“Don’t worry about that. Can’t have my boss finding out I wasn’t home with flu. Even though it’s too hot now for the fish to be biting, I need a day on the water to recover from finding your patient.”
On the drive back into Chicago, I tried to explain to Lotty what had happened, but I was having trouble with my memory at that point. Besides, it was still hard for me to talk.
Lotty stopped at a fast-food place and ordered a giant lemonade; she kept shaking me awake and demanding that I drink. The traffic was heavy, and the way she darted around tractor-trailers would have made me fear for my life if I hadn’t been so doped.
Despite my incoherence, Lotty grasped enough of the story that she decided not to take me to the hospital: if Wade found out that I was still alive, protecting me would be a security nightmare. She took me instead to her own home. Jewel Kim agreed to tend to me personally; Lotty found a temporary advanced practice nurse to look after the clinic.
It was a good three days before I was well enough to sit up on my own. My memory came back slowly, too, but somewhere deep in my unconscious mind, I must have already decided on a strategy for exposing Lawlor: Lotty said that even while I was still delirious, I was crying, “Don’t tell him I’m alive.”
When I began speaking, and thinking, clearly again, Lotty reluctantly gave in to my demands to see Murray. It was Murray who said he would announce my death in the huddle.
“Wade’s been mighty strange in the mornings,” Murray said. “He hovers around, wanting to know if anyone’s heard about unusual deaths in the area. I asked him point-blank if he thought the vampire was sucking children’s blood, and he went off in a tirade. Hearing that you’re dead should lull him.”
Lotty and Max had spoken to Jake, who took a leave from his Marlboro fellowship to see me: every afternoon he played a private concert for me, a medley of my favorites from the bass repertoire.
Petra and Mr. Contreras had to be told the truth, too. I was afraid my cousin might not be able to keep the secret, but she handled it by taking a leave of absence from the foundation and hunkering down with the old man and the dogs.
Petra drove Mr. Contreras over to see me every afternoon. He annoyed Lotty by making spaghetti and meatballs for me in her kitchen, but she didn’t have the heart to send him away, except on the day he thought it would be a good idea to bring Mitch and Peppy with him. Jake, his arms around me in the guest bed, laughed with me as Lotty ordered the dogs away so fiercely that Mitch’s voice was strangled mid-bark.
It was after I’d made my first solo walk from Lotty’s guest room to the balcony and back that Lotty let me start working with Murray on the program. Murray’s first hurdle was to clear the topic with his management.
Murray’s producer, Deirdre Zhou, didn’t know I was still alive; she’d been told that Murray’s final guest was someone with a special insight into the death of Wade Lawlor’s sister. Part of what kept Murray up several nights running was writing two scripts: one for Deirdre Zhou, which showed me following leads to nowhere in the so-called vampire murder. That was the one that made it up and down Murray’s chain of command, getting approval from Weekes himself.
The second script was the one that Murray memorized, going off the teleprompter, leading Wade to his frenzied outburst.
Once his producers had gotten permission from Weekes to do the show, Murray worked like a demon. He turned up another copy of the Southwest Gazette with Tommy Glover’s picture in it. Wade apparently had gone into the paper’s archives when he first learned about the photo and pulled their old paper copy, but Murray put out a bid on eBay, and paid five hundred dollars to someone in Utah who had kept a copy of that issue. Murray persuaded Iva Wuchnik to come on the show, telling her that this would be her chance to vindicate her brother. He went to Eddie Chez, from the Tampier Lake Township Fire Department, and said they wanted to go over a story that went back to the department’s volunteer days.
We all wondered why Chez hadn’t come forward when Tommy was first arrested. When we spoke to him after the show, the old fireman scratched his head in embarrassment.
“I didn’t connect the dots. Tommy, when he was arrested, it was two days after the fact, and, well, even though he hung around our crew, a lot of times we didn’t really notice him special. And then Wade, well, he told everyone he’d seen Tommy follow Maggie into the woods. It’s terrible that we all believed him without even thinking about it.
“And even though Netta kept saying Tommy was innocent, well, she’d been at work when Tommy was at the Reinhold Garage fire, and even she was so rattled she didn’t connect the picture in the Gazette to the murder. Wade must’ve been like a cat on hot coals when that come out, but nobody put two and two together. It’s like my wife says, we all had this unconscious idea about what a retarded guy might do—we all were just prejudiced, plain and simple.”
53.
VAMPIRES DON’T KILL EASY