The Pain Nurse

by Jon Talton

  At least he was off the morphine. It had masked the pain but it had brought dreams. Morphine took him to an old amusement park in Newport, Kentucky, right across the river from downtown. He had no memory of such a place ever existing—but it must have, the drug told him so. It was fenced off and deserted, but Will had walked through the gate. It was twilight, the sky on the verge of rain. He was alone, surrounded by rusting kiddie rides. All around was a quadrangle of old wooden buildings, their reddish paint flaking off. He walked inside one and saw straw on the ground, as if it had once been a stable. The morphine told him that children had been killed here, many children, murdered horribly. His dreaming self fought to find a way out, a way to wake up. The souls of the innocent dead followed him until he had crashed back into his broken body, staring at the harsh light over his bed. After that, he was happier to have the pain than the morphine dreams.

  As he slowly got better, Will would dress in the bed and call a nurse first thing in the morning to transfer him from the bed into a wheelchair. The wheelchair was comfortable and moved easily. It had the brand name Quickie, which seemed like a sick joke. He might never be able to have a quickie again.

  He stayed out as long as they would let him. With difficulty, he began to slide himself from the bed to the wheelchair, wheelchair to toilet and back. He needed a nurse there to help, of course. His right leg seemed unable to bear any weight, although he could move it easily. Will had quickly realized that he was one of the better-off patients. When the nurses weren’t taking care of what everyone called “the quads,” they were writing endless paperwork, as bad as cops, worse even. He called the nurses less often, did things for himself.

  “You look good.”

  Will knew it was a lie. Mueller started to clap him on the shoulder, then seemed to think better of it. His hand hung between them awkwardly. They awkwardly shook hands. Steve Mueller was around forty, wearing chinos, tie, and wool sport coat. He had a close-cropped halo of blond hair ringing his baldness and the look of a faded high school football player. He had a bristly peach-colored mustache. Growing up on the west side, he had played football for Elder, and had never been farther than Chicago. In other words, he had the resumé of nearly everyone who rose to command in the Cincinnati Police Department. It was one more reason Will would never move ahead. He was Scots-Irish Protestant in a German Catholic town.

  “Can I wheel you somewhere, so we can talk? Where’s that pretty wife of yours?”

  “She’s working. I can wheel myself.” And Will could, until he started hurting too badly. “There’s a Starbucks down by the lobby.”

  “How are you two doing? You and Cindy.”

  “We’re okay. We’re good.”

  “That’s good.” Mueller sounded skeptical. Then: “Love conquers all, huh?”

  After a few minutes, they had navigated the crowded hallways, out of neuro-rehab, down the corridor behind the emergency room and into the bright, glassy expanse of the main concourse.

  “So Dodds is working this homicide?” Will asked after they had coffees. He clutched his cup in both hands.

  “How you doing?” Mueller countered.

  This innocuous question had assumed the complexity of quantum physics. Before the tumor, Will could give the expected answer without a thought. Nobody really wanted more. Doin’ fine. Now everything about his life was contained in the unstated. No matter how hard he worked, he could barely move his left leg, his most violent command from the brain translating into a murmur in his toes, like a broken clock pendulum. Vast tracts of his belly, buttocks, and right leg were dead to the touch, as if a deranged dentist armed with Novocain had repeatedly attacked him. He was put in the shower so rarely, and getting in was so painful, that he could smell himself like some street person he used to roust. He was constipated. He hurt for hours. Every movement was difficult. Nobody wanted to hear all that.

  He said, “I’m okay. The docs seem pleased. The tumor was not malignant. They think they got it all. I need to get into rehab.” He knew he was lucky or blessed to be alive, that he could have been killed or put into a wheelchair permanently. Yet he felt exhausted. He was working hard to keep it from showing.

  Mueller half nodded. Will’s mind went back to the homicide, an easy leap from thinking about pain, a dead leg, and Judge Judy.

  “Dodds needs to follow the MO,” Will said. “This woman was killed…”

  “I know. On the surface it appeared similar to the Mount Adams Slasher. Dodds told me he saw you. You know, big guy, I had my appendix taken out last year, and for the first day I hardly knew where I was. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you were probably kind of out of it that night…”

  Will put the coffee on a table and shifted in the wheelchair. The maneuver required him to push down with his arms and swivel his hips. Instantly his back flared in agony. He whispered, barely in control, “I know what I saw. If Dodds…”

  “I don’t want to hear about you and Dodds. You’re like an old married couple fighting. He feels like you deserted him when you left homicide. Anyway, that detail’s got its hands full right now. Three nights ago a P&G executive was shot and killed on a street in Over-the-Rhine. You know Procter rules this town. Mayor’s going nuts. Dodds’ partner, Linda Hall, she’s off on maternity leave. So he’s working solo. This doctor was probably just a victim of a random crime. I see the street people just wandering through the halls. Gangbangers. Dodds will clear it.” He looked around. “Should you even be out here?”

  “Who knows?” Will said, forcing a conversational voice. “Better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.”

  “An interesting statement from an Internal Investigations cop.” Mueller didn’t smile. “I talked to your doctors.” He paused as a loud procession of family members went by, bearing stuffed animals, headed to the children’s wing. He nervously scratched the back of his right hand. As a patrolman, Mueller had been nicknamed Scaly, because of some kind of skin ailment that made him itch constantly. Officers complained that the seats and steering wheels of patrol cars inhabited by Mueller on a previous shift always had a dusting of flaked skin. At some point, he had gone to a doctor, but the name had stuck: Scaly Mueller. Now he only scratched when he was in uncomfortable situations.

  “I talked to your doctors,” he repeated.

  “They say I will walk again.”

  Mueller lowered his eyes and sucked in his lips. “Come on, Will,” he said finally, “you’re in a wheelchair. I know that’s hard to accept. I can’t even imagine… Best case, you’ll always use a cane. And that’s okay. My gosh, things could have been so much worse. But you face a tough rehab and you’ll never be able to be…”

  “You talked about a desk job,” Will quickly interposed. “Why not? We have wounded officers who are technically disabled, but the department finds a place for them. I can still do internal affairs, white-collar crime. I’m good at what I do.”

  “You weren’t wounded,” he said. “Those guys, they have a story to tell, the public loves them and we benefit from their continued service. You know the way of the world. Why are you so fired up to keep mucking out this sewer anyway? Had a deal down in Walnut Hills last night. You see the paper? Dispatch lost contact with two uniforms on a domestic. One of them ends up shot dead. Young guy, twenty-three, one kid. Jeez. Now the hospital killing is yesterday’s news. There’s going to be hell to pay at communications. Chief is already all over my ass for a report. Why would you miss that? Hey, today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  Will said nothing. His life now was lived in front of his face, in the next moment. Get his meds. Follow the rehab group down to the gym. Keep from shitting on himself. The painful process of pulling on socks. Trying to find the humor in the way that the human foot was such a stubborn hook that he fought to get his underwear off it. He didn’t want to think beyond that, yet this killing wouldn’t let him alone. He sipped and put the coffee down again. His hands were shaking. He hadn’t touched caffeine since befor
e surgery. He concealed the shaking by wheeling himself.

  “Hey,” Mueller said, following. “Want to go up to the solarium? That would be nice. See downtown probably, all the leaves are off the trees.”

  They crowded into an elevator with people in green and purple scrub clothes. They looked comfortable. They could stand. Will was now looking at the world from most people’s belly buttons, something new to a man who stood—stood!—six feet, two inches. They rode up two floors and the car emptied out. But when Mueller started to step out, Will stopped him.

  “Let’s go to the basement.”

  Mueller looked at him oddly and they rode down in silence.

  Will led the way when the doors opened.

  “What are we doing down here?”

  Will ignored the question, hearing Mueller’s shoes click behind him. The hallway was dim and deserted. Only one overhead lighting fixture was illuminated. Taking his bearings, he tried to remember how far the doctor’s office was from the elevator. Every few feet, dark corridors intersected the hallway. The beds and equipment parked against the wall looked ancient.

  “It was down here,” Will said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Remembering.”

  The office was easy to find, about a hundred feet from the elevators and near two fire doors that could be shut, closing off the main corridor. The police seal was still on the door. The fluorescent lights were at least twenty feet away.

  “He liked to strike in the dark,” Will said. “He would unscrew porch lights so women couldn’t see who was on the front step. He was thinking tactically.”

  “Are you nuts? The Mount Adams Slasher? Craig Factor was convicted righteously.”

  “Factor didn’t do it.”

  “You and Dodds had him dead to rights. That was a totally clean case.”

  Now Mueller was really itching, left hand scratching the back of his right. Will studied the floor, wondering if any bloody footprints had been left. The Slasher had an amazing ability to avoid leaving shoeprints on a bloody crime scene.

  “Dodds and the DA pushed the evidence. You know that.”

  “You can’t argue with DNA.”

  A sudden rattle came from the hallway, as if a stretcher were being moved. Will strained to see, but nothing emerged into his line of sight and soon it was quiet again. He said, “Sure you can.”

  Mueller came around to face him, bent to his knees so their faces were on the same level. His cheeks were filling with blood.

  “The Mount Adams Slasher terrorized this city for three months. Three women living alone were killed, including a cop’s wife…”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “There hasn’t been a single case since you and Dodds arrested Factor.”

  Will pointed to the door, wincing as the pain coursed from his back to his upper arm. “Until last week.”

  Mueller laughed uncomfortably. “Come on, Borders. You want to go back and reopen the Cincinnati Strangler case, too?”

  The Cincinnati Strangler had been in the mid-1960s. Homicide detectives still studied the case. Will wondered if Mueller was making fun of him. Mueller, who stood there, effortlessly shifting from one leg to the other in his impatience. Will was trapped in the wheelchair. He stared at his legs, useless in the sweatpants, feeling both heavy and light. He couldn’t even stand. Not even for a moment.

  “I’m not talking about ancient history, Steve. This is an open homicide. It happened right here. We owe it to that doctor and her family to pursue the truth.”

  “What are you saying?” Mueller’s voice kicked up a notch. “Do you know what the chief would say if I even raised this? It had to be Factor. What other theory works?”

  “Bud Chambers.”

  “No, don’t. Don’t you dare.” Mueller backed away a step as if Will had pulled a knife on him.

  “Damn it, Steve. Don’t let Dodds piss this away. This homicide is the same MO as Mount Adams. It’s him. Do they have a time of death?”

  “No…I don’t know. Look, Will, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re not going to be a cop now. Take the disability. You can get a good partial pension. My gosh, your wife must make a ton with the bank now. You don’t need the money. Quit driving yourself nuts over this. Think of all the Reds games you can go to.”

  “You can break that seal and get in that office,” Will said. “I want to look around. And I want to see the murder book. Nothing is right about this case.”

  “Stop.”

  “Just call security and let’s look inside.”

  Mueller smiled and shook his head. “You were a good detective, Will, but never very smart about your career. I was worried about that when you transferred over. Big-time homicide copper having to lower himself to investigate chickenshit complaints against officers. I was afraid you’d always want to go for the big cases, even when you didn’t belong there. You didn’t disappoint me. The Reading incident, remember?”

  “The city was in the wrong. I just went where the facts pointed.”

  “And you didn’t mind pissing on a city council member to get there.”

  “Important people can still be asked questions. A good internal affairs investigator has to be able to do that. And he has to be able to disagree with his superiors.”

  “In your world, but it’s not too smart. You can make enemies in high places. Most cases in our division involve pleasing our stakeholders.”

  “Our ‘stakeholders,’ as you call them, are the citizens of Cincinnati, not the brass.”

  “Sure,” Mueller said. “That’s what I meant. What I mean is you need to be smart this time, stop driving yourself nuts over some case that’s just a lot of smoke.”

  “In the middle of the smoke lies the crime.” Will wanted to slap himself. Now he was making up his own Muellerisms.

  Mueller took on an uncharacteristically thoughtful expression. “You’re not tracking, Will. I never wanted you on this detail. Homicide guys always think they’re better. Never knew why you left a prestige detail like homicide to come here. But we had a new chief and I did what he told me.”

  “Does the chief know you’re trying to retire me?”

  Mueller gave an exasperated sigh. “Has the chief been to visit? It’s time to take you back to your room.”

  Will felt enveloped in sudden exhaustion and pain. His back muscles rippled with spasms. He stared down the hallway, to where the floor and walls disappeared into the silent gloom. The black void seemed to erase any sense of the busy, noisy hospital above them. He imagined someone emerging from it any second, someone he and Dodds had missed before.

  Chapter Five

  The extra security guards lasted two days, then they were gone. Cheryl Beth was surprised they had lasted that long. The chaos that was Cincinnati Memorial Hospital was always overwhelmed by fresh chaos, fresh crisis, fresh calamity, like rolling waves. Usually she tap-danced her way through it. It was harder in the days after Dr. Christine Lustig’s murder. The extra guards had been replaced, as if by memo, by holiday bunting hanging from the nurses’ stations. Yet shock and dread were as present inside the hospital as the late autumn days outside, the cold December wind that whipped against her coat. The hospital held a memorial service for Christine Lustig in the cafeteria. The newspapers seemed to forget about the killing, too: fresh, terrible trouble in the ghetto just down the hill. Yet beyond that, the city was bundled up happy and waiting for Christmas. There had been no snow and little rain, allowing the magical heartland twilights that Cheryl Beth loved, where the black tree limbs stood out against the infinite cobalt blue horizon. This year she had barely noticed. She had barely slept.

  Three days after finding the body, Cheryl Beth began her day as usual, in the tiny office she shared with two other nurses. Office space was always valuable, and this was the sixth shabby closet she had been crammed into in six years. Only the neurosurgery unit and administration had the nice offices. It was an unusual day, because there were no fires to put out, e
ven after two days off. So she looked through the overnight referrals and quickly checked her e-mail. Today she wanted to get five patients off IVs and onto oral pain meds. She never stayed in the office long.

  “I can’t believe Lustig would be in that office at that time of night,” Lisa said. Lisa was a nurse practitioner in charge of recruiting neuro-ICU nurses. She looked around thirty-five, but Cheryl Beth knew she was ten years older. She was slender with long, straight auburn hair, a pretty midwestern face, and the body of the high school cross-country runner she had been. Her husband worked for DHL at the airport but traded stocks online, convinced he would make a fortune from the Internet boom. Lisa was fascinated by the murder and kept up a running commentary, picking up the thread seamlessly the next day from where she had last left it.

  “Have you been digging through my desk?” The drawers were unlocked—Cheryl Beth never left her desk unlocked. The files on top of the desk were out of order. The normally neat desk drawers had been pawed through, though nothing seemed to be missing.

  “No.”

  “Somebody unlocked my desk.”

  “Maybe you forgot to lock it. Anyway, there’s no way I would even go in that basement at that time of night without security with me. This place is nuts. We don’t even know who’s in these hallways half the time. Maybe it was Crazy Lennie who did it?”

  Crazy Lennie was a homeless man who sometimes wandered the hospital. Security would throw him out. He would come back, sometimes when he was brought to the emergency department for his assorted ailments. Lennie was distinguished from the many lost souls that frequented the hospital by his passion to defecate in the hallways, and not in a corner but usually right in the middle of the floor. It had entered the hospital vocabulary: a pile in the hallway was a “Lennie” or, “Somebody Lennied outside the ICU.”