Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery Page 12

  “Hello?” the pleasant desk clerk asked.

  “Still here.”

  “Don’t be too fast to pass up Templeton’s. For my money, best T-bone in the county. You still want that number?”

  Pellam declined.

  He dug another quarter out of his pocket, made a call and sat down on the curb.

  A half hour later the headlights of Stile’s Taurus swept around a curve, and the car braked to a stop beside him. It was the first car he had seen on this road all night.

  “WHAT YOU’RE EXPERIENCING is called phantom pain.”

  “Like Ghostbusters,” Donnie Buffett said.

  The woman smiled.

  Buffett shook his head as he laughed at his own tiny joke. Mostly, though, he was studying her. All right, she was a doctor and she was a woman. Well, Buffett knew better than to think it was weird that Dr. Weiser, this famous SCI specialist, wasn’t a man. But he could not get over what kind of woman she was: young, early thirties, a sleek, pretty face, short, punky auburn hair, a pug nose, a chin dimple. Fingernails painted glossy white. Lipstick red as a stop sign. Under a white lab coat was a silk blouse printed with red and green and blue geometric shapes. And—in addition to dark stockings and black ankle boots that had hooks, not eyes, for the laces, she wore a black leather skirt. Almost a miniskirt.

  When she’d entered the room, the woman had stuck her hand out, firmly shook his, and said, “Wendy Weiser. Your SCI doctor. You’re the cop, right?”

  Buffett had cocked his head, brushed off the surprise, and said, “Hope you don’t mind if I don’t stand up.”

  “There you go,” she had said. “Today’s men. No chivalry to speak of.”

  Then Weiser had plopped down in a chair and started right off talking, flashing her green eyes at him. She repeated a lot of what Dr. Gould had said. She didn’t use the word “nonambulatory,” though her message was no better than his.

  She explained the pain he had been feeling in his legs was common in SCI trauma and was called “phantom pain.” That’s when he had made the Ghostbusters comment.

  Now, as Buffett studied her outfit, Weiser suddenly hopped up. She strode to the door and swung it closed, then returned. “There are rules, but . . . what’s life without risks, huh?”

  “I’m a pretty safe man to be in a closed room with, wouldn’t you say? I mean, I can’t exactly chase you around the room. When I get a wheelchair you better watch out.”

  “You and me, we’ll race someday.” She examined him with a curious smile. “Sounds like the gunman didn’t get your sense of humor.”

  “Hey, Doctor.” Buffett looked overtly grave. “If you’re gonna help me I’m gonna help you. I’m gonna teach you to speak cop.”

  “I say something wrong?”

  “Shooter.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Not gunman.”

  “Oh. You don’t say gunman?”

  “On TV they say gunman. We say shooter. Or perp.”

  “Perq?”

  “Perpetrator. Perp.”

  “That’s great.” Her eyes widened. Buffett did not for a minute believe this enthusiasm but he appreciated it anyway. She added, “I’ll have to use that sometime. Perp. Would a perp also rob somebody? Like a burglar?”

  “Yup. Perp equals bad guy.”

  “So my ex-husband is a perp.”

  “Could be,” Buffett said. “And, while I’m giving you a lesson. He doesn’t shoot. He smokes them. Or dusts them. Or he lays the hammer on somebody. And if he kills them, he offs them or ices them or whacks or does them.”

  “You have to learn all this in cop school, huh?”

  “It’s more your postgraduate work.”

  “Officer . . .”

  “Donnie.”

  “And I’m Wendy. Everybody calls me Wendy.” She looked at him with mystified, amused eyes. “Donnie, I’ve got to say that most people aren’t quite so chipper after they’ve been through what you have.”

  He waved his arm vaguely toward his feet, signifying his injury. “This goes with the job description. You’re not willing to accept it you don’t sign on in the first place. Doesn’t mean I like it.”

  Could he really call her Wendy? She was a doctor. Then again, she was wearing earrings in the shape of tiny hamburgers.

  Weiser opened her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes; a lighter was stuffed efficiently into the cellophane wrapper of the pack. “You mind?”

  “No.”

  She asked, “You want one?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell,” Weiser said.

  “I don’t work vice.” Buffett realized he hadn’t shaved since he had been in the hospital. He guessed he looked like shit. Well, that was her problem. He didn’t have to look at himself.

  Weiser pulled the gray chair closer, inhaled deeply on the cigarette several times. She crossed her legs and bent down to stub out the cigarette on her boot heel. She dropped the butt in her pocket.

  “Evidence,” she said. She straightened up, put both feet on the floor.

  “Doctor—”

  “Ah . . .” She cocked an eyebrow.

  “Wendy,” he corrected. “It seemed so real.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “The pain.”

  She stood up and opened the window, to air the room out, and returned to the chair. He felt the cold air on his arms and face. But he didn’t feel it on his legs. She said, “It’s both psychological and physiological. Amputees have the same sensation. It’s real in the sense that pain is a subjective experience and what you’re experiencing is just like any other pain. But it’s phantom because you aren’t feeling a pain response to stimuli at the nerve endings. Say, wasn’t your wife going to be coming by?”

  “She was. A while ago. She’ll be back tomorrow.” He tried to picture Penny Buffett and Wendy Weiser chatting at a barbecue or PBA picnic. It was impossible to imagine this scene.

  Weiser nodded. “Well, next time. This is mostly a social visit, Donnie. We’ve done a lot of tests and we’re going to do a lot more. I’ll be talking to you more specifically about the results of those tests in the next couple days. What I’d like to do now is just talk with you about your injury in general.”

  He looked away. She shifted her chair casually so that she was closer to his line of vision. He glanced at her and he felt compelled to hold her gaze.

  “I want to tell you what I’m going to do, as your doctor, and talk to you about what you’re going to do for yourself.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She said, “First, I want to do something I don’t do with all my patients: I’m going to tell you what’s going to be going on in your mind over the next several months. This is sort of like—what’s that they say on Wall Street?—insider information. Normally this is what we doctors keep in mind as we work with our patients but you seem like somebody who’s got a good handle on himself. You look skeptical. Donnie, I’ve had SCI patients that won’t even let me in the room for the first month after their trauma. I’ve had vases thrown at me. See this scar? It’s from a dinner tray. I’ve had patients who don’t seem to see me. They watch TV while I’m talking to them. It’s as if I’m not even in the same room. They don’t acknowledge me, they don’t acknowledge their injury. You’re in a different league from them.”

  “I can’t ignore a woman in a leather skirt. It’s in my genes or something.”

  “I think we’re going to be a great team.” She then grew serious. “There are several stages of recovery—I’m speaking of emotional recovery—in a trauma like you’ve experienced. The first is shock. It’s numbness, emotional blockage. It’s similar to what happens to the body with physical injury. Shock insulates the patient. That can last up to two or three weeks after the incident. I’m amazed but you seem to be out of this stage already. That kind of snappy recovery is rare. I’d guess you’re already in phase two, which is realization of what’s happened. You’ll start feeling anxiety, panic, fear. A real bummer.�
�

  “Bummer.”

  “My daughter’s language.”

  “You have a daughter?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Don’t believe it.”

  She deflected this with a polite smile. “What you’re going to experience is that you’re not real present. We say that you’ll be, quote, unavailable psychologically.”

  “And what would your daughter call it?”

  Weiser considered. “ ‘Zoned out,’ probably. A defense mechanism because you’re going to start to feel awful. But with you, I have every reason to believe that it’ll be short-lived.”

  She pronounced it with a long i. Short-liiived. That sounded weird so he figured it was probably right. He also guessed that between the punk earrings was a very, very smart brain.

  “So that was the second phase,” he said. “What’s the third quarter going to be like?”

  “What we call ‘defensive retreat.’ You’re going to believe that you can cure yourself. Or that you’ve come to accept your injury and it doesn’t bother you. You’ll miss therapy sessions, you’ll do everything you can to avoid thinking about the accident. Oh, by the way, you’ll probably become an insufferable son of a bitch. You’ll want to blame somebody for what’s happened. You’ll have a lot of anger in you.”

  “Kid I knew got hurt once, bad. We was diving off the docks, and this kid from the neighborhood—”

  “Which is?”

  “Alton.”

  “No kidding,” Dr. Weiser said, “I’m from Wood River.”

  “Ha, Land of Lincolners in the Show Me state.” Buffett snorted.

  “When I was married—he was a professor at Wash U—we lived in Clayton. God, I was glad to get out of there, move back to the country . . . You were telling me about this friend of yours?”

  “Just a kid. He dived in the water . . .” Buffett wondered if dived was the right word. Dove? He wished he’d said jumped. “. . . and you know how high some of those piers are. He hit a board he didn’t see. We got him out right away so he didn’t drown but what happened was he went blind. He hit the back of his head or something. He tried to beat me up. He said I should’ve seen the board. He accused another kid of pushing the board under him. Finally he moved away. He never came back or called.”

  He wondered what the point to the story was. He looked for something concluding—something to tie it into what she was saying—and fell silent.

  Weiser said, “We’re used to behavior like that. It’s part of recovery. You may get some of it right back from me. I grew up with three brothers. I’ve got kind of a short fuse myself sometimes.” She retrieved her cigarette from her pocket and broke away the crushed part. She lit it again and drew three times then went through the extinguishing routine once again. “The fourth phase is where we get the work done. You’re going to come to understand what’s happened. The defenses—whether it’s anger or denial or rationalization—will crumble and you’ll confront it.”

  “I never did understand that word. Confront. Like deal with. Those aren’t words that mean a lot to me.”

  “You’re not there yet so you can’t expect them to. You’ll be in heavy-duty physical therapy throughout this phase. Finally . . . You’re looking skeptical again. Are you listening? The final phase is the coping phase. In effect, you accept what’s happened and you reorganize your life around the way you are.”

  Buffett laughed again. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be able to play the violin after the operation.”

  Weiser’s smile faded and she leaned forward. For an instant he was wholly unnerved by the eye contact but was compelled to return her gaze. He felt electricity between them. His scalp bristled and his heart suddenly pounded like a snare drum.

  He felt a twitch of pain. Well, phantom pain. When he spoke, it was not his own voice that he heard but one that was lower and more mature and calmer. “Doctor, I don’t want you to think I’ve got a swollen head or anything but I’m a survivor. I don’t lose. At anything. Ever. Getting into the police academy, getting onto the varsity basketball team, yeah, even at five ten. Everything I’ve ever set my mind to do, I’ve done. Well, what happened to me is crap, sure. But I’m alive. I got friends. I got family.” His right hand curled into a fist. “And I’m going to get through this.”

  Weiser sat back, her pine green eyes neither cautious nor inspirational, but immensely pleased. It seemed as if by delivering his monolog he’d passed a test of some sort. “It’s going to be a real pleasure working with you, Donnie.”

  They shook hands and made an appointment for their next session.

  When the door closed, Donnie Buffett exhaled slowly and said a short, silent prayer of thanks. If Weiser had turned inches to the right she would’ve seen the hypodermic syringe that a harried orderly had accidentally left on the bedside table just before the doctor entered the room—the syringe that had been virtually the only thing in Buffett’s thoughts during the doctor’s entire visit. He gripped the head of the bed with his large hands and tightened his ample biceps. He moved up one inch. Sweat broke out. Another huge flex, another inch. He felt as if he were dragging the weight of ten men with him. He reached for the syringe.

  No, not yet. Six inches to go.

  He inhaled deeply and gripped the bed once more. Another inch, then another.

  He kept at it, two more inches, closer and closer. A half inch. He paused for a minute, wiping the slick sweat from his eyes and feeling his heart slam fiercely from the immense effort. Donnie Buffett figured this exertion was good. It was perfect. Because when he injected the air into his vein, the course of his racing blood would speed the bubble straight to his heart and jam it stopped like a swollen piston, sending his whole body to join his legs in a sleep that was cold and deep and forever.

  “HOWDY.” JOHN PELLAM stepped into the hospital room.

  He startled the cop, who dropped something on the floor. “Hell,” Buffett snapped. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry.” Pellam walked past the flowers, looking around. Dozens of bouquets, wreaths, plants. Pellam wondered if the nurses got irritated, having to water all this foliage.

  A pale, pretty face appeared in the doorway. Pellam motioned her in. “This is Nina. Donnie Buffett.”

  She said hello.

  “How you doing?” came Buffett’s muffled voice. He was contorted sideways, bending down trying to pick up something from the floor, struggling. His face was red and slick with sweat.

  “You okay?” Pellam walked around the bed. Buffett was reaching for a pen he had dropped . . . No, not a pen, a syringe.

  “Here, I’ll get it.” Pellam bent down, retrieved the needle, and stepped over to a plastic box that said Used Syringe Disposal Only.

  “No!” Buffett shouted.

  Pellam paused, and he and Nina looked at the cop curiously.

  “I’ve got to give myself a shot.”

  “You?” she asked. “Don’t the nurses do that?”

  Buffett stared at the needle for several seconds. He cleared his throat. “I’m, you know, a diabetic. I can give them to myself.”

  Pellam shrugged. “It was on the floor. I’ll ask the nurse for a clean one.” He dropped it in the disposal box. “I don’t mind.”

  Buffett’s eyes clung to the disposal box, looking heartsick. Pellam reached for the nurse call button. Buffett barked, “I’ll do it myself later.”

  “No trouble.”

  Buffett snatched the button away from him. “I said I’d do it myself.”

  A difficult silence arose. Nina and Pellam simultaneously asked him how he was feeling, and he answered, “Fine. I’m fine.” More silence. Nina turned to the flowers, examined them and refilled several of the vases with water. Buffett seemed angered by this but he said nothing and she didn’t seem to notice that he was out of sorts.

  Pellam studied Buffett for a moment and decided he looked pretty good, all things considered. Apart from the red face and sweat, he seemed to be a healthy man lying in bed. The only evidence of in
jury: He was dressed in a white, blouselike gown speckled with small, pale blue dots.

  “Something you wanted?” Buffett asked.

  Pellam did not know how to respond. He wasn’t expecting this constant level of hostility. He said the first thing that came into his mind. “You need anything?”

  “No. I’m doing fine.” When the silence filled the room again Buffett relented and made conversation. “I get kind of bored, you know. I got TV.” He motioned broadly at the old set as if they couldn’t spot it themselves.

  Pellam said, “I guess I came by, one of the reasons, I was a little hotheaded the other day.”

  Buffett was being forced to apologize and he didn’t want to. He watched a silent CNN news broadcast for a moment. Tankers unloading in some foreign port. Pellam was just starting to wonder if the cop would clam up and that would be that. He was glancing at Nina when Buffett said, “I started it. You were just, you know, reacting. All this . . . It’s got me kind of shook up.”

  “I read in this magazine one time,” Nina said. “Glamour. No, Mademoiselle, I think. That if you have a serious accident, it’s like you’re a whole different person for at least six months afterwards.” She abruptly stopped speaking, perhaps worried that Buffett would think he was doomed to a half year of mental anguish.

  But Buffett was laughing. “Well, it’s got me a shitload of flowers. You want any, go right ahead.”

  Nina shook her head. “Oh, I couldn’t, no.”

  Buffett glanced at Pellam. “And the mayor came by to visit me. Which isn’t as exciting as, say, the mayor of L.A., since our guy also has the Buick dealership out on 104. He’s that kind of mayor, you know.” There was a manic edge to Buffett’s voice. Maybe he was being cynical, maybe he was really impressed that the mayor had come to visit him. Pellam couldn’t tell. Buffett broke the silence that followed this by saying, “It’s just so damn boring. TV sucks, you know that?”

  “I don’t own one,” Pellam said with more enthusiasm than he intended. “I’ve got a monitor, but it doesn’t receive. It’s just hooked up to a VCR.”

  Buffett sighed and began clicking the gray box of the remote control through a series of stations. An old movie came on. He shut the set off. “I should probably get some sleep. I’m still in shock. No, really. Spinal shock, it’s called. Not like, ha, normal shock. Sleeping’s a good thing.”