Small Crimes

by Dave Zeltserman

  ‘What were you hoping for?’ I asked. ‘That I had gotten hit and would bleed out before help could get to me?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  He turned and glared at me, but it was forced and unnatural. Then he looked away. We stood silently for what seemed like minutes before he muttered something about me waiting where I was. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said.

  I watched as he walked away, his gait self-conscious. He was about to enter the house, but he backed up to let the two EMTs out. They held a short conversation before he slid past them and went inside.

  The stretcher the EMTs were carrying was empty. As they were loading it into the back of the ambulance I asked how my mom was.

  ‘I think her hip is badly bruised, but not broken,’ one of them said to me.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be taking her to the hospital?’

  He shrugged. ‘If they don’t want to go, you can’t make them.’

  The two of them finished loading up the ambulance and then drove off. I sat for another few minutes on the curb and then stood up and got into my car. While I sat there I thought about the police holding up the ambulance on me. When I had called, I had spoken to the switchboard operator, and she had probably relayed my message to the desk sergeant, Schilling. It had probably been his idea. Still, I was sure Bill knew about it. As I thought about it, I realized I didn’t care. Just as I realized I didn’t care that my parents had thrown me out. Let them all do whatever they wanted to. As soon as I could, I’d be out of Bradley. Then none of it would matter.

  I had my eyes closed and head tilted back when there was a short rap on the driver’s side window. I opened my eyes and saw Bill leaning over, frowning. I rolled down the window.

  ‘You weren’t planning on driving off, were you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I was just waiting here for you.’

  ‘That’s quite a mess in there,’ he said.

  I didn’t bother answering him.

  He waited for a few seconds, realized I wasn’t going to say anything, and then continued. ‘Your parents claim you have photos that belong to them. They want them back.’

  ‘They’re pictures of my kids.’

  ‘They say they’ll file charges against you if you don’t return them.’

  ‘Let them.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  He started fingering his handcuffs. He had them half slid off his belt before I stopped him.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I’ll go in and talk to them.’

  He shook his head. ‘They don’t want you in their house. Why don’t you hand me those photos. It would be a pretty stupid thing to have to arrest you for.’

  ‘Yeah, it would be,’ I agreed. ‘Especially since if I was brought in tonight, I’d make a stink about that ambulance being held up on me. Someone might actually care about it.’

  I could see his eyes dull a bit, but he didn’t say a word. I let out a lungful of air. ‘Why don’t you go back in there and tell them that if they want I’ll give them their pictures back, but if I do, I’ll also be driving to Albany tonight so I can take my own in the morning. Let’s see what they say to that.’

  Bill’s mouth twisted into a smirk as he shot me a disgusted look, but after a ten-count, he turned and went back into the house. When he came back he told me I could keep the photos.

  ‘You need anything else from me?’ I asked.

  He shook his head, his eyes as lifeless as glass.

  ‘I’ve got a duffel bag with my clothes in there. It’s in my bedroom. You want to accompany me while I go in and get it?’

  ‘They don’t want you in there.’ I could see in his eyes the last thing he wanted to do was run another errand for me. It just about killed him, but he gritted his teeth and told me to wait where I was while he went in and retrieved my bag for me.

  As he went back into the house, I got out of the car and stretched. My muscles ached and I was dead tired. As I stretched, Bill came out of the house with my duffel bag. For a moment it looked as if he were going to hand it to me, but as I reached out for the bag he dropped it at my feet.

  ‘About your being shot at,’ he said, ‘here’s a suggestion. Why don’t you get in your car and keeping driving ’til you get someplace where somebody gives a damn?’

  Chapter 13

  I found a roadside motel in Eastfield to spend the night. The room they gave me had a dirty, stale feel to it and seemed more like a bunker than a motel room. The walls were concrete, the flooring a mix of industrial carpeting and cement, and the mattress had to have been at least thirty years old and in worse shape than the one I had in jail. It was the type of place where you kept your shoes on, and still checked where you stepped so you wouldn’t walk on any left-behind hypodermic needles or used rubbers. Still, I was out before my eyes closed. Completely out, no dreams, nothing. It was as if a switch had been thrown.

  The room was still dark when I opened my eyes. My neck and joints ached and I had a rotten taste in my mouth and generally felt lousy. With some effort, I contorted my neck and upper body so I could look at the two-dollar alarm clock next to the bed. It was only a few minutes past five. I pushed myself out of bed, got into the shower and tried to get as clean as I could. It wasn’t easy; the shower wasn’t the type you could really get clean in. The soap they gave was a small sliver, the water stayed mostly cold and only at the end made it close to lukewarm, and the lone towel that was left folded in the bathroom couldn’t have cost more than fifty cents and was about as thick as tissue paper.

  I wanted to get out of there quickly and escape the griminess of the place, and was dressed and in my car by five thirty. The first thing I did was drive to an all-night gas station and buy some doughnuts, aspirin and road maps. I brought all the stuff out to my car, and after wolfing down the doughnuts and chewing on a few aspirin, I unfolded the road maps and planned out a trip to Montreal. Before heading off, I called my parole officer, Craig Simpson, on a payphone and left a message that I had to miss our meeting because of a job interview. I knew Craig well enough to know that while he’d be annoyed by my canceling our appointment, he’d let it slide.

  I had thought long and hard about seeking out Junior for the stunt he pulled the night before, but I had this nagging feeling about Charlotte that I couldn’t shake. When I thought back about our day together and how she had acted after she’d left the hospital, it seemed bizarre to me. Almost as if she suspected me then of wanting her to overdose Manny. I had this image of her in my mind, of when we had driven to Burlington, how she sat closed and withdrawn, and how she’d occasionally peek at me when she didn’t think I was looking. I shuddered involuntarily as I thought about it. It was more than that, though. It didn’t make any sense for her to jump to that conclusion as quickly as she had. There was something not quite right there and I was going to find out what it was. As much as I wanted to pay Junior back, this seemed more important.

  Even though it was only six in the morning and the sun hadn’t yet had a chance to rise, the air had a clammy feel to it and you could tell the day was going to be overcast. It was the type of weather that would get into your bones. I put the top down anyways. I don’t know, I guess after seven years cooped up in jail, I now wanted as much air as I could get. Driving to Montreal was only a half-hour longer than the ride to Albany, but I didn’t get any sense of peace from the trip. I had too many thoughts and worries nagging at me.

  I reached customs by nine thirty and got to the first hospital a little before ten. It took some persistence and wheedling on my part, but the woman working in the records room was too polite to stonewall me for long. After a while she checked their files and told me that Charlotte never worked there. I went through the same deal with three more hospitals until I found one that Charlotte had worked at. When I asked the clerk in their administration office whether I could speak with someone familiar with Charlotte’s work history, she asked me to wait
a few minutes, and then got on the phone and tried to locate someone for me. Less than ten minutes later I was brought into the office of the Chief of Surgery.

  The Chief of Surgery, Dr Henri Bouchaire, was a cheery-looking fellow, about thirty-five, with light brownish hair and long sideburns. He stood up immediately to shake my hand, and when he sat back down, he pressed both his hands flat together so they formed an apex, and rested the tip against his chin.

  ‘I’d like to thank you for taking the time to see me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s quite all right.’ He paused to show me an anemic smile. ‘I understand you have several questions that you would like to ask concerning a nurse we once employed. Charlotte Boyd, is that correct?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you are?’

  I fished my driver’s license out of my wallet and handed it to him. Fortunately, I was able to renew it while in jail. He gave it a cursory look and handed it back to me.

  ‘My name’s Joe Denton,’ I said. ‘I’m a retired police officer from Vermont and I’m investigating Ms Boyd for a hospital that she is currently employed at. To be honest, I’m surprised to be talking to you. I expected to be meeting with her past supervisor.’

  ‘Yes, normally that would be the case.’ He seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment. As he looked at me, the thin smile he was showing weakened. ‘Is your investigation for a general background check or did, uh, a specific incident occur?’

  ‘A specific incident occurred.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘A patient died who shouldn’t have.’

  All his cheeriness left him. He looked down at his desk for a few seconds before meeting my eyes. ‘Did this, uh, patient die of respiratory failure?’ he asked.

  I wanted to kick myself for not researching this better, but I took a gamble and nodded. He separated his hands and started slowly massaging his temples.

  ‘Are you okay, Doctor?’ I asked.

  He nodded and dropped his hands to his desk. ‘I’ve been afraid of this,’ he said.

  ‘So you had some unexplained deaths here also?’

  He both sighed and nodded at the same time. ‘Mr Denton, could you please tell me what your hospital’s medical staff suspects?’

  It looked like not only did I hit a long shot, but one that was going to pay off big. ‘Morphine overdose,’ I said as calmly and evenly as I could.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ he murmured.

  ‘And you think the same thing happened here?’

  ‘We had four patients who died of respiratory failure which I found suspicious,’ he said. ‘Let me explain. Overdosing a patient with morphine will cause respiratory failure. During the post-mortem the only change is diffused cerebral edema, and the problem is that it is very nonspecific to link to a morphine overdose.’

  ‘But you suspected Ms Boyd?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘Their deaths did not seem consistent with their medical conditions. They were all her patients. And her demeanor afterwards seemed, uh, unnatural to me. But there was no evidence, at least none that could be used in court, to support my suspicions. The morphine levels in the IV bags were where they were supposed to be and I don’t believe the instrumentation was tampered with. But after the first three deaths, I personally marked all the morphine IV tubing. I found with the last patient that it had been changed.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That she could have used a syringe to inject morphine into the IV tubing and replaced the tubing afterwards. Later, there would be no evidence of what she had done.’

  ‘Why would she bother replacing the tubing?’

  ‘In case we looked for a needle hole.’

  I leaned back in my chair and thought about it, and tried to muster as indignant a look as I could. ‘So you confronted her and forced her to leave your hospital?’

  He nodded. He was beginning to look a little green around the gills.

  ‘You did more than that, didn’t you,’ I said. ‘You forced her to leave Montreal.’

  ‘I wish there was something else I could have done,’ he said. ‘We had no concrete evidence that she poisoned her patients. I felt fortunate simply to have her leave the province.’

  ‘So as long as she moved to another country and murdered her patients there, that was okay with you?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, of course not. But what else could I have done?’

  He seemed like a decent enough guy and I didn’t get any enjoyment out of putting him through the wringer, but I needed to make my performance look authentic. The last thing I wanted to do was make him suspicious and have him check up on me.

  I gave it some time to make it look like I was mulling things over. ‘Well, Doctor,’ I said after a while, ‘I guess I can appreciate how difficult the situation must’ve been for you. I guess if I were in your shoes, I don’t know what I would’ve done.’ I paused, because there was something else nagging at the back of my brain. ‘Were the four patients all terminal?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No, in fact only one of them was.’

  I must’ve, at least at some level, been suspecting that, but it still came as a surprise. I guess when the idea first came to me, I had assumed Charlotte had been acting out some sort of angel of mercy thing. But it wasn’t that. She had other reasons for doing what she did. And this image of her sneaking through the hospital with her morphine syringe started to creep me out.

  I had another question that was nagging at me. I asked him whether Charlotte had any close friends at the hospital that she might’ve confided in. He told me he had asked around at the time and couldn’t find anyone who considered themselves more than an acquaintance of hers. And not many considered themselves that.

  I stood up and thanked him for his time.

  He seemed taken aback by my abruptness, but took my outstretched hand and mumbled out an apology for what happened. I then left him deep in his own thoughts.

  At a subconscious level, I must’ve suspected something like that of Charlotte all along. I had to have. That had to have been why I came up with the plan that I did, because otherwise it would’ve been completely nuts. Maybe it was the way she avoided talking about Montreal, or maybe it was some look or expression of hers that I’d caught a glimpse of, or maybe it was simply the whole package, but something about her had caused that seed to be planted in my mind.

  I could understand now why she had jumped to the conclusion that she did. When I had made my offhand remark about overdosing Manny, she must have panicked and thought that I had already dug around her past in Montreal and suspected what she had done. I thought about her and the repressed life that she lived. It must’ve been worse when she was in Montreal. I could just imagine how all that repression would weigh on her. How it would press on her chest. How tough it would be to breathe against. And how she’d find relief by unloading a morphine syringe into a patient’s IV tubing.

  Well, anyway, she was going to use a morphine syringe one more time.

  It was only a quarter to twelve. I drove around until I found a diner, and then went inside and ordered lunch. My waitress was a cute little thing; blonde, perky, big dimples, and friendly as all hell. She had one of those smiles that made you feel good just looking at it. I kidded around with her after she brought me my food and had a feeling that if I asked her to come back to the States with me, she would’ve jumped in my car. In any case, the check was six bucks and I left her a ten-dollar tip.

  After lunch I thought about driving around the city and seeing the sights. I thought about it, but decided to head back to Vermont. I still had plenty of things that needed to be done. When I reached the US border and the customs officer asked how my trip went, I couldn’t help myself – I just showed him a big smile and told him it was the best damn trip I ever had. I was feeling too good to have said anything else. Hell, I was just about beaming. I hadn’t realized before how much stress had bottled up in my neck and back and joints, but it was all gone now.
I was feeling loose. Maybe a little anxious, but not much. All in all I felt good.

  As I drove, at times my mind would just drift along, not aware of anything but the road and the scenery. At other times I found myself thinking about what was going to happen. Charlotte was going to shoot enough morphine into Manny’s IV tubing to kill him and that would be the end of it.

  When the idea had first come to me, I was concerned whether a morphine overdose could be detected by an autopsy. Now, though, thanks to the good Dr Bouchaire, I knew that it couldn’t be. I knew that there was nothing to worry about. Soon Manny would be checking out and that would be that. Dan Pleasant would be off my back, Phil Coakley would be left empty handed, and Junior, well, that was still a problem. Something was going to have to be done about him. There’d have to be payback for his taking a couple of shots at me. But I knew I’d come up with something, and when it was all over, I’d move somewhere and start fresh. And then I’d start doing what I needed to for my girls.

  During my ride back an idea popped into my head on how I could take care of Junior. Over the next half-hour or so, the idea gelled nicely, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It would be a fitting epitaph to my life in Bradley. After a while my mind started drifting along with the scenery again. And then I just settled back into my seat and enjoyed the ride.

  Chapter 14

  I was on Route Six as I entered Chesterville, and as I passed the Green Valley Motor Lodge, I saw half a dozen police cars and three sheriff’s vehicles in the parking lot, all with their lights flashing. I almost stopped to see what had happened, but I knew my presence wouldn’t be appreciated. Still, my palms felt itchy as I drove by.

  Two miles down the road, I spotted a bar and pulled over. From the outside, the place looked like a typical small-town dive. It was four thirty and the bar was busier than it had any right to be. Inside, it looked just as divey. At that hour it should’ve had only a few hardcore and unrepentant drinkers scattered about. Instead it was nearly wall to wall people and there was a buzz running through the room.