Malpractice in Maggody (16 page)

I really didn’t want to hear any more. “After lunch?”

“Dawn and Toby returned here for anger management. I’d hoped we were ready for role-playing, but both of them were, shall we say, too intense for objective analysis of their emotional reactions to minimal confrontation. I had to call an orderly to separate them. Toby went to work out with Walter. Dawn said she was returning to her suite. The orderly helped me put the furniture back in place and pick up the books and other projectiles. I took a few minutes to regain my composure, then went to Brenda’s office to review her dietary supplements to make sure the two weren’t receiving excessive stimulants. None of these herbal remedies has been properly studied, and their purported potencies aren’t regulated by the FDA. I prefer to know exactly what my patients are ingesting. Brenda would much rather don a robe and collect her roots and berries under a full moon.”

“It sounds as though you were in and out all day,” I said to get him back on track.

“It does, doesn’t it? I met with Vince in the surgical suite to make sure everything was ready for the tumescent liposuction he was planning to perform on Dr. Dibbins this afternoon. That, of course, has been put off because of what happened to Molly.” He took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “A truly terrible thing. She was so…so vibrant and happy. I can’t believe someone would do something like that to her.”

I’d finally found someone who was plainly distressed by her death. “You liked her, I gather.”

“If I’d met her fifteen years ago, I would have dropped out of medical school and dedicated myself to making her happy. We would have lived in a simple house, raised a few adorable children, and spent our evenings sipping cocoa in front of a cozy fire.” He closed the notebook and went to the window. His back to me, he added, “Brenda was very cruel to Molly. Envy is a dangerous emotion that can simmer beneath the surface like molten lava. Molly tried to ignore it, but I could see how deeply it wounded her. She wasn’t like the rest of us, especially these damned bloody patients who all believe that they deserve public adoration. She was pure.”

“Do you think Brenda might have told Molly to meet her in the garden after the staff meeting?” I asked delicately, already imagining myself driving toward Springfield in time for a cold beer and a tantalizing greeting. And, of course, a warm-up game of Scrabble.

He turned around. “Molly wouldn’t have agreed to that. She wasn’t quite the doormat everybody assumed she was, nor was she stupid. She married out of high school to escape her parents, but she chose a boy whose family owned a successful business. She was squirreling away money in a separate checking account and planning to get away as soon as she could.”

“She told you this?”

“People seem to think they can confide in a psychiatrist.” He attempted to smile. “We’re not supposed to have irrational emotions.”

I would have sympathized with him had the clock not been ticking. “Do you think Brenda might have followed Molly outside?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You’re the one who brought up the simmering lava.”

“That’s hardly a motive for murder. Killing Molly wasn’t going to make Brenda twenty years younger, forty pounds lighter, and afoot shorter.” He sat down behind his desk and stared at me. “Yesterday at five or so, I returned here to have a cup of tea, wrote some notes for the case file, and went to the meeting. Afterward, I came back to read, then went to bed. Vince woke me up to tell me about Molly.”

“You weren’t in the garden when the sheriff and medical examiner arrived?”

“I was too upset. Vince and Brenda were talking about her death as if it were nothing more than a nuisance. With Vince’s permission, I got a glass of brandy from his room and took a sleeping pill. I was oblivious to everything until a maid came in this morning at seven-thirty with my breakfast tray.”

“When did you notice someone had been through your personal papers?”

“While I was reading through the mail that came yesterday, I realized I needed to make the call. That’s when I took out the folder.”

“Is everybody’s schedule as hectic as yours?” I asked.

“Brenda, Walter, and I stay busy. Vince will be once he starts doing surgery. He is intensely interested in the success of the program, since he invested as much capital as I did. I think he was stretched to his limit, too. He’s had some problems with malpractice suits. His license in California has been suspended by the state board—or maybe even revoked. I don’t know the details.”

“But he can practice here in Arkansas?”

Randall shrugged. “When a physician from another state applies for a license, it’s issued almost automatically as a courtesy. The petty bureaucrats don’t bother to check, and there’s no national registry to indicate a physician’s record of malpractice suits. Most of them are settled out of court, anyway, with nondisclosure clauses.”

“So the AMA looks out for its members, I suppose. Too bad for the consumers.”

“The AMA has a very powerful lobby in D.C.,” Randall said. The telephone on his desk rang before he could continue. He picked up the receiver, listened for a few seconds, said, “Yes, she’s here,” then handed it to me. “It’s Brenda. You have an outside call.”

I assumed it was Harve, since he and Les were the only ones who knew where to find me. “Hello?”

“Arly?” squawked Estelle. “It’s a good thing I knew where to find you. You have to get over here to your office right this minute. Ruby Bee’s gone and shot someone!”

“Who?” I demanded.

“Me, if you must know. Ruby Bee should be pulling up to the gate any second now. Get yourself out there so she can bring you back here right away!”

“And what are you doing?”

“Bleeding, of course. What else would I be doing?”

I
tossed the receiver to Randall and told him we’d finish our conversation later. When I got to the reception room, Brenda Skiller was waiting, her hands on her hips like a belligerent coach.

“I thought I made myself clear earlier,” she began, making no effort to hide her exasperation. “I may not have specified that answering the telephone was among your simple-minded duties, but—”

“It’s an emergency,” I said. “Someone’s picking me up at the gate.”

I scrambled down the porch steps and out to the brick driveway, my thoughts too muddled to come up with any kind of rational explanation. The idea of Ruby Bee shooting Estelle was too absurd to imagine. What’s more, Estelle was a helluva lot more nonchalant than I would have been. What was she doing? Bleeding, of course.

Silly me.

When Ruby Bee pulled up, I almost dove into the front seat. “What on earth is going on? You shot Estelle?”

“Don’t get your pigtails in a poke, missy,” Ruby Bee said darkly as she turned the car around and drove back toward Maggody. “It’s not like I shot her on purpose. The gun just went off.”

“What gun?”

She gave me one of her snootier looks. “The gun I bought the other day to protect myself. I took it out to show Estelle, not realizing it was loaded. The man who sold it to me warned me to be real careful about that, but then he rambled on for so long, I just plunked down my money and left.”

“Okay, so you didn’t know it was loaded when you shot Estelle. How badly is she hurt?” I said, resisting the urge to whack her with her own handbag (which was definitely loaded).

“How many times do I have to tell you that I didn’t shoot her? Her foot happened to be in the way, that’s all. She’s carryin’ on something fierce over what most folks would dismiss as a piddly accident.” She braked at the stop sign and took her sweet time peering both ways before turning onto the highway. “The bullet grazed her big toe. From the way she shrieked, you’d have thought it hit her smack dab in the heart and she only had a few seconds before she keeled over dead. Nobody dies from gettin’ shot in the big toe, for pity’s sake. I offered to put a Band-Aid on it, but she insisted on me taking her to your office in case she passed out. She figured the ambulance would have an easier time finding her there.”

I untangled my legs and sank back in relief, then jerked up as I grasped the grimmer implications what she’d said. “Where did you buy this gun? Didn’t you have to wait twenty-four hours while the seller requested a background check on you?”

“If you must know, I bought it at a little gun show over in Oklahoma. I swear, I’ve never seen so many guns, knives, and tattoos in one room. I got out of there as fast as I could.”

“Please explain why you felt the need to buy a gun,” I said.

“Ever’body in Maggody has one these days on account of the crazy folks locked up at that foundation place. Mrs. Jim Bob organized a committee to keep watch and report suspicious activity. I told her I wasn’t about to sit in a persimmon tree all night with a pair of binoculars. I’m not the only one. Even Elsie and Lottie are beginning to complain, and I heard there was a squabble at the last meeting of the Missionary Society.” She parked in front of the PD and got out of the car. “Don’t pay Estelle any mind if she starts in about all this terrible pain she’s in and how much blood she’s lost.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, wondering how many other local residents were keeping handguns in their bedside table drawers. Most of the men hunted deer or bunnies or other hapless furry critters, but they knew enough, at least when they were sober, to keep their rifles locked up where their kids couldn’t get to them. The thought of the members of the Missionary Society sipping tea while they compared calibers and admired each other’s inlaid pearl handles was chilling. And if they’d bought them at backwater gun shows, they’d have no clue how to handle them safely.

Estelle was sitting behind my desk, her foot propped up and wrapped in a dish towel. The evidence, a lime green high heel with a rhinestone buckle and slight rip near the pointed toe, was centered on the desk. She waggled limp fingers in our direction. “Thank gawd you’re here. I keep having these dizzy spells, like the room is closing in on me. My heart’s still racing faster than a twoheaded toad fallin’ down a well, and I’m having a hard time catching my breath. I reckon I’m in shock.”

“Shall I throw you in the backseat and race to the emergency room in Farberville?” I asked. “Better yet, I could take you with me back to the Stonebridge Foundation. There are two medical doctors who’d be delighted to sew up your toe and keep you overnight for observation. You’ll be safe, since there are bars on all the cell doors to keep the drooling psychopaths from sneaking up on you while you’re asleep.”

“Good grief, Arly,” said Ruby Bee, “I told you the bullet barely grazed it.”

I smiled at Estelle, who was turning paler by the second. “But we can’t be too careful, can we? Sometimes these minor wounds can cause blood poisoning, or even gangrene. You don’t want to end up painting the toenails on a prosthetic foot, do you?”

Estelle pulled off the dish towel and dropped it in the trashcan. “All the same, you ought to take Ruby Bee’s gun away from her afore she shoots somebody else.”

“I did not shoot you,” protested the accused gunslinger. “Besides, you’re the one who insisted that I take the gun out of the drawer and show it to you. You should have seen ol’ Hubbubba Buchanon when it went off. He liked to piss in his britches in his hurry to get out the front door. And of course there was Estelle, hopping around on one foot and gobbling like a wild turkey.”

Estelle rolled her eyes. “I seem to recollect you were a mite upset yourself, Rubella Belinda Hanks. As well you should have been, considering you’d just shot me.” She handed me a piece of paper from my scratch pad. “Some prickly man from somewhere up north called while I was waiting. He had me write all this down, but he wouldn’t so much as give me a hint of why you’d care about these places. You aiming to take a road trip?”

I looked at the note, which was nothing more than a list of cities: Wichita, Denver, Laramie, Casper. They were, I realized glumly, locations where Eileen’s credit card had been used in the last eight days. She was traveling northwest at a good clip. Earl, Kevin, and Dahlia would not take the news well, even though it implied Eileen was alive and kicking.

“Well?” demanded Ruby Bee. “
Are
you aiming to take a road trip? Being your mother, I have a right to know.”

I stuffed the note in my pocket. “The only place I’m going is back to the Stonebridge Foundation. How’d y’all know where to find me?”

“Brother Verber told Mrs. Jim Bob,” Estelle said. “She called Ruby Bee, wanting to know what you were doing there. I’d like to know, myself.”

“So would I,” added Ruby Bee, giving me a baleful stare.

I sat down on the visitor’s chair. “Was Brother Verber in the persimmon tree? Jesus H. Christ, if I’d known, I would have gone over there and shaken the tree until he and every last persimmon came tumbling down. This surveillance nonsense has to stop right now! What’s more, I want one of you to call Mrs. Jim Bob and get a list of everyone in town who purchased a gun in the last week. I’ll bet not one of you has a license. Harve can haul the lot of you to the county jail and let you cool your heels for a couple of weeks. Maybe the Missionary Society can save the souls of prostitutes, junkies, biker chicks, and sloppy drunks who’ll be sharing the cells with you. I wouldn’t count on it, though.”

“Well, I never!” said Estelle. She stood up and came around the corner of the desk, apparently having survived the mortal toe wound, and poked Ruby Bee. “You tell her that’s the rudest thing anyone’s said to me in all my born days!”

Ruby Bee wasn’t taking it much better. “Now you listen up, young lady. We had no choice but to buy the guns to protect ourselves, since you sure ain’t gonna do it. That serial killer already knows where to find me. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he told all the other inmates, too.”

“They are not inmates,” I said in a steely voice, “nor are they there because they’ve committed violent crimes. They’re”—I tried to find an innocuous phrase—“people in need of help to restore their health. And before you jump on that bandwagon, they do not have contagious diseases. You are not in danger of contracting the plague, yellow fever, malaria, or smallpox.”

“Then what are they doing in a place like Maggody?” Estelle asked suspiciously. “Seems to me there are plenty of hospitals all over the country. Are they hiding out from the law?”

I was on thin ice, and the temperature was rising. Anything I said would be spread all over town within an hour. On the other hand, allowing this increasingly hysterical speculation wasn’t going to help. Mrs. Jim Bob might already be on the trail of discount Howitzers and grenade launchers. “Okay, I’ll tell you this much. There are only four patients, and they’re relatively famous in their fields. They don’t want any publicity.”

“Famous?” said Ruby Bee. “Like who?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said, “but you’ve probably never heard of any of them. Instead of fretting about their identity, you’d better spend your time warning the local ladies’ militia that if they don’t turn in their guns to me by no later than noon Monday, there’ll be hell to pay. I’m serious about this.”

Ruby Bee and Estelle glanced at each other, then looked meekly at me.

I didn’t have a chance of staring them down, so I shrugged and said, “Take me back to the foundation, please. I have some unfinished business there.”

“Like a case of murder?” said Estelle.

Ruby Bee sniffed. “It ain’t like you have to go back to give them manicures. Besides, the man who took you over there is a deputy sheriff. Has he taken to moonlighting as a cabdriver?”

“Never mind, I’ll drive myself.” I went out and got into Ruby Bee’s car, adjusted the seat, and made my escape. Not a great escape, to be sure, but a satisfying one. I wondered how long it would take Ruby Bee to notice that I’d stolen her car.

Mrs. Jim Bob was on the phone when Jim Bob came home for lunch. Ignoring her, he made himself a ham sandwich and started toward the living room to see if he could catch a ball game on TV while he ate. He’d almost made it when his wife said, “Where do you think you’re going? Perkin’s eldest vacuumed in there, and I don’t want crumbs on the carpet. Brother Verber’s coming by later this afternoon for tea.”

Jim Bob returned to the kitchen doorway. “So I’m not supposed to sit in my own living room on account of Brother Verber? Maybe he should be paying the bills every time you decide to decorate it.”

“Maybe you should spend more time praying for forgiveness and less time with your harlots at the trailer park,” she replied automatically.

He poured himself a glass of buttermilk and leaned against the edge of the counter while he ate. “Who were you talking to when I came in?”

“Joyce Lambertino. She reported that half an hour ago Ruby Bee drove right up to the gate in front of the Stonebridge Foundation. A minute later, the gate opened and Arly came racing out and threw herself in the car. Ruby Bee drove away so fast Joyce liked to have choked on the dust.”

Jim Bob washed down the last of his sandwich with a gulp of buttermilk. “What was Arly doing there? Gettin’ electric shock therapy?”

“Nobody knows for sure. When I called Ruby Bee earlier this morning, she claimed she didn’t even know Arly was there. It’s hard to believe they invited her to drop by for coffee and cinnamon rolls. Except for the foreigners living at the Flamingo Motel, no one’s seen any of them. I’m beginning to think this is a matter for the FBI.”

“Have you been making fruitcakes all morning?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said, drumming her fingers on the dinette table. “You have to admit that it’s suspicious the way they keep to themselves. For all we know, it could be a terrorist cell.”

“Plotting to blow up the silo at the co-op?” Jim Bob couldn’t help himself from smirking. “Maybe you should call the Pentagon so they can send in the Marines.”

“You are the mayor of Maggody, Jim Bob Buchanon, not the village idiot. You have the responsibility to keep this town safe from outsiders. If you can’t live up to your duty, then the citizens ought to elect someone who can.” Mrs. Jim Bob licked her lips as she considered this. “It’s a sad day when women have to protect themselves while men sit around and play poker. There’s no law that says a woman can’t be elected mayor.”

“You’d run against me?” he said incredulously.

“Someone needs to, and it sure isn’t Roy or Larry Joe. They’d make just as much of a mess as you have. No, it’s going to take a woman’s hand to get this town organized and on the map. If I was the mayor, we’d have a city hall, civic clubs, mandatory summer programs to stop the teenagers from engaging in sinfulness and debauchery at Boone Creek, and committees to plan festivals and put up Christmas lights every year. We could have one of those living nativity scenes in front of the Assembly Hall, bringing in tourists from all over the county.”

“You can’t run against me!” he sputtered. “You’re my wife, fercrissake! How would it look? Who’s putting these ideas in your head? Just give me a name and I’ll—I’ll go knock the snot out of ’em! No wife of mine is running for office.”

“Then I suggest that you put your glass in the sink and go running back to the SuperSaver. I need to get started on a poppyseed cake for tea.” She opened a recipe book and began to thumb through it. “No, I’ll make date bars instead. Brother Verber couldn’t get enough of them at the last potluck supper.”