If the Center was Polk’s one great passion, I wondered where that left Mona. Duh. With Smoldering Towel Boy, that’s where.
“Do you have a list of his active patients?”
Amberg’s face flushed pink as he turned from the films to look at me. “I find this a little awkward. When Milt started turning away patients, Madie gave them the choice of several other neurologists—with Milt’s approval, of course. They also had the option of staying here with us. Most of them stayed. And frankly, it’s not because I’m the best doc in town, either. It’s because of Madie. Patients love her.”
“Okay, let’s see if I have this right. Dr. Polk had few or no patients left, and therefore had no income from his practice. So how did he pay his share of the rent?”
“I suppose there’s still some money trickling in. But for the past several months, I paid it all, which was only fair. I had added income from taking over his patients. Plus, I was using most of the utilities and supplies. I tried to get Milt to formalize the arrangement by selling his practice to me, but he said he wasn’t ready for that.”
“So, are you still interested in buying it?”
“That depends. There’s not much left to buy—some equipment and office furniture, but that’s it. I’d consider making an offer if the number was reasonable, but frankly, it would only be out of consideration for Mona.”
“I’m surprised you think the practice is worth so little. I mean, Dr. Polk must have been in business for twenty years or more. How could he lose it all so fast?”
Amberg returned his gaze to the films, but his look seemed more reflective than focused. “You have to understand,” he went on. “I’ve known Milt since medical school. He’s a brilliant man, but a bigger risk taker than I care to be. That’s why we share office space but not balance sheets.”
“When Dr. Polk did see a patient, who collected the money?”
“Madie, but she sent everything to his billing service for processing. There was some talk a while back of having Francine take over that function, but I’m not sure if that ever happened. You’ll have to ask Madie.”
“When was the last time you saw Dr. Polk?”
“Oh, about a week ago, I’d say. Why?”
“I just wondered if he seemed upset about anything.”
He paused. “If he was upset, he kept it to himself. My conversations with Milt mostly centered around medicine.”
A green button on a wall panel pinged and lit up. “My patient is here. I’ll show you to Milt’s office. Madie’ll look in on you in case you have any questions.”
He pulled the X-rays from the clips and led me down the hall to another office. As he unlocked the door, I said, “Dr. Amberg, you’ve known Milton Polk for a long time. I’ve heard a lot of theories of how he died—suicide, murder. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s yours?”
He looked directly into my eyes and without hesitation said, “I don’t have a theory. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
His answer was abrupt, but I didn’t take offense. The question didn’t have an easy answer, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to know what events in Milton Polk’s life had collided so dramatically to leave him dead in the murky waters of Santa Monica Bay. I banished that image from my thoughts and opened the door.
Polk’s office was smaller than Amberg’s and had no pictures of a spouse or adoring progeny to greet visitors. A desk, two chairs, and a two-drawer lateral file, along with a lone diploma from Northwestern University School of Medicine hanging on the wall, were the extent of the furnishings. The office looked as if the same person who’d done Amberg’s had decorated his, but Polk’s was toned down as if she’d lost enthusiasm for the project. Or maybe the office merely reflected the fading passion of its occupant. In any case, any vitality that may have existed there had vacated the space long ago.
I opened drawers, hoping to find another calendar or journal that might provide any clue to Polk’s recent movements. The lateral files contained more medical journals and article reprints on neurological disorders, but no maroon envelope with an Aames & Associates logo on it.
You find out a lot about a person by looking through his desk. Polk sorted paper clips. The big ones and little ones were carefully separated. However, the same compulsion didn’t extend to rubber bands. Those were mixed up and tangled together like some big rubber band love-in. He was a Post-it junkie, too. Every size, color, and functional specialty—he had them all. Along with the standard medical books, he had a copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (in French, no less). Amazing how much, and how little, that said about him.
Lying flat in the bottom drawer were what appeared to be several disorganized manila file folders that held the corporate books and records of NeuroMed Diagnostic Center. Mixed in with that pile were several testing protocols and more pink health insurance claim forms. Some claims were for patients examined in Sherman Oaks, and others were for those tested at NeuroMed. These days, most insurance claims were submitted electronically. I wondered why the billing service had sent hard copies to Polk.
“Finding everything okay?” Madie stood in the doorway.
“Nothing very promising.”
She gave me a no-kidding look as her eyes swept the room. “No wonder. You don’t have the Deep Six file.”
I cocked my head in confusion. That was a term from the old Watergate scandal. I wondered what troublesome documents Polk had wanted to bury.
“Dr. Polk had a system,” she explained. “The mail came. He’d look at the return address. Some letters he opened. The rest he threw in a box. The stuff sat for a month or so until he got tired of looking at it, and then he’d toss the whole thing.”
“Without reading any of it?”
“Usually,” she said with a chuckle. “Then he’d start another box. He always had one going. Hold on.”
She disappeared down the hallway and returned minutes later, carrying a carton she’d found in the coat closet. It was heaped full of mail. I thanked her, grabbed a letter opener from the desk, and dug into the box like a pig looking for truffles. The search was tedious. There were stacks of unopened mail, some friendly and some not so friendly: past-due notices from everyone from the Financial Times to a bottled-water company, statements from two separate bank accounts. I thumbed through the canceled checks. Sizable payments had been made to several biotech suppliers for testing equipment, but none made out to Sunland Manufacturing. There were no recent large deposits, and no appointment calendars, either.
The last statement from Polk’s insurance billing service showed that the practice was owed approximately ten thousand dollars in outstanding receivables. It wasn’t much, but it might support Mona’s “interests” and help me piece together an accurate income statement for the practice brokers.
I glanced at my watch. It was close to four-fifteen. I’d already been here over an hour. I estimated it would take me another half hour to get to the bottom of the box. Frankly, I didn’t blame Polk for deep-sixing most of this stuff. I could guess what was in most of these envelopes, and I didn’t want to open them, either. I began passing up the familiar and opening only what piqued my interest, until I found an envelope from a law office with a string of names too long to digest. Inside were three typewritten pages entitled:
MINUTES OF REGULAR MEETING OF BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF NEUROMED DIAGNOSTIC CENTER, A CORPORATION
Snore. After a paragraph of legal yada, yada, yada, I almost tossed it back in the hopper, but something caught my eye. It was an announcement that Francine Chalmers had been duly elected vice president of said corporation. All resolved, approved, and ratified.
I thought, my, my. Neither Polk nor Francine had given me the impression she was anything but an employee. They’d certainly never told me that she was an officer in the corporation. My face felt warm with anger. Those sneaky liars. I should have been told. If Francine was vice president, that information should have been included in my busines
s plan. Polk had obviously wanted it kept hidden, but why?
“How’s it going?”
I gulped air and crushed the pages to my chest. Madie stood in the doorway watching me.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said, “but Dr. Amberg’s gone, and our last patient is just leaving.”
“Guess I zoned out,” I said, catching my breath. “Madie, how well do you know Francine Chalmers?”
“Pretty well. She used to work here, you know, until she left to manage the Center.”
“Did she have a financial interest in NeuroMed?”
“You mean more than her paycheck? No way. Francine never had a dime. If she wanted to go out to lunch, she had to beg Kenny for money.”
“Kenny?”
“Her husband. The jerk. I used to tell her she should leave him, but I think she was afraid.”
“Dr. Amberg told me there was talk of Francine taking over the billing. Did that ever happen?”
“Not that I know of, but you’ll have to ask her. Anyway, are you going to be much longer? Because my boyfriend’s picking me up right at four-thirty.”
“I’m not finished, but I can take the box with me if you don’t mind.”
She didn’t, so I tossed the unpaid bills, along with the rest of the mail, into the Deep Six carton and followed her down the hallway. The overhead fluorescent light reflecting on her hair made her look like a Christmas tree angel. We were almost at the lobby door when I stopped at a room that had been closed off before. Inside was what looked like radiology equipment.
“You take X-rays here?” I asked.
“Some,” she said. “Not as many now that Dr. Polk isn’t here. That guy really liked to zap his patients, especially when he first bought the thing.”
It was only a slight possibility, but if Polk had used this equipment a lot, he might have left the NeuroMed documents somewhere inside the room.
“Mind if I take a look?” I asked.
She checked her watch, and for the first time I noticed a crack in her cheerfulness. Nonetheless, she said, “No problem.”
The room was cold and empty except for a modified version of a doctor’s examination table and a couple of chairs. There was a loud hum from the machine’s power source, and the total absence of any odor. Attached to a metal runner on the ceiling was a large X-ray head with a hose about four inches in diameter snaking to a box on the wall. The place reminded me of every horror film I’d ever seen: dimly lit laboratories, and mad scientists hovering over still bodies. Then I thought of Milton Polk lying in a morgue refrigerator. I had to squeeze my shoulders toward my ears to stop the chill that was moving up my spine.
There weren’t many places to hide a maroon envelope in the room. Nevertheless, I checked the drawers of the lone storage cabinet, but found only hospital gowns and various medical supplies.
As I walked toward the door, my eyes scanned the room one last time, and that’s when I spotted something on the X-ray equipment that made the skin around my jaw prickle. I pulled a chair over and stood on it until I could reach the machine’s cold metal handles. A small raised plate was attached to the underside of the contraption. It was stamped with the manufacturer’s name, Medcomac—the brand name used by Sunland Manufacturing.
I called for Madie and waited until her squishy rubber-soled shoes squeaked into the room.
“How long have you had this?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “A year or so, I guess. Dr. Polk knew somebody at the company. He got a good deal on it. Are you done in here?”
“Yeah, for now.”
Madie walked toward the back of the office to douse the lights, and I headed for the exit, trying to make sense of what I’d just discovered. The Medcomac equipment established a clear link between Polk and Sunland Manufacturing. I just didn’t know what it meant. Had someone at Sunland simply sold equipment to Polk, or had that person also been involved in insurance fraud with Polk or someone else at NeuroMed—like Francine? The fact that she’d been made a VP of Polk’s corporation indicated that she was closer to him than either of them had let on.
As nutty as it sounded, I wanted the X-ray equipment to be a clue. Except, what if it turned out to be linked to Polk’s death? What was I going to do then—set off with my Junior Sherlock spyglass to deduce the truth? That was more than nutty; it was suicidal. The image of a lifeless face in a blurry Polaroid picture flashed through my mind. But as the photograph came into focus, I saw not Milton Polk’s face but my own.
All of a sudden, I felt as if I needed Dr. Watson and a couple of Valium. I wanted a safe haven, someplace to think, and that could be found in only one place—home.
14
forty-five minutes after leaving Amberg’s office, I pulled into my driveway and headed for the back door. From the Domanskis’ open window next door I heard the sounds of another boozy argument. There was something about the combination of the gin and the sea air that made their voices carry. The marriage seemed less than ideal to me, but it had held together for thirty years, which was a good deal longer than mine had, so who was I to criticize?
As I stepped inside, I was greeted by the smell of lavender, and the clickity-click sound of toenails on tile—the white and wiry Muldoon. When he realized who it was, something like disappointment appeared in his big brown eyes. He turned abruptly and skulked toward the French doors and waited. After I let him out, I unloaded the rug and tchotchkes from the car into Pookie’s bedroom, where they’d have to stay until I could figure out what to do with them. I also brought in the tote bags from Mona’s place, and the Deep Six box.
After that, I checked my messages. There was one from Eric, telling me that he’d asked for a return call from Sheldon Greenblatt, who had been in court when he’d called. Court, schmort. Shelly should get his priorities straight. I needed his help now. The other call was from Pookie.
“Hi, baby. Mommy misses you.”
It sounded like something mushy a normal mother might say—not my mother, but somebody’s. There was only one explanation for this uncharacteristic display of überaffection. The sweat lodge had melted her brain.
“Kissee-kiss, lovey-boo,” the message continued, “and give Tucker a big smooch, too.”
Well, that explained it. “Muldoon, it’s for you,” I shouted.
No response. He was obviously too busy to take the call. Pookie continued with some adult stuff about the workshops and giggled about a fellow retreatoid, a sixty-year-old brain-fried Haight Ashbury survivor named Bruce, who had the hots for her. Only problem? He had trouble remembering her name, and everything else in the short term. Nevertheless, she asked me to FedEx a bottle of ginkgo biloba and her Ravi Shankar’s The Sounds of India album. She was joking, but I could read between the giggles. She was having a good time. There was a brief pause before she added, “Have you called Sylvia yet? When you do, be careful, Tucker. That woman’s not operating in the upper level of her vibrations.” I hated to admit it, but I missed my mother and found myself wishing she’d left a number so I could call her back.
Somewhere off in the distance, Muldoon was barking. I opened the door and called for him.
“Is this your dog?” It was a nervous, high-pitched voice, coming from somewhere in the shadows near the house.
I stepped outside and saw that Muldoon had pinned a woman against the side of the deck. I called again for him to come, but of course, he didn’t. It took at least three more times before he punctuated his one final growl with mrrph and then reluctantly walked back onto the deck.
As the woman stepped into the light, I could see that she was somewhere in her late fifties, with that fresh-scrubbed earnestness you see on faces in small Midwestern towns. At the moment, however, she looked as though she’d be happier at home whipping up a tuna hot dish for the Grange supper than fending off my suspicious glare.
“I knocked a few minutes ago,” she said, “but nobody answered. You must have just gotten home. I hope you don’t mind my lo
oking around.”
“That depends on what you’re looking for,” I said.
As she reached into her purse, I flinched, half expecting her to pull out an AK-47. It had been that kind of day. Luckily, I didn’t embarrass myself by diving behind the fake wicker, because all she brought out was a business card. When she handed it to me, I noticed the logo of a local real estate company, and her name, Jane Ventana, agent.
“Sylvia Branch asked me to stop by,” she said in a tone that was hesitant. “The woman who owns the house. She’s planning to put it on the market in the next few months and wanted to get a ballpark figure of the value. Are you a renter?”
My jaw clamped shut so tight that I nearly didn’t get the next sentence out. “News flash, Jane. Mrs. Branch can’t put this house on the market, because she doesn’t own it. I do.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I must have the wrong address.”
“No, you have the right address, just the wrong information. Sylvia Branch is playing games with your head. I’d blow her off if I were you.”
Well, jeez, I said blow her off, not blow her away, but I guess the hard-edged tone in my voice was enough to start Jane Ventana backing away from the house the moment she interpreted my words as crazy-woman-with-killer-dog speaks. Ventana threw in several more nervous “excuse me’s” and “I’m sorry’s” before beating a path to her car.
When she was gone, I went back inside. I could feel the vein in my neck pulsing as I rummaged through some old photographs and my father’s camera equipment, which were stored in Grandma Sinclair’s steamer trunk, until I found the file that held all the legal papers dealing with the house.
I reread a copy of my grandmother’s will. The wording was as I remembered. Anne Sinclair had left the bulk of her sizable estate to her two surviving children, Sylvia Branch and Donovan Sinclair. But the beach house, she’d left to me. My grandmother could have changed her mind, but according to Pookie, she was an astute woman with a lot of money and a lot of lawyers. Why would she bother to write a new will and then not tell anyone? Aunt Sylvia had to be up to her old tricks again.
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