“I’ve got to get going,” I said.
“Yes, I understand. Thank you for everything. I may
call you to discuss this further. In the meantime, send your bill to my
secretary.”
As I walked out the door they were gazing into each
other’s eyes and discussing the wonders of osmotic equilibrium.
On the way out I stopped in the hospital cafeteria for
a cup of coffee. It was after seven and the dining room was sparsely populated.
A tall Mexican man wearing a hair net and blue scrubs ran a dry mop over the
floor. A trio of nurses laughed and ate doughnuts. I lidded the coffee and was
preparing to leave when movement fluttered in the corner of my eye.
It was Valcroix and he was waving me over. I walked to
his table.
“Care to join me?”
“All right.” I put down my cup and took a chair facing
him. The remains of a giant salad sat on his tray along with two glasses of
water. He used his fork to move a tumbleweed of alfalfa sprouts around the
bowl.
He’d traded his psychedelic sport shirt for a black
Grateful Dead T-shirt and had tossed his white coat over the chair next to him.
From up close I could see that the long hair was thinning on top. He needed a
shave but his beard growth was sparse, spotting only the mustache and chin
areas. The drooping face had been worked over by a bad cold; he sniffled,
red-nosed and bleary-eyed.
“Any news on the Swopes?” he asked.
I was tired of telling the story but he’d been their
doctor and deserved to know. I gave him a brief summary.
He listened with equanimity, no emotion registering in
the hooded eyes. When I was finished he coughed and dabbed at his nose with a
napkin.
“For some reason I feel an urge to proclaim my
innocence to you,” he said.
“That’s hardly necessary,” I assured him. I drank some
coffee and put it down quickly, having forgotten how awful it was.
His eyes took on a faraway look and for a moment I
thought he was meditating, retreating to an internal world as he’d done during
Raoul’s harangue. I found my attention wandering.
“I know Melendez-Lynch blames me for this. He’s blamed
me for everything that’s gone wrong in the department since I began my
fellowship. Was he that way when you worked with him?”
“Let’s just say it took a while to develop a good
working relationship.”
He nodded solemnly, picked some strands from the ball
of sprouts and chewed on them.
“Why do you think they ran away?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“No insights at all?”
“None. Why should I have, any more than anyone else?”
“I was under the impression they related well to you.”
“Who told you that?”
“Raoul.”
“He wouldn’t recognize relating if it bit him in the
ass.”
“He felt you’d developed especially good rapport with
the mother.”
His hands were scrubbed and pink. They tightened
around the salad fork.
“I was a nurse before I became a doctor,” he said.
“Interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Nurses are always complaining about their lack of
status and money and threatening to quit and go to med school. You’re the first
I’ve met who actually did it.”
“Nurses gripe because their lot in life is shit. But
there are insights to be learned at the bottom of the ladder. Like the value of
talking to patients and families. I did it as a nurse but now that I’m a doc it
makes me a deviate. What’s pathetic is that it’s viewed as sufficiently deviant
to be noticed. Rapport? Hell, no. I barely knew them. Sure I spoke to the
mother. I was sticking her son every day with needles, puncturing his bone and
sucking out marrow. How could I not speak to her?”
He gazed into the salad bowl.
“Melendez-Lynch can’t understand that, my wanting to
come across as a human being instead of some white-coated technocrat. He didn’t
bother to get to know the Swopes but it doesn’t occur to him that his
remoteness has anything to do with their—defection. I extended myself, so I’m
the goat.” He sniffed, wiped his nose, and drained one of the water glasses. “What’s
the use of dissecting it? They’re gone.”
I remembered Milo’s conjecture about the abandoned
car.
“They may be back,” I said.
“Be serious, man. They see themselves as having
escaped to freedom. No way.”
“Freedom’s going to sour pretty quickly when the
disease gets out of control.”
“The fact is,” he said, “they hated everything about
this place. The noise, the lack of privacy, even the sterility. You worked in
Laminar Flow, right?”
“Three years.”
“Then you know the kind of food the kids in there get—processed
and overcooked and dead.”
It was true. To a patient without normal immunity a
fresh fruit or vegetable is a potential medium for lethal microbes, a glass of
milk a breeding pond for lactobacillus. Consequently, everything the kids in
the plastic rooms ate was processed to begin with, then heated and sterilized,
sometimes to the point where no nutrients remained.
“
We
understand the concept,” he said, “but lots
of parents have difficulty grasping why this horribly sick kid can have his
fill of cola and potato chips and all kinds of junk while carrots are out. It
goes against the grain.”
“I know,” I said, “but most people accept it pretty
quickly because their child’s life is at stake. Why not the Swopes?”
“They’re country folk. They come from a place where
the air is clean and people grow their own food. They see the city as a
poisonous place. The father used to rail on about how bad the air was. ‘You’re
breathing sewage’ he’d tell me every time I saw him. He had a thing for clean
air and natural foods. For how healthy it was back home.”
“Not healthy enough,” I said.
“No, not healthy enough. How’s that for a frontal
assault on a belief system?” He gave a mournful look. “Isn’t there a term in
psych for when it all comes tumbling down like that?”
“Cognitive dissonance.”
“Whatever. Tell me,” he leaned forward, “what do
people do when they’re in that state?”
“Sometimes change their beliefs, sometimes distort
reality to fit those beliefs.”
He leaned back, ran his hands through his hair and
smiled. “Need I say more?”
I shook my head and tried the coffee again. It had
gotten colder, but no better.
“I keep hearing about the father,” I said. “The mother
sounds like his shadow.”
“Far from it. If anything, she was the tougher of the
two. It’s just that she was quiet. She let him run off at the mouth while she
stayed with Woody, doing what needed to be done.”
“Could she have been behind their leaving?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “All I’m saying is she was a
strong woman, not some cardboard cutout.”
“What about the sister? Beverly said there was no love
lost between her and her parents.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. She wasn’t around much,
kept to herself when she was.”
He wiped his nose and stood.
“I don’t like to gossip,” he said. “I’ve indulged in
too much of it already.”
He snatched up his white coat, flung it over his
shoulder, turned his back and left me sitting there. I watched him walk away,
lips moving, as if in silent prayer.
It was after eight by the time I reached Beverly Glen.
My house sits atop an old bridle path forgotten by the city. There are no
streetlights and the road is serpentine, but I know every twist by heart and
drove home by sense of touch. In the mailbox was a love letter from Robin. I
got high on it for a while but after the fourth reading, a hazy sense of
sadness set in.
It was too late to feed the koi so I took a hot bath,
toweled off, put on my ratty yellow robe, and carried a brandy into the small
library off the bedroom. I finished writing a couple of overdue forensic
reports then settled in an old chair and went through the stack of books I’d
promised myself to read.
The first volume I grabbed was a collection of Diane
Arbus photographs but the unforgiving portraits of dwarfs, derelicts, and other
walking wounded made me more depressed. The next couple of choices were no
better so I went out on the deck with my guitar, sat looking at the stars, and
forced myself to play in a major key.
THE NEXT morning I went out on the terrace to get the
paper and saw it lying there, sluglike and bloated.
It was a dead rat. A crude noose of hemp had been tied
around its neck. Its lifeless eyes were open and clouded, its fur matted and
greasy. A pair of disturbingly humanoid forepaws were frozen in supplication.
The half-open mouth revealed frontal incisors the color of canned corn.
Underneath the corpse was a piece of paper. I used the
Times
to push the rodent away—it resisted, sticking, then slid like a
puck to the edge of the terrace.
It was straight out of an old gangster movie: letters
had been cut out of a magazine and pasted up to read:
HERES TO YOU MONEYCHASER HEADSHRINK
I’d probably have figured it out anyway, but that made
it a cinch.
Sacrificing the classified section to the task, I
wrapped up the rat and carried it down to the garbage. Then I went inside and
got on the phone.
Mal Worthy’s secretary had a secretary and I had to be
assertive with both of them to get through to him.
Before I could speak he said, “I know, I got one, too.
What color was yours?”
“Brownish gray, with a noose around its scrawny little
neck.”
“Count yourself lucky. Mine came decapitated, in a
box. I almost lost a damn good mailgirl because of it. She’s still washing her
hands. Daschoff’s was ratburger.”
He was trying to make light of it, but sounded shaken.
“I knew the guy was a sicko,” he said.
“How’d he find out where I live?”
“Your address on your resumé?”
“Oh shit. What did the wife get?”
“Nothing. Does that make sense?”
“Forget making sense. What can we do about it?”
“I’ve already begun drafting a restraining order
keeping him a thousand yards from any of us. But to be honest, there’s no way
to prevent him from defying it. If he gets caught at it, that’s another story,
but we don’t want it to get that far, do we?”
“Not too comforting, Malcolm.”
“That’s democracy, my friend.” He paused. “This taped?”
“Of course not.”
“Just checking. There is another option, but it would
be too risky before the property settlement has been completed.”
“What’s that?”
“For five hundred dollars I can have him sufficiently
damaged so he’ll never be able to piss without crying.”
“Democracy, huh?” He laughed.
“Free enterprise. Fee for service. Anyway, it’s just
an option.”
“Don’t exercise it, Mal.”
“Relax, Alex. Just theorizing.”
“What about the police?”
“Forget it. We have no evidence it was him. I mean we
both know it but there’s no proof, right? And they’re not going to fingerprint
a rat because sending rodents to your loved ones is no felony. Maybe,” he
laughed, “we could get Animal Regulation on it. A stern lecture and a night at
the pound?”
“Wouldn’t they at least go out and talk to him?”
“Not with the workload they’ve got. If it had been
more explicit, something that constituted a threat, maybe. ‘Here’s to You
Motherfucking Shyster’ won’t do, I’m afraid—the cops feel the same way he does
about lawyers. I’m going to file a report just for the record, but don’t count
on help from the blue guys.”
“I know someone on the force.”
“Metermaids don’t carry much weight, fella.”
“How about detectives?”
“That’s different. Give him a call. You want me to
talk to him, I will.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“Great. Let me know how it goes. And Alex—sorry for
the hassle.” He sounded eager to get off the phone. At three and a half bucks a
minute it doesn’t pay to give it away free for any length of time.
“One more thing, Mal.”
“What’s that?”
“Call the judge. If she hasn’t gotten a care package
yet, warn her she may.”
“I’ve already called her bailiff. Scratch up a few
more brownie points for our side.”
“Describe this asshole as precisely as you can,” said
Milo.
“My size almost exactly. Say five eleven, one
seventy-five. Raw-boned, muscles. Long face, a reddish tan like construction
workers get, busted nose, big jaw. Wears Indian jewelry—two rings, one on each
hand. A scorpion and a snake. A couple of tattoos on the left arm. Bad dresser.”