Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  There was a light on upstairs—the bedroom, I assumed. I got out of the car, walked up the flagstone steps to the front door, and rang the bell. I heard it chime and waited for a light to click on. No light, but from somewhere in the house a couple of dogs began yapping wildly. I rang the bell again. Nothing but the dogs. My heart was thumping, and I pulled out my cell phone. I punched the callback number for Tobel and heard the telephones ringing in the house. Five rings and the answering machine picked up. I snapped the phone shut, leaned on the doorbell for a good five seconds, then gave up.

  I sat on the steps and called the lab again. The call rolled over and rolled over again until voice mail picked up. So even Alaine had left the lab, hurrying home, no doubt, to make passionate love to her Igor, or Ivan, or whatever the hell his name was.

  The dogs continued their frenzied barking. Perhaps Dr. Tobel had gone out for a walk or for coffee or for anything and would be back presently. It was a bit of a stretch for a seventy-year-old crippled lady, but it was better than, well, better than the alternatives.

  Twenty minutes later, I hit the bell again and tried the door. The bell rang and the doorknob didn’t turn, and nothing moved inside but the dogs. I made my way along the front of the house. A broad deck extended from the front door along the outer wall and ended in a hedgerow. Double French doors separated the deck from the dining room. I peered through the doors. The dogs, two dachshunds, had tracked me through the house and were bouncing off the glass in the French doors, barking furiously. No one, I was convinced, could sleep through that racket. No one.

  Goddamn it.

  “Dr. Tobel!” I pounded on the glass. I dialed her number again, and again heard the phone in the house ring until the answering machine picked up: “You’ve reached . . .”

  I tried the French doors. They, too, were locked. I moved around the entire perimeter of the house, through the jungle of hyacinths and laurel. The dogs followed me through the house, their barking fading in and fading out as they backtracked to intercept me at each door. All the doors were locked.

  The car in the carport, the dogs running loose in the house, the light upstairs . . .

  I picked up a cobblestone from the garden and ran to the French doors. Holding the back of the stone, I pushed it into the glass pane nearest the doorknob. It didn’t break, so I stood back and threw it. The glass shattered and the dogs went crazy and the stone bounced off the carpet inside. I reached my hand inside and undid the lock. As I withdrew my hand, a piece of glass sliced my wrist; blood beaded along the two-inch cut.

  Inside. The house was alive now with barking, spastic dachshunds. One peed on the floor as he backed up and yipped and growled. There was a dog cage, opened, next to the dining room table. I called Dr. Tobel’s name, but my voice quickly died out in the carpet and books and barks. I had been to the house a few times before and remembered the layout: kitchen to the right, stairway and large living room to the left, bedrooms and studies upstairs.

  No sound came from the kitchen; I went there anyway, hoping not to see Dr. Tobel splayed out on the floor, a pot of tea boiling. But the kitchen was serene. I took a paper towel and pressed it to the cut on my hand. I moved to the living room and then to the stairs.

  “Dr. Tobel? It’s Nate McCormick. Are you all right?”

  Up the stairs to the carpeted upper hallway. I saw a slightly opened door and a light burning. I pushed the door open.

  “Dr. Tobel?”

  A bed sat against the far wall, the bedspread rumpled as if someone had been lying there. The reading lamp was on, but there was no open book, no sheaf of files on the bed or on the nightstand. Next to the bed was a large dresser covered thickly with photographs in silver frames. To my right, another door was open and a fluorescent light shone from inside. The bathroom.

  “Dr. Tobel?”

  A cane lay half on the carpet of the bedroom, half on the bathroom’s pink-tiled floor. The body of my mentor was twisted on the floor, one cane at her side, one at her feet, her arms and legs akimbo. An amber bottle lay opened beside her; tiny white pills dotted Dr. Tobel’s body, the sink, the floor.

  She lay there, her eyes half-opened and her mouth stretched back in a grimace. Quickly, without thinking, I moved to Dr. Tobel and pressed my fingers to her neck: no pulse. I pulled a makeup mirror from the counter near the sink and put it close to her mouth and nose. No fogging, no breath. Her skin was cold to the touch.

  I stumbled out of the bathroom.

  CHAPTER 51

  Often, I have noticed, it is possible to distill the entire experience of another person into one memory, a memory that becomes shorthand for everything you felt. It might be the last time you saw them, the fading waving figure through the rearview mirror of your car. A fishing trip, perhaps, or a gesture. When I think of my father, for example, I first see the red face of a drunkard, furious and a little scared because he’d just hit his son across the face with a belt. Thence, everything else flows, the good and the bad.

  Oddly, my boldest memory of Harriet Tobel is not my own. It was not even communicated to me by her. It came through the oral tradition of the medical school, the one that perpetuates the mythos of the institution, its faculty, its famous and infamous students. To put it more crassly, I got it through the med school rumor mill.

  Dr. Tobel, we all knew from the first weeks of school, was the crippled professor we saw lurching from the lab to the dean’s office to the classrooms. Other than the fact that she seemed to be able to get from A to B without help, I never understood why she chose the canes instead of the wheelchair. And though she was my advisor, and I had met with her a handful of times in those first few weeks, I never had the courage to ask.

  But that’s not the memory, the memory that is not mine. The memory is this, told to me by a gangly fourth-year medical student in that first week: Harriet Tobel on the golf course with her canes. She hobbles to the tee; someone gives her a club. In a single, swift motion, she raises the club, drops the canes, swings at the ball, and falls to the ground. She does this for nine holes, eighteen if the more ambitious rumors are to be believed. Swing, hit, fall. Swing, hit, fall. That story was shorthand for a life: like Washington and the cherry tree, like Teddy Roosevelt and the charge up San Juan Hill.

  There she now lay, this woman who’d observed all the nastiness I could summon, who’d risked some of her considerable reputation to help me in California and again in Baltimore. She’d seen all the warts, carbuncles, festering sores on the character of Nathaniel McCormick, and she hadn’t run from me. Not like Alaine. Not even like Brooke Michaels. For me, her support was as fundamental as those canes were for her.

  And now I was alone, sitting on the carpet of the bedroom, gazing down into bathroom, blood from my hand slowly soaking the paper towel. I was afraid I would not be able to get up again.

  When the initial shock had finally burned itself out, I stood, blew my nose, wiped my eyes. Though my brain was still pounding with emotion, I made a stab at objectivity. I tried to be a doctor, or an epidemiologist, or a medical detective, or whatever the hell I was. I tried to be what Dr. Tobel believed I could be.

  On the nightstand, there was a telephone. I picked up the receiver and dialed information for the medical examiner’s office. I hung up before the operator gave me the number. I needed to think.

  “Nathaniel, please call me when you get this message.” Dr. Tobel’s last words kept looping through my brain. “Ivory Coast.”

  Now, two feet away from me, she lay dead.

  It wasn’t right.

  I went back to the bathroom and tried to take in the scene. The medicine cabinet door was open; pill bottles had been pulled from the shelves and had fallen into the sink. A soap dish was overturned on the floor as if Dr. Tobel had grabbed at anything to stop her fall.

  I took a tissue and picked up the small amber bottle that was opened and empty on the floor: nitroglycerin, which matched up with the tiny tablets spread all over the room.

  Dr. Tobe
l, it seemed, had died of a heart attack, a myocardial infarction in medicalspeak.

  I looked in the medicine cabinet. The top shelf was filled with white and amber vials of prescription medications—Digoxin, Lasix, Ramipril, Losartan, Lipitor—and a smattering of over-the-counter laxatives and stomach medications. The drugs read like a medical chart for heart disease.

  In that case, I guess it was a heart attack.

  I played the scene over in my head: She’s in bed waiting for my call. The chest pain starts. At first she thinks it’s angina, but she’s worried because she was resting and angina shouldn’t hit when you’re at rest. Or maybe she knows then it’s a big one. She’s a doctor and familiar with the symptoms—the sweating, the pressure on the chest, the pain radiating to the jaw or down the arm. She heads for the tablets, hoping to pop a couple under her tongue, relieve the pain. But she knows.

  She barely pops the top off the vial before her oxygen-starved heart goes into an arrhythmia. It arrests. She dies.

  She dies, just before she was to tell me something “very important.”

  Ivory Coast.

  I went to the telephone, dialed information again, and this time got the number for the medical examiner’s office. Because the death had been unattended, the person at the ME’s said, they’d send over the police to ask a few questions.

  Good, I thought. Then I sat on the floor outside the bathroom door, looked at Dr. Tobel’s body, and tried to think.

  I didn’t hear the car until it stopped. Quickly, I moved to the window that looked over the drive and the garden. Nothing. The car must have been in front of the big hedgerow that ran between the property and the road. The engine ran, a faint rumble that barely perturbed the silence outside. I waited for a car door to slam, for whoever was inside to make an appearance. But nothing happened. After a full minute, I decided to go downstairs and see who it was. If it was the police—and who else would it be?—I’d be able to get things started. This death bothered me, and I wanted an autopsy to get underway quickly.

  I could still hear the engine when I stepped onto the front stoop. As I rounded the end of the hedgerow, I heard the car slide into gear and begin to move. I got the first letter of the license plate—P—and saw it was a dark-blue or black sedan, with only one person, the driver, inside.

  The car moved steadily through a stop sign at the end of the block.

  “Shit,” I said.

  The police, two of Atherton’s finest, were not happy to be there. Both seemed bored, which left me wondering what Atherton cops would normally be doing on a Wednesday night. I mean, this wasn’t Oakland or San Jose.

  So, the three of us sat at the dining room table while, upstairs, the medical examiner’s men packaged Dr. Tobel’s body for transport. The dogs ran around our feet.

  The female half of the team, an Officer Bein, looked at me across the table. “And why do you think there’s something wrong here?”

  “I just don’t think she was that sick.”

  Bein glanced at her partner. “Well, you’re the doctor, but isn’t that why they call heart attacks the silent killer?”

  “That’s high blood pressure,” I corrected automatically.

  “Whatever.”

  “Why didn’t she get to the phone?” I demanded. “Heart attacks rarely kill you immediately.”

  “It didn’t kill her immediately,” Bein said. “What about the pills? She tried to get them into her mouth.”

  “Someone could have put them there.”

  Bein rolled her eyes.

  I said, “And what about the car parked outside? What about it taking off as soon as I came outside?”

  “Dr. McCormick, we’ve been through this. We have the first letter of the plate and that it’s a dark sedan. You know how many matches we’ll get on this? It’s not like it’s a crime to park your car here. . . .”

  “You know of anyone who harbored grudges against Dr. Tobel?” This was from Officer Mackey, Bein’s partner.

  “No,” I said.

  “You know anything about lovers?”

  “No.”

  “Was she a gambler, Dr. McCormick?”

  “Come on, are you serious?”

  “I should ask you the same thing, Doctor. You see, the scene here, this is not a police matter. Your friend died of a heart attack.”

  There were sounds on the steps, and I heard one of the ME’s men swear loudly. The dogs heard it, too, began to bark, and scuttled into the foyer.

  Mackey told me, “Put them in the cage, will you? They’re going to trip up the guys on the stairs.”

  I gave the officer a good fuck-you gaze, then went to the kitchen for some dog treats. In the foyer, a gurney was parked near the front door. The ME’s men made their way awkwardly down the stairs, a black body bag slung between them.

  “Cute dogs,” one of them said, nodding toward the two dachshunds, who sat solemnly underneath the gurney as if they were looking for protection.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the black, zippered plastic.

  “Come on, guys,” I said to the dogs. Once they spotted the treats, they followed me back into the dining room to their cage, where I closed them inside.

  As I sat down at the table, Officer Bein said, “I have some questions for you now. What happened to your hand?”

  I’d forgotten about the hand. “I cut it breaking that window.” I pointed to the French doors with the missing pane.

  “Why’d you break the window?”

  In the foyer, I could see the ME’s men drop the body onto the gurney. I turned away.

  I said to Bein, “Because she wasn’t answering the door. I was worried.”

  “If you were worried, why didn’t you call the police?”

  “Because I’m a doctor. I could have helped her if she needed it.”

  “So you broke in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you coming to the house, anyway?”

  “We had plans to meet.”

  “This late?”

  “Yes. No. We didn’t have plans to meet. I was supposed to call her. When she didn’t answer, I got worried. I came over.” Dr. Tobel’s body was wheeled through the front door. One of the ME’s men was quietly whistling a Broadway tune I’ve always hated. “Look, this is a waste of time. Don’t you guys need to dust the place for fingerprints or something?”

  Detective Bein cracked a smile. So did her partner. “And whose would we find besides yours and hers?”

  “I don’t know—that’s why you check for them, right? You’re the police.”

  “Maybe we should dust, Jack,” Bein told her partner. “And we’ll get a forensics team in here to comb for fibers, and—hey—maybe this is too big for us. I’ll put in a call to the FBI. We can dragnet the whole neighborhood.” Both cops were grinning. Bein said to me, “Yes, we are the police, and my professional opinion is that I see nothing strange here. We could run you down to the station and interrogate you if that would make you feel better.”

  It wouldn’t make me feel better. I didn’t say that. Instead, I told her, “You guys are really a bunch of pricks, aren’t you?”

  That got some reaction. Bein said, “Listen, you arrogant—”

  “Look, Doctor.” Mackey shot a warning glance at his partner. “We appreciate that you’re upset, but there isn’t anything here. And we’re busy.” He pulled out a card. “The body’s going to the medical examiner’s. They’ll do an autopsy. That should make you happy—”

  “It will.”

  “But I got to tell you, Doctor, I’m with Officer Bein here. This is an elderly lady who died of natural causes. Still, if you find anything, give us a call.”

  Mackey stood and handed his card to me; then the two officers left. I can’t say I was disappointed they were gone, but as the sound of the vehicles faded, loneliness enveloped me. I went back into the dining room, opened the dogs’ cage, and sat on the floor as they jumped in and out of my lap, trying, as dogs will, to get me to smile. I didn’
t.

  CHAPTER 52

  “Please come back.”

  “I can’t, Brooke.”

  “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “I need to call her children.”

  “You can call them tomorrow.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You need to sleep,” Brooke said. “Look, I’ll come pick you up; then I’ll bring you back tomorrow morning. You can—”

  “Thanks,” I said. It was after two a.m. I’d called Brooke to unload. But after waking her up, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Any words I could think of—hollow, cored-out, sad, miserable—would sound too trite, too unimportant. “You go back to bed. I’ll be there sometime soon.”

  “Nathaniel—”

  “Good night, Brooke. Thanks.”

  I hit End on the cell phone. Thirty seconds later it rang.

  I answered. “Brooke—”

  “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “I have the dogs.”

  “Nathaniel.”

  “I appreciate the concern, but I really have to go. Good night.” I ended the call. It began to ring again. I silenced the ringer.

  Dr. Tobel had two children, two boys. Oddly, I knew nothing else about them. Though their pictures were prominent on the bureau in Dr. Tobel’s bedroom, she’d never spoken of them to me.

  After looking around the kitchen for the children’s telephone numbers and finding nothing, I went upstairs. The dogs trotted after me into the study. They lay next to one another on the floor. I sat in the worn leather chair behind the big oak desk and switched on the green banker’s light. The room looked like something plucked from the middle of the last century: the old desk was topped with a battered leather blotter; textbooks and old reference books lined the walls. Pictures—none more recent than the 1970s—hung on the walls. There was a fireplace set into the wall, with a long mantel stretching above it. On the mantel was clustered a motley collection of objects: antique ice tongs, masks I had sent Dr. Tobel from Africa, an Incan or Mayan pot. All in all, the room was almost a museum piece.