Dying to Remember

by Glen Apseloff

  At eleven thirty he tried calling California to get the last autopsy report, but the person who could give him that information hadn’t arrived at work yet. The report would have to wait until after lunch. He poured the remainder of a cup of coffee down the kitchen sink and headed out the door.

  Traffic was light on Storrow Drive along the Charles River. Barnes set his cruise control and relaxed. By the time the Harvard Bridge came into view, he no longer remembered why he was going to the hospital, but he knew the reason could be found on the list in his pocket, and he would relearn it soon enough.

  At the hospital, he found Billings’s office and knocked on the open door.

  Sitting behind his desk, Billings looked up from a hospital chart. “Hey, Chris, have a seat. I’m just wrapping up here.”

  Barnes sat in a leather chair and waited for him to finish.

  “Priscilla should be here any minute . . . She’s looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Priscilla?”

  “My wife. You’ll like her.”

  Just then he heard a knock at the door. He turned as Priscilla entered. She looked like a model—tall, elegant—with just a hint of gray in her jet-black hair.

  “Hi, hon.” She smiled at Nate, then turned to Barnes. “You must be Christopher Barnes, the bypass wizard.” She extended a dark hand. “I’m Priscilla.”

  He grasped it gently. “Chris. Nice to meet you.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Chris. I know if Nate ever needed a bypass, he’d want you to do it. Of course that’s only because he can’t do it on himself.”

  Barnes couldn’t help but smile.

  Priscilla turned to Nate. “Are you ready to go, hon?”

  He closed the chart on his desk. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Priscilla let Barnes sit in the front while Nate drove them to a nearby Indian restaurant. Seated at a booth, they looked through menus and decided to share entrées. Barnes felt uncomfortable eating family style with these virtual strangers, but he figured it was better than taking the risk of ordering a single entrée that might turn out to be inedible.

  Throughout the meal, Billings and Priscilla kept a conversation going. Mostly they talked about their daughter—their pride and anguish. It was a topic as foreign to Barnes as needlepoint, but the challenges involved in raising her made for good conversation.

  “We should have taken her to your wife . . . last year,” said Billings. “She broke her ankle. Needed a plate and screws put in.”

  “Who did you send her to?” asked Barnes.

  “George Gainer. I’ve known him for years, and . . . I’ve always trusted him. But in retrospect that was a mistake. The ankle got infected, and . . . it was a mess.” Billings spooned curried vegetables onto his plate, over a small mound of rice.

  Barnes didn’t know anything about Gainer. “Is she okay now?” he asked, accepting an entrée of tandoori chicken that Priscilla passed to him.

  “Yeah. It just took about three times as long for her to recover.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Fifteen,” said Priscilla.

  “She’s at that age where all the boys are chasing her,” said Billings. “If you had a fifteen-year-old daughter, Chris, would you let her go out with a boy . . . to a movie that doesn’t end until eleven thirty?”

  “That’s out of my league,” said Barnes. “I don’t know the first thing about raising kids.”

  “Nobody really knows,” said Priscilla. “You just do the best you can. I think it’s fine to give them a little freedom, within reason.”

  “Eleven thirty isn’t within reason,” countered Nate, “especially if . . . she’s with a sixteen-year-old boy.” He speared a curried carrot with his fork.

  “I’d have to agree with Nate,” said Barnes. “Sixteen-year-old boys have got only one thing on their minds.”

  “It’s hard to remember back that far,” said Priscilla. “Were we ever that young, Nate?”

  “I don’t know, but . . . you’ll always be young to me.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “Nate always knows what to say.”

  “Yup, he’s quite a guy.” Barnes no longer recalled where the conversation had started, but that didn’t matter. Despite everything, he felt at ease.

  “Um, Chris,” said Nate, taking on a more serious tone, “there’s something . . . I should tell you.”

  So much for feeling at ease.

  “There’s going to be a meeting this afternoon . . . in the surgery conference room at four o’clock. It’s to discuss your future . . . in the surgical program.”

  “They don’t waste any time, do they?” That jarhead chairman, Carl Milligan, was probably behind it.

  “No. I’m telling you because . . . I don’t like it when people do things behind someone’s back.” Billings took another bite of curried vegetables and waited for a reply.

  “Yeah, I appreciate it.” Barnes didn’t know what else to say. At least Billings had told him. He wondered whether Denny had, too.

  “Let me make a suggestion,” offered Billings.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Don’t go to the meeting. Let me handle it.”

  Barnes wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, trusting Billings, or anyone, with something so important—his entire career. “If you don’t want me to go,” he said, “why’d you tell me about it?”

  “Because you have a right to know. But if you show up there, they’re going to pick at you till you bleed. Then they’ll all attack you like . . . turkeys.”

  “Turkeys? You mean maybe sharks?”

  “No, turkeys. Sharks tear you apart, but turkeys, when one of them starts bleeding, the others gang up and peck him to death. Not a pretty sight.”

  “I have to tell you, Nate, I’m not afraid of turkeys.”

  “You know those guys. You don’t want to be there. I’m going to tell them . . . you and I are working together and you’re still the best pair of hands in the hospital . . . or maybe second best. Then I’ll recommend we keep working together . . . for the next month. After that, they can call another meeting . . . to assess the situation. Considering you’re still in the early stages of recovery, it would be reckless for them now to pass judgment . . . on your future. I don’t think they’ll do anything rash . . . if it might come back to haunt them.”

  Billings was probably right.

  “They need to consider,” he continued, “that this is uncharted territory. You could recover most of your ability to remember, and . . . they’d look pretty stupid if they got rid of one of the most high-profile cardiothoracic surgeons in the country. Not to mention the fact that they’d want to avoid a lawsuit.”

  “That I don’t doubt.” For the administration, covering their behind was always priority one.

  Billings put his napkin onto the table. “With your okay, I’ll pick up your cases . . . and we’ll do them together. You’ll get paid for the operations, but the patients will see me in the office before and after their surgery. You can be there if you like. I’ll extend my office hours to fit them in.”

  “I don’t know.” Nate was going out on a limb for him, increasing his own workload and his liability. “Seems like a lot of effort on your part. I won’t argue, but I’m not sure I’d have done the same for you.”

  Nate shook his head. “Probably not, but don’t try to talk me out of it. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “Is it really that simple?”

  “No. It’s the right thing to do . . . and I know how you feel. I know what you’re going through.”

  “How can you know what I’m going through?”

  “I’ve had people ostracize me. I’ve had people, even family, treat me like I was . . . damaged goods.”

  Barnes didn’t know how to respond to that. What about the man was damaged? Physically he was like a professional athlete, and mentally . . . well, he obviously wasn’t a slow learner.

  Billings continued. “You probably wonder why I talk the way I do,
so . . . deliberately. It’s because . . . I used to stutter. It was bad, real bad. I’m told it didn’t start until I was five, but I don’t ever remember not doing it. It would take me thirty seconds just to . . . spit out a sentence. I’d try real hard not to stutter, but the more I tried, the worse it got. I became what they called an . . . advanced stutterer. I had repetitions, prolongations, and blocks. You name it. I repeated parts of words . . . a lot. Especially if a word started with de, like de . . . cide or defense. I still don’t like saying them.”

  Barnes now understood, however briefly, where Billings was coming from.

  “Growing up was no picnic. I had a lot of . . . shame. The kids in school teased me. They imitated me. They called me stupid. I had to take speech therapy . . . and it didn’t help. When anyone visited my parents, before they arrived, my father would take me aside and remind me not to talk to them. ‘Just shake hands and go into the other room,’ he would say.”

  Billings was trembling, and Priscilla took one of his hands in hers.

  “So how did you overcome that?” Barnes asked.

  “I just did. On my own. But not until college, and I still have to fight it. So I know how you must feel at times: self-conscious, isolated. That’s . . . a lot of the reason why I’m offering to help you, why I’ll pick up your cases and work with you.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Priscilla beamed, as though Barnes had just been accepted into the family. “Nate will take care of you,” she assured him.

  Barnes believed her.

  Chapter 49

  Wearing latex gloves, Wright and Gould sifted through Barnes’s trash in a back room of the station. Both of them had hoped the ballistics test on Houston’s Glock would turn up a match to the bullets that had killed Elizabeth—then Barnes’s garbage wouldn’t be so important—but the results had come back negative; the gun was definitely not the same weapon used in her murder. That didn’t eliminate Houston as a suspect, but it made Barnes’s trash more important.

  A drop cloth covered the floor, and they stood in the middle of it, reading scraps of paper and letters. Food products, napkins, and other useless refuse accounted for much of the trash, and they discarded those items into large cardboard boxes lined with plastic bags. On a sheet of paper on a clipboard, they took notes of anything that might provide insight into Barnes’s lifestyle, his friends, or his finances. This information they obtained from not only his personal correspondence but also credit card bills and business mail.

  “I wonder if this stuff is any good,” Gould said, holding up an empty bottle of Pinot Noir. “Maybe I should ask that Collins chick—she probably drank two-thirds of it.”

  “Are you thinking of buying some?” Wright glanced at the label. French. Probably expensive.

  “What I buy comes in a can. You think he’s screwing her?”

  “It may be the other way around.” Wright thought about Barnes, mentally disabled and trying to cope without his wife. Would someone with his disability, yet also his reputation and resources, be appealing to a woman like Shirley?

  “I don’t trust that Collins chick,” said Gould. “Or Barnes.”

  “You’re not the trusting type,” said Wright.

  “You got a point there. I sure as fuck don’t trust Denny Houston. I wonder whether he was screwing Elizabeth Barnes. We know she let Marshall Coburn into her panties, and he hardly even knew her. I’ll bet he put a loaf in her oven and it pushed Barnes over the edge. Only question is, why didn’t Barnes kill him too?”

  “Well, we can’t arrest Barnes on a hunch or even on motive and opportunity. We need evidence.”

  Gould tossed the wine bottle into a trash box. “Evidence is overrated. He did it. He was looking at big money problems, and his wife was a cash cow who was going to have a kid he didn’t want and that probably wasn’t even his. Meanwhile he’s fucking some blonde at a conference.”

  “Just find us some evidence,” said Wright.

  Gould had moved on to other garbage. “This is disgusting.” He held up an empty carton of Chinese food. “How do people eat this crapola? Smells like paint thinner.”

  Wright was surprised his partner could smell anything through Gloria’s cologne.

  Gould threw the carton into the trash.

  “Some people think hot dogs are disgusting,” Wright pointed out.

  “Yeah, foreigners.”

  Wright didn’t say anything to that, and for a while they sifted through trash in silence. Then Gould said, “Looking through all this is gonna take a week.”

  Wright glanced at his watch. “We’ll finish today. Captain says he’ll try to get two men to help us.”

  “Yeah? You believe that and I got some real estate to sell you. I’d bet my left arm nobody helps us.”

  “I’m not sure what I’d do with your left arm, although, come to think of it, Karen and I have been looking for something to put over the mantel.”

  Gould threw a handful of coffee-stained napkins into the trash. “I hate this part of the job. I didn’t become a cop to look through garbage.”

  Wright hated it, too. Yet looking through garbage might be the key to cracking the case. Both he and Gould knew that. Gould just liked to complain.

  Wright looked at his watch. He hoped the other two cops would get there soon.

  Chapter 50

  Barnes returned home after lunch and walked in on Carmen, the maid. “Buenas tardes, Dr. Barnes,” she said, turning off the vacuum cleaner.

  Barnes spoke to her in Spanish, and before she could offer her condolences, he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Today is Friday,” she explained. “I clean the house on Fridays.”

  “The house doesn’t need cleaning. There are no dishes to wash; there’s no laundry; there isn’t even any dust. You’re vacuuming a carpet that’s clean enough to eat off of.”

  “Yes, Dr. Barnes, but Miss Claire told me to keep coming and make sure the house stays clean.”

  “It’s clean now,” he said, suppressing the urge to ask her who Miss Claire was and why she would ask anyone to clean a house that was already spotless. “Please go home. I’ll still pay you.” He threw his overcoat onto a chair.

  “Yes, Dr. Barnes.” She unplugged the vacuum cleaner and started to wrap up the cord.

  A sudden thought occurred to him. “Can you tell me anything about Elizabeth?” He took out his notes and started looking through them for ideas about what questions to ask her.

  “God bless her, she was a special woman. It’s terrible, terrible what happened to her.”

  “Yes, it is, but what I mean is, is there anything specific you can tell me about her, or about the house?”

  “Specific?” She seemed evasive, focusing more on the vacuum cleaner than on him.

  “Is there anything you can think of that you haven’t told the police?” He saw in his notes that she had found the body. “Was there anything unusual when you found Elizabeth or when you cleaned the house after the murder?”

  “No, Dr. Barnes.”

  “Take a minute to think.” He tried not to sound condescending. “Elizabeth cared about you very much, you know, and anything you can tell me that might help me figure out who did this would be something that Elizabeth would want. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, Dr. Barnes.”

  “Was there anything unusual you may have found or seen when you were cleaning up, anything out of place?”

  “Not really.”

  From the way she avoided his gaze, he figured there was something. “Please tell me, Carmen. For Elizabeth.”

  She stopped fidgeting with the vacuum cleaner. “I’m not sure it means anything, Dr. Barnes, but the thing the computer plugs into, that metal thing that goes into the wall . . .”

  The surge protector. “Yes.”

  “It was turned off. She told me that it protects the computer and I shouldn’t turn it off, but the last time I cleaned, it
wasn’t on. I know because otherwise I’d see the little orange light. I didn’t know what to do, so I left it off. I hope that was right.” She wrung her hands.

  Barnes didn’t care how anxious Carmen felt. All he could think of was Elizabeth. She may have accidentally turned off the surge protector, but more likely someone else had. He wrote a note to himself.

  “Does that help?” Carmen asked.

  “I’m not sure, but thank you for telling me.” He shuffled through his notes again and saw he’d suspected someone had altered the text in one of Elizabeth’s computer files, a summary of clinical trials with GBF-complex-coated screws. Carmen’s observation now lent more credence to that. He turned his attention to her again. “Is there anything else?”

  “No, Dr. Barnes.”

  “All right. Thank you, Carmen.” He put his pen and paper back into his pocket. “If you think of anything else, call me. Okay?”

  “Yes, Dr. Barnes.”

  He doubted she would.

  While Carmen finished putting away her cleaning supplies, Barnes called California for information on the patient who had died of bacterial meningitis. The principal investigator of the study had left town on vacation, and the only coinvestigator who could help, Dr. Kapryn, had managed to tie himself up in meetings until at least four thirty Pacific time. That meant Barnes would have to wait until after seven thirty in the evening. He gave the secretary his telephone number and the number of the fax machine in his office upstairs. She assured him Dr. Kapryn would return the call.

  Barnes jotted down the information. On his list he saw a note about dinner with Shirley and a reminder to call Claire, to try to find out more about her significant other, Darcia.

  He called Claire at work.

  “A couple quick questions,” he began, after apologizing for the interruption. “I have in my notes that you and Darcia invited me over for Christmas.”