Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s walking around like the living dead. How long has she been like that?”

  “What? I don’t know. A few days, maybe.”

  “All right, then. This guy back east was killed a few days ago.” I let Rosalinda process that. “Look, she was upset her boyfriend wasn’t calling her back. Now she’s upset that he’s dead.”

  Rosalinda’s mouth moved, but nothing emerged. At the top of the stairs, a huddle of concerned faces were looking down at us, doing a poor job of hiding around a corner. “God forbid what’s killing those girls in Baltimore is working its way through here,” I told Rosalinda. “Or is threatening to. We really could use your help.”

  “I thought you needed this to be confidential.”

  “Well, you know what?” I looked at the faces at the top of the stairs. “I think it’s beyond that now.”

  CHAPTER 33

  After the worst of Gladys’s grief had burned itself out, the four of us sat in the living room, cups of tea in front of us on a low table.

  Rosalinda was eyeing the wet photo of Douglas Buchanan, laid out next to her teacup. I asked her, “Do you recognize him?”

  The way she looked at it, I thought she was going to tell me she knew him, that he’d been around Santa Ana many times before. Instead, she surprised me. “No,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “You’re positive—”

  “I said I don’t know who he is, Doctor.”

  I pointed to the picture. “Gladys, what’s this man’s name?”

  Gladys shifted her puffy eyes to the photo. “Casey,” she said.

  Rosalinda said, “She may be confused about who—”

  “Casey,” Gladys said.

  Rosalinda pursed her lips.

  “Do you know his last name?” I asked Gladys.

  She looked at me as if she didn’t understand.

  “Casey who?” I said.

  Gladys shook her head.

  “How do you know him?”

  “He was my husband.”

  Glances shot between Brooke and me. Rosalinda’s face was stony.

  “You were married to him?”

  “He said we would get married. When he came back.”

  “When he came back from where?”

  “He was going to a place near New York. Where the planes crashed.”

  “Did he say he was going to Baltimore?”

  “I don’t know. I love him.” She turned on the faucet and began to weep again.

  I asked, “Did you ever have sex with Casey?”

  Rosalinda glowered at me. Perhaps I was too blunt, but it did shock Gladys out of her crying. Way to go for the insensitive male. John Myers would have been proud, I think.

  “No. I loved him. We were getting married.”

  I was on a roll, so I fired again. “Did Casey ever live here?”

  “No. He lived in another place.”

  “Did he live here in San Jose?”

  “He lived somewhere else.”

  “Did he live in this city?”

  Gladys looked confused.

  “He may have lived somewhere else in the area,” Rosalinda told me. “‘Here’ means this house, I think.”

  “But you never saw him?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. Sheepishly, it seemed to me.

  Rosalinda seemed to be doing a fine job of interpreting what Gladys told us or didn’t tell us, depending. I said to her, “Ask her when Casey left.”

  “A long time ago,” Gladys said.

  I asked, “Where did you get the telephone?”

  Rosalinda answered, “Her parents got her the phone.”

  “Ask her,” I said.

  “Honey, who gave you your telephone, the one you carry with you?”

  “Mom and Dad.”

  Rosalinda gave me a look that said “See?”

  “Then why was the billing address here?” I got no response from either woman. “Would Gladys’s parents trust her to pay for the phone bill on her own?”

  Both Gladys and Rosalinda stayed quiet. The two had to be in cahoots somehow. Perhaps Rosalinda took care of the bills.

  “Why’d they cut off the service? The service to the telephone was cut off two days ago. Why?”

  Gladys stole a glance at Rosalinda. Scratch that; she was staring full-bore at the nurse, as if pleading for help. Brooke cut in. “Gladys, I’m going to ask your parents about the telephone. I want to know why they stopped service on the phone.”

  Gladys’s eyes widened. “No. No! Don’t tell!”

  Good going, Brooke, I thought. I looked at her. She was frowning. No doubt she was learning what I’d learned recently myself: People lie, and not just about their health habits, not just about sex and drugs, not just about how many drinks per week they ingest. They lie about big things and small things. They lie if they’re smart, they lie if they’re slow.

  “Did you have anything to do with paying for the cellular phone?” I asked Rosalinda.

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see a bill?”

  “No! Doctor, you are not the police, right?”

  “I am not the police. I told you in the hallway what I’m doing.” And: I don’t believe you for one moment about not seeing a bill, Nurse. “Gladys, I’m going to ask you a question, and it’s very important that you tell me the truth. Did Casey get the telephone for you?”

  “I-I love him so much,” Gladys stammered. Her face contorted, her mouth pulling open like the figure from Munch’s Scream. Spittle dribbled down her chin. She made no sound.

  Brooke tried. “Gladys, please tell us: Did Casey get the phone for you so that you two could talk to each other?”

  But she fared about as well as I had; Gladys closed her mouth and began to sob again. The interview was over—I could see that as plain as the tears on Gladys Thomas’s bewildered face and the worried-angry look on Rosalinda Lopez’s.

  We made an appointment for eight the next morning and left.

  CHAPTER 34

  Brooke and I walked to the car. The sun was low over the mountains, the sky painted an imperial purple. Pretty, really, despite the circumstances.

  Brooke interrupted my California dreamin’. “They’re lying, aren’t they? They’re both lying.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “Why?”

  “Why is that what I think?”

  “Come on, Nathaniel. Why are they lying?”

  I slipped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “If I knew that, I’d be on a plane tonight.”

  My stomach growled loud enough that Brooke looked over. I realized I hadn’t had anything to eat since I’d forced down a club sandwich on the flight.

  “I’ll drop you downtown. Then I need to grab some food and think these things out.”

  Brooke said brightly, “Thanks, Nathaniel, I’d love to have dinner with you.”

  “You don’t need to get home to your husband?”

  “No,” she said simply. Interesting, I thought, but I didn’t press. She added, “There’s a great Japanese place near work.”

  We rode in relative silence for a while, only Brooke’s directions—“Left here,” “Right at the next block”—interrupting.

  Finally, Brooke said, “Maybe he was in love with her, even though he was sleeping with all these other women. That would account for the phone and might even account for why they hadn’t slept together.”

  “Gladys never actually said they didn’t sleep together. But yes, I was thinking the same thing. It’s like he got his rocks off with all these women in Baltimore but strung the good girl along in California. Wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.” I thought for a second. “I don’t like it.”

  “What?”

  “The lies here. Why are Gladys and Rosalinda lying? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for Rosalinda?”

  “Maybe having a relationship like this is agai
nst the house rules. Maybe Rosalinda knew about Douglas and Gladys. If that’s the case, then she’d want to keep it quiet, right? To save her own skin.”

  “Maybe. I’ll ask about that tomorrow.” But there was more at work than just keeping an illicit affair under the rug; I was sure of that. Well, I wasn’t sure, but I had a feeling about it.

  “Why do you think Casey got her the phone?” Brooke asked.

  “So they could talk, keep the lovers’ lines of communication open.”

  “No. Why do you think it was Casey who got her the phone and not someone else?”

  “Like I said, it was for long-distance pillow talk. Remember, the phone was immediately cut off after the Baltimore police made contact. It was almost as if they had a contingency plan. You know, ‘If anyone ever gets this number, make sure you cut off the phone service.’”

  “And you think Gladys could have done that?”

  “I don’t know. But I think Gladys could have told Rosalinda about it, and she might have cut it off. She knew about the phone; that was for sure.”

  “But why would Casey go through all the trouble of getting her the phone? Why risk sending money to Gladys and have her pay for the phone?”

  “Maybe he was being watched.”

  “By who?”

  I shrugged.

  “We’ll have to press her on that tomorrow.” Brooke stared out through the windshield. “I’ll take her aside and try—”

  “Brooke—”

  “—to work it out of her. I think we had something of a connection—”

  “Brooke,” I said more sharply. She looked at me. “I don’t need any help with this investigation. Thanks for coming today, but I’m the one who’s been assigned here.”

  She frowned and sat back in the seat. “But you’re here at the invitation of the Santa Clara Department of Health. That’s who invited you. That’s who I work for.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m running a couple of TB and HIV surveillance programs, but they’re running themselves. And I can help you.”

  “But like you said, you don’t work for CDC anymore—”

  “So?”

  “So this isn’t your job. Besides, at CDC you were, what? Epidemiology Division? This is a Special Pathogens investigation—”

  “Oh, don’t get all departmental and bureaucratic on me.”

  “Seriously. I’m here for a few days to wrap this up and get the hell back east. It’s a dead end anyway. I’ll be done by tomorrow morning at eleven.”

  “What about the phone and the secret affair? What about ‘I don’t like the lies’?”

  “What about it? They had a relationship. They got a phone, and now Gladys and her nurse are lying about it. A little weird, sure, but I’m convinced it’s irrelevant to what’s happening in Baltimore.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am. This guy—Casey or Douglas or whoever—was probably killed by the brother of someone he poked. He was a sexual predator, remember? He pissed people off.”

  “You’re not convinced this is irrelevant. You’re just trying to get rid of me.”

  “You’re right, Brooke. And just because we slept together half a dozen times means you’ve got the window to my soul.”

  She grinned at me. “That’s right,” she said, and kept on smiling.

  CHAPTER 35

  By the end of the sushi dinner, I was exhausted—loaded with fish and a beer, jet-lagged and coming off a week’s insomnia—and Brooke had worn me down. Despite my best efforts, we were talking about Douglas/Casey and Gladys Thomas again.

  “Why did she say New York?” Brooke asked.

  “Because New York is famous, Baltimore’s not. Maybe that’s all she could remember. Maybe that’s what Douglas said—Casey. He was from York, PA, after all. Maybe she got confused.”

  “I think this is all very strange. And the way she said ‘New York, where the planes crashed,’ that was like adding a time stamp to it. It’s as if when she learned about the city, at least when it was important to her, New York was still identified by nine-eleven. It seems to say that Douglas Buchanan became affiliated with New York sometime after the attacks.”

  I finished off my beer. “There are too many jumps between York and New York and ‘where the planes crashed.’ It didn’t seem like he was much of a presence here recently.” I thought for a moment. “A situation like this would make it easy for him to keep two separate lives.”

  “You said his parents died. Maybe that’s where he got the money for phones and for traveling.”

  “And maybe that’s for the police to figure out. Look, we’re getting off track here. All we need to deal with is whether she banged Casey or not. And, if she did, whether she’s hiding some nasty bug.” I signaled the waiter for the check.

  “Where are you staying?” Brooke asked.

  “I’ll find a motel out by the airport.”

  “I have an extra bedroom. You’re welcome to—”

  “A motel is fine. Besides, what would hubby say?”

  “He wouldn’t say anything.”

  “You have him that whipped, hunh?”

  “For that to happen, he’d have to exist.”

  I had the awful feeling of having just jammed my foot deep into my mouth. “He’s not dead, is he?”

  She laughed. “Not remotely. Last I heard, he was balling one of his graduate students. The perks of being a professor, I guess.”

  The check came and we both reached. I snatched it away from her. She stared at me. I asked, “Did you just say balling?”

  “I did.”

  “The vocabulary of a liberated woman.”

  “Learn to deal with it, Dr. McCormick.” She finished off her beer. “You get dinner, I’ll provide the lodging.”

  The waiter returned with a credit card slip, which I signed. I gave the guy a twenty-five-percent tip, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

  “We called off the engagement six months ago,” Brooke said.

  It took me a second to pick up the thread of conversation. When I did, I said, “I plead innocent.”

  “You shouldn’t. You’re a big reason why it didn’t work.”

  “Me?”

  “You were so much of a man in bed, Nathaniel, I could never be satisfied by anyone else.” I was being made fun of, and I felt myself beginning to blush. “After I finished that first year in Atlanta, I took the assignment at the state department of health in San Francisco to be with Jeff, stayed there for a few months before leaving EIS and coming down to Santa Clara. He and I tried to make it work for a while. Boy, did we try. But really, how could I think of getting married when I’m away from this guy for three months and can’t keep my hands out of another man’s pants? It told me it just wasn’t right.”

  “Or that you’re a nympho.”

  She didn’t seem to like that one—I guess, in the case of broken engagements, you could dish it out and not take it—and excused herself to the bathroom. There went my invitation to stay the night.

  “The bed is just a futon and full of cat hair,” she said when she returned. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  I did, in fact, mind the cat hair. But all things considered, accepting a little kindness from Brooke Michaels seemed like just the right thing to do.

  CHAPTER 36

  Brooke’s apartment was a nice two-bedroom affair that looked like it had a lot of light in the daytime. Plants everywhere. A cat—Buddy was his name—lounged on a chair. On the walls, there were a few Ansel Adams prints, pictures of Brooke on mountaintops, on a boat in scuba regalia, in a forest, lugging an immense backpack. A road bicycle hung from hooks on one wall; below it rested a mountain bike.

  Brooke, who’d called in to her office to check messages, scrawled notes onto a pad. When she finished, I pointed to the bikes.

  “I saw this piece at the MoMA once. I think it was called Bikes in Repose. How’d you afford it on your salary?”

  “Daddy owns an oil company. He bought it for h
is princess.” She smiled, but the smile faded to a look I didn’t like.

  “What? Your dad doesn’t really own an oil company?”

  “Tim Lancaster left me a message. He was making sure you arrived safely.”

  “That’s it?”

  “And he said to keep an eye on things, let him know if there are any problems.”

  So, Tim was enlisting Dr. Michaels to spy on me. Fantastic. “Do you have any beer?” I asked.

  “Help yourself.”

  I pulled a bottle out of the refrigerator, twisted the cap, swallowed a gulp. I said, “You don’t work for EIS anymore. Tim’s not your boss. He never was your boss.”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t owe him anything.”

  “No, I don’t. But it’s not good politics, Nathaniel.”

  “You gotta be kidding me. You’re going to give him updates on me?”

  “No. But it does put me in an awkward position.”

  “Why? Just tell him everything is terrific. Tell him we discovered the cure to AIDS written on a napkin under Gladys Thomas’s pillow.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. I drained half my beer before she added, “It was a little slimy of him to ask me to keep tabs on you.”

  “Tim is slimy. He’s not actually human, you know; he’s a filovirus. That’s why he does so well in Special Pathogens.”

  She laughed.

  “Okay, so maybe I am on his shit list,” I said.

  “No. You? I thought you were next in line for director.”

  Everyone’s a comedian.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll cover for you, Nathaniel. You know I will.”

  I pulled a long draft of beer. “I don’t need that.”

  Brooke smiled and said nothing.

  Brooke retired and I, despite a grinding exhaustion, hopped on the computer in Brooke’s office/guest room and checked my e-mail. A message from Tim, asking me how things were going. After his call to Brooke, I figured he didn’t need to know how things were going, so I deleted the message without responding. Not good politics, maybe, but good for my soul.

  I cruised around the Web for a while, checking the newspapers for what they were saying about the outbreak in Baltimore. Nothing much. The baseball season was halfway over, and a bomb had just macerated a dozen people in Jerusalem, so the sick retarded folks were squeezed down to a few lines. On the whole, this wasn’t a bad thing.