Murders at Hollings General ddb-1

by Jerry Labriola

  "An accident. This old contraption should have been torn out years ago. Damn the board! Damn the history!" "It's hydraulic?"

  "Unfortunately, yes. And a strain for six floors. It always was."

  "Where's the control room?"

  "Around there," Foster said, nodding to the left.

  "You have a key to the door?" David asked as they walked past the corner.

  "Not with me but in my office." Foster's forehead was dotted with sweat.

  "Wait!" David shouted. "What the … it's been jimmied!"

  David bent over and squeezed into the sooty compartment. Its smell reminded him of the times he stood under his car, watching an oil change. Steadying himself on a slippery, squishy floor and brushing cobwebs aside, he yanked on the cord to an overhead light and found he was standing in a pool of inky oil.

  David's eyes flitted back and forth across the ram cylinder, the pump and the oil storage tank, finding it hard to process the entire scene in one swallow. He finally settled on an oil line and squatted to get a better look. It was disconnected at the tank end where he saw oil in a thin ooze. Off to the side, he noted that the synchronizer for the car door and hoistways on individual floors had been tampered with.

  He was about to stoop out when he spotted a piece of adhesive tape on the pump housing. Printed in neat, block letters was: "SEE?"

  That was a last straw. David reeled back, numbed by death and mockery at the base of the clock tower he so revered.

  Chapter 12

  Having notified hospital security and Kathy of Ted Tanarkle's fatal plunge, David paced about the Hole awaiting the arrival of the usual investigative unit. Earlier, he had suggested to a shaken Foster that he retreat to his office-that he would be contacted shortly.

  Now what? Has Victor Spritz neared his goal of eliminating the entire EMS oversight committee: Bugles, Coughlin, and now, Tanarkle? That leaves Alton Foster.

  Like in a dream, he heard Belle's questions echoing in the background. And further behind, the panicky voice of the page operator. But David was in an impenetrable zone, seized by an obsession that he was in over his head. In over his head and down in the Hole, a two-bit command post whose dank smell told him he was below ground. And now there was to be an investigation of another fiendish crime, this time sixty feet away. They're getting closer.

  He shuddered. It's happening. It's what you wanted, isn't it, baptism under fire? Fire? You mean a goddamned raging inferno. It could make you hard-boiled. So shape up, David, and be hard-boiled!

  Kathy came in. She rose on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. He felt placated by the aroma of her presence. "Here we go again," she said.

  "Are the same people here?"

  "Same people."

  "Mind if I listen in," Belle said, "so I know what's going on?"

  David stared at her for a moment. "Belle-sorry, Ted Tanarkle's been killed. He either fell or was pushed down the elevator shaft." He pictured the control room and corrected himself: "Pushed."

  "Oh, no!" Belle exclaimed. She exhaled loudly. "Where? Which elevator?"

  "Around the corner."

  David gave Kathy the details of the past half-hour, concluding with what he discovered in the control room. He saw Belle dabbing the corners of her eyes, something he was certain she hadn't done after she learned of the other murders.

  "The bastard got into the machine room over there and rigged the controls so that when Ted pushed the button upstairs, the door there opened but the car stayed down here. You know, I just can't imagine an observant guy like him not noticing the floor dial, or even worse, walking into an open space. Either he was distracted or pushed."

  "Ugh," Kathy grunted.

  "Okay if I don't join you and the team next door?" David said. "Foster's upstairs and I want to clear some things before they settle out."

  "We'll go up afterward," Kathy said.

  "And then, I'm looking for Spritz. He's turned into a loner-a frigging disappeared loner. If you run into him, call me, will you?"

  Kathy nodded. "David." She beckoned him aside. "Nick says we have to step up our involvement. Says we've got a damn serial killer on our hands."

  "Big revelation."

  "You know what he means. People can be on our butts more than on yours."

  David checked to see if Belle was watching before scooping up the unaware detective. "You can be on my butt any time you want," he whispered.

  Kathy pulled away. "David! This is serious. Even the hospital unions called. And now, after this, everyone and his uncle will demand the impossible. Like bring in the killer in an hour."

  "Sony." And he was, after rationalizing he had permitted himself a moment of therapeutic giddiness. "But, shouldn't that be `his or her uncle or aunt'?" David asked with a straight face.

  Kathy peered down her nose and gave him a dismissive gesture.

  Although David couldn't resist the quip, he scolded himself for compounding inappropriate and indelicate behavior. Idiot! He was your friend and mentor.

  Before leaving, he handed Kathy an envelope containing the adhesive strip from the control room. "Could you give this to Sparky? Calling card. I'll explain later. Thanks."

  David paraded the length of the building to the front elevators, rode to the sixth floor and doubled back to Foster's office suite. Now there's police officialdom to contend with. So we bump into each other. But maybe not; it's not as if they haven't been working the cases from the git-go. Okay, then, last one across the finish line's a rotten egg!

  Foster's secretary was not there so he assumed she was on a coffee break-it was ten a.m. He barged into the administrator's office and found him standing at his desk, sorting through some letters which he fumbled to the floor. For the first time since Bugles' murder, David realized Foster had switched from sport jackets and slacks to more formal suits. This morning, he was in shirtsleeves and open vest. His coat lay slung on a table between a lamp and several overturned portraits.

  "I didn't mean to frighten you, Alton."

  "Who's frightened?" Foster said, stooping for the letters. "This institution is merely crumbling around us."

  David sat stiffly on a chair before the desk, directly in line with threads of sunlight pouring through a venetian blind.

  "Here, let me get that," Foster said.

  "No problem," David said, moving the chair. "A few stripes of light on a black day. Black Day at Hollings General."

  "Sounds like a murder mystery."

  "Then how's Murders at Hollings General?"

  "Jesus! Murder! What did we do to deserve this?" Foster said. He sat behind his desk and stared vacantly into space.

  David took out his pad. "Alton, I have some questions." He didn't wait for a response. "When Ted came here, what did he want?"

  "He handed me his resignation."

  David's head snapped up. "His-his resignation?"

  "That's right. I have no idea why. I tried to talk him out of it but he wouldn't listen. He left in kind of a huff."

  "Yes, I know," David said, laying a finger across his lips. "I could hear some of the conversation. And then you followed him out?"

  "Yes, but not immediately. I waited a second or two, hoping he'd come back."

  "I see. And the door. Your back door there. Why was it locked?"

  "Locked? But, I left it open for you."

  "I tried it, Alton. It was locked."

  "Well, I don't know. It must have blown shut. It does that sometimes. I should have made sure it was kept unlocked. I don't think I did, come to think of it. "

  David didn't stop writing as he asked the next question. "Now, when you got to the elevator, you said you saw the exit door closing."

  "Yes, I'm absolutely certain someone had just gone through it. But I didn't have the presence of mind to look. David, I was so shook by the whole thing. It happened so fast."

  "And you didn't see Ted fall, right?"

  "Right."

  "You're sure?"

  Foster's face darkened. "Yes,
I'm sure. Are you suggesting …?"

  "I'm not suggesting anything," David shot back, aware he'd stepped on words again. But he didn't care.

  "I got there and it was too late. What more can I tell you?" Foster said.

  "Fine. That's your story and I've got it written here."

  "David, for Pete's sake!"

  "One last quickie, Alton. Did Ted drop in on you or had he called ahead?"

  "He called ahead."

  "How far ahead?"

  "Oh, maybe half an hour. What's that got to do with anything?"

  "Curious, that's all."

  David read over his last few lines and got up to leave. "That's it for now. I think you may have to go through the same thing with the police. Don't take it personally but you were the last person to see Ted alive."

  Foster tensed his jaw. "Me or the guy who went out the door."

  "Yeah, that's true," David said. "Him or you. By the way, have you seen Victor Spritz anywhere?"

  "No, and he's not in his office. I already checked. His second banana is running the EMS scene and I'm worried about that, too. He's not very reliable."

  "I'm afraid there's more to worry about than EMS ambulance dispatches," David said, closing his notepad. "As important as they are."

  In the moments between Foster's office and his secretary's desk, David thought: Screw it, this is hardball. Hard-boiled in hardball. So? Let him take the Hole away from me-if he's not on death row.

  The secretary had returned. David said, "The scream I'm sure you heard … "

  This time, his words were stepped on. "Dr. Brooks, I hope I never hear anything like that again. Never, for the rest of my life."

  "I understand, but can you remember whether the scream came before or after Mr. Foster passed you?"

  The secretary pointed to spots in the air before her. "After. Yes, after."

  "And, how long had you been at your desk?"

  "I usually arrive at about quarter-to-nine."

  "From the time you arrived until the tragedy occurred, did you have occasion to see Mr. Foster, other than when he passed you?"

  "No."

  "Or talk to him on the intercom?"

  "No."

  "Does he ever leave out the back door without letting you know?"

  "Oh, please. More often than not."

  David was about to pursue the issue when his cellular phone vibrated. It was Belle.

  "Guess who's just been admitted to ICU-came in through the E.R."

  "Christ, what now? Who?"

  "The Bugles kid."

  "Robert? What happened?"

  "Somebody knocked him around, apparently. He's in pretty bad shape."

  David waved off Foster's secretary who had pointed to the coffee maker. "Is he conscious, do you know?" "The E.R. says just barely."

  "I'm going over. Then I'd better join the gang downstairs. I can't believe all this."

  He thanked Foster's secretary with a thrust of Friday in her direction and hurried to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit.

  He entered the central control station, a long exposed area separated from the corridor by a workbench laden with stacks of manuals and requisition slip trays and strewn with metal-covered patient charts. Behind the bench, a nurse sat before a counter attached to the full length of the monitoring wall. Making notations, she scanned the rows of EKG tracings and vital sign windows, once nodding to a specific panel to indicate to another nurse that its corresponding room needed checking.

  David hadn't visited ICU since his full-time days, and he thought that the ambient technology was louder than he remembered-the buzzes, the rings, the snaps; and that the odors were more prickly-the antiseptics, the detergents, the hydrocarbons. Once again, he imagined he smelled ether there but knew ether was no longer used.

  He greeted the staff huddled around a portable chart rack as one of four green-clad residents led a case discussion among students in short white jackets whose side pockets bulged with small manuals, tourniquets and lab slips. An older gentleman in grey slacks and green blazer leaned against the wall. David recognized him as an attending surgeon and the session as the obligatory and hallowed "rounds."

  "How's the Bugles boy?" he whispered to the head nurse.

  "Just came in from Imaging, Dr. Brooks. They said his MRI's okay. He's a little groggy but knows where he is. He's down in 520. Madeleine Curry's with him. She's `on float' and we grabbed her."

  "Thanks, Annie. Good to see you again."

  David proceeded quietly down an endless corridor, past rooms with curtains open or half-drawn or fully drawn; past patients artificially ventilated; patients invaded by drainage tubing; patients immobilized for fractured extremities, their legs and arms yielding to weights and pulleys and strange angles; cocooned skulls; moans and groans and sobs.

  Room 520 was the next to last. David paused at the doorway.

  "Hi, Madeleine, fancy meeting you here," he said softly. "The last I heard, you were a fixture on Men's Surge." She was blonde, full-figured, too sultry for her profession, and known for her scorching eye contacts.

  "David! What have you been doing with yourself? Oh, wait, I take that back. It's house calls and that other love of yours, right?" She arose slowly from a chair, carefully closed the patient's chart and sashayed toward the door. One would have expected Madeleine, a little bird of a woman, to have been given to quicker movements. She raised up and David kissed her forehead, and, for a moment, her perfumed fragrance brought him back to the sizzle of the old days.

  "Only the other love-and I assume you mean detective work," David stressed.

  "What else would I … oh, I see, and then there's Kathy. Well that's a given, isn't it?" Her one-shouldered shrug connoted indifference tinged with contempt.

  David squelched a frown, yet believed there was no subtext to the question. He left it unanswered.

  Another of David's old flames, Madeleine had been one of his youngest and had made no bones about her displeasure at being cut off once Kathy reentered the picture. He still believed her sassiness enhanced her sex appeal but he felt now, more than before, that both were anathema to a hospital setting, particularly an intensive care unit. Besides, there were more pressing matters at hand, so he allowed the corners of his lips to turn up in a conciliatory smile.

  David approached Robert who lay propped in bed between a sitting and supine position. His eyes were closed, the left a beefy lump, its lashes partly inverted. Dried blood caked his forehead and nostrils, and a padded bandage covered his left temple and ear.

  "Robert, it's me, Dr. Brooks." David reached down to enclose Robert's crossed hands in one of his own, leaving it there.

  Robert's right eye struggled open as the left side of his face creased and contorted upward.

  "Don't try to open the other eye," David said. "You're going to be all right but you've got to rest it off."

  Robert inched his head in David's direction and, prying his lips apart, mumbled, "Hello, Dr. Brooks."

  "Who did this to you, Robert?"

  Robert's eye appeared to blink uncontrollably. "My brother." He coughed and swallowed hard. "He got … mad. He, he … got … mad."

  "Why?"

  "I let you in … dad's place." Robert's eye clamped shut and tears seeped over his cheeks. Madeleine plucked a Kleenex from the box on the nightstand and dried the tears.

  "That's enough," David said, gently squeezing Robert's hands. "You rest, now." As an afterthought, he added in a lower voice, "Too bad you weren't better trained to defend yourself." He immediately regretted the statement, or at least making it at the wrong time. But he wasn't sure Robert even heard it.

  David backed up a few steps before turning to leave. Although it had crossed his mind, he judged it best not to inquire about Madeleine's personal life for fear of resurrecting talk of their schism years before.

  On the way to the elevator shaft in the basement, he puzzled over the attack and its ramifications. Questions came at him like ticker tape. What does Bernie
know? Foster's medical training? The shipments? Whatever from wherever. Istanbul? Is Bernie in on it? And, didn't Robert say his brother was in Tokyo? What's going on there?

  David found the usual crew milling around the elevator and control room area. Sparky flitted about taking photographs. The hospital's security force of a half-dozen was there, and uniformed officers stood mute and soldierly at each end of the hall. A sheet covered Tanarkle's corpse.

  Kathy and Nick emerged from the control room and David motioned them aside.

  "Foster's all yours," he said, "and did you hear about Robert Bugles' beating?"

  "When did it happen?" Nick asked in a matter-of-fact tone, drowning out Kathy's gasp.

  "This morning. I just saw him in ICU. He's got some superficial contusions and abrasions. They'll probably keep him overnight as a precaution, but he should be all right." David thought Nick looked somber.

  "Who did it?" Kathy asked. "Were you able to talk to him?"

  "Yeah, and he said it was his brother, Bernie. We should bring him in. He was supposed to be in Tokyo but apparently he's around."

  "He's always supposed to be in Tokyo," Nick said.

  The comment convinced David that Nick was more involved in the murder investigations than had been let on.

  "And while we're at it," David said, "anyone know where Spritz is? He's got to be questioned, too." He didn't want to stare at Nick, instead alternating his gaze between him and Kathy, disguising his greater interest in the reaction of the Chief Detective.

  Nick hurriedly left to talk to one of the security guards.

  David turned to Kathy. "Something eating him?" he asked.

  "It's not you, David, if that's what you're thinking. He's just feeling the pinch. Four murders here in one week. City Hall's on his back. Don't forget he's new to these parts and he's responsible."

  "I guess you're right." David put his hands on his hips and looked up and down the hall, and up above the elevator shaft to a point he estimated would coincide with the clock outside. "Four murders here in one week" rung in his ears.

  "I hate to sound bossy, Kath, but we've really got to locate those two guys."