stuff had been routine. Sometimes he’d help the attorney with insurance problems. Sign the right form, fudge an examination for a car accident, whatever was necessary. It wasn't much. None of it was. Not until Dombrowski came along.
Barely able to contain his anticipation, Carly asked quietly, “Tell me about Dombrowski.”
“Well Langella and his partner got Dombrowski as a client through the public defenders’ office. They weren't in line for a referral but they were probably the best outfit on the public defender’s list. The district attorney really didn't want anyone to say Dombrowski didn't get a good defense and end up with a mistrial, so he picked the best of a rather motley lot. They wanted him to have a good defense, then be found guilty and die. There wasn't a whole lot of sympathy for the man, but no one wanted him to go free.”
Carly knew the circumstances but didn’t want to interrupt the flow of information by saying so.
"Langella didn't talk much about it other than he tried to string it out as long as possible. The same was true regarding the appeals process. All he was thinking about was billable hours. I followed it in the newspapers and on TV. I was interested as I assumed that once he was determined competent to stand trial, Dombrowski would end up on death row at 'Old Max'. Beyond the professional curiosity, it didn't matter to me. At least not until we got closer to his execution and Langella brought those other people to see me.”
“What other people?” Carly snapped anxiously, almost abruptly.
The doctor seemed a little surprised by Carly's tone, but continued on, “The two doctors from that pharmaceutical company. They came to see me at home with Langella about a month before Dombrowski was executed. Langella knew the last appeal process wasn't going to work or last forever, after all no judge would ever let that man escape execution. So he was pretty sure that Dombrowski was going to die when he came with these people. They said they wanted Dombrowski's body after the execution and would I help them get it.”
Carly was beside himself as he brimmed with questions. He weighed the option of interrupting, yet he hesitated as Hasan was speaking freely and lucidly. He needed to hear this story from the horse’s mouth.
“I don't know what you know about this sort of thing, but generally the state takes possession of all the bodies of executed prisoners. They get cremated and the ashes are buried at the prison cemetery. If the body were turned over to relatives and such it could become a circus. This way it avoids a lot of weird publicity like grave robbers looking for some kind of souvenir. At any rate, bodies are only given over to next of kin with a court order. These doctors wanted me help them switch the body with another. According to state penal policy, I was to watch all executions, declare the prisoner dead and escort the body to the crematorium. So if I wanted to switch the body, it would have been pretty easy for me. I figure it wouldn't hurt, they said they would get a 'John Doe' from the Denver morgue for the switch. No one would be the wiser and I'd be $25,000 richer.”
Hasan stopped to take another drink. Almost saddened as he drained the cup, he ambled into the kitchen again. Carly could hear the clinking of a bottle as more ‘coffee’ was made. So fixated on his own needs Hasan never offered Carly anything, but what the tall man was getting was exactly what was needed.
Using the booze stop as a break in Hasan’s monologue, Carly took the opportunity to start directing the conversation, and asked, “That’s a lot of money for a body isn’t it? Even Dombrowski’s?”
Hasan let out a short laugh as he plopped back down onto the couch, “I shouldn't have agreed so fast, it made me look easy. They had been testing me, they didn't want the body switched. They just wanted to see if I had a price and how easy I'd come to it.”
What Carly heard next, chilled his soul. Hasan without looking up from his cup, tugged on his cigarette and said, “What they wanted was Dombrowski. ALIVE!”
Carly suddenly felt cold. The nagging thought that had lingered in the back of his mind, had hidden in the recesses of his soul, the thought that got him run out of Los Angeles as a laughing stock, made him spring forward...Dombrowski was alive! Without thinking he found himself across the room, gripping the doctor's shoulders, as he yelled, “He's alive, isn't he? Tell me damn it.”
Frightened, the smaller man recoiled trying to break the grip that was digging into his shoulders. “You're hurting me. Let me go,” he pleaded. “What's wrong with you? I thought you were going to help me. Leave me go or I won't tell you another word. Do you hear me?”
Dazed, a thousand thoughts running through his mind, Carly finally processed the continued plea of the doctor. He let go of the shoulders, keenly aware that his own hands hurt from the strength of the grip. He eased back into the recliner, muttering his apologies.
“That's better,” Hasan said suspiciously. “Yes they wanted him alive, for tests they said. They had a private high security facility where they were going to do a variety of brain scans on him. CAT scans, PET scans, MRI's, the whole works. They said they would test him and then they'd finish the execution for us, get rid of the body and no one would be the wiser. They said they'd give me $100,000 if I'd help.”
Hasan hadn’t known what to do. The money was one thing, but letting Dombrowski live was another, even Hasan had his limits for doing dirty deeds. In Carly’s mind, the possibilities or what had seemed to be impossibilities were endless, with the worst case scenario being what was happening in Los Angeles. Langella had convinced the doctor eventually. Actually he had threatened him. First Langella said he'd get Hasan fired, set him up for a drug bust or something so he'd lose his license. Then he told the frightened little man deportation was next. Finally, just to make sure his message was perfectly clear, Langella said that he had friends in the army who would 'do' Hasan just for the target practice.
Shaking his head at the thought, Hasan spoke almost defiantly at what he had settled for. “I finally agreed for $250,000 and a vow of silence. The pharmacy people had it all planned out. They had already bought out one of the executioners. He was going to substitute the poison for a neuro-narcotic, which would approximate death. A heart rate so reduced it would be indeterminate, same with respiration and skin temperature. For a while Dombrowski would appear to be dead. In fact, the medication had the potential to kill him, but we assumed that he had the constitution to survive. He was a pretty amazing physical specimen after all. If he did die, who would care? He was supposed to anyway. As the medical examiner, I would officially declare him dead and sign the certificate. We would then make the switch and off Dombrowski would go to his new owners, so to speak.”
Anxiously, but with as much control as he could muster, Carly managed to ask in a dry hoarse whisper, “Who were they?”
"That couple from the pharmacy company? What's it called?......Memory something or other.”
“MemoryLock?” the professor asked incredulously.
“Yeah that's it. Merriwhether and that sour-faced wife of his. They were the ones.”
Nearly faint with surprise, Carly rose to his feet. Immediately the doctor recoiled, afraid the tall stranger was going to hurt him, but Carly waived his hand in reassurance.
“Relax, I’m just trying to digest what you've told me. Are you sure Merriwhether and his wife, the owners of MemoryLock, were the ones who had bribed you to fake Dombrowski's execution? Absolutely positive?”
“Yes of course. They paid me when we transferred the body. Both of them were there, along with some great big guy I hadn't seen before. They were all dressed in lab coats and had a private ambulance. They were going to pretend that they were doing a routine transfer of a patient from the Cañon City hospital to wherever they were going.”
“What happened to Langella, his partner, and the two executioners? Do you know?”
“No, but I can guess. Langella told me later, before I left the prison that he thought he could get more money out of Merriwhether. I think the same thing happened with one of the executioners, the one who died in the car crash. The other two might have just found out what they're partners were into and had to be eliminated or they might have died naturally. I don't know. I came here to be alone, I was scared not so much of Merriwhether but that I'd get caught and be deported. My insurance policy against Merriwhether is a relative in Pakistan who has information from me that he'd send to the Denver Post if anything happened to me. It spells it all out in vivid detail. Merriwhether knew it was true. He also knew I wouldn’t say a word, after all I had gotten what I wanted or at least what I thought I wanted.”
“He probably figured you would drink yourself to death,” Carly said with a bluntness Hasan could not dispute. He shrugged in response and stared idly past Carly through the screen door.
Carly knew he was sitting on a time bomb. Statement or no statement, if Merriwhether was involved he would do anything to prevent the doctor from speaking. A live eyewitness was far more believable than a piece of paper coming out of another country. Quickly, Carly asked the nervous little man sitting on the couch,
“Does that truck work?”
“No.”
“Then get a few things together, we're getting out of here. You're no longer safe, no matter what you think. I'll get you some place where nobody can touch you, then we can sort out your story.”
Hasan tried to argue but Carly cut him off with a directness the doctor believed when he heard it.
“They will know I have been here. They will come and kill you and worry about the fall out later.”
It took Hasan little time to pack. A day’s worth of clothes and a week’s worth of cigarettes and booze went into a cheap gym bag. At least a week’s worth for anyone else. The little man didn’t bother with hygiene and grooming supplies, much to Carly chagrin.
Knocking at the door of the monastery, the situation was reminiscent of days of old when churches were often used as sanctuaries and safe haven.
The monk answering the door was the same one who gave Carly directions. “Nice to see you again. I see my directions were correct,” as he nodded toward the doctor. “Are the two of you interested in supper and rooms?”
“Maybe supper Father, but first we need a land line phone we can use in private.” Holding up his oft neglected cell phone, he added, “I can’t get a signal here.”
“It's Brother,” the monk corrected Carly icily. “You can use the one it the Abbot's office, it quiet and affords some privacy.”
Carly nodded appreciatively and with Dr. Hasan in tow, he settled into the spartan office.
Dave Ramirez was his first call.
“Glad to hear from you,” his old partner greeted him enthusiastically. I've got a lot of information on all the dead lawyers and prison people as well as Dr. Hasan.”
“Sounds great Dave, but I've got bigger news.” Suddenly cautious to his surrounding, Carly lowered his voice and spoke into the receiver. “Listen Dave, I don't want to talk about it now, not here, but I think I can blow the whole L.A. murder case right out of orbit. It's amazing! And then some! I'm going to head down the canyon tonight, I'll call you tomorrow if I don't drive straight through to Denver. I may want to stop in Cañon City first.”
With the brief goodbye barely said, he slid the phone back into its cradle on the abbot's desk. His thoughtful reverie was suddenly broken by the sharp retort of a gunshot. From the corner of his eye, he saw the monk turning away from Hasan's slumping body and move in his direction. With the reactions only years of police work could have built, Carly whipped his long legs at the advancing figure. Bowling the legs of the robed-figure out from under it, Carly was quickly able to roll onto the monk, his fists pumping. As the monk struggled to reach the pistol that lay just out of his reach on the wooden floor, the professor's longer arm covered the distance with ease.
Thrusting the pistol into the monk's face, Carly leaned back as he straddled the prostrate man beneath him. As he recovered from the adrenaline rush incurred by the fight, he didn't notice the others as they approached from behind. A sudden flurry of brown tipped him to the converging figures, but the short notice only afforded him the luxury of seeing another monk swinging the bat towards his head. The flash of light as the pain exploded in his head was so intense he never saw who had struck him or heard the explosion of the pistol going off in his hand. As he slumped to the floor he saw the pooling blood covering the polished hard wood planks. As he passed into unconsciousness, he was sure the bleeding was his.
Chapter Eleven
The cold water jolted Carly awake, the suddenness of his movements made his head throb with a stabbing pain. Gingerly he surveyed his surroundings, lest he cause a reoccurrence of the pain. He frightened himself by his inability to recognize where he was or how he got there. He was naked, in a pink tiled shower with cold water cascading down on his shivering form, and his head ached, as it never had before. Slowly he tried to rise, his movements unsteady and shaky, the waves of pain crashed through his level of tolerance forcing him to nausea. Recovering slowly, he stepped out of the shower not caring he had left the water run. From the towel rack, to the toilet tank, to the sink, Carly found a slow path of support as he stumbled into the darken bedroom of a motel.
As he lay on the bed, he fingered the prominent bruise at the back of his skull. “No blood,” he reassured himself, “but one helluva knot.”
Convinced that he wasn't too seriously injured, he grabbed a pocket mirror from his ditty bag on the night stand.
Quickly turning on the lamp on the dilapidated nightstand, he watched his pupils constrict rapidly. Equal and refractive, the eyes didn't lie...he didn't have a concussion.
“Thank God for that,” he moaned out loud.
The greatest damage he could assess was what had been done to his memory. The brochure on the nightstand reading “The Embers Motor Lodge” of Salida, Colorado struck no memory cords. The last thing he could recall was meeting Hasan and even that was hazy at best.
As he lay motionless on the bed, hoping the pounding in his skull would somehow subside he tried to recall what had happened. He found the best recollection he could put together was after he met with Hasan he took off driving back to Denver, but for some reason he must have stopped at the motel in Salida. Maybe he had been tired, maybe it had been late, he couldn't remember the exact time when he saw Hasan, or when he left Needlepoint, but he thought it had been near nightfall. Somewhere along the line he must have stopped for the night, started to take a shower, slipped, hit his head and woke up sometime later. The cheap plastic clock on the dresser indicated it was nearly eleven. “Must be P.M.,” he mused at the pettiness of his deductive powers, as he looked out the window and eyed the night sky amid the glow of neon signs through the gap in the cheap flowered curtains.
Slowly he oriented himself and sat up, fighting the pain and the threat of sickness. He pawed through the ditty bag again, finding the ever-present bottle of aspirins. He force
d four tablets down sans water with a grimace at both the taste and the pain of the motion. As he stared vacantly at the carpet, trying to overcome the acrid bitterness in his mouth, he recognized a sense of confusion. It seemed to be some feeling of an inconsistency amidst all the inconsistencies of the day.
“Why on earth is my ditty bag with all my toiletries in here, next to the bed while I was taking a shower?”
The puzzlement increased as he spied his clothes heaped in a pile next to the bed. Again he found himself facing an inconsistency. He usually didn't undress in the bedroom and walk naked into the bathroom, it was an uncomfortable action even in his home, a much warmer place than this god forsaken draft box of a motel.
Although not tidy by any means, as Joy had reminded him from time to time, he wasn't in the habit of piling his clothes up on the floor either, particularly in a motel. If anything the years he spent on the road had taught him a sense of organization when he traveled, lest he forget something and found himself in another city without a belt, or a hair brush, or any of the other things that make life on the road somewhat bearable.
He knew he would never be able to figure it out, at least not this night. With the small respite from the pain that the aspirin provided, Carly managed to dress and slide out into the cool night air. The rush of brisk Rocky Mountain night cleared his head. Orienting himself, he headed off in the direction of the lights of convenience store, finding his headache giving way to a ravenous hunger and a desire for a cup of coffee.
After sating his hunger with three overtly chewy burritos from the store’s microwave, he found himself able to recollect a bigger portion of the day's events. He had seen Hasan sometime in the afternoon. He remembered wandering around Needlepoint looking for directions but having the hardest time finding anything open. He had found a phone book, but Hasan wasn't listed, but the little map had offered some pattern to his street by street search. He still didn't remember how he found Hasan's house, but he remembers meeting the quiet little man. The doctor had sat patiently on a deep rich leather couch, covered with a light afghan pulled to his chin, to fight off a summer cold he had said, as he answered Carly's questions. He hadn't been much help in regards to Dombrowski's final days or the execution. He had said shortly after Dombrowski died, he had won the Colorado lottery, and retired to Needlepoint. He told Carly he spent his days reading and hiking the Sangre de Cristo mountains just outside of town, a leisurely and reflective life, the kind he had dreamed about before he came to the United States.
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