Executive Man
By Jack Conlan
Her whatever it was—her entanglement, if that was the word for it—had started innocently enough. She and Jacob had started chatting one night near the end of her shift. The shift had been a real crusher, multiple patients had coded, and everyone had been running wild all night. It had been blissfully quiet on the floor then; a hazy pre-dawn light was breaking through to the nurses’ area where she had been sitting when he walked up and started making small talk. He was tall and athletic if not classically handsome. Good looking, but he knew it. His stubble was not just the result of a long hospital shift, it was also an affectation. Because all the nurses talked about Jacob. When the new physician’s assistant had shown up with his baby blues and his hair gelled just so, tongues had wagged. Nurses could give any organized group a run for their money when it came to gossip.
So, what are you doing here, Elle? she asked herself in the quiet of the front seat of her car. Her hands were on the steering wheel and, even in the pitch black of the early hours of the morning, her mammoth engagement ring still sparkled, flicking shards of light and regret into her eyes. Mitch had been so proud when he had given it to her. But not of getting engaged to her. Of the size of the ring.
“Isn’t it huge?” She remembered him asking immediately after asking the question most girls in her position were dying to hear. She had agreed because it was impossible not to agree. To both questions. Neurology had been good to Mitch and everyone at Vanderbilt Hospital knew it. As the resident hotshot surgeon on the spinal floor, Mitch was one of the most popular kids in school. An engagement ring worth more than triple her student loan balance was just a way to show how good medicine had been to him. Their engagement was met with general approval, a kind of fairy-tale romance where Prince Charming was a neurosurgeon and the girl with the glass slipper was an ICU nurse from South Nashville.
So, what are you doing here? Elle asked herself, again. She was parked outside of Jacob’s house in East Nashville at almost 3:30 in the morning. Her chat with the handsome PA hadn’t been as innocent as she had told herself originally. And it had led to shared lunch breaks and the occasional shared cigarette when no one else was looking. Mitch’s travel to Chicago for a conference had made tonight a foregone conclusion. Jacob, ever the kind heart, had asked her to stay. Of course she wouldn’t.
Sitting in her car parked a block from his house, Elle was considering her situation. She had been considering it for some time. It was like she was on an elevator stuck between floors and didn’t know whether to push the button to go up or down. So, she sat. In her car. Stuck. A flicker of light that reflected off her ring was the first indicator of a car coming down the opposite side of the street. Shaken from her own thoughts, and even mildly panicked at the prospect of being discovered at a place where she shouldn’t have been, she at first reached for the ignition of her car to get the hell out of there. She stopped. Her thoughts ran away from her.
What if it’s one of Jacob’s friends from the hospital? Her thoughts then went into overdrive. What if it’s Mitch? What if he came home early and followed me?
The twin hands of fear and regret closed around her throat like a vice, locking her into position: hand poised just above the key to her car, her eyes staring straight ahead at the headlights coming towards her.
Suddenly the car, still in motion, flicked its headlights off, plunging the street back into near-total darkness. Elle was actually parked under a streetlamp, but it was off; either burned out or shattered by some vandal. The street was almost pitch black except for the small light coming off the side of a long-closed Mexican restaurant that faced away from the street Elle’s car was sitting on.
Elle watched and waited for the car to park. Waited for her fiancée to leap out with an “Aha!” brandishing a scarlet letter, tailor-made for the occasion, that he would pin to her breast before marching her through the ICU as her colleagues shouted “Shame!” and hurled spoiled vegetables at her. Instead, the car parked. Nothing happened. At first.
It was a nice car. Elle could see that. A late model BMW. A luxury car. Mitch had taken her along when he had bought his BMW, mainly just to show her that he could buy a BMW with the ease that mere mortals did not possess. Mitch’s BMW was silver. The car on the street was an inky black that almost disappeared in the darkness. Without the slightly reflected light from the trim along the car’s bumper, Elle would have hardly known it was there. The BMW sat silently for what seemed like a long time. Elle’s hand had dropped from where it had been poised over her car’s ignition and had fallen to her lap. She was watching the BMW now with an intensity she didn’t really understand. The luxury car was facing her car and about twenty yards away to the left. Maybe the person in the BMW was watching her. She couldn’t tell. The two cars sat there, across from each other like a standoff from an old cowboy movie that Mitch had made her watch one time.
When the door of the BMW opened, it startled her, nearly making her jump in her seat. The night had gone so quiet for the past few minutes it had almost made her forget that there was a driver in the other car. The driver of the BMW didn’t get out immediately, but the interior light illuminated his face. He was middle-aged, Elle guessed, but handsome with salt and pepper hair and a grey goatee. He was wearing the white button-down shirt of a business executive, but the collar was open, and he was tieless. There was something about his exposed neck that was almost seductive, but Elle knew that the seduction wasn’t meant for her in particular. His face was drawn and pinched at the bridge of his nose, lines that carved deep into his face. Elle had been around a lot of powerful men at the hospital. Surgeons. Department chairs. Hospital executives. Even Mitch. This man would have been able to make small talk at the same country club about whatever those same men made small talk about at such gatherings.
But not tonight. Something was off about him.
After what seemed like a long moment, the man got out of the BMW and closed the door. A few seconds later, the car’s interior light faded off and, once again, the street was plunged into darkness. Something in the recesses of Elle’s brain told her to reach up, turn the ignition key, put her Honda Accord in drive and go. Just go. Now. The man was not moving but was just standing by the car. What was he doing? This executive man with his pinched look and his tie off, standing in the blackness in the early hours of the morning by the back end of a Mexican restaurant. Elle found herself frozen. Unlike her paralysis before, this wasn’t of her own making. She was transfixed by executive man. As she watched him, she swore she saw his shoulders rise and sink like he was exhaling hard. Then he walked to the trunk.
The trunk opened and Elle could not see what the man was doing. This is silly, she thought. This whole night has been—
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the man struggling with something in the trunk. He was, she discerned, trying to get something out of the trunk and was having difficulty with it. Something heavy.
When she first saw the blonde hair, it didn’t register.
The sudden explosion of surreality was functionally incomprehensible. Like if you were at dinner at an expensive restaurant and suddenly acrobats took over and began hurling each other across the room and leaping between the immaculately set tables. She didn’t even realize her mouth was wide open until minutes later.
The hair was blonde but not real blonde like Elle’s younger sister, Sara. It was dyed blonde, something you could tell even in the ambient light. She looked young. Her face was covered in shadow so much at first that all Elle could make out was that she appeared to be wearing the remnants of bright blue eye shadow. But her youth was in her shape and her size. The blonde had the body of a young woman with thin bare arms. Lithe legs that were flopping aimlessly as executive man wrenched her out of the trunk and put her over his right shoulder.
That’s when Elle first saw the blood. It was coming from the blonde’s head, and as executive man turned, the light from the Mexican restaurant splashed over them, revealing her blonde hair was matted with a brown and crimson stain that was unmistakable to Elle.
“Oh my God.” She breathed, almost involuntarily.
Elle had no idea what the blonde’s condition was, but she wasn’t moving. Nor was she offering any resistance to executive man who marched away from his inky black BMW with her thrown over his shoulder like a worn out rug. Elle strained to see if she could tell whether the blonde was still breathing but decided after a few seconds that she couldn’t. The horror slowly built in her chest, and Elle watched wordlessly as executive man walked towards a dark shape that Elle couldn’t make out at first. Then it crashed over her like a dark wave.
A dumpster.
Elle felt a noise rise in her throat, a combination of a groan and a grunt. Disbelief was pulling hard at her, and she wanted to follow it. This is not happening. This can’t be happening. Her mind raced about what she should do. Part of her wanted to jump out of the car and charge at executive man, to stop him, and to revive the poor young blonde and put the last several minutes back in the genie’s bottle. The rest of her was terror. She did not want whatever executive man had done to the blonde to happen to her.
Any struggles that executive man had in getting the blonde out of the BMW’s trunk were gone. Elle’s eyes were mercilessly transfixed on him as he hefted the small female body over the top lip of the dirty green dumpster. He then pushed up from the woman’s painted toes—hot pink,
Elle saw—under the ball of her foot and heaved upwards until her body slithered into the dumpster and vanished completely. Elle realized her right hand was at her mouth and she was biting down on her index finger. Tears were welling in her eyes as executive man brushed his hands off like he had just moved something foul and unpleasant and walked back to the BMW. He paused briefly at the trunk to touch a button that automatically closed it without making so much as a click. Still brushing at his hands to remove whatever was on them, executive man quickly opened the driver’s side door and got in. The headlights of the BMW blasted onto the street and Elle froze with her heart pounding in her chest. He has to see me. He has to know that I saw him. For a long second, her fate seemed to hang in the air.
Then, the BMW dropped into gear and quickly accelerated up the street right past her. Elle’s hands were shaking so violently that she had to open and close them a few times before she felt steady enough to open the door to her car. She ran to the dumpster and called out:
“Hello? Hello, can you hear me? Are you okay?” She frantically searched for something to stand on so that she could see into the dumpster. “Please be okay. I’m a nurse! Please be okay, please be okay!” There was nothing to stand on. She couldn’t see inside to find the young woman.
Elle looked around for someone, anyone, to help her.
Jacob.
She started to run towards Jacob’s house but three steps into her run she pulled up and stood for a moment. What would she say? In truth, what she would say to Jacob paled in comparison to what she would tell Mitch. What she would have to tell him. There was no immediately available explanation for why she was in the streets in East Nashville at almost four o’clock in the morning. Her entire existence appeared before her eyes. He would take the ring back. She would be the talk of every man, woman, and child at Vanderbilt Hospital. For years. Whatever department she worked in the story would follow her around like a bad odor.
But the woman in the dumpster.
Elle ran back to her car and went into her purse looking for her cell phone. Naturally, it was nowhere she could find it. Out of frustration, she dumped her entire purse into the passenger seat and finally saw the glitter of her phone’s case flash in the darkness before it tumbled to the passenger floorboard. She had to almost crawl into the driver’s seat to pull it out. When she looked at the display, she momentarily saw that she had a missed call from a familiar number.
Mitch. He had left a message five hours earlier. She caught the flick of light from her ring out of the corner of her eye. She stood up, clutching her cell phone in her hand.
In the painful weeks that followed, Elle reflected that she had faced a choice at that moment near the dumpster. Whatever executive man had done or not done had not affected her. At least not on the surface. The secrets of her entanglement with Jacob could have remained buried. Temporarily, if not forever. As she considered the events of that night over and over again, as she was walked through them by family and friends and detectives and lawyers, she considered what was, at first glance, the choice she had at that moment. Whatever terrible decisions she had made, everyone usually said, she had made the right decision about what to do.
What they didn’t know, what no one understood was that it hadn’t really been a choice at all. The young blonde woman took any choice from her. In the street that night, in the quiet calm of an almost morning, Elle swallowed hard and lifted the phone to her face, opening up the display.
She dialed three numbers.
