Eyes Wide Open

“Well, wherever it is”-the detective looked at me directly-“trust me, Dr. Erlich, it’s a whole different world out here… Look, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings-I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know how hard it is to hear-but this kid plainly wanted out of the game. You know what I’m saying, don’t you? He’d made statements that he wanted to end his own life. He claimed to the doctors that the gun he was looking to purchase was intended expressly for him. I shouldn’t go into this yet, but your nephew’s toxicology report came back. He was clean. Nothing in him at the time of his death- nada. Not even Seroquel, doc. You catching what I mean…?”

I caught exactly what that meant. Evan hadn’t been on his meds.

That explained how he had managed to climb all the way up there. How he still would have had the urge to follow through with it.

It pretty much explained everything.

“So how the hell did he manage to find his way all the way up there?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “But I do know how the death certificate is going to read. Death by suicide.” He reopened the door and looked at me before he headed back in. “What the hell else would the kid be doing up there in the first place?”

Chapter Nine

A fter they left, Sherwood slipped back into the interrogation room, shutting the door.

He took out his cell and pressed the number for the hospital over at County, worriedly thumbing the edge of Evan Erlich’s file.

Stories like his happened every day out there. Gang executions, drug ODs. Runaways. They all had mothers who wept and didn’t understand. Suicide or accident? What did it really matter? The kid was dead. A tragedy was a tragedy. If it hadn’t ended like this, the next time-and there would have been a next time, Sherwood knew-he would have likely taken the mother and father out too.

His job was to try to make sense of the rotten outcomes. Just not too much sense.

Tomorrow, sure as sunrise, there’d be two more.

The hospital operator answered. Sherwood placed the phone to his ear. “Dr. Derosa, please.”

He knew about tragedies. And not just on the job. He thought of his son, Kyle, more than twenty years ago, and his wife, Dorrie-almost two years now. He had this new liver. A gift. From a minister. Edward J. Knightly. Now he even peed righteous, Sherwood sometimes said with a laugh. This whole new chance at life. This new lease. What the hell was it even for?

How do you make sense of others’ tragedies when you can’t even figure out your own?

A voice came on the line. “Dr. Derosa here.”

“It’s Sherwood,” he said, leaning back in the chair. “I’m calling about that Erlich kid. That jumper…”

“Yeah…” The doctor sighed, as if he didn’t need to be reminded. “We’re all really sorry about that one here. I got a call this morning from some relative of his. A doctor.”

“And how did you handle it?”

“How we always handle it, Don. You know we don’t put ourselves directly involved.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you ought to get a bit more directly involved in this one.”

The psych ward doctor cleared his throat. “What do you mean?”

“They want a look at his medical records. They’re right, of course. Funny, they want to know how the hell their son was dropkicked back on the street and a day later ended up dead. And you know what?”

“What? ” The doctor sounded a little peeved.

“I can’t say I really blame them on this one, Mitch. Just thought you’d want a heads-up.”

“The kid was a ticking time bomb, Don. We do our best to stop ’em. This one went off.”

“Well if I were you, you might want to look at it again. That it’s all buttoned up.”

“Buttoned up? ” The doctor’s tone now had an edge of irascibility to it.

“Any loose ends…” Sherwood stared at the file, at the copy of Evan’s medical records included there.

Ones the poor, grieving family would never see.

They didn’t need anyone tugging on loose ends here. Not the family; not some pushy outsider from New York. The problem with loose ends was, once pulled, you just never knew what would tumble out.

“I think you know what I mean.”

Chapter Ten

I tried the hospital again as soon as we got back to the apartment.

Again, no luck.

The doctor in charge, Derosa, still hadn’t called me back. Which was starting to piss me off, since several hours had passed, and it was professional courtesy to receive a reply. A secretary at his office said he was still at an outside consult.

Even a call to Brian, the mental health social worker there, went straight to his voice mail.

I was beginning to feel like a wall of silence was being erected, and the doctor and his staff were bricks in it.

Finally I got fed up. I was losing valuable time. I tried the nurse’s station at the psych ward. I got to a Janie Middleton, who identified herself as the chief nurse on the ward. “I’m told you wanted some information on Evan Erlich?”

“Nurse Middleton”-I softened my tone-“my name is Jay Erlich. I’m a surgeon in vascular medicine at the Westchester Medical Center back east in New York. Evan was my nephew…”