CHAPTER ONE
I’ve had the dream for as long as I can remember. I’m perched on a dizzying edge, staring at the ground far below. It’s twilight: not quite dark, but nothing is distinct. I have to jump because it’s the only way to get where I’m going and I absolutely have to get there. But when I step off, into the empty air, will I be able to control the fall? My heart pounds. A flash of ice races up my spine.
I step.
And that weightless second after I do, that moment when the question’s still unanswered—that’s why I do it, every time. Yes, I need to get there, wherever there is. But I know as I’m doing it that need is not the reason.
That dream’s not, and never has been, a nightmare.
It was the same now. That moment on the edge. But not quite the same: I was awake and could’ve backed out of this one. There was another way to get down. Like in the dreams, I couldn’t make out what was below, but not because it was dark. The July morning was bright, the sky was a glorious blue, and the ground was far, far away, at the bottom of two and a half miles of empty air. And there wasn’t anywhere I needed to get to. I could’ve chosen not to step out of the open airplane door.
Except my brother pushed me.
Technically, he didn’t push. We were attached, me in front, sitting with our legs dangling out of the plane, and he jumped. But just before he did, I was about to. He pushed but I’d have pulled. I wanted that moment. And I got it.
Weightless, wind rushing, blue around, sun flashing, green below, that giddy moment lasting and lasting and stretching on, way longer than the dream, until a sudden tug and then silence, no rushing, just floating, down, sideways, sailing along above an abstract of greens and browns that slowly resolved into buildings, roads, fields. A truck, some cars, a Quonset hut. A dust cloud above a dirt strip.
“Now,” I heard in my ear.
Laughing, I tucked up my knees.
Elliott stuck the landing.
He was the skydiver, after all.
Back in the hut I was still laughing as I asked, “Can we go again?”
“Not today.” Elliott grinned as he slipped his glasses back on. “I knew you’d love it.”
“Don’t tell Ma you took me.”
right. My brothers and I have spent a lot of time over our lives trying to hide things from our mother. It rarely works.
Elliott passed the gear across the counter to a bearded, muscled guy who, I imagined, was just waiting for his shift to end so he could go jump.
“So when can—” I stopped as Elliott’s phone played “Confusionality” by Doctor Django and his Nurses. He checked the screen and answered, stepping away. I strolled around the room, looking over the photos of shrieking free-fallers, floating formations, and a set of flyers in wingsuits. How had I waited this long to take Elliott up on his offer to join in?
My brother slipped his phone back into his cargo shorts and turned. I was about to repeat my half-asked question when he cut me off with one of his own.
“You know a good criminal lawyer?”
CHAPTER TWO
My brother needs a lawyer,” I told Bill over the phone from the skydiving hut.
“Your brother is a lawyer. Unless it’s a different brother, in which case his brother is a lawyer.”
“It’s Elliott, he needs a criminal lawyer, and it’s for a friend.”
“That’s what they all say. What happened?”
“The friend was found at the hospital in the company of a dead body.”
“Did he make it dead?”
“No.”
“That’s what they all say. New York City? Long Island, upstate, New Jersey?”
“That’s as far as your reach extends?”
“God no. You need Nebraska? The Leeward Islands?”
“Just testing. Manhattan.”
“The guy’s in custody?”
“Yes, and he’d rather not be.”
“That’s what they all say.”
Bill called me back five minutes later. By then Elliot and I were in his car drinking tea as he zoomed us out of the Sussex County airport and raced toward the George Washington Bridge. Drinking tea, that’s what the Chin family does when we’re stressed. Also, when we’re calm. Or hungry, stuffed, happy, sad, sleepy, or wide awake.
“Leo can’t do it himself,” Bill reported. “But he has a bad-tempered young woman with a chip on her shoulder he recommends.”
Leo would be Leo Kirschenbaum, Bill’s longtime attorney. Any recommendation of his was worth taking. “Sounds lovely.”
“Not according to Leo. But she may be what your guy needs.” He gave me the details.
“Juanita Cohen,” I told Elliott, putting down my phone and picking up his. He raised an eyebrow at the mismatched name but said nothing. “You want me to call her?”
“Yes, thanks, and put it on speaker.”
I tapped in his password. My brothers and I all know each other’s, and our mother’s, too. Hers is “phone.”
“Cohen.” A woman’s voice, sounding harried, growled out of Elliott’s sound system after three rings. “Talk loud, I’m on the street.”
“Hi, Ms. Cohen. This is Dr.
Elliott Chin. I’m calling because—”
“Because some asshole got himself arrested because he was stupid enough to sit beside a body waiting for the police to show up. That you?”
“Not me—”
“No, I mean, that’s the case and you’re paying the bills? Leo told me.”
“For now.”
“All I need. What’s his name and where is he?”
“Jordy Kazarian. Manhattan Detention Center.”
“I’ll call you when I’ve seen him.” Cohen was gone.
“Wow,” Elliott said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone slam down a cell phone before.” A horn blared as a blue BMW roared past us. “Sorry.” He slowed the car down. “I guess I’m a little upset. About Jordy. I’m driving like a maniac.”
“Elliott? You always drive like a maniac. And that guy was just trying to prove his gas Beemer can beat your electric Porsche. You may be upset about your friend Jordy but it’s also just barely possible you’re upset because someone got murdered at your hospital.”
“Well, but… I mean, people die in the ER all the time. It’s been a long time since I’ve been upset about a patient dying.”
I doubted that but didn’t say so. “Murdered is different and this wasn’t a patient. She was a nurse, a colleague. Did you know her?”
“Sophia Scott. We’d met. We ran into each other every now and then. But I didn’t really know her.”
think murdered is different enough that the news would burn up the wires.”
“It will now. Jordy says Admin put a clamp on it. I guess they were able to keep it on until the arrest. You can see why they did it—not the kind of thing you want people to know happens in your hospital.” He was silent for a few moments, then said, “I feel like…” He trailed off.
“Like you should have been able to do something? Like you always feel? Elliott, you barely knew her and you weren’t there. And why am I even saying that? I can’t talk you out of feeling that way. So tell me this—who’s Jordy, why does him getting busted upset you, and why were you the guy he called?”
For a minute, Elliott didn’t answer. He acted like he was concentrating on his driving, but he drives like he runs the ER at River Valley Downstate Medical Center: fast, smooth, on the edge but never rattled, no matter how big, wild, or dire the situation. By long-trained, finely honed, and by now deeply trusted instinct. I gave him time. It wasn’t the road he was thinking about, or a jerk in a Beemer that was bothering him.
“Jordy’s a diener. At the hospital,” he finally said.
“What’s a diener?”
“Morgue assistant. Prepares patients for autopsies, maintains the equipment, things like that.”
“You still call them patients when they’re dead?”
He glanced over at me. “Why not?”
“Because it’s kind of weird. To us living patients. So why’d he call you? Instead of his family or something?”
“His mother was the only person in his family who’d have anything to do with him. She’s gone now. No point in calling his father, I guarantee.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s River Valley’s chief of medicine.”
“Oddly cozy, both of them at the same hospital. So you know him?”
“Too well. There’s another one, too, Jordy’s brother. Also a doctor.”
“Yet Jordy called you.”
Elliott looked almost embarrassed. “I saved Jordy’s life once.”
“Oh no. Seriously, bro? So now you’re supposed to be responsible for him forever?”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s just, he thinks I know what to do in situations. He comes to me for advice. That kind of thing.”
“Ah. Situations.” I nodded sagely, which was lost on Elliott because he was watching the road. “Like you’re, I don’t know, some kind of older brother?”
I have four older brothers, but only the oldest two—Ted and Elliott—ever really acted like older brothers. The next brother down from them, Andrew, has always been my buddy. As kids he was my partner in whatever childhood crimes we got up to. Our mother disapproved of our carrying on but
constantly cracked our father up, and at least when we got grounded it was together. The brother closest in age to me is Tim, and from the day I was born he thought it was his job to boss me around and make me as boring as he was.
After our father died when I was thirteen, Ted, as the eldest, did his best, but he was born the absent-minded professor he is, professionally, today. Elliott, by contrast, was always there, present, paying attention. Helping out. It was Elliott who tried, whenever he could, to accompany Ma to my school plays and track meets, Elliott who vetted my boyfriends—and also Elliott who made sure I understood birth control.
Becoming a doctor, I’ve always suspected, was Elliott’s way of being an older brother to the world.
“How did you save Jordy’s life?” I asked now. “I mean, actually or metaphorically?”
“Actually. The first time I met him was about five years ago when he turned up in the ER, OD’d on a drug cocktail. At one point his heart stopped. I got him going again.”
“God, Elliott, just like that guy’s daughter last spring. Have you thought about starting a religion? At least a website. Rise from the Dead dot com.”
My brother threw me a quick glance. “It happens in the ER every day, Lyd. People flatline, we bring them back. It’s in the playbook.”
“Yeah, well, seeing your brother’s face plastered all over the news doesn’t happen every day. Or your son’s. Ma was so unbearable about you Tim
got jealous.”
Elliott flushed. “That guy” last spring had been one of the glitterati, a private equity king named Seymour Larson. Met Gala, City Ballet Ball, Landmarks Conservancy Board. Giant yacht, private jet, fleet of Bentleys. Endowed chair here, library wing there, concert hall somewhere else. Wherever A-listers were found and photographed for the rest of us to envy you’d see Larson, smiling, holding a drink, light bouncing off his pale bald head. His glamorous wife would be standing beside him, and somewhere in the young-people part of the glitzy crowd would be his dazzling daughter. Beautiful people leading their best lives.
Until the daughter, Hartley, was delivered by screaming ambulance to Elliott’s ER with her skin turning blue and vomit all over her Paolina Russo shantung blouse.
When you save the life of a celebrity you become one yourself. This happens especially if the celebrity’s dad, far from trying to hush the whole thing up, gives interviews praising the ER staff and Dr. Chin in particular while he decries bloodsucking drug dealers who prey on young people whose judgment is still poor. The papers, news sites, and local TV all had the story, and they all had photos of Elliott: in stained hospital scrubs in the ER, in action; in a clean white coat over the stained scrubs outside the ER, with Larson; and in a suit and tie in the fancy river-view conference room at the top of the hospital’s administration tower, between Larson and Elizabeth Gordon-Platt. Gordon-Platt was chief administrator of the hospital, the widow of a former parks commissioner, and a member of Seymour Larson’s social circle.
Pass Go.
The police commissioner announced a new war on drugs.
Larson, in each photo, managed to look both jubilant and grateful. Gordon-Platt, in the one in the panorama conference room, smiled like a cat who’d eaten a whole cage full of canaries and had just been told there were more.
Elliott, in all those photos, looked uncomfortable and impatient. His fifteen minutes of fame deeply embarrassed him, in no small part because of the relentless teasing of his brothers and sister and the ceaseless crowing of his mother. And here I was starting up again. Why, shame on me. I moved on.
“So Jordy’s a user?”
“Not anymore,” Elliott said, with what I hoped was gratitude for my forbearance but was probably more like the relief you feel when a mosquito you haven’t been able to swat finally flies away. “He was self-medicating against the trauma of being in med school.”
“Remembering you in med school, I’m not surprised. But morgue assistants have to go to med school?”
“No. Jordy thought he did, though. He was on the way to becoming a doctor. He hated it but he’s from a family of doctors—grandfather, father, older brother—so it never occurred to him he had a choice.”
“Not his mom?”
“She was a social worker. Jordy says she put his dad through med school, then they broke up.”
“You mean then he ditched her because he didn’t need her anymore.”
Elliott looked over at me, then back to the road. “I wasn’t there.”
“Jumping to conclusions, guilty as charged, but seriously, I’ll bet you dinner his second wife’s young, blonde, and curvy.”
“How do you know there’s a second wife?”
“There always is. Anyway, Jordy. When did he drop out of med school?”
“After his OD. He said what happened in the ER was like a wake-up call.”
“A wake-up-the-dead call.”
“He said being dead and coming back made him think the dead might be more interesting than the living. He quit school and applied for diener jobs. River Valley offered him a job right away, because he was already overqualified. I think they thought DeBreng—Jordy’s dad—would be happy.”
“But not?”
“He was mortified. But what’s he going to say, ‘Fire my son, he’s a loser’?”
“And they took Jordy even though he had a drug problem?”
“One of the drugs he’d taken he had a scrip for,” Elliott said.
I looked
over at my brother. “And that was the one you put in the record?”
“I had no way to be sure what else he’d taken. He was only guessing, himself. The one with the scrip could easily have been the one that almost killed him. Anyone can forget if they took their meds and double dose. People make mistakes all the time.”
They sure do, I thought. I looked out the window to see a blue BMW getting a ticket at the side of the road.
Back in New York, Elliott dropped me on the west side and headed home across Central Park. I was still buzzing from the jump so I subwayed to the dojo on White Street to work off some adrenaline. An hour and a half later, after I’d helped lead a beginners’ class through some basic moves and served as sparring partner for some more advanced students and then worked on some combinations of my own, I hit the showers. I came out feeling ready to take on the world. When I checked my phone, I found a text from Bill: CALL ME.
“Hey,” I said, following instructions. “What’s up?”
“You were. I forgot to ask before, how was the jump?”
“Oh my God, it was amazing! You should come with me next time.”
“The Navy offered me that opportunity. You’re harder to resist than Uncle Sam, but marshalling all my willpower, I still say no.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.” I slipped into
my George Takei T-shirt.
“You missed something, too. Between when I talked to you and now, I got an interesting phone call. A lawyer wants us to work on a case.”
“Well, great, but I’m waiting for the interesting part. Isn’t that pretty much what we do?”
“We haven’t worked for this lawyer before. It’s Juanita Cohen.”
I stopped, one high-top in hand. “You’re kidding. It’s not the case I called you about? My brother’s friend the diener?”
“The guy’s a diener?”
“You know what that is?”
“Of course. That makes it even more interesting. Yes, that case. Cohen called Leo to recommend a PI and he suggested us.”
“Is that some kind of conflict of interest?”
“Only if Leo’s getting kickbacks. Which of course he’s not because that’s illegal.”
“Oh. Bet he gets some nice whiskey at Christmas, though.”
“Brandy, and Hanukkah. Meeting at one thirty. You want to come?”
“You bet. Where?”
“Your office.” ...
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