doing it. But it’s hard for me to ignore the facts, David. And an awful lot of the facts point to you.”
“Well, I’m not a killer,” he says, calmer now. “Nor am I gay.” He sucks in a breath and squeezes his eyes closed. “But,” he adds, “Sidney Carrigan is.”
Chapter 31
At first I’m not sure if David means Sidney is gay, a killer, or both. As it turns out, David isn’t sure either about the killer part. That Sidney is gay, he is certain of. That Sidney is a killer, he doesn’t want to believe. Nor do I.
I finally take the seat David offered earlier and sit in stunned silence as he tells me everything he knows. It is a puzzling, sad, and sordid tale, one that makes me wish I’d kept my damnably curious nose out of things.
David explains how he first became aware of something going on when he overheard Sidney and Karen having a heated argument in an on-call room one night a couple of weeks ago. “I couldn’t hear everything they said, but certain words came out quite clearly,” David says. “I understood that Karen was asking Sid for money and threatening to reveal something about him if he didn’t. The next day I confronted Karen and, after first trying to deny it all, she just broke down and sobbed. That was when she told me about Mike, that he was her brother, that he was gay, and that he had AIDS.
“She told me how they were orphaned when Karen was nineteen and Mike was still in high school. She assumed responsibility for him then and has felt she has had it ever since. Apparently, it’s been quite a struggle, emotionally and financially. When Mike was diagnosed with AIDS, things really got bad. They had no health insurance and the cost of the drugs he needed to take to keep the disease under control was astronomical.”
Something clicks into place in my mind. “How long ago was he diagnosed?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. But I gather it was a number of years ago. Karen said he came close to dying once before. That was before the current protease inhibitor treatments became available.”
“That might explain why she took on that nurse’s identity,” I muse. “If she was hurting for money, the difference in pay between an OR nurse and an assistant could have made a significant difference. Plus, it might have given her access to supplies she would have otherwise had to buy for him.”
“I don’t know,” David says. “I suppose it’s possible. I didn’t know Karen wasn’t who she said she was until after she was killed. All I knew was what she told me, that she’d been trying to care for Mike for the last twenty years. She was buying his drugs, paying his rent, and she also set him up in his business.”
“You mean the medical supply company? Karen set that up?”
“So she said. Apparently it’s organized under a fairly convoluted corporate structure that hides the real owners’ names behind a series of dummy companies, with the main one looking like a sole proprietorship owned by Mike Halverson. In truth, the place is owned by Karen. That’s why she was trying to talk some of the docs into investing in the place. She had it set up so that they could become blind owners, their names never appearing anywhere in any official capacity. Then the docs could refer business there and convince their associates to do so, too, profiting from the revenues their referrals generated.”
“Did anyone buy into it?”
“I’m not sure. I know she was upset when I declined to participate, but she seemed to take it in stride. Though to be honest, in retrospect I think my refusal was why she turned her attentions toward me in another way.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning her seduction.”
I give him my best skeptic’s look. “I suppose you’re going to tell me it was all her fault.”
“Of course not. I let myself get caught up in it all. I felt sorry for her at first and simply wanted to help her. Then one thing led to another and…” He shrugs, as if it is no big deal. “Maybe she was hoping to blackmail me. I’m pretty sure that’s what she was doing to Sidney. But your untimely arrival in the OR that night sort of eliminated any hold she had over me.”
“How convenient.”
David lets out a mirthless laugh. “Go ahead. I deserve whatever nastiness you want to dish out. What I did was stupid and thoughtless. I never meant to hurt you, Mattie. You don’t know how many times I’ve come to regret what I did.”
“Did you kill Karen?”
“What do you think?”
I study him a moment, gathering my thoughts. “I think,” I say finally, “that you’re not the man I thought you were. I think that you have betrayed my trust. I think your supposed love for me, or for anyone else for that matter, isn’t nearly as deep as your love for yourself.”
I pause, seeing the misery my words have triggered in him and trying to take pleasure from the fact. But for some reason, all it does is make me feel worse.
“But no,” I conclude somewhat anticlimactically. “I don’t think you are a killer.”
“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
