Doc in the Box (7 page)

I’d covered other random shootings over the years: convenience store holdups, a gunman who went crazy in a cafeteria, another who shot up a supermarket late one night. I did some of the victim profiles. They were the kind of good people that bad things happen to. I still remembered one of the convenience store victims with particular sadness. He was a thirty-six-year-old African American teacher who stopped to buy his wife a rose. That romantic gesture cost him his life. The cafeteria victims included a seventy-year-old nun having lunch with three friends from high school. Yes, high school. St. Louis friendships lasted a long time. In this case, until death. All four women died together. One of the victims in the supermarket holdup was a mother of two who ran out of Pampers at the wrong time. Her husband had stayed home with the kids. The checker who died
with her was working her way through college. She was twenty-one.

These people had no connection with the crimes or the shooters. Nobody had anything bad to say about them, and you’d be surprised how eager people are to speak ill of the dead, as long as it’s not for attribution.

That’s what was different about these hospital murders. These victims had been cruel, or at the very least, thoughtless to their patients. It was almost like someone killed them deliberately. If so, the cops were going to have a heck of a time tracking all their enemies. Might as well open the phone book and point.

When Mayhew finally came back, we went over my statement again, and I signed it.

“Now can I see Georgia?” I asked.

“You can see her after she gives us a statement downtown.”

“Downtown? You’re dragging a woman with cancer to police headquarters?”

“The doctors checked her out. She’s fine, Francesca,” Mayhew said. “She’s sitting up cracking jokes.”

“It’s an act,” I said. I’d seen her collapsed and crying. “She’s sick and upset. She needs me to be with her.”

“She needs a shot of Scotch,” Mayhew said. “Quit worrying. I’m not going to beat her with a rubber hose. We just need her statement, and she’ll be more relaxed giving it downtown.”

“At least let me talk to her, so I know she’s okay.”

“After we talk to her, you can see her. You can even take her home.”

“She’d better be okay,” I said, but my threat sounded pointless. The police let me out a back exit,
away from the press. I didn’t want to scoop my paper by showing up on TV. I couldn’t believe the sun was shining. I felt like I’d been cooped up in there for a month.

I drove to police headquarters on Clark and Tucker, but Mayhew wouldn’t let me upstairs. I paced around in the lobby. It had that gray-brown marble that’s supposed to be impressive but has been used in too many public restrooms. I saw other worried people who looked like they’d grabbed the first thing in their closet and run out the door. They were waiting, like me. No one said much.

Georgia finally came out of the elevator. She looked wrinkled and worn as a charity suit, but she said she was fine, dammit, and would I quit fussing and take her home. Didn’t I have a story to write for the next edition?

“If I’m writing the story, at least tell me what happened,” I said, opening the car door. “I didn’t see anything.”

She took a deep breath, as if the subject was still painful to talk about, and said, “I didn’t see anything, either. After you left for the cafeteria, the receptionist hung up the phone and probably returned to her book. She was quiet, anyway, and there wasn’t anyone else around for her to torment. I was reading an old
Time
magazine from December. You’d think for what I’m paying here, they could afford newer magazines.

“I heard a loud pop about five minutes later, and didn’t look up. I thought it was kids setting off firecrackers. Then I heard more pops coming from a back room and a voice begging, ‘Don’t kill me! Please
don’t kill me!’ Then there were more pops and silence. By this time, I’d figured out somebody had a gun and I was probably next. I threw myself down on the floor and crawled under the table, expecting him to come back out and kill me, too.”

“You keep calling the killer he,” I said. “Do you think the shooter was male? Can you give a description?”

“You sound like a cop,” she said, and in her present mood, that was no compliment. “No, I never saw him. I never even saw his shoes when I hid under the table and he ran out the door. I keep saying him, but it could be a her. But it would have to be a big woman. Maybe it was the footsteps that made me think it was a man. They seemed heavy. The person definitely wasn’t wearing heels. But lots of women don’t wear heels, especially at a hospital.

“I’m so useless as a witness. I couldn’t even remember how many shots were fired. And I’m supposed to be a trained observer.”

Her voice was getting weak and wavery. She sank back in the car seat, and her thin bluish eyelids fluttered shut. Her next sentence was almost a wail. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I was sitting right by the receptionist. He could have popped me in the back of the head and I’d have never known what hit me. I don’t understand why he didn’t shoot me like he shot her. No one else could figure out why, either.”

Her hopelessness alarmed me. “You’re not a suspect, are you?”

“No, I’m a witness, but no thanks to me. I didn’t help things much at the hospital. The paramedics were crawling all over me in the waiting room, annoying the hell out of me, and this uniformed cop
who looked about twelve years old was standing next to the dead receptionist. He said, ‘Who would want to kill this poor woman?’

“And I said, ‘Everyone who ever met her.’ ”

I knew Georgia would be okay.

The dreams started again that night. I knew they would. They always came when something bad happened.

I did everything I could to ward them off. I didn’t go to bed. I knew that was a bad idea. Instead, I sat up in my grandfather’s recliner and wrapped myself in my grandmother’s yellow-and-brown afghan. Then I stacked my books around me. I told myself I wanted to read my favorites, but I piled them up like a barricade. Comforting old hardbacks by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, early Sue Grafton, and in my lap, a fat brown volume of Dorothy Parker opened to “You Were Perfectly Fine.” I gathered these strong women to protect me: Agatha, Dorothy L., Sue G., and Dorothy P. But they couldn’t help me. Nothing could.

No matter how much I stared at the pages, the words wouldn’t register. Instead, I kept opening the door to the radiation oncology department. I’d walk up to the receptionist’s desk and see her bloody head. Then I’d race into the back rooms, looking for Georgia, and find the therapist and the doctor. And the blood. So much blood spattered and dripped and
splashed. It was horrible. But at least I was awake, and as long as I was awake, I was safe.

Then I opened the door again, except this time, I wasn’t in radiation oncology. I was in my parents’ house. I was coming home from school, and I was nine years old, and I knew in some despairing part of me that the dream had started and I couldn’t get away. I knew there was something wrong in the house, just like I knew there was something wrong in radiation oncology. It was very still, except for this odd dripping noise. My mother wasn’t in the kitchen fixing dinner and my father’s car was in the driveway. He never came home from work this early. I went up the stairs, which were tilted at the funhouse angle you find only in dreams, and I opened the door to my parents’ bedroom. I wondered why my mother had a new red bedspread, and why she and Dad were taking a nap in the afternoon on a weekday. I heard the dripping noise, and then I saw the blood. It was dripping off the ceiling light. And I was running screaming from the room and out into the street.

But I didn’t wake up. Instead I ran and ran until I was in the cemetery at their funeral, and now I knew what had happened. My mother had killed my father and herself. Everyone was shocked, except me, because they were supposed to be such a perfect suburban couple. But I knew they drank a lot, and she hit me when she was mad at my father, and she was mad all the time. He fooled around. Sometimes he’d take me along when he saw his lady friends, and I’d have to play outside. I think he liked betrayals even better than he liked sex. Betraying my mother wasn’t enough. He had to have the affair with a neighbor or a woman at church or the wife of a man he worked
with. The cruelest thing he ever did was have an affair with my mother’s best friend, Marcie. That made my mother crazy and she shot him and killed herself.

Now I was running through the cemetery’s gray granite tombstones, and everything was gray, grass and sky and graveside flowers, and I was trapped inside that famous photo of me at their funeral, the one in
Life
magazine. It showed me standing at their grave, in my little blue coat, except in the dream it was gray, too. I was supposed to be the picture of grief, but I was glad they were dead. I never told anyone that, but now I got to live with my grandparents, who never hit me.

In the dream, I was looking down into my parents’ grave. But I didn’t see the two steel caskets. I saw nothing. Just black. The blackest black. The black was closing in on me, coming for me. It was going to swallow me up. That’s when I began screaming.

Then I woke up.

What time was it? The time glowed green on the digital clock: four-oh-three. Ugh. How long had I been asleep? I didn’t know, but I felt awful. I brushed my hair out of my face and sat up. The recliner squeaked and suddenly lurched shut, almost toppling me out of the chair. My head felt like it was stuffed with old cobwebs and I’d left a little puddle of drool where the afghan was bunched around my face. Lovely. No wonder I lived alone.

My stomach rumbled and gurgled. I was hungry. It was almost breakfast time, except I wanted dinner. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, and god knows what was in a
Gazette
sandwich. It had tasted like cold, wet newsprint. My system craved the comfort of
the four basic food groups: grease, calories, cholesterol, and chocolate. I knew where I could get all four at this hour. There was a twenty-four-hour White Castle a few blocks away. I dressed and drove there. The chilly air chased the last ghosts away, and Ralph, my blue Jaguar, felt smooth and powerful as he prowled the empty streets.

The sky had the eerie blackness that was almost ready to fade into dawn. The people in the stark White Castle interior looked like characters in a Fellini movie. There was an old woman wearing a tight black dress and bottle-blond hair in a glamorous Veronica Lake style. Bright orange lipstick was creeping up the cracks in her lips. Two pale young men, who looked like they’d borrowed the same bottle for their own dandelion-dyed locks, were taking a break from selling their skinny bodies. A workman in khakis was getting his thermos filled with coffee, and a dark-skinned woman in a white uniform was dipping fries in ketchup. I ordered four of the oniony sliders, fries, and a chocolate shake. This food was more soothing than the finest lobster and pâté. Pâté. Wait a minute. Didn’t I see a recipe for an offbeat pâté somewhere? Sure. A wire service story about White Castle pâté. Now that was a recipe.

“Make that to go,” I yelled. Two minutes later, I grabbed the grease-spotted bag and headed back to my flat.

The salt-spangled fries and sliders glistening with hot grease slid down easily while I did my Internet search. I found several recipes using the little burgers, including a White Castle turkey stuffing. (Belly Bomber Thanksgiving dressing. The folks at Tums would be thankful indeed.) I was tempted by
the Broccoli “Castlerole” recipe, which used ten White Castles, four packages of chopped frozen broccoli, a box of Velveeta, and Ritz crackers.

But the White Castle pâté had classic simplicity. I’d need a blender, but I thought I had one somewhere that belonged to my grandmother. I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets, shoving aside dusty Dutch ovens, a meat grinder, and an ancient turkey roaster, until I found a blender from a long-ago margarita party. That had been a real success. Grandma had misread the directions on the mix, doubled the booze, and sent half the party home in cabs. The rest went home on all fours.

I lived in my grandparents’ South Side flat, and I hadn’t changed anything since they died. I still had the same slipcovers on the sofa and all my grandfather’s bowling trophies in the living room. Over the old Magnavox console TV hung a picture of Jesus whose eyes followed you around the room. Plastic roses were twined in the picture frame. The kitchen had a massive gas refrigerator, a Sunbeam toaster shiny as a chrome bumper, and a monster Magic Chef stove with a warming oven. Just looking at that thing gave me delusions I could cook. On the bathroom wall were Grandma’s plaster fish with the three gold bubbles and a top-hat toilet paper cozy she’d knitted herself. A decorator friend called the place a perfect museum of kitsch. I couldn’t see buying all new stuff at Crate & Barrel. Besides, I admired my grandparents’ good, honest lives. I guess it was a way of keeping them with me.

I checked the clock. Six-eleven. Mrs. Indelicato’s confectionary was just opening downstairs. That used to be my grandparents’, too. A confectionary
was the St. Louis precursor to the convenience store. Most are gone now, but not my grandparents’. Some of the same families they waited on still stop in the store for six-packs, Pampers, and a pound of boiled ham. Mrs. I took it over and ran it the way they did, which meant she didn’t make any money, either. She lived in three rooms in back of the store, and had appointed herself my guardian. Mrs. I was furious when I broke up with Lyle, and hardly spoke to me for months. She was finally beginning to thaw, but she still gave me the cold shoulder sometimes. I gave her a cheery morning greeting. She waved back, and I relaxed. She was busy unpacking Campbell’s soup, and even at that hour her shirtwaist was perfectly starched and every iron gray hair was in place. I bought bacon, yogurt, sour cream, and a bunch of rather elderly parsley.