34. Sinclair
Sinclair
Mickey Brown is the Swiss Army knife of fixers, with a razor-sharp blade for every occasion. And by blade, I mean a member of his team: experts who are so highly skilled and so morally ambivalent that they can handle anything.
I should know. My family keeps him in business, after all.
I call him on the way home from that utter disaster. Never have I felt so helpless, every last tool in my toolbox lying uselessly at my feet. My mandate to him is simple: get me everything possible on Elyse Ward’s family situation and, crucially, her financial one, too.
I have a couple theories, and I’d like to see them put to the test.
At the very least, enlisting Mickey’s help is a distraction from this powerlessness I’m feeling.
He’s my Hail Mary, my last distress flare.
He’s one final bastion of competence and levelheadedness in a world where I’m rapidly losing my mind.
Having all sense of control taken from you, having people—women—all around you deciding to stonewall you, will do that to a guy.
Now I just need Mickey to come good.
He does come good, less than forty-eight hours later. I sit at my desk and devour his dossier with indecent haste.
First, I force myself to do the most painful thing and acquaint myself with the details of Sylvie Ward’s accident.
Mickey has pulled both the report from Bayonne PD and the letter from one of the specialists at Jersey City Medical Center to her primary care practitioner.
The police report is a matter of public record, but I don’t want to think about what ethical lines Mickey’s “blades” crossed to steal someone’s private medical records.
I pull up the PDF of the police report, which is sobering in its clinical flatness. I scan it and see at a glance the ways in which the law has failed Sylvie, who was about eight blocks away from her home on the evening of June 7 when she was hit by a dark-colored sedan.
Vehicle 2 struck the rear wheel of the bicycle, ejecting the rider, who landed on the roadway approximately 15–20 feet from the point of impact, impacting the rider on her right side. Her helmet was dislodged on impact.
My sight begins to darken at the periphery, and I close my eyes for a long moment, blowing out a shuddery breath. My hands are sweating, and I wipe them on my pants. For a second, I’m back there on a pitch-black road in the bowels of Long Island.
But this is important. I open my eyes and force myself to read on, bracing for more verbal brutality. The report surmises that the driver was probably doing over the speed limit, given how far Sylvie was thrown, and then continues with absolutely no leads of value:
Vehicle 2 driver: UNKNOWN. Fled scene. No plate obtained. Witness reported seeing a dark-colored sedan continuing north on Avenue A. No skid marks were observed at the scene, suggesting the driver did not brake prior to or following impact.
Motherfucker.
The police stopped looking for the driver by the end of August. Case suspended pending new information, which sounds like laziness to me. With a shaking hand, I close out of the PDF and click on the medical letter instead. I scan the wording.
…comminuted fracture of the acetabulum and pelvic ring... open reduction internal fixation... hardware... foley, transfusions, DVT prophylaxis... non-weight-bearing for ten to twelve weeks... patient counseled regarding likelihood of post-traumatic arthritis and arthroplasty in her future.
I don’t understand most of the medical jargon, but it seems fair to conclude that, in plain English, the PCP letter is saying that Sylvie was fucked.
Some frustrated googling uncovers the following: that when she was thrown across the street like a rag doll, she landed on her right hip, driving the ball into the cup and shattering the latter while also cracking her pelvic ring.
Jesus Christ.
No wonder the poor woman is still using a wheelchair six months later, although if my memory serves, Elyse mentioned that Sylvie is spending more and more time on crutches around the house.
Arguably the most ominous phrases in the letter are those in the future tense: the specialist seems to be suggesting that Sylvie may need a hip replacement later if she develops arthritis in the reconstructed socket.
And here she is, a single, working mom whose company failed to provide her with adequate cover against this kind of accident—if you can call a sedan mowing into a cyclist accidental.
Even if the hitting part was an accident, the running part certainly wasn’t, and that is a truth far too uncomfortable for me to entertain in this moment. So it’s a relief to move on to the financial evidence Mickey has unearthed.
First things first: my theory was correct. Statements from Elyse’s checking account show two credits from Pink Onyx Corp.—Alchemy, I assume—in October to the tune of ten grand each… and two debits, each one made the day after the monies dropped, to a physical therapy center in Bayonne.
Mickey’s paper trail also names the patient receiving treatment at said PT center—Sylvie Ward—and shows her statement of account there as well as earlier correspondence from the center threatening to halt all treatment unless payments were made against the balance.
Fuck.
I slam my MacBook closed for a moment and consider the significance this evidence yields my theory.
First—Elyse used every cent I gave her to pay down her sister’s medical debt. Every single cent. She didn’t even take a hundred dollars for herself.
Second—and this is honestly a tough one to sit with—I made a calculated bet, when she rejected my advances that first night at the bar, that ten grand would be a sum she couldn’t say no to.
I mean, anyone working bar shifts to make ends meet could use ten grand, right?
The way I saw it, she could protect her morals or choose the money.
But these bank statements shed new light over her state of mind, and I don’t like it.
Because, in her head, she had far less of a choice than I thought.
She couldn’t leave that money on the table when her family was up to its eyeballs in medical debt, so she took it…
and she laundered every last cent of it into an act of love for her sister.
Third—I was pissed enough when she turned down the twenty-five grand I wanted to pay her for each evening at my apartment.
But in light of the above? I’m only just realizing how excruciating it must have been for her to leave that money on the table—especially since she’d just learned that she hadn’t gotten the Voss job.
At the time, I found her decision irritating rather than noble.
But it allows me to think that she really was in as deep as me, even then.
She needed every dollar of that money, but something changed for her emotionally between the Alchemy sessions and showing up to my apartment.
And that something was strong enough that she couldn’t stomach taking my money anymore—right after I’d screwed her over with the modeling job she’d won on her own merits.
Which brings me, conveniently, to my fourth conclusion:
Elyse was right. Sylvie was right. Fuck, even Vanessa was right.
What I did to Elyse in that conference room was the grossest overstep, the most devastating act of betrayal I could have inflicted on someone I love.
I was so fucking dismissive. I acted on instinct, exactly like the toddler she said I was, and I didn’t give a second thought to what it might mean for her and her family to lose out on that opportunity.
What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, right?
Wrong.
Because I’m looking at another very illuminating stack of documents, all pertaining to Sylvie’s emergency care, surgery, and a ton of other shit. I scan the invoices quickly to see what fell through the net after the insurance company paid up.
Two hundred and eleven grand to Jersey City Medical Center for the ER, OR, blood, meds—the lot.
Another hundred, give or take, for various physicians.
And fifty for the ambulances, some in-patient rehab, and fuck knows what else.
Jesus Christ.
She wasn’t kidding about underinsurance.
Sylvie Ward owes a total of three hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars to the hospital, its affiliates, and the PT center.
Judging from the amount of red ink on the most recent statements, the hospital is handing its share over to third-party debt collectors very fucking soon.
Yeah—nope.
That’s not happening.
If the events of these past few days have taught me that I’m good for precisely nothing but my money, then the other side of that coin is that my money can do good where I cannot.
It can gain access where I cannot. And, even if Elyse never wants to see me again, I may just be able to sleep easier knowing that I came into her life and left her and her family with one good thing: the knowledge that the roof over their heads is secure.
I pull up Mickey’s number and send him a terse voice note.
“I want all of that medical debt cleared, but it needs to be anonymously done. Got it? I don’t want my name anywhere near it. And it needs to be done now.” God knows I do not want the Ward family’s Thanksgiving to be overshadowed by debt collectors knocking on their door.
Mickey calls me back within the hour.
“There are a few charities that buy bundles of debt from hospital providers, usually for cents on the dollar, but the ones I spoke to are adamant that they won’t pay off individuals’ debt on demand. That’s not how they work. It has to be done at the county level—it’s policy.”
That’s not how they work. What a crock of shit. I sigh. “Call one back and tell them that I’ll pay down a hundred times that much, but I want one percent of that donation to go to the fucking Wards. Of course they can do it. I don’t want that Computer says no bullshit.”
“So, what, thirty-six-point-six mil to Hudson County medical debts, but the Wards have to be within that bundle. Consider it done. You won’t end up paying anything near the nominal amount. Like I said, they can clear it up for pennies.”
I don’t give a fuck what kind of distressed purchase value I can get on this thing. God knows I’m paying for ancient sins as well as recent ones. “How will the Wards be notified?” I ask instead.
“The charities do these branded letters. You get one in the mail—‘Hey there, you’re now debt-free.’ It’s like Santa Claus came early.”
I like that. I like that a lot. I try very hard to envision Elyse’s face, bright with the best kind of disbelief instead of dark with the worst kind of heartache. It doesn’t exactly work, but I’ll keep trying.
Mickey hangs up without saying goodbye, and I throw my cell down, dragging my hands over my eyes.
It’s not enough… but it’s something.