“Gary.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but heard it waver. “You’re not yourself. Your wife died…”
“Ex!” He shouted it and made a flourish with one hand. “Yeah, poor Chris. Poor, poor Chris…the whore!” His eyes narrowed and he thrust his right hand out toward her in a half-fist.
“Slash! Slash! Slash!” He made violent cuts back and forth with an invisible knife, crouching down like a street fighter. His hard penis shook like a diving board. “You know I can use a knife! Chris, you whore. For what you did to me…”
He stepped toward Cheryl Beth, but his effort to hold the door kept him just enough off balance.
Springing to the foot of the first bed, she slid the rolling table that usually held a patient’s dinner tray between them.
“Gary, I swear to God I’m going to start screaming.”
“You used to like this, Cheryl Beth.” He stroked himself. He had always been irrepressibly proud of his endowment, bragging about how difficult it was to find size thirteen shoes. Now the memory made her shudder.
“You’re acting like some kid resident, not a seasoned physician,” she said, making her voice sound a haughtiness she didn’t feel. “And I’m sure not a nurse looking for a doctor husband.”
“Oh, Cheryl Beth, we had such fun…”
There he was with his finely toned physique, but she felt nothing. It was just a body. Another fragile container of bone and muscle and tissue in the hospital. Nursing aides giving sponge baths often caused male patients to have erections. It wasn’t sexy. It was kind of sad. She felt all this, but only below the incoming waves of fear.
He could see her take a deep breath to call for help and began speaking rapidly.
“You’ve got to help me, Cheryl. The cops came to my apartment this morning, with a search warrant. That big black detective.” He held his hands in a pleading position. “He thinks I killed Chris. They took away things. Evidence. Please, please…” His chiseled, confident face dissolved into tears and he slid down against the wall sobbing. “Please, I need you.”
“Put your pants on or I’m out of here.” She squared her shoulders and gave him her nastiest look. She wouldn’t let herself show fear. “And step away from the door.”
“You’ll talk?”
“If you step away from the door.”
He pulled himself up and walked slowly to a chair that held his clothes. She saw the clothes only now-they might have been a clue to stay out if she had seen them earlier. As he moved, she kept the rolling table between them. With the door unguarded, she made two wide strides to it, threw it open, and started out.
“Please!”
She turned to face him. “I’ll stay for the moment, if you don’t piss me off or get weird. But get dressed. And don’t call me Cheryl. You know what my name is.”
“Sure, sure.” He was half mumbling as he slid into his boxers and his slacks. She dropped down the doorstop so the door was half open, and she leaned against the wall by the jamb.
“God, I need to fuck right now.”
It was true: he used sex to relieve stress. It took her awhile to realize that he was most aroused when he was under the greatest pressure. Soon after that, she came to understand that she might just as well not have been there. She was just a female body to him. A way to work off stress. Another conquest.
“Talk to your pal, Amy.” Cheryl Beth folded her arms, half feeling sorry for him, but still drunk with adrenaline fear.
“That bitch.” He slipped on his dress shirt and quickly buttoned it. His face was a caricature of little-boy petulance. She half expected to see him use his sleeve to wipe his runny nose. “She sold me out.”
“Sold you out?”
“The cops said she didn’t back up my story that we were together that night, the night that Chris was killed.”
“So she told the truth.” She was comforted by the sounds of a housekeeping crew working in the hallway close by.
“Do you know how much money I bring into this hospital as a neurosurgeon?” His adult voice was back, but with an angry edge.
“I know, you’re the famous two-million-dollar man.”
“They told me this would go away. They said it would not touch me!”
“Who told you? What are you talking about?”
“The hospital! Jim Bryant!” The CEO of Memorial. Cheryl Beth had a hard time believing such a thing. Gary’s eyes were still wild.
“Gary, I told you that night you should immediately go to the police and tell them the truth.”
“Bryant said he’d shut it down. No one would even talk about it.”
Cheryl Beth took that in but kept her face as expressionless as possible. You’re an open book.
“You’ve got to help me,” he said, adding, “Cheryl Beth.”
“I’ve done all I can do, Gary.”
“Damn you!” He shook his fist at her. “You’re such a cold bitch. It’s all because your mother never loved you. I get you.”
She pushed her anger down into her shoes and quietly said, “Gary, you never knew anything important about me. What matters to me. You weren’t man enough to ask or to understand. We just fucked. It was nothing special.” The cold harshness of her voice surprised her. His eyes widened and he actually twitched, jerking his head to the left, the veins standing out in his neck.
“Please, I’m sorry.”
She just watched him.
“You saw me at the bar that night on Main Street…”
“No, I didn’t. You just said you were there.”
He stood, but didn’t move toward her once he realized she would walk out the door. “You’re not playing well with others. I was there, you saw me.”
“I did not.”
“Don’t you understand the favor I did for you? When I first talked to the police…”
“You said I was your lover. We hadn’t been together for months. That was no favor.”
“I didn’t tell them you were with Christine that night, on Main Street, before she came back to the hospital.”
“So? I told them. They already know.” She was amazed at the effortless way she lied. He started to talk, but she was already out the door, walking fast to the elevators.
Chapter Twenty-three
The next morning Will wheeled himself out to the busy main lobby and lined up at the Starbucks. It was one piece of the normal, outside world in the dreary daily hospital routine. His brother had brought him some money and fresh underwear, and then gone off to his shift as a firefighter. They were not close, and he could sense the discomfort from Mark, that he and his family might end up having to care for an invalid. Will vowed that wouldn’t happen. He would find a way to be self-sufficient. People worse off than him could do it. Cindy-he didn’t know when he would see her again, and didn’t want to care. Their marriage was just a scar now, not a wound. He couldn’t fix it, never could. His physical pain was less-it was noticeable, now more an anxiety he might miss his next dose than the constant vicious companion of recent weeks. Don’t worry about becoming an addict, Cheryl Beth had said. So he wouldn’t worry. He ordered his coffee, got it and rolled over to a table, then he saw the front page of that day’s Enquirer.
“Nurse charged in doctor’s murder,” a large headline said. A smaller one added: “Police suspect a romantic triangle led to killing.” He set the coffee down and read:
Police on Wednesday arrested a 35-year-old nurse in the Dec. 6 murder of Dr. Christine Lustig at Cincinnati Memorial Hospital.
Judd Mason, who also worked at the hospital, faces one charge of aggravated murder, according to Cincinnati homicide Det. J. J. Dodds.
Mason, of Deer Park, was arrested at his home around 4 p.m. Tuesday without incident. He is being held in the Hamilton County Jail on $1 million bond. Dr. Lustig, 41, was found dead in her basement office. According to the medical examiner, she died from repeated stab wounds.