The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “You’re an employee of this firm,” Clark says.

  “I’m on leave.”

  “You can’t be on leave if you’re working.”

  “Sure I can. Watch me.”

  Next, she gets a call from a reporter, the Chronicle’s Gary Newbart, a heavyset guy with a boyish face who’d unfortunately saved her cell phone number after she’d given it to him a few years earlier when she was desperately trying to get some publicity for a client.

  He fires off several questions in rapid succession. To each she responds, “You know I can’t answer that, Gary.”

  “Come on, Carolyn, you gotta give me something,” he implores. “Even off the record.”

  “If I had anything to give you, Gary, I’d give it to you. You know how much I like and respect your work.”

  Hanging up, she thinks how much she misses being able to talk in riddles and doublespeak. It always amazes her how much you can say without saying anything. Of course, depending on how things play out, she may have to change her tune. She may soon be looking at a serious pivot and spin move if they have anything on her client, which is why she threw Newbart the compliment. She didn’t want any ill will.

  A few minutes after she hangs up with Newbart her cell phone rings again. She thinks of letting the call go to voice mail, but at the last second she decides to pick up because the caller ID shows a local 650 number. Turns out it’s a guy named Tom Bender from some tech blog. The way he announces himself, he expects her to know him and his blog and seems incredulous that she doesn’t.

  “We cover start-ups,” he says, impatiently explaining his background. “We’ve profiled Mark McGregor in the past. Had him on our video podcast, The Hot Seat. You sure you don’t know us?”

  “Maybe,” she replies. “How’d you get my number?”

  “I know people,” he says. “Most of the time, I can make three calls or less and get anybody’s number I want. Fact.”

  “Do you mind telling me who gave you my cell phone number?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  “Look, I can’t tell you that. Live with it. I just need you to verify a couple of things.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “My sources are telling me that the crime scene may have been contaminated.”

  “Who are your sources?”

  “I can’t divulge that.”

  “Well, I don’t have a comment at this time,” she says. “And please don’t use anything I say. Nothing I say is for quotation except what I just said. No comment.”

  “Look, I’d think it would help your client if word got out that the police bungled this thing. It works in your favor. By you saying ‘no comment’ you’re essentially validating my source.”

  “No. I’m saying ‘no comment.’”

  “I’m just stating a fact, Ms. Dupuy. That’s what people will think when they read my piece.”

  “Since when do you cover crime?”

  “When it happens to one of our own—and in our backyard.”

  She almost laughs. He sounds like a Marine talking about a fellow Marine.

  “I literally live two blocks away from where this happened,” he adds. “I was there last night.”

  “So, what’s your angle?”

  “I’m going to blow the lid off this thing.”

  “By saying stuff that isn’t true?”

  “Don’t belittle me. My source said the word ‘Hack’ was written next to the body. In the victim’s blood.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “The word has a lot of connotations. I don’t know if you know that. Look, work with me, I can help you. Don’t, I can make things difficult for you.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No, it’s a friendly suggestion. So let me ask you again: Are you aware of the crime scene being contaminated in any way? My understanding is that this Detective Madden allowed people into the house that shouldn’t have been there.”

  “Look, whatever your name is—”

  “Tom. Bender.”

  “Okay, asshole. Here’s the deal. I don’t know how you got my number or what you want but we’re going to pretend this conversation never happened. Because if anything I say ends up on the Internet, I’ll have your ass.”

  He laughs. “How do you plan on doing that? You going to sue me? People sue me every other week. My key investor’s my lawyer. Works cheap. Litigation’s just a form of advertising for us, Ms. Dupuy. We bake it into the budget. So, I’ll rephrase. How the fuck do you plan on doing that?”

  “I’ll tell you how. I actually remember why your name rings a bell. You know why I remember?”

  “No, why?”

  “I have a girlfriend. She’s works in PR for a tech firm that shall remain nameless. And I now remember that she had sex with some guy named Tom Bender who runs some sort of tech blog he thinks is influential.”

  “I don’t think it,” he says. “Others think it for me.”

  “Whatever. You know what she said about Tom Bender?”

  “What?”

  “She said for some guy who’s so full of himself he sure has a small penis. And we’re not talking small as in average. We’re talking comically small. Humiliatingly small.”

  Bender doesn’t respond right away.

  “Who’s your friend?” he finally asks. “What company does she work for?”

  Carloyn gives a brief pause. “She doesn’t,” she says. “I made her up. But your silence speaks volumes, needledick.”

  Another silence, this one slightly shorter. She expects him to explode in rage. But he doesn’t.

  “Well played,” he says. “I like you, Ms. Dupuy.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she says, and hangs up.

  She barely has time to take a breath, let alone calm her rage when the doorbell rings. Shit. Her first thought is that the press has shown up and she hasn’t showered or dressed yet. She isn’t ready. But when she peeks out the kitchen window, it’s just Dr. Ted Cogan, her ex-boyfriend twice removed. He’s standing there in his clogs, wearing green scrub pants and a lightweight navy-blue Patagonia jacket that she bought for him as a birthday present almost two years ago. He must have just gotten off his shift at the hospital.

  Bracing for the early-morning chill, she zips up the lavender-colored fleece she’s wearing over her pajamas and opens the door. The temperature will hit the low sixties later in the day but it’s in the mid-forties now.

  “What do you want, Ted?” she says. “What are you doing here? This is really not a good time.”

  She notices him trying to look past her to see if there’s someone else in the house. “No, I’m not with anybody, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I heard,” he says.

  “Really? On the radio? Was it on the morning news?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it was all over Twitter and Facebook,” she says, “so I guess everybody’s heard by now.”

  “You’re shitting me. You put it on Facebook?”

  “No, not me.”

  She stares at him, a little surprised by his aggressive tone. A thoracic surgeon who also does trauma work, he isn’t one to fluster easily. Yet he appears genuinely agitated, even a little disheveled, like a drug addict in search of a fix. His hair’s standing up on one side but not the other, and it looks like he’s been running his hands through it, even pulling at it a bit. He has a day or two of Brett Favre stubble that’s the same salt-and-pepper color of his hair, and his blue eyes, penetrating as ever, seem more bloodshot than usual. Despite all that, she can’t get over how good he looks.

  “Well, who the fuck did?” he demands.

  Squinting, she flashes a quizzical look. It suddenly dawns on her that they’re talking about two different things.

  “What are you talking about, Ted?”

  “I’m talking about you having a baby on your own.”

  “Oh.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asks.

/>   “You know Mark McGregor? From the club?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, someone killed him last night.”

  Now it’s his turn to say, “Oh.” After absorbing the news, he says: “Christ. How?”

  “He got hacked. Literally.”

  “Where?”

  “At his home. It’s in Menlo Park, right off Valparaiso.”

  “Hacked? Like with a machete?”

  “I can’t talk about the details, but it was apparently pretty messy.” She says that after the police showed up last night, McGregor’s wife called her, requesting she come over.

  “You know her from the club, too, don’t you?” she asks. “Beth Hill?”

  “Did she do it?”

  “I don’t know. But she didn’t like the questions Madden was asking. She thinks he thinks she killed him.”

  “He probably does.”

  After making the comment, Cogan goes silent, staring at the ground. He’s intimately familiar with Detective Hank Madden. A few years ago he’d been accused of raping and causing the death of a former patient, a teenager named Kristen Kroiter, who’d tragically hanged herself at home. Madden had been in charge of the investigation. If the nature of the alleged crime wasn’t disturbing enough, complicating matters was the fact that, when Madden was a child, his pediatrician had molested him (the revelation of his ordeal had come out in a newspaper profile years earlier). Needless to say, a few people, including Carolyn, felt the detective harbored some resentment toward doctors, and that he’d let that resentment influence how he approached the case.

  She wonders whether Cogan is thinking about all that. Then, for a brief, horrifying moment she has a vision of him on top of Beth Hill, passionately screwing her. She has no reason to believe he’s slept with her, yet there she is, suddenly thinking he has, incensed.

  “Man, I played tennis with that guy last summer,” he mutters. “Rinehart and I had drinks with him and his friend afterwards. Interesting cat. Real talker. I couldn’t tell whether he was full of shit or not, which I liked. He tried to get us to invest in his company.”

  She takes a breath, relieved. His assessment reminds her of a great line from Breakfast at Tiffany’s that she’s always liked. In the party scene in the middle of the movie, the actor Marty Balsam says, “She’s a phony, but she’s a real phony.” The line seems somehow apropos of Mark McGregor. He was charismatic and seemed to make friends easily, but he also made a strong first impression that not everybody bought into.

  She says, “Well, Beth Hill married the guy after he testified against her fiancé in court, so he must have something going for him.”

  “I forgot about that.” Cogan smiles, a memory returning. “Rinehart actually asked him how he’d pulled it off.”

  Maybe because he’s used to having frank and open discussions with his patients about their perceived physical flaws, Cogan’s plastic-surgeon friend, Rinehart, God bless him, is never one to shy away from asking blunt, personal questions. His nickname’s the Rhino because he has short, thick legs and a big gut and he once charged the net to get to an opponent’s drop shot and ended up plowing through it, snapping the net off its moorings without injuring himself.

  “Really? What’d he say?”

  “He said he was a good listener. That was the way to a woman’s heart. That and a lot of money and a big dick.”

  “For real?”

  “His very words. I swear.”

  “Well, he was right about the money and the big dick,” she says. “Any schmuck can listen. Doing anything about what you’re hearing is the hard part.”

  “Ouch,” he says. “It just got a little colder out here. Can I come in for a minute?”

  Discipline, Dupuy, she thinks. She’d promised herself that if he ever showed up or called, she’d keep her cool—and her distance. It would be tempting to fall back into the old routine. When they were dating, he’d come over some mornings, walk into her house (he used to have a key) and get in bed with her. “How many?” she’d always ask. And he’d report the number of trauma victims who’d come into the hospital. More than half of the time, he’d say, “Slow night.” But usually he had a story or two to recount, which she loved hearing.

  They live just a few miles apart; she in Palo Alto, he in an area of Menlo Park called Stanford Hills, which is just off Sand Hill Road, very close to where Forman killed the SLAC researcher with his car. Cogan’s house is a little bigger and sits on a bit more land, but it arguably isn’t as charming (she had a three-bedroom cottage, he a four-bedroom ranch).

  They’d talked about moving in together and had even had a three-month-long cohabitation trial, with the understanding that if things progressed they’d sell both houses and get a larger one. But things didn’t progress. A series of niggling arguments (mainly over his interactions with other women) mushroomed into something more menacing and destructive. She felt like she’d pulled out of the parking lot one day and instead of encountering the usual speed bump, she’d run over a set of severe-tire-damage “Tiger Teeth.” It got ugly.

  Then she started drinking. Heavily.

  “I’ve got to get showered and dressed,” she tells him now. “I’ve gotta deal with the press and my asshole partners, not to mention my client.”

  “This is a big deal, right? When was the last time something this big happened around here?”

  “You,” she says. “That was big.”

  “No, I mean a murder like this.”

  “A while.”

  “Are you really having a kid on your own, Carolyn?”

  “I am, Ted. Trying anyway. I’m doing a cycle right now.”

  She wonders who’d told him, though she didn’t really care. She’d informed enough people to ensure he’d hear about it. It had actually taken several days longer for the news to reach him than she’d anticipated. Funny how people could be more discreet when you were open with something and totally indiscreet when you requested they keep it a secret.

  “Who’s the donor?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. But he seems good on paper.”

  “ADI, huh?” Anonymous donor insemination. She’d heard the term, of course, but didn’t know he had. “So, you’re really going to do this?”

  “I told you I was going to.”

  He shakes his head disapprovingly.

  “If you want in, Ted, you’ve got a week,” she warns.

  “I’ve got shitty genes, Carolyn. I told you that.”

  She laughs. It still strikes her as comical for someone who looks like George Clooney to stand there and tell you he has shitty genetics. But Cogan, who’s been married before to a woman who left him for her suddenly rich ex-boyfriend, is a doctor, and Alzheimer’s runs in his family. On top of that, his father died relatively young of cancer. So, he does have something to worry about. But the way she sees it he’s simply come up with a clinical excuse for birth control.

  “The only bad gene you’ve got is an anti-Dad gene,” she says.

  “You know, I think about her sometimes.”

  “Who?”

  “Kristen.”

  Kristen is his former patient, the girl who died. He rarely, if ever, speaks about her. Carolyn had told him to get some counseling after everything that went down, but he’d shrugged off her suggestions. He’d done a rotation in psych, he explained to her, and didn’t think much of the discipline, which had become much more about changing people’s outlooks and demeanor through drugs rather than through conversation. Like a few other doctors she knew, Cogan was good at dispensing his own medical opinion but not so good at accepting others’.

  “What do you think about?” she asks.

  “Just what happened, why she would have done that to herself. How irrational it really was and how I could have prevented it. And then I think about all the bad things that can happen to kids. I see it every day in the hospital, Carolyn. Have you ever had to tell a parent their kid has died in a car accident?”

  No, she hasn’t.
>
  “So is it the genetics or just a dour outlook?” she asks. “Or is it just me? Or all of the above?”

  “It’s not you,” he says.

  “Then what is it, Ted? We’ve been through this over and over. Why are you here? You said you were out.”

  “I did.”

  “So?”

  “I heard. It bothered me. So I’m here. And now I’m fucking cold.”

  “I gotta go, Ted.”

  “How are you doing with the shots?”

  “Shitty.”

  “I thought so. And you’re going to continue even with all this going on? Those fertility drugs can make you a little wiggy, you know?”

  “Tell me about it,” she says. “I just told some asshole tech blogger to go fuck himself. Probably not a good idea. But it could be over tomorrow. They might find the killer. Or if Hill really gets charged, someone’s going to tell her to get some big-name attorney. I’ve done two murder cases as a defense attorney, three as a prosecutor.”

  “Well, let me know if I can help with anything.”

  “I will.”

  “Hang in there, okay? This is good, Carolyn. This is really good for you. I’m happy for you.”

  She doesn’t know whether he means the case or the kid but suspects the former.

  “Go home, Ted. You’re not making sense anymore.”

  12/ MONEY ON MONEY

  OUTSIDE THE HOLDING CELL ON THE LOWER FLOOR OF THE MENLO Park police station, a sign affixed to the wall reads, “It is a felony to possess or to bring into this jail any narcotic or paraphernalia, alcoholic beverage, firearm, tear gas or explosives. Violators will be imprisoned for up to four years in a state prison. Sections 4573 & 4574 California Penal Code.”

  Purposely slurring his words, Richie reads the sign aloud as Madden stands behind him, unlocking the handcuffs his partner clamped on Richie’s wrists earlier. “You guyz is a bunch of party poopers,” he says after he finishes reading. “How do you expect to have any fun around here?”

  The truth is, it isn’t much of a jail. The room they put him in feels more like a small, austere, windowless office, with its cement floor painted gray and cinder-block walls painted white. Integrated into the wall on one side of the room is a sort of bench or shelf made out of a Formica-like material that has child-friendly rounded corners. On top of the bench is a bed mat the color of green hospital scrubs. The mat’s only a couple of inches thick and not as comfortable as the futon couch he sleeps on up in the city, but at least it has some padding.