by Robin Cook
Damn! Didn’t see that coming!
He peered over the now-leaning fence and scanned the courtyard area. There was still no sign of anyone about. He was fairly sure the noise had gone undetected. He looked down at the pot fragments and clumps of dirt that had spilled out of it. In the dark it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like Sal had been growing tomatoes in it. Not anymore. He pushed the fragments into the patio corner with his foot and then tried to pull the fence to its original position. No luck. And pulling it made a lot of noise. He’d try to deal with it later from the opposite side.
George tried the glass sliding door. It was locked, but it was an older model, so all he had to do was lift the sliding panel up to disengage the latch.
A moment later George was inside the apartment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He didn’t feel at all comfortable turning on the lights. He felt like a burglar. A thud from above made him freeze, then he realized it was just the tenants in the apartment upstairs moving around. He had a flashlight app on his phone. Until now he had only used it to read menus in dark restaurants, but now he flipped it on. It threw a strong but concentrated beam of pure white light through the phone’s camera flash feature.
He panned the light across the room, wondering where Sal would have kept his personal phone book. He moved into the kitchen, searching the counter below the wall-mounted landline. Nothing. He methodically worked his way through the kitchen, pulling out drawers and digging through them. They were filled with papers, but there was no particular order. Sal must have saved every piece of paper he ever received. George found an address book and was encouraged, only to see that it was brand-new, with no entries at all.
He returned to the living room, checking the coffee and end tables. No luck there, either. All that was left were the small bedroom and tiny bathroom. In the bedroom he found a number of magazines, old newspapers, and letters. He groaned but, having come this far, steeled himself to go through it all, hoping he might find a letter from one of the sisters. For one who was so meticulous about his car, Sal didn’t seem to mind that his apartment was a haphazard mess.
George carried all the material over to the bed. Holding the phone with the flashlight in his left hand, he began rapidly shuffling through it. Nothing. His eyes shifted to the nightstand. There was a television remote, the latest issue of Car World, a book about the Civil War, and . . . aha! A worn address book!
The sound of a dog barking outside startled George. He sat still and listened. He heard it again and relaxed, recognizing it as coming from out on the street, not from the courtyard. He reached for the address book, but stopped his hand in midair. He heard another, more disturbing noise. It sounded as if the door to the apartment was opening slowly. A chill ran down George’s spine.
With his heart pounding, George started to stand up when a blinding light hit him in the face. A second later another bright light hit him from outside the window.
“Freeze!” The command came from a disembodied male voice.
George froze, not from the command but from sheer terror. In the next instant the bedroom’s overhead light flipped on, flooding the room.
“Hold it right there!” ordered a uniformed LAPD policeman standing in the doorway, his firearm pointed at George, who had dropped the phone. “Hands in the air!”
With great effort, as if his muscles were refusing to function, George raised his hands. They were visibly trembling.
“I got him!” the policeman yelled to his partner in the courtyard. “Get your ass in here on the double!”
The officer in the bedroom advanced toward George. “Drop to the ground, facedown! Spread your arms and legs! Now!”
George obeyed and immediately felt a sharp pain in his back as the officer’s knee pressed into it. A moment later the second officer charged into the room. He grabbed George’s wrists, cuffed them behind his back, and quickly patted him down. “He’s clean!” The two officers roughly hauled George to his feet.
• • •
George stood by the police cruiser at the rear of his apartment complex. The uniformed officer who had apprehended George was looking down at his smartphone, taking notes while he interviewed George. He had George’s driver’s license along with his hospital ID tucked between the two of his fingers holding the phone.
“And how long did you say you lived here?” the policeman inquired.
“A bit more than three years,” George answered. His voice was tremulous from the adrenaline still coursing through his system and his cognition was not what it should have been, but otherwise he had recovered for the most part. He was now feeling indignant about how he was being treated.
A small group of bystanders, many in sleepwear, were watching the proceedings. George looked vainly for Zee but didn’t see him. Instead he recognized an older woman in pajamas among the group who lived up on the second floor.
“Mrs. Bernstein!” George called out to her. She frowned and looked away. George turned his attention back to the cop. “You don’t want to tape this, too?”
The policeman looked up. “Pardon me?”
“Just wondering why you’re not taping this. I was recently told by an officer that details can be forgotten if you’re not careful.” George angled his face down to try and read the cop’s phone. “At least I don’t think you’re taping this.”
The cop stared at him. George knew he was coming off as a smart-ass, which wasn’t his intention, but it was hard to stop. The whole episode felt surreal.
“Sorry. It’s just that one of your colleagues was interviewing me earlier today and he . . .” George trailed off, realizing that he was digging himself into a deeper hole.
“You were interviewed by another police officer earlier today?”
George backpedaled, getting nervous. “Yes. But not because I did anything wrong. It was right after Sal’s car crash, which I’m certain you have heard about. Sal’s the neighbor whose apartment you found me in.” George nodded down toward the IDs that the officer had between his fingers. “I’m a radiology resident at L.A. University Medical Center and your colleague was trying to put together a picture of what had happened.”
“What did happen?”
“Sal—Mr. DeAngelis—apparently got confused and crashed his car and killed himself. I guess. I mean, that’s what appears to have happened. He had Alzheimer’s and multiple problems. Anyway, I wanted to try to help by getting in touch with the two sisters whom I had met some time ago, to let them know what had happened. I was looking for their contacts.”
“So you broke into a neighbor’s apartment at night to get in touch with a dead man’s sisters?” The policeman smiled sarcastically.
George opened his mouth to respond, then stopped.
“Look, I just wanted to call Mr. DeAngelis’s siblings and let them know he died today. Is that a crime?” George said.
“The way you went about it is. You couldn’t have asked the building manager to let you in?”
“Ha! I tried enlisting the super’s help but . . . The man has a drinking problem, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
George and the officer looked across the way to where the second officer was interviewing the super. The man was still having trouble standing. He kept leaning against the building before pulling himself up straight and crossing his arms in front of him in an attempt to appear sober.
“And I leave for work early in the morning before he gets up,” George continued. “Look, I didn’t think it would be all that big a deal. I have the exact same apartment, and I’ve gotten into mine through the sliders a number of times when I forgot my keys. I thought I’d just go in, grab the phone numbers, make the call, and that would be it.”
“And you didn’t trust the proper authorities to make those calls?”
“Listen!” George said, his voice progressively rising. “The fact of the matter is that I do
n’t think anyone was told about the sisters. I had mentioned it earlier today to the detective who talked to me, but I had heard through a friend that during the evening news it was stated the victim had no family. And I was told earlier that I was listed as the patient’s contact person in case of emergency. Just me! Tonight I realized someone had to try to get a hold of the sisters. I was only trying to help.” By the time George finished, he was practically yelling.
The second police officer stopped talking with the super and looked over at George. The small crowd of neighbors and passersby went quiet, too.
“Sorry,” George said to the cop. “It’s been an emotional day.”
With a look of exasperation, the officer turned George around. Without saying anything further, he unlocked the handcuffs, setting George free.
• • •
Trudging back to his apartment, George realized that he had narrowly succeeded in talking his way out of being arrested. The super’s being so obviously drunk had helped. Still, George was furious with himself. What the hell had he been thinking? Back inside his apartment, he again threw himself onto his sofa, thinking that he had to get a grip.
18
EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT
L.A. UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2014, 10:51 A.M.
It was a busy morning for George in the ER. The department was jammed with patients and the construction crew. The heat wave just made things worse. Patients suffering from heatstroke and heat exhaustion were streaming in, and there had also been an uptick in heart attacks and respiratory problems. The high temperatures also brought out the infamous L.A. road rage. A couple of fender-benders had resulted in a shoot-out and a knife fight. Victims of both were currently being treated in the trauma rooms. The result was that George and Carlos were overwhelmed with radiology studies. Of the six possible stroke cases, they had determined that five were in fact positive, requiring immediate medical intervention. The sixth case turned out to be an ophthalmic migraine masquerading as a stroke. There had also been two head traumas. On one, the CT scan showed a subdural hematoma, requiring immediate surgery. The only good news was that George was so busy, he didn’t have time to think about Sal’s death, Tarkington’s passing, or his own near arrest. He’d been holed up in the imaging room since seven thirty, working nonstop.
Just before eleven, Carlos returned from a quick coffee break to find George surveying a new batch of radiological studies.
The first was a chest film of a driver in a recent accident whose airbag did not deploy.
“What do you see?” George asked Carlos.
“A fracture of the clavicle . . . and several ribs.” Carlos pointed to the fractures in turn.
“Anything else?”
“There’s a small amount of fluid in the lungs.”
George was impressed. Carlos was picking up the nuances quickly. “Good. Let’s go on to the next case.”
“I saw Dr. Hanson out there in the ER,” Carlos said as he brought up the next image. It was a pelvis.
“Really! What was he up to?” George asked. As Clayton was head of the teaching program in radiology, the residents generally liked to know when he was around, since they knew they were being evaluated on a month-to-month basis. They would alert each other when he was lurking nearby, usually by tweet or text. But George was more sensitized than usual, since Clayton had showed up in the ER only the day before.
“It seemed like he came in to talk with Debbie Waters. He just ignored me and asked Debbie if he could have a private word with her, even though she was obviously busy.”
“Is he still out there?” George asked, unsure if he should be concerned or not. Under the circumstances, his talking in private with Debbie was a tad worrisome.
Carlos shrugged. “He was when I came in here.”
George stood up, cracked the door, and looked outside. Sure enough, Clayton was leaning against the main desk, folder in hand, having a prolonged tête-à-tête with Debbie. Now, that was particularly unusual behavior in the middle of the day, especially with the level of confusion swirling around them. Vaguely, George wondered if they might be resurrecting their own rumored relationship. But if that was the case, it was even more unusual that they would do so in plain sight. The one good thing was that he couldn’t imagine that they could be talking about him for so long.
At that instant both Clayton’s and Debbie’s heads swung around and seemed to stare in George’s direction. George pulled back, alarmed that they might be able to see him spying on them. He quickly let the door close and went back to where he had been sitting.
“This is a seventy-eight-year-old woman who fell in the shower,” Carlos said, beginning where he had left off, but then changed the subject. “Hey, what’s this about Clayton Hanson liking the ladies? Is it true? It’s been tweeted around us first-year residents, particularly to warn the women.”
George laughed. He noticed it was the first time Carlos left off the “Dr.” in referring to Clayton. He was already loosening up. “I think I’ll take the Fifth on that issue,” said George, directing their attention back to the film. “Let’s get back to work. What’s your take here?”
At that moment Clayton opened the door and stepped in. Although he had appeared relaxed at the ER’s central desk when George had looked out at him, now he seemed anxious and rushed, as if whatever he had been discussing with Debbie had gotten him fired up.
“Can I have a quick word, George?”
Carlos immediately stood up. “Excuse me. I need a bathroom break anyway.” He quickly left the room.
George felt his pulse quicken. He had no idea what was coming but feared that Clayton might have learned of his near arrest. The administration did not take kindly to residents having run-ins with the law.
But Clayton just lowered his voice and asked, “Did you have time to chat up Kelley?” He took Carlos’s seat and leaned forward.
“No,” George said, bewildered. Why was that even remotely important enough to come in and interrupt a reading session?
“A little slow on the draw, are we?” Clayton teased, with eyebrows raised.
“I have to wait for the right moment, and with the crash and all it probably won’t happen today either. I actually haven’t even seen her. A lot of the routine ER visits are being seen over in the clinic building with the construction going on.” George would have liked to tell Clayton to ease up on his efforts to perk up George’s nonexistent social life, but he didn’t have the courage.
“If you don’t jump on this, you’ll be losing out possibly, I’ve heard, to a couple of hot-ticket first-year orthopedic residents from Harvard.” Clayton laughed as he gave George a light jab to the shoulder. The laugh sounded false, like it was forced.
George didn’t answer, restraining himself from asking Clayton what he had been doing in the morgue.
“Have you at least followed up with Debbie Waters? The more I’ve thought about it, you would really have some fun with her.”
“Debbie’s not interested in me. My sense is that she’s after bigger game than a resident.”
“Not true! She’s just being professional. She doesn’t want any more hospital gossip. She got her fill of that when we dated a few years back. I was just talking with her, and she confessed that she’d been eyeing you for months. She’s been hoping you would show a little interest.”
George laughed. “Yesterday I tried to get her attention, but she pretty much just ignored me.”
“That is not true. She thinks you’re quite handsome.”
George rolled his eyes.
“Hey, give it a shot,” Clayton persisted. “As a personal favor to me. I mean, after I talked you up and everything.”
“Does she know about Kasey?”
“Of course. She has a lot of respect for you being ser
ious with someone with problematic medical issues.”
“Is that it? She feels sorry for me?”
“Hell no. It’s respect, not sympathy. Jesus, lighten up. She’d like to be your friend.”
“Are you bullshitting me? If you are, I have to tell you that I’m a bit vulnerable right now.”
“Swear to God. I’ll go out there right this minute and bring her back here to the radiology reading room so she can tell you herself.”
George was horrified. “No! I’ll figure out my own way to talk with her.”
“Okay. All right. I’m going to count on it, so don’t be shy. It’s not healthy to be isolated like you are. Even considering the, you know, the tragedy and all. Like I said, it’s not like you have to marry Debbie, for Chrissake. Just get out. Pretend you’re normal.”
“I appreciate the concern, but my ego has taken a few hits lately.”
“I wish I was back in my twenties.” Clayton got to his feet and opened the door to the ER. “No grass would be growing under my feet. I can tell you that.”
Carlos, who had been waiting outside, strolled back in, passing Clayton with a nod and suck-up smile. Clayton ignored him.
“What was that all about?” Carlos inquired, nodding toward the door that was settling into its jamb.
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Let’s get these films read.”
Carlos revived the monitor. It had gone to sleep.
As the image of the X-ray came up, George found himself marveling over the absurdity of the head of the radiology resident program worrying about George’s social life. But be that as it may, he began to wonder how he might approach Debbie, having now essentially promised Clayton that he would.
“Do you remember this case?” Carlos asked.
“I think so. A seventy-eight-year-old woman who fell in the shower, injuring her right hip. So what do you see?”