Bitter Medicine

by Sara Paretsky

  “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 clinic. 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 closed. 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 back stairs 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 make you 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 patient 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 redemption. 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 Lotty’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.

  31

  Midnight Projectionist

  As I was falling asleep between Lotty’s lavender-scente
d sheets I remembered the phone number I’d found in Alan Humphries’s papers. I struggled awake and dialed it again. It rang five times; I was going to hang up when a sleepy-voiced woman answered.

  “I’m calling from Alan Humphries,” I said.

  “Who?” she asked. “I don’t know who you mean.” She spoke with a Spanish accent; in the background a baby began to cry.

  “I want the man who’s been helping Alan Humphries.”

  There was momentary pause. From the muffling of the receiver, I thought she might be conferring with someone. When she spoke again, she sounded worried, or helpless. “He—he’s not here right now. You must try later.”

  The baby’s cries sounded louder. Suddenly, in the total relaxation fatigue induces, a fragment of an old conversation swam up in my memory. “Oh, I’m a married man now, Warshawski. Got me a nice wife, a little baby… .”

  No wonder she felt worried or helpless. Sergio’s angelic beauty might have swept her off her feet. But now she had a small baby and a husband who was gone much of the time, who had frequent conversations with the police, who brought home large amounts of money whose source she wasn’t supposed to ask about.

  “Can I reach him here tomorrow, Mrs. Rodriguez?”

  “I don’t know. I—I suppose so. Who did you say is calling?”

  “Alan Humphries,” I repeated.

  I barely remembered to hang up the phone before falling down the well of sleep. When I woke up, the August sun was streaming around the edges of Lotty’s oatmeal-colored curtains. As I came to, a feeling of dismay gripped the pit of my stomach. Oh, yes. Peter Burgoyne. A goodly apple rotten to the core. But it was Humphries, not Peter, who’d been calling Sergio. Getting him to break into Malcolm’s apartment and hunt for the dictating machine. Maybe bludgeoning Malcolm to death had been Sergio’s added touch, not included in the original price of admission.

  I picked my watch up from the bedside table. Seven-thirty. Too early to reach Rawlings. I got up and went to the kitchen where Lotty already sat with her first cup of coffee and The New York Times. Lotty never exercises. She maintains her trim figure through sheer willpower—no muscle would dare go flabby under that stern gaze. She does have rigorous ideas on diet, however—fresh-squeezed orange juice, no matter what the season, and a bowl of muesli constituted her invariable breakfast. She had already eaten; the empty bowl and glass were rinsed and neatly placed on the draining board.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and joined her at the table. She put her paper down and cocked her head at me.

  “You’re doing all right?”

  I smiled at her. “Oh, yeah, I’m okay. Just a little bruised in the ego. I don’t like having affairs with people who are using me. I thought I had better judgment than to let it happen.”

  She patted my hand. “So you’re human, Victoria. Is that such a bad thing? Now what do you do today?”

  I grimaced. “Just wait. See if Rawlings will come to Friendship’s conference. Oh—one thing you could do if you would. Can you see that they don’t discharge Mr. Contreras until after this weekend? His daughter is hot for him to go home with her, away from the dangerous city. He doesn’t want that at all, and he’s nervous the doctors will insist on it. I said I’d bring him home with me if they want someone looking out for him, but I don’t want to have to spend half my time worrying that he’s fending off Sergio Rodriguez while I’m away.”

  She promised to take care of it during her morning rounds. Looking at her watch, she gave a little exclamation and took off—Lotty goes to Beth Israel to see patients before starting her day at the clinic.

  I wandered moodily around Lotty’s apartment for a while. Human, huh? Maybe she was right, maybe not such a bad thing. Maybe if I learned to accept my own fallibility I’d be easier on other people. It sounded good—a page out of Leo Buscaglia. But I didn’t believe it.

  I walked from her apartment to the clinic to pick up my car, then headed to my own place to change clothes. At ten o’clock Max’s secretary called me there to say everything was set for me to go to the Friendship conference on Friday. “He registered you as Viola da Gamba.” She spelled it dubiously. “Could that be right?”

  “Yes,” I said grimly. “We’ll hope that they’re as stupid as he thinks they are. Who’s Lotty going as?”

  She sounded more doubtful than ever. “Domenica Scarlatti?”

  I decided my nerves couldn’t take very many collaborations with Max, told the secretary to thank him but remind him that the sharpest people often cut themselves.

  “I’ll give him the message,” she said politely. “The conference will be held in the Stanhope Auditorium on the second floor of the main wing out at Friendship Hospital. Do you need directions?”

  I told her I could find it and hung up.

  Rawlings was in when I tried him. “What do you want, Ms. W?”

  “You free Friday morning?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could. “Want to go on a field trip?”

  “What are you up to, Warshawski?”

  “There’s a medical conference out in Schaumburg on Friday. I think they may cover some interesting morbidity and mortality statistics.”

  “Morbidity and mortality? You’re trying to snowball me, but I know you’re talking about death. You know something about Fabiano Hernandez’s death. You have evidence and you’re concealing it. That’s a felony, Warshawski, and you damned well know it.”

  “I’m not concealing anything about Fabiano.” I’d forgotten him. I paused a minute, trying to work him into my equation, and couldn’t. Maybe Sergio had shot him, thinking he was being double-crossed. “Malcolm Tregiere. And I don’t know anything—I’m just guessing. They’re going to present a paper that may or may not reveal the truth about what happened to him.”

  Rawlings breathed heavily into my ear. “May or may not? And what might that be? Or not?”

  “Well, that’s why I thought you’d like to go to Schaumburg. Just on the chance, I had you registered for the conference. It starts at nine, coffee and rolls at eight-thirty.”

  “Damn your ass, Warshawski. For two cents I’d run you in as a material witness.”

  “But then you’d miss the conference, Detective, and you’d go to your grave wondering if you’d ever really have found out about Malcolm Tregiere.”

  “No wonder Bobby Mallory turns red when he hears your name. His trouble is, he’s too much of a gentleman to try police brutality…. Nine o’clock in Schaumburg, huh? I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.”

  “I’m going to be out there already. Why don’t you arrange to go with Dr. Herschel? She can help you find the place.”

  “Mighty white of you, Ms. W,” he grumbled.

  “Always happy to do my citizen’s duty of helping the police uphold the law, Detective,” I said politely. He slammed the receiver in my ear.

  After that, there was nothing else I could do but wait. The cleaning service I’d called sent over a crew around noon. I told them to pick everything up and put it away someplace and scour and wax every surface. Why not have it completely clean once a year? I called the friend who’d made my extra-thick front door for me originally and commissioned another one. He apologized profusely when he heard it hadn’t held up to an ax and offered to line the new one with steel, for an additional five hundred dollars.

  I covered my face with extra-strength sunscreen and jogged over to the lake, where I spent most of the afternoon. Labor Day was around the corner, and usually about that time we have a big storm that turns the lake water over, making it too cold for swimming for the rest of the year. Time to make the most of it. I floated on my back, enjoying the sense of being rocked in the cradle of the deep, secure in the arms of Mother Nature.

  Max’s secretary called me at noon Thursday to tell me the slides were ready. I drove over to Beth Israel for them. Max was in a meeting, but he had left a neatly labeled packet for me.

  Thursday night. Back in my business clothes with Lotty’s white coat for disguise. This ti
me I’d packed an overnight case and reserved a room at the Marriott. Lotty and Rawlings would meet me there at eight-thirty in the morning. Max and Murray were driving together and would join us at the hospital entrance.

  At midnight I reached the hospital grounds. I made a circuit of the staff parking lot before going in, to make sure that Peter’s Maxima wasn’t there. Then, white-jacketed and I hoped professional, I went in through the main entrance and up the stairs to the second floor.

  The Stanhope Auditorium took up the far end of the corridor overlooking the parking lot. The double doors were locked, but again they had used a standard model that turned back easily. I closed them behind me and shone a flashlight around.

  I was in a small theater, ideal for this kind of meeting. Twenty-five or so rows of plush-covered, swivel seats were stair-stepped down to a stage. Just now its curtains were drawn. In front of them stood a large white movie screen, with a podium and microphone to one side.

  The audiovisual equipment was in a projection room at the rear of the theater. I unlocked the door, my hands shaking a bit with nerves, and started examining the carousels full of slides.

  32

  Mortality Conference

  Max and Murray were waiting for us in the visitors’ parking lot. In contrast to Lotty, whose dark face was pinched with worry, and Rawlings, who affected a heavy-policeman attitude, Max was ebullient. He wore a tan summer suit with an orange-striped shirt and a tie of darker umber. When he saw us, he bounded over radiating goodwill—kissing Lotty and me, shaking hands enthusiastically with the detective.

  “You look very sharp, Vic, very professional,” Max told me. I was wearing a trouser suit in wheat-colored linen with a dark-green cotton shirt. The jacket was loose, covering my gun, and I had on low-heeled shoes. I wanted to be able to move quickly if I had to.

  Murray, whose shirt was already slightly rumpled from the hot drive, merely said grumpily that “this had better work.” He joined spiritual forces with Rawlings, who cheered up slightly when he realized none of the party knew exactly what to expect—he had thought I might have brought him out to embarrass the police.