(2012) Political Suicide

by Michael Palmer

  Their next stop was the locker room area, where they were instructed to remove and lock up all personal effects—wallets, jewelry, pens, keys. A second guard, equally as somber as the first, escorted them through another heavy door that clanged shut with the finality of a thunderclap. They passed through the metal detector without incident and followed the guard along a warren of corridors that eventually brought them to the visitor center.

  “That was fun,” Lou said to Cap, realizing his palms had gone clammy and his pulse had ticked up several notches.

  “I never get used to this,” Cap said, “but it’s a good reminder of where I could have ended up.”

  “Amen,” Lou said.

  Lou took his assigned seat on a long bench with partitions on either side of him. Cap got placed somewhere to Lou’s right, perhaps five or six partitioned spaces away. There were eight or nine other visitors here, their conversations subdued. Handprints marring the thick Plexiglas were the echoes of the devastated and desperate loved ones who had cried into the black phone Lou would soon use to speak with McHugh.

  The one good thing about this jaunt to jail was that it made Lou forget about the hugely disappointing encounter with Detective Chris Bryzinski. The man’s lack of enthusiasm was very high on Lou’s list of irritants. Maybe after he finally brought himself to listen to the striking conversation between the high-ranking congressman and the young marine, Bryzinski would call Lou with a little more energy. And with luck, once that happened, the icy atmosphere between Lou and Sarah Cooper would begin to thaw.

  A loud buzzer pulled Lou’s attention toward the door and Gary McHugh’s somber entrance. The flamboyant physician looked absolutely miserable in his orange prison jumpsuit. He had clearly lost weight, and his usually buoyant complexion had gone sallow. McHugh slumped into his chair as he and Lou picked up the wall-mounted phones.

  “Thanks for coming, Lou,” Gary said, his voice rife with torment. “It’s great to see a friendly face. Any face, for that matter.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “Not so good. I keep telling people I didn’t do it, Lou, and nobody will believe me.”

  “You’ll get your day in court,” Lou said. “But you’ve got to stay strong.”

  “Yeah, stay strong. Not so easy here. Lou, this place is a nightmare. We get the same thing to eat every day. Every blasted day. It’s dirty and overcrowded. There’s no decent exercise yard. You don’t get a single second of privacy. Not a second. You can’t even take a dump here without somebody whistling at you. And the gangs—the gangs run the place, and they are really bad. If I have any positive news to report, it’s that after listening to one guy after another blame alcohol or drugs for the mess he’s in, I’ve begun to realize that if I ever get the chance, I need to put more effort into my recovery.”

  “That’s great to hear you say. See if you can get your hands on any AA literature.”

  “I’ll try, but I’m really terrified speaking up about anything.”

  “We’re working on that,” Lou said.

  Lou knew that McHugh’s being a doctor did not help matters at all. In fact, the inmates were certain he could get drugs, which only heightened the enmity toward him in a number of quarters when he couldn’t deliver. There was little or no sympathy for him in jail, just as there was little compassion in the press or hospitals for most of the other PWO clients. They had been given the Great American Dream, elusive to so many, and through their appetites, their lust, their passion for excess, or their psychiatric illness, they had destroyed it. Never mind the good they had done over the years, or the patients they had cared for so meticulously and selflessly. From the beginning of his recovery, Lou had argued on any number of platforms that, like anyone, doctors had the right to be sick, although they also had the obligation to seek treatment.

  McHugh was constantly being threatened; his wife and children refused to visit him; and even his attorney had been acting somewhat distant and clinical.

  Lou debated trying to boost his friend’s mood with an account of the recording he had found, but until Sarah finished her deposition and listened to the CD herself, it did not seem like a wise idea at all. He also worried about raising McHugh’s hopes without first seeing a change in Bryzinski’s attitude. Instead, Lou tried to cheer him up by talking medicine and, without naming names, the new cases he had been assigned by Walter Filstrup. Nothing had much effect.

  “So, what do you think?” McHugh asked, obviously tired of the small talk.

  “About?”

  “Come on, Lou. What have you learned? What did Jeannine say? Does she think I did it?”

  “She’s hurt, Gary, rejected by her kids just like you have been, and angry as hell. At the moment, there isn’t much doubt in her mind that you’re guilty.”

  “Damn. Lou, I swear, I didn’t kill him. You’ve got to keep searching for proof of that. I don’t care if I never get to practice medicine again, but if I get sent to prison, I swear I’ll—”

  “Easy, pal. Remember that ‘day at a time’ stuff? It’s not just words. It saved my life.”

  McHugh wiped the sleeve of his orange jumpsuit across the sweat beading up on his brow. “Okay,” he managed.

  Cap came up behind Lou, bent down, and whispered in his ear, “We’re all set.”

  The guard eyed Cap with suspicion.

  “Gary,” Lou said into the receiver, “look down the row, to your right. You see the large black guy with the Mohawk? His name’s Booker—Tiny Booker.”

  “I’ve seen him around. He’s hard to miss.”

  “Well, Tiny has got your back now. He and his pals are your protection in here until you get out. Don’t lose faith Gary. We’re going to find proof that you’re innocent.”

  “Yeah? Tell that to my kids, will you?”

  “When it’s right. I’ll do that—promise.”

  The guard approached and motioned to his watch that the visit needed to end.

  “Stay strong, pal. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Thanks. It’s good to know someone’s got my back.”

  “And Gary?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What you said about not caring if you ever practice medicine again? Believe it or not, that’s pretty healthy thinking.”

  The guard led Lou and Cap back to the locker area, where they retrieved their things. Cap opened his wallet, checking to see that his money was still there.

  “What?” he said, responding to Lou’s come on, now look. “There are a lot of criminals in here.”

  “I shudder to think of how close I came to getting myself locked up. So, Cap, do you think your friend Tiny will have any luck protecting Gary?”

  Cap worked his jacket back on. “I dunno. Like you said, these are bad places, Lou. Tiny told me it’ll be tough to keep watch all the time, but he’s got enough juice with the gangs that it’ll probably turn out all right.”

  “And what if he can’t?” Lou asked.

  “Well, I know that looking at those sausage-sized fingers of his would hardly make anyone a believer, but Tiny Booker is the best B and E man, the best lock-picker in Baltimore, and maybe one of the best anywhere. I’ve seen him get past alarms that would make Willie Sutton go dizzy in the head.”

  “And how’s that going to help, Gary?”

  “Because if Tiny says he can do something, my bet is on him doing it. But if it turns out he can’t help McHugh, there’s a better-than-even chance he could break him out of here.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Lou used the hours before his graveyard shift to nap, read fifty or so pages of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, and hit an AA meeting. The sparsely attended discussion group dealt that day with Step One of the twelve steps—admitting one is powerless over his or her addiction and that their life had become unmanageable. Gary sounded as if he were inching toward that vital first step on the road to true recovery.

  “You can’t be too stupid to get this stuff,” Cap had said when he and Lou first met, “but
you can sure as heck be too smart.”

  Hopefully, Gary was in the process of being given the gift of desperation. From his own experience, Lou had learned that the harder that gift was to obtain, the better.

  When he finally left the ER, it was, as usual, an hour after his shift should have ended. The thirteen hours were hectic enough to make them pass quickly. Lou, pleasantly bone-weary, headed down to the hospital caf for what he now realized was his first real meal in most of a day. Grapefruit juice, poached eggs on an English muffin, home fries, milk. Because of his reluctance to use any disposable dishes or utensils, he as usual annoyed the server by insisting on metal, glass, and ceramic. Renee, who considered herself a die-hard green, had continuously lectured him on how much less environmentally friendly it was to wash dishes than to go paper, but he defended his reluctance to change anything by demanding statistics.

  He had just reached an empty table and set his tray down when his cell phone began vibrating.

  It was Sarah Cooper, and she did not sound at all pleased. “Are you somewhere where you can pick me up?” she asked.

  Lou looked longingly at his breakfast, none of which was transportable. “When?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “I suppose so. I’m at Eisenhower Memorial. I just got off—”

  “We need to go and speak to that detective you left me a message about. I just got off the phone with him. He’s waiting at his office for us, but he says he’s got to leave soon. I need to hear from both of you exactly what you said to him.”

  “Do you want to listen to the disc first?”

  “Dr. Welcome, what part of ‘he says he’s got to leave soon’ are you having trouble with?”

  “Attorney Cooper, does the approach of being snide and nasty usually get you what you want?” Lou picked at the edge of an English muffin, which was already becoming soggy.

  “I’ll be just inside the street door to my office,” Sarah said.

  The line went dead.

  Over the ten-minute drive to Sarah’s office, Lou mustered the ten years of serenity that defined his recovery. From their initial meeting at McHugh’s place, something hadn’t been right between the two of them. But what?

  Lou pulled to the curb, and as promised, she hurried out. There was no question that he found her attractive. It was hard not to. But if she wanted to push him away, she was doing a near perfect job.

  “Drive!” Sarah ordered, slamming the door behind her and snapping her seat belt in place.

  “Wait, I think we should talk,” Lou said.

  “About what? What could you say that you haven’t already?”

  Lou flashed on the time in grade school when he had tried to impress some older boys by shoplifting a wind-up robot from a toy store. He had been desperate for their approval then, just as he realized he was for Sarah Cooper’s approval now. That, in all likelihood, was what lay behind his rush to turn the disc over to the police. And if her reaction was any measure, he was screwing up just as badly as he had by pilfering the robot. The difference was that unless he was way off base, he had done nothing wrong this time.

  His punishment for the shoplifting gaffe was the payment of a month’s allowance to the proprietor of the store, and a two-page essay about why it was wrong to steal. He glanced over at the attorney he had wanted so much to impress, and wondered if he was going to get away that easy.

  He slipped the car into the flow of traffic and headed west.

  “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?” he asked finally. “Why the rush to go back to see Bryzinski?”

  Sarah’s look held all the warmth of concrete. “Do you think you went into medicine because you were arrogant, or did you become arrogant because you became a doctor?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “All right, let me try this another way: Do you think it would be right for me to stroll into the emergency ward and start sewing up patients?”

  Lou was about to go for a flip answer, but bit it back at the last instant. “No,” he said solemnly. “That wouldn’t be appropriate.”

  “So, do you think the rules we have for handling evidence in legal cases is any less crucial and binding than the rules you have for treating patients?”

  “I suppose not, but—”

  “There is no ‘but.’ You may have messed up. You physicians screw up all the time because you just don’t listen. The rules to follow are there, starting with, Listen to the patient. But you decide when you’re going to pay attention to them and when you just don’t feel like it. Even if this Bryzinski has taken perfect care of that CD, the potential is there for disaster. Trouble at home, an alcohol problem, some sort of scary medical report from his doctor. He loses his concentration or isn’t paying attention to you in the first place, and all of a sudden, all your good intentions fly out the window. When your patients tell you something, do you listen?”

  “Of course I listen.”

  “And what about when I told you something back at Gary McHugh’s house. Did you listen?”

  Lou could not understand why she was so upset. It wasn’t as if he were a naïve idiot. He had made a thorough, even brilliant, search and had turned up a CD that was going to help his friend and her client. Then he had made two copies of the CD, and took the original to the police. What was wrong about any of that?

  She should have been ecstatic about the discovery. Perhaps her vitriol was nothing more than a stab of jealously at Lou having proved his worth to McHugh’s case in just a matter of days. He decided to push the envelope.

  “Sarah, I found evidence that should at least infuse doubt into the case against Gary. I don’t see why you’re so upset.”

  She sighed deeply while Lou weaved through the increasing volume of early afternoon traffic. “You just don’t understand how things work,” she said.

  Lou wanted her to look at him. The angrier she got, the more he wanted to appease her. They should be forging an alliance—for Gary’s sake, they needed to be on the same team.

  “Why don’t you explain to me how things work instead of getting so upset with me? I did try calling you.”

  “But then you decided you could just handle things yourself. The old M. Deity.”

  “What’s your deal?” Lou asked. “All that matters is the police have the evidence you’ll need to help Gary.”

  Finally, Sarah turned to him. He immediately wished she hadn’t. “Do they?” she asked. “Just in case, did you make sure the copies you had made were flawless reproductions?”

  “No, but—”

  “And did Jeannine Colston see you find the CD?”

  “She was sleeping off a migraine and asked me not to wake her unless I had to. I didn’t even know what was on the disc yet, and I felt she had done enough, spending so much time with me. She was really a mess.”

  The Toyota picked up even more speed.

  “So nobody knows that you found this evidence that will possibly help cast doubt on the guilt of Gary McHugh?”

  “Well, Bryzinski does.”

  “You told me he didn’t listen to the recording in front of you. Did Bryzinski know that nobody else had heard that recording?”

  The speedometer’s needle inched ahead.

  Lou nodded. “I understand what you’re getting at.”

  “At last, light dawns. Doctor, this isn’t a child’s game. A man’s life is at stake here.”

  Lou began to boil. “I think I appreciate what’s at risk.”

  “Do you? You think this is just about evidence? A congressman has been murdered, Lou. Don’t you get it?”

  Lou realized it was the first time she had called him by his given name.

  “This is about sound bites and CNN and twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage. It’s about getting somebody fingered for the crime, winning in the court of public opinion, and lastly putting the so-called scumbag who the DA says did it away for life. It’s about elections and promotions, and that has nothing—and I do mean nothing�
�to do with evidence.

  “Who looks bad if Gary McHugh isn’t the killer? Who looks bad if your tip capsizes somebody’s boat—someone with a lot more power and influence than you and I have, someone who doesn’t want the public to think that an investigation into a congressman’s murder was shoddily handled? Whose ass is in a sling when the media starts reporting that the Keystone Kops bungled yet another high-profile investigation? I’m not talking evidence. I’m talking the facts of life in the law—real and often very ugly facts.”

  Lou glanced down at the speedometer and saw that he was now traveling eighty in a fifty. “We’ll be there soon,” he said.

  CHAPTER 16

  The remainder of the ride to the state police barracks in College Park was made in absolute silence.

  Breathe in … breathe out …

  Lou used the mantra to keep focused on the speed limit and on the likelihood that in a short while, there would be no further tension between him and Sarah Cooper. The detective in charge of the Colston murder would produce the CD, and Gary McHugh would no longer be the only suspect. Case closed—or, more to the point, just beginning.

  Sarah Cooper had an edge like honed steel. It was humbling and not a little embarrassing to be spoken to the way she had spoken to him, but he could see her point. His enthusiasm and, yes, maybe his arrogance had overwhelmed his objectivity. And for whatever reason, Sarah was disinclined to cut him any slack at all.

  The flag outside the low brick building was still at half-mast. With all the violence in the world, Lou wondered if its condition might be permanent. The two of them were kept waiting only a short time before Chris Bryzinski lumbered into the waiting room and motioned them to follow him into the inner sanctum. Lou watched as the man’s girth nearly brushed against each side of the doorframe, and he mused about what would happen if the detective were ever forced to chase a criminal. They stopped in the hallway just beyond the door.