Bury the Lead

20



LAURIE IS SILENT during the ride to the hospital. I don’t know what she’s thinking, and I don’t feel like I should ask. It’s only when we pull into the parking lot that she breaks the silence.

“I shouldn’t have left her there,” she says. “I should have dragged her out.”

“You did all you could.”

She shakes her head. “No. I could have pulled her away and shown her something better. Made it easier for her. Instead, I asked her if she wanted to leave. She said no, and I said fine.”

“Rick is the villain of this piece. Not you.”

Sondra is out of surgery by the time we arrive. We stop in the recovery room to see how she is and to confirm that it is really her. She’s still out of it from the anesthesia. The doctor says she took the bullet in the shoulder and has lost a lot of blood, but that eventually she should be okay. A half inch to the left, and she’d be dead.

Drive-by shooting, not baseball, is a game of inches.

A hospital official brings us into his office, then asks us if Sondra has any insurance. Somehow I don’t think Rick provides major medical for his employees, so I sign a form taking financial responsibility for the costs. I wonder if they would otherwise throw her out into the street and if they would first disconnect the tubes helping her breathe.

The officers that answered the initial call have since left, but Detective Steve Singer of the Passaic police arrives to talk to us. He and Laurie know and like each other, which is the good news. The bad news is that I once took him apart in a cross-examination, and my guess is every time he shows up at a murder scene he hopes that I’m the victim.

Singer tells us Sondra was shot in a drive-by, but there are no witnesses so far willing to come forward. He asks how we came to know Sondra and how she came to have my card. I tell the story, after which he looks at Laurie, hoping she’ll refute what I have to say.

“You know anything about this?” he asks.

Laurie nods. “I was there, Steve.”

I see a quick flash of disappointment on his face, then a nod of resignation. He was hoping to at least arrest me for solicitation of prostitution, but he now knows that’s not going to happen.

“Okay,” he says. “What else can you tell me?”

“She had a pimp, a guy named Rick. He hit her while we were there,” I say.

Suddenly, Singer’s face brightens. “Wait a minute, I heard about this,” he says to Laurie. “You kicked his ass, right? The guys were talking about it.”

“He slipped and fell,” she says. “I just neglected to catch him.”

He turns to me. “What were you doing while the lady was punching him out? Holding her purse?”

His question confirms my low opinion of his intelligence. He knows nothing; the fact is that Laurie wasn’t even carrying a purse that night. It was more of a handbag.

I fire back. “Maybe if you geniuses hadn’t let the pimp walk so fast, a woman wouldn’t have been shot tonight.”

Singer grunts, goes to the phone, and calls in to the precinct. He talks softly for a few moments, holds on for a short while, and then hangs up, a self-satisfied look on his face.

“Rick is still in custody, genius.”

This is a little embarrassing, but I recover quickly. “Then he had it done.”

Since nothing I say has any credibility with Singer, Laurie jumps in for support. “It’s too big of a coincidence to be otherwise, Steve. Rick was humiliated, and he didn’t want to come straight at me, so he went after Sondra, knowing I’d blame myself.”

Singer seems to think this is sound reasoning, and he leaves to talk to Rick at the jail. “I’m gonna miss his wit,” I say to Laurie after he’s left. A few moments later the doctor informs us that Sondra is conscious and we can see her.

She’s very much weakened; a .38-caliber bullet in the shoulder has a tendency to do that. She also has no idea who shot her. “A car just pulled up real slow, and I saw the window open, and I don’t remember anything after that.”

“But you think they were aiming for you? Was there anyone else around that could have been the target?” I ask.

She shakes her head sadly. “No. It was just me. Just me.”

She is unable to provide any helpful information, and she’s soon going to have to answer the same questions from the police, so we let her doze off.

In the car going home, Laurie says, “We have to help her, Andy.”

“She’s got to want that help,” I point out.

She shakes her head. “No. That’s what we said the other day. She didn’t want it, so we backed off. Like we did our good deed and that’s enough. Well, it wasn’t enough.”

“And a better plan would be . . . ?”

“To help her whether she wants it or not, and let her see if we’re right. Then if she feels the same way, we can back off. But we cannot send her back on those streets without trying a hell of a lot harder.”

“What does that mean in the real world?”

“It means finding her a job and a place to stay. It means putting her into a position where she can develop some self-respect and dignity.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say.