Head Case Read online

  ‘How did you sneak in here?’

  ‘When you were taking your long winter’s nap, I got to be friends with one of your nurses. Nice guy. He called to tell me you made it after you woke this morning. He said I could get in around now without anyone stopping me.’

  ‘Jose?’

  The smile. ‘Feliciano. And the guy can’t even sing. I heard him try.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me he was staying in touch with you. Funny guy.’

  ‘You know he used to be in the rodeo?’

  ‘He said.’

  ‘I looked him up on my phone. He was a big name, until he wasn’t.’

  Kelson drank his beer. ‘You need a lawyer? I can call Ed Davies.’

  ‘I talked to him already. He set up a meeting with Johnson and her partner to talk this thing through, but they seem to have their panties tied in a knot about me.’

  ‘Davies will convince them you could either shoot or let Renshaw commit murder.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. When the cops look at me, they see a big black man with a gun. Scares the hell out of them.’

  ‘Venus Johnson’s black,’ Kelson said.

  ‘This matters, why? She wears the uniform. Maybe she goes home, takes a shower, and washes it off. But next morning, she puts it on, and, abracadabra, I’m a threat. She sees me with a gun, she puts one between my eyes before her white-boy partner gets his pistol out of his holster.’ He drank the rest of his beer. ‘Look, I’ve got to get going before someone here calls her. But I wanted to see you with your eyes open and hear the foolishness coming out of your mouth. When are they kicking you out of here?’

  ‘First thing tomorrow.’

  ‘You need anything, let me know. If I don’t answer, call Cindi. She’ll get the message to me.’

  ‘Things will cool down,’ Kelson said. ‘Davies is good at this.’

  Rodman gave him the gentle smile. ‘Enjoy the beer.’ Then he was gone.

  Kelson lay on his bed. He sipped from the Red Stripe and felt the alcohol merge like a pleasant stream with the painkillers in his blood. Outside the slatted window shade, ice crystals formed on the glass, but Kelson felt warm. Aside from the mechanical tick of a monitor, the room was silent.

  FIVE

  At 7:40 the next morning, Jose brought a breakfast tray. The watery scrambled eggs tasted like soup. While Kelson lined the tater tots around the back of the plate – a battlement to keep out invading armies – Jose detached cords and tubes from the monitors, IV, and other machines. He whistled ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ badly.

  A memory niggled Kelson – something he’d heard about or read. ‘Didn’t the real Jose Feliciano sing that at the World Series in the sixties? Did a protest thing with it?’

  ‘Am I the fake Jose Feliciano now?’ the nurse asked. He dropped a clamp in the garbage.

  ‘Upset Richard Nixon or someone?’

  ‘Did you think more about looking into the people I told you about?’

  Kelson tore a corner off a piece of toast and stared at it. ‘What did they make this from?’ He put it in his mouth and chewed.

  ‘Three people,’ the nurse said. ‘The lady. Two men.’

  ‘No,’ Kelson said. ‘I’d be wasting my time and your money.’

  ‘Sure,’ the nurse said, ‘but what’s it hurt to look?’

  A man in a white lab coat stepped into the room. He was in his late sixties, his gray hair thinning, his forehead dotted with liver spots. He had bright blue eyes and a fleshy nose. His lab coat fit his shoulders so well it could’ve been tailored.

  He came to the bedside. ‘I’m Jeremy Jacobson – chief of the ICU. Suzanne Madani asked me to stop by before we discharge you. How are you feeling this morning?’

  ‘Like someone shot me in the arm, then pumped me up with pain meds,’ Kelson said. ‘More or less normal.’

  The doctor’s mind was elsewhere. ‘Good, good.’ He pressed a stethoscope to Kelson’s chest. ‘Breathe,’ he said.

  Kelson breathed. ‘Less exciting when you do it,’ he said.

  Jose Feliciano stood by the door, watching.

  Jacobson said, ‘Your charts say you meet with a therapist for your head injury.’

  ‘Once a week.’

  ‘Keep breathing,’ the doctor said.

  Jose pulled out his phone and typed on it.

  ‘Your therapist is Sheila Prentiss?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Dr P.’

  ‘Breathe out. You’ll want to check in with her first thing. This kind of trauma – especially when it’s repeat trauma – can trigger episodes.’

  ‘I feel good,’ Kelson said. ‘Really.’

  Jacobson pulled the stethoscope away. ‘Well, your lungs sound healthy.’

  ‘Nice to be breathing.’

  Jose looked up from his phone. He started whistling the theme song to Chico and the Man, one of his namesake’s greatest hits.

  Jacobson glanced at the nurse. ‘Please, Mr Feliciano, this isn’t the time.’

  ‘Sorry, Doc,’ Jose said.

  Jacobson nodded at Kelson as if he was used to such things. ‘You may get dressed. Be careful with the bandages. You’ll want to change the dressing in another forty-eight hours. I’ll go over the papers with you.’

  Then a female nurse peeked into the room from the corridor. ‘Dr Jacobson? May I have a minute, please?’

  Dr Jacobson looked resigned to interruptions. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and he stepped out.

  When the doctor left, Jose closed the door. He smiled at Kelson.

  Kelson shook his head at him.

  Jose started singing ‘Light My Fire.’

  ‘Cut it out,’ Kelson said.

  Jose sang louder.

  ‘Don’t.’ Kelson slipped out of his bed and stood, shaky on his feet.

  Jose kept singing.

  ‘That’s awful.’ Kelson tugged at the hospital gown with his good hand. ‘I’m a wounded man.’

  ‘Three people are dead,’ the nurse said. ‘Think about it, compadre.’

  Kelson undid the knot on the back of the gown. His jeans, his underwear, and a shirt and coat Nancy and Sue Ellen had brought after rescuing the cats from his apartment were folded on a tray table next to the bed. ‘There’s nothing to think. Three people died. I feel bad about that. But from what you tell me, there’s nothing there.’ He dropped the gown.

  ‘That’s because I didn’t tell you all of it.’

  ‘Look, I can’t—’

  The nurse started singing ‘The Thrill is Gone.’

  Kelson said, ‘Stop it.’

  Jose rocked his hips and sang.

  Kelson started to sway. ‘Stop. Please.’

  Outside in the corridor, Dr Madani spoke to Dr Jacobson. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Take care of it … really, it’s fine. I’ll finish here.’

  She knocked on the door – and stepped in.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she said.

  Jose stopped singing.

  Kelson stopped swaying. ‘You’ve never seen a naked man dance before?’

  ‘Is that what you were doing?’

  ‘You’re blushing,’ he said. ‘That’s charming.’

  She shook her head. ‘Put on your street clothes. Tell me when it’s safe to come in.’

  ‘It’s his fault,’ Kelson said, as she ducked out of the room. He grabbed his underwear and jeans from the table. ‘Jerk,’ he said to the nurse.

  ‘One little look?’ the nurse said.

  Kelson shook his jeans, opening the waist enough to put a foot in. ‘Look at what? There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘Look. If there’s nothing, stop looking.’

  ‘You’re as crazy as I am.’ He zipped the jeans. ‘You sure the bull didn’t stomp on your head when it broke your back?’

  Jose grinned. ‘I’m sure that happened a time or two.’

  SIX

  Kelson took a cab to his apartment. The sky was clear, the sun rising bright, but the streets were gray with ice, the trash cans and fi
re hydrants capped with snow.

  The driver glanced at Kelson in the rearview mirror, holding his eyes on the bandaged arm. ‘You been away?’

  Through the window Kelson watched a woman, bundled against the cold, navigate a baby stroller over an icy curb on to a crosswalk. ‘On my own little island.’

  ‘Bad place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there,’ the driver said.

  ‘I hung out with a bull rider.’

  The driver glanced again. ‘You got any extra pills, I’ll trade for the fare.’

  Kelson went into his building and stood in the lobby. He smelled the familiar smells of his life. He felt the familiar heat. They made him dizzy. He stared at a security camera.

  ‘Hi there, baby,’ he said.

  He rode the elevator to his floor. When he got out, he stopped again in the blue-carpeted corridor – at once familiar and disorienting. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘You and me against the world.’

  Ever since Bicho shot him in the head three years earlier, he suffered from occasional bouts of autotopagnosia along with his disinhibition. As his therapist Dr P explained it, people with the condition don’t recognize their own bodies. They see their arms and legs and wonder whose they are.

  As Dr P said – and Kelson already knew – he had a peculiar form of the condition. He seemed to separate from his own appearance especially when he needed to reconcile strange events with his normal life. He would think he looked like someone else – sometimes a stranger, sometimes a person he knew well. He would look in a mirror and his reflection would startle him. ‘Shooting a bullet through the frontal lobe is like jamming a screwdriver into a hard drive,’ Dr P said. ‘You don’t know what you’ll get but whatever it is, it’s going to include surprises.’

  Kelson had experienced fewer bouts in recent months, but now in the corridor he felt as if he stood beside himself, though the self he stood next to was invisible. He went to his door and jammed the key into the lock. Once inside, he went into the bathroom. He stared at the mirror. The reflected face – the left eye drooping under the pink scar, three days of stubble on the pale chin and cheeks – was sweating.

  He laughed. He washed his face in the sink. When he looked at the mirror again, the wet face looking back still seemed strange, though less so. ‘Ride ’em, cowboy,’ he said.

  Since Nancy divorced him, he’d lived in the studio apartment with a dining table outside the kitchenette. He went to the table and sat. Then he paged through the papers from the manila envelope Dr Madani gave him before shoving him out of the hospital. Insurance papers. Instructions about caring for his wound. Prescriptions for antibiotics and Percocet. Emergency contact numbers.

  Kelson set those papers aside. He considered the remaining one – a sheet Jose had slipped in with the others, with three names on it and his own contact information.

  Patricia Ruddig

  Josh Templeton

  Daryl Vaughn

  Jose’s phone number.

  Kelson got his laptop from his bedside table and turned it on. ‘He’ll pay double,’ he said. ‘Or triple.’

  As the computer booted up, he stared at the furniture in the apartment, dizzied again by its strange familiarity. In the first couple of years after Bicho shot him, clutter gave Kelson headaches. The headaches were rarer now, but he still kept the walls bare and he had few possessions he couldn’t store in a drawer, the closet, or a cabinet. On the morning he confronted Renshaw, he’d made his bed, creasing the cover, before Rodman picked him up. Aside from two dents where the cats – now with Sue Ellen at Nancy’s – had slept, the bed was neat. He made the ntching sound that usually brought Payday and Painter’s Lane scrambling.

  Then he opened Google and searched for Patricia Ruddig.

  Ruddig was an unusual name, maybe Irish, and there was only one link to it when he attached it to Patricia. Her name appeared on a list of condo association members at a building on the corner of Ainslie Street and Claremont, on the city’s northwest side. ‘Useless,’ Kelson said. He wrote the address by her name anyway.

  He typed in Josh Templeton. He got more than eleven thousand hits. He changed Josh to Joshua. He got more than nine thousand. ‘Equally useless.’ He added Chicago to the search. Two thousand. ‘Better.’ He added obituary. Ninety-two.

  He scrolled past the first four, which looked irrelevant. Then he said, ‘Ha.’

  According to the obituary, Josh Templeton, twenty-one, died from injuries suffered in a car accident a month and a half ago. He was a junior at DePaul University. He grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Survivors of the crash included his loving mother and his fiancée Melanie. Visitation was at the Ellis Funeral Home in Fort Wayne.

  Using the obituary information, Kelson dug into Josh’s social media. Josh was a good-looking kid growing into a good-looking man – tall, thin, with light brown skin, his black hair done back in cornrows. His fiancée, Melanie, looked no older than seventeen or eighteen. Her skin had a creamy whiteness. ‘Alabaster?’ Kelson said. In one shot, she clung to Josh’s arm as if she’d never let go. In another – with him standing behind her, his arms holding her close – she looked like she’d caught the biggest fish in the ocean. In a third, they sat on the hood of a brown Toyota Camry. ‘Death car?’ Kelson said.

  He scribbled notes by Josh’s name on the sheet of paper. Fort Wayne. Ellis Funeral Home. DePaul. Fiancée Melanie. Brown Camry.

  Then he Googled Daryl Vaughn. He got over seven thousand hits. Adding Chicago got him only four hundred. Typing in obituary took him down to twenty-six.

  He scrolled through them without seeing anything promising. He opened the links anyway. A remote-control airplane enthusiast died at eighty-one. A north suburban banker left behind four children. A seventy-year-old retiree died after a brief illness. Kelson found no bums beaten to death by other bums.

  He shut down the computer. Then he called the phone number at the bottom of the sheet of paper. The call bounced to voicemail, and Jose Feliciano’s recorded voice greeted him cheerfully. Leave a message, amigo.

  Kelson left a message. ‘I looked. I didn’t see anything. And what’s with the amigo thing? Are you being ironic or are you just real friendly?’ He hung up.

  He went into the kitchenette, opened the refrigerator, and stared inside. He said to the refrigerator, ‘Not hungry.’

  Out on the dining table, his phone rang.

  ‘Screw it.’ He closed the refrigerator door.

  The phone rang.

  He opened the cabinet over the kitchen sink. There were boxes of cereal and crackers.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Still not hungry.’ He closed the cabinet.

  The phone rang.

  He left the kitchen and walked past the phone, into the bathroom. He turned on the faucet. Staring in the mirror at a face he knew he should know, he shaved. Then he turned on the shower and wrapped his shoulder in a towel on the injured side. Holding his bandaged arm outside the stall, he stepped under the hot stream and cleaned himself. When he got out, he looked in the mirror and said, ‘Still dirty.’

  He walked out of the bathroom naked.

  He looked around the apartment – at the dizzying chairs, dresser, bed.

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning on a bitter January day. He climbed into bed and closed his eyes.

  SEVEN

  Kelson got up that evening at nine p.m., four hours after the sun set. Heat pumped from the radiator, but he shivered. He put on underwear and pants and wiggled into a shirt and an oversized sweater. He’d slept off the Percocet, and his arm ached. ‘Like a pulled tooth,’ he said, ‘if your arm grew teeth.’

  Though Dr P had mostly weaned him from the painkillers he took after getting shot in the head, he kept a vial in the medicine cabinet. He shook a pill into his hand and said, ‘Hello, old friend,’ then swallowed it down. He stared at his face in the mirror. ‘You too.’

  He rode the elevator to the lobby and went out to his Dodge Challenger in the freezing dark. The car, which he’
d bought with his disability payout, was painted burnt orange.

  ‘A muscle car,’ Dr P had said. ‘An orange phallus. Do you think you’re trying to compensate for something?’

  ‘Yup,’ Kelson said.

  Now he inched over icy streets, steering one handed, his other hand flopping by his side. He dropped off his prescriptions at a Walgreens and drove to the Golden Apple Grill.

  His regular waitress knew better than to ask personal questions unless she had time for his answers. But as she handed him a menu, she gestured at the bandaged arm and said, ‘Fall on the ice?’

  ‘A car thief with a taste for vintage Mercedes shot me,’ he said, then told her all about it. ‘Who’d’ve thought – a bull rider,’ he concluded.

  The waitress, who’d taken a seat across from Kelson at the ten-minute mark, said, ‘You live an unenviable life.’

  While he waited for his food, Kelson listened to the message Jose Feliciano had left on his phone ten hours ago. The voice sounded breathless. ‘It happened again, amigo. I swear to God – another lady. You’ve got to come back.’

  ‘Nope,’ Kelson said. ‘You think it happened but it didn’t.’

  He deleted the message.

  ‘You’re a rodeo clown,’ he said, as if Jose sat across from him. ‘Too much bucking. Chuck wagons running through your head.’

  The waitress set a cup of coffee in front of him and held a finger to her lips. ‘You’re scaring the other diners.’

  ‘I’m an expert on delusion,’ he said.

  ‘Shh.’

  So he started to call Jose – to tell him he was being delusional – but then he had a better idea. He dialed Sue Ellen’s number instead.

  ‘Dad.’ Her voice always seemed to chime.

  ‘Hey, kiddo. I’m calling to say goodnight.’

  ‘Did they let you out?’

  ‘It’s not like I was in jail.’

  ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘Did getting shot make you think you need to be a better dad?’

  ‘You might be too smart for your own good. I thought phoning would be a normal dad thing.’

  ‘But you aren’t normal,’ she said.

  When they hung up, he dialed Ed Davies at his law office, where he often worked until midnight.