The rest was paperwork, a cardboard snack for some downtown computer.
It was a depressing document. Nothing in it surprised me. Not even the fact that Cary Nemeth’s private pediatrician of record, the physician who’d actually signed the death report, was Lionel Willard Towle, M.D.
I left the chart stuck under a stack of X-ray plates and walked toward the elevator. Two eleven-year-olds had escaped from the ward and were waging a wheelchair drag race. They whooped by, I.V. tubing looping like lariats, and I had to swerve to avoid them.
I reached for the elevator button and heard my name called.
“H’lo, Alex!”
It was the medical director, chatting with a pair of interns. He dismissed them and walked my way.
“Hello, Henry.”
He’d put on a few pounds since I’d last seen him, jowls fighting the confines of his shirt collar. His complexion was unhealthily florid. Three cigars stuck out of his breast pocket.
“What a coincidence,” he said, giving me a soft hand. “I was just about to call you.”
“Really? What about?”
“Let’s talk in the office.”
He closed the door and scurried behind his desk.
“How’ve you been, son?”
“Just fine.” Dad.
“Good, good.” He took a cigar out of his pocket and made masturbatory motions up and down the cellophane wrapper. “I’m not going to beat around the bush, Alex. You know that’s not my way—always come right out and say what’s on your mind is my philosophy. Let people know where you stand.”
“Please do.”
“Yes. Hmm. I’ll come out and say it.” He leaned forward, either about to retch or preparing to impart some grave confidence. “I’ve—we’ve received a complaint about your professional conduct.”
He sat back, pleasurably expectant, a boy waiting for a firecracker to explode.
“Will Towle?”
His eyebrows shot skyward. There were no fireworks up there, so they came back down again.
“You know?”
“Call it a good guess.”
“Yes, well, you’re correct. He’s up in arms about some hypnotizing you’ve done or some such nonsense.”
“He’s full of shit, Henry.”
His fingers fumbled with the cellophane. I wondered how long it had been since he’d done surgery. “I understand your point; however Will Towle is an important man, not to be taken lightly. He’s demanding an investigation, some kind of—”
“Witch hunt?”
“You’re not making this any easier, young man.”
“I’m not beholden to Towle or anyone else. I’m retired, Henry, or have you forgotten that? Check the last time I received my salary.”
“That’s not the point—”
“The point is, Henry, if Towle has a gripe against me, let him bring it up before the State Board. I’m prepared to swap accusations. I guarantee it will be an educational experience for all concerned.”
He smiled unctuously.
“I like you, Alex. I’m telling you this to warn you.”
“Warn me of what?”
“Will Towle’s family has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to this hospital. They may very well have paid for the chair you’re sitting on.”
I stood up.
“Thanks for the warning.”
His little eyes hardened. The cigar snapped between his fingers, showering the desk with shreds of tobacco. He looked down at his lost pacifier and for a moment I thought he’d break into tears. He’d be great fun on the analyst’s couch.
“You’re not as independent as you think you are. There’s the matter of your staff privileges.”
“Are you telling me that because Will Towle complained about me I’m in danger of losing my right to practice here?”
“I’m saying: Don’t make waves. Call Will, make amends. He’s not a bad fellow. In fact the two of you should have a lot in common. He’s an expert in-”
“Behavioral Pediatrics. I know. Henry, I’ve heard his tune and we don’t play in the same band.”
“Remember this, Alex—the status of psychologists on the medical staff has always been tenuous.”
An old speech came to mind. Something about the importance of the human factor and how it interfaced with modern medicine. I considered throwing it back in his face. Then I looked at his face and decided nothing could help it.
“Is that it?”
He had nothing to say. His type seldom does, when the conversation gets beyond platitudes, entendres, or threats.
“Good day, Doctor Delaware,” he said.
I left quietly, closing the door behind me.
I was down in the lobby, which had cleared of patients and was now filled with a group of visitors from some ladies’ volunteer group. The ladies had old money and good breeding written all over their handsome faces—sorority girls grown up. They listened raptly as an administration lackey gave them a prefabricated spiel about how the hospital was in the forefront of medical and humanitarian progress for children, nodding their heads, trying not to show their anxiety.
The lackey prattled on about children being the resources of the future. All that came to my mind was young bones ground up as grist for someone’s mill.
I turned and walked back to the elevator.
The third floor of the hospital housed the bulk of the administrative offices, which were shaped in an inverted T, paneled in dark wood, and carpeted in something the color and consistency of moss. The medical staff office was situated at the bottom of the stem of the T, in a glass-walled suite with a view of the Hollywood Hills. The elegant blonde behind the desk was someone I hadn’t counted upon seeing, but I straightened my tie and went in.
She looked up, contemplated not recognizing me, then thought better of it and gave me a regal smile. She extended her hand with the imperious manner of someone who’d been at the same job long enough to harbor illusions of irreplaceability.
“Good morning, Alex.”
Her nails were long and thickly coated with mother-of-pearl polish, as if she’d plundered the depths of the ocean for the sake of vanity. I took the hand and handled it with the care it cried out for.
“Cora.”
“How nice to see you again. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes it has.”
“Are you returning to us—I’d heard you resigned.”
“No, I’m not, and yes, I did.”
“Enjoying your freedom?” She favored me with another smile. Her hair looked blonder, coarser, her figure fuller, but still first-rate, packed into a chartreuse knit that would have intimidated someone of less heroic proportions.
“I am. And you?”
“Doing the same old thing,” she sighed.
“And doing it well, I’m sure.”
For a moment I thought the flattery was a mistake. Her face hardened and grew a few new wrinkles.
“We know,” I went on, “who really keeps things together around here.”
“Oh, go on.” She flexed her hand like an abalone-tipped fan.
“It sure ain’t the doctors.” I resisted calling her Ol’ Buddy.
“Ain’t that the truth. Amazing what twenty years of education won’t give you in the way of common sense. I’m just a wage slave but I know which end is up.”
“I’m sure you could never be anyone’s slave, Cora.”
“Well, I don’t know.” Lashes as thick and dark as raven feathers lowered coquettishly.
She was in her early forties and under the merciless fluorescent lighting of the office every year showed. But she was well put together, with good features, one of those women who retain the form of youth but not the texture. Once, centuries ago, she’d seemed girlish, hearty and athletic, as we’d thrashed around the floor of the medical records office. It had been a one-shot deal, followed by mutual boycott. Now she was flirting, her memory cleansed by the passage of time.
“Have they been treating y
ou okay?” I asked.
“As well as can be expected. You know how doctors are.”
I grinned.
“I’m a fixture,” she said. “If they ever move the office, they’ll pick me up with the furniture.”
I looked up and down her body.
“I don’t think anyone could mistake you for furniture.”
She laughed nervously and touched her hair self-consciously.
“Thanks.” Self-scrutiny became too unsettling and she put me in the spotlight.
“What brings you down here?”
“Tying up loose ends—a few unfinished charts, paperwork. I’ve been careless about answering my mail. I thought I received a notice about overdue staff dues.”
“I don’t remember sending you one but it could have been one of the other girls. I was out for a month. Had surgery.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Cora. Is everything all right?”
“Female troubles.” She smiled. “They say I’m fine.” Her expression said that she thought “they” were abject liars.
“I’m glad.”
We locked gazes. For just a moment she looked twenty, innocent and hopeful. She turned her back to me, as if wanting to preserve that image in my mind.
“Let me check your file.”
She got up and slid open the drawer of a black-lacquered file cabinet, and came up with a blue folder.
“No,” she said, “you’re all paid up. You’ll be getting a notice for next year in a couple of months.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She returned the folder.
“How about a cup of coffee?” I asked casually.
She looked at me, then at her watch.
“I’m not due for a break until ten, but what the hell, live it up, huh?”
“Right.”
“Let me go to the little girls’ room and freshen up.” She fluffed her hair, picked up her purse and left the office to go into the lavatory across the hall.
When I saw the door shut after her I walked to the file cabinet. The drawer she’d opened was labeled “Staff A-G.” Two drawers down I found what I wanted. Into the old briefcase it went.
I was waiting by the door when she came out, flushed, pink and pretty, and smelling of patchouli. I extended my arm and she took it.
Over hospital coffee I listened to her talk. About her divorce—a seven-year-old wound that wouldn’t heal—the teenage daughter who was driving her crazy by doing exactly what she’d done as an adolescent, car troubles, the insensitivity of her superiors, the unfairness of life.
It was bizarre, getting to know for the first time a woman whose body I’d entered. In the scrambled word game of contemporary mating rituals, there was greater intimacy in her tales of woe than there had been in the opening of her thighs.
We parted friends.
“Come by again, Alex.”
“I will.”
I walked to the parking lot marveling at the ease with which I was able to slip on the cloak of duplicity. I’d always flattered myself with a self-assessment of integrity. But in the last three days I’d grown proficient at sneak-thievery, concealment of the truth, bald-faced lying and emotional whoring.
It must be the company I’d been keeping.
I drove to a cozy Italian place in West Hollywood. The restaurant had just opened and I was alone in my rear corner booth. I ordered veal in wine sauce, a side order of linguini with oil and garlic, and a Coors.
A shuffling waiter brought the beer. While I waited for the food I opened the briefcase and examined my plunder.
Towle’s medical staff file was over forty pages long. Most of it consisted of Xeroxes of his diplomas, certificates and awards. His curriculum vitae was twenty pages of puffery, markedly devoid of scholarly publications—he’d coauthored one brief report while an intern, and nothing since—and filled with television and radio interviews, speeches to lay groups, volunteer service to La Casa and similar organizations. Yet he was a full clinical professor at the medical school. So much for academic rigor.
The waiter brought a salad and a basket of rolls. I picked up my napkin with one hand, started to return the file to the briefcase with the other, when something on the front page of the resumé caught my eye.
Under college or university attended, he’d listed Jedson College, Bellevue, Washington.
20
I GOT HOME, called the L.A. Times, and asked for Ned Biondi at the Metro desk. Biondi was a senior writer for the paper, a short, nervous character right out of The Front Page. I’d treated his teenage daughter for anorexia nervosa several years back. Biondi hadn’t been able to come up with the money for treatment on a journalist’s salary—compounded with a penchant for playing the wrong horse at Santa Anita—but the girl had been in trouble and I’d let it go. It had taken him a year and a half to clear his debt. His daughter had gotten straightened out after months of my chipping away at layers of self-hatred that were surprisingly ossified in someone seventeen years old. I remembered her clearly, a tall, dark youngster who wore jogging shorts and T-shirts that accentuated the skeletal conditions of her body; a girl ashen-faced and spindly legged who alternated between deep, dark spells of brooding silence and flights of hyperactivity during which she was ready to enter every category of Olympic competition on three hundred calories a day.
I’d gotten her admitted to Western Pediatric, where she’d stayed for three weeks. That, followed by months of psychotherapy, had finally gotten through to her, and allowed her to deal with the mother who was too beautiful, the brother who was too athletic, and the father who was too witty …
“Biondi.”
“Ned, this is Alex Delaware.”
It took a second for my name, minus title to register.
“Doctor! How are you.”
“I’m fine. How’s Anne Marie?”
“Very well. She’s finishing up her second year at Wheaton—in Boston. She got A’s and a few B’s, but the B’s didn’t panic her. She’s still too rough on herself, but she seems to be adjusting well to the peaks and troughs of life, as you called them. Her weight is stable at a hundred and two.”
“Excellent. Give my regards when you speak to her.”
“I certainly will. It’s nice of you to call.”
“Well actually there’s more to this than professional follow-up.”
“Oh?” A foxy edge, the conditioned vigilance of one who pried open locked boxes for a living, came into his voice.
“I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I’m flying up north to Seattle tonight. I need to get into some transcripts at a small college near there. Jedson.”
“Hey, that’s not what I expected. I thought you wanted a blurb about a book in the Sunday edition or something. This sounds serious.”
“It is.”
“Jedson. I know it. Anne-Marie was going to apply there—we figured a small place would be less pressure for her—but it was fifty percent more expensive than Wheaton, Reed, and Oberlin—and they’re no giveaways themselves. What do you want with their transcripts?”
“I can’t say.”
“Doctor.” He laughed. “Pardon the expression, but you’re prick-teasing. I’m a professional snoop. Dangle something weird in front of me I get a hard-on.”
“What makes you think anything’s weird?”
“Doctors running around trying to get into files is weird. Usually it’s the shrinks who get broken into, if my memory serves me correctly.”
“I can’t go into it now, Ned.”
“I’m good with a secret, Doc.”
“No. Not yet. Trust me. You did before.”
“Below the belt, Doc.”
“I know. And I wouldn’t gut-punch you if it wasn’t important. I need your help. I may be onto something, maybe not. If I am you’ll be the first to hear about it.”
“Something big?”
I thought about it for a moment.
“C
ould be.”
“Okay,” he sighed, “what do you want me to do?”
“I’m giving your name as a reference. If anyone calls you, back up my story.”
“What’s the story?”
He listened.
“It seems harmless enough. Of course,” he added cheerfully, “if you get found out I’ll probably be out of a job.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Yeah. What the hell, I’m getting ready for the gold watch, anyway.” There was a pause, as if he were fantasizing life after retirement. Apparently he didn’t like what he saw, because when he came back on the line, there was verve in his voice and he offered a reporter’s priapic lament.
“I’m gonna go nuts wondering about this. You sure you don’t want to give me a hint about what you’re up to?”
“I can’t, Ned.”
“Okay, okay. Go spin your yarn and keep me in mind if you knit a sweater.”
“I will. Thanks.”
“Oh, hell, don’t thank me, I still feel crummy about taking all that time to pay you. I look at my baby now and I see a pink-cheeked, smiling young lady, a beauty. She’s still a little too thin for my taste, but she’s not a walking corpse like before. She’s normal, at least as far as I can tell. She can smile now. I owe you, Doctor.”
“Stay well, Ned.”
“You too.”
I hung up. Biondi’s words of gratitude made me entertain a moment’s doubt about my own retirement. Then I thought of bloody bodies and doubt got up and took a seat in the rear of the hearse.
It took several false starts and stops to reach the right person at Jedson College.
“Public relations, Ms. Dopplemeier.”
“Ms. Dopplemeier, this is Alex Delaware. I’m a writer with the Los Angeles Times.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Delaware?”
“I’m doing a feature on the small colleges of the West, concentrating on institutions that are not well-known but academically excellent nonetheless. Claremont, Occidental, Reed, etcetera. We’d like to include Jedson in the piece.”
Jonathan Kellerman - [Alex Delaware 01] Page 22