The Florentine Deception (15 page)

“Ooh, I almost forgot the most important thing,” I said. I popped open the back door, grabbed three magazines and plopped them into Papa's lap.

“Okay, let's review,” I said, wheeling him to the elevator in my new set of scrubs. “You're recovering from hernia surgery, hoping to leave the hospital tomorrow. You couldn't sleep so we're taking a walk around the hospital.”

“Right, ever sharp, kid.”

Up to this point, my calm astounded me. I was about to brazenly walk into a hospital, break into the morgue and hunt for a corpse. Yet, somehow I was totally relaxed. Papa and I emerged from the elevator and navigated a zigzagging ramp toward the main entrance.

“Act sick, like a recovering patient,” I murmured, bending over to his ear. He slumped and proffered a sickly look. “Genius!”

A blast of cool air hit my face as I pushed Papa past UCLA's sliding glass doors and into the hospital lobby; except for a guard and two tired-looking staffers behind the reception desk, the lobby was deserted. The guard, sixty-plus years old and balding in his navy-blue uniform, nodded at Papa as we strolled past him toward a bank of elevators.

“Catch any terrorists lately?” exclaimed Papa, to my horror. The guard swiveled around to face us, vaporizing any semblance of calm I'd enjoyed moments earlier. Gripping the handles tightly with frustration, I rotated the wheelchair.

“Excuse me?” he said, shooting a severe look at Papa. My grip tightened further, now visibly whitening my knuckles. “Caught a ninety-year-old trying to steal an extra helping of lime Jell-O from the cafeteria last week. That count?” He smiled.

“You old dog,” replied Papa.

“He's always kidding around.” I gave the guard a “sorry, this guy's a little crazy” look and swiveled Papa's chair around toward the elevators. “Good night,” I continued.

The nearest elevator was waiting open, so I wheeled Papa in, facing the back of the elevator to prevent any further banter, and pumped the basement button. My left hand relaxed slightly on the handle as the door closed behind us.

“What were you thinking?” I asked, once the doors shut.

“Oh shithouse, I was just being friendly.” He did have a way with words.

“Pop, you've got to try not to draw attention to us. I want to get in and out of here as quickly as possible—unnoticed.”

Papa grunted and inserted the tip of his index finger into his right nostril.

A few seconds later, the elevator doors slid open. I rolled him into the corridor and then stopped at a T-shaped intersection connected to the main hallway. The basement was truly miserable; I could only imagine what it'd be like to have to wait down here in the gloom for an x-ray, nervous enough about having some horrible disease. Overhead, bank after bank of fluorescent tubes cast an austere tinge on the discolored, off-white walls and seventies-style speckled linoleum. For a school with so much funding, UCLA had obviously spent their money elsewhere.

A pointing hand stenciled on a green placard at the junction indicated that Radiology was to the left. Overhead, the tubes produced a dreary sixty-hertz hum. The place was totally deserted.

“That's where you go for x-rays?” I asked Papa, pointing down the corridor.

“For x-rays, and when they take blood.”

“Ever see a door that looked like a freezer there?” I asked.

“No. Not that I remember,” he said earnestly.

“Ever been down this way?” I asked, pointing toward the right.

“No.”

“Well, what do you say we try the road less traveled, Ingy?”

“Sounds fine to me.”

“Hold on!” Papa wisely grabbed the armrests (he'd learned from experience) and I accelerated the chair forward with both hands, momentarily kicking up the front wheels before rounding the corner toward the right hallway. The wheelie maneuver drew the ire of my parents, but always gave Papa a kick.

This hallway emanated the same depressing mood and continued another hundred feet, sprouting offshoot corridors every twenty-five feet. With a single glance, I could tell that none of the hallway's nondescript wooden doors met our criteria. Papa began humming softly to himself while I proceeded down the hall to check each of the branches. After another fifteen minutes of exploration, we finally hit a dead end with an alarmed emergency exit. It'd be easy to get lost here, and the experience now rekindled memories of UCLA Student Orientation where mischievous counselors told Edgar Allan Poe-esque stories of careless freshmen getting lost for days in the medical center's twenty-seven miles of hallways. Papa continued to hum, now with a more nervous tenor, or perhaps I was just projecting.

“I think we should've taken door number two,” I said, dejected. I looked down at my watch; it was 10:15, way behind schedule.

“Its kind of frustrating when you're looking for something and can't find it,” said Papa comfortingly.

“What do you say we head back and look on the Radiology side?” I said.

“Fine by me.”

Seeking to raise my spirits on our way back, Papa entertained me with one of his many teenage orderly stories; remarkably, I hadn't heard this one. Responsible for removing dead patients from their hospital beds, apparently Papa had mistakenly wheeled the wrong patient (heavily sedated from surgery) to the morgue. The patient later woke up, nearly frozen and surrounded by corpses, and was only discovered three hours later, screaming, by the coroner. Sometimes I wondered if I was adopted. In any case, the story served its purpose, and by ten-thirty, we were back by the first set of elevators heading toward Radiology.

On the floor, a set of red foot-shaped stencils evidently led to the waiting room. Slowing my speed to a more casual pace, I pushed Papa along the footprints about twenty feet, past a pair of handicapped bathrooms, before pausing for a nonchalant look into the waiting room on our left. Along the wall, an elderly African American man in a ruffled tuxedo sat beside a younger woman, probably in her late fifties. The elder slouched forward, his face buried in his hands, crying quietly. The woman, probably his daughter, rubbed his back sympathetically. A male attendant sat at the counter reading a novel. No one bothered to look up at me, and before Papa could engage any of the visitors, I rolled him farther down the hall, leaving the footprints behind. Two more doors, both unmarked and with opaque glass windows, lined either side of the hallway before it terminated at yet another T.

“Let's hope we're getting close,” I whispered into Papa's ear.

“Come again,” he said, stopping his humming.

“I said I hope we're getting close.” He nodded.

As we approached the intersection I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and offered a silent, nondenominational prayer.

“All the lights are off,” he whispered.

I opened my eyes. He was right; someone had switched off the lighting on both sides of the corridor, doubtless to save electricity. It was impossible to see more than ten or fifteen feet down the right side of the hallway as it disappeared around another bend; however, about a dozen steps left of the intersection, a muted glow issued from the panes of a service alcove and the glass window set into its adjacent door. An empty gurney with a stack of folded white sheets and several boxes of surgical gloves sat against the far wall. Just as I was about to take a step forward to examine the placard next to the service window, someone inside the office cleared their throat, and, from the looks of the shadow cast on the hallway floor, stood up and began walking toward the door. Panicked, I accelerated the wheelchair down the opposite corridor into the gloom.

Chapter 25

I stopped just around the corner, breathless but ensconced in a comforting haze of darkness.

“What the hell?” Papa whined, vexed by my impulsive dash.

“Shhhhh,” I whispered, gripping his shoulder firmly. “Someone's coming.”

We both heard the door jerk open and a second later the squawk of a walkie-talkie.

“Just be patient. I'll be up in a minute,” growled the voice. Whoever it was wasn't much younger than Papa and had soles worthy of a tap dancer. When the clopping receded I extracted my keychain from my pocket, careful to stifle the jangling.

“Let's see where we are.”

I juggled my keys until Steven's inch-long lithium light settled between my thumb and forefinger, then depressed the button. About midway down, my beam illuminated the object of our expedition: a wide, stainless steel freezer door and an accompanying keypad. The door's twin sat embedded in the opposite wall. These had to be the two cadaver storage rooms.

“Eureka!” I whispered to Papa.

“Now we're cooking with gas, kid,” replied Papa, equally excited.

I wheeled him between the two doors, both of which were clearly labeled: “Instructional Morgue” and “Hospital Morgue.” That made things easier.

I pulled out my smartphone and looked up the code Linda had given me: five-four-five-five.

“Want to try to unlock it?” I asked Papa. Never mind the fact that if we did open the door, there was no way in hell Papa would agree to wait in the lobby. I'd worry about that on the off chance that the code still worked.

“How?” he said, looking up at me.

“I have an old code for the door. It might still work. Stand up and I'll give you the code.”

Papa rose from the chair and scratched the back of his neck.

“The first digit is a five. Push five, Pop.” Papa directed a shaky index finger toward the keypad and onto the five button, holding it down a good second before retracting his finger.

“Next hit four.” Papa repeated the procedure. “Then five again,” I paused. “And finally another five.”

Papa released his trembling finger and looked expectantly at the door. A half-second later, the keypad emitted three rapid chirps. With my second prayer of the day, I grabbed hold of the hefty, stainless steel handle and tugged.

The handle refused to give. Fearing Papa's trembling hands might have inadvertently mashed an adjacent button, I re-entered the four-digit code. The door vetoed me once again.

“Damn,” I whispered. Although I knew that the code had little chance of working, I'd still hoped.

“All right, Pop, I've got to get you back up to the lobby and find the combination.” Pop turned, now partially stooped, and looked at me gravely.

“I don't want to go up. I want to help you here.”

“Papa, I don't want you to get in any trouble.”

“Ah, to hell with trouble. I'm eighty-eight years old, what are they going to do to me, send me to Leavenworth?”

I looked down at my watch.

“We don't have time for arguments. You want to stay? Stay. I need to get a look in the office around the hall. Do you want to stay here, or should I bring you over to the bathroom by Radiology?”

“I'll stay here.”

“Fine. Don't move. Don't talk. Don't fart. I'll be right back.” Papa eased himself back into the chair and began kneading his swollen, arthritic knuckles.

It had been a minute since the tap-dancing septuagenarian left his post. I didn't know how long before he'd return, so I walked briskly back down the hall, took a quick look toward Radiology—the hallway was empty—and over to the alcove. The door was closed. A carved wooden block resting just behind the service window read “Clarence.”

Reaching for the doorknob, I was gripped by a surge of anxiety. I looked back over my shoulder, then leftward down the darkening hallway. Both clear. A single bead of sweat accumulated on my temple.

The doorknob to Clarence's station turned effortlessly and with infinite care I inched the door open just a hair, peered in to make sure there wouldn't be any surprises, then swung the door fully open and lowered the door stop. If the guy came back I'd say the door was open, that I was just looking for help.

The office consisted of a storeroom and the service alcove we'd seen from the hall. An old CRT monitor sat on a severely nicked, antique metal desk, along with a keyboard, a phone—its handset tagged “X7519,” and coffee dregs in a formulaic paper poker-card cup. I held my breath, listened for footsteps, and then slid open Clarence's desk drawer. Aside from a handful of pens, a blank pad of stickies and a small notebook, the drawer was barren. The notebook—the miniature variety with the tightly wound spiral aluminum coil—had seen better days. I gently lifted its green cover, which remained attached by just the bottom few coils, to find a series of notes shakily scrawled in pencil. Unfortunately, neither the inside cover nor the first few pages offered any tantalizing clues—only a few phone numbers and a reminder to buy milk, denture cleanser, and walnuts. Later pages contained similar minutiae, coffee stains, and a creased gas station receipt.

Thirty seconds of additional flipping led me to the second-to-last page, which to my delight contained two columns of four-digit numbers. Though neither column was labeled, I knew these were the codes. The list ran the length of the page and from the spurious pencil marks on the opposite page, I guessed it also ran down its back. A flip confirmed my suspicion and simultaneously raised and dashed my hopes. Midway down the page, Clarence had decided to start concealing his codes, replacing the four-digit numbers with four-letter codes. This in itself didn't bother me; his unbreakable code was almost certainly just a substitution of the digits with letters from the telephone dial. What did bother me was that the last line of the right column didn't end in a four-digit code, but rather in the words “Andrea's birthday”—a mnemonic that was obviously trivial for Clarence to remember but utterly useless to me.

Loathe to waste any more time, I wrote the last four-letter code, “BYNE,” on a stickie, dropped the notebook back into the desk and rushed for the doorway.

Papa's tightly cropped head bobbed from behind the corner three times before I completed the forty-odd-foot walk back.