To be questioned as a primary suspect in Royce Stewart’s death had been painful. To see the distrust in the faces of some of my colleagues, and the perverse approval in the eyes of others- that had been distressing. But ultimately, I’d always had an escape clause where Shorty was concerned. I’d always known that if I were arrested or indicted, Genevieve would come back and tell the truth. I’d still be a conspirator in Shorty’s death, but not an accused murderer.
Now an unhappy possibility had arisen. Was it possible that Genevieve’s confession wouldn’t be enough? If all the physical evidence pointed to me, and so did all the witness testimony from Blue Earth, would a grand jury weigh Gen’s unlikely claim of guilt against the preponderance of evidence, and send me to trial instead? Once that happened, there would be very little to keep a jury from convicting me.
When I’d first been questioned by detectives from Faribault County, lying to protect Genevieve had seemed natural and right. Now I wondered if I hadn’t dug for myself a deeper hole than I’d ever realized.
The bedroom door opened, and I turned from the window.
“Hey,” Cicero said from the doorway, “sorry about that.”
“It’s your job,” I said.
“Are you hungry?”
I realized that I was. “How did you know that?”
“Med school,” Cicero said. “We’re taught to catch malnutrition early. What did you have for dinner?”
“Four whiskey sours, three beers, and half a basket of potato wedges,” I admitted.
“If there’s a more balanced meal than that, I haven’t heard of it,” Cicero said. “Let me make you some coffee and see what I’ve got in the way of food.”
I frowned. He was far from rich; I wasn’t even sure he was solvent. “You shouldn’t waste your food on me,” I said.
“Enjoy it and it won’t be a waste,” Cicero said.
He fixed me a tomato-and-avocado sandwich with a cup of coffee; we went back into his bedroom while I ate.
After I was mostly done, Cicero asked, “So, why were we drinking tonight?”
“Why is it that doctors always say we when they mean you?” I asked him.
“It suggests empathy,” Cicero said. “You weren’t celebrating, were you?”
“No,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, really.” I lifted the mug of coffee as if it would protect me from his curiosity.
“Like hell. What’s wrong?”
I licked a drop of tomato-stained mayonnaise from my finger. “That was a really good sandwich,” I said.
“Thank you. What’s wrong?”
I sighed. “It’s complicated,” I said. “It has to do with what my husband went to prison for, and… I just thought I was doing the right thing, and now I’m not so sure. Maybe you can understand that. What am I saying, of course you can.” I gave him a knowing look. “That’s how you lost your license, isn’t it? Assisted suicide. You helped a terminally ill patient to die, right?”
Cicero lifted an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”
“It wasn’t hard to figure out,” I said. “Compassion. It’s your fatal flaw.”
“Sexual misconduct,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I lost my license for sexual misconduct with a patient.”
“You’re joking,” I said.
“Sarah,” he reproved me, “why on earth would I make a joke about something like that?”
Chastised, I took refuge in my coffee once again. I drank, then spoke more carefully. “But it was a misunderstanding, right?” I said. “A false accusation?”
“No,” Cicero said. “It was sexual misconduct, period.”
I wanted to say, That’s not possible.
“She came into the ER one night on a suicide attempt,” Cicero said. “She was tiny, barely five feet tall, with waist-length blond hair. I could see that the suicide attempt was ambivalent. She’d cut her wrists, but only shallowly. I got her admitted to the crisis unit, and during the process, she told me her story.
“She was British, had come to New York at 16 to study ballet. There was a rift in her family: her mother was dead, and she didn’t talk much anymore to her father and sister. She’d wanted to start a new life in the States, but things didn’t go well. She’d started to struggle with her weight, which meant anorexia and amphetamines, and then alcohol and downers to cope with all the stress. She had a series of boyfriends, none of whom treated her well, and when her career evaporated, she’d married the worst of them, a man with a more serious drug problem than she had. She had two babies in quick succession, and quit drugs for her children’s sake, but her husband never did, nor was he faithful. One day she woke up and realized she was trapped in a strange city and a loveless marriage, with two small children and no viable skills. That was when she decided her kids would be better off without her.
“She was obviously troubled, but to me it seemed that something in her was struggling to survive, suicidal ideation or not. I was hopeful about her case, but after I got her a bed in the psych ward, I didn’t hear anything about her again.
“She never forgot me, though. One night, about six months later, she left me three phone messages at the ER. I called her and found out that she was in crisis again. Her husband, who’d been a needle user, had told her he was HIV positive and didn’t think he could support her or the kids anymore, then took some cash and the car and left. She hadn’t heard from him in two days. She couldn’t come in to the ER, because she had no car and no one to watch her babies, but she badly needed someone to talk to, in person, not over a crisis line. She asked if I could come over.”
Cicero rubbed his temple, remembering. “I can remember to the minute how long I had before I got off work. Forty-two minutes; there was a digital clock hanging in the corner. I looked at it and told her I’d be there soon.”
It wasn’t right that I was feeling angry at this woman. My anger should have been focused on Cicero. I could see how he must have appeared to her: tall, competent, caring, handsome, and sworn to first do no harm. But instead I felt a spark of anger at the unknown, needy, grasping woman who I knew was about to drag Cicero into a trap that would cost him his job, his license, and eventually his legs.
“On the way over,” Cicero went on, “I’d been thinking about what I would tell her: that she had to get tested for HIV, places where she could get help taking care of her children. But she didn’t want to talk about her problems when I got there. She was composed, making tea in her kitchen in this long white nightgown. She didn’t seem crazy, and she didn’t seem suicidal. If she had, everything would have gone differently.”
I felt a little chill when Cicero said the word suicidal, realizing where this story might be going.
“She told me about her childhood, ballet, and England. In the middle of this reminiscing, she said it was ironic that she’d married her husband in order to stay in America after her visa expired. Now all she wanted was to be in London again, and she was afraid that was never going to happen. She said she felt like her life was over at age 22.”
The building’s air-conditioning kicked in, noisy in the silence between his words.
“It seemed very, very natural,” Cicero said, “to put my arms around her and hold her.”
He said no more, bringing the curtain down on the first act of a two-act story.
“She could have been HIV positive,” I reminded him, as if the danger hadn’t long passed, one way or another.
“I knew that,” Cicero said. “Did you ever read Hamlet?”
“Once,” I said.
“Did you notice the oddly sexual imagery in Ophelia’s burial, how the queen compares a bridal bed to a grave?”
“What are you saying?”
“That sometimes proximity to death can be erotic. She was Ophelia to me. I wanted to lie down in her grave and bring her back to life.”
“So I was right the first time,” I said. “It was compassion.”