“Okay. Say hello to ol’ Ron for me, would you?”
I nodded, but I doubted a cheery greeting from Big Al Lindstrom would do much to lift the thick pall of depression that surrounded Ron Peters.
After the accident, the initial diagnosis of Peters’s condition had labeled him a C-6 Quadriplegic Incomplete, which meant, among other things, that although his neck was broken, the spinal cord itself hadn’t been severely damaged and there was reason to hope that he would eventually recover some, if not all, of his bodily functions.
But that thread of hope had also meant that for almost two months, Peters had been stuck in rigorous traction with steel bolts drilled into his skull supporting sixty pounds of weight. His neck injury meant he could choose to lie on one side or the other, but never on his back or his stomach. He was beginning to get some movement in his arms, but that was about it. Eventually was proving to be just that—eventually.
During his first month in the hospital they had kept Peters so doped up that I don’t think he cared what was going on around him. But now, as the long weeks of physical confinement continued, as he remained totally dependent on other people for his most basic needs, Peters had fallen into a bleak chasm of hopelessness.
The nurses told me that wasn’t at all unusual for someone in his condition, that he had to be shown there was a reason for him to go on living. I came by to visit regularly, but he rarely spoke in anything other than monosyllabic grunts.
Attempting to cheer him up, one day I brought along his daughters, six-year-old Heather and seven-year-old Tracie. I thought seeing his kids might give him the needed motivation to fight back, to try to get better. No such luck. Within minutes of their arrival, he asked them to turn on the television set and then proceeded to ignore them completely in favor of the nightly news. I had taken two heartbroken girls back to their temporary quarters in my downtown condominium.
Maxine Edwards, the girls’ regular baby-sitter, had comforted them as well as she could, soothing them and drying their faces. When subsequent visits weren’t any better, I finally took the bull by the horns and packed the three of them off to southern California for a two-week vacation.
It’s times like that when it’s nice to have money. I put in a call to Kelly, my college-age daughter, who lives in Cucamonga with her mother and stepfather. Since I was footing the bill, Kelly readily agreed to serve as tour guide and chauffeur for the duration of their visit.
I had received several delighted phone calls from the girls. They were having a ball. Disneyland, Universal City, and Knott’s Berry Farm would never be the same. But Peters had not been happy when he heard about the trip. In fact, he had been pissed as hell. We had exchanged ugly words over it. He said they shouldn’t have gone, since it wasn’t something he could afford to pay for himself. I told him he had placed the girls in my custody for as long as he needed them there, and I was more than prepared to handle all the accompanying expenses.
The girls had sent home a collection of gaudy postcards addressed to their father, all of them bearing clumsily scrawled notes telling him to get well soon. As a matter of fact, I was packing the whole batch of cards in my jacket pocket, had been for several days, while I put off going to the hospital and having what I expected to be a nose-to-nose confrontation with their father. I wasn’t looking forward to his reaction once he saw the cards.
It was time to go though. However tough it might be to face him, I couldn’t, in good conscience, put it off any longer.
I rode an elevator up to the fourth floor. Peters’s roommate, a diving-accident victim, was gradually making the transition out of bed and into a wheelchair. He was out of the room when I got there. Peters was lying on his side, an open newspaper propped clumsily on the bed beside him.
“How’s it going?” I asked, doing my best to sound jaunty and cheerful.
“About the same,” he said, not looking up.
“Any word about when you’ll get out of this ungodly contraption?” I patted the overhead traction frame.
“When they’re damned good and ready,” he replied morosely.
As usual, Peters wasn’t in a particularly conversational mood. I struggled to carry on my one-sided monologue.
“Big Al and I started a new case today,” I said, hoping to strike some small spark of interest. “Some gay creep got himself plugged full of holes from a high-heeled shoe and then got thrown down beside the railroad track. You know where the Burlington Northern Tunnel entrance is? There behind the Pike Place Market?”
I paused to give Peters an opportunity for comment. None was forthcoming. I plunged on.