YOU’D THINK I’D BE ALL MR. SPIRITUAL after making amends to Colin Alvarez and finding out my dead best friend had a son, but no, not really. Because the first thing I did once I got home was put on a blue Armani blazer that no cop with the possible exception of William Bratton would ever wear. I slipped my retirement badge and ID into the breast pocket and practiced a couple of times pulling it out while covering the word “retired” right there in the middle. If I were going for veracity, I would have strapped on my gun, too, but I was a little too proud of the fact that for eight years it hadn’t left the lock box at my shop. The buttoned sport coat, I told myself, should do the trick. I printed up a list of hospitals in the areas of both the 911 call and the motel where Terry had died. Impersonating an active police officer was a federal crime, but I couldn’t ask Manny or Sean for help. This one was mine.
Twenty years ago, you could find out almost anything by flashing a badge. After Rodney King and O.J., even uniformed police officers weren’t as authoritative as they used to be.
Imagining who could be most easily bullied, I started with the hospital receptionists. But the receptionists had been apprised of California state law.
“Thought you’d save yourself some time?” said the redhead at Western Medical Center whose smock was covered with dancing Grateful Dead bears. “You know you need a subpoena for that information.”
It was maddening, as anyone at the right hospital with a computer could have told me: Had Terry been here? Who gave birth to his child? Where did she live?
It was way past lunchtime, and I was getting cranky with my lack of progress. After three hospitals and one compliment to my tailor, I was about to take off my sport coat when I found myself standing next to a smoker outside the revolving doors of St. Joseph’s. A skinny white guy in a green smock, he sucked so fiercely that his ash grew at a visible rate.
“You’re not a cop,” he said.
I smiled, kept my mouth shut. His real audience had been the attractive young African-American woman wearing a denim cowboy shirt. There were several more smokers near the revolving door. Everyone got a good look at me and my Armani jacket. I cranked up my smiling but malevolent stare. Only then I noticed what my police training had initially missed: the plastic wristband that identified him as a patient. My A.A. training, at least, kicked in: the furious smoking suggested inpatient detox.
I shoved into his face the picture of Terry from the memorial. The crowd of smokers drew away. “Have you seen this man? What’s your name?”
Between glances at my hard eyes, he checked the picture. The woman in the cowboy shirt shook her head, daintily placed her cigarette in the ashtray beside the revolving door, then went inside. Deprived of his muse, the cigarette addict’s nerves twisted tighter. Pulling out a notepad, I danced toward the not completely unlikely possibility that this guy and Terry had found each other at some point. He shook his head.
“I asked you what your name was,” I said.
Another voice spoke up behind me. “Can I help you?”
This man, too, was dressed in scrubs, but he was too healthy-looking for a detoxing addict. Maybe a nurse, probably a doctor. Clean teeth, bright skin—he looked me in the eye.
Cigarette Addict beat it back to the rehab, where people wouldn’t shove pictures in his face.
“Are you trying to hurt him or help him?” The guy pointed with an unlit cigarette toward Terry’s photo.
“He’s dead. I’m looking into what happened. May I ask your name?”
As he lit up, we stepped onto a grassy median between the parking lot and the emergency-vehicle lane, away from the other smokers.
“If you stop trying to intimidate me, I’ll try to help you, but I’m not going to tell you my name.” He smoked, but not desperately.
I nodded.
“You were a friend of his?”
I nodded again.
“Is that a yes?” he said. “You wouldn’t have taken that answer from the poor kid you were browbeating.”
“That was a yes.”
“What kind of cop are you? I don’t need your name, but I like to know who I’m talking to.”
“I’m not a cop. At least not in a long time.” I pulled out my retirement badge, pointed to the word “retired” on the ID. “He was my friend.”
After a long moment, the man said, “The mother had a hard labor, and he didn’t take it well. He started cussing out the nurses. He asked the attending where he’d learned how to butcher pregnant women. They got him to calm down for a little while, but then it got worse: he started punching his thighs, as hard as he could. I worried that he was delusional or detoxing, so I pulled him outside to chat.”
“To diagnose him, you mean?”
“No, I mean to chat. I asked if he was taking drugs. He laughed, said he was fifteen years clean. Talking about it, he started to chill out. I bought him a cup of coffee. Are you his business partner?”
“No. Did he talk about a business partner?”
“I guess that’s good. He said his business partner was a nightmare, and he hoped he hadn’t figured it out too late.”
“Did he say this man’s name?”
“Nope. At first he wouldn’t even talk about his girlfriend. Later, he told me that he loved her more than any woman he’d ever known.”
“When was this?” I asked. “What day?”
“It must have been, yeah, May ninth, a Sunday, around four P.M., because I got off at six.”
“I’m good with dates.”
“You must have been a really good listener, too.”
That didn’t come out the way I had planned, and the doctor—or whoever he was—crouched down to grind his ash into the curb below us. He’d had enough of my shit. He didn’t toss the cigarette, though; he would put it in the ashtray beside the door like a good citizen.
“He needed to talk. That’s all I have for you.”
We stood back to let an EMS truck pass. It had become a bright afternoon. The sky was stark blue, and it gave the hospital above us a hard edge. I suddenly wished I weren’t such an asshole. It was a familiar wish.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but it sounds like you have some experience with guys like my friend.”
He looked at me and took time before he answered. “My boyfriend was addicted to Vicodin, but he’s been clean in Narcotics Anonymous for three years. My ex-wife was a cocaine addict. My dad was a vicious drunk. I have three brothers and one sister, and each of them explains to me—unsolicited, at least three times a year—why they don’t have a drinking problem.”
I asked my last questions into the grass. “How did it end? Was the baby okay? Was my friend okay once the baby was delivered?”
“My shift was over, and I went back home. At that point, mother and baby were fine. When I checked in the next day, I heard that the father had lost it again, and the attending had prescribed him some Valium. Wouldn’t have been my call. I found out later, though, that your friend refused the Valium. It’s weird, but I was proud of him.”
He checked for sarcasm and didn’t find any. As I shook his hand, I asked him if he might see his way clear to helping me find the mother. He took a deep breath and sighed. “I can do that,” he said. “I believe your intentions are good.”
I laughed. “Best not to get into my intentions,” I said. “But they’re good as far as she’s concerned. I want to do what I can for her and the little boy.”
“Do you think it’s weird,” he asked, “that I can remember her name right now?”
“Why would I think that’s weird?”
“I don’t usually take this kind of interest,” he said, “but I had it in my mind to call your friend sometime, see how he was doing. What happened? How did he die?”
“Heroin overdose,” I said. “Less than two days after you talked to him.”
“Jesus.”
We looked at each other for a moment, long enough for me to see a weariness in his eyes that I might have missed. Maybe he was seeing the same weariness in mine. I shook his hand again and thanked him for reaching out to a stranger in trouble.
“Who are we talking about now?” he said. “You?”