3 Too Calm

Mike Helbock had been a paramedic for more than a dozen years. In that time, he had seen plenty of people die. He also had seen their loved ones react as life slipped away, and never before had he seen someone as casual about death as Randy Roth.

As Helbock hovered over the comatose Cindy Roth while the aid car screamed toward the hospital some eight miles away, he kept thinking about the man with the sunglasses. Most people are frantic, Helbock thought, or if they aren’t, they’re almost rigid. Not that guy. For Pete’s sake, that guy was practically nonchalant.

The doctors at the hospital were on the radio. Helbock could tell from Cindy Roth’s blue coloring that she hadn’t had any air for at least ten minutes before the resuscitation efforts began. The doctors kept asking Helbock what was wrong with the victim; they didn’t understand how she could have drowned so close to a life raft. Was she diabetic, the doctors wanted to know? Did she have some sort of seizure?

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Helbock could only report. “There’s got to be some reason,” the doctors told Helbock over the radio. “I can’t find anything,” Helbock said.

Why hadn’t Roth alerted a lifeguard earlier? Helbock couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked for help far sooner. Someone had told Helbock that Cindy was found facedown in the water in the raft, that Randy had been swimming, and that he had “pushed” the raft to shore with Cindy in it. Helbock thought that meant that Randy had pushed the raft ahead of him while swimming toward shore, which Helbock thought was crazy. What was wrong with that guy, anyway?

About ten minutes later, the aid car pulled up to the hospital’s emergency entrance, and Cindy was hustled inside. Helbock got ready to write his report. There’s something wrong with this whole thing, Helbock thought. The flavor of this call stinks.

Randy turned his Izusu Trooper onto the freeway to follow the paramedic van. Patti Schultz sat next to him in the front seat. Tyson and Rylie sat in the back. The boys were still crying, but making an obvious effort to keep quiet. Schultz again had the impression that the kids were frightened of Randy, that Randy was a stern father who frowned on the kids showing any emotion. The boys said nothing.

Schultz tried to talk to Randy, but Randy answered in monosyllables. Even when they turned onto the freeway, Schultz noticed that Randy was driving very slowly. She was watching him closely. “His affect was off,” Schultz said later, referring to Randy’s demeanor. “He didn’t seem to be reacting at all. I didn’t want him to have a reaction on the way in, and endanger himself or his children.”

Randy asked Schultz how long a person could go without oxygen before irreversible brain damage and death. Schultz didn’t want to tell Randy directly that Cindy was probably already dead, fearing that it might trigger the pent-up reaction she saw as inevitable. She tried to be gentle.

“Well, the paramedics are giving her medication which will hopefully start her heart again,” Schultz told Randy. “They’ll do more at the hospital. She’s going to have very good care.”

“Well, how long then?” Randy asked. Schultz thought she should give Randy some hope. “Oh, maybe thirty minutes,” Schultz said, knowing she was telling a white lie. “After thirty minutes of CPR.”

Randy was silent for a minute. “What about without CPR?” he asked.

Schultz admitted that it wouldn’t be very long. Randy nodded. “I thought it was about four minutes before the brain stops,” he said. “I remember that from the CPR class I took.”

Schultz said nothing to this, but was thinking: If this guy knows CPR, why didn’t he help his wife?

The scene at the beach upset another bystander far more than she had realized. After the aid car left, Maureen Devinck gathered up her children and her belongings and went straight home. She was still marveling over the man’s lack of apparent reaction to his wife’s probable death. She could still see Randy casually deflating and rolling up his raft while his wife was dying only a few feet away. That was weird, Devinck thought. You’d think he’d have been more interested in the condition of his wife than his boat, wouldn’t you?

Maureen’s husband was home from work when she arrived. She looked at her husband and immediately burst into tears. She imagined herself on the beach, with paramedics rolling her back and forth to empty her stomach of water, shoving tubes down her throat, and her own husband so seemingly indifferent to her plight.

“Think about it,” Maureen told her husband. “If they were doing CPR on me and I’m laying there and looking dead and there’s no response and they’re flipping me back and forth and emptying my stomach … I just can’t imagine you would sit at the end of my feet and act so … unresponsive. He didn’t ask, ‘Is she gonna be okay?’ He didn’t even, you know, go, ‘My God, where’s the ambulance?’ It was really, really weird.”

That was when it hit Maureen: she was sure in her heart that the man had murdered his wife. “I think he killed her,” Maureen told her husband and a neighbor who had come over. “Do you think I should call the police and tell them how I feel?”

But Maureen’s husband and the neighbor told her she was just suffering a reaction from the trauma of the events. “Oh, Rennie, there’s such a large range of shock,” the neighbor said.

“I know, but it just seemed weird,” Maureen insisted.

Maureen’s husband didn’t think she should call the police. “Rennie, I’m sure if that’s the way he was acting, the police are going to catch on,” he said. “If there’s anything to it at all, the police are going to investigate.”

As it turned out, just as Devinck was having this conversation, the police were indeed preparing to investigate, and for exactly the reasons that Devinck had pinpointed.