The nurse moved so I could see her, and I recognized Helen Murchison-old and ugly and efficient. She had one gold front tooth that winked when she smiled. She didn’t smile much. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“Weak,” I replied. I tried to lift an arm and put it behind my head, but the tubes tangled. “What the hell is all this plumbing for?”
“Well, you’re doing well, Sheriff. You just relax and rest.”
“And you didn’t answer my question. Where’s Perrone?”
“Dr. Perrone will be in first thing in the morning.”
“Then I need to see Estelle Reyes, Helen. Right now.”
“Detective Reyes?”
“Yes.”
She looked at her watch. “Would she be at the office now? It’s three in the morning.”
My chamber of tubes and machines didn’t have any windows, so I had to take her word for the hour. “Three a.m.,” I muttered.
“It’s probably the first decent rest you’ve had in some time, isn’t it? That’s what Sheriff Holman said this afternoon.”
“Yeah, well, do me a favor, will you, Helen?” I gagged a little and it took several minutes before I could talk. “Call the dispatcher and tell them that I need to see Estelle Reyes.” I stopped again, marshaling my strength. “The minute she sets foot in the door. And tell her to bring my briefcase.” She nodded. That was enough exercise for me. I let myself sink back into the pillow and bedding.
Later, the voices were an irritation, and I begrudged having to swim back to the surface again so soon. I had been enjoying my personal black void. Two men and Helen were standing near my bed. Even in the subdued light, I recognized Dr. Alan Perrone.
“Good morning, Sheriff.” He smiled. “Nice vacation you got going here.” The bell of his stethoscope was ice-cold. He straightened up and pushed the instrument back in his pocket. “Sheriff, this is Bob Gonzalez.” I looked at the young man with Perrone. Maybe one year of med school at most. “He’s one of our emergency-room rotation docs from Las Cruces. He was on duty when you came in yesterday.”
Gonzalez hadn’t taken his hands out of his pockets yet. But I felt as if I were being X-rayed by his unblinking black eyes.
“What we have planned,” Perrone said, “is a session of complete rest first. We need to build your strength back up. You’ve been pushing pretty hard lately. Personally, I thought you looked like hell that night we worked on your undercover cop.”
“Everyone goes out of their way to tell me that,” I said, wishing I had the energy to put some gravel in my voice.
“You might start believing them. We consulted a little with Bud Sprague last night, too. He said the same thing.”
“Dr. Sprague, you mean?” I asked, and Perrone nodded.
“Listen,” I said, “I need to see Estelle Reyes. It can’t wait.” I looked at Helen Murchison. “Did you call like I asked?”
Dr. Perrone didn’t give her a chance to answer, but said, “Reyes is waiting downstairs. She came in about an hour ago.” Perrone smiled slightly. “And she understands that she has to wait. You need to understand that too.”
“This can’t wait.”
“I’ll let her come up for about fifteen minutes. That’s it.”
“How long am I going to have to stay here?”
“If all goes well, we’ll probably move you out of this ICU room later this morning.”
“ICU? What the hell am I doing here?”
Gonzalez wasn’t amused. “You’re here because you fell flat on your face yesterday.”
“We need to run some tests,” Perrone added. “We need to find out what’s going on inside that old carcass of yours. And you need to start taking care of yourself.”
“Are you saying I can’t smoke in here?” I asked.
Perrone just laughed gently. “I’ll send Detective Reyes up. Helen here will wait outside the door with a stopwatch. When the time is up she’ll pitch the young lady out on her ear.” He patted my knee. “And I was sorry to hear about the Salinger boy. That’s rough when a teenager packs it in.” He headed for the door. “Fifteen minutes with Reyes. That’s it. Give yourself an uneventful day and night, and then we’ll see.”
I nodded weak agreement. Doctors always leave the full story hanging. What else could I do? The two doctors left, and I asked Helen, “What’s Gonzales’s racket?”
“Dr. Gonzalez is doing his residency in thoracic surgery.”
“Oh.” I thought I had detected something predatory in the young doctor’s gaze. “Well, he’s not practicing on my thorax, I’ll tell you that.”
Helen Murchison nodded, and smiled.
***
If Estelle Reyes had been busy plastering her mother’s house when she got the call, there was no sign of it when she padded into ICU. She was dressed in one of her immaculately pressed outfits that might have been customed-tailored. I knew better. She didn’t have any extra nickels to waste on clothes from what we paid her, but her trim, square-shouldered figure made even the cheapest rack clothes look good. She was carrying my briefcase, and there was a red paper seal across the lid seam.
“You’ll sure go to some length to avoid work, sir,” Estelle Reyes said. She laid the briefcase on the foot of the bed.
“How about that, eh?” I said, feeling better already with her in the room. I pulled the sheet up a little to cover my potbelly.
“You startled ten years out of my life when you came around the end of that building. I was walking across with Sheriff Holman and Bob Torrez, and there you came, flying on one wing. You crashed right in front of us.”
“One of my better performances. Anyway, we don’t have much time. I want to hear what you found.”
Reyes sat on the side of the bed. She looked down at her fingernails and silently chewed on her lip. Finally she said, “It seems a damn strange place for a kid with as much to live for as Scott Salinger to commit suicide, sir.”
“I agree. No place makes sense. You’ve talked some with Amy and his folks?”
She nodded. “I mean, he had a view of the city dump. And if he went up there in the dark, he could see the lights of Posadas, but there are more picturesque places.”
“That’s what the coroner said.”
“Over the years, you’ve probably investigated-what, about a dozen suicides all told?” She looked sideways at me.
“Something like that.”
“And I’m willing to bet that your experience supports what I’ve read. People who destroy themselves usually do it at home…right in the middle of their misery. Have you ever known one who went out into the wilderness? I’m not saying it never happens, but it seems strange to me.”
I nodded and tried to adjust the goddamned tubes. “And the Consolidated boneyard was not a haunt of Salinger’s,” I said. “Still, you never know what goes through a kid’s mind.”
“True. But there’re a couple things about this case that bother me. I sort of wondered if you had seen the same things, because you evidently moved the body some.”
“I lifted the gun,” I said. “I checked the body for an exit wound.”
“There wasn’t any. Bob Torrez says that’s not unusual for hollow-point ammunition, especially the lighter-weight bullets. Did you have a lot of trouble freeing his fingers?”
I shook my head. “No. His thumb was in the trigger guard, but I didn’t have any trouble. His fingers were more or less in a relaxed position.”
“Odd that a heavy Magnum like that wouldn’t recoil back.”
“They don’t jump all that much,” I said. “Not enough to fling the gun away, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’d just think that someone who was wound up tight enough to shoot themselves would be gripping that gun pretty tightly, is all. I mean, no matter what decision they make, no matter how resigned they are, there’s got to be some apprehension. The grips of that gun were wood, with sharp checkering. There was little indenting on the skin of his palms or fingers.” She shrugged and pulled a manila envelope off her clipboard.
“Doc Clark was talking with me, too. He said he’d mentioned the same thing to you.” She pulled out a thin pack of five-by-seven photographs and held one up for my scrutiny. Salinger’s T-shirt had been cut away, and it was obvious that most of the blood was below the ragged, dime-sized hole in the center of his chest. “That track isn’t just from cotton soaking like a wick,” Reyes said, pointing at the stain that marked a straight line from wound to collarbone.