Blinded

SEVEN

Sam’s heart attack wasn’t awful by heart attack standards. The cardiologist didn’t think he’d suffered significant muscle damage.

During my visit to the hospital early Monday afternoon, Sam pointed out the location of the narrowing they’d discovered on a plastic model of the human heart that was about the size of a grapefruit. I’d had to hand him the model; he was flat on his back with some strange device that looked like a single-span suspension bridge straddling his groin. He’d explained that it was pressing on the incision in his artery with approximately the force that nature used to turn coal into diamonds.

All in all, not the precise degree of pressure that most men preferred in the vicinity of their groin.

“The one that got blocked up is called the diagonal artery. It’s that one there.” He pointed at a little red line on the model. “They put a stent in it to hold it open. You know what that is?”

I nodded. I rested my fingertip on the diagonal artery on the model in my hands and tried to visualize the blockage in Sam’s heart and the small wire-mesh pipe propping open his fragile blood vessel.

“Doctor said it could’ve been much worse. My other arteries are open. Not wide open. But enough open.”

“That’s good news, right?”

“It’s not bad news. But best case is you want them all wide open.”

“Where’s Sherry?” I asked. I sat and held the model heart in my hands. It seemed inappropriate to set it back down. Even though it was plastic, I felt like I should be extra careful with it.

“She’s been here most of the day. Right now she’s taking a walk or something. Getting some tea, I don’t know. She said she needed a break from all this.” He waved at the voluminous paraphernalia of the cardiac care unit. Monitors, pumps. Lots of plastic tubes and two- and three-digit LEDs telling those intelligent enough to understand them important things about Sam’s condition. “It’s okay.”

I knew Sam’s wife pretty well. I thought I knew her well enough to guess that her sympathy for her husband’s condition would erode at some point and that her anger that Sam didn’t do shit to take care of himself would emerge in a form that would cause him to cringe.

“Is she mad already?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “I fucked up. She told me this was coming. The heart attack. My father had one, you know. Same age I am right now. She’s been bugging me to work out with her, eat better. Shit.”

I couldn’t see how regret and remorse were going to aid Sam’s short-term recovery. I said, “That’s neither here nor there. It’s what you do from now on that matters, right?”

He snorted. “God, that’s an intelligent thing to say, Alan. If I had my checkbook, I’d write you a check for your wisdom this very second. What is it these days, a hundred and something for fifty minutes? What a bargain! But they took my pants when the ambulance brought me in, sorry. My wallet was in it.”

Sam fenced with me constantly about my profession; it was part of the fabric of our friendship. This particular jab was halfhearted at best. After dealing with Diane-who had been at the top of her game during our morning joust-I had no trouble absorbing Sam’s feeble sarcasm. “Forty-five minutes, actually. You scared, Sam?”

He looked away from me before he nodded. “I’m glad I was with you yesterday. I never would have called for an ambulance if I was by myself. I would have convinced myself that it was a kidney stone. Or two stones. I’d probably be dead because I’m stubborn.”

“I’m glad I guessed what was going on. It was lucky.”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. The neck thing got me worried, though. Didn’t see what it could have to do with your kidneys.”

He sighed, or groaned. I wasn’t sure.

“The doctor told me I need to develop some collaterals, whatever that means. In case there’s a next time.”

“Collateral what?”

“Blood vessels. Blood supply.”

“How are you supposed to do that?”

“Exercise, apparently.”

He spoke the word with an inflection usually reserved for a phrase like “root canal” or “prostate exam.”

“I’ll help,” I said. “We’ll start off walking, then we’ll bicycle or run. Whatever they recommend.”

“Thanks,” he said. He hadn’t wanted to ask for my help, but he’d hoped that I’d offer. “Want to know what’s ironic?”

“Sure.”

“Krispy Kreme is finally coming to Boulder. That’s what I heard. I’m probably never going to get to eat another doughnut in my life, and the Taj Mahal of doughnut shops is finally coming to my town.”

“There are worse things.”

“Name three.”

“I thought your cholesterol was okay.”

“It’s been going up for a while. It’s kind of high. The truth is, I eat a lot of crap. So I’ve been wondering, how did that thing work on Emily’s paw? The umbrella thing you were making?”

“It’s working great; she loves it. Lauren thinks I should quit my job, patent it, and get rich.”

“You don’t want to be rich.”

“I don’t?”

He shook his head, but he didn’t elaborate. In other circumstances I would have pressed him, but my mind had already darted back to the conundrum of the Dancing Queen and her husband the murderer.

I opened my mouth to ask Sam for advice about Gibbs and Sterling, but as my eyes flitted from one of the unpleasant accoutrements of acute cardiac care that were surrounding him to another, I kept quiet. I admit that I briefly entertained the notion that Sam would find my unsolved homicide problem a pleasant distraction from his health and family problems, but that rationalization left an immediate sour taste.

Discretion ruled. I decided that I would struggle with the Dancing Queen on my own.

A nurse bustled through the door to Sam’s room as though she’d had a running start. She was all business, and her fresh white Reeboks told me she had a sprinter’s soul. She checked me out while her eyes took in the readings on Sam’s various monitors. She adjusted the pump on his IV and flicked at the spaghetti of plastic tubing leading to his forearm as though she were sending a malarial mosquito on its way to the afterlife.

“How’s your pain, Detective?” For some reason she was touching his toes as she inquired.

“Hey, Snoopy,” Sam said, as though he’d just recognized she was in the room. “It’s still there. It’s hard to stay in this position for so long, you know. I feel like Ray Bourque kicked me in the kidneys and he’s been standing on my groin for most of the third period.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I hear it’s like,” she replied.

I stole a glance at the hospital ID hanging around her neck. It indeed read “Snoopy.” Snoopy Lipner, R.N. I could tell she didn’t have a clue who Ray Bourque was and was more than content to go to her grave without learning why Sam Purdy would have an image of the man standing on his groin. I could’ve explained to her about hockey’s place in Sam’s universe and his peculiar love of traditional defensemen, but I didn’t think Snoopy really wanted to know that, either. I was tempted to ask her about her first name, but was guessing that just about everyone did and that she’d grown weary of the inquiries a long time before.

She pulled a syringe from the front pocket of her tunic, uncapped it with her teeth, and had the needle in a port in Sam’s IV tube faster than Wyatt Earp could draw his six-shooter. She depressed the plunger and disposed of the empty in a sharps container in another blink of the eye. “This’ll make it easier for you. Just another hour or so, and we can take that thing off your groin. Hang in there, and I’ll be back to check on you soon.”

“Can I have some more of those ice chips before you go?”

She lifted a paper cup off the table and placed the edge against his lips.

Sam tilted the cup and spilled a few slivers of ice into his mouth. Afterward he seemed to exhale for ten seconds as the medication from the syringe entered his bloodstream and the molecules started mating with the appropriate receptors in his brain.

“What did you give him?” I asked.

“Water, in the form of ice chips. Who are you?” Snoopy asked.

“A friend.”

“He’s the one who brought me in,” Sam said. “He’s a good guy, a doctor. Not a real doctor. You know, a Ph.D., a psychologist.”

She eyed me as though she’d finally decided that she’d let me stay. She lofted the IV tubing. “That was fentanyl. For the pain. That position he’s in is a killer.” She returned Sam’s water glass to the bedside table. “You did good work yesterday,” she told me. “We got him early enough that we were able to bust his clot in the ER. Because of that he’s going to walk out of here with most of the heart he came in with.”

She was gone in a flash.

Sam mumbled, “Nurses are nice to cops. Don’t know why that is.”

Gingerly, I placed the plastic heart on his rolling bedside tray and watched his eyelids grow heavy as the fentanyl continued its work and the inevitable sedation went along for the ride.

His eyes suddenly popped open, and he said, “Marriage is a funny thing. Love isn’t enough, you know? People think it is, but it isn’t. Other things happen sometimes. They do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, honestly curious.

He didn’t respond.

I sat beside him for a few moments more and watched his breathing get into the uniform rhythm of narcotic semisleep.

I was aware of an impulse to run home and make Sam an umbrella for his heart. Rigid foam rubber, plastic strips, some filament tape. That should do it. Something to shield his heart from whatever out there might want to bruise it. And to protect it from whatever he might be inclined to do to it, too.

I whispered, “Nurses are nice to cops because most of the time the cops deserve it, Sam. That’s why.”

I sat beside him for a few more minutes, silently rehashing what Gibbs Storey had told me that morning. In my mind I asked Sam what a cop like him would say to a story like hers. I asked him what the Boulder police were likely to do after the police in California informed them that they had a killer in their town.

Sam slept through it all.