“I guess that would include now, huh?”
“I thought you might want to come to bed sometime.”
“I’ll try to keep it short.”
He felt something go out of her. “I left her number by the phone,” she said, standing up. “Have you had anything at all to eat?”
He shook his head. “My client’s finally started to figure out he’s in trouble, but it was all I could do to get him to talk to me on the phone. It was originally supposed to be his night for his kids. He thought the thing with Glitsky was going to take like a half hour. I asked him when he thought we could get a few minutes, maybe talk about some things so I didn’t have to find them all out from third parties. So he says he doesn’t know—he’s got his kids this weekend, too. He works a million hours a day. But I had him with me on the phone. There wasn’t going to be any other time. So I told him to call his ex-wife, change his plans, tell her not tonight. We had to talk.”
Frannie was just looking down at him. She’d crossed her arms over her chest, her body language expressing it all—disappointment, disapproval. Sadness. “There’s leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator,” she said.
“I don’t know if it’s anything,” Rebecca Simms said.
“That’s all right,” Hardy said. “If it’s keeping you up, it’s probably worth talking about.” He sat at his dining room table, his yellow legal pad in front of him, the portable phone at his ear. He’d poured himself a glass of orange juice and drank half of it off in a gulp. “Did you remember something about Dr. Kensing?”
“No, not exactly that. Not that at all, really.”
Hardy waited.
“I’ve been thinking about how I should say this, since I don’t really know anything specific, not for sure. I just went back on the floor after we talked and I guess the whole discussion we had—you know? The general conditions here?”
“Sure. I remember.”
The line hummed empty for another few seconds. Then Rebecca blurted it out. “The thing is, everybody on the staff knows something is really wrong here. The nurses, I mean. Probably some of the doctors, too. But nobody really talks about it. It’s more a feeling, like a ghost is hovering over the place or something.”
Hardy closed his heavy eyes. She sounded like she meant it literally. Terrific, he thought. The woman he picked at random in the hospital cafeteria, although she’d seemed like an intelligent person by the light of day, was in fact a nutcase and now she had his home phone number. Frannie was right—he shouldn’t have it on his business card.
“Well.” Hardy was ready to end the conversation. “I don’t know if a feeling—”
“No, no.” She cut him off. “That’s not it. It’s…what I’m saying is that people are dying here.”
Hardy had picked up his juice glass and now he put it down. His fatigue was suddenly gone. “What do you mean, people?”
“Patients. People who shouldn’t die.”
“What kind of patients?”
“Mostly old, I think. Mostly in the ICU.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No, not a hundred percent.” He could hear the exasperation in her voice. “That’s what I said at the beginning. I’m not sure.”
“Okay,” he said, hoping to keep her moving along this trail. “That’s all right. I’m interested.”
“But nobody’s really sure of anything, or saying if they are…”
“Right. But I’m more interested in general conditions there anyway. It doesn’t have to be specific—the low morale and so on…”
“Well, all of that’s true, too, the tight money, the job insecurity, all that. But really, when we were talking I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was, until tonight when I got home and it hit me…”
“What did, though?” This was pulling teeth, but they seemed to be loosening.
She paused a moment. “It sounds stupid to even say.”
“Can you try? I won’t think it’s stupid, no matter what. Promise.”
A longer pause. “Well,” she said, “if people keep dying when they shouldn’t…”
Hardy finished for her. “Maybe somebody’s killing them.”
“Yes.” The relief in her voice was palpable. “That’s what I was trying to get at. That’s what it is.”
“Do you have any idea who it might be?”
“No. Well, maybe, I don’t know. As I said, I don’t even know if it’s true. But the first one I heard about was maybe a year ago, a man had had a stroke, but it was one of those situations, you know, where the family was hoping he’d recover, the prognosis was okay if he came out of his coma, and they didn’t want to pull the plug. So they were waiting. Everybody thought he’d be long term, but then two days into it, he suddenly died.”
“Okay,” Hardy said. “But doesn’t that happen?”
“Sometimes. Sure.”
“It doesn’t necessarily mean somebody killed him.”
“No, of course not.” She went silent again for a long beat. “If it was that one man, everybody would have probably forgotten about it by now. But he was something like the third patient to die in as many months. So one of the ICU nurses mentioned it in the nurses’ lounge. There’s this one weird little guy who works up there, a nurse actually. Rajan Bhutan is his name. He was on duty for all of them.”
“Somebody thinks he might be killing patients?”
“No, not really. I don’t even know why I mentioned that. I mean, nobody thought about it at the time, but then…it kept happening.”
“It kept happening,” Hardy repeated. “How often?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. But often enough.” He heard her breathe out heavily, the load off.
But Hardy put another one right on. “Do you know if anyone’s gone to the police about this? About this man Rajan?”
“No. I don’t know. If someone had, wouldn’t we have heard?”
“You’d think so.”
“And…” She chopped off the thought.
And Hardy jumped on it. “What?”
“Nothing.” A pause. “Really, nothing.”
“Rebecca, please. You were going to say something.”
The decision took a while. “Well…let’s just say that it would be hard to keep working if anybody went to the police or the newspaper or anything. I mean, look at Dr. Kensing and Baby Emily. Imagine if it got out that Portola was killing its patients. There’s a culture there that’s”—she sought the word—“self-protective, I guess.”
“Most cultures are,” he said. “But I don’t know if I can believe it about this. You’re saying the administration wouldn’t want to know if one of their staff is killing patients?”
“Oh, they’d want to know, all right. They just wouldn’t want anybody else to know. It’s like bad doctors.”
“What’s like bad doctors?”
A little laugh. “Well, basically, there are none.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means every doctor on the staff is great until they’re transferred to, say, Illinois. They get great references, maybe even a raise and moving expenses. Why? Because there are no bad doctors.”
“And no whistle-blowers.”
This was a sobering statement, and Rebecca Simms reacted to it. Her voice went hollow, nearly inaudible. “And I’m not being one now, Mr. Hardy. I’ve got three children and my husband and they all need me to keep this job. I don’t know anything for certain. I just thought it might help you to know the general conditions, as you called them. We know Mr. Markham was killed, don’t we? Maybe that changes something.”
“Maybe somebody could go to the police.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. I mean, what would they say?”
“They’d say what you just said to me.”
“But it’s all so nebulous. There isn’t any…there’s no real proof….”
“There would be bodies.” Hardy refuted her in his calmest voice. “They could autops
y the bodies. Haven’t they done postmortems anyway? At least on one or two of them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think the families usually…” She trailed off, repeated that she just didn’t know. “Anyway, you’re not part of this. I mean here at the hospital. Maybe you can do something.”
Hardy realized that this was as good as it was going to get, at least for tonight. “Maybe I can,” he said. “I’ll try, anyway.” He thanked Rebecca for the call. “You were right. It was important. And I don’t think there’s really any reason for you to be afraid. I’ll keep you out of whatever I do. You were brave to call me.”
He heard the gratitude in her voice. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re a good man. I’m sorry it was so late.”
When he hung up, he remained at the table, unmoving, for a long while. He hadn’t been able to keep the phone call very short after all, and no doubt Frannie was by now asleep. Even if she wasn’t, the mood would have passed, had already passed by the time she went upstairs. Rebecca Simms had called him a good man, but he wasn’t feeling much like one at the moment.
Eventually, he finished his juice, got up, and took the glass into the kitchen, where he rinsed it in the sink. He was drying it when he heard a recognizable something behind him. He turned to see his son, one foot resting on the other one, squinting at him in the doorway. “Hey, bud,” he said quietly. “Whatcha doin’?”
Vincent wasn’t quite a teenager yet, but most of the little boy in him was recently gone. Now his hair was buzzed short and his ears stuck out, while the frame that had tended to a round softness had become lanky, nearly skinny. “I couldn’t get to sleep.”
Hardy came over, bent down to him. “You haven’t been asleep yet all night?”
The boy sat on his knee, threw an arm around his neck. “No. I’m having bad dreams.”
“What about?”
“Where you keep disappearing. We’re all in this forest and you’re just going off for a minute to do something, and then we wait and wait until Mom says she’s going to go looking for you, but we beg her not to go because then she won’t come back, either, but then she goes and the Beck and I are left there, and we start calling after her, which is when I wake up.”
Hardy didn’t have to use much imagination to come up with the underpinnings of this scenario, although Vincent certainly wasn’t using it as a guilt trip. He hoped he wasn’t that sophisticated, yet. If it was his sister, Hardy wouldn’t have been so sure. He pulled him closer, which at this time of night his son would still accept. “Well, I’m here,” he said comfortingly, “and if you woke up, that means you were asleep, doesn’t it? Which means you could get to sleep after all, couldn’t you?” The lawyer, arguing, making his point.
“I guess so,” Vincent said.
“Come on, I’ll tuck you back in.”
But Vincent’s bed, in the room behind the kitchen, hadn’t been slept in at all. He pointed to the back of the house, Hardy’s old office. “I’m in the Beck’s room. Mom said it was okay.”
They got to the connecting door and Hardy noted the heap of blankets next to his daughter’s bed. “Why are you in here?” Hardy thinking it was no wonder his son wasn’t sleeping soundly on the hardwood floor.
“You know the Beck. She gets scared,” Vincent whispered.
Hardy knew. Fanned by her school’s various “awareness” programs, Rebecca’s profound and random fears—about death, teen suicide, stranger abduction, AIDS, drug addiction, and so many more—had reached crisis proportions about a year before. “I thought we’d worked most of those out. What’s she still afraid of?”
“Just the dark, mostly. And being alone sometimes.” Interpreting his father’s heavy sigh, Vincent hastened to add, protecting her, “It’s not every night. She’s way better than she was.”
“Good. I thought so. Do you have a futon or anything to lay on under those blankets?”
“No. I sleep good just on the floor.”
“I see that,” Hardy said. “Except for the bad dreams and being awake at twelve thirty.” But Hardy spoke in a conspiratorial, not critical, tone. The two guys in the house had their own relationship—they had to stick together. “Let’s get you something, though, okay?”
So they grabbed cushions from the chairs in Vincent’s room and put them on the floor. As he got settled, Hardy pulled the blankets over him. “You could probably get in your own bed now and the Beck wouldn’t notice.”
But he shook his head, happy to be important. “That’s okay. She needs me here sometimes. Girls do, you know, Dad.”
Hardy rubbed his hand over his son’s buzz cut. Vincent wasn’t meaning to twist the knife in his heart—he was honing his little man chops, which hopefully someday he would put to better use than his father did. “I know,” Hardy said. His hand rubbed the bristly head again. “Are we still not kissing each other good night?” This nightly ritual had ended only a couple of months before, just after Christmas, but occasionally when Vincent’s guard was down, or nobody else in the family was around, he’d forget that it wasn’t cool to kiss Dad anymore. Tonight Hardy got lucky, and figuring it was going to have to be one of the very last times, held onto the hug an extra millisecond. “Okay, get some sleep, Vin.”
“I will now. Thanks, Dad.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Want to hear a joke?”
Hardy, halfway to his feet, summoned his last unit of patience. “One,” he said.
“What do you get when you turn an elephant into a cat?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, you’ve got to try.”
“Okay, I’m trying. Watch. My eyes are closed.” He silently counted to three. “Okay, I give up. What?”
“You really don’t know? An elephant into a cat? Think.”
“Vin…” He stood up.
“A cat,” Vincent said. “You turn an elephant into a cat, you get a cat. Get it?”
“Good one,” Hardy said. “You ought to tell it to Uncle Abe. He’d love it.”
For reasons that eluded him, he stalked the house front to back several times, rearranged the elephants yet again. Then he sat for a while in the living room, until he was fairly certain that Vincent had dozed off. He came all the way into the Beck’s room again, leaning down over the cushions and then the bed to make out the dim outlines of his children’s faces, calm and peaceful now in sleep.
He eventually, finally, made it up to the master bedroom. There he double-checked the alarm to find that it was still—again?—set for 4:30. He would have to issue a home edict making his alarm clock off limits except for him and Frannie. He moved it ahead two hours.
In bed, with his wife breathing regularly beside him, he wondered briefly about all the subliminal communication going on in his house, among his family. He and Frannie with the elephants, the Beck’s now unspoken but still clearly upsetting fears, Vincent’s last joke an obvious attempt to keep his father in the room another few seconds, although he would never simply ask. The dynamic, suddenly, seemed to have shifted and Hardy, at least, felt adrift, moving among the rest of them with a kind of gravitational connection, but nothing really solid, holding them together.
He lay awake now, echoes of his son, unable to sleep despite his exhaustion. His memory had dredged up a contradiction that now gnawed at him. Earlier in the day, Rebecca Simms had derided the idea that someone had killed Tim Markham in the hospital. It was ridiculous, she’d said. It must have been an accident.
Or he’d simply just died, which, she’d reminded him, “people do.” But by tonight, such deaths—unexplained possible homicides—had become common, a regular feature during the past year or more at Portola. He wanted to call her back and clarify her position—maybe he’d broken through the culture barrier at the hospital where criticism wasn’t tolerated and then forced her to consider the unthinkable with Markham, and it had awakened other ghosts.
But the facts of the deaths alone—if they were facts, if they could be proven—were stagge
ring in their implications, and not just for his client, although Kensing was going to be in the middle of whatever transpired. For Hardy, it would mean more hours, greater commitment, escalated involvement; less time with his wife, less connection with his children, less interest in the daily rhythms of his home.
It also meant that he was truly putting himself in harm’s way. If someone, whether it was this Rajan Bhutan or someone else at Portola, had in fact killed again and again and if Hardy was going to be involved in exposing those crimes, then he was going to be in that person’s sights.
He turned again onto his side, and might even have drifted off into a semblance of a dream state, where he was swimming in turbulent waters with some of Pico’s sharks circling, snapping at him, closing in. Then something—some settling of his house, a random noise outside—sent a surge of adrenaline through him and he threw his covers off and sat bolt upright in bed. His breath came in ragged surges.
It woke Frannie up. “Dismas, are you all right? What time is it?”
“I’m okay. I’m okay.” But he really wasn’t. That largely unacknowledged yet pervasive fear that Rebecca Simms had described at Portola seemed to be stalking him, as well. Even the familiar darkness in his own bedroom felt somehow sinister, as though something terrible lurked hidden just at the edge of it.
He tried to laugh off the imaginings for what he told himself they were—irrational terrors in the wake of a nightmare. But they held their grip. Finally, feeling foolish, he switched on his bedlight for a moment.
Nothing, of course. Nothing.
Still, it took a long while before his breathing became normal. Eventually, he let himself back down and pulled the covers over him. After a minute, he turned and settled spoon fashion against his wife.
Before his brain could start running again, sleep mercifully claimed him.
16
Kensing finished his morning rounds at Portola’s ICU and walked out to the nurses’ station. Waiting for him there was the tall and thin figure of Portola’s administrator, Michael Andreotti, who wanted a private word with him. They walked silently together down one long hallway, then took the elevator to the ground floor, where Andreotti led the way into an empty conference room next to his own office in the admin wing, and then closed the door behind them.
The Dismas Hardy Novels Page 67