The wireless unit was borrowed from Narcotics. They both knew it was a piece of shit, a tool not much used on the mean streets of Somerset County but hopefully good enough. They heard a car door slam, greet-greet Hi-Hi chitter-chatter and double doors into restaurant noises, the rhubarb of laugh and talk, bright sounds of tine and plate. They heard Amy ask for a quiet booth, Good girl. Tim and Danny slid reflexively into their leather buckets listening hard.
Hi hon-ney, how are you?”
Charlie winces at the December sun. “Oh, all right,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Oh-kay.”
Amy nods at the bloody nicks below his nose and lip. “Well, you shaved.”
Charlie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I shaved too closely.” He touches his chin, feeling dried blood. “I shaved once, then I looked at myself in the mirror, said, Oh my god! With my glasses on.”1
They push through the double doors into the good-time décor, a beer-o-clock theme with hanging mugs for regulars and tables out behind. Amy now takes another look at Charlie. The too-close double-shave, the new haircut and, okay—he did look like he’d dressed for a date.
“Look at you!” Amy says. “With the decked-out shirt.”
“I know,” Charlie says. Despite the December weather, he was in dated tropical wear—a loose shirt in the same ice-cream white as his pants and shoes. “I’m all white.” If not for the repeating jungle leaf print running along one side of the shirt, he might have been in uniform.
Amy tells the hostess they’re playing hooky from work, sneaking smiles at Charlie, making it fun as they follow the waitress to the back of the bar. Charlie and Amy slide into opposite sides of a vinyl booth.
“So,” Charlie says, jumping right in. “They were talking about me on the radio.”
“Wait—when?”
“Oh, when I was driving here,” Charlie says. He’d been following the news closely for several days. Newark Star-Ledger reporter Rick Hepp had an unnamed source confirming that the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office was investigating a string of possible homicides at Somerset Medical Center, with an unnamed local male nurse as the lead suspect. The news leak had exploded from there, gathering scope and juicy specificity by the hour. “I was listening to the classics station, it was a local station, like 99, a local oldies station. Or, it was—”
“And it said…?”
“My name,” Charlie says. “ ‘Charles Cullen.’ And, you know, and the other one, 101.5, it just mentioned that it was a nurse. I’d read it too, before—the investigation, they’d mentioned it.”
“And this is…”
Charlie had been following himself in the papers. “The Newark Star.2 And I read it in the Morning Call—it’s a local paper—that they’d contacted the nurse’s employer, what they thought would be the employer, and—what they thought—that’s Montgomery, so…”
“Oh, Montgomery,” Amy says. “Is that—”
“How’s everybody doing today?” the server, Joel, asks. “Maybe you folks wanna start off with a couple drinks?”
Charlie glances at Amy, unsure. Amy’s having a Corona. But Charlie’s been sober for weeks now. He promised his daughter he’d stay that way.
“Um, yeah,” Charlie says. “Um… Miller? Or Michelob?”
“We have Michelob Ultra.”
“Yeah,” Charlie says quickly. “Good, good…”
“That’s, like, low-carb, dude,” Amy says.
“Oh is it?” Charlie says. “Oh, ha-ha. No no no, not that. I’ll have a Corona.”
Charlie waits until the waiter is gone before he continues. “Yeah, and so my eldest is thirteen,” he says. “So I just told her, I took care of that.”
“So you just told her… because you were worried it was going to hit the papers?”
“Well, I didn’t talk to her until a couple of days ago,” Charlie says. “When they took me up for questioning. Because they told me, you know, next time they see me, they’re going to put handcuffs on me and take me in, so I wanted to call her and let her know.”
Charlie tells Amy he’d been waking up and going to bed wondering, Can I sleep through the night, or are they already at the door? When the call did come, it wasn’t the police at all, but a reporter from a newspaper. Charlie is famous. He wants Amy to know this is way bigger than his recruitment flyer. “And, well—it was in the New York Times, so—”
“Did you folks have a chance to look over the menu, or…” It’s the waiter again.
Charlie drops his head and studies his placemat until the kid disappears and he has Amy’s attention again.
“Okay,” he says. “So… you want me to start from the beginning?”
Over the wire the noise grew by degrees, with the early after-work crowd becoming louder round by round, plus there was an electrical something interfering with the mic frequency—air traffic control or a pager or the girl’s pacemaker; they didn’t know, only that it was a strain to listen to.
The men leaned in, ties hanging, as if getting closer to the box was going to help with the headphones. They heard Amy tell Charlie, “All right, let’s start from the beginning,” which made them lean in even more.
When—when everything happened at Somerset, they only said—”
“That there was an issue with my application,” Charlie says. “You know, something like that. I mean I went to the first interview, that was fine, then when I went to the second interview, when they pulled me off the floor—the first one was at upper management, that was for the Reverend…”
“What happened? I—I mean, honestly, I don’t even know what happened with him.”
“I don’t know,” Charlie says. “I mean, he seemed fine at the time.”
“He seemed—I mean, did you have him?” Amy knows all of this, of course; she knows more than Charlie could imagine. The point is to make him say it. “What did he have?” Amy asks. “What was wrong with him?”
“I think he was liver failure and kidney failure,” Charlie says. “We had to dialyze.”
“I think I had him,” Amy says.
“Yeah, well I had him once. Or twice,” Charlie says. “When he was over at the ICU.”
“So you had—he was in the ICU and then he moved?”
“Yeah, they moved him, and, then, they… they all talked how about how he passed away, and the dig levels were high… I’m not sure if I heard the… but I remember seeing him but I don’t remember, so…”
“Who had him, though, when all that went down?”
“It was me, I think I had him that night,” Charlie says. He explains to Amy how they’d shown him his signatures. He says he didn’t remember every time he took meds for a code that wasn’t normal, but he made mistakes sometimes, and sometimes forgot his glasses—and anyway, you know, really, it’s like, who remembers this stuff?
“And management got called in when?”
“Sometime after that,” Charlie says.
“So, when Risk Management questioned you, did they actually show you the chart?”
“They showed me the chart,” Charlie says. “And they showed me my signature. And, I don’t remember doing that, but I cosigned dig. And they showed me the Pyxis records then, they had the records and they showed me how, I guess, I’d canceled orders for the dig, ordering it under another patient. I’d ordered dig for another patient and then canceled the order.”
“You did that?”
“Yeah, I did,” Charlie says. He gives Amy his sheepish look. “I did that.”
“Charlie, you’re a dumbass,” Amy says.
“I know, I know!” Charlie says.
Hear that?” Danny said.
“Lund had the Pyxis for Gall.”
“And the cancels.”
“Yep.”
“Fuckers.”
The Southwestern spring rolls are laid like daisy petals around dipping sauce.
“Wait,” Amy says. “You actually have the papers with you?”
“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Well, just the one.” He flops the paper on the table like a winning poker hand and watches for Amy’s reaction.
“The—the New York Times?” Her shock is genuine.
That is the reaction. “Yeah,” Charlie says.
Amy shakes her head, not sure what the proper reaction should be.
“Um, wow,” she says. “The freaking New York Times.”
“Yeah.” Charlie nods toward the paper. “It’s the Metro section.”
Amy reads. He takes in the raw amazement on her face, the way her lips form words as she scans the story, the wisps of blonde hair that fall as she bends to read the description of him.
“It just says ‘a male nurse,’ ” he says.
“And, oh, gee,” Amy says, her voice doofy. “I wonder who it is, ‘… was fired in late October.’ ”
“Yeah,” Charlie says.
“Blah blah blah… five other hospitals.” Amy looks up, squinting and serious. “Charlie, is that true?”
“Yeah, see, I mean—I jumped around five other hospitals—”
“Is it true?”
Charlie reaches for his beer. “I had—a problem, when I first started out, with uh—the first hospital I worked at was Saint Barnabas, and there was a patient there who crashed with low blood sugar, and there was some question.” He takes a sip. “But nothing came of it. There had been other problems at Saint Barnabas. Somebody had been spiking IV bags in the store room with insulin, and—”
“What?” Amy says.
“Yeaaaah…,” Charlie says.
“But—knowing your ICU, I mean, how would they—”
Charlie explains the process and how, after the crashes and confusion, somebody finally checked the IV bags and…
“All the IV bags, or—”
“Oh, no. No no,” Charlie says, as if that was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. He reaches casually for a spring roll and holds it, waiting.
“So… why did they pinpoint… but they pinpointed you,” Amy says, as if making the connection for the first time. “They tried to…”
“Yeah, but—”
“Were these older patients?”
“No,” Charlie says, chewing. “One of these was younger.3 But, the others… they questioned me.”
“What did you think? What did you think, when they were questioning you?”
It was like a big deal at Saint Barnabas; Charlie wants to make that clear. A mystery. There were all sorts of nurses that hung the bags. Even a smart person couldn’t figure out a pattern from something like this.
“But what did you think? When you were going through that, what did you think could have happened?”
Charlie chews his spring roll, thinking on it. “I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t,” he says. “There was one patient, that was an HIV patient, she had terminal AIDS, and the mother wasn’t involved, but the father wanted the patient… um, and he thought that, maybe, I would do it. But I really didn’t know, about that.” Charlie quickly adds, “You know. I never got accused. But I left there.”4
“But, when did that happen? That happened years ago.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what is your opinion? Because it looks bad.”
“Oh, I know. I know.”
“I mean, Charlie—it looks bad.”
“I mean, I was a target. I’ve been looked at, you know, in Warren County. Warren Hospital, they did interviews. They said, ‘We want to talk to you.’ They said, ‘Now, it would be a long investigation, we don’t have enough to charge you.’ ”
“Yes, but, are you capable of doing it?”
Charlie lowers his head. He remains still for a long time.
When he speaks again, his voice is unnaturally slow.
“As far as abnormal lab results, I was… the other time, that was dig. That was at Warren Hospital. A patient that died, twenty-four hours after I’d been her nurse. Someone said, the son had said, that I injected her with something.”
“The son?”
“The. Little. Little woman. The—mother… mother said, that, she said—yeah, I don’t remember, uh… that, at all,” Charlie says, struggling. “Other than, you know, that the doctor… thought it was a bug bite, and they investigated.” He insisted on taking a lie detector test about the woman’s death. And how, yeah—he passed.
“Nice!” Amy says.
Charlie brightens. “And then I sued them for discrimination,” he says. It was actually an administrative leave with full pay from Warren, which kept Charlie out of their wards for nearly three months, but the cash settlement was basically the same thing, and it makes a much better story. “They settled out of court, and I got, like, $20,000,5 so…”
“Nice!” Amy says.
“Yeahyeahyeahyeah,” Charlie says. “And that’s where I was admitted as a patient, to that hospital, after my suicide…. And so—there’s another twist to that story, too.” The newspaper story had mentioned his stay in the Muhlenberg psychiatric ward. It’s a story he likes to tell. “I was going through my divorce at the time. I was at Warren. And then I started… talking with someone.”
Bleep bleep bleep. Amy fumbles in her purse for her cell phone alarm clock. It’s a signal for the detectives listening to flip the tape. Charlie waits until she’s back in listening position again and he can continue the story.
“So, I started… seeing someone… romantically there. I was technically getting divorced and… whether or not she thought…”
Amy squeals. “You were having an affair?”
“Yeah—but I was actually going through a divorce.”
“You were having an affair!”
“Well,” Charlie says, “it was pre-divorce, technically.”
“Technically,” Amy teases.
“Technically,” Charlie says. Just as now, he was still technically living with Cathy.6
But between the cops raiding the house and Amy’s flirty messages on the machine, Cathy is already convinced that he and Amy are going to take off to Mexico like desperados. It isn’t the worst idea; Charlie is dressed for the tropics.
Charlie tells Amy the Michelle Tomlinson stalking story again, making it sound like a slapstick romance. He liked her, but there was a misunderstanding, which led to this whole ridiculous thing where he sorta, um, broke into her apartment one night, and…
“Can I get you folks anything?” Amy turns. It’s the pesky waiter again.
“I’ll tell you what—what’s your name? Jeff? Joel. Joel, we’ll just call you over when we need you, okay?”
Amy watches him go. Between him and Charlie’s free-associating, she is getting nowhere. Her bravery is wearing off faster than the beer can replace it. She has a brief image of her heart exploding, the microphone picking up the liquid sound.
“I just wanna poke his little eyes out,” she says, and shoots Charlie a secret look. There is no way she can handle this much longer.
Over the headphones, a door squeaks, squeaks again. The restaurant noise is suddenly small and distant. Then another door, a woman’s hard heel on tile, the hollow metal of a locking public stall.
“Okay, look, you better turn it down,” Amy says.
She hasn’t realized how public her life has become until she needs to use the ladies room. Who knows how many people are listening in. Amy squeezes her eyes tight, imagining away the high hiss sounding off porcelain. But she has a microphone strapped onto her heart. They can hear everything.
She let the sink run, the noise of it making her feel alone at last, and studies the girl in the mirror, the one Charlie trusted, the one the detectives trusted, too. Who is she? A friend? A spy? Amy fingers the scar scalpeled across her breast plate, thinking of the damaged heart below it, the microphone strapped close by. This is her life now; you could listen to her pee over the radio. She is utterly transparent, like the clear plastic woman from biology class, the conflicting dimensions of her inner life encapsulated in parti-colored pieces: injuries and insecurities, the glandular excretions of fear and hope. She couldn’t see inside of Charlie like this. Behind the computer screens and paperwork and cancellations and a uniform was a man she does not know. But maybe now, across a restaurant table, she can know him. “You can do this,” she says, trying out the sound, liking it. Then she checks her gloss and pushes back out the door.
Amy figures Charlie might have bolted the restaurant. She has a sudden flash of him on the highway, headed north to her house, waiting in her driveway as her daughters returned from school, and—but there he is, slumping in the booth like an unplugged robot. Amy slides into her seat and watches his eyes flick up and register her. And suddenly, he is present, and the story picks up just where they left off.
Charlie speaks freely about the allegations and circumstances, providing details of patients who mysteriously died. He was comfortable with the details. They thought he did it, Charlie says. The hospitals. The investigators. He can talk about Them.
“Charlie?” Amy says. “I need to ask you something. Are you capable of doing those things?”
Charlie sags suddenly.
“Because that’s what I want to know. Are you capable?”
Charlie sits, quiet. When his voice finally comes, it is in halting monotone bursts, directed at the appetizer.
“What they were saying… is that these people were die… were people that were going to die… were doing really poorly but…”
“Charlie?”
“I don’t really want to talk to you about it,” he says. He sits and stares for several more seconds. “Knowing that, you know… I mean… they even asked if I was attracted to patient death, you know…,” he finally says. “They… they said I did.”
“Charlie,” Amy says.
He looks up again.
“Listen to me.”
He’s waiting.
“You are… excellent.”
Charlie is listening.
“You are—” Amy searches for the word “—a phenomenal nurse. And you are, my… my best… partner. That I’ve ever worked with. And I’ve… you know, and I look at this, and I, you know I’m hearing this, and I really wonder, Charlie, what… you know… I can’t imagine being investigated once. But to be investigated over and over and over again…”
Charlie’s eyes drop to his empty beer.
“Charlie?”
He looks up.
“What’s your opinion of… yourself?”
Amy has just pushed Charlie into the deep end. “But I don’t, I don’t…”
“You know how much I care about you…”
“I know. I know, it doesn’t, you know—” He shakes his head. “It’s gotten to the point that, if I do get charged…”
“Charlie,” Amy says. “Charlie. Look at me.”
He looks.
“This is over and over again.”
“Do I want it to be over?” he says.
“Do you want to be caught?” Amy says gently. “Do you want it to be really over?”
“I… really… as far as the charges…,” Charlie begins.
“Charlie,” Amy says. “Look at me.” He’s slipping away. She leans in close. “Look at me.”
He looks.
“You are not stupid.”
He watches her. “Yeah.”
“And you know I’m not stupid.”
“Yeah. I know, I know.”
“And you know how much I care about you.”
“I know, I know, I know, I know…”
“And I’m scared for you,” Amy says. She can’t help it—the wave of sadness has started rising in her chest. “Do you want to be caught?”
“It’s to the point… if they bring the charges, and… I just feel a little… uh… overwhelmed,” Charlie says. “And I feel, uh, you know, the hospital, the charges if they… when, um, I’m going into collection, and I have payments, and…”
She reaches for his hands, dead on the table. “Please.” She is crying now. “Please let me help you.”
“I don’t… I wouldn’t… I can’t.”
“Let me help you.”
“I can’t. I can’t…”
“Let me help you.”
Charlie has stopped moving.
“I see you, Charlie, and I’m not stupid. Nobody gets investigated over and over again, for no reason, Charlie. You know I know that.”
He looks into a hole in the tabletop. “I—”
“What do you want?” Amy says. “How are you going to go on from here?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I—”
“Would it be easier if you were caught?”
“No,” Charlie says. “It wouldn’t. I—”
“How are you going to stop?” Amy asks. “Why? Why? You’re so good. Do you know why?”
Charlie shakes his head at the floor.
“Charlie, what about Father Gall? What happened? What happened?”
“I just… can’t… I can’t… I… I can’t… I…”
“I know you can. What happened? I know you’re scared, but what happened?”
“I’ll, I’ll deal with the—”
“Charlie, I’m right here,” Amy says. “Right now. Do you know?”
“It’s… in the public,” Charlie says. “I don’t want… I can’t… I don’t want my life… it will… my life will… fall apart…”
“Your life already has fallen apart,” Amy says. She lets that soak in. “It already did. It already did.”
“Hope not. Hope not. Hope not.”
“Yes,” she says. “Your life fell apart. And it’s falling apart. And it’s not going to come back together. I don’t think so.” She shakes the newspaper at Charlie. “And I read this…”
“People… believe…” His eyes search the table. “It… depends, what you think people are capable of.”
“Please? Tell me how I can help,” Amy says. “Please tell me. What I can do?”
“You. Do. Help. What I see happening is… unacceptable. You know… I…”
“What do you see happening? Charlie?”
“Being charged. Going to jail,” Charlie says. He seems gone, the words leaking from his mouth like bubbles rising to the surface. “I lose. My children…”
“You’re already losing them,” Amy says. “You already are. And—I have never respected a nurse more than I respect you. And I am torn apart, watching you. I am torn apart. Because I see you. Out of everyone I know, I see you. And I knew you, and I felt you.”
Charlie rocks gently in his seat like a child, mumbling, “I don’t know, about, about, you know, what, your idea, of me… I just want it to be over…”
“How can we do that, then? How can we do that, then?”
“I… I… I… I, all I can do…,” Charlie says. His voice is monotone, barely audible. “I’ve been giving them the truth. The truth. Truth.”
“Not enough truth,” Amy says. “What if you confessed?”
Charlie shoots a look at her. “I can’t.”
“Is there another option?”
“I… face the sources,” Charlie says. “Face the accusations… they… I… they don’t know, the… I can’t handle the trial, the…”
“Charlie!” Amy cries. “This is me. Why? Just—why? Why did all this start? Charlie! Why? Are you ever going to stop? You can lie to the cops, but not to me. Not to me.”
Charlie is muttering, talking circles, repeating words.
“I am not stupid,” she says. “I’m not afraid of being your friend. I’m your friend.”
Amy feels the vinyl of the booth rising around her, closing her off.
“I—like. Being with you. I love… when we worked the codes together. I love it when you were on with me. And you left me—abandoned.”
She squares the newspaper to where Charlie’s gaze is pinned to the table.
“Honey. I’m reading these, and you know what? I’ve been in nursing, for all these years. And no one has ever accused me of murder. And you’ve been accused now five times—more, maybe; you’re telling me sometimes it’s even more. And people think you actually killed people.”
“No, I can’t… it wouldn’t… I can’t…”
“I’m here, Charlie,” Amy says. “I’m here, because—I love you. And I’m here because—I know you killed those people.”
Charlie has stopped moving.
“I know it,” she says.
The world has stopped. His lips move.
“Was it just—a rush?” Amy asks. She reaches across the table. His hand is cold. “Was it just for the kick of it, like when we’re at a code?”
Charlie’s eyes flick to the edges of the table, the space there.
“I don’t know why,” Amy says. “I—I don’t know what your motivation was. But I know you’re smarter than this. And I know you did it.”
“I can’t—”
“I know you did it. Let’s go to the police station. We can tell them together.”
“I can’t I can’t I can’t…”
“Because I know you killed them, Charlie.”
Charlie looks up.
This time, she feels a sudden wave of cold static. Then she sees the switch.
Sees his skin go slick and buttery. Watches his jaw reshape and his spine shift. Then Charlie’s eyes began to drift apart.
The right eye unplugs and drifts lazy to the edge of the table, reading the darkness there, pacing kinesthetic tracks back and forth and back. The left eye watches her. The wax head twists and speaks. The voice is low and toneless. Amy has never heard this voice before. It does not remind her of anything human.
There are undercover detectives here, men with guns watching, somewhere—but she isn’t feeling that kind of fear. She doesn’t sense evil in the man across from her. It’s not rage or murderous lust. It’s blankness, a horrible nothing. A wall has fallen. There is nothing behind it. In this moment, she knows. Charlie is not Charlie. If she did not know him, it was only because there was nothing really to know.
Tim had tried wiggling all the levels of the stupid wireless receiver, but they weren’t getting squat out of there. The voices were distorted and drowned. They’d listen for a while, straining at the pips and pops and birdsong from the speakers. Then Danny would try the knobs. After a while they just stared ahead across the parking lot and watched the doors.
Charlie came out first, from the side door, alone. They watched him unlock his car and pull out onto 22.
“Where is she?” Tim said.
“I don’t know.”
“This isn’t good,” Tim said. “I’m going in.”
Then Amy pushed through the front entrance. She hung to the door handle and stopped, dazed. The detectives hopped out of their car, waving and yelling. Amy looked to the sound, lost across a parking-lot sea.
She made the car before she fell apart and collapsed sobbing into Danny’s arms. Tim opened the door and they slid her in to collect herself in the Crown Vic’s heat. The recorder was there between the seats, a tape still spinning in the plastic window. The sight sobered her.
“So,” she said. “Did you get it?”
Tim looked at Danny. “We’ll get him,” he said. “But—we were having a little trouble making out what he was saying.”
“I told him,” Amy said. “I told him that I knew. Something weird happened to him. His face. It was—awful. And he kept saying the same thing, over and over.”
“What did he say.”
“He was talking weird,” Amy said. “Low, almost a growl, one word at a time. But I think what he said was, ‘Let. Me. Go. Down. Fighting.’ ”