Dr. Knox (8 page)

Before my first trip to Africa, she'd said: “The more you go away, the less of you returns. One of these days, you won't come back at all.”

She was right about that. The trip after that was an open-ended one, to the C.A.R. I was there three months when the divorce papers came and I signed them the same day.

A burning ash fell to the table and left another scorch mark.

Little remained of my marriage. Margot got the place in Stratford and most everything else. The one thing I still had from her sat atop a bookshelf: a leather-bound journal. She'd given it to me on my first trip, but it'd remained stubbornly blank until I got to the C.A.R. The medic I'd replaced there, the exhausted Dr. Demetrios, suggested that keeping a journal was useful, that writing had helped her avoid drinking too much. I don't know how lucid her entries were, but mine were mostly fragments—impressionistic, wandering, fevered, and lacking any coherent narrative. Which made them entirely faithful to my experience there.

I looked, but couldn't see the journal in the darkness. Not that I would've touched it. I rarely opened it, not to the entries, not to the photos tucked in back—of Merry, one of my nurses there, and Mathieu, her son. She was twenty-five then, and would be no older. And Mathieu? Close to Alex's age back then. I touched my right flank above the hip, along the oblique, and then I touched my left quad. I could feel the ripples of scar tissue through the fabric of my jeans and tee shirt.

I exhaled a dusty breath and rubbed a hand across my eyes. The joint was gone, and the beer too, and soon the night. I needed sleep, but my bed was so far. I stood, listed to port, leaned against the window. The red light blinked on my phone.

“Fuck,” I whispered, and pressed the message button. There was silence at first, then street noise—traffic and indistinct voices—then shallow, shuddering breaths, like someone fighting tears. I listened twice more, and took a breath of my own.

“Elena,” I said aloud.

Lydia's house was a white bungalow on Repton Street, in Highland Park—a neat, Spanish-style box on a street of similar boxes. It had a red tile roof, a narrow porch, a lawn in front that looked like a putting green, and a short chain-link fence all around. Her block was slow to wake on Sunday morning, empty but for a bleary-eyed woman and an old collie who struggled on the buckled sidewalk. I nodded at them as I opened Lydia's gate and went up the cement path. Before I made the porch steps, Lydia boiled through the front door. She wore a white tee shirt with no sleeves, and green scrub pants. Her hair was resting uneasily on her shoulders, and her hands were on her solid hips.

“We get one phone call, and that's it?” she said. “You forget we're here, maybe? You think I'm the fucking lost-and-found? You look like shit, by the way.”

I held up a white bakery box. “Doughnuts from the Nickel,” I said. She scowled some more, but her heart wasn't in it. “Got four maple bacon in here, and some red velvet.”

She shook her head, but her face softened. “I've got coffee on.”

Lydia's house smelled of coffee, wood soap, and cedar. Her kitchen had a red tiled floor, and yellow-and-red tiled counters, and it was cleaner than many places where I'd performed surgery. The appliances were old but gleaming, and the breakfast nook had a bay window and a flood of sunlight. The window looked onto the backyard, where there was a lemon tree, a profligate Chinese hibiscus, a stretch of lawn, and Alex, kicking a soccer ball with Arthur and Lucho. The kid wore gray gym shorts, a yellow Galaxy tee shirt, and—despite Arthur's and Lucho's best efforts—a look of concentration but not of enjoyment.

“He do okay last night?” I asked.

Lydia shook her head. “He ate fine, pretended to watch TV, and went to bed when I told him. I don't think he slept much, though, and he cried when he thought no one could hear.”

I sighed. “You got him new clothes.”

“
You
got him new clothes—the old ones needed washing. They were pricey, though, the old ones.”

“Yeah?”

“That little striped shirt, those shorts, his sneakers, even his underwear—altogether they probably cost more than your car. They come from France, and Artie says only a few stores in town carry them—in Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Brentwood.”

“Artie knew that?”

Lydia gave me a pitying look. “He knows how to read labels and use Google. You're not the only one who can play detective, doctor. And, talking about that—did you get anywhere finding the mother?”

I drank some coffee and took a deep breath. I didn't want to lie to Lydia, but the best I could do was to not lie completely. “I think her name is Elena. I found somebody who saw her and Alex together. Apparently, they were staying in the neighborhood.”

“Staying where?”

I took a while clearing my throat. “The Harney,” I said finally.

Lydia's brows leapt.
“¿Un burdel?”

“That's the place.”

“What the hell kind of woman brings her child to a whorehouse?”

“The kind that's in trouble, Lyd. The kind with people after her and no place else to go.”

Lydia crossed her arms. “And what about those people? You find out something about those men on our security cameras?”

I shook my head and drank some more coffee.

“Elena, eh? Well, it's something, but not enough, doctor. Unless she shows up tomorrow, we got to call Family Services. The kid needs help.”

I nodded vaguely, then refilled my coffee mug and put some doughnuts on a plate. “Let me talk to him,” I said, and went out the back door.

Alex froze when I stepped into the yard. Arthur and Lucho looked at me and then at each other. Arthur juggled the soccer ball from one foot to the other, then flipped it deftly to Lucho, who trapped it.

“Hey—doughnuts!” Lucho said, straining for jolly. “You want one, Artie?”

“Sure. How about you, little man? You like doughnuts?”

Alex looked at me, at Lucho, at Arthur, at the doughnuts. He nodded slowly, his pale face empty of expression.

“All right,” Lucho said. “How about some milk with that?” Another slow, careful nod. “C'mon, Artie, let's get milk.” Arthur nodded and they both went inside.

Lydia had a tile-topped table in the yard, and four wrought-iron chairs. I sat in one of them and put the doughnuts down. “Take your pick. I like the vanilla glazed myself, but they're all good. This one's got bacon on it. You like bacon?”

Alex approached warily, his eyes flicking from me to the plate.

“Have a seat,” I said.

He sat. After a while his hand reached out for a maple frosted.

“Good choice,” I said. “You're Alex, right? I'm Adam. I don't know if you remember me. I was there when your mom brought you in—when you weren't feeling well. After you ate the peanuts.”

Alex looked at me some more. “I remember,” he said. “You're the doctor.” His voice was small and faraway, as if it had come from the bottom of a well.

“Yep. You can eat that doughnut, you know. No peanuts.” He nodded slowly and took a bite. Color rose in his cheeks.

“Lydia told you your mom left you with us?” Alex locked his eyes on the tabletop. He nodded slowly. “We're trying to get in touch with her. Do you know how we can do that?”

“No.”

“Were you and she staying at a place near my clinic? It's called the Harney—kind of an old place, made of brick? Lots of women stay there.”

Alex nodded. “It…it was noisy in there, and it smelled bad. My mother didn't want me to touch anything.”

“I bet. How long were you guys there?”

“I…I don't know. A few days.”

“How'd you get there?” I asked. Alex looked up at me, puzzled. “Did you drive there?” He nodded. “Your mom had a car?” Another nod. “She drove you?” Again a nod. “Do you know where Elena is now, Alex? Any idea where we can find her?”

He sighed deeply at the mention of her name. His gaze shifted to the lemon tree, to a branch heavy with fruit. A tiny breeze sprang up, and I could smell lemons, dry lawn, the heat swelling in the air. Alex shook his head.

“Is there somebody else we could call? Somebody who takes care of you? Your dad, maybe, or an aunt or uncle? Your grandma or grandpa?”

Alex stiffened, and his eyes found a patch of earth beneath his feet. He shook his head. “I'll wait for my mother,” he said softly.

“How about school?” I asked. “Is there someone we could talk to there?” This didn't merit even a head shake, and he sat still and silent until the back door opened and Lucho appeared with a glass of milk.

“Drink up,
mijo,
” Lucho said.

“He say anything?” Lydia asked when I returned to the kitchen. She filled my coffee mug and looked through the window, into the backyard.

“Not much. Not anything, really. His mother brought him to the Harney from somewhere—somewhere more luxurious, I guess, given his clothes. But, wherever that was, he doesn't seem to want to go back, or even to say a word about it. He just wants to wait for his mother.”

Lydia shook her head. “Adam,” she said. Her voice was quiet, and her eyes were sad.

“They'll grind him up, Lyd. With all the goodwill in the world, DCFS will grind him up.”

She sat at the kitchen table and sighed. “You know, when they tossed me out of Palms, and I had Lucho and Linda to feed—they were little then, and their goddamn mother was still up in Chowchilla—I didn't know which way was up. I didn't know if I could even get another job.”

I nodded, because I knew the story. For ten years, Lydia had been a scrub nurse in the cardiac unit at Palms-Pacific Hospital, one of the nation's leading medical centers. She was at the top of the nursing food chain, and had assisted on angioplasties, bypasses, valve replacements, stent insertions—everything up to and including transplants—until she ran afoul of a surgeon with a gin problem. He'd walked into a catheter ablation stinking of it, and Lydia had walked out and filed a complaint. But the surgeon's father-in-law had a wing named for him at Palms, and a seat on the board of trustees, and so much for Lydia's career. Her next job, when she finally found one, was something of a step down: at the L.A. County Medical Center Jail Ward.

“Christ,” she said, “I didn't know if I could put dinner on the table back then. But I got work, I kept my head down, and we got by. After a while, I even scraped together a down payment on this place. You didn't see it when we first moved in, doctor—it was a fucking mess.”

“It looks great now, Lyd, but where are we going—?”

She held up her hand. “It wasn't easy to put aside the money for it, or for Lucho's school things, or Linda's. It wasn't easy working in that jail for fifteen years—the place is a fucking shithole. I didn't like it, but I did it. I kept my head down and kept my mouth shut and did it. 'Cause I remembered what happened when I didn't do that—when I tried to do the right thing to the wrong people. And I remembered how they did me at Palms—trying to make me say I didn't see what I saw, getting other people to lie, the bullshit they made up about time sheets and missing meds and—”

“They were trying to scare you.”

“And it worked too. I learned a lesson from that—about how fast you can lose things, how fast they can be taken. One wrong step…”

“You're overreacting, Lyd. What we've done is totally defensible. We thought the kid's mom was coming back, so we looked after him for a few days. Nobody's going to bust chops for that.”

“Not if we call Family Services tomorrow. But I know what
a few days
means to you.”

“You're—”

“I'm not your mother, you know—I had enough playing mother with Lucho and Linda. I don't want to be mad or lecture you or make you feel bad—but you scare me sometimes. You're a damn good doctor—and you know I don't say that easy. You're smart and you've got a good eye; you're a hell of a clinician. And you're very careful, at least when it comes to the patients. Never sloppy, never lazy—you care about them, doctor, I know that. You got good medical sense, but it's the rest of your sense I worry about.”

“My sense is fine.”

Lydia shook her head. “I'm not a complete idiot, doctor. I don't know what you get up to with your pirate friend, but I notice what happens to the bank account after—those cash deposits. I don't know the details, and I don't want to—but I know bad judgment when I see it.”

“I don't know what to tell you, Lyd. We—”

She held up a hand again. “I don't know how many more years I'm gonna do this, doctor. Tell the truth, I'm surprised I'm still doing it, after all the time at the jail. But Dr. Carmody—
dios mío,
he could talk—am I right? He had
pasión.
He talked me right into the clinic.”

Lydia drank more coffee. “Junie's mother died six months ago,” she said. Junie was a nurse from the jail hospital—her boyfriend, maybe, though she never said. “So he has her place in the desert now, way out there. He's fixing it up for retirement. He wants me to go with him, maybe. A few years, and I might. Until then, I don't need explanations from you. I just need peace and quiet.”

I nodded at her and smiled, but could make no promises.

According to the street girls Sutter shmoozed, Troop wouldn't show up at the Harney until two on Sunday afternoon, so we hid from the heat and ate tacos at a stand on Fifth Street. We could see into the kitchen from the counter, and a black-haired woman there was smiling at Sutter.

“I can talk to this guy myself,” I said around my taco. “You don't have to be here.”

Sutter laughed and drank his lemon ice. “Talking, you'll do fine. It's what comes after I'm worried about.”

“The guy's an MI waiting to happen. I think I can manage.”

“The trick is not to have to. Plus, Mr. Coronary has friends.”

I shrugged. “You got more work coming up for me?”

“You know I can't predict. I get a call when I get a call, and then I call you.” Sutter drank more of his lemon ice. “The wolf at the door?”

“Constantly. I'm not close to what I need for the building.”

Sutter looked contemplative, as he did when opining on anything involving logistics, tactics, small arms, or real estate. “Downtown's too hot a market now.”

“As I keep pointing out: it's not downtown, it's fucking Skid Row.”

“It's just a matter of time before they rename it Downtown East or something. Check out the Valley, brother. I picked up a couple of short sales there—nice ranches—had them renoed and rented in no time.”

“Your real estate empire grows ever larger.”

“You should try it—putting down some roots. I'm closing on a little apartment complex in Chatsworth next week. I could set you up. It's got a pool and a nice laundry room.”

“I don't think so.”

“You moving in with Nora?”

“What?”

“Don't look so surprised. You spend a lot of time there, and she doesn't seem to mind.”

“Houseguest is one thing, playing house is another.”

“Who said anything about playing?”

“Nora's not interested in more than what we've got, and I've had my fill of marriage. One was more than enough.”

Sutter reached the bottom of his lemon ice with a loud slurp. “That's it for you and love? One and done? Tapped out?”

I squinted at him. “You sound like an ad for a dating Web site.”

“I'm a believer, brother—I'm all about the romance. My only problem with love is that there's just too much of it around. Some days, it's everywhere I look. For instance, another five minutes staring at that line cook back there, I may to have to propose. Check out those eyes. And that dexterity. I'm a sucker for a girl who knows how to work a knife.”

Troop was a half-hour late for his shift at the Harney, and when his sour-looking colleague came out, Sutter and I went in.

Troop was locked in his wired glass bunker, studying a fresh bottle of Olde English. He looked up at Sutter and didn't like what he saw. He liked me less. His mouth opened before he knew what to say, and all that came out was an asthmatic wheeze.

I pointed at his chest. “That doesn't sound good. You a smoker, Mr. Troop?”

As if to answer my question, he dug in a shirt pocket for a cigarette. He plugged it in his mouth, lit it, and coughed. “What're you doing here? I told you I'd call if I heard anything about that chick. Did I call you and forget about it?”

“You didn't, but I wondered if that was because you didn't have my number anymore. Because you gave it to your Russians.”

Troop's florid face grew redder. He made a flicking motion with his hand. “
My Russians?
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”

“Plus, you owe me money. Forty bucks.”

He laughed. “You're a funny guy, doc. Now, if you two want a room, I'll give you a break on the rate. Otherwise, fuck off.”

“Who are the Russians?”

“Who are the Russians?”
Troop repeated in a whiny schoolyard sneer, and he pantomimed jerking off. He grinned and puffed his cigarette, and in one fluid motion Sutter leapt to the countertop, vaulted the glass barrier, and lit on Troop's desk with barely a sound. Troop's mouth opened and he wheezed again; his cigarette fell into his lap.

I was surprised too, but I hid it better. I chuckled and pointed at Troop's smoldering crotch. “You'll want to do something about that. I think those pants are made of petrochemicals, and they'll fuse to your skin if they melt. It'll be ugly.”

Troop looked down, horrified, and Sutter stepped easily from the desktop and poured Troop's bottle of malt liquor—the better part of forty ounces—into his lap.

“What the fuck!” Troop squealed, and jumped to his feet. He stumbled backward, slapping at his wet crotch. His rolling chair collided with a card table, knocking over a soda bottle, some paper cups, and two grease-stained bags from Sonic.

Sutter laughed. “This guy's a comedy show. Just like that English dude—Mr. Bean.”

“Wha…what the fuck!” Troop said again, scuttling sideways into a filing cabinet, and sweeping an old cassette player to the floor. It shattered, and sent a tape and plastic shards across the linoleum.

Sutter shook his head. “Really, I can't add to this. He's leaving me with nothing to do.”

“Who are the Russians, Mr. Troop,” I said, “and what do they want with the girl?”

Troop swallowed hard. “I…they…”

“Sit down,” I said, “before you fall down.”

He did, and his chest heaved. “I don't know what Russians—”

Sutter leaned his hips on the desk and rested one sneakered foot on Troop's chair, between his legs. Sutter sighed and pushed off slowly, rolling Troop to the far corner, where he stopped with a gentle bump.

“I get that you're scared of them,” I said, “and I can see why—they seem like scary guys. But they're not here now, and we are. Whatever they might do to you is theoretical. What we do is…more concrete.”

“Who are the Russians?” Sutter said quietly.

Troop looked down into his soaked lap. “They…they work for Rostov,” Troop said, half swallowing the words.

“Who's Rostov?” I asked.

Sutter stood up straight and rubbed his chin. “Siggy Rostov,” he said. “He runs whores, among other things. Whores, gambling, loan-sharking, the list goes on—but mainly whores. Probably half the girls who work out of here work for Siggy somewhere up the line. That right, Troop?”

“More than half.”

“What's this Rostov want with her?” I asked.

“I don't know. It's not like those guys tell me shit.”

“When did they come around?”

Troop wiped his brow. “They're always around here, but they started asking about her on Friday, middle of the day.”

“She wasn't here?”

“She and the kid went out in the morning. They didn't come back.”

“How long had they been staying here?”

“Since last Tuesday. Paid a week up front.”

Sutter nodded. “Paid for a week, but didn't stay a week. She leave anything behind?”

Troop looked into his crotch again. “I…I don't think so.”

“You want to try that again?” Sutter said.

“I…I found some stuff under the bed.”

Sutter shook his head. “Going under a bed at this place—you're braver than you look. Let's see it.”

Troop shifted in his seat. He pointed to his desk. “Bottom drawer, on the right—but there was next to nothing.”

Sutter opened the drawer. He took out a white plastic grocery bag and looked inside. He picked through it and shrugged, then tossed it over the glass wall to me. “See what you make of it.”

There wasn't much to see: two pairs of Alex-sized tee shirts, shorts, underpants, and socks, a pair of Alex-sized sandals that looked like leather but were actually plastic, two new toothbrushes, a tube of candy-flavored toothpaste with superheroes on the label, a bottle of chewable multivitamins shaped like funny cavemen, a granola bar, and, at the bottom, a wallet. It was leather, buttery and supple, a softly glowing black on the outside, and inside an arterial red. There was a logo embossed on an inside flap, a leaping horse, and a monogram—HM—in gold Helvetica letters above the credit card slots. Other than the lingering smell of money, it was empty.

I held it up for Troop to see. “You find it this way?”

He nodded, and looked at his crotch again. “I told you, next to nothing.”

Sutter slapped the back of Troop's head. “Try not to be so full of shit,” he said, smiling.

“What was in there?” I asked.

Troop reached into his back pocket. His own wallet was a nylon-and-Velcro affair, like a lumpy gray brick. He peeled it open and took out a thin stack of cards. “Some guy's business cards—that's all there was. I figured the chick took the credit cards and cash.”

Sutter took the cards. “Hoover Mays. No address, just a 213 phone number. Who the fuck is named
Hoover
?”

“You planning to do something with the cards?” I asked.

“Thought maybe I could call the guy, sell his wallet back. Even empty it's worth something, and I wasn't gonna tell him it was empty.”

Sutter slapped his head again. “Douche bag. So this was it—the shopping bag, the wallet—nothing else?”

Troop rubbed his head. “I swear.”

Sutter looked at me. I shrugged, and he looked at Troop. “Here's your deal,” Sutter said. “You talk about our visit with no one—including and especially Siggy Rostov and his monkeys—and we do the same, okay? You tell no one how you spilled your guts to us, and we tell no one, and everyone sleeps soundly at night. Am I transmitting clear?”

Troop nodded. “It's clear.”

“Okay, then,” Sutter said, and he pocketed Hoover May's calling cards, leapt to the top of Troop's desk, and vaulted the glass again with no more effort than a leaf in the wind.