Loving Time (29 page)

“What’s going on?”

“Room’s been sealed.”

“Why?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

April Woo opened the door and popped her head out. “Hi, Jason. I thought I heard your voice. What’s up?”

“I could ask you the same thing.” Jason cocked his head at the red-faced man blocking his way.

“Officer, would you mind giving us a little breathing space here? The doc is on our side.” April smiled at the cop.

The uniform hesitated, then shuffled sideways two paces so Jason could get two steps closer. Slowly he took in the mess. Paper all over the place, documents from the spilled stacks of
files, notes, reprints of articles. Spots on the floor by the green vinyl couch that looked like vomit and dried blood. A Brooks Brothers jacket hung on the back of the chair. Abandoned lengths of plastic tubes, torn packaging of disposable needles, sterile wipes, and other medical detritus left where they’d been dropped. More files were stacked on Dickey’s desk next to a laptop computer with a portable printer attached to it. There was nothing on the pull-out board except a nearly empty glass with a small quantity of brown liquid with a greasy film around the sides. The rest of the room seemed untouched, the bookcases with plaques and knickknacks, the table by the window with small, fragile decorative objects on it.

“It’s peculiar,” April told Jason. “I’ve gone over the place pretty carefully, and there’s no sign of medications of any kind. No aspirin, no cough medicine. Guy didn’t even take antacids. That’s unusual. Another thing. In suicides, the pill containers are on the scene. They don’t just walk away after the guy drops dead. How did the Elavil get into him?”

“He has another office. Maybe he kept his medications over there.”

“Well, Jason, if he took the stuff in his other office, wouldn’t he have died over there?”

“Not necessarily. It might have taken several hours for him to get really sick. If he ingested the Elavil by accident somewhere else, he might have felt fine for a while and gone about his business.” Jason scratched his beard. “What was he doing with all these files on a Sunday? Do you know?”

“All I know is the lady with him at the time says she locked the door after they took him away and no one touched a thing. Does she always tell the truth?”

“There was a lady with him?” Jason asked.

“Yeah, Dr. Treadwell.”

“Really.” Jason remembered Clara’s phone call on Sunday night telling him Harold had died. Clara always seemed to leave a few key items out of every story. This time it was the fact that she had been with Harold when he had his seizure.
What had she been doing with him? He let his breath out in a rush, didn’t want to think about it.

“The woman in Personnel is real upset. She says there’s going to be hell to pay if she doesn’t get her files back where they belong. She’s in quite a panic about it.”

Jason smiled. “Gunn’s an anxious person. So, what’s the procedure for investigation here?”

“I’m waiting for my supervisor. By the way, where’s that other office of his?”

Jason took her arm and moved down the hall away from the uniform. “It’s in the doctors’ office building. That’s where he saw patients.”

“So what did he do
here
?”

“This is his academic office.”

“Yeah?” April deadpanned. She didn’t even have her own desk, not even a drawer of her own. Academic office, patient office. What’d these doctors need two offices for, her face said clearly.

“Yeah.” Jason smiled. She was cute.

“You got two offices, too, Doc?”

“Uh-uh, only the one.” He scratched his face.

“So what’d Dickey do in
this
office?”

“This was where he did the administration side of his job. Harold was on hospital committees, taught classes, supervised residents. He wrote articles for journals, spoke at conferences. Maybe he was working on some kind of patient follow-up project with those files.”

“Like what kind?”

“Like I don’t know what kind, April. Like to make statistics, see how patients were doing five years later, ten years later. Something like that.” He checked his watch, was certain that was not what Dickey had been doing with the files.

They’d arrived at the elevator bank. Miraculously, no one else was around. “A patient like Raymond Cowles committing suicide fourteen years after treatment ended?” April asked. “Are you suggesting Dickey was working on that?”

“Huh? No … Look, April, a certain percentage of the borderlines commit suicide no matter what you do to help them. It’s a fact of life. If they want to die, they find a way.”

“Oh, I didn’t know Cowles was a borderline personality,” April murmured.

Jason
tsked
. “You know what I mean. I’m just saying don’t jump to conclusions. There may be no connection between the two deaths.”

“Maybe not. This one might not be a suicide. I don’t see a note. I don’t see a container of pills. I smell liquor, I see a glass, but I don’t see a liquor bottle or a flask. Where did it come from? Where did it go?… Anyway, Jason, the files Dickey was working on are employee files. Very few are patient files.”

Jason’s brow furrowed. He had to talk to Clara. Maybe Hal had been working on the condom thing and the person he’d been looking for somehow … “Look, April, I’ve got to go. I have a patient waiting for me.”

“Yeah, well, what did you come here for, anyway?” April’s face stayed blank.

“It’ll have to wait. Will you keep me posted on this?”

She smiled suddenly, as if he’d told her something important. “Well, thanks for the input.”

“So keep me posted,” he said again.

“Hey, I’ll level with you as long as you level with me.”

“Oh, come on, April. When have I ever not leveled with you?” He’d punched the button twice for the elevator. It didn’t light up. He punched it again.

“Oh, Jason, this is something different This is your turf. I’m not feeding you information so you can house-clean before we get the facts.”

Would he do that? He opened his mouth to protest. The elevator doors slid open. The elevator was full of people.

“Hey, Jason. Good to see you. I heard you’re—”

Jason pushed in. “Is this a down? Oh, sorry, getting out.”

Too late. The doors slid shut.

“
A
nything?” Sergeant Joyce stormed into the empty squad room as Mike Sanchez was on his way out. There was no question she was pissed. A case from when she was in Sex Crimes three years ago had finally come to trial, and the A.D.A. had promised her she’d be up and could testify first thing.

“What took so long?” Mike asked. It was already after one.

“Some damn thing with the judge. The opening of the trial kept getting delayed and delayed. Bailiff wouldn’t let me go, and I wasn’t called until eleven-forty-five. What’s new?”

“Your unnatural at the Psychiatric Centre left a mess in his office.”

“What kind of mess?” Sergeant Joyce was something of a mess herself. First thing in the morning, in her black suit with the wraparound skirt that just grazed the top of her chubby knees and apple-green blouse, she must have looked pretty put-together for her court appearance. Now the four-leaf clover pin with a tiny green stone in the center, which may or may not have been an emerald, was the only thing about her still on straight. Everything else looked like yesterday’s well-thumbed newspaper. Almost the whole of her blouse had worked its way out of the wrinkled skirt. Her hair was wild, her eyes were watery, and her upturned Irish nose was red and raw. Balled up in her fist was a green handkerchief, which she clapped to her face suddenly but too late to stop the explosion.

“Achoo!”

“
¡Válgame Dios!
” Mike said.

“Thanks. Both my kids are sick,” she muttered, snuffling angrily as if illness, too, were a purposeful act intended to further complicate her life. “Can you believe that? Both of them at home with flus and fever, and I don’t feel so hot myself.”

“Too bad,” Mike said. “Have you taken anything?”

“Nah.” She shrugged it off. “Where are you going?”

“I’m on my way over to see what’s up with Woo. Seems this guy Dickey took a lot of files over the weekend when they were supposed to be secured, and the hospital wants them back.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the problem?”

“April says there’s something wrong.”

“Yeah, so what’s wrong?”

“Lot of mess in there, but the doc was known for never working on the weekends. Something was up with him. Also there were no medications of any kind on the scene.”

“So he swallowed the pills somewhere else. Anybody check on what medications he took? Guy was in his sixties, wasn’t he? Maybe he took his medication, forgot he’d taken it, and took it again.” She edged the side of her thumb into her mouth and started nibbling at it, her red nose leaking. She didn’t want a homicide here.

Mike looked away. “We’re checking on it.”

“Aw, shit. Let’s take a look.” She sneezed again. “Anything new on the rapes?”

“No. Squirrel must be new in the area. No one knows him.”

“What about the street people?” Joyce sloped reluctantly out into the hall.

Mike followed her at a distance. Suddenly his throat felt a little scratchy. “Yeah, well, we got a few of the street people say they saw someone who looked kind of like the guy in the sketch hanging around earlier this week. But we have no leads on who he is.”

“I don’t want any uniforms out there. We have to let him think he got away with it.”

“No uniforms,” Mike confirmed. A lot of people, but no uniforms. He put his hand over his mouth and coughed, testing. Now he had to get in the car with her. All he needed was a bad cold. The temperature had gone up again. Maybe that was the problem. Hot, cold. Everybody wore the wrong thing, got sick, passed it along.

In the lot Sergeant Joyce headed for the navy unit she’d used that morning to go to court With her there was never any argument about who drove. She always sat on the passenger side and told whoever was at the wheel how to drive. Mike got in and opened his window all the way. It was only a few blocks to the Psychiatric Centre. Today Joyce clearly didn’t feel well enough to tell him how to get there.

Instead she sneezed and complained all the way, didn’t like being pressured into a big investigation at the Centre when young girls were getting brutally raped a few blocks away on their college campus, didn’t like the way she felt, didn’t appreciate spending the morning in a closed witness room waiting for a case three years old to come to trial. Then she started all over again. Without exactly saying it, mostly Sergeant Joyce seemed uncomfortable about going into the Psychiatric Centre, where cops had to hand over the bullets in their guns and walk around with the anxious feeling they were buck naked.

The hospital parking lot was down the hill nearly two blocks away from the Centre. In the interest of time, Mike parked inside the white diagonal lines a few feet from the entrance. And still it was twenty minutes before they found April and Serge on the nineteenth floor. The ritual of finding the head nurse on the third floor, emptying their guns and turning them over to her, did indeed worsen Sergeant Joyce’s mood. She headed for the uniform, drew him aside, and talked to him for a few heated minutes.

“Yo,
querida
” Mike smiled at April. “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up.” April was cool. “What’s going on? You said in ten minutes two hours ago.”

Another angry woman. He shrugged. “Unavoidable delay.”

“Oh, yeah? What kind?”

He cocked his head toward the uniform, who was suddenly galloping off down the hall toward the elevator bank. Sergeant Joyce turned to them, honking into her handkerchief. “So what am I doing here?” she demanded.

April closed her mouth and led the way to the late Harold Dickey’s office. She repeated the facts as she knew them while the two Sergeants looked around.

“Dr. Treadwell told me she locked the office after Dickey died, and no one’s been in here since. No way to know, though.”

April pointed out the almost empty glass with its greasy coating. They all crouched around the glass studying it.

“Smells like scotch,” April said. “So where’s the bottle?”

Joyce turned away to sneeze on a stack of spilled files.

“
¡Válgame Dios!
” Mike said automatically. He caught April’s eye, then smiled. Nice, huh? The place had probably been contaminated thirty different ways to Christmas before. Now they had a whole new set of genetic markers and a germ farm. A tiny jerk of April’s chin indicated a slight thaw.

Joyce finished mopping her face. “Bag it.”

“You want the place dusted, sealed?” Reluctantly, Mike turned his attention to her.

Joyce shook her head, rolling her watery eyes. “How many people were in this room when the guy collapsed? What, ten, fifteen?”

“Probably not that many. Maybe seven,” April said.

“I got a call on this last night.” Joyce wiped her eyes. “Seems this Dr. Dickey treated a lot of important people in his day. One of the trustees claims Dickey saved his kid’s life when she had a breakdown a few years ago. Three or four seem highly motivated to know what happened to him.”

Mike’s scrutiny focused on the laptop. He could feel April looking at him.

“So it’s not going to go away,” she said.

“That’s right. They want it clean. No mystery,” Joyce said.

So the Sergeant had known it before they even met in the squad room. Known she was coming here and there was cause to investigate further. Mike chewed on the end of his mustache. Nice of her to tell him.

“So you want the place gone over.”

“Yeah. And don’t release the files.”

Mike pointed at the laptop. “You been into that yet?” he asked April.

She shook her head. “Didn’t want to touch it.”

Suddenly Joyce fixed her attention on April. “You been here all morning?”

“Since nine-thirty.”

“You haven’t interviewed the wife?” the Sergeant demanded accusingly.

“No, ma’am.”

“Why didn’t you go interview her?”

“Ah, I was concerned about leaving the scene. I’ve had two requests for the return of the files,” April replied evenly. “The hospital lawyer was down here. He told me we couldn’t have access to them. Said they’ve been patient with us so far. But the files are confidential and have to be returned today. As far as I can tell, nobody’d given them a thought until this morning, when we turned up. There seems to be a lot of anxiety around here.”