A Man to Die for
Authors: Eileen Dreyer
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General, #Victorian
A Man to Die For
“It was difficult for the Angel of Death to kill everybody in the whole world, so he appointed doctors to assist him.”
Nachman of Bratzlav
Jewish mystic, 1771-1811
CONTROL YOUR IMPULSES, her mother had always said. Stifle your…
HIS ARRIVAL WAS foretold like the second coming of Christ.
CASEY DIDN’T DWELL on Dr. Hunsacker. In fact, once she got…
IT WAS HIS eyes.
ST. LOUIS IS a city of neighborhoods. Originally defined by its…
IT WAS POPPI who told her. Casey was in trying…
CASEY COULDN’T REALLY see him as a Bishop. More a…
SO, HOW EXACTLY did one go about proving that a…
HIS STOMACH WAS killing him. The last few days had…
BARB SLAPPED OPEN the door. “What are you guys doin’…
CASEY COMPLETELY FORGOT about Janice. “Where?” she asked, already hearing…
SCANLON HAD HER by the arms again. “What are you…
IT WAS ONLY the first day of June, and already…
HE MUST HAVE sensed her humiliation. No more than half…
JACK COULD GUESS what kind of day Casey had had…
SHE’D EATEN A .38. No question, according to the Brentwood…
“THEN WHY DID Janice go out and buy herself a…
FIRST JACK LOOKED. “Are you sure?”
TONIGHT JACK DROVE with the top down and Bird on…
BERT WAS ALREADY flipping through his notebook. “Tell me about…
“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?” Casey shrilled, whirling on her mother.
WHEN A PSYCHOPATH finally shows himself in the movies, he…
“BEG NOW,” he advised, standing over her, the gun wavering…
CONTROL YOUR IMPULSES
, her mother had always said. Stifle your urges, the church echoed. She should have listened. The next time she had an urge like this one, she was going to lock herself in a closet until it went away.
“Honey, why are we here?”
“I have to make a stop before I take you home, Mom.”
A stop. She had to report a crime. Several crimes. That wasn’t exactly a run to the local Safeway for deodorant.
Gripping her purse in one hand and her mother in the other, Casey McDonough approached the St. Louis City Police Headquarters like a penitent approaching the gates of purgatory. It seemed amazing, really. Casey had been born no more than fifteen miles away, but she’d never visited this place before. She’d never even known precisely where it was.
A stark block of granite that took up the corner of Clark and Tucker, the headquarters did nothing to inspire comfort. Brass grillwork protected massive front doors and encased traditional globe lamps that flanked it. Unmarked police cars and crime scene vans hugged the curb. Police in uniform or windbreakers and walkie-talkies hovered near the front door, chatting among themselves. Civilians edged by, sensing their intrusion, much the way they would enter her hospital.
Casey didn’t want to be here. If she could have, she would have approached her friends on the county police force instead. She would have pulled one of them aside when they’d come into her emergency room and proposed her theory in a way that could be considered an inside joke instead of an accusation.
“Say, Bert, what would you think if I said there’s something just a little more sinister than fee-splitting going on around here? What if I told you that some of the bad luck around this place is actually connected? And not just because I know all the people involved, either.”
Bert would laugh and deflect her fears with common sense, and the issue would have gone no further.
Only none of the crimes Casey suspected had actually happened in the county. Bert wouldn’t know anything about them. He couldn’t do her any good. If she wanted any relief from the suspicions that had been building like a bad case of indigestion over the last few weeks, she was going to have to find it with the city cops. Cops she didn’t know. Cops who didn’t know her.
Casey pulled on the heavy glass-and-brass door and winced at its screech of protest. It sounded as if it resented her intrusion. The way everybody else ignored the noise, the door must have been objecting for years.
Inside, the foyer was a high square of marble, cool and hushed. Casey held the heavy door open for her mother to follow inside. Sketching a quick sign of the cross, the little woman instinctively reached for a holy water font.
“It’s not a church,” Casey reminded her.
It was hell. She was in hell for what she suspected. But Casey just couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. It was time to let somebody else help shoulder the weight of this rock she was carrying around her neck.
“What do you mean it’s not a church?” her mother asked, swinging around on the gray marble floor, her voice echoing in the cavernous lobby. “Who’s going to take care of St. Joseph?”
Heads turned. The female officer at the control desk at the far side of the room came to a kind of careful alert, like a guard dog catching an unfamiliar scent. Two middle-aged black men slouching against the wall of the diarrhea brown and green waiting area interrupted their conversation to assess the new entertainment.
“It’s a police station,” Casey whispered, a hand on her mother’s arm so she couldn’t get far. “It’ll only take a minute.”
She shouldn’t be thinking of her civic duty. She should be thinking of her personal duty. She had a mother to take care of. A mother nobody else really wanted to be saddled with. What was going to happen to Helen when Casey was without a job, without a career, without any kind of future? Because if she took another step, that was exactly what was going to happen. This simply wasn’t the kind of action the medical hierarchy overlooked.
“Can I help you?”
This was stupid. She had no business being here.
She had no choice. Evelyn had been her friend. Casey stepped up to the desk.
“Couldn’t I just go to confession?” Helen asked in a little whimper. “I only pruned her roses.”
The officer frowned. A petite, precise black woman with very little humor in her expression, she considered Casey’s mother like a bad joke. Casey couldn’t blame her. But then, Casey didn’t know that the sergeant was going to like Casey’s story any better. How did she say it? How did she pull all the suspicions whirling around into some kind of recognizable order? How did she relay them so that she would be taken seriously, so that she’d be able to hand off the responsibility and avoid recriminations for making accusations about respected people committing crimes?
Crimes. A euphemism. A generality that didn’t carry the impact of the truth. She’d been avoiding the issue by calling it a crime, instead of what it was. She’d been dancing with inevitability, because the minute she gave voice to the suspicions that had been hovering like unwelcome ghosts, there wouldn’t be any retreat. There wouldn’t be any chance of calling her fears a mistake.
“Ma’am?” the officer nudged without appreciable patience.
“Murder,” Casey blurted out ungracefully.
The officer scowled, hands on hips. “Take your roses seriously, huh?”
“Have you ever thought of the convent?” Helen asked, reaching across the dark wood desk.
The officer flinched.
Casey pulled Helen back just in time. “Say a rosary, Mom.” When Helen nodded agreeably and began to dig into her purse, Casey returned to the officer. “It’s about the murder the other night, Crystal Johnson. I may have some information about it.”
That elicited a long, considering look. “You wanna tell me?”
Casey didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry. Didn’t this woman understand how tough this was? Didn’t she know that all Casey had were intangibles, feelings, instincts, for God’s sake? Didn’t she understand that Casey couldn’t betray herself out here in the open, where an echo could carry her suspicions to the wrong set of ears?
“It’s a long story,” she hedged miserably. And somebody’s going to see me here, somebody from the hospital like me who never comes into the city except to shop and eat, but who maybe got their car stolen or impounded for a ticket, and they’ll go right back to work and report just what I was doing at the city police headquarters.
The officer took one more look at Helen, then Casey. “You’re not confessing, are you?” She sounded almost hopeful.
“Not without a priest,” Helen piped up.
Casey ignored her. “I suspect somebody else,” was all she could manage.
A nod, a quick look around the lobby, at nothing at all. “Well, in that case, I’ll do you one better. I’ll get you a Bishop.”
Casey considered herself rightfully frustrated and depressed. She should have known better. She wasn’t really frustrated or depressed until fifteen minutes later when she stepped into the Bishop’s office for the first time. One look at him made the rest of the situation pale in comparison.
Even so, she straightened as much as she could, shoved her mother into a seat, and challenged the officer. “There’s somebody you and I need to talk about.”
HIS ARRIVAL WAS
foretold like the second coming of Christ. Administration, that great hospital prophet of profit and loss, whispered his name with reverence and hope. Men in three-piece suits said novenas, drunk with his potential, aquiver with his proposed patient load. Silver-haired corporate giants wept with joy. A great wind of change was sweeping over Mother Mary Hospital, and its name would be Hunsacker.
The labor and delivery staff took up the song the minute he first crossed Mother Mary terrazzo, the nurses entertaining the cafeteria crowd with psalms to his looks and charisma, teasing the unanointed with his proximity, congratulating themselves on their incredible luck to be so privileged with his presence.
The floors followed, and then surgery, until the reputation of Dr. Dale Hunsacker threatened mythological proportions.
He was handsome. He was electric. He remembered names and told jokes and brought in pizzas. The administration loved him because he had managed to siphon the wealthier pregnancies their way when he decided to name Mother Mary his primary hospital, and the labor and delivery nurses loved him because he inspired administration to cough up some badly needed money for their unit. So what if he wasn’t the best OB/GYN to hit the halls. Neither were any of the other OBs on staff, and not one of them was nearly as pleasant.
Dr. Dale Hunsacker, doctor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, late of the finer neighborhoods of Boston and New York, had decided to escape the pressures of the East Coast for the settled, homey atmosphere of St. Louis. In no more than a matter of weeks in his new home, he had proven a rare talent, attracting some of the area’s more wealthy women into his practice on weight of word of mouth and an unforgettable smile. Dr. Dale Hunsacker was an up-and-coming commodity in one of the most cutthroat business venues in St. Louis—medicine. And much to the chagrin of the more traditional moneyed hospitals in the area, Mother Mary had him.
Dale was a great guy. Dale was a dream. Dale was a hell of a team player. By the time Casey met him, she knew she was either going to end up hating him or having his children.
Given a choice, she would have picked almost any other night to finally meet the newest staff legend. Friday night was bad enough in the emergency room, but a full moon was worse. And to top it off, the weather was warming up. All those bananamen out there who had been waiting out the cold weather to go back into action were revving into high gear.
Five hours into her shift, Casey was tired, hungry, and crabby. The idea that all this was just a preview of the months to come depressed her immensely.
“It’s like a zoo in here tonight,” she complained to Janice Feldman when they met at the medprep where the medications were kept.
Tall, elegant, and irritatingly spotless at eight o’clock at night, Janice grinned and waved a manicured finger at Casey’s freckled nose. “Watch it, hon. One of the surgery nurses got fired for bandying about that particular euphemism. Administration thinks it’s derogatory.”
Casey lifted a dry eyebrow. “It is,” she assured her friend. “That’s why I said it.” Drawing up fifty of Vistaril, Casey capped the needle and turned to consider the long hall. “Sounds like it’s feeding time, too.”
Babies wailed, drunks howled, one particularly colorful psychotic screamed a series of numbers out loud to keep them all from disappearing, and the radio babbled nonstop. Phones rang, monitors beeped, and sirens moaned on their way in.
“Hold ye there, virgin!”
Casey stiffened and spun around. “Oh, shit, Ralph. I told you to watch him!”
A close relative of Gentle Ben was bearing down on her, hair and beard flying, eyes glittering, arms outstretched to her. The leather restraints he’d been wearing flapped in his wake. He was buck naked and ugly as sin.
“Save me, virgin!” he howled, scattering security guards like bowling pins. “Die for me!”
Casey planted herself foursquare in his path. “I have affidavits,” she yelled at him, hands on hips, fighting a grin. St. Paul came in every other month when he forgot to take his Prolixin and tried to sacrifice a redheaded virgin to ensure the safety of his virility. Unfortunately, Casey was the only redhead around. “Witnesses. Participants. I—am—not—a virgin!”
“I’ll swear to it!” Dr. Belstein yelled from room three where he was sewing up a toddler’s chin.
“Me, too,” Michael Wilson added, hand in the air from where he was adjusting a pair of crutches at the other end of the hall. “She was great!”
“Nae!”
“Did St. Paul live in medieval Scotland?” Janice asked as security gave it another try. Two of them grabbed restraints. Two more tried flying tackles.
“What I want to know,” Casey answered, watching the foray passively, “is whether he’s only been this ugly since he fell off that donkey.”
St. Paul finally came down when Casey just stuck a foot out and tripped him. The ensuing crash of people tumbled two chairs and sent a stock cart rolling into the telemetry desk. Janice delicately lifted a spotless white shoe just in time to have St. Paul slide neatly beneath. Spittle dotted the floor, but not her uniform.
“You’ll need to fill out an incident report,” Ralph informed them from where he lay amid the tangle of arms and legs.
Casey waved him off. “I’ll just copy off the last four.”
She was turning back to close up the cabinet when a wild howl split the air. Both she and Janice turned in the direction of room eight, which had been empty only moments earlier.
“What’s that?” Janice demanded as the voice rose again, somebody’s impersonation of a screech monkey.
“Your gomer du jour,” Barb announced as she stepped out the door. “Mr. Wilson Macomber. Ninety-two and holding.”
Janice groaned. “Again? I just sent him home.”
Barb’s smile was smug as she handed over the paperwork from the nursing home that had transferred Mr. Macomber in. “He misses you. I need rooms, kids. Clear something out.”
“So I can get
Mrs
. Macomber?” Casey demanded. “No, thanks.”
Barb just looked down at the floor where security was still trying to convince St. Paul he wanted to go back to his room—or Thessalonia, as it had been dubbed for the night. “Don’t forget to fill out the incident report.”
Casey and Janice turned back to their task, handily ignoring the scuffle that still continued behind them and the newest member of the Friday Night Choir.
“We really want to do this, right?” Casey asked.
Janice knew Casey well enough to laugh. “More than sex.”
At that, Casey sighed and cleaned up her equipment before racing off. “I wouldn’t know,” she admitted. “I haven’t had sex in so long, it would be hard to compare.”
“Trust me, then,” Janice suggested.
Casey turned, hearing the sudden tension in the other nurse’s voice, but Janice was way ahead of her. “Heard from Dr. Wonderful yet?”
“Hunsacker?” Casey shook her head. “He’s still missing in action. Which just proves that he’s not stupid. God knows, I wouldn’t want to face that bitch when she’s in full cry.”
Janice huffed self-righteously. “The price of courting the rich.”
“Casey!” one of the other nurses yelled from the far end of the hall. “Mrs. VanCleve wants you!”
Casey’s mood took an immediate nosedive. “He’d better get his butt in here fast,” she threatened blackly.
“He will,” Janice promised with a commiserating pat to the shoulder. “And from what I’ve heard, it’ll be well worth the wait.”
Casey stopped just long enough to shoot her friend a particularly derisive look. “Honey, he’s gonna have to fart flowers to impress me after this.” And then she headed off to face the glacial Mrs. VanCleve.
Casey’s feet ached. Her calves ached. Come to think of it, her hips ached. She’d walked on to a full house and hadn’t stopped moving since, sending three patients to surgery, two to intensive care, and waiting to get one to Fantasy Island before somebody really did make him disappear. She’d held babies, comforted confused old people, pacified drunks, and dodged St. Paul. And to top it off, she’d gotten stuck with Mrs. VanCleve.
She knew Barbara had dumped the woman on her out of spite. Barbara didn’t like Casey, and tended to use her shifts as triage nurse to drive home the point. Whenever Barbara triaged, Casey’s patient load was Herculean. It also encompassed the far end of a badly laid out hall, so that Casey would suffer the maximum amount of inconvenience.
The Emergency Department, like everything else at Mother Mary, had been designed by architects whose specialty must have been racetracks. Constructed in a long L shape, its twenty-five rooms demanded a lot of running and a constant strain to keep an eye on all the patients.
Well, Casey thought again as she slipped into Mr. Willington’s room to give him his pain medicine, at least she got her exercise. Be thankful for small things, her mother always said. Well, this was about as small as it got.
Pulling the cap off the syringe with her teeth, Casey aimed for the right upper quadrant of Mr. Willington’s emaciated backside and slid the needle home.
“I’m going to turn off the lights now,” she told him quietly, because anything hurt him at times like this. His skin was like leather by now, but he refused to flinch. Casey retrieved her empty syringe and dumped it in the waste, the cap still caught in her teeth like a toothpick. “And we’ll see how it does. Would you like me to get your wife?”
“No,” he moaned, turning as best he could. “Let her get away from me for a while.”
Casey settled him with patient hands, smiling because that was all she could offer him now when the pain medicine wouldn’t even really work anymore, smoothing his hair back from a clammy forehead, trying to ease his discomfort as much as she could before consigning him back to the floors that he so seldom left anymore. “Well, you get some sleep,” she crooned, already wearing the edge off her molars against the plastic needle cap she’d begun to chew like old gum to work away the stress. “I don’t want any wild music or dancing in here.”
He managed a small grin at her wan joke. “Not unless I’m feeling particularly frisky.”
She flipped off the lights and eased back out the door, hating the futility of aching for him, wishing he’d die quickly so she could stop torturing him.
“Yes, Mrs. VanCleve.” Leaning into the room next door, Casey kept her voice level and concerned, even though she had long since decided that the only thing Mrs. VanCleve needed was a high colonic and a fast boot out the door.
For Mrs. VanCleve’s part, she was comfortably ensconced on the cart like a Victorian hostess, hair perfectly coiffed and hands weighted down with enough diamonds to support a third world economy. Her nails were blood-red and her lipstick matched. Her eyes were harder than the stones in her rings and brimming with disdain.
“Do you know who I am?” she demanded yet again, her voice scathing.
Casey overcame the urge to say, Yes, of course. I’ve been in this room every thirty seconds since you walked in the door. I should damn well know who you are by now.
“We’ve tried everything to reach Dr. Hunsacker,” she explained yet again. “He isn’t on his beeper, and he’s left the other hospital. Like I said, Mrs. VanCleve, since you didn’t let Dr. Hunsacker know you were coming in, he couldn’t be here to meet you. You can wait for him, or if you’d like, one of our doctors can still see you.”
She’d given that speech so many times in the last forty-five minutes she was thinking of printing it on a laminated card, like Miranda rights. Mrs. VanCleve was no more impressed than she had been the other ten or twelve times.
“I will not see some…intern! You get out and find Dr. Hunsacker now! I have a dinner to attend, and I will not be late.”
Casey was still counting for patience when Michael screeched to a halt alongside her.
“Casey, Billie Evans is coming in in full arrest.”
Immediately Casey lost interest in the society queen with the bladder infection. Without even closing the door, she turned on her tech. Instead of the crutches he’d been working on, he held out a set of scrubs. “What do you mean?”
Scrubs meant one thing, Trauma. Public relations still demanded white uniforms in this part of town, but if the nurses had the time when trauma was expected, they were allowed to change into the more practical scrubs.
“She was hit by a car. 264 just called it in. Five-minute ETA.”
Casey grabbed the greens. “Have the secretaries place another call for Hunsacker. And ask them if they’d give me the log times on those calls so I can chart it. Might as well make some use out of all this paperwork. Then get respiratory, lab, and X ray up here. Notify OR.”
He ran. Casey moved to follow him.
“Don’t you just walk out on me,” Mrs. VanCleve demanded.
Casey leveled a set of equally cool blue eyes on her patient. “I have no choice. Someone is dying. Surely you can understand that that has to come first.”
“I don’t—”
Casey didn’t wait for the rest. She was already on her way in to set up for Billie.
She was shaken. Billie was the head nurse down in recovery. Not a popular person, by any means. A past master at the art of territorialism, Billie ran her unit rather like someone with the surname of Bonaparte, alienating everybody within range of her powerful voice and imposing figure. But Billie was one of them. You took care of your own, because nobody else sure as hell did.
The room was set up within three minutes. Respiratory stood by, lab had been called, one of the other nurses had run for blood, and a call was out to the trauma doctors. Fluids hung from poles, their lines snaking down toward the waiting gurney. The plastic morgue wrap had already been stretched beneath the paper sheet, just in case. The code drugs were laid out in neat rows on the shelf, and all the myriad forms waited to be filled out on one of the stands. Now, there was just the waiting.
“Casey?”
Flipping a sterile towel over the instrument tray she’d just opened, Casey turned to answer, and found herself face-to-face with Dr. Hunsacker.
She’d never met the man, but there couldn’t be any mistaking just who he was. Leaning in the doorway, his hand on the wall, dressed in rugby shirt and chinos, he looked tousled and handsome. Something out of an old romance, Dr. Kildare, come to heal and comfort.