CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (19 page)

T
HIRTY
-T
HREE

W
hen I was ready, when I’d thought and smoked and watched the wind in the paper birches for a while, I went back in and down the basement hall.

In the doctor’s office, Elena was behind her desk. Her lips were red and glossy, but her smile was unconvincing. An old woman with a humpback sat in the waiting room, both hands on the head of a cane.

I asked to see Dr. Madsen.

“He’s with someone.” Elena’s voice was subdued. “And he has appointments …”

“It’s important.”

She seemed uncertain. “Can you come back?” She began to look down the columns of the appointment book.

“Tell him I need to ask him a question. About the Cobras.”

If she had any idea what I meant she didn’t show it. She buzzed the doctor, gave him the message. She hung up, said, “He says if you can wait a minute, he’ll be right out.”

“Thank you.” I added, “I’m sorry about Dr. Reynolds.”

She lowered her eyes. “It’s a terrible thing.” She shook her head sadly, side to side.

The humpbacked old lady did the same.

The wait wasn’t long. Madsen escorted a trembling, rheumy-eyed old man into the waiting room, gave Elena rapid orders about him. He glanced at the humpbacked woman, then said to me, “Come on.” He turned back down the hall to his office without waiting to see whether I was with him.

The office was small, cramped, crowded with papers and books. Both Madsen’s and Reynolds’s medical-school degrees and licenses were on the wall. Reynolds’s were framed in teak, Madsen’s in cheap chrome.

“I don’t have much time.” Madsen plopped himself into the chair behind the cluttered desk. “It’s a zoo around here today, because of Reynolds.”

“A lot of tranquilizer prescriptions?”

“Tranquilizers, sedatives, high-blood-pressure medication, heart medication. What did you want to see me about?”

“I’m in a strange position, Doctor.” I settled into the visitor’s chair. “I’ve seen something I don’t understand. I want you to help me make it make sense.”

“I’m not a psychiatrist. Or a psychic.” He leaned forward impatiently.

“I’ve seen photographs,” I said. “They all look like this.” I took the single photo from my pocket, dropped it on his desk.

His eyes went to it; he didn’t move to touch it. After a moment he breathed, “Damn!” He stood, looking like he wanted to pace; but the room was too small. He stuck one hand in his pants pocket, rubbed the back of his neck with the other, shifted his weight, sat again.

He picked up the photo, flicked it with a fingernail. His eyes
met mine; in them I saw anger and, I thought, disappointment. “All right. What do you want? Same deal?”

“Same as what?”

“What the hell do you think?”

“The deal you had with Howe?”

Madsen’s mouth was set tight; he didn’t answer.

I asked, “What was the deal?”

“Two fifty a month. That’s all I’ve got.”

“What does it buy you?”

“Silence. What else?”

“What about?”

He tapped the photo. “That.”

“What is that?”

“Christ, what does it look like?”

“It looks like you and Skeletor in a doorway. As far as I know it’s not illegal for a doctor to come out of a building in the company of a gang member.”

He looked at me as though I’d said something in a foreign language that he was shaky in. “Okay,” he finally said. “It’s not illegal. So get out and leave me alone.”

“If it’s not illegal why are you willing to pay blackmail?”

To my surprise he laughed, although I didn’t hear much joy in his laughter.

“At least you call it what it is,” he said. “Howe had other names for it. My ‘contribution to his retirement plan’ was my favorite.”

“Tell me about the Cobras.”

“Hey,” he said, “what the hell do you want?”

“I want to know what’s going on in this picture.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“That killed the cat.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“What if I don’t tell you?”

“There were eight other photos similar to this. I left them where I found them.”

Madsen paled a little. “You don’t have them?”

“No.”

“Where is that, where you left them?”

I skipped over that. “They’ll be found, eventually. I may lead
the cops to them or I may keep my mouth shut—I haven’t decided—but they’re not stupid. They’ll find them. When they do I may be able to help, if I know the truth.”

He abruptly stood again, walked behind his chair, clamped his hands on its wooden back. “I don’t see how,” he said. “Or why.”

“For Christ’s sake, Madsen, I don’t either. But what have you got to lose?” He didn’t answer. I said, “I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like a doctor making a house call. But it isn’t. It smells like a doctor writing prescriptions and otherwise supplying drugs to a street gang. But if it is, there’s more proof than this, because you can’t blackmail anyone over a photo that looks like a doctor making a house call.”

He still said nothing. “I don’t know where that proof is,” I said. “But the cops will find that too. They’re good at finding things if they know what they’re looking for. The only way they won’t find it is if they don’t look.”

“And why wouldn’t they look?” Madsen asked.

“I’ll tell you why they
would
look: if they’re looking for Howe’s killer’s motive. They’ll stop looking when they get Howe’s killer and don’t need to look anymore.”

Madsen sat again. “So if I cooperate with you, I may get out of this without losing my license?”

“Or going to jail. I can’t guarantee that, Doctor. I’m not a cop or a D.A.; this isn’t a plea bargain. But I’m a private investigator working on these killings and if I can find out something that helps, I don’t see how it could do you anything but good. Unless you’re the killer.”

He flushed but didn’t answer that. His look was wary. “I thought you were a security guard.”

“That was a story.”

“But you were here before Reynolds and Howe—”

“I came here about Mike Downey. Since I’ve been on this case two more men have been killed. That sort of thing puts a big chip on my shoulder.”

“I can see that.” He stared into the photo again, as if trying to change its images. “All right,” he said suddenly. “What
do
I have to lose?” He punched the intercom button on the phone. “Elena, I’ll be another little while.” He didn’t wait for her answer.

Madsen and I looked at each other in silence for a short time. I
noticed the disinfectant smell from the examining rooms had crept in here, too. It made me want a cigarette.

“Okay,” Madsen said. “You’re right. There’s more proof. There are records going back years here of drugs ordered for which no prescriptions were written. But if you check the storeroom you won’t find the drugs, either.”

“What sorts of drugs? Speed? Downers?”

“No,” he said.

“What, then?”

His eyes were on the photo. “Antibiotics. Gamma globulin. Insulin. Occasionally Demerol or morphine, but not often.” He looked up at me again. “And one-use disposable syringes. Hundreds of them.”

The early afternoon sun was beginning to spot the ivy leaves outside Madsen’s window. “I don’t get it,” I said.

Madsen sighed an impatient sigh. “About five years ago I’d just left this dump one night when a kid came charging out of a building down the street. Fourteen, hysterical. Later I found out she knew I was a doctor because doctors on TV carry black bags.” He jerked his thumb at his medical bag, on the floor by his chair. “She dragged me into a first-floor apartment. There were half a dozen kids there, teenagers, including one who was having a baby in the middle of the living-room floor.”

A gentle wind ruffled the ivy. I wished the window were open.

“She was actually doing fine,” Madsen went on, “but there was the pain and the blood and the other kids, who were scared and useless and frightening her more. I sent one of them to call an ambulance, got rid of the others and delivered the baby.” He added, “It was a girl.”

He paused for a moment. “The ambulance came and took them to the hospital. Later I went to see them, to see how they were doing.”

“Did you know her?”

He shook his head. “But when you deliver a baby, it makes you proprietary, if you know what I mean.”

I thought I did. “What happened?”

“They were all right. I asked her—her name was Charlene—I asked Charlene why she hadn’t gone to the hospital when she’d gone into labor. She told me she wasn’t sure it was her time, because she
didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like and she wasn’t sure when the baby was due.”

“How can that be?”

“That can be,” he said, “if you don’t see a doctor the whole time you’re pregnant.”

“She didn’t?”

“No, she didn’t. Know why?”

“Why?”

“She was on drugs. Crack, sometimes heroin. She thought if you were on drugs and you went to the doctor they made you have an abortion. One of the other kids told her that.”

“Jesus.”

“She’d been trying to kick the drugs. She was going to go to a doctor when she did.”

“How was the baby? If she was on drugs—”

“She was fine. Sometimes they’re lucky.”

I waited while Madsen’s thoughts seemed to drift somewhere else.

“Charlene was convinced it was me, though,” he continued. “That I was why the baby was all right. She thought I was a hero.”

“It’s nice when people think that.”

His eyes told me he had no use for grandstanding. “A few weeks later that same fourteen-year-old showed up at the door here, hysterical again, but controlling it better. She asked me to come with her.” He shook his head slowly. “I went.”

“Another baby?”

“No. Diabetic coma. A kid who’d never been diagnosed. I got him stabilized and to a hospital. He lived.”

“Wait,” I said. “What am I hearing here? Eric Madsen, personal physician to the Cobras?”

“Look, I don’t give a shit what you think. Those kids are throwaways. No education, no jobs, no family. No chance.”

“Those kids are killers.”

“Some of them. Some are the brothers and sisters and friends and girlfriends of killers. Is that a capital crime in this state?”

“Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”

Madsen’s smile was small and bitter. “In Nazi Germany they didn’t start using gas chambers until near the end of the war. Mostly prisoners were just overworked, underfed, underclothed, their medical
needs ignored. You can kill millions of people that way.”

“You think there’s an analogy?”

“You don’t?”

I had no answer.

“Anyway,” he said, “they trust me. I do what I can.”

“A clinic?”

He shrugged. “I go over there a couple times a week and deal with whoever comes. I give them needles so the ones who shoot up won’t give each other AIDS. I try to get them into legitimate programs: prenatal care, drug abuse, AIDS testing. But the ones who won’t go are better off with me than no one.”

“So you steal from here?”

“All these millions spent on people who think they’re already dead, or wish they were, but not a nickel on fourteen-, sixteen-, eighteen-year-old kids? Damn right I steal from here!” His face was suddenly livid. I was silent; he calmed a little.

“The only thing,” he said, “and I made this clear to Snake, I won’t have anything to do with gang activities. They get themselves shot or stabbed taking care of business, they get themselves to a hospital and leave me out of it.”

“Do they stick to that?”

“Pretty much. Every couple of months I get some kid bleeding, dish towel wrapped around the cut, and I’ll hear, ‘My man jes’ walkin’ down the street, mindin’ his own bidnez, these dudes jump on him.’ ” Madsen’s street accent was almost as good as Robinson’s. “But Snake makes them play it pretty close to the rules. He doesn’t want to lose me.”

“Snake cares?”

“Is that a big surprise to you, Smith? Snake’s vicious. But he’s organized himself a little family over there, and he takes a lot of pride in providing for them.”

I thought of Snake on the playground in the dusk, beaming at the other guys, the ones holding the guns.

“What do you get out of it?” I asked.

“Funny,” he said. “I almost thought you were one guy who’d know the answer to that.” That was all he said.

We regarded each other across the desk in the cramped office. It occurred to me that the sharp smell of disinfectant, which I disliked so much, was part of Madsen’s daily life.

“Reynolds was killed in Howe’s apartment,” I said.

“I know that.”

“Did you know the place had been searched thoroughly—so thoroughly that you might think the searcher never found what he was looking for, otherwise he might have stopped?”

He frowned. “No,” he said. “What does that mean?”

“I thought the searcher might have been looking for these.”

He looked at the photo again without touching it, then abruptly looked up. “Me, you mean? And then I killed Reynolds because he came in and found me at it?”

“It’s believable.”

“It’s crazy.”

“No, it isn’t. It may be wrong but it’s not crazy.”

He held a breath, let it out slowly. “All right. It’s not crazy, but it’s wrong.”

“Were you there?”

He shook his head.

“At any time, were you there? To look for these?”

“No. I was hoping with Howe dead no one would know what they were. Besides, how the hell would I know where to look?” His expression changed as he considered me. “How did
you
know where to look?”

“Forget it. You break the law your way, I’ll break it mine.”

It seemed to me then that he wanted to smile, but he didn’t smile.

“Now what?” he said. “You want money, or what?”

“I want to know how Howe found out about you. About this.”

“He said he got curious when he saw me with Skeletor. Then he rooted around until he found the discrepancies in the records, then came to me. God, he had a smirk on him …”

“Did you kill him?”

He stopped, startled; but his eyes and his voice were clear as he said, “No.” Then he asked, “Do you believe me?”