V.I. Warshawski 04 - Bitter Medicine (35 page)

I paused to drink some of the new wine. It wasn’t as full-bodied as the Cos d’Estournel, so I was less inclined to gulp it like Kool-Aid. Not that I’ve ever liked Kool-Aid well enough to gulp it. I got back to my argument.

“There’s a chance that they’ve kept Lotty’s file on Consuelo. If you run your story, that will disappear faster than democracy in Chile. I want to take them by surprise.”

“Oh, all right.” Murray was grumpy for a minute or two, but his basic good nature won’t let him carry a grudge. “What do you propose doing, Nancy Drew?”

“We-ll, I’ve got an idea.” I ignored Murray’s Bronx cheer and ate some more pate’t “Max, they know Lotty’s name, but I bet they don’t know yours. They’re giving a conference this Friday. Amniotic-something-or-other. Can you call tomorrow and sign up? You’ll want to bring-you coming, Lotty? Murray?-four people with you.”

Max smiled. “Certainly. Why not? I will speak with my heaviest accent and tell them I am calling from New York, flying in just for the day.”

“You don’t have to show up. Just get five spaces reserved. Maybe we’d better all have pseudonyms in case Peter checks the attendance roster. He knows Lotty and me. He won’t know Murray’s name, of course. Or Detective Rawlings.”

“Rawlings?” Murray asked. “Why bring in the police? They’ll spoil everything.”

“I don’t know if he’ll come,” I said impatiently. “But I’d like him to see the story with his own eyes. It’s too unbelievable otherwise. Will you do it, Max?”

“Certainly. And I want to be there in person. If there are to be fireworks, why should I not see them? Anyway, this will be a fine opportunity for me to watch you at your detective work. I have always been curious.”

“It’s not the thrill you’re expecting, Loewenthal,” Murray said. “Vic favors the Dick Butkus approach to detection- hit the offense hard-you know, just so they know they met you at the line of scrimmage-then see who’s left on the ground when she gets done. If you’re looking for. Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe doing some fancy intellectual footwork, forget it.”

Thank you for the testimonial,“ I said, bowing over the table. ”All are appreciated and may be sent to our head office in Tripoli, where an appropriate response will be generated. Anyway, Murray, you don’t have to come. I was just asking Max to include you out of courtesy.“

“Oh, no. I’m coming. If this story is going to start breaking on Friday, I want to be there. Anyway, I’m going to have the thing keyed in, ready to transmit, the moment your pal Burgoyne looks at you with his honest but troubled eyes and says, ‘Vic, you’ve persuaded me to turn myself in.’ Or does he just call you ‘sweetheart’ or ‘Victoria’ or ‘She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’?”

When we got to Beth Israel and went down to the Medical Transcription center, finding Malcolm’s dictation was almost anticlimactic. The night operators were startled to see Max come in. The laughter and raucous comments we’d heard while walking down the hallway stopped immediately and everyone turned to her machine with the intensity of radar women looking for incoming ICBMs.

Max, behaving as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the hospital’s executive director to show up at ten at night, asked the lead operator for Malcolm Tregiere’s output. She walked over to an opened filing cabinet, thumbed through to the Ts and pulled out a manila envelope with Malcolm’s name on it.

“We wondered why he hadn’t come for it-it’s been sitting here for dose to a month.”

I took a look at Lotty, who appeared to be controlling herself with maximum effort.

“He’s dead,” she finally said, her voice coming out harshly. Terhaps you missed the news and the announcement here at the hospital.“

“Oh, gee-I’m sorry. He was such a nice man to work for.”

When Max started to walk away with the folder, she said hesitantly, “Uh, look, Mr. Loewenthal. We’re not supposed to let dictation go out to anyone but the person who did it So could you write a little note for my supervisor? You know, explaining Dr. Tregiere is dead and all and you’re taking responsibility for the papers?”

“I had no idea I ran such a tightly organized hospital,” Max murmured ironically. But he obediently took a piece of paper and scribbled a few lines on it.

We followed him out of the room, trying not to act like tigers surrounding a gazelle. Max pulled a stack of papers out of the envelope and riffled through them, continuing to walk toward his office. We trailed behind him.

“Yes, here it is. Consuelo Hernandez. ‘At Dr. Herschel’s request I drove to Friendship Hospital on July twenty-ninth where Consuelo Hernandez had been admitted at thirteen hundred fifty-two. According to the nurse on duty, she had arrived unconscious and in labor’” He handed the sheaf of papers to Lotty.

“I don’t understand,” Murray said, gazing hungrily at Lotty. “If you’re right that the boys at Friendship wanted this badly enough to kill for it, why didn’t they simply do what you did just now-come in here and get it.”

Lotty looked up briefly from her reading. They didn’t know he was on staff here. They knew he was my associate. That was all. I didn’t think of it myself. My secretary, Mrs. Coltrain, typed his dictation about patients he saw at the clink. It never occurred to me that he didn’t give all his notes to her. I know that was stupid. But between the shock of his murder and the shock of the attack on the clinic, I haven’t been thinking too clearly this last month. I didn’t even remember to expect his report on treating

Consuelo at Friendship until I got notice of that claim last week.“

We had reached Max’s office and waited while he unlocked the door and turned on the lights. It was a comfortable room, not furnished with the opulence of his counterpart at Friendship, but filled with the artifacts of a long, cultivated life. The desk, scarred from years of use, sat like Alan Humphries’s atop a Persian rug. This one was old and worn in places-Max had bought it himself when he was twenty-five, in a secondhand store in London. The shelves were filled with books, many on hospital management and finance, but many also on the Oriental art he liked to collect.

Lotty sat on a faded couch to finish her reading. Murray watched her intently, as though he expected to absorb the material by picking up her brainwaves. Fatigue had hit me, a combination of too much wine, too little food, and my unpleasant reflections on Peter Burgoyne. I sat in an armchair apart from the others, my eyes dosed. When Lotty finally spoke, I didn’t open them.

“It’s all here. The failure to treat her for close to an hour. It must have been when you told them Malcolm was coming that they started the magnesium sulfate, Vic.”

I didn’t move at the mention of my name and she went on.

“He says they’d told him they were using ritodrine. He told me that on the phone. But he’d got there shortly after her first cardiac arrest and it kept worrying him, what had caused it. So he called the head nurse when he was back at Beth Israel and got the truth out of her-she was worried about Consuelo’s condition and was eager to talk… Abercrombie showed up right before Malcolm left. At six.”

“Abercrombie?” That was Murray.

“Oh, yes. You don’t know, do you?” Lotty answered.

“He is the perinatologist they advertise as being on their staff. Actually, he’s part of Outer Suburban-that big teaching-hospital complex in Barrington. He just takes a retainer to fill in at Friendship when they call him.”

No one said anything for a few minutes. Then I forced myself to sit up, think, open my eyes.

“You have a safe?” I asked Max. At his nod, I said, “I’ll feel better if these things are under lock and key. But let’s get photocopies first-Murray, can you make thirty-five millimeters of Malcolm’s report as well as Burgoyne’s notes?”

“I kind of felt that coming,” he said. “This is going to cost a fortune-twenty-four-hour turnaround on… we’ll have to split these pages in four to make the text readable… twelve slides. You got six hundred dollars, Warshawski?”

I didn’t, as he knew damned well. Max spoke up. “I’ll get our darkroom here to make up the slides, Ryerson.”

I got to my feet. Thanks, Max. I appreciate it… I’m going home. Too long a day. I’m past thinking.“

“You’ll come with me, my dear.” That was Lotty. “I don’t want you driving. And I don’t want you going home to that wreck of an apartment. Besides, whoever broke in may think you have more to reveal. I’ll feel better if you’re safe with me.”

No one could feel totally secure facing a drive with Lotty at night, but the offer cheered me. The thought of that solitary climb up the backstairs to my kitchen door had been hovering unpleasantly at the back of my mind.

We waited while Max went down the hall to copy the papers. He had a little wall safe behind his desk, put in by the trustees to safeguard his personal papers-“an absurd response to urban crime,” he called it, but useful tonight.

Murray, almost slavering like a bloodhound, took the copies. I nearly laughed watching his face fall as he tried to read them. Nothing like someone else’s jargon to nuke too feel completely ignorant.

“Damn,” he said to Max. If you and Lotty weren’t swearing these were life-threatening documents I sure as hell would never guess it. I hope Nancy Drew Warshawski here knows what she’s doing-I wouldn’t leap up and yell I’m sorry-I killed Malcolm Tregiere‘ if someone confronted me with them.“

“Then isn’t it good that you’re not exploding this in the Star without all the facts,” I said nastily. “Anyway, I don’t think Peter Burgoyne killed Malcolm. I don’t know who did.”

Murray faked astonishment. “There’s something you haven’t figured out?”

Max was watching us with patent amusement but Lotty didn’t find the interchange particularly funny. She bustled me out the door and down the hall, scarcely waiting for Max’s good-bye.

Once buckled into Lotty’s passenger seat, I let exhaustion take over. If Lotty was going to pick this night to ram into a streetlamp, my fear wouldn’t stop her.

Neither of us tried speaking during the ride. I supposed, from the remote shell of my fatigue, that she needed comfort. With her skill and experience, Lotty could have commanded any price she wanted to name at any hospital in the country. But her major goal was to make her art as accessible as possible to the people who needed it most.

Sometimes when Lotty gets me angry I goad her by accusing her of thinking she can save the world. But I suspect it really is her goal-to somehow cleanse herself of the evils she’s lived through by making people healthy. I don’t have such grand ideals as a detective. Not only do I not think I can save the world, I suspect most people are past redemp-tion. I’m just the garbage collector, cleaning up little trash piles here and there.

Like Peter Burgoyne. No wonder he’d been so obsessive about Consuelo’s death and Lorry’s reaction. Because he knew he’d let her die. Whether the treatment he’d given her had contributed, I wasn’t competent to evaluate. But by agreeing to work in an environment where he was promising a service he couldn’t deliver, he had created the situation that caused her death.

He’d been a good doctor once, with lots of promise. That was what the chairman of Friendship indicated his references said about him in the letter offering him the position at Friendship. That’s probably why he’d kept his case notes on Consuelo: laceration. He knew what he should have done, if he’d been the kind of doctor Lotty was. But he didn’t have the guts to admit he was wrong. So he could torment himself in private, without having to confess in public. Mr. Contreras was right. Peter was a lightweight.