Code Blues

by Melissa Yi

  I felt guilty. "Do you want to?"

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling. "Can I plead the Fifth?"

  "We're not American. But I guess I can let you off the hook this time." I toyed with my pen, twirling it between my fingers. I wasn't laughing anymore. "You know how you said Alex was charming?"

  She suppressed a sigh and nodded.

  "Was that from...personal experience?"

  Her eyes were amused and sad at the same time. "No."

  It was pathetic, but I breathed easier.

  She added, "I have a healthy sense of self-preservation." She stood, smoothing her hemp-colored shorts. "Dr. Levine wants to see you before you go."

  My mouth hung open a little. I wanted to tell her I used to have a fine sense of caution and sanity. I used to be a good girl. Just like you!

  She touched my shoulder lightly. "Okay?"

  She wasn't asking about Dr. Levine. I had to admit, Tori was more tough-love than I'd realized. But maybe it was a good thing. I exhaled. "Yeah. Okay."

  It turned out Dr. Levine was dying to give me his son's futon. "Just let me call my wife. We'll work something out. We'll borrow a truck!"

  I had to laugh. "The Zippy Moving Company has sworn to send me my things today. If not, I'll call you."

  He wrote down his numbers for me. I wondered if he'd always been this helpful, or if he, like Tori, was trying to fill some of the void Kurt had left behind. Not a bad legacy after all.

  Tori suggested we go out to dinner. I shook my head. "Moving van time." It was just an excuse. I wanted to see if Alex had left a message. At the very least, I could pull the sleeping bag over my head and leave the world behind.

  "I'll walk you home," she said. It was easier to say yes than to keep fighting her. I definitely needed a refill on my bug juice.

  We walked to the Mimosa Manor in silence, our feet tapping on the sidewalk. The day had clouded over and the air was heavy. We walked faster. Summer storms could be super soakers.

  As we turned down Mimosa, I could see a white van blocking the laneway. I stopped dead. Then I shook my head. The lettering was for a Montreal company, not Zippy.

  Tori said, "I bet it's for you." Before I could stop her, she ran up to the passenger side and accosted a van guy in quite good French. She turned to me with a radiant smile. "Your company gave these guys the contract after their truck broke down. You have a bed!"

  The van guy, who was wearing a dirty orange baseball cap over his scraggly blond hair, turned to me and said, "Appartement cinq? 'Ope Zee?"

  "That's me!" I burst out. Maybe my luck was finally turning. It was a sign. I had an entire wardrobe again. I could sleep in a proper bed. I could brush my hair instead of combing it. My DVD's were back. I clasped my hands together. I wanted to hug this heavy metal moving dude. "Thank you, thank you!"

  As he stared at me, nonplused, thunder rumbled in the distance and I felt the first drop of rain on my arm.

  The moving guy raised his eyes to the grey skies and summarized our feelings. "Tabarnouche."

  Chapter 17

  I managed to get through the next few days without seeing Alex, which gave me both a fierce satisfaction and a burning epigastric pain whenever I was at the hospital. I'll never make fun of someone with reflux or an ulcer again, I vowed to myself. It hurts.

  Still, I knew Alex would be at Grand Rounds on Wednesday. No matter what rotation you were on, you were supposed to attend family medicine Grand Rounds.

  "I wonder what they're going to do for it," Tori had mused to me as she helped me unpack my living room on Monday. "Kurt was supposed to present on partner abuse. He'd been researching it for months. He showed us a stack of articles he'd printed out. He asked if anyone knew graphic design and could help make a pamphlet for the FMC to hand out. Robin told him that child or elder abuse should have a higher profile in our community, but Kurt was adamant. 'This is a still an under-recognized problem. If family doctors don't tackle domestic abuse, who's going to do it? Not the dermatologists or the cardiac surgeons! We're the ones who follow people for years. If you want to do a presentation on child or elder abuse, Robin, I'll be happy to clear some rounds time for you.'" She smiled. "That made Robin very quiet."

  I laughed and slit a box open with my Exacto knife. "Really? I'd have thought he'd jump at the chance."

  She laughed with me. "That's true. Maybe he was trying to think of some good articles for it."

  It was mean to make fun of Robin, but I needed my jollies where I could get them. I sighed. "At least if he was in our group, he'd volunteer to do all the presentations."

  She shook her head, a dimple peeking in her left cheek. "Don't worry. Dr. Callendar would never let him get away with it."

  "Figures. He wants to spread the pain." I lifted the flaps of the box. Med school notes. Just about useless. I pushed the box under my desk.

  Tori just smiled and shook her head. I was no closer to figuring out how she got into that demon's sweet spot. She twirled a screw in my pine Ikea bookcase and made a face at the divots and scrapes. "It's too bad the moving people ruined your furniture. They banged up the front and back, so there's no good side."

  I threw up my hands. "I'm so happy to have a bookcase, I don't care!" It made me think of Alex again. I so wanted a boyfriend, I latched right on to him. Did he just seem irresistible because I was desperate?

  I remembered the way he touched my breasts and blushed. No. It wasn't just desperation.

  Tori clucked her tongue. "Ahem. Do you want medical books in here or regular books?"

  I shook my head. "Sorry. Yeah. I mean, medical books. I'll keep regular books in the bedroom."

  Her dark eyes were sympathetic. "You know, he doesn't deserve you."

  My face looped in a half-smile. "That's what I keep telling myself." I picked up Henry. "Is he more acceptable?"

  She tilted her head to one side, considering. "He is rather wooden." She smiled when I giggled. "But I definitely admire his flexibility and his poker face. Yes, he's a keeper."

  We laughed as I went to help her figure out how to space the shelves.

  On Wednesday, Kurt made the front page of both the Gazette and La Presse. The Gazette lamented the belated police investigation as too little, too late. A suspicious death is a suspicious death. They should have erred on the side of caution instead of assuming it was an accidental insulin overdose. La Presse did a sort of obituary, talking about how Kurt had tried to overhaul St. Joe's, but really exposing our fleabag quarters. They quoted a patient as saying, "It doesn't inspire confidence when the curtain gets stuck halfway around when you're getting an internal examination." I wondered if it was my patient from Friday.

  Funny. St. Joe's FMC was a splintering mess, but I was already getting used to it. After Dr. Levine assisted me with a pelvic exam, I now knew to caution the patient, "The curtain may not work, sometimes it gets stuck, so I'll knock before I come back. I have to go outside the soak the speculum in warm water. I'll help you on to the table. The lamp may be broken..." Already, I was adapting instead of outraged. I wondered if it was a good thing.

  For once, I had the morning off. I checked my e-mail at the hospital, because my high-speed still hadn't been hooked up at home. One of my Western friends sent me her new address. My mother asked if I could make it to Kevin's end of summer school play. Kevin said basically the same thing: HI. COME HOME!!!!

  I wrote back to all of them. Then I sat in the residents' room, listening to the buzz of the computer and the occasional footsteps in the corridor. Everyone else was hard at work. It was weird to be here.

  The room didn't smell as bad as usual. The trash had been emptied. There were still cafeteria trays and dishes, but it was all stacked on top of the fridge. There was even a new ficus tree beside the computer. I touched the leaves. Fabric, but still. Someone cared. I understood a bit why Kurt had tried. If we all pitched in, we could do something about this place.

  Kurt. I looked back at my computer screen. "Click here to return to Ya
hoo! Mail."

  I clicked. Back to the sign-in screen. Instead of using my own ID, I typed in the one from the memo: dr-kurt.

  Yahoo was a public webmail system. If I could figure out his password, I could access his e-mail. Of course, if he was at all clever, I'd never be able to figure out his password. I tried all the usual things: dr-kurt, kurt, vicki, even mireille, under various capitalizations. I dug through my bag for the orientation package and tried his phone numbers. If I knew his birthday, I'd have tried that, too.

  No dice.

  The police had taken away all his personal papers. The computer had been wiped. But the Internet had been created to survive a nuclear attack. The information was waiting in cyberspace, if only I could reach it.

  I wanted to bang my head on the beige monitor. For all I knew, the police had cracked his e-mail and were even now tracking all the people who had met with him and talked to him. But from what everyone said, it was a mammoth task. I just wanted to take a look. See what didn't fit. That was the key in detective books. They're always slipping you red herrings and trying to make you suspect the most obvious person, but I could usually spot the murderer because the person does something that catches my eye. I'm no good at tracking alibis and calculating motives, but I can still finger the guilty party.

  The combination clicked behind me. I zapped the screen closed just before Stan Biedelman threw open the door and stared at me. "Hey. What are you doing here?"

  "Waiting for rounds."

  He gestured at the computer. "I'll go to the library. I can pull a Robin and live there, researching useful stuff like how speed can give you a headache and that's why doctors shouldn't take drugs, even if you've been up for 36 hours."

  "No, it's okay. I'm done." I stood up and migrated to one of the couches. "How are you doing?"

  He grinned at me. "I only have half a day of internal medicine, and I get free food today. How do you think I'm doing?" He settled down at the computer and opened Explorer. It came up with the default window of St. Joe's hospital.

  I laughed, relaxing. "Is the food kosher?"

  He waved his hand. "I eat the vegetarian stuff. It's fine. I'm not that observant, anyway. I eat shrimp and lobster." He started typing.

  "Oh." I tried not to stare at his yarmulke.

  He chuckled and swiveled to look at me. "So you're wondering why I wear the funny hat on my head?"

  "Oh. No. Nothing like that." I brushed some crumbs off the back of the sofa.

  He roared. "Sure you are! It's okay. I'm used to it. My family's more observant. So I do the Friday night Sabbath with them and I wear this." He touched his head. "It doesn't hurt anyone."

  I was distracted by the alibi. "You do the Sabbath on Friday nights?"

  "Yeah. See, Saturday's our holiday—"

  "I know that." At his mock-astonished face, I said, "I used to read these books as a kid about the 'All of a Kind Family.' They were Jewish. But the point is, you were celebrating Friday night? All night?"

  He nodded, face clearing. "Yeah. So you can count any observant Jews out. It's family night. We weren't out murdering any goyim. So it wasn't me or Dr. Levine." He grinned at my face. "You didn't know? Levine's a Jewish name and he's more observant than me."

  "I didn't consider Dr. Levine." I dug my nail into the burgundy vinyl of the couch.

  "So who are you considering?"

  I didn't want to name Mireille or Alex, but now that he'd mentioned it, they probably weren't Jewish. Certainly Alex didn't have any family here, or a proper alibi after 10 p.m. Every time I uncovered more information, it just opened a new, Costco-sized can of worms. I covered my eyes. Now I'd be spying on them during Grand Rounds. No wonder police did this as a full-time job.

  Stan started typing again. "Fine. You're going to crack this case and don't want to share the evidence with me. I understand."

  I jumped.

  Stan laughed. "Did you hear all the latest shit? How they think it was an insulin overdose, but his drug screen came back positive, so they're not sure?"

  I gaped at him.

  He cracked up. He even swiveled away from the computer so he could pound his hand on the desk and cackle. "Hey, detective, you should see your face!"

  I shut my mouth with as much dignity as I could muster. "Just tell me 'the shit,' Stan."

  "All right, Sarge." He dialed down the laughter. The flush in his face died down, too, and he shifted in his chair. "I guess it's not that funny, but the way you talk about excrement kind of is. You must have a lot of fun with your patients. Anyway, these are all rumors, but the word on the street is that they found GHB and excess insulin in his system and they think the time of death was around 2 a.m, give or take a few hours."

  GHB. Grievous Bodily Harm. Street drug of champions. Not. I licked my lips. "I thought they said succinylcholine."

  "That, too. But it turns out it's a lot more complicated than they thought. I looked it up. You can test false positive for succ just from background 'noise,' so it's hard to prove one way or another. So they're sending it for more tests. I think the GHB is more solid, though, and they nailed his insulin and C-peptide levels, so it's definitely an insulin OD. Insulin and GHB. Maybe succ."

  I licked my lips. "So they still think it's murder."

  He shrugged his shoulders. "The whole thing is hard to prove, right? I mean, they'll be searching for needle marks for the succ, but the guy had type I Diabetes. He'd be riddled with them. He could have taken GHB for fun, and then gotten confused when he was hypoglycemic and OD'd on his insulin."

  My head spun, but I fought back. "And paralyzed himself with succ while he was at it?"

  "The succ isn't a hundred percent, but let's say it is. You know how people get when they're hypoglycemic. Their brains aren't getting enough glucose. They're sweaty, they talk funny, they're confused. Maybe he wandered up around the OR, grabbed the wrong vial..."

  I shook my head. "Everything's locked up. He couldn't just 'wander in.' And what was he doing at St. Joe's in the middle of the night, anyway? He didn't even do call, right? Except for taking care of all of you guys who called him for their personal problems. No. I bet someone called him in and asked him to meet them. I bet that's why his pager was missing!"

  "His pager was missing?" Stan blinked twice.

  "Yeah. You know how we can track back to see who called on the pager? It stores the last few numbers. I bet that's why the murderer took it! We should find the pager!" I paused. "You know how they used to say 'Cherchez la femme'? We should cherchez le pager!"

  "What are you talking about?"

  I actually didn't know why they used to say 'Cherchez la femme,' but I was on a roll here. My first instincts had been bang on, just like on a multiple choice test. I flapped my hand at him to make him hush up. "But the murderer took it. So there has to be another way. Phone records? Is there some way I can access phone records?"

  Stan stood up. "Hope. I think you'd better calm down."

  I leapt to my feet. "Calm down? Not when I could crack this case! C'mon, you were making fun of me, but I just got a serious breakthrough!" I rushed for the door.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stan reaching for me and saying, "Hope, wait a second," but I ripped open the resident room door and nearly barreled into Jade Watterson, the resident on ICU, who still had her hand outstretched to punch the combination into the residents' room door.

  "Are you okay?" she called after me. "Rounds haven't started yet!"

  What was she going on about? Oh, yes, Grand Rounds, I thought, as I zipped down the stairs with my own breath huffing in my ears. A middle-aged woman in a blue cardigan made a great show of stepping aside for me and I waved my thanks.

  Maybe I'd make it to rounds. Maybe not. Kurt had done rounds on physician drug abuse, and people were still talking about it, so it had to have rocked—

  I punched open the door on the landing of the bottom floor, but I had to wait for a family with a stroller. The mother lumbered along, obviously pregnant un
der her long Muslim shift, so I couldn't cut her off even though I really wanted to.

  While I waited, my brain ping-ponged. Kurt. Drugs. Was it possible that he'd OD'd instead of being murdered? Well, it was if you thought he'd take GHB, if he was enough of a hypocrite to lecture against drugs and then snort 'em up, or however you took GHB. I personally didn't get why anyone would take a date rape drug for fun, but then, I didn't really even drink, and I'd never tried marijuana, so no one would ever come knocking at my door for a cheap high.

  At last, I squeezed by the family of six, more patients with walkers and wheelchairs, and hustled toward locating. I stood in front of their desk while the two women in a booth sat behind Plexiglas and ignored me, white coat notwithstanding.

  "Allo?" said the plump, middle-aged one with brown curls and glasses, after glancing at her companion. She looked like a librarian, basically.

  "Hi," I said in English, giving them my best smile. My French is pretty good, but I figured their English was better and I didn't want to waste time. "I'm Dr. Hope Sze, a first year resident on emergency medicine."

  They exchanged a look that said, So?

  I concentrated on the librarian, focusing my smile on her while I unclipped my pager from my waistband and showed it to her. "I was wondering if you might have a record of the phone numbers of people who paged me. You know, like I can go through the memory on the pager and find the last three numbers, but before then..."

  "We do not keep any phone numbers," said the other woman, with a moderate French accent. She looked 50-something with short grey hair and a jowly mouth like a bulldog.

  "Right." I met her eye and beamed at her instead. The bulldog mouth tightened. I wouldn't get too far with this one, but I had to try. "I realize you don't mark them down or anything, but maybe your telephone keeps a log?"

  "I don't know why you are asking," said Bulldog.

  "I'm just curious," I said. I looked at the younger one, but her eyes slid away. I turned back to Bulldog and made my final appeal. "You know, with everything that happened to Dr. Kurt..."