The Nurse without a Name

(Coarse Content Warning)

I have written the same essential mystery several times in different forms for assorted commissioners. The “rating” has changed over the years from the first writing in 2005.

The passages below were never used. I wrote them originally for episodic television. The television option(s) expired; the master length of the novel contracted and expanded between 250-375 finished pages.

I utilized a fairly obvious Elmore Leonard style. You would know Leonard’s writing if you watched the tv series Justified. In keeping with that style, I did not bother to give the nurse a name. The nurse appears for three minutes and is gone. That sort of exposure doesn’t require a name.

What appears below is the raw form as I drafted it and in the original formatting, however unwieldy. In keeping with my own style, I have not bothered to edit in any way. It’s raw.

It’s raw in more ways than one.

If you are soft or easily offended, stop reading here and go play with your cat.

-Chap5: October 1998-

The Retard File

. . . it had taken three weeks to wrangle the whole thing together. Jake leaned on the hood of the car while the guy in the nurse’s uniform shuffled toward a long line of metal-doored storage units. It was sort of cool, a man being a nurse. Jake had seen men taking the job of stewardess on airplanes. He thought about it: they weren’t called a Stewardess anymore. Flight, something?

Flight Attendant, that was it.

The guy wasn’t dressed like a nurse as if he was a queer dressing like a nurse. He had on the nurse-outfit, whatever that thing was called. A shapeless blue getup with pants and a sort of shirt with no collar. There was a name for that thing; the drillers in the dentist office wore them too.

‘When I moved down here, I didn’t know how long I’d stay. Put most of my shit in storage, and I don’t come by enough to know the keys, so . . . ‘ the nurse barked over his shoulder. He was rummaging in his pocket like a mouse got loose in there.

Jake looked around the storage yard with its threadbare gravel, concrete forms and steel doors. This was Maudlin, no! Mauldin, a suburb of Greenville, South Carolina. He had seen a lot of storage units in his day, some going back thirty years. This one was about midland. It had no entry-gate to stop a gang with a van from driving straight in, smash the locks, and empty six units in fifteen minutes. The lot was gravel, but the units themselves were raised so they wouldn’t flood. That flood in Tampa, what a mess. The nurse’s unit had not flooded, thankfully, and the mere fact that he had a single lock on it meant that the treasure would have been preserved. About every third unit had a second lock on it; Jake realized a lot of renters were way behind on their payments.

I guess he’s a good nurse, Jake thought inwardly, which makes him more qualified than me.

The nurse tried several keys without success. Jake had learned from experience. By about the third failure, a person generally kicks the door. He was surprised when the nurse got agitated, animated even, but did not take it out on the door.

The fourth key was the one. The copper lock fell to the side, the nurse grabbed a rope-pull on the ground, and in one somewhat unathletic motion he hoisted the door aloft, with a clang and shudder that only ended when the door cinched into place atop the unit.

An ungainly mess of crap furniture, lamps and small household items, and a dozen lumpy black trash bags greeted the nurse as if yawning from a cave. As the light filtered in, Jake could see there were file cabinets and other stacks of things – records, maybe? – lining the back of the place. They were actually elevated on postal pallets, just in case of flood. Jake was mildly impressed.

The nurse jumped right in. Jake moved off the car a bit and approached the cave. Backaways he had learned about getting shut-in a storage unit. Anything that was being done on the inside, could be watched from the outside. But Jake did want to watch. There was a lot going on in that storage unit.

Something fell, shifted or slipped with every move the nurse made in that cave. As he searched, the nurse felt compelled to talk. Normally this was a great thing; talking meant information, however insignificant. But Preacher had sent his man down to Maudlin – goddammit! – Mauldin to buy something, not to interview someone. The chatter was just nonsense.

‘In the old days, when I got out of college, newspapers had photographers, see? I came on with a local newspaper, following those reporters around that thought they would uncover the next Watergate. It wasn’t exciting work, taking pictures of Boy Scout Troops or a huge pumpkin or the newest strip mall, whatever the story needed. It paid the bills. You could do weddings or pet-shoots or baseball teams on the side, and that money was good if you had the gear.’

The nurse paused every so often to look at something he had fallen over or spilled. He laughed, shook his head, and pushed the item back into a place where it wouldn’t fall onto the floor again.

Jake started to wonder how long it might take. He knew what was coming at the end of this search. It would be money.

‘But then, that first Gulf War came around, and the election was a bitch, with three guys running, and the newspaper business started to run dry. You had most families, they were either set with both mom and dad working, or it was a single mom. Who the hell has time to read a newspaper these days?’

Jake wondered if the nurse could actually lecture and search at the same time. He gave that nurse credit. He kept talking, but he kept searching.

‘It got lean. First thing they did, they handed you a beeper. So, if there was a big story, you would catch a beep, and you could meet the reporter at the scene. Most staff shooters went down to part-time. Benefits, gone. Most of us realized that was the start of the finish.’

The nurse kept talking, but he kept searching.

There was no porn bag, no stash of his wet-sock materials, so Jake assumed the nurse had no girlfriend back at his place. If there was a girl there, there would be a porn stash here. One usually delivered a clue as to the other. So much of life was actually a pattern.

‘Other stuff, what you could call Feel Good or Archived, those were things you could shoot on a loose schedule, like a Monday. That’s the stuff you print when you need to fill space. All those outfits have files of that stuff, plug-in material when the advertiser reduces his ad-buy. The older veterans called it The Retard File; you can always pull a story out about how a retard ran around a tree, or painted a dog, or some shit that is heartwarming to the community. Charity, a book drive, something like that. The Retard File. It makes sense.’

Jake actually paid attention to that. Every system had its own subsystem. A supporting system. There is a plan in place for contingencies. What to use if something goes wrong. Or in case of surprise.

‘Then they handed these cardboard cameras to the reporters, and made them take their own pictures,’ the nurse was yelling now, deep in the cave, ‘maybe a front page, above the fold as they say, maybe that would need a real photographer, but for most things, a reporter could take a picture of a State Senator hugging a retard. That’s when I knew I was done.’

Jake thought to himself Please end the story there, and find the files. No more talking.

‘So I knew I was done. I knew I was done, you know? I found a nice little cash-in, I shot bachelor parties for the groom to keep as a memoir, and that was sort of cool, but they tried to stiff me on the money. I had a couple of guys surround me in a parking lot once, and took my film. No. So I went and got a certificate and my days are made up on clipboards and missing signatures.’

Suddenly the nurse wrenched a medium-sized file out of the mess. A victory shriek bounced off the metallic walls.

‘ Found it, hellyeah! I knew it was here. Man, I thought this was the homerun swing for me. I kept everything.’

Jake took a step inside the storage unit. Somehow the smell of the place magnified once he was inside. He was being extremely mindful of that file. It was thick, but not too thick. And it was loose, which meant he didn’t want anything falling out. Preacher had paid for the entire file. For this kind of money, Jake wanted the whole damned thing, no orphans.

The nurse cradled the file like it was a newborn.

He opened it carefully with wide eyes and that nostalgic look people assume when they revisit a huge fork in the road of their life. At first he touched the photographs gingerly, as if they were feathers. The nurse shook his head and sucked his teeth as if he were visiting the grave of a loved one.

‘This was my big hit. This was it. The homerun. You remember that black guy, he killed the white girl out in California? They call them niggers down here, so I do that in company, but really he was just black to me. He carved up his wife, something, I don’t remember.’

Jake nodded, and spoke for the first time since they had arrived at the LH Storage Facility. ‘Yeah. Orenthal Simpson. A football player. My mom had that on tv every day.’

The nurse took on an aspect of animation, almost leaping off the ground. ‘Exactly, that’s right! Well, back then, unless you were slingin’ crack in Washington DC, there wasn’t much of this around. But . . . the nurse paused here and looked away . . . I caught this one red-hot.’

Jake cocked his head to the side. ‘Red hot?’

‘Yeah. Oh yeah! I had hit the bottles too hard at the Reston Town Center, and cronked-out in my car. Man, what a loser. I scooped snow off of my car and drank it. Tasted like liquid plastic, but I put a bunch in me, and after a while, I went ahead and tried to drive home. Days were different then. Driving while Dizzy wasn’t such a big deal.’

Jake kept his eyes on that file. The nurse was more animated with every sentence.

‘I left Reston and got on the highway. Sure enough there was a cop, and an ambulance racing by. The ambo had it’s lights on, but no siren. That means . . . ‘

Jake finished that sentence ‘ . . . someone is dead.’

The nurse looked at Jake for the first time. His tone took on a more normal contour. Now he spoke slowly.

‘I had my gear. I followed that ambo. The roads were covered with snow, but it was that cold snow, you know? The stuff that falls and stays. It isn’t sloppy so much. I rolled my window down and gulped in the cold air. We turned up into Chanel Falls, a ritzy place up in the forest, where people live on two or three acres each. Not the sad side of the world.’

Jake was listening to every word. He wished he had his micro-recorder on him. It was twenty feet away, in his car, but he needed the file. The file was guaranteed information. The babbling nonsense of this nurse was helpful, but Jake couldn’t risk slowing him down by asking him to wait.

‘Okay, then what’, Jake asked.

‘I shot everything,’ was the simple reply.

The nurse looked down at the file as if it were a wedding ring, a ring that had fallen off the dock into the dark waters of the lake and foretold the end of a marriage before it had begun.

‘I mean everything. Everything. I was shooting up the road, down the road, at the weird crime scene where that poor bastard got shot, everything. I mean, everything.’

Jesus, thought Jake.

The nurse continued.

‘I shot so much, I couldn’t develop all of it at the newspaper. They would know how many pictures I actually developed, the chemicals I used. I knew a guy at Fort Belvoir, he developed all those wacko photos the soldiers take when they are in Thailand or the Philippines. He helped me get them all done. It is all here. After the nigger thing in California, I thought this was my career-maker, my home run.’

‘Is it all there?’

‘Yeah. I think so.’

Jake reached into his jeans and produced Preacher’s money.

‘That’s $250, cash in folding money. As I promised on behalf of my employer, I will secure those photos, use them for investigation, and return the originals to your care. We are not buying them. We are renting them. Here is the agreed amount.’

The nurse had worked his way out of the storage-cave. Now he hesitated, looking from the cash to the file and back again.

‘It’s worth more than that.’

‘It sat in your tin cave for over two years.’

‘It’s worth more than that. I shot everything.’

‘We can acknowledge your effort, and your results. I am not here to play games over the price. I will add $50 to the price of rental. That makes $300. I have it here. That’s it. I need to get on with this thing.’

‘That’s not enough. You are paying a lot of money for a bunch of four year-old pictures. They have to be worth more,’ the nurse was not exactly whining now, and he wasn’t clutching the file, but he had the hallmark signs of remorse, that he didn’t get what he had deserved originally, years ago, and he wanted to make up for it now.

Jake was out of time.

‘Let’s be clear about this, and I’m sorry because it is not my style to lean on people. But this is not a movie. I don’t have a scary gang of guys in black suits with guns surrounding you. I made a deal, you made a deal. You asked for more money, I gave you more money. There is no more money. Those photographs are very important, yes. But we can proceed with this investigation without them. A man got shot in the face three times and bled in the snow while steam rose out of his head into the cold night air. No one cares but me. And you made a deal.’

‘That’s not the point. This should have been it, it! I’m bathing people in their beds. I’m wiping ass and ballsacks fifty times a shift. Maybe, maybe one word of thanks in a day. Most of them bitch non-stop, accuse me of molesting them, yell about how their kids never call, all kinds of shit I don’t deserve. I caught this thing, cold and live. I shot everything that night. It isn’t fair.’

‘Life isn’t fair. I am taking the $50 back because you’re fucking around. I’m not a thug, I’m not here to threaten or hurt you. The best I can do is send gay porn magazines to your neighbors with your name on it. Makes it uncomfortable coming and going from home. Then the catalogues show up at work. You become the focus of all conversations.’

The nurse groaned.

‘If you solve this thing, will I get any credit?’

‘No.’

‘Not even if you find the guy?’

‘No. We are not paid to find the guy. We are paid to find out why.’

‘Jesus, okay. I wasn’t trying to shake you down for extra money, really. It was my big break. I don’t even know the name of the taco that got shot.’

‘Jose Cristobal De Villa. And even that is most likely a complete fabrication.’

‘Why didn’t the police solve this thing at the time? It was murder.’

Jake shook his head silently.

‘He wasn’t white.’

XXX