Awake a day later, tranquilized and woozy, with a pint of my sister’s blood sloshing through me. A screaming pain in my side beneath the drugs.
Apparently in the night I’d tried to escape. Torn my stitching and the IV drip, somehow made it over the guardrail of the bed. I caused the nurses all sorts of trouble calming me down.
I don’t remember what exactly prompted the escape attempt, but I recognized a dull fear coursing through me. Fear of being helpless and being forever at someone’s mercy, and knowing this wasn’t paranoia. That fear branded on me, insinuated into the wound in my side.
In the end you can save nothing and no one. And yet.
When Sonia and Kay came into focus, sitting at my bedside, I felt the fear ebb slightly.
Sonia had a bandage on her brow from a laceration that would take seven stitches and slowly fade to an indelible furrow. She told me Jeff and Marie were on their way, and even Blatchford, up and around now with the help of a cane, wanted to come down. And anyway, Essex was in no condition to press the issue.
“She lost the eye. Sonia broke her hand, too.” Kay spoke with the reverence of someone with a newly minted hero.
Within the week I was trussed up, released, and allowed to make the trip home. The hospital bill cost as much as a Linn Sondek turntable or a good used Chevrolet.
Jeff told me the company would pay. When I asked if that meant I was still a part of Wakeland & Chen, he grunted an affirmative.
“Next time you get yourself stabbed,” he said, “try to do it at home.”
Lee Henry Crowhurst’s initial position was stoic silence. Once they got him to waive his right to counsel and begin talking, he confessed. And kept confessing. He put himself in for seventeen homicides, including Tabitha Sorenson, all on contract. Four of the victims were still listed as missing, and he offered to disclose the locations of the body dumps for fifty grand apiece. The State’s Attorney’s office bought it, on condition Crowhurst give up his clients.
He’d met Essex inside, impressed her with his matter-of-fact demeanor and candor about what he did. She’d contacted him months ago to find Tabitha Sorenson and kill her, with the two of them splitting the recovered money. He’d agreed, but didn’t do legwork: you find her, he’d told her, or hire someone to do it for you.
When Essex furnished him with Tabitha’s location, he’d taken the train up from Seattle, using a false passport to get into the country. Once in Vancouver he’d bought a cheap set of knives from the first department store he saw. Crowhurst waited for nightfall, then slipped in a back window, incapacitated Gill, and confronted Tabitha.
He explained how his banking contact had notified him the minute the money cleared. A green light for murder.
All told, Crowhurst made off with just under two hundred thousand dollars. Once it was in his account, he gave Essex nine thousand and instructed her to be patient. He swore he wasn’t trying to rip her off, only being cautious to make sure the funds weren’t traced back to Tabitha. In the meantime he’d followed and photographed me, Kay, and Jeff, Essex telling him it would keep me quiet.
His testimony went on. Dates and wounds inflicted and sums agreed upon.
I’d study Crowhurst’s evolution over the following years. The first leaked videos of his confession showed the genuine article. The scars on his face and the lisp from his mangled tongue only added to his credibility. Then, in later interviews, still plainspoken but now self-aware, playing a role for his audience. His slow, considered responses gradually tapering to phrases learned by rote, repeated on command. And finally cutesying himself up into a sound-bite-spouting talking head, available when an expert on psychopaths or hitmen was needed. A joke of himself, a paper tiger, and prison royalty.
Dana Essex pled guilty and didn’t speak a word.
It was a Big Sensational American Murder Case, and Sonia and I found ourselves supporting players. It was everywhere. We endured it, head down and covered up, like a boxer on the ropes waiting for her opponent to punch herself out.
Months later, at the tail end of February, when a lull in work had left me feeling restless, I walked downtown to view the demolition. The Central Library was on my way. On a whim, I took the elevator to the seventh floor, where I asked for Sabar Gill.
“He’s in the stacks,” the Special Collections curator said. “One floor down.”
I found Gill as he was shifting an electronic shelving unit back into storage position, a blue-bound book in his hand. His expression hadn’t changed much from the last time we’d spoken.
“Got a minute to talk?”
He considered it and nodded. “I have to hand this book off. Just wait here and I’ll be right back.”
I stood by the guardrail, watching the pigeons in the atrium swoop up to the skylight. Gill returned, leaning on the rail to my right.
I said, “You probably don’t want to hear this from me, but Essex told me all Tabitha cared about was you being safe. That she bargained her money away to make sure. And whatever else, the rest of your life, you’re always going to have that.”
He didn’t answer, only stared across the atrium to the cables that held up the Milton quote.
“Anyway.” I prepared to take my leave. “Felt you should know.”
“What’s weird,” Gill said, “is even though I know it wasn’t you, when I think about her and picture her killer, it’s your face I see.”
“I guess that’s understandable.”
He looked at my ribcage, noticed I was wincing. “The news said she stabbed you. Does it still hurt?”
“Not if I don’t move or laugh or breathe.”
We made small talk and I left. Outside it was a white-skied winter day, rain in the offing. I walked up Robson, bought a Japadog, then turned right on Richards and headed east to the building site.
A small crowd had gathered on the corner of Pender, where a lifetime ago I’d intervened between Essex and Gary. The crowd was more upscale than the neighborhood usually saw. Gary darted among them now, asking for change and cigarettes. The crowd looked past him, training their cameras and cell phones on the spot where my office had been.
The building had been reduced to a skeleton of exposed joists, scaffolding around it, blue plastic and cyclone fencing marking off the perimeter. The workers were carting out the building in pieces, loads of crumbling brick and timber.
Tied to the fence was a sign proclaiming the future location of THE LOFTS, with HOMES STARTING FROM $799,000, and below that the hashtagged slogan, YOU DON’T NEED A MILLION!
But beyond that, what the demolition exposed—a hand-painted sign on the faded brick of the neighbor building. A movie advertisement, HAROLD LLOYD IN SAFETY LAST!, directing passersby to the long-gone Capitol Theater.
A white-gloved hand pointed up the street to where the Capitol had stood. My now-gutted office had preserved its neighbor’s sign for almost a hundred years. The white paint looked pristine, a ghost emerging above the rubble, though the hand now pointed nowhere.
I made sure to slip Gary some money, enough to convince myself, at least for the moment, that I wasn’t like all the others. He greeted me with a belated Happy New Year.
I limped home, thinking about how the past returns to us, how it folds back upon us. How it always seems to have the final say. And I thought, as curses go, there probably were worse.