“If she won’t talk, I can’t judge how dangerous she is, Ren. If you’re ready to discharge, I’m going to have to transfer her to a psych hospital.”
“I know. Maybe it’s what she wants. Poor kid’s been home alone a lot since her sister got sick. Maybe she just needs some TLC.”
I smiled. “I have an idea. If that’s all she needs, why don’t you take her home, Ren? She could babysit for Jonas. That would be great.”
“You get her better, Alan, and I’ll not only grant you a one-year moratorium on making fun of your profession, I’ll also gladly foster-child this one forever. There’s something really, really good inside Merritt Strait, I feel it.” Adrienne pressed hard on her own chest. “It took some of our best work to keep her alive over the weekend and, you know what, it makes every miserable day of my residency worthwhile to see her skin pink and her kidney functions almost normal.”
“Are you ready to discharge?”
“We’ll watch her for another day or two. But soon she’ll be ready to go.”
“I may need you to go to bat for me with MedExcel, Ren. Marty called this morning and told me they’ve already complained about the expense of the one-to-one nursing. They want it d/c’d. You know they’re going to scream if I try to transfer her to a psych unit.”
“I’ll talk to Marty. We’ll work something out with MedExcel or the hospital or something. Order whatever’s necessary, Doctor. Not to worry.”
Five
The Rangers were in town to play the Avalanche and Sam Purdy was psyched. The plan was for him to come by my house around six and drive us to Denver to the hockey game.
He paged me at five-thirty, just as I was finishing with my last patient of the day. The number he left on the screen of my beeper was unfamiliar.
I picked up the phone and punched in the number. Sam answered gruffly after four rings. “Sam, is that you? It’s Alan. What’s up?”
“Change in plans, I’m afraid. Can you drive tonight? I’m at a crime scene without my car. I think it would save time if you just picked me up. I’m out east, not too far from your house.”
“You have the tickets with you?”
“Right next to my heart.”
“No problem, I’ll pick you up. Give me directions.”
He did.
All the rules had seemed to change in my relationship with Sam Purdy after he had exercised his cop discretion and chosen not to believe me after I confessed to him that I thought I had shot someone last October.
Before that night we had enjoyed a friendship, but it was an odd hybrid of being buddies and being adversaries. We’d tried to enhance the relationship before; we bicycled together for a while, but that faded away from mutual neglect, and our friendship continued to languish within the bloody boundary lines where his police interests and my psychological acumen overlapped. We occasionally had breakfast together, sometimes spoke on the phone for no reason other than to stay in touch, and made vague plans about getting together that we rarely followed through on. Not once had Lauren and I rendezvoused socially with Sam and his wife, Sherry.
But over the last winter things had evolved, and Sam and I started meeting away from work. The first couple of invitations were from me, generated, I think, by my persistent anxiety that he would change his mind about ignoring my confession and end up busting me for some capital offense related to that gun going off. Right from the start, though, the incident the previous October seemed dead for Sam. I tried to make sense of how something so monumental for me seemed so inconsequential to him. I finally decided that by behaving the way I did that night in October I had passed some initiation ritual that was meaningful for Sam in a way that I might never understand. Maybe by caring enough to do what I did that night, I had crossed a line, joined some unnamed fraternity, earned some invisible stripe, and to Sam, I was now good enough to be a member of the club.
What club? I don’t know.
Those first few meetings we met late, after nine at night, after Sam had tucked his son, Simon, into bed. Sherry was a morning person, and was usually in bed shortly after Simon. What Sam normally did during those late-evening hours with his family asleep, I don’t know, but he seemed grateful for the opportunity to get together with me.
For a month or so we struggled to find the right place to meet. We tried the brewpubs, Walnut and Oasis, and played some pool. We tried some coffeehouses. We met in a few of Boulder’s bars-the West End, the Boulderado, even one memorable evening at Potter’s. But nothing felt right until Sam decided that maybe I would be a suitable companion to accompany him to hockey games and invited me to Denver to watch the Colorado Avalanche.
Sam had three season tickets in the second row of the second deck in the southeast corner of the arena. One for him, one for Sherry, one for Simon. On a cop’s salary, the tickets were a big investment. On school nights, Sherry wouldn’t let Sam take Simon along, so Sam was left to fend for himself on weeknight games.
Sam had been raised in northern Minnesota and had played hockey all his life. The arrival of a National Hockey League team in Denver brought him joy that was hard for me to understand until he took it upon himself to begin to teach me about offensive defensemen and blue lines and two-line passes and clearing zones and delayed offsides and the importance of finishing checks.
During those late-winter games, I was a hockey student. He instructed me about nuance without ever taking his eyes from the ice.
And during the twenty-minute breaks between periods, Sam and I stopped being buddies and started becoming friends.
During the first game we attended together, in the break between the second and third periods, Sam started talking about a case he was doing, some guy who was using legal tricks to get some incriminating evidence dismissed against him.
“He’s a damn rapist, Alan. Just slime. We suspect him in two other assaults. We have fingerprints, we have semen, we have him cold. I don’t care what his lawyer does; this guy is not going to walk.” He tried to flag down a popcorn vendor, who ignored him. “See, justice isn’t the same as law, Alan. It isn’t about cops or prosecutors or judges or legal procedure or any of that shit. Justice is about doing the right thing, about making sure, absolutely sure, that the right thing happens. Sometimes unlawful things result in justice. Cops know that. Civilians don’t get it.”
For some reason he pointed at the Zambonis preparing the ice for the third period. “Hockey players know about justice; basketball players don’t. Basketball players want the referees to provide justice; hockey players don’t rely on the cops. See, justice is reluctant; it’s not really a natural state of affairs. The natural state of affairs is survival of the fittest. But justice isn’t about that. Justice is about the weak surviving, too. It can be unnatural. And because it’s not natural, it often needs a shove.”
“Are we talking about last fall, Sam?”
“What? That? I don’t know, I don’t know. The right thing happened, didn’t it? Could be.”
The crime scene he was working the day of the Rangers game was in an upscale residential neighborhood in east Boulder, north of where I lived. The chief trial deputy in Lauren’s office, Mitchell Crest, lived in a more modest corner of the same subdivision. Lauren and I had been to his house once for a seder.
I said, “Sam, depending on traffic, I can be there in fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“I may need a little more time than that to finish up. But I really want to be at the game when they drop the puck. I was dying to see the warmups, but I’m afraid there’s no way now. This is the Rangers, you know. We’re talking Sandstrom and Gretzky. I’ll hustle to pull this together. When you get here, check in with one of the patrol guys.”