Perfect

by Harry Kraus

  I massaged his scalp, envying the thickness of his hair. One thing I understood about this man was that he would talk about it when he was ready. My job was to try and be there when the story finally bubbled to the surface.

  The confrontational me wanted to ask him just what he thought he was doing visiting a beautiful young resident in her apartment. But now wasn’t the time for jealousy. Henry needed my support, not my suspicions, so I bottled it and poured him another drink.

  I moved around and sat on a couch facing him. “We’ll get through this,” I promised.

  He looked at me with eyes that were glazed over, the alcohol already numbing his pain. Not enough, though, to cover something else, something I’d recognized in others but never in my trauma surgeon husband: fear.

  “Sure,” he muttered. “No one keeps a Stratford down.”

  We sat in silence another ten minutes before I stood and walked towards the stairs.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “The guest room. I’m not ready to sleep in our bed yet.”

  Henry sighed. “But the 6000 is so much more comfortable.”

  I shrugged. “I know, but I’m still not sleeping there. Not yet. Maybe if I buy a new mattress cover.” I looked at the disappointment on Henry’s face. Perhaps it is different for you. You deal with death every day. “I’m sorry, Henry.”

  That night, Henry stared at the glowing green lights of his alarm clock as 2:10, 2:11, 2:12 crawled by with unbearable lethargy. He rose, dry-swallowed a sleeping pill, and looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. The man in the glass slumped forward, haggard and defeated. He couldn’t erase the memory of the night’s horror. The image of pain on Cindy’s face. Eyes pleading with him to protect her, to intervene, to stop a madman high on drugs and bent on revenge. He shivered as the memory of his helplessness mocked him.

  Emotions of fear, anxiety, anger, and revenge all fought for supremacy within his soul.

  He studied his sallow complexion in the dim light. A wave of nausea rose and faded with the fresh memory of the barrel of a gun shoved into his face.

  “This is what happens when you stop cooperating, Doc.”

  He splashed water on his face and lifted a thick terry-cloth towel to muffle his cries as shock yielded to an eruption of emotion. He shuddered uncontrollably and gasped, his normal façade of control and professional demeanor flung aside.

  After a minute, he lifted his eyes to meet those of his reflection again. He nodded at the image, sensing the hardening of his resolve.

  He’d been caught in a riptide once. He was twelve years old, vacationing at Nags Head, North Carolina. The water was fast-flowing and deep, his tiptoes scraping as the sand slipped away and out of reach.

  Henry sniffed and smiled at the memory of his battle with a force far more powerful than his adolescent body. His cool head saved him that day. He’d followed the instructions of his own father, who’d warned him of the dangers of the current.

  He was in a riptide of sorts again, caught against his will, control yielded to forces far more powerful than his own. And yet he understood his responsibility. He alone had decided to swim in these troubled waters.

  There, in the dim light of the bathroom, he began to formulate a plan.

  “Anders,” he whispered. He looked at the towel in his hand and tossed it on the floor in disgust, as if to rid himself of the evidence of his tears. He was a man. A surgeon. He would not yield himself to displays of weakness again. He sniffed again, swallowed, steadied his voice, and declared to his reflection, as if resolving to take out the trash, “Anders, I’m going to kill you.”

  The next morning, while Henry performed surgery on his English muffin, I quizzed him about my list of worries. “I think Yolanda erased the pictures from my Nikon.”

  Henry didn’t look up. He mumbled with his mouth half full of bread. “Why would she do that?”

  “I can’t figure that out. I was closing in on someone I was convinced was the guilty party in Jack’s hit-and-run. I’d gone up to Ruckersville on a tip from an insurance agent. I found a truck grille covered with the same blue paint.” I shook my head. “But something’s going on. Chris Black went up to check out my story and found nothing like I described it. So I took him my camera, but everything had been erased.”

  “Why would she erase your camera?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve wondered about that quite a bit, even imagining she knew the guy that struck Jack’s car, like maybe she planned to have Jack killed.”

  “Now that’s crazy.”

  I shrugged and sipped at my coffee. “I know. But it seems so many weird things have been happening at the same time, I was searching for a link.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she was due an insurance payout if Jack died, so she hires this Anders dude to kill him and make it look like an accident. Then she realizes I’m on to this guy, flips out, and commits suicide.”

  Henry dropped his butter knife. “Did you say ‘Anders’?”

  I nodded. “Jesse Anders. Why? You know him?”

  Henry wiped his mouth with a napkin and cleared his throat. “I treated his wife.” He paused, looking intently at me from across the breakfast table. “Stay away from him, Wendi. This guy is trouble. He could be dangerous.”

  I could tell from his tone of voice that my husband was dead serious. But now I was more curious than ever. “Dangerous? What do you know about him?”

  “My work has provided plenty of opportunity to intersect with the down-and-outers of our fine society, honey. Anders is a drug-gie. A dealer. If he’s covering something up, and you expose him, he seems the type to seek revenge.”

  “How would you know?”

  Henry’s voice was quiet, just above a whisper, yet so serious, it seemed melodramatic. “He threatened to sue me, Wendi.”

  I started to respond, but he interrupted, “Stay away from him.”

  Again, I opened my mouth in protest, but my words lodged in my throat when I saw Henry’s expression. I nodded, but wondered if Henry really expected me to comply. Threats from parties on the opposite side of the law from me had never stopped me before.

  Henry squinted in my direction before standing in front of the foyer mirror. He seemed satisfied that I was sufficiently scared not to get myself into trouble. Oh how little my husband really understood about my personality. To Henry, it would be unthinkable for me to cross him. And I suppose, if truth be known, I’d had little reason to do it in the past. But he’d never made demands of my professional behavior before.

  I watched his routine. In the end, he checked his zipper once. Patted the fly. Smiled at himself. Turned to go, then back for a second check. Patted his fly a second time. Again, his shoulders shifted, revealing his intent to walk away. He turned back to the mirror a third time, running his finger along his zipper a third time. I watched his face reflect his inner torment as he turned to go again. Then a fourth time, now with a casual glance at me.

  OK, I thought, this is new territory for Henry. He’s never, ever checked more than two times until this week, and now, he’d done a quadruple check. I’m not sure what I expected. Lightning, perhaps? Something was definitely stressing my husband.

  I smiled at him, offering him a little wave to send him off, but worrying that the axis in Henry’s world had shifted. I stood and carried my coffee to the front room to watch him leave. I guess I shouldn’t have been too freaked out about his compulsivity explosion. After all, he’d accidentally run over one of his residents last night. That should be enough to disrupt his routine.

  Henry signaled for a left turn as he approached the end of our one-hundred-foot driveway. OK, I thought, it’s not the end of the world.

  Rene seemed to be intent on sleeping in, so I tiptoed around sipping Kenyan AA coffee as the events from the last few days filtered and refiltered through my cranium. I bounced from crisis to crisis, from my blowup with my parents to my father’s plea that I should try to learn to know my
mother again. I thought about Yolanda and Chris Black and his questioning about my relationship to Jack.

  I thought about Henry and wondered if we were going to make it. I swung a pendulum from being excited about the possibility of adopting Rene’s baby to being upset that he was at the apartment of a gorgeous blonde resident when he should have been home with me. That’s when I remembered something that Chris Black told me last night about Henry’s pedestrian accident scene and I realized why the whole thing seemed a little funny. “For the record, everything corroborated with his story, including the brake skid marks in front of the body location and blood on the pavement.”

  Brake skid marks? Almost impossible for a Mercedes with antilock brakes.

  With my curiosity pricked, I sat down at my kitchen desk and called Sig Eichmann, the medical examiner. As a forensic pathologist, he deciphered the cause of death. As an accident reconstructionist, I looked at the pattern of individual injuries to assist in piecing together just what took place. The collection and interpretation of forensic evidence surrounding death and of postmortem physical evidence were shared arenas for us and had brought Sig and me into collaboration on many cases.

  I imagined Sig wearing his green apron over a paper gown and latex gloves as I dialed. A few minutes later, his secretary forwarded my call. “Wendi,” he said with his rich German accent, “I’m up to my backside in alligators here. Two homicides, an overdose, and a pedestrian accident.” I listened to him sigh. “What do you need?”

  “A favor.” I hesitated. “I want to know about Cindy Swanson.”

  He made a clicking sound with his cheek. He was thinking.

  “The pedestrian death from Charlottesville last night.”

  “Ooooh.” More clicking sounds. “I’ve not finished with that one. Dana’s looking at it. Crushed skull. Intracranial bleeding. Death from a head injury, I’m sure.” He paused. “Who asked you to look into it? Police consult? Insurance?”

  I held my breath for a second. Sig probably didn’t know Henry was involved. I couldn’t lie to Sig. “She was an acquaintance.”

  “Wendi,” he said. “I shouldn’t be giving you information. I could get in a lot of trouble if — ”

  “I know about confidentiality, Sig. I’m not telling a soul,” I said.

  “Please, Wendi. My office has had too much bad press lately. An uncontrolled information leak could get me fired.”

  “Sig, relax! I won’t tell anyone.”

  He sighed again, and his breath whistled into the phone.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I already knew about the case from Chris Black. He called me about it last night. You haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know.”

  “Tell me again why you called.”

  “I just wanted to hear it from you.”

  “You’re suspicious of foul play.”

  I didn’t want to bias him. “You told me what I wanted. She died of a head injury resulting from a pedestrian accident. End of story, right?”

  The silence on the line told me he wasn’t buying my technically true explanation. I thought about my commitment to cast aside my fake life. “OK,” I continued with a sigh. “That’s not the whole story. The pedestrian was struck by my husband.”

  Sig huffed. “Wendi, I’m so sorry.” He paused. “But I wish you hadn’t called me. Your personal attachment to this case makes it worse that I’ve offered you information.”

  “You told me nothing,” I countered. “Nothing that I didn’t know from my husband or Chris Black.”

  The clicking noises resumed. Sig’s paranoia about protocol violations rivaled the acceleration of my what-iffer. That’s what Henry always called it when I started in on an accident reconstruction with a hundred different possible scenarios.

  Sig continued, “I’d better go. Violence never sleeps, you know. I’m here, day after day, sorting out the sins of man.”

  His choice of words made me wince. “OK, Sig. I’ve got the picture. I’m not trying to interfere.”

  “Goodbye.”

  I shook my head and ended the call no closer to an answer than I was before.

  Sig Eichmann, M.D., sat down at his desk and picked up a slice of cold cheese pizza. As he ate, he reviewed the gross findings of the Swanson case.

  The patient had suffered multiple skull fractures and a severe underlying brain injury. The skull was crushed, eggshell fractured, and the overlying skin held the tell-tale markings of tire tread and ground-in asphalt.

  The vaginal swabs indicated recent sexual intercourse, and external inspection failed to reveal any evidence of forced penetration. The semen sample had diminished sperm motility, indicating sexual contact twenty-four to thirty-six hours before her demise.

  In light of the findings, Wendi Stratford’s interest in the case bothered him even more. He stripped off his disposable gown and gloves, depositing them in a large red bag labeled “biohazard.”

  He walked to his office and phoned Detective Chris Black of the Charlottesville Police Department.

  The answer was pure business. “Detective Black.”

  “Detective Black, this is Dr. Eichmann. I’m calling about a case your city forwarded to me this morning, pedestrian accident, Cindy Swanson.”

  “I know the case.”

  “I’ve not concluded my study, but I’ve got enough here to raise some flags I thought you should know about.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The skull is badly fractured, consistent with the police report I’ve read. This may be as straightforward as is first apparent, but . . .”

  The detective huffed his impatience. “Spit it out, Doc.”

  “There’s more, Chris. I didn’t want to tell you.” He halted and tried to massage away the growing pain in his temples. “Wendi Stratford is my friend. Yours too, I understand.”

  Chris huffed. “Damned near embarrassed me out of the department. She cost me a promotion.”

  Sig frowned. “She called me, trying to get information about my findings. She seemed intent on getting me to say that it was a simple death from head injury due to a pedestrian accident.”

  The detective cursed again. Sig could hear the squeak of a desk chair. “So what are you saying? You suspect something else is up?”

  “I don’t know. I just got a funny feeling when talking to Wendi. She’s such a straight shooter, but she sounded overly concerned about this case being resolved quickly as a pedestrian death from head injury.”

  “Her husband was the driver. She should be concerned.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing. Just a gut hunch.”

  “Stick to the evidence, Doc. Let me follow my own hunches.”

  “I’ve got semen sample from the victim. I’m submitting it for a DNA analysis for a fingerprint.”

  “Wonderful.” Eichmann listened to a tapping noise, the detective drumming his fingers on the mouthpiece. “You still haven’t told me your final opinion on the Pate autopsy. Straightforward suicide?”

  Sig ran his hand through his white hair. “I’m going to officially sign out Yolanda Pate’s autopsy as narcotic and alcohol overdose. But straightforward? I’m not sure. She had a few cuts inside the mouth. Could be signs of a struggle before death.” He paused. “Overdose victims don’t struggle. They just simply quit breathing from lack of a respiratory drive.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that the findings are suspicious for foul play. I suppose she could have bitten the inside of her mouth in her drunken state, then later overdosed on the Oxycontin. But that brings up other issues.”

  “Issues?” Black sounded irritated.

  “The Oxycontin bottle didn’t belong to the deceased, and the prescription happens to have been written by Dr. Stratford. Have you talked to this guy, Lanny Bedford? His name is on the bottle.”

  Black sighed. “Of course. That’s my business, OK?”

  “Sure.”

  Chris Black said, “Have a nice day.”


  The pathologist listened as the detective slammed down the phone. So much for a nice day. He’d seen too much inhumanity today to believe in nice days anymore.

  Chris Black wasn’t easily intimidated. He looked at Dr. Stratford’s ego wall and wondered whether, if he himself had so many diplomas and awards, he would display them in such an arrogant grouping. Ceiling to floor, shoulder to shoulder, like obedient soldiers standing for inspection, all the certificates were bordered by shiny black frames. This morning Chris decided to follow the pathologist’s hunch and push on Dr. Stratford a bit, just to see if anything suspicious bubbled to the surface. Besides, he rather enjoyed making perfectionist types like the surgeon sweat.

  The detective tapped a silver pen against his cheek and allowed his eyes to bore in on the surgeon’s face. “Were you sleeping with your resident?”

  Chris watched as the corner of the surgeon’s mouth twitched. “Where did that come from? I thought you were here to see how I was doing.”

  Black leaned back in his chair and forced a laugh. “I am, I am.” He paused. “I guess you need to be warned, Henry. They’ve taken a semen sample from the body,” he said, studying the surgeon’s face. “It’s amazing what our forensics guys can do with trace evidence. Pubic hair, DNA,” Chris said, waving his hand in a little circle, before continuing, “and that sort of thing.” He chuckled. “They all whisper the truth.”

  “This has nothing to do with how she died.”

  Chris raised his eyebrows and stayed silent, letting Henry squirm. The doctor played it pretty cool.

  “Do I need to call my lawyer?”

  “Do you?”

  The surgeon huffed.

  “Why don’t you tell me the story, Henry? It will save us all a lot of misery. Talk to me.”

  Henry Stratford adjusted the perfect knot in his tie and lowered his voice. “Look, Chris, you and Wendi are friends. Bringing this up now isn’t going to change anything.”

  “I understand the need to be discreet.”

  Henry leaned forward over his desk, the fluorescent overhead light reflecting in the sweat on his brow. “We were working on a research paper together.” He stared back at the detective. “She came on to me, Chris. I went to her house to tell her it was over.”