Come Out Tonight Read online

  I used to think that when I moved into Manhattan and got my own apartment, I’d be going to clubs and bars, picking up girls, livin’ la vida loco. But I got that out of my system pretty fast. Mom had made me go to pharmacy school, but I stayed just long enough to get a technician’s certificate. I didn’t know what to do with myself, but I got the job at Duane Reade right off the bat. Carl, this tall, heavyset dude with Michael Jackson hair, and I hit it off at the interview. Then I found this run-down walk-up eight blocks away, and I just settled in. I mean, I was still going to bars, picking up girls and in general sowing all those wild oats I never got to sow when I lived with my parents in Queens, but with AIDS and SARS and Herpes these days, you can’t be too careful, you know? So, six months later when I met Sherry jogging in Central Park, and realized she was the one, that was the end of the wild oats. I wanted her to move in, but she said she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t one of those girls who just wants to get married and have kids. She was thirty and had already had one major breakthrough in her research.

  Yeah, I suppose I should mention that Sherry works at Vandenberg Institute for Medical Research, this world-famous midtown establishment that does research for research’s sake. If you’re brilliant enough to get a job there, you can pick whatever you want to study. You can work on photosynthesis in algae or the embryology of snails, or why the sky is blue, and get paid big bucks for doing it.

  Four years ago, Sherry and this guy Ryan set up a lab researching the effects of alcohol on the brain. No one knew how alcohol made you drunk. They used to think it acted on the whole brain, but Sherry showed that alcohol acted only on certain sleep receptors in the brain. Now, alcohol didn’t always set off those receptors. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Trying to find out why, they lucked onto the chemical formula of this new drug. They synthesized it, and boy did it set off those receptors. What they had found was a whole new class of hypnotic sleep medication! It was such a big deal, that some pharma company got into it and licensed it, and it went on to sell a cool hundred million scrips a year! Somnolux the name was. Too bad the Institute kept the rights to it. You get the privilege of working for this world-class research institute without scrounging around for grant money, Sherry says, in exchange for losing the rights to your own discoveries. Sounds good until you actually discover something....

  Anyway, the whole point of this is that she wanted to be a big shot, and now she was, and she wasn’t going to give that up for me. She liked me, she said. She liked me a lot. But she didn’t want to tie herself down just yet. Besides, lately, she said, I had been really irritable. All she had to do is look at me wrong, and I pretty much jumped down her throat. Really, I don’t know what she’s talking about. I’m a pretty mellow guy. She must be referring to the time I found her and that guy from work in her apartment two months ago. I kind of flew off the handle. I know that, and I’m not proud of it, but there you are. I love her, and I don’t want to share. She did try to talk about it with me - she told me he didn’t mean anything to her - that it was just a problem with work - but I wouldn’t listen. Since then, I guess I’ve been kind of moping. So, maybe she’s right. Still, I’m a pretty easy guy to get along with, if you don’t push my buttons.

  But now I’m wondering if all that good stuff is down the tubes. I mean, I don’t know when Sherry’s going to come out of it. Sometimes I could swear that her eyes follow me around the room, she smiles at me when she sees me come in, or she cries when she sees me getting ready to leave. She must recognize my voice, I tell myself, because she opens her eyes when she hears it. It’s at those times I’m slapping all the nurses on the back, telling them it’s just a matter of time before Sherry Pollack is back! That next week, next month, she’ll be right back in her lab, discovering something new.

  And then there were the other times: the times I was sure Sherry’s going to lie there for the rest of her natural life, nurses turning her body every few hours so she doesn’t get bed sores, tubes coming out of every possible orifice, moaning but not talking, eyes open but not seeing. A human vegetable. OhmyGod! Don’t let me even think of that.

  * * *

  I came into Sherry’s hospital room to see a guy bending over her bed, talking to her. Not a doctor: he was wearing a sports jacket and tie. As I entered, he turned around. It was that guy from Vandenberg. Ryan: the guy who always seemed to be hanging around her, whispering in her ear, coming onto her. I glared at him.

  “What are you doing here?” I said to him now, not so nicely.

  The guy extended his hand. “Ryan O’Donnell, in case you’ve forgotten,” he said.

  “Henry Jackman, in case you did,” I answered, not extending my hand in return.

  He dropped his hand. “Came to see Sherry,” he said.

  “Vandenberg wants to know if she’s dead and they can stop paying her insurance bills?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “I wanted to know how she is.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “Isn’t there any change?”

  “No.”

  He looked incredulous. “No change in three months?”

  “She opened her eyes,” I said.

  “Really? That’s wonderful,” Ryan said, leaning over the bed to gaze into Sherry’s sleeping face.

  “But that’s all. She’s not conscious.”

  He straightened up. “But how can...?”

  “PVS,” I said as cryptically as I could.

  “What?”

  “Persistent vegetative state.” I gave him the definition. “Persistent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness.”

  “Irreversible! Did the doctor say that?”

  I paused, making him wait for my answer. “The doctor said if she didn’t wake up by three months, she probably wouldn’t.”

  “Probably,” the guy said.

  “Most likely,” I said.

  The guy took one last look at Sherry lying there with a tube through her nose, and a catheter coming out of her ass, put his hand over his mouth as if he was going to puke, then said, “Excuse me,” and hurried out.

  Good riddance, I thought. I walked over to the bedside and just stood there. Sherry was in sleep mode, her eyes closed. If it weren’t for the tubes, you might imagine she had just dozed off. Well, tonight it was three months. Okay, three months minus eleven hours. Give or take a few hours, anyway: she had been lying there for hours the night of her attack.

  The doctors said that she still had no volitional movement, no change in cognitive status. All her movements, they said, were reflexive, random. She might withdraw her hand or foot from a painful stimulus, even vocalize if you pinched her, but it wasn’t higher order behavior. The smiles weren’t smiles. “It doesn’t look good,” Dr. Mehta had said, “but let’s wait for three months.” And here it was three months.

  Well, I wasn’t giving up yet. She still had eleven hours. “Sherry!” I called. Her eyes snapped open. I could swear they focused on my face for a half a minute before they closed again. “Startle reflex,” the doctor might say, but I wouldn’t know.

  There was a noise at the doorway. Sherry moaned, and I turned around. It was the Vandenberg guy. “Thought you were gone,” I said.

  “Just needed to get a little air,” the guy said, coming up to Sherry’s bed.

  The two of us gazed at her in silence.

  “She was quite a girl,” the Vandenberg guy said.

  “Is,” I said. He nodded. We gazed some more.

  “You know, she wouldn’t go to bed with me,” he said after awhile.

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “She said she couldn’t, because she was in love with you.”

  That was the first I heard of that.

  “She talked a lot about you, Henry. For one, she said you had no ambition.” He laughed. “That kind of got to her. She liked men who were going someplace. Like me.”

  “But she wasn’t in love with you,” I said, my voice returning.

  “No,’ he said. “I guess not
.” He continued to stare at Sherry, as if, maybe, she might contradict him. “But she told me other things about you,” he added.

  “What the hell was she talking to you for?”

  “Hey, we were always talking. Mostly about our research, but other things, too....She said you wanted her to move in with you, but she was afraid. ”

  “Afraid? Sherry?” Then after a moment, I asked, “Afraid of what?”

  “You,” he said. “She was afraid of you.”

  “Afraid of me? That’s ridiculous. What else did she say?”

  He shrugged. “She wouldn’t say. Then she just stopped talking about you altogether.”

  I looked at Sherry. Sherry, I wanted to say. Tell me you didn’t say that. Say something, Sherry. Instead, I turned to him and said, “You’re lying.”

  “Why would I lie?” the Vandenberg guy said, and walked out.

  Yeah, why would he lie? I hardly knew the guy. All I could think about was the time her cell rang late one night. I remember her scrounging around in her purse till she found it.

  “Hello?” Sherry said, flipping it open. “Yeah, wait a minute.” She walked into the bathroom with the phone. The light went on. “Okay, what is it?” I heard her say through the door. It was a little muffled, so I crept up to the door to listen. I mean, she was my girl. I needed to know who was calling her in the middle of the night.

  “We’ve talked about this,” she said. “Over and over. You’re not going to make me change my mind.” There was a silence while she listened to the other voice.

  “But there’s something wrong with it,” she said at last. “Can’t you see that? People doing things they don’t remember. Doing things totally out of character. Yeah, yeah. Well, I changed my mind about that. It’s my prerogative. Now I want to bring it up at the Monday conference.”

  Then a long, long silence while the other voice had his say. “Stop lying to yourself, Ryan,” Sherry said, finally. “You can’t possibly believe that.”

  I heard her click the phone closed, and I ran back to bed. I heard the toilet flush. The light went off. The door opened, and she climbed into bed beside me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Shit at work,” she said, before she closed her eyes.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long after that, that Dr. Mehta told me Sherry was going to have to leave. The insurance company said that if she hadn’t regained consciousness in three months, she wasn’t going to, and there was no use in her enjoying such a high lifestyle of testing and rehabilitation that she had at the hospital. Dr. Mehta recommended a nursing home in the Bronx.

  “You’re giving up on her!” I shouted at him, but he didn’t even bother to spout statistics this time, just patted me on the shoulder and said there wasn’t much else he could do.

  I have to admit I made a big scene, yelling that Sherry was locked inside this lifeless body and not able to talk or to get out. They were burying her alive. They were condemning her to no life at all. The nurses started out all nice, but then, when I wouldn’t calm down, and I wouldn’t listen to reason, they walked away. In the end, St. Vincent’s allowed me another week to get my shit together and arrange for the nursing home, and then it was so long Sherry.

  She went in a wheel chair in the back of a van to an all-right place. The home was clean. The nurses were nice, but harried. But she didn’t get any therapy, and the staff didn’t come in to turn her as much, or to get her out of bed to sit in a chair, or to change her diaper the moment that it was wet. Sherry just lay there, day in and day out, eyes open and eyes closed. I came every day at first, then every other day, and then once a week. I just couldn’t stand seeing her like that.

  DONNA

  It’s been three months since Sherry Pollack was attacked, and she hasn’t woken up yet. I’d check in from time to time, finding out, for example, that at three weeks she opened her eyes. But, the doctor said when I called him that there was no need to come see her, because she wasn’t conscious. The dichotomy startled me until I thought back to Terri Schiavo in Florida. They called it a vegetative state. And despite her opening her eyes, she never did attain consciousness.

  The rest I couldn’t remember, so I googled Terri Schiavo, which gave me a long list of articles about the Florida court battle between her parents, who wanted her kept alive at all costs, and her husband, who insisted it was his wife’s wish that she not be kept alive through mechanical means. The husband won, and they removed her feeding tube after fifteen years in a vegetative state. Schiavo slowly died of dehydration without ever attaining consciousness. I wondered whether that would be Sherry’s fate.

  Henry Jackman called today to say they’re moving her to a nursing home in the Bronx, and, by the way, what’s happening with the case. I told him not much. The mayor cut our budgets again, and I’ve been trying to stay on top of my other five cases, only one of which I managed to close, regarding a juvenile, a stolen hand gun and a Korean deli owner. And that goes back two years. “What can I say?” I told him. “I’m working on it.” Needless to say, Jackman wasn’t satisfied. He screamed in my ear for several minutes about how everyone was giving up on her.

  He’s right: I haven’t been working on it, but I couldn’t tell him that. A subway stabbing a week ago, which left two men dead, has been taking up most of my time. The victims were heading home on the subway from a party. One of the victims threw a bag of trash through the open door toward a trash receptacle, accidentally hitting a man. The man allegedly became enraged and in return stabbed the two men to death. The men boarded the train at Times Square, and were found at West 96th when an officer just happened to get on their car. He got them to the hospital but they both were pronounced DOA. We’ve been searching for the assailant since it happened. It’s been in all the papers. Of course, I had to spend all my time on this case. But go tell him that.

  Then, as I was sitting at my desk doing paperwork on the stabbing case, a call came in for me from Officer Vincent McNally asking me to come down to 119 West 96th Street. A woman was strangled in her second floor apartment. I left everything as it was and walked the five blocks to 96th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. It wasn’t hard to miss. There was a police-issue Ford Crown Victoria in front, and the entrance to the brownstone was open with McNally standing in the doorway. He led me into the second floor apartment to where Jessica Finklemeyer was lying naked on the floor, under an open window. She was a sweet looking thing. Early twenties at most. Damn, this is the part of the job I’ll never get used to.

  “Must have come through the window,” the officer said. While they were detailing the room, I noticed something strange: the bed was sheetless, and the sheets could not be found. The victim was obviously strangled during sexual intercourse, and, by the look of her neck, it was done manually. But what did he do with the sheets?

  I sent O’Malley upstairs to question the third-floor tenant, but he came down saying no one was there. That made sense, since it was mid-morning. I jotted down the name and decided to get back to him that night. Meanwhile, I visited the first floor apartment of Arlene Fisher. No one was there, until a young girl in short shorts walked in the front door and down the hallway carrying a bag of groceries.

  “Are you Arlene Fisher?” I asked, showing her my badge.

  “Yes. What happened?”

  I told her about her upstairs neighbor.

  “OhmyGod,” she said, putting down her groceries. “Poor Jessica!”

  “Do you know if she had any visitors last night?” I asked.

  “Well, last night I can’t be sure. But she’s got this boyfriend,” she said, gesturing with her key to her door. “You mind if we go inside where it’s cool?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I told her.

  She unlocked the door, and a blast of cool air came rushing out. “The landlord doesn’t have an electric meter for each apartment, so we pay a flat fee for utilities. Might as well keep the air going if you don’t pay any extra for it,” Arlene explained, chuckli
ng. This bit of opportunism seemed dumb to be telling a police officer, but the breeze was nice.

  “Do you know her boyfriend’s name?” I asked, as I walked in.

  She thought a minute. “Sorry, no.”

  “Could you identify him in a line up?” I asked.

  “No, I never saw the guy,” Arlene said curtly. She seemed to be getting nervous. I wondered why.

  “How do you know of this boyfriend if you never saw him?” I asked.

  “Jessica said something about him once,” she replied. “Anyway I hardly know…knew her. Is that all, Officer?

  “Well, what did Jessica tell you about him?”

  “Nothing really. Just that he was good in the sack,” she said, walking me to the door.

  I asked her whether she knew any of Jessica’s visitors, but she said no, that they hardly talked anyway, that she kept to herself most of the time. I wrote Arlene Fisher under the other neighbor’s name, scribbled a few notes, and told her to keep in touch if anything came to mind.

  * * *

  It was early afternoon by the time I got back to the precinct. I had stopped at a sandwich shop to bring back a tuna on rye with pickle on the side. I’d decided to brown bag it and eat lunch at my desk so I could finish the paperwork on the stabbing case. But no sooner had I got back than I got a call to go out again: a possible sighting of the assailant in the stabbing case.

  I stuffed the tuna on rye into the galley refrigerator, grabbed my half-drunk bottle of water and went downstairs, stopping first at the desk to ask Ricardo if he could find the number of the upstairs neighbor and to keep calling till he found him in. I thought I’d go over there on my way home.

  The day was a total washout. The sighting turned out to be a false alarm. The assailant was still at large. Then Ricardo caught me on the way upstairs to tell me he’d tried calling the neighbor half a dozen times, and no one answered. I thanked him. Maybe I’d go over myself.