“Yes. But what you told me before is that you had gone to plead with Dr. Robilio for your sister’s life. But what you’re saying now is that you had actually gone back to blackmail him with the videotape?”
She seemed stunned by the bluntness of my summation. She said, “Yes, I guess that’s right.” With both hands she lifted her hair off her shoulders and twisted it into a knot above her head. “Before, when I, um-”
“Lied?”
“Okay. Lied. I guess…I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you about the videotape at all.”
“And the rest of the-”
“The rest is just the way I told you. The way I look at it now is that I feel I may have done what everybody says I’ve done. Killed him, you know. But I didn’t pull the trigger. That was…Trent.”
“You went home with Robilio’s gun? As you told me before?”
“Yeah, the same as I told you already. I really was going to shoot myself with it.”
“And the videotape, you took that with you?”
“That, too.”
“The police never found it in your room.”
She lowered her hands and her hair spilled back down past her shoulders. She swiped a few strands from her eyes. “I, um, left it outside…for Maddy. When I called her I told her where it was. I didn’t want anybody to know what I’d done. I figured she would get rid of it, the tape. I made her promise not to show it to anybody. Especially Brad.”
“You didn’t know about any scheme that they cooked up? Madison and Brad? To try to extort Robilio’s company for money?”
She shook her head. Her tone was incredulous as she asked, “You think I would do this for money?”
I dropped my chin to my chest to try to stretch the tendons in my neck. They felt like they had been surgically replaced by steel cables. When I raised my head again I focused on Merritt’s eyes and knew my heart was not in what I needed to do next. I didn’t want to confront this kid. I wanted to comfort her. But I did what my training, and not my instincts, told me to do. I said, “You’re not being totally honest with me, Merritt.”
She looked surprised, then offended. “What do you mean?”
“The fingernail? Remember? The red one? The police found it.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot about that.”
What she meant was that she forgot I knew about that. I said, “Do you know where they discovered it?” I wanted her to tell me.
She shook her head. Her ignorance seemed genuine. But then again, picking liars out of the soup of life wasn’t one of my more developed talents.
“They found it in the master bathroom. On the second floor. You were upstairs in the bedrooms?”
She looked at the door and played with her hair before she said, “Yeah.”
The police had found no blood on the stairs. “That same day? Before you found his body?”
She nodded. “When I first went inside, I went looking for him. I went upstairs, all over.”
“And the nail?”
“I broke it.”
“How?”
It was beginning to register that Merritt was much more adept at omissions than she was at lying. She said, “I, I don’t know. I guess I, um, I hit it on something.”
This was painful. “What? What did you hit it on?”
“I, I don’t know.”
“Come on, Merritt, tell me. Let’s finish this tonight.”
In all my years doing this work I’d come to recognize that many patients have a need to secrete something away, to protect it from the harsh light of examination and confrontation. Early in my career, I was puzzled to learn that the secret was often not necessarily of much consequence, but instead that the motive had to do with my patients’ need to retain one safe place, to underscore their independence, their separation from me.
I waited.
“Do I have to?”
I didn’t answer. My lips felt rusty, my tongue uncooperative.
“This is Maddy’s secret. Not mine. I don’t want to tell it.”
I felt heaviness above my eyes. I was done arguing.
“Okay, okay. Maddy was with me, you know, when I went back to see him, Dr. Robilio, to show him the tape. We both thought it would be better. At first, she went upstairs looking for him. I checked the first floor, the kitchen and living room, you know. Then I went upstairs and I caught her up in his bedroom stealing stuff. Jewelry, perfume. I mean she was looking through drawers, everything. We had a fight about it. That’s how I broke my nail, fighting with Maddy. I made her put everything back.”
Fighting? That could explain the blood in Merritt’s urine in the ER. “Did she hit you in the gut?”
She narrowed her eyes and said, “I don’t know. Why?”
“Never mind. Did Madison put everything back?”
“At first.”
“What do you mean?”
“A few minutes later I found him, downstairs, just like I said-dead. Maddy was still prowling around on the first floor. When I screamed she came downstairs, too, and saw me with him, you know, all bloody and everything. She stood in the doorway and then she ran back upstairs. I didn’t know where she went. After…you know, we got out of there. On the way back to my house, she was really cool, like level. Not panicking like me. She showed me she had stolen his keys. She kept saying these may come in handy. I was going nuts over what I’d just seen, I didn’t care that much about his keys. I mean he was dead, right? What good were his keys? What good was he to me anymore? What good was he going to be to Chaney?”
I offered her my silence as a host might offer a guest a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She could choose anything she wished, or she could choose nothing at all.
She said, “I’d like to go to bed now.”
It was almost two. I said, “Yes.”
The night was cold, even for April. My car was cold. Boulder was forty minutes away. My house was empty. My dog was well cared for.
Despite the fact that I couldn’t afford it, and without much second thought, I drove a few blocks downtown, turned my car over to a valet, and checked into the Brown Palace Hotel. A bemused bellman who was dressed much more nicely than me led me to an elegant corner room on the eighth floor. I called Lauren and left another message on her parents’ machine. I drank all the cognac from the minibar and fell asleep to something nasty on Spectravision.
The next morning I ordered coffee and juice from room service. I signed the chit the waiter handed me without even glancing at it. I was not at all interested in knowing how much my indulgence was costing.
After begging a disposable razor and toothbrush from housekeeping, I dressed in yesterday’s clothes and enjoyed an hour alone with CNN, reading the New York Times, and sipping the Brown Palace’s good coffee.
Then I called Sam’s pager.
A minute later, the phone rang by the bed. He said, “Detective Purdy returning a page.”
“Hi, Sam, it’s Alan.”
“What is this number? Where the hell are you? Adrienne said you never came home. Nurse said you left Children’s around two-thirty.”
Sam is a good detective. “I’m at the Brown Palace.”
“The Brown Palace?”
“The hotel.”
“I know it’s a hotel. What the hell are you doing at the goddamn Brown Palace?”
“Treating myself.”
A pregnant pause. “You alone?”
I laughed. “Not that kind of treat, Sam. Where are you? Boulder?”
“Right down the street at the hospital. MedExcel faxed a financial approval to the Seattle hospital first thing this morning. Maybe half an hour ago. MedExcel’s execs are shitting bricks over the possibility of Gusman’s role in this whole thing getting public. Your friend Adrienne was marvelous, she left them thinking she was doing them some huge favor. Docs here at Children’s are talking with the docs in Seattle about whether Chaney is still a candidate for the procedure. The Seattle docs want some new tests done before they accept her. That’s all happening right now.”
“How long will it take?”