by J. Paul Drew
I told Jacob we couldn’t tell people to bring Terry home without first saying she was missing and he said he didn’t see why not and we went around for a while. That’s the way it always is.
Finally he saw that nothing was going to get in the paper unless he gave in a bit, and so he did. That’s also the way it always is, and it’s very trying, all that wasted energy.
Then I told Jacob I needed a couple of desperate-father quotes to round things out.
“Just tell them,” he said, “that I miss her. I’m not myself without her. I need her and miss her and want her back with me.”
Now was the time to ask the question that was bothering me. “Do you love her?” I said.
“She’s my whole life.”
It was about the weirdest breakfast of my life, but at least there was a page 1 story in it. I went back, wrote it, and handed it in. Joey did exactly what I knew he’d do— sent me back to Kogene with a cameraman.
Steve Koehler was in the reception area when we got there. He walked over and shook hands, all smiles. “Nice to see you again. What can we do for you?”
But I didn’t have to answer because Jacob poked his head out about that time, apparently looking for Steve. I told him we needed a picture to go with the story and also mentioned something else Joey wanted— a few quotes from Marilyn.
So he went to get her and it was obvious this was the first she’d heard of the interview. But she gave the quotes and they posed together. They seemed happy. At least they seemed to have some sort of strong bond between them. Probably it was genetics. At any rate, it was hard for me to reconcile the notion of being married to a woman like Marilyn Markham with Jacob’s cold dismissal— “How on earth could she be my mate? How could I possibly breed with her?”
It was equally hard to reconcile his crazy story about Project Terry with the way he said “She’s my whole life.” The way he looked and sounded when he said it damn near made me cry.
CHAPTER 17
I went back to the office and called the University of California Medical Center. They told me Dr. Rumler was in pediatrics at Moffitt Hospital and on vacation. So I called Booker the burglar.
“How’d you like to help me out again tonight?”
“I don’t know. How interesting is it?”
“UC Med Center. A doctor’s office.”
“Not bad.” He thought a minute. “A piece of cake, of course, but at least it has a little color to it. What are we looking for?”
“A patient’s chart.”
“I like it. I wouldn’t mind at all.”
“What time do we go?”
“I can’t tell yet. I’ve got some arrangements to make. Can you call back in two hours?”
“Sure.”
Next I called John Reid, the young biochemist who’d shown me around Kogene.
“Have you ever heard of something called a smart bomb?”
“Sure. It’s a way of delivering a drug to the target site.”
“Come again?”
“Say the disease is— oh, breast cancer— and you’ve got a cure for it. You’ve still got to get it to the afflicted cells— they’re the target site.”
“Go on.”
“So, say breast cancer manifests a protein that distinguishes it from healthy cells— let’s call that Protein B. You can use antibodies to recognize it.”
“How’s that?”
“A monoclonal antibody is one that will bind to only one thing. So if you can find the one that binds to Protein B, you can make a smart bomb and zap the cancer.”
“Oh. So how do I do it?”
“Well, you just mix your drug with your antibody and a lipid and you pass sound through it. Then what happens is like a miracle. Everything assembles into a biological form called a micelle— a little cell with the drug in it. The antibody is embedded in the lipid, and it sticks out, so it can bind with the protein. It’s like one of those oranges stuck with cloves.”
I thanked him and hung up.
It was late enough to have a beer and go home and I did, hoping I wasn’t going to find an empty house again. I kind of liked having Sardis around.
She was there all right, with a pork roast in the oven and a pie cooling on top of the fridge. She all but met me at the door with a martini. She had on a dress and her legs looked terrific. She was terrific. Spot was terrific. It was all terrific. I wondered if this was what it was like to have a family.
We had some Mondavi Barberone. Sardis kicked off her shoes and sat at the end of the sofa with her feet in my lap. We had some more Barberone.
Eventually Sardis took her feet out of my lap and sat in it herself and wrapped her gorgeous legs around me and kissed me. I kissed her back. Her fingers made little feathery strokes on my back and neck and face.
All very nice, but I just wasn’t in the mood to go any further. I stopped kissing her and just sort of held her, hoping she’d get the idea. She did, but she wanted things absolutely clear: “Don’t you want to make love?”
“Not right now. Maybe later.”
“Is something bothering you?”
“No. Not really. I have to go out for a while tonight. I guess I’m not very relaxed.”
She looked at her watch. “When do you have to go?”
“Omigod. I have to make a phone call.” I was an hour late calling Booker.
He said we had to be at the hospital before eight, because that was when visiting hours ended. He also told me what to wear and pointed out that it was after seven. So much for the pork roast.
“Bad news,” I told Sardis. “I have to go now.”
“When will you be back?”
“With any luck, around ten or eleven, I’d say. Maybe later.”
“But you haven’t eaten.”
I kissed her lightly. “A fact I very much regret. I’m really sorry about this.”
“Maybe I could make you a sandwich.”
“No, thanks. Listen, I’ve got to change.” I went in the bedroom and put on my new white jeans and an ordinary button-down pinstripe shirt, as Booker had ordered. (Actually, he said to make sure the shirt was a few years old and a little frayed, but the only clothes I had were brand-new. It was just dumb luck I’d bought white jeans instead of tan ones.)
“You look very nice,” Sardis said. “Do you think… I mean, would it be all right if I asked you where you’re going?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t tell you.”
“Oh. I guess I made an ass of myself making dinner and everything. I forgot you had a social life before I knew you.”
“Look, I can’t talk about it now. I’m late.”
“Maybe when you come home.”
“There’s something I ought to tell you. I may not make it home tonight.” I meant, of course, that I might be arrested, but in retrospect I have to admit the timing was terrible. Sardis looked stricken, so I said, “Will you bail me out if I don’t?”
She managed only a very pallid little smile, thinking I was making a joke to cover an awkward moment. But there was no time to deal with it now. I had to go burgle a hospital.
Booker and I met outside our target. He was wearing a white jacket, the sort you can buy at any uniform supply store, and jeans. He pulled a stethoscope out of his pocket and told me to put it around my neck. I did and we looked exactly like a couple of hip young docs.
There was a candy stand to the left as we entered, and an information desk on the right. Near the candy stand was a hospital directory. Booker never gave it a glance. He just sauntered, bearing left, till he got to the elevators. I followed him aboard and he punched 8.
We couldn’t talk as we rode, as we weren’t alone, but when we got off, Booker sauntered us unerringly to a men’s room. No one was there, and a good thing, because I could hardly contain my enthusiasm for Booker’s style: “Those ‘arrangements’ you mentioned. You cased the joint.”
He shrugged. “It’s my job.”
“Did you buy the stethoscope especially
for this?”
“No. It kind of comes in handy sometimes in my work. But the jacket’s new— you like?”
“You can wear it to Perry’s.”
“No, no, no. Mcdonald, you don’t know anything. It’s for Carlos O’Brien’s in Tiburon.”
“Oh.” An amazing man, Booker. A key for every lock and the right clothes for every singles joint.
“Now, here’s the drill. I don’t know what security is like after eight o’clock, but I figure as long as we look like docs we can pretty much come and go as we please. It’s 7:50 now. Take off your stethoscope.”
I did and he took off his coat. Now I was just a visitor in white jeans and Booker was another in regular jeans. “Let’s go in the meditation room until just before eight— they may lock it for the night— and then we’ll go down to six.”
“Six?”
“The sixth floor. Pediatrics.”
The meditation room had ornate wooden doors that looked as if, in less secular days, they’d opened into a chapel. The room itself was bare and a bit grim. Booker pulled a couple of straight wooden chairs close to the wall and sat down in one, facing the wall and keeping his back very straight. I sat in the other and followed suit.
We were alone in the room, but if someone came in, all he’d see would be the backs of two serious meditators, probably with desperately ill family in the hospital. Probably he’d leave right away, embarrassed at disturbing us. Booker had thought of everything.
At 7:59 exactly, Booker got up, motioned for me to follow, and led the way back to the men’s room. Again, no one was there, so we slipped into our respective stethoscope and coat and stepped back into the corridor.
The next part was an unbelievable piece of cake. We just got off the elevator, turned right, and went through a door that led to a corridor with eight or ten doctors’ offices opening off it. Booker was a marvel.
It was nothing to find Dr. Rumler’s office and walk right in, with the aid of the key of the day, selected by Booker in about one and one half seconds. Dr. Rumler had a file cabinet and three deep drawers in his desk. Terry Koehler’s chart wasn’t in it or them.
“It’s a bust,” I said.
“Can’t find it?” Booker’s voice was sympathetic. “Is the chart you want the only one missing? Or aren’t there any charts at all here?”
“No charts at all.”
“Well, never fear. They must be somewhere in the hospital. The question is where.”
“Maybe we could just walk to the pediatrics desk and ask for it.”
Booker shook his head. “Too risky. The nurse or whoever’s there must know what docs would be on at night. We can only get away with this if people see us at a distance. I mean, we look like we might be docs or we might be orderlies or even male nurses, I guess. But we don’t know who’s authorized to look at a chart and who’s not.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“Let’s just take a spin around and see what we can see.”
“Okay.”
We walked down the corridor with the offices and turned onto another full of rooms with sick kids in them. The light was dim and I thought it was one of the most depressing places I’d ever been. But then we came to a more depressing one— the corridor with the intensive care nursery on it. You could see the babies through the windows— most of them about the size of a football and lots of them full of tubes and needles. At the moment I wasn’t crazy about Booker’s job.
We passed the desk and saw a rack full of blue loose-leaf notebooks that looked like charts for the patients who were currently admitted. What we didn’t see was a sort of central room where old charts were kept.
We found yet another corridor— the floor’s main one— and gave it a whirl. It, too, housed a lot of doctor’s offices, but it also had doors with no names on them. Booker simply opened them up. But not a chart did we find.
“That must mean,” Booker said, “that all the hospital’s charts are kept together, rather than separately by clinic. Maybe even all the charts from all the hospitals in the med center are kept together.”
“We’ve got to find out where.”
“I’ve got an idea. Let’s go back to Rumler’s office.” Booker’s idea was simplicity itself. He picked up Rumler’s blue med center directory and turned to Charts. That didn’t work, so he tried Records. No luck, but he was undaunted. He simply started at the beginning and read every listing, looking for a likely one. Fortunately, he only had to go halfway through the book: Medical Records had to be it.
The only trouble was, the directory didn’t say where it was. All it had in it were phone numbers, not locations. Clearly we couldn’t ask someone in the hospital, as we were supposed to look like we knew what we were doing. Even if we got away with it, it would draw attention to us. So that was out. At least that was my theory.
“Au contraire,” said Booker. “Asking someone in the hospital is the only way to find it. Ergo, exactly what we shall do.” He talked funny for a burglar.
But he burgled like an angel. He motioned me to follow him to the first floor, where he found a pay phone and dialed Moffitt Hospital.
“Hello,” he said, “can you tell me where Medical Records is?”
The operator said something, probably, “Shall I connect you?”
“No, thanks,” said Booker. “A friend who works there left something at my house and I need to return it… . Okay, good. Where’s that, exactly? Got it. Thanks a lot.” He got off the phone, giggling his head off. “Everybody’s so goddam helpful. I could have called my friend, right? And asked him where his office is. But she was so busy being nice she didn’t even think of it. Sort of restores your faith in human nature, being a crook.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of it exactly that way.”
Booker nodded. “It’s true though. There’d be a lot less crime today if the average citizen were more suspicious.”
“So where’s Medical Records?”
“Let’s sit down a minute.” He led the way to a batch of chairs near the doors. “Here’s the thing. It’s not in this building. It’s in the Ambulatory Care Center, that big glass building across the street.”
“Let’s go.”
“Uh-uh. I haven’t cased it. There might be a security guard or God knows what kind of alarm system. There might even be people working in the building. Anyway, I have a funny feeling about Medical Records.”
“What?”
“Well, listen, if you had some chronic disease and you were in and out of the hospital, sometimes you might get sick at night, right? And they’d need your chart.”
“So you think Medical Records is open all night. I mean twenty-four hours a day. Unburgleable.”
“Nothing is unburgleable.”
“I don’t see any lights over there.”
“Means nothing. The record room could be in the back of the building.”
“So what do we do?”
“I’m thinking.”
I let him think.
He sighed, finally. “If it were daytime, I’d just go over and have a look. It’s got to be done tonight?”
“Should have been done last night.”
“We need an inside source. You don’t know any medical librarians, do you?”
“God, no. Wait a minute!” I said the two sentences back-to-back, falling all over each other, concurrently practically. Inspiration had come with the speed of light. “Erin Harris.”
“You do know one.”
“Not exactly. She used to work for the New York City Public Library.”
“Terrific.”
“Hang on a second. She forsook it all to move here. Now she’s in the clerical pool at the med center. I think she got sick of cataloguing.”
Booker brightened. “How well do you know her?”
“Well enough. She knows I write mysteries. I’ll just say I need help with a plot.”
“You better hope she’s home.”
She was. And eager to help, like the
hospital operator. From Erin I learned these important facts: Medical Records was indeed open twenty-four hours a day; if a doctor needed a file at night, a messenger was sent for it; it was completely computerized and you needed the number of a chart to get the chart.
I also learned it was in the basement and there was a side entrance on the plaza outside the building. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I figured it would come clear once we got down to serious burgling.
So it looked like all we had to do was call up, claim to be Dr. Rumler, then go across the street and claim to be a messenger and we’d have one Terry Koehler hospital chart in our possession. If we could get its number, somehow.
That meant a wholesale search of Rumler’s office. And that meant going back to the sixth floor. So we did.
I’m sure Rumler must have had some system for keeping chart numbers— exactly what we wanted must have been somewhere in that office— but neither I nor the best little burglar in the West could turn it up. Ingenuity was called for. I turned to Booker.
“Only one thing to do,” he said. “Invoke Kessler’s Fourth Law of Burglary.”
“Great idea. What is it?”
“When in doubt, brazen it out.”
“You mean storm the building?”
“Nope. Call Medical Records, say you’re Rumler and don’t have the number for some reason or other.”
“You’re the doctor.”
“No, you are.” He pushed the phone at me and I dialed Medical Records.
“This is Dr. Rumler,” I said, “and—”
“Dr. Rumler!” It was a light male voice. “You sound awful!”