They put me in the same damn bed in the General’s emergency room where they’d put me after the quake. This time the walls were festooned with cornucopias and fake foliage sprays and goofball turkeys in buckle hats. A string of letters across the top of a window commanded BE THANKFUL!
I was thankful there was no mass-casualty event out there waiting for me this time. I was also thankful that the nurse—Nurse Elissa, the same as last time—wasn’t wearing her vampire costume anymore.
“Are we going to be seeing you for monthly head injuries, Doctor?” she’d asked, after I’d had my CT and the results were in, and she’d decided I was stable enough for taunting. The test results were mixed. I had a nondisplaced right posterior parietal fracture, a hairline break in my skull where Denis Monaghan had pistol-whipped me. Under it was a thin subdural bleed. I wouldn’t need surgery, but I would need an inpatient stay for a couple of days of observation and neuro checks. This time, I had absolutely no intention of leaving before they told me to.
Inspectors Jones and Ramirez came to interview me before my transfer out of the ER and up to the neurology ward. Monaghan was in custody, they assured me right off the bat. He’d been arrested without incident, and was denied bail as a flight risk, but they didn’t want to give me any more detail than that.
I told them the whole story about the utility-vault crime scene, and we worked out a chain-of-custody transfer for the plastic bags with the samples I’d gathered and stuck in my pockets—the blood from the framework pin and from the stain on the vault’s floor. The latter was especially important, since that floor was now covered in half a pour of solid concrete. They assured me that the construction crew had, with the help of the responding officers from Southern Station, found Javier Aguinaldo’s body and dredged it out of the wet cement before it set. They recovered the gun, too.
“Why did he truss her up and leave her there, do you figure?” Jones mused to his partner. “He coulda just shot her.”
I gave him the stink eye. “You say the sweetest things, Keith.”
“Well...?”
“He was worried about someone hearing the gunshot, remember,” Ramirez said. “He was waiting for the cement truck before he could get rid of her. But when she made a break for it and he knocked her out, I guess he figured it was safer to tie and gag her, and stash her under the rocks down there. Let the cement do the work.”
Jones grunted. “Okay, then why didn’t he strangle her once she was out? That’s nice and quiet.”
“Usually.”
“Boys,” I said. “I’m moved by your concern. Maybe Monaghan didn’t want to take a chance with the gunshot while people were just outside, and maybe he wasn’t quite cold-blooded enough to put his hands around my neck and squeeze, but he didn’t really mind leaving me to drown in sludge. How do I know? In my experience, people who resort to murder as a problem-solving technique aren’t planning three moves ahead.”
The detectives agreed with that opinion. As a general principle, anyway.
I spent all day Friday lolling on an inpatient bed, watching TV and nursing my wicked headache. Some of the people from the office came by and others sent flowers. My brother Tommy snuck me a burger and fries, and a big malted chocolate frappe that did more to improve my condition than anything else.
Anup Banerjee sent a small bouquet of carnations and daisies through an 800-number florist. It bore a printed card expressing his cordial get-well wishes.
On Saturday I had a surprise visitor. It was the public defender Eva Yung, Samuel Urias’s lawyer. I was thrilled to see her, and eager to hear what was going on with her client, now that I had pieced together the case that would exonerate him.
“He’s gone,” she said. “I don’t know where.”
Jason Bevner had called Eva on Friday morning to tell her about the charges against Monaghan for the same crime her client was charged with. She immediately demanded they release Urias. Bevner agreed. It took the rest of the day to get the paperwork done, and to process Samuel Urias out of the jail. He stepped through the San Francisco County Hall of Justice door at Bryant and Seventh a free man, just before the end of business that day.
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting for him there.
“Wait...what?” I said. “Why ICE? What’d he do?”
“Nothing,” said Eva Yung.
“He has a green card, right?”
“Yes. Sam has a green card. And he’d been arrested on a felony. So ICE can detain him, and they can deport him.”
“What—?”
The lawyer looked out the window and watched the traffic on the 101 freeway.
“That’s the way it is.”
“He didn’t do anything! He was set up—by the guy who did the murder!”
“Jessie, don’t excite yourself, all right? You have a head injury.”
The only reason I didn’t tell Eva Yung to stick her concern where the sun don’t shine was because Eva was, herself, so very subdued. I recognized the look on her face as she studied the passing cars. It was the look I’ve seen in a hundred grieving mothers, the ones who have had a couple of weeks to come to terms with the loss of a child, and who were, by then, in the throes of a deep, lasting depression.
We sat in silence until she went on. She explained, or tried to, that, as far as she could tell, several disparate agencies saw Sam Urias’s deportation as a win-win. For ICE, they get to connect crime and immigration. Never mind that the immigrant in question hadn’t been convicted of any crime—he’d been arrested and charged in one, a serious one, and under the federal rules in place for their agency, that was enough for them to take action. As a bonus, grabbing Urias off the street the second he left jail provided the ICE guys with an opportunity to poke a sanctuary city in the eye. As for the San Francisco district attorney, they could denounce ICE and claim they’d had nothing to do with them, then proceed with a clean slate against Denis Monaghan for the murder of Leopold Haring. This time they were sure to get a conviction.
“Or, more likely, a plea. I don’t see Mr. Monaghan going to trial,” Eva concluded.
“But...he framed Urias. He set him up to take the blame for the crime the DA is trying him for! Shouldn’t they want to... I don’t know, explore that aspect of the crime?”
“No. It’s a distraction. You gave them the murder weapon—the real one—and the scene of the crime. Then you gave them another body, Javier Aguinaldo’s, to pin on Mr. Monaghan. They don’t even want to talk about that whole messy thing with the screwdriver and the two old corpses.”
“Monaghan’s defense attorney can raise it, then! Shit, the DA would open the door to an insurmountable pile of reasonable doubt that way... Wouldn’t they?”
Eva Yung smiled—again, in the mirthless way I’ve seen on the faces of people who have lost loved ones—and said, “I’ll bet they get the screwdriver evidence excluded. With Samuel Urias out of the picture, they can ignore him. They can pretend they never charged him. And, like I said, this isn’t going to trial. No way. Did you know that Denis Monaghan is undocumented?”
I nodded. “So what?”
“So he doesn’t want to be sitting in a courtroom listening to the prosecutor tell the jury he’s an illegal alien murderer for days and days, that’s what. They will do that. His immigration status won’t get excluded, believe me. If Mr. Monaghan goes to trial, he’ll lose, and he’ll go down for life. With a plea deal instead, he might get a twenty-year term, out in fifteen, and then shipped straight back to Ireland. The DA will be eager to offer a deal like that, and his attorneys would urge him to take it.”
“Fifteen years for two murders, and an attempt to kill me, too?”
“Haring’s death isn’t a murder, remember. It was self-defense, manslaughter, tops—and desecration of a corpse, I guess. As for you? Well, if I were the DA, I’d look to add some assault and battery and unlawful detention, but I couldn’t be certain I’d make attempted murder stick, so I probably wouldn’t try too hard with that. Use it to persuade the other side they don’t want to even go to trial. And they wouldn’t want to.”
“Monaghan’s immigration status is his motive for killing Javier! He was afraid of getting deported—”
“Yeah, well, the DA doesn’t care much about motive if they’ve got all this other evidence against him. Besides, they know Mr. Monaghan is going to get deported after his stint, for sure and for good.”
No death in Ireland, Denis Monaghan had said—because, without papers, he couldn’t travel back there and then return to the life he’d built in San Francisco. But now he was going to get it, if he survived his last years in America, in prison.
Eva stood. “I’ve got to get going. Busy weekend. Get better, okay?”
“Wait,—” I said, “what about Samuel?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you don’t know where he is.”
“I don’t. And ICE doesn’t have to tell me. They don’t have to tell anybody. As far as the Feds are concerned, Samuel Urias is a guest in this country. Or was.”
“But he’s...not illegal. Which means he’s legal...”
“He’s not a US citizen. ICE might be holding him in detention, or they might already have sent him back to Mexico. I don’t know. I won’t know, not until he’s free to call me, if he chooses to. If he does, I’ll try to advise him about his options for gaining reentry—but I’m not an immigration attorney.”
She turned her back and went to the door.
“Eva,” I said, “he has a family here.”
Eva Yung looked over her shoulder. She was trying to hide her pain and rage. She was doing a pretty decent job of it.
“Tomorrow is another day, Jessie. Heal up, okay?”
Heal up. I’ll try, Eva.
I pulled out my cell. I wanted to call Anup, ask him what Eva could do about Samuel Urias, ask him who he knew that worked in immigration law, who he knew that could strategize a demand for ICE to produce Urias. Demand the rule of law.
I didn’t dial. I put the phone away, and laid my head back on the papery hospital pillow.
I fell asleep until a ward nurse woke me for another neuro check. He shined the penlight on my pupils and asked me how I was doing, made me stick out my tongue, squeeze his hands, raise each arm, wiggle my fingers. I passed, apparently. My headache was almost gone and I was hitting all my marks. They were going to release me in the morning. That would be Sunday morning.
“Can I go back to work on Monday?”
The nurse was a tall, slender man. He looked down at me dubiously. “You’re that eager?”
“We’re short-staffed.”
The nurse just handed me a sheet of instructions and precautions in the care of head injury, and left.
The neurology department left me alone with my injured head for a while, until a doctor in a white coat came to bother it. I was getting a little tired of their routine.
“Hello,” she said brightly.
“Hey, Doctor, I don’t mean to be rude, but I just did the tests. Maybe you mixed up rooms?”
“No, no. I’m here to see you. Teska, correct? Czesława?”
She pronounced my given name perfectly. That’s what made me sit up and take notice. No one ever gets Czesława right. No one who isn’t Polish, anyhow—and this doctor didn’t look Polish. She was an older woman, with skin the color of scorched driftwood and shining, silver-threaded black hair. She had enormous brown eyes and enviable lashes that I could tell were the real deal, no mascara. Something about those eyes was familiar to me.
“I hope you’re feeling well,” she said, and smiled a little nervously. She had a faint, lilting accent.
Shit, that smile. I definitely knew that smile. My eyes went automatically to the blue embroidery on the lapel of her white coat.
D. Banerjee, MD.
“Dr. Banerjee?” I said.
“Yes. Denise Banerjee, here at the hospital. Though at home I am Dakshina.”
Dakshina was Anup’s mother’s name.
“I...can sympathize, Dr. Banerjee,” I said.
“Yes, Jessie. I know you can.”
I held out my hand. She took it gingerly.
“It’s a real pleasure to meet you Dr. Banerjee,” I said, and offered her a smile.
The nervousness evaporated from her own. “Likewise. It is.”
“You aren’t here on a consult.”
“Well. In a sense, I am. How is your head?” she asked.
“Mending.”
“That’s good.”
We just contemplated each other for a bit. Then I said, “How is your son?”
“Oh, you know. He pretends nothing’s wrong.”
“Yes. He would. Does he know you’re here?”
“No...! I do rounds at the General once a week, and had a patient on this floor. I happened to spot your name on the board. It’s an unusual name.”
I couldn’t help laugh at that. Anup’s mom went on. “I asked around the nursing station. They had quite a story for me.”
“It’s all true, I’m afraid.”
“I...”
Whatever thought she’d had, she couldn’t finish it. She started giggling and didn’t stop.
“What is it?”
“I just hope Anup isn’t right about you. How could I face him?”
That took me off balance. “What do you mean?”
“He...oh, that boy. He’s not a boy, of course, but he is, always, to me. I know when he’s lying, even when he’s lying to himself. He told us, me and his father, that it’s over between you.”
I didn’t see how that was funny. It wasn’t funny to me. What was wrong with this woman?
“But the lie he told,” Anup’s mother went on, “was in answer to my immediate next question, which was, of course, why? We’d been waiting so long to meet you, yet he kept putting it off. Then, out of the blue, he announces that you were gone from his life, and when I asked him why, he said he had broken it off because you worked too hard, and he didn’t like that.”
A flame came to Dr. Dakshina Banerjee’s eyes, a flame I recognized along with her eyelashes and her smile. “Well! I let him have it, as they say. I was shocked by that, truly! We didn’t raise Anup that way, to expect that a woman should wrap herself around his life, beholden to him, and I told him so. Quite sharply, I’m afraid.”
I realized why she’d suffered that case of the giggles. “And then I go out and get myself nearly killed on the job, just to prove his point. That’s what you mean?”
She nodded. “It struck me as hilarious, in an absurd way, and I apologize. I realize that’s not the reason my son broke off his relationship with you. As I said, I know when Anup is lying to me.”
Again we watched each other. I fought to maintain a poker face. She had ambushed me, after all. She seemed genuinely caring and concerned—but, still, I didn’t want to let my guard down. She wanted me to tell her the real reason for the breakup. I didn’t feel comfortable doing that. She didn’t press me. Finally I felt obliged to correct one thing she’d said.
“He didn’t break it off. It was mutual.”
“I see. I...hope you will reconsider that decision. You see, I fear that Anup is...ill-equipped, sometimes, to make the right choices when it comes to...romance and such. It is our fault, really—mine and his father’s. We simply don’t talk about romances, about...love relationships, at home. We never have done. Now, I fear, that flaw in our parenting has led our son to make a terrible mistake.”
The poor woman. She was so wrong. I didn’t feel it was my place to tell her so, but Anup is a grown man, and is entitled to own his mistakes. She went on:
“I fear, you see, that Anup has manufactured in his own mind a terrible misapprehension of the duties he owes us as our son. I fear he thinks we would disapprove of his relationship with you, because you aren’t...because you haven’t been raised in our community. That is a nonsensical assumption. We have, I hope, never given him such an impression.”
Well, lady, it’s too late now, I wanted to say. Maybe Anup had invented his fear of his parents’ disapproval, or maybe they had seeded it and were blind to that—or in denial of it. Not my circus. Not anymore.
I shifted in the bed to signal that this particular family therapy session was drawing to a close. Dr. Banerjee leaned away from me a small distance. Message received.
“Thank you for coming to see me, Dr. Banerjee,” I said.
“Please call me Denise, won’t you, dear?” She loosed another of her nervous giggles. “Or Dakshina, of course.”
God, this woman was making it hard for me to dislike her. I had worked it out in my own head that she was the villain here, that she and her husband had harried Anup into the old “we know what’s best for you” mindset, and that he was too weak to break free of it. Speaking to her in the flesh made me suspect that I was wrong. Anup had made the choice to exclude me from his family life quite on his own. It was a shame. It was a tragedy.
“It was kind of you to visit, and it really was a pleasure to meet you,” I said.
And that was that. Dakshina nodded sadly and held out her hand to shake goodbye. I took it, and she asked if she might kiss me. I said yes, and she leaned in and planted warm lips on the edge of my chin, avoiding the cheek that was still raw from the duct tape. She held her grip on my hand for too long. I was the one who finally had to loosen it, and even then she didn’t want to release me.
But she did. And then she left without another word.