by Mark Coggins
“Okay, let’s have ’em.”
“Well, it occurred to me later that there might have been some other drug mixed in with the heroin. Some people do speedballs, which is a mixture of heroin and cocaine. The problem in treating a speedball overdose is that Nalline has no effect on the cocaine. Once you suppress the effects of the heroin, the cocaine comes blasting through with a vengeance.”
“But no one dies of a cocaine overdose.”
“Sure they do. Especially if their body has been weakened from a disease or congenital defect. And there you have my other idea. It’s possible the girl had an underlying medical problem that compounded the overdose. In the end, her heart just stopped. Could be she already had a cardiopulmonary defect.”
I shook my head. “From what I saw of her, she was pretty damn vigorous. But how could we find out for sure-I mean, about other drugs or medical problems.”
“I’m surprised at you, August. Wait for the autopsy, of course. That or talk to the hospital staff. They might have run blood tests for the drugs or detected other health problems.”
“I like the hospital angle. You took her to Mount Zion, right? You chummy with anyone on their staff?”
“What? Are you joking? I know all the ER staff. Penny Waller- she’s a particular friend of mine at Mount Zion.”
“Great. How’s to take a quick trip over to Mount Zion and talk to her?”
“Right now? There’s no chance of that, man. I see enough of emergency rooms without using my free time to visit them.”
It took some arm-twisting and the promise of more Guinness Stout, but eventually I managed to get O’Grady bundled into a cab headed in the direction of the hospital. We pulled up in the broad drive of the emergency entrance and I paid off the driver. Ronan jumped out and strode through the automatic doors to a reception desk just inside. When I caught up to him, he had already established that Penny Waller was in a staff lounge a short way up the corridor. He bulled through the lounge door without knocking.
It opened onto a narrow, brightly lit room that had a glass-topped coffee table and a pair of worn couches covered in green plaid. At the back was a kitchenette with a sink, coffee maker, and a tiny refrigerator. The only person in the room was a bored-looking woman with short hair dyed a shade that only occurs in nature on fire engines. She was wearing an austere hospital pantsuit that didn’t completely obscure a lush figure. Her eyes were startling china blue, she had a silver stud in her left nostril, and she was sitting on a couch using a slight overbite to good advantage on a juicy red apple. She looked to be in her mid-twenties and the tag on her breast read Penny Waller, RN.
She took one look at O’Grady and said, “Scat! Shoo! Go away! I’m on my break. Don’t you dare bring any business to me.”
“Relax, darlin’,” said O’Grady. “You can see that I’m not in uniform. The fact of the matter is, we’re here for a small favor-and it has nothing to do with new patients.”
Waller eyed us skeptically. “I can smell the beer on your breath from here, Ronan. This isn’t another one of your crazy scavenger hunts, is it? The things you paramedics think of when you get drinking. ‘Do you have an x-ray of a guy with a gerbil up his butt, Penny? Do you have some of the pubic hair they shaved off the mayor before his hernia operation, Penny?’ Sheesh. You guys need to grow up. Who’s your friend there, anyway?”
If O’Grady was the least little bit embarrassed, he didn’t show it. He dropped on to the couch across from Waller. “His name is August Riordan, Penny dear. He’s a great drinker, a mediocre jazz bass player, and a bad detective. The terrible thing is, he makes more money from the third than the second. The result is a set of warped priorities. Rather than drinking or bass playing, he fritters his time away chasing clues.”
Waller put the apple down on the table. She looked up at me while working on a back tooth with the nail of her pinkie finger. “Damn apples,” she said after a moment. “I only eat them because they’re supposed to be good for you.” She flicked a particle of apple peel across the room. “Clues. What kind of clues?”
I said, “I want to look at the medical file of the woman Ronan brought in last night. The one who died.”
“And why would that be?”
“I want to find out how she died.”
Waller shrugged elaborately and glanced over to O’Grady. “She OD’d on heroin. What’s to find out?”
O’Grady gave me a hand. “I’m afraid I suggested there might be some complicating factors,” he said. “We’d like to see if they ran any tests on the pharmacology or diagnosed any underlying health problems.”
“This is just like one of your scavenger hunts,” said Waller. “What do you think, I can go up to ICU and just ask them to hand over the file? Besides, they probably sent it to the coroner’s already.”
“If the file is gone, then of course there’s no help for it. But where’s the harm in borrowing it for a short while if you find it’s still there? I would regard it as a particular favor, Penny. It’s the quickest way to restore me to my bar stool, and get the great white detective out of both our camiknickers.”
“He wouldn’t be in my cami-whatever’s if you hadn’t have put him there.” She stared at Ronan defiantly and then snapped her eyes over to me. “Okay, I’ll go look. But only because I have a soft spot for tall men with dark hair and pale complexions.”
O’Grady laughed. He said to me, “I believe that was a reference to you. God gives all his creatures the means to get by. In your case he’s compensated for your lack of brains with an appearance that is inexplicably attractive to emergency room nurses.”
Penny Waller giggled and left the room. She came back a few minutes later carrying a pink file folder. “Here it is. They were holding it for the results of some lab work they ordered last night. Came back too late to do her any good, I guess.” She passed the file over to O’Grady. “You can hang out here and read it. Don’t even think of taking it out of the building. I’ve got to go back on duty, so when you’re finished drop it off with Ellen at the front desk.”
“Thanks very much,” I said. “I doubt there’s anything of interest, but I just felt like I had to touch all the bases.”
Waller nodded and put her hand out for me to shake. “No problem. Maybe next time you play somewhere, you can invite me to come. I like jazz-as well as tall, pale men with dark hair.”
“Done,” I said, and shook her hand. My eyes and O’Grady’s tracked her shapely posterior out the door.
“Well, there you are, August,” said O’Grady. “You’ve made a new friend.”
“I’d like her better if she didn’t use her nail for a toothpick.”
“Don’t be getting above yourself. Penny Waller is a jewel of a girl. She’s just a little earthy is all.”
O’Grady began thumbing through the file. I looked over his shoulder while he read, but I didn’t get very much from what I saw. There was a page on the top with handwritten notes. Below that were various forms with text printed by a computer, a long strip of graph paper with what I assumed was output from a heart and respiration monitor, and a log of some sort with annotations made every half-hour. The last entry was made at 4:30 AM.
“So,” I said. “What do you make of it?”
“Well, I can tell you that she died of massive pulmonary edema. Basically that means her lungs filled with fluid, and the resulting strain on her lungs and her heart eventually did her in. It happens sometimes with heroin overdoses, although doctors don’t really know why. Some people think it’s triggered by the stuff they cut the heroin with-which is often quinine-and some people think it is caused by mixing the heroin with other drugs or even alcohol.”
“Is there anything to show that there were other drugs in her system?”
“It does appear she’d been drinking, at least. There’s a test here that shows her blood alcohol level was .10 percent when she was admitted. Nothing that says she’d used coke or barbiturates, however. The best way to double check would be
to analyze the stuff left in the syringe or run a urinalysis during the autopsy.”
“They also got some unused packets of drugs from her purse they could check. What about other health problems? You said something about a cardiopulmonary defect at the bar.”
“Well, I don’t see anything to indicate a problem like a bad heart valve. There is one thing that’s a little odd. They ran a blood test on her and her T-cell count is somewhat depressed.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means she might have had some sort of infection. The count is still above 500, which is not way out of whack, but it could indicate the presence of a viral respiratory infection, bacterial pneumonia, or even TB. If she had any of those, it would definitely have contributed to the pulmonary edema.” O’Grady stared down at the folder and seemed to drift off.
“What?” I said. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that a low T-cell count can also be an indicator of HIV. You know that intravenous drug users are a high risk group.”
“Did they run an AIDS test on her?”
“No, you can’t do that without a patient’s written permission. Since she never regained consciousness, they wouldn’t have been able to get it. But I wouldn’t want us to jump to conclusions. A T-cell count like that might indicate nothing more than a bad flu. And in the end, it is still secondary when it comes to determining the cause of death. To quote our friend Penny, ‘She OD’d on heroin. What’s to find out?’”
I mulled that one over a bit. “Okay, I’ll throw in the towel. Her death just seemed a little too convenient. I guess I wanted to find some evidence of poison or other foul play.”
“The only foul play around here, lad, is the continuing lack of liquid refreshment. I suggest we repair to the nearest pub and remedy that situation posthaste.”
O’Grady and I left the hospital and walked up Divisadero to a bar on the corner at Pine. I split another pitcher with him, listening to the story of how he and his partner had a contest giving CPR to an eighty-year-old man who’d been dead for twenty minutes by the time they got him strapped in the ambulance. The goal was to see who could drive the dead guy’s pulse rate the highest on the ride to the hospital. O’Grady claimed he won by sending it to two hundred, which he said was twice as high as the guy ever got when he was alive.
I left O’Grady in the company of Mr. Guinness for my appointment with Duckworth at around 9:30.
QUEEN TO QUEEN’S KNIGHT ONE
“I THINK YOU’VE GOT THE REAL DEAL THIS time, August,” Duckworth said, looking at me in the mirror of his cramped dressing room. He was perched on a stool with a laptop computer balanced precariously on top of a crossed leg. Swathed in a red silk gown with gold swirls embroidered throughout the bodice, he had accessorized with matching red pumps, diamond earrings, and a short black wig with ludicrous spit curls that clung to his cheeks. Overall, he looked like a young Liza Minelli with too much time on the bench press. “The card appears to have the source code on it, as well as a compiled version of the game. Of course, I really couldn’t say for sure that all the source code is there unless I tried to recompile it. I don’t have a C++ compiler so I can’t do that for you now.” He ejected the PCMCIA card from a slot in his computer and passed it back to me.
“Really?” I said. “All that on this little card? It doesn’t need batteries or moving parts or anything?”
Duckworth shook his head and his diamond earrings shimmered. “Nope,” he said. “It’s called flash memory and I don’t really understand how it works, but somehow it stores information nonvolatilely without consuming power. As long as you don’t step on the card or drop it in the sink, anything you write on it is retained for as long as you want.”
“Terri McCulloch must have stolen the card from Bishop when she took the software.”
“That makes sense. He’s the sort of guy who would have all the latest toys. I doubt he would have used the card to archive his source code, though. I’m sure he has DVD drives, optical storage devices, and all sorts of other paraphernalia for that. Still, it would be a very handy way for Terri to make off with the chess program. Light, compact, and easy to conceal.”
“You’re right about that,” I said, slipping the card into my breast pocket. I looked down at the table in front of Duckworth and picked up an eyelash curler from the clutter of makeup, brushes, powder puffs, and lipsticks. “This looks like something Terri McCulloch would have used in her dungeon. Aren’t you afraid of pulling your eyelids clean off?”
Duckworth smiled. “It seems more medieval than it is. You should try tweezing your eyebrows. Now that’s torture.”
I returned the curler to the table. “I guess that’s all I needed. I’m taking the card back to Bishop tomorrow if he’ll agree to see me. And that will be the end of that.”
“But what about Nagel? You never did find out what he was up to.”
“No, I didn’t. I’m not going to worry about it. That reminds me: did you get all the duct tape out of your hair?”
Duckworth brought his hand up to the back of his head almost involuntarily. “I had to douse it with lighter fluid for a good half hour, but it finally came out.” Duckworth looked at me solemnly. “I guess this is good-bye then.”
I chuckled. “Don’t make it sound so dramatic. But thanks for all your help, Chris. I really appreciated it.”
Duckworth stood up. Even in his heels, he only came up chin high. I watched as his eyes filled with water and his lower lip trembled. “Would you mind giving me a hug, August?”
I hesitated, and then awkwardly reached round to hug him. He hugged back with a fierce strength, and planted a blubbery kiss on my neck. “I’m going to miss you.”
“Cut it out,” I said. “We’ll get together again.” I broke the clinch and stepped back. “Maybe we can do a brother/sister act. Me on bass and you on vocals.”
Duckworth smiled weakly. Streaks of mascara-stained tears rain down his face “Yes, I’d like that.”
I walked over to the dressing room door and pulled it open. “By the way, Chris,” I said. “You look swell in red.”
BISHOP’S GAMBIT
I CALLED BISHOP THE NEXT MORNING. ONCE I got it into his pointy little propeller head that I actually had his software in my possession, he agreed to see me. Eagerly. I told him I would stop by around midday. But before heading down to Woodside, I took another walk down Post to visit the Chess Room of the Mechanics Institute Library near Montgomery Street.
The librarian said I didn’t look like a man who would be greatly interested in chess, but she agreed to help me use the computer-based card catalog to dig up a few books on the subject anyway. I put in several hours beneath a gigantic demonstration board reading about famous games in chess history. I returned the books to the librarian when I was finished and admitted that her estimation of my interest in chess had been about right.
The sun had burned off the morning clouds and fog by the time I pulled into Bishop’s driveway. The house appeared freshly scrubbed, and the surrounding grounds seemed as green as the emerald in the Buddha’s belly button. The bell played the same waltz as last time, but I still couldn’t place it. Jodie answered the door wearing another swimsuit. This one was a dark, one-piece number that was cut so high on her hips it almost exposed ribs. Flying in the face of sound structural engineering practices, a flimsy netting that exposed a great deal more than ribs had been used throughout the top of the suit.
“Hello August,” said Jodie soberly. “Things didn’t work out very well, did they? Edwin says Terri brought it all on herself, but I can’t help but feel bad.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s white of you. Is the big fella around?”
An odd expression settled on Jodie’s face. “He’s on the phone. He told me to take you to the study to wait ’til he gets off the line.”
“Lead on.”
I followed a few steps behind, watching her taut calf muscles flex and release as she sashayed down the marble
hallway. She dropped me off in the same study chair as before. Looking around, I realized for the first time that the chessboard next to Bishop’s desk was actually a computer with pressure sensitive pads of the sort Duckworth had described. I fiddled around with the switches until some lights came on, and then made some trial moves with the black pieces and watched as the computer responded. I had been going at it for about fifteen minutes when a voice from behind interrupted:
“What’s the damage?”
I looked up to find Bishop standing at the door in a bathrobe and sandals. Jodie was just behind him. “I’m ahead in captured pieces,” I said, “but I understand you can’t always judge by that.”
“Yes, it depends on the circumstances. We’re going out to the hot tub. Would you care to join us?”
“Thanks but no thanks. I didn’t come prepared.”
“I’ll be happy to loan you a bathing suit.”
The thought of me trying to squeeze into one of Bishop’s swimsuits was laughable. “No, I’ll have to pass.”
Bishop made a dismissive gesture. “Well, come out with us anyway. We can talk while Jodie and I soak.”
I got up and followed them out the study door, down the marble hall to an adjoining hall that led to a back door. The door opened onto a vast redwood deck that was laid in a parquet pattern and extended from the house in multiple tiers. Wrought iron lawn furniture was scattered across it on various levels, and planter boxes with carefully trimmed Japanese bonsai were set along the edges. We followed the course of a winding stair to ground level and then went along a flagstone path into a group of oak trees. The hot tub was in the middle of a large clearing, set flush into a redwood deck and covered by an octagonal pavilion. The tub itself probably wasn’t big enough to hold the killer whale show at Sea World.