Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) (7 page)

“Hello?” The breathless voice was a woman’s, low and melodious.

“Oops. Sorry - I must have dialed the wrong number.”

“Were you calling Dante? He’s in the shower. This is sara.”

Sara, the woman who thought her ghost-written quickie celebrity autobiographies meant she shared both a profession and a spelling affectation with e.e. cummings; sara, the woman Dante had dated two years earlier; sara, who seemed to be on a one-woman mission to make feel Claire feel provincial, stupid and plain.

“Is this Claire?” Her voice was as sickly sweet as cough syrup.

“Yes. Yes it is.” With an effort, she kept the speed and pitch of her voice normal.
 
Claire had felt this way once before, when her car had been rear-ended. The impact had snapped her forehead onto the edge of her steering wheel, opening up a section of her skin as neatly as a seam. She had stared at her blood-flecked dash with the same sensation of disbelief, layered over the knowledge that in another second she was going to be feeling great pain.

“We were just planning a surprise birthday party for Ant.” Ant was sara’s putative boyfriend. Claire wasn’t going to give the woman the satisfaction of inquiring why such an activity required a shower. “Should I ask Dante to call you when he gets out? What time is it there anyway?”

How like sara not to know whether New York ran ahead or behind the rest of the country. For a minute, Claire imagined the map of the United States the other woman must carry in her head. It would be like one of those caricatured cartoon maps you sometimes saw in tourist spots. New York City - complete with the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center - would bulge out to cover most of the nation, nearly overlapping with the slightly smaller Los Angeles reduced to the Hollywood sign. The rest of the map would be mostly blank, with an occasional cartoon sketch of a cow or a blade of wheat.

“You know, you’re right. I think by the time he gets out of the shower it will be too late to call me back,” Claire said. Then she broke the connection.

In the shadow of an oversized bouquet of tropical flowers, Claire waited in Sinq’s lobby. The flowers seemed too big to be real, but when she tapped a petal with her finger it was cool to the touch. The restaurant was all glossy pale wood and walls covered in wheat-colored linen, but its look of quiet elegance was offset by the loud babble of voices. Many of the diners weren’t talking to their companions but to their cell phones. From the nearest table she could hear a man arranging to sell six hundred shares of stock. A waiter went from table to table, dealing drinks like cards.

Claire walked over to the window, but it was too dark outside to pick out the faces of the people walking by. Her Perfect Silhouette pantyhose seemed to have shifted downward in just the walk from the car. Discreetly, she tried to tug on the waistband, which was now level with her hipbones. It didn’t budge.

A cool hand cupped her bare shoulder, startling her. Before Claire could even draw in a breath, Dr. Gregory was dropping a peppermint-scented kiss on her cheek.

“You’re looking lovely. I don’t think I’ve seen you in a dress before, just jeans or running shorts. I now know just how much I have been missing.”

“Thank you,” Claire said.
 
His gaze made her uncomfortable, so she looked down at her shoes, plain black Aerosole flats, stretchy enough to accommodate the Ace bandage she still wore around her ankle. When she had opened the door to the restaurant, heads had turned, and she’d both enjoyed the feeling and been unnerved by it. Dr. Gregory’s compliment just served to remind Claire of her continual promises to herself that she was going to stop walking out the door looking like she just woke up. She was going to start wearing earrings, she was gong to buy pretty sweater sets, she was going to put on make-up more than once a month and she was going to start wearing shoes that weren’t meant for exercise.
 

The hostess took them to their seats at a small table on the outskirts of the restaurant. When they sat down, Claire’s knees grazed Dr. Gregory’s under the table, and he gave her a private smile. She was going to have to be careful. There had always been a little hum of interest coming from his direction, but tonight it seemed more intense. She gave him a brief answering smile, then took shelter behind her menu.

Claire had spent enough time with Dante in New York City restaurants that she now knew basically how to eat at a place like Sinq, how to sit so the waiter could smoothly set the plate in front of her, how to deconstruct a dish that had been created to dazzle the eye as much as the palate, even how to imagine how truffle-infused roasted garlic mashed potatoes with chanterelles might taste. The thought of Dante gave her a pang, but she pushed the thought away.

The menu was filled with the kind of terms she associated more with New York than Portland: banana ketchup, shredded arugula, mango chutney, broccoli rabe. Every entree seemed to have at least a dozen ingredients. The first entree listed was a “pan-seared tenderloin of beef sandwich stacked with phyllo, dried cherry and fig bigarade, caramelized Fuji apples and sweet potato, accompanied by hazelnut dumplings, and finished with a tawny port reduction swirl.”
 
This was beyond even Claire’s power of imagination. She settled for the simplest thing on the menu, pasta topped with roasted red peppers, pine nuts and tiny quills of asparagus. Dr. Gregory ordered a steak smothered in sautéed shallots and shitakes, which surprised her. He didn’t seem like the meat and potatoes kind of guy, even the truffle-infused kind. While they waited for their main course they dipped slices of bread into a plate of what the menu had described as “unfiltered Umbrian olive oil.” Claire had no clear idea where Umbria was, or even if it was a region or an entire country, but the end result was still good enough to make her lick her fingers.

“So is it fun being a doctor?” Claire asked. Dr. Gregory had ordered the same drink for both of them, and Claire took a cautious sip. It was sweet-tasting, but with a kick at the end.

He smiled to himself. “It was what I always wanted to be when I was growing up. You know, Dr. Kildare. Dr. Welby. All the good guys on TV were doctors. Of course, a nineteen-sixties TV version of a doctor’s life isn’t exactly how it works today.” He pinched the end of his nose. “Dr. Welby never had to deal with managed care or capitation.”

“What’s captiation?”

“If this is any hint, it has the same Latin root as decapitate.” His mouth smiled but his eyes didn’t. “The HMOs tell you they will only pay you so much per head. Of course, that only works if everyone stays healthy. You pray like heck that none of your patients gets really sick or needs a referral to a specialist.” He took another long sip of his drink and then set the empty glass on the table. “Thank goodness there’s still a few private pay patients like you. You know, I wasn’t exactly fantasizing about having to turn myself into a hustler when I put myself through school. I did enough of that when I was an undergrad majoring in English lit. Once I got hired by a temp agency to walk around at a doctors’ convention dressed in a giant stomach puppet and hand out samples of a new antacid. I saw these guys in their nice suits and with their clean hands. The next day I changed my major to pre-med. I thought being a doctor would mean I wouldn’t have to figure out how to make money.” He signaled with two fingers for the waiter. “Here, let me order you another one.

Claire realized she had finished her own drink without being aware of it. She was going to have to take it easy, especially when she was sitting across from a good-looking man and trying hard not to think about whether Dante had betrayed her. When Dr. Gregory excused himself to go to the bathroom, Claire pushed her drink away from her and vowed not to touch it. She was relieved when their food came.

“Do you realize you are about the only woman in here who’s eating?” Dr. Gregory asked her after she had eaten a few mouthfuls. He gestured with his fork, his words coming fast, his face animated and happy. “Look around. In a place like this, the men eat and the woman pick. I’ll bet you half of them go home and make themselves throw up whatever they
did
eat.” Claire’s gaze followed his gesture. It was a room full of bare shoulders and studied rumpledness, and just as Dr. Gregory had noted, the women’s plates of striped sea bass or crispy mango duck with mandarin coffee glaze sat virtually untouched.

“So, why did you ask me about how to fake a pregnancy?
 
I take it that it’s not just that you want to put a good scare into your boyfriend?”

Claire decided not to answer his half-framed question about whether she had a boyfriend. She was going to keep everything on a professional level. “You like puzzles so much, I’m sure you know why I asked. I figured I could make an appointment to see this Dr. Bradford, and see what I can find out about what happened to my friend’s daughter. But I don’t want to get booted out of the clinic after I fail a pregnancy test.”

He gave her a sly grin. “Claire, don’t tell me you’re sleuthing.” He reached across the table to pat her hand. “You should leave that kind of thing to the professionals.”

Claire pulled her hand free. “My friend doesn’t have the money to pay a private investigator. She’s having a hard enough time paying for health care for her kid. She’s got one of those insurance policies that pays for eighty percent, but twenty percent of a whole lot of money is still a whole lot of money. I just want to look around the clinic little bit, check things out. So, say I’m a patient of yours and I come to you and say I’m pregnant. How do you -.”

He interrupted her. “Is that what you’re planning on doing at the Bradford Clinic? And then what? Are you going to bring a miniature camera disguised as a ball-point pen? Hide a cyanide capsule in a false tooth?” The skin by his eyes crinkled when he smiled over the edge of his glass. He was one of those people who seemed to have a year-round tan.

“I don’t know what I am going to do. But I need to get in there. I figure the only way I can get in the door is if I’m a patient. But that’s the tricky part, as I’m not willing to actually get pregnant to do this. I was hoping there might be some way to fool them. So tell me - if I came to you and said I was pregnant, how would you know if I were telling the truth?”

“I wouldn’t. At least not in the beginning, not until I see the results of your urine sample. If you tell me that your menses are two weeks late, then I begin to think you may be pregnant. And then if you complain of nausea, particularly in the morning or after going a few hours without eating, and if you say that your breasts are tender when I do my clinical exam, then I am nearly certain.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward her. “Now as your doctor, I happen to know you have a tipped uterus, which is good.”

Claire could feel herself flushing. “Why is that good?”
“Early in a pregnancy it’s nearly impossible to palpate a tipped uterus and tell anything. I would rely more on what you report to me. A positive urine test would just be the icing on the cake. So to speak.”

She lowered her voice. “But how would I pass a urine test? Could I put someone else’s pee in the cup?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Say, for example, if you carried a vial filled with a pregnant woman’s urine in your purse? The only thing that might trip you up is if the nurse picks up the sample and realizes it’s cold. Everyone’s supposed to be following universal precautions these days, which means you wear gloves whenever you handle blood or body fluids. Wearing gloves, a person might not notice whether the sample is the right temperature. When they do drug testing, though, the first thing they do is drop a thermometer in the sample to make sure it actually belongs to the person it’s supposed to. I heard of a guy once who bought some clean urine. Before he went in for the test, he tried to heat it up in the microwave. I guess he thought it would cool down on the way over to the test site, but still be warm by the time he poured it into the collection cup. Only his brain must have already been fried, because he set the timer for two minutes. The container exploded - and that was the end of the microwave’s useful life.”

Claire made a face. “Can you think of a way to keep a sample the right temperature without destroying it?”
Looking thoughtful, Dr. Gregory took a sip of his drink. “A real sample should be internal body temperature, which, you’ll remember, is nearly one-hundred degrees. What you could do is conceal the sample in your armpit.”

“Armpit?” Exploding urine samples, hiding things in your armpits- Claire hoped that none of the other diners was eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Axillary temperature - that’s armpit temperature in layman’s terms - is only a degree cooler than internal. That’s why I sometimes suggest that parents stick a thermometer under their kid’s arm for a few minutes. It’s a good alternative for babies too young to use an oral thermometer - or for parents too scared to use a rectal one.”

“How would I get my hands on a real sample, though? I don’t know anyone who’s pregnant.”

“Then you’re in the wrong line of work. Every pregnant woman who walks through my door has her urine checked to make sure she’s not spilling sugar or protein. After that, the sample goes right down the drain. If you’re nice,” a dimple flashed on his chin as he smiled, “I could pass a sample your way.” He set down his glass and signaled the waiter again.

Claire decided not to explore what he meant by ‘nice.’ “But what I need is the urine of someone who’s just barely pregnant, right? You’ll have to be careful not to give me urine from some woman who’s nine months along, or the clinic will know I’m lying.”

 
“Actually it won’t matter. An in-office urine test only looks for the presence - or absence - of the pregnancy hormone HCG. It doesn’t make any distinction about how much there is, just whether it’s there or not,” Dr. Gregory said. He raised a cautioning finger. “If I do help you out, though, you have to promise me two things.”

“Sure. What?”

“You can’t tell anyone about how I helped you. And most especially you can’t tell Dr. Bradford. Even if he catches on as to what you’re doing, you have to promise me you won’t bring my name into it. He’s a big man in this town, especially in medical circles. If he got mad at me, I could easily find my name being ‘inadvertently’ left off preferred provider panels.”

Claire agreed, with a mental asterisk that excerpted Lori and Charlie. After all, they already knew about this dinner tonight. And she could swear them to secrecy. “You said I had to promise two things.”

He smiled. “‘Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.’ You have to let me know what you find out.”

“Of course.” Their salads had come and gone. Claire excused herself to go the bathroom. When she got up, she could feel that her pantyhose had shrunk a little bit more, trying to regain the original doll-size they had been when she pulled them from their package. No longer anchored over her hipbones, they slid perceptibly as she walked to the bathroom. They were beginning to tug her panties down, too.