The Right Wrong Thing

by Ellen Kirschman

  “Have you had a chance to talk to Chief Reagon?”

  “She’s quite a lady. Very gracious. Wants us to work as a team. I need to give it a little time. In the meanwhile, I’ll do my job like I always do.” He stands up. “I appreciate your concern. People have been dropping by all day. My voice mail and in-box are filled. I didn’t realize I had so much support.” This isn’t surprising to me. The police association publicly endorsed him and campaigned hard for his selection. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.

  “Thanks for dropping by.” He extends his hand and for the first time since I’ve been here, he smiles. “Don’t worry about me, Doc. I’m good to go.” And before bending his head to his paperwork, he winks at me—a big, theatrical wink that crinkles up his left cheek and pulls at the side of his mouth.

  * * *

  Frank turns over and nuzzles the back of my neck. Outside my window the afternoon light has turned dusky and dark. October in California is usually warm and bright. But this year—courtesy of climate change—we’ve had an early winter. Damp and unseasonably cold. I light the candle that I keep next to my bed.

  “Nice appetizer; what’s in store for dinner?” he asks, stretching over me, reaching for his glass of wine on the bed stand. “How come you’re on my side of the bed?” he asks.

  When did it get to be his side? We’ve grown close in the past year, but not close enough for him to lay claim to half my bed. At our age, Frank thinks we don’t have time to waste. There’s some truth to that. These days I look better dressed than naked and certainly more appealing from the front than the rear. There’s a new bouquet of broken capillaries on my left calf and in the dim light, my upper arms are starting to look like driftwood. Frank challenges me wrinkle for wrinkle, shows me his liver spots and says he’s going to get drunk and have them tattooed together with a Celtic chain. I don’t find this funny.

  On the other hand, Frank has filled the hole in my heart left by my ex-husband, Mark. I hardly think about him or his child bride Melinda and their baby Milo anymore. I feel only a hollow victory that he has surrendered his license as a psychologist after being charged with healthcare fraud. Never pays to have your unlicensed wife do your pre-employment evaluations, then sign and bill for them as though they were your own. I hear via the grapevine that Melinda is still beseeching the Psychology Examining Committee to let her sit for her license. Until her case is resolved, she’s a stay-at-home mom.

  Frank strokes my arms with a lascivious touch and yanks me back into the present.

  “I’m hungry,” he says. “Food, woman.”

  “I was hoping to tire you out so you wouldn’t want to eat.”

  “I’ve worked up an appetite. I have to keep my strength up for the likes of you, you know.”

  “That’s not all you need to keep up,” I say.

  He pushes me out from under the covers toward the shower and leans against the headboard. Candlelight blurs the lines on his face, and I can see the resemblance between the shaggy, bearded, silver-haired man in my bed and the young Navy lieutenant J.G.—tall, thin, black-haired, and clean-shaven—who hangs in a gold frame on the wall over the desk in his office. I turn on the water and wait for it to get hot. Frank has promised to install an instant hot something-or-other so I don’t waste water. Hot showers are my vice, along with popcorn and red wine.

  My phone rings before the water gets hot. Frank whacks me on the rear and steps past me into the shower stall, singing under his breath. It is Raylene, chief communications supervisor at KPD. She comes right to the point with no hello and no apology for calling me on a Saturday. “We have an officer down. It’s a cluster. We’re going to need you at University hospital, Code 3. Hold on.” I can hear talking in the background. The dispatchers’ normally calm voices sound high pitched and strained. Bad things aren’t supposed to happen in upscale suburbs like Kenilworth where every other house is owned by a lawyer, a doctor, or a university professor. Bad things belong on the other side of the freeway in East Kenilworth, home to a working-class population of Hispanics and Pacific Islanders. People like that are known to get drunk and belligerent, while people like us—white and educated—commit our crimes behind closed doors or in our offices. Raylene comes back on the phone.

  “Is anyone hurt?” I ask.

  “Wish I could tell you. They’re stepping all over each other on the radio. All I know is someone’s on the way to the hospital. Let’s hope it’s the bad guy.” She disconnects without another word.

  I start pulling on clothes as Frank comes out of the shower, dripping and smiling. “I have to go.” I mean it as an apology, but it comes out like an announcement.

  The look on his face is part disappointment, part irritation.

  “A cop’s been hurt. I don’t know any details or when I’ll be back.”

  He shakes his head and bends to give me a quick kiss. “You wait. Someday one of my clients is going to have an emergency in the middle of the night, and I’ll have to leave you naked, cold, and hungry.”

  “Will it be a burned-out light bulb or a busted pipe?”

  “Something like that.” He smiles. “You Ph.D. types aren’t very handy, you know.” He gives me a hug. “Should I wait for you? Not good to come home to a cold bed.”

  My chest tightens. I don’t want him to stay here alone. Not that I don’t trust him, I do. It just feels too soon—like we’re living together in two different houses.

  “Don’t wait,” I say. “I could be gone a long time.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  There are two police cars on the edge of the hospital parking lot, parked driver’s door to driver’s door—the officers watching each other’s back, wary of a nosy supervisor or worse, a bad guy looking to assassinate an inattentive cop. I drive past and wave. They look up, eyes wide, as though they are doing something wrong. This is the look I always get from the cops, even after a year. It’s as though they think I keep a mini-cam in my bra sending a minute-by-minute feed to the chief’s office.

  A fire engine and a medic van are parked at odd angles in front of the entrance to the hospital emergency room. I park in the visitors’ lot and walk down a long sidewalk to the door. Everything is quiet except for the fall leaves crunching underfoot. The big glass doors slide open as I approach. I step through onto a sound stage flooded with light and moving people. This is a teaching hospital; the medical personnel hardly look old enough to have graduated high school. They move quickly and quietly, dressed in pajama-like clothes and Day-Glo rubber clogs. If it weren’t for the stethoscopes and name tags, I would be hard pressed to tell the patients from the personnel.

  A harried-looking receptionist asks for my identification and then directs me to a private waiting room for cops only. Cops and ER staff are part of the same team and accord each other professional courtesies. Romantic liaisons between ER nurses and cops are common—after all, who else is up in the middle of the night? And who better to understand the pace and pressure of working a high-stress job. I walk down a short hall and through a door marked “private.” The room is jammed with cops, most in uniform, some in street clothes. There is a low hum in the room that stops momentarily when I open the door. For a second, all eyes are on me and then they drop.

  “We thought you were the ER doctor. We’re waiting for him.” Manny Ochoa steps out from behind the open door. He’s wearing jeans and a police department t-shirt. I’m not supposed to have favorites, but I do, and Manny is it. He stood up for me, believed in me, almost lost his job because of me, after his fellow rookie, Ben Gomez, committed suicide, and everyone, myself included, blamed me for his death. Manny’s matured into a confident, skillful officer, and I feel a special bond with him that I don’t feel with the others. He owes me nothing. I owe him, but in his quiet way, I get the sense he’s still keeping his eye on me.

  “What’s going on? Who’s hurt?” I ask.

  “Tom Rutgers. We don’t how badly. We’re waiting for the ER doc to tell us.”

&
nbsp; “What happened?”

  “Rutgers and Randy Spelling were doing a welfare check on some homeless guys fighting down by the creek. There’s an embankment. Rutgers went down first because some guy was laying on the ground, looked like he was unconscious. Spelling held the perimeter. All of a sudden this guy’s up and on Rutgers with some kind of a sword, caught him in the neck and the arm. Rutgers yelled for help and—I don’t exactly know what happened—but somebody said Rutgers said Spelling froze. He kept yelling for her. She finally got on the radio and called for help then ran down the hill. But by this time, the wacko’s friends are jumping in, trying to grab Rutgers’ gun. Spelling jumped on the pile, but somebody pulled her off and then she disappeared. Rutgers doesn’t know what happened next.”

  The door to the waiting room opens, and the ER doc steps in. He’s a tall, muscular man in green scrubs with a surgical mask pulled up over his forehead on top of dusty gray hair. All eyes are on him, appraising, measuring. He has the stature of a man cops can respect. Everyone falls quiet. The doctor gives a broad smile.

  “Okay, guys. Sit down. Officer Rutgers is going to be fine. He’s one lucky guy. The cut to his neck missed the vital arteries and caught muscle that I sewed up with an eye to his future. He’s a good-looking dude and now he’s going to be even more of a magnet for the ladies who are all going to want to know how he got such a beautiful scar.”

  “He’s already fighting the women off, Doc,” somebody says from the back.

  “He’s going to have to fight harder now.” The doctor grins, supremely confident, enjoying the high-level locker room banter. “I’m going to keep him overnight, just to be sure. All the rest of his wounds are superficial and don’t require suturing. There are no internal injuries. He’s got a broken finger.”

  “The middle one, I bet,” someone shouts.

  “Which I splinted. Other than that, I think he’s good to go. He’s in good shape to start with, that always helps. A couple of you can see him; not all of you. He’s in Room six. Don’t stay long. He’s tired, as you can imagine, and we gave him some pain meds, so he’s going to get real sleepy in about twenty minutes. Any questions?”

  “Yes,” I say. “What about Officer Spelling?”

  I can hear a low rumble behind me.

  The doctor shakes his head. “If there was another officer who was injured, I haven’t seen him.”

  “Her,” I say.

  He raises his eyebrows. “I don’t know what to say. Check with the receptionist. The medic van only brought in one officer.”

  * * *

  We file out of the waiting room, heading in different directions. Out in the cool night a small group of officers have stopped to talk at the edge of the parking lot under a bower of old oak trees, their voices rising in the quiet.

  “Anyone seen the chief?”

  “Where’s Spelling?”

  “Whoa. Don’t go there.” There is laughter and more comments I can’t hear for the laughing. “The chief should pick on someone her own size.”

  “There is no one her own size. The broad is an Amazon.” More laughter. In the weak yellow light from the streetlamps I can see Jay Pence’s silky silver hair. The champion of women is laughing it up like one of the boys.

  I turn back to the hospital. I don’t want to walk by them to get to my car, hear them go silent until I pass, and then start in again, maybe talking about me, maybe not. It’s eight-thirty. I feel a stab of regret that I didn’t tell Frank to wait for me. I’m not looking forward to walking into a quiet, dark house. I think about calling him at his house, driving over, and spending the night. But I’d have to stop home first for a change of clothes and my pills. The last thing I want is a menopausal pregnancy. I walk back into the glare of the hospital. Truth is, the closer I get to Frank, the more I push him away. And the more I push him away, the more I want him closer.

  * * *

  Room 6 is near the emergency room, some kind of temporary holding for overnight patients. Two officers pass me on the way out, so engaged in conversation they don’t notice me standing by the door. I push it open. The room is dark, except for the neon blinking of a gaggle of machines. A young blond woman is sitting next to the bed, stroking Rutgers’ arm. He appears to be asleep. She turns when she hears the door move. Despite her tear-swollen eyes, she is pretty.

  “You bitch, get out of here. You almost got him killed.”

  “Excuse me. I’m Dr. Dot Meyerhoff, the department psychologist.”

  She clasps her hands to her mouth. “I am so sorry. I thought you were Randy Spelling.”

  I could take this as a compliment. Randy Spelling is at least twenty-five years my junior, and while we’re both about five feet tall, with short hair, hers is brown with blond streaks and mine is salt and pepper, with an emphasis on the salt.

  “How’s he doing?” I approach the bed. Rutgers is sleeping deeply.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “And you? How are you doing?”

  The blinking lights turn her tears to alternating streaks of pink and green. “When they called me, I thought he was dead. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I can’t stop shaking. He’s alive, but I can’t stop thinking that he could have been killed.” Both hands cover her face, little ragged pieces of tissues cling to her fingers.

  “That’s why I’m here. I’ll be talking to Tom and to you about what’s happened, how it may affect you in the future and what you can do about it.” I take a business card out of my pocket and put it on the bedside table. “I’ll be in touch.” This is something I learned from Ben—it’s on me to pursue an injured officer, not wait for the officer to call me. “First things first, Mrs. Rutgers—Tom needs to rest and recover from his physical wounds.”

  She looks at me and dabs at her eyes. I see in the dim light that they are bright blue. “We’re not married. I’m his girlfriend. My name is MaryAnne Forester.” She extends her hand. “You’re the lady who wrote the book about police families, right?” I nod. “I read it, but I skipped the scary parts. I didn’t think we’d need them.”

  * * *

  It’s almost nine o’clock. I haven’t gone to the bathroom since I got to the hospital, which must be a record for me. These days, I never pass a restroom that I don’t need. I open the door. There is a pair of booted feet in the last stall. For a moment I think I’ve walked into the men’s room by mistake until I hear someone crying.

  “Randy, is that you?” I call through the door. The toilet flushes.

  “It’s Dr. Meyerhoff.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?”

  “No.”

  She’s still in the stall by the time I exit mine and wash my hands.

  “Randy, please come out. I’ll wait for you.”

  “I’m fine, really. I just want to be alone.” She flushes a second time.

  “You can’t lock yourself in the bathroom forever. People are looking for you.” She makes no response. “If you’re worried about Tom, I just saw him. He’s going to be fine. He’s got a cut on the neck, a broken finger, and some bruises. They’re keeping him overnight only as a precaution and they’re going to release him tomorrow. He’s okay. Really.”

  The door to her stall swings open. She’s in full uniform, her tiny frame made more boyish by the chest-flattening effect of the bulletproof vest she’s wearing under her shirt. She looks worse than Tom Rutgers’ girlfriend. Her swollen eyes are red-rimmed and crusty.

  “From what I heard, you’ve had a rough night.”

  “What else did you hear?” She has her back to me now, dabbing at her eyes with a wet paper towel, watching me in the mirror at the same time. “Did they tell you I froze, that I got bounced on my butt? Did they tell you Rutgers told me to pull my gun and I didn’t?”

  “You don’t have to defend yourself to me. I’m not going to second guess any of your decisions.”

  “I should have used my Taser.”

  “With a pile of peopl
e rolling on the ground, wouldn’t you have risked hitting Tom?” She pitches the wadded-up towel into the trash can with perfect aim. “I’m not trying to make you feel better. Your memory of what happened and Tom’s memory of what happened won’t be the same. Memory degrades under extreme stress. Give yourself forty-eight hours to settle down before you start judging yourself. Get some sleep.”

  “I let everyone down.” She bends over the sink. The tap water runs over her hair and her neck, mixing with her tears. When she stands up, tears and water drip on the floor and streak down her uniform.

  “I was so close.”

  “Close to Tom?”

  “No, close to finishing probation.” She mops at her hair with a towel and then separates the strands with her fingers, pulling spikes of hair into a cap. “Now they can fire me and they don’t need a reason. Although being a coward is a pretty good reason.”

  “You are getting way ahead of yourself. Let’s talk this over in my office. My private office on Catalan Court, not my office at the PD.”

  “Do I have to?” She wets a fresh towel, folds it carefully into a small square, and holds it over her eyes, one at a time.

  “Sorry, department policy. You and Tom are both required to see me following a critical incident.”

  She turns around. “How do I look?”

  “Fine. Where are you going?”

  “Back to work. I have a report to write.” She hoists her heavy leather belt around her tiny waist and throws her shoulders back. “After I hand in my report I’m going 10/8, back in service.”

  “Randy. That’s crazy. You’ve just been through a very dangerous incident. You should go home.” She opens the door to the hallway.

  “Everyone’s mad at me. They’ll be even madder if they have to write all the paper and then stay overtime to backfill my beat.”

  The door closes behind her, and I listen to her footsteps as she walks down the hall.