“Thank you for that, anyway.” His smile is grim.
“I’m curious, David. What were you and Karen fighting about the night she was killed?”
“I confronted her about Sidney. I could tell something was bothering him; he just hasn’t been himself lately. And because of the argument I overheard, I couldn’t help but think that Karen had something to do with it. She tried to tell me that the argument was just her getting upset with Sid because she asked him for a loan and he refused her.” He pauses, his expression growing sad. He turns away from me and looks out a window.
“But I didn’t believe her. I’ve heard things about Karen over the past few weeks that are rather disturbing. Arthur Henley told me about a conversation he had with her where she kept mentioning Ruth and making suggestive comments that made it sound as if she might let something slip to Lauren.”
“That wouldn’t have gotten her very far,” I tell him. “Lauren knows all about Ruth.”
“She does?”
I nod. “She and Arthur have…well, I guess you could call it an understanding.”
“Guess that explains why Arthur didn’t seem too bothered by Karen’s hints. Anyway, then I heard a similar story from Mick Dunn. Seems Karen made some suggestive comments to him, too, after he’d slept with her several times. She was threatening to let it slip to Marjorie.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “Like Marjorie doesn’t know about Mick.” I shake my head. “Man, poor Karen. She kept picking all the wrong people to try to blackmail.”
“Until Sid,” David says. “Sid never did come right out and admit anything, but there were things he said that made me think Karen might be trying to blackmail him, too. I just couldn’t figure out what she had over him. I didn’t know then that Sidney was seeing Karen’s brother, or that Sidney was gay. But when I confronted Karen and told her I wasn’t going to allow her to get away with blackmailing Sid, she told me everything, not only that Sid was gay, a fact he was desperate to hide, but that he was HIV positive. She cried and pleaded with me, saying that Sid’s money was the only way she could keep Mike on the drugs he needed, that he’d already developed an intolerance for one protease inhibitor and had to be switched to another one that was even more expensive.”
He pauses, lost in memory for a moment. “I thought about what she was saying and tried to see things from her point of view, to understand her situation. But I kept coming back to the fact that Sidney was HIV positive and operating on patients.”
He leans forward, burying his face in his hands for a moment. When he straightens up and looks at me, I see the raw emotion, the exhaustion and misery of it all reflected in his eyes. He looks haggard and bereft, and I fight an urge to go to him, to hold and comfort him. When he continues, his voice is flat and impassive.
“While I don’t condone Sid’s lifestyle, I’ve always liked and respected him. His family is highly regarded here in Sorenson and I have a great deal of respect for Gina and her work, as well. I know that a scandal like this will be devastating to them. Not to mention what it will do to the hospital if word gets out. But while I’m not eager to expose Sid, I still feel morally obligated to do something.
“I told Karen I was going to talk to Sid and try to convince him that he should retire and move away somewhere. Try to start over. I suppose in a way what I was planning was a form of blackmail as well. For I’d pretty much decided that unless Sid left voluntarily, I was going to report him. I hoped that by doing that I might be able to control the fallout and minimize the damage somehow.
“But when I told Karen what I intended to do, she went berserk. Then she told me about her pregnancy. I suspected it might be a last-ditch effort on her part to get me to side with her, to have enough sympathy for her plight that I wouldn’t expose her or Sid. But I wasn’t convinced she really was pregnant. Or if she was, that it was mine.”
He looks at me then, a pleading question in his eyes.
“I can’t tell you, David. The DNA results haven’t come back yet.”
He sighs, his face rigid.
“Did you go to Karen’s house that night? Hurley said he had a witness who saw you there.”
“That’s total bullshit. According to Lucien, this purported eyewitness was just some anonymous woman who called from a pay phone at the Quik-E-Mart. Lucien thinks it was a crank looking to get a cheap thrill. I never went to Karen’s house that night. In fact, I never saw her again after she left here. But I don’t have an alibi for the period of time in question. Actually, I do have one, but I haven’t been willing to share it yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“After Karen left that night, I put in a page to Sidney, found out he was over at the hospital trying to catch up on his back charts, and went over there hoping to talk to him when he was finished. I got there just as he was coming out of the hospital and we spoke in the parking lot. I confronted him with what I knew and he didn’t deny any of it.”
He shakes his head. “You should have seen him when he talked about this Halverson guy. He kept saying he was truly in love for the first time in his life and that, faced with a considerably shortened lifespan, he no longer felt the need to hide who he was, to be so circumspect about his sex life.
“I told him that was all fine and good, but that I couldn’t ethically allow him to continue to operate on patients if he was HIV positive.”
“What was his reaction?”
“He was obviously upset…. Devastated might be a better word. I don’t know. I think he was so caught up in the euphoria of his relationship with Halverson that he hadn’t really thought through all the consequences. Then he got pissed at me. He got in his car and left, refusing to hear me out.
“I didn’t know what to do at first. But I knew I couldn’t let things go on the way they were. So I headed out to his house hoping to talk to him some more. Except when I got there, no one was home. I knew from Karen that Mike frequented the Grizzly Motel and I guessed that was the most likely place to find Sid. So I headed out there, and when I saw his car, I bluffed my way into finding out what room he was in. Then I laid down the law to him and Mike.”
“And how did you leave it?”
“I told Sid I’d give him a week to make up his mind. Either he leaves voluntarily or I report him. And the week will be up the day after tomorrow. That’s why I didn’t tell that detective where I was the night Karen was killed. I knew Sid would just deny it all and then I’d only end up looking worse.”
“If Sid doesn’t withdraw from operating voluntarily, are you going to go ahead and report him?”
“Yes.” His sigh carries the weight of the world with it. “But I have to tell you, Mattie, I don’t like being in this position. Sid is not only a respected colleague of mine, he’s a friend. I’m trying to do what’s right, but for some reason it feels all wrong.”
He buries his head in his hands and again I am struck by an urge to reach out to him, to pull him to my breast and comfort him. I still hate him for what he did, for his betrayal of me, of us. But I loved him deeply once and I suppose that on some level, I still do. It’s not an emotion I can just turn on and off with a switch. And seeing how utterly dejected and tormented he is by all that has happened, I can’t help but feel some empathy for him, a softening of my anger.
“What about Gina?” I ask him. “Do you think she knows any of this?”
“I have no idea.”
Then I ask the question that hangs between us, the one neither of us wants to verbalize. “Do you think Sid killed Mike Halverson?”
“I don’t know,” David says. “God, I hope not.” He gets up and walks over to a window—the same one I peered into on that fateful night—and stares out at the world, his expression troubled. “Why would he kill the guy if he loved him?”