Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  The only sounds were the clicking of metal on porcelain.

  “I’d like to start with you, if you don’t mind,” I told the staffer who’d let me into the house.

  She mumbled something about setting an example; then we retired to the living room. She slid the pocket doors closed.

  First things first, I got her vitals: Her name was Velma Tharp, she was originally from Stockton, but came down after junior college to look for work. She’d been at the home for about eight months.

  Enough of that. I pulled out the picture. “Do you recognize this man?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Were you aware of any relationship Gladys had with any man?”

  “What kind of relationship?”

  “Romantic, friendship, whatever. Doesn’t matter.”

  “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  And that’s how it went for the next fifteen minutes. I did the cop-type questions—Did you see anything unusual last night? Any odd phone calls? But Velma Tharp seemed to have had her head in the proverbial sand; when I told her we were finished, she promptly stood.

  “Oh, one more thing,” I said. “What’s your shift here?”

  “Usually, eight to eight. I do the overnight Sunday through Thursday.”

  “Those are normal shifts? Twelve hours?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you say you didn’t hear or see anything unusual last night?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not eight o’clock. Why are you here now?”

  “With all that’s happened and with Rosalinda leaving . . .”

  “She left?”

  “Quit today. Just like that. Really left us in the lurch.”

  I made a note of it, thanked her, and asked her to send in the next woman.

  Through the pocket doors, I heard Velma say something to a woman she called Stacey. By the time she sat on the couch across from me, Stacey was already in tears. After getting name and age, I asked her how long she’d been at the home. She didn’t know. I pulled out the picture of Douglas.

  “Do you know this man?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bingo. “Do you know his name?”

  “No. He was Gladys’s boyfriend, though.”

  “Did he come here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did he ever stay here?”

  “No.” She said it emphatically. “We’re not allowed.”

  “Do you know how often Gladys met with this man?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “When was the last time he was here?”

  “Long time.”

  We went on like that for another ten minutes, me lobbing the simplest questions I could think of, Stacey bunting back monosyllabic answers.

  The next girl came in, then the next. Each interview followed the same script. All knew Casey, some by name, others only by his picture. If nothing else, Casey had done a hell of a job keeping a tight rein on his girlfriend.

  It was pushing past eight o’clock, and I heard a television go on in the room across the hall. Some of the women went upstairs.

  Around nine o’clock I got to my last woman. As luck would have it, the woman had gone upstairs to her bedroom and Velma had to retrieve her. Ten minutes later, Mary Jacobson situated her ample rear in the couch. She settled her hands in her lap and leveled her blue eyes at me. She was, she informed me, Gladys’s roommate.

  I went through questions that had by that time become routine. As I probed, I quickly sensed that all had not been dandy between the roomies. So I asked about it: “Did you like Gladys?”

  “No,” she said without hesitation.

  Okay, I thought. “Why?”

  “Gladys talked all the time on the phone. Nah, nah, nah. All the time. Gladys—” She faltered.

  “What? Mary?”

  She struggled with the words, then spoke. “Gladys would be touching herself. Down there.” She pointed to her lap. “It was gross.”

  “While she was on the phone?”

  “Yeah. It was really gross.”

  I found myself sizing Mary against Gladys and wondering if the woman sitting across from me had the strength—and the cunning—to murder her roommate and string her up in the garage.

  I asked, “Did Casey ever sleep over?”

  “No way.”

  “Did he ever visit Gladys in her room?”

  “My room.”

  “Right. Your room.”

  “No way.”

  “Do you think they ever had sex?”

  She thought about that for a moment, then asked, “Put his thing in Gladys?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Gladys would have told me about it.”

  “Why would she tell you?”

  “Gladys told me everything.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Gladys thought I liked her. Gladys thought I was her friend.”

  Chalk one up for the universality of human misperceptions. The last time I thought someone really liked me was a year before, and that someone was Brooke Michaels shortly before she left for California to be with her fiancé; and that was just after I found out she even had a fiancé. Gladys and I had both been duped.

  “Was there anything different about Gladys in the past few days? Was she acting funny?”

  “Gladys was acting weird, all sad.”

  “Did she talk into the phone?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear her go outside last night or this morning?”

  “The lady already asked me that.”

  “The lady? Detective Walker?”

  “The police lady.”

  “Tell me. Did you hear Gladys leave the room last night or this morning?”

  “No.”

  “You heard other things, though.”

  “I had these.” She dug into a pocket in her robe and pulled out a pair of earplugs. Why, Mary, you little snoop. So the talk, talk, talk didn’t bother her unless she left out the earplugs. She probably got off listening to the steamy phone conversations between her roommate and Casey, then stuffed in the earplugs when she wanted to sleep. Last night, she’d said, she wanted to sleep. I believed her.

  No more questions for Mary Jacobson came to mind, so I ended the interview and walked to the front hallway. I imagined her alone up there, sleeping like a rock without her earplugs for the first time in years and loving it.

  Velma was in the small office, playing solitaire on the computer. I asked her who was winning. She seemed a little confused by the question, but finally said the computer.

  “Can you give me Rosalinda Lopez’s telephone number?”

  “I can’t give that out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we can’t give out employees’ home phone numbers. And she’s not even an employee anymore.”

  I saw a sheet of contact numbers pinned to a corkboard on the wall. I’d bet the rental car outside that Rosalinda’s number was there. I walked to the corkboard, found the number next to Lopez, and wrote it down.

  Velma glowered at me as I left.

  CHAPTER 49

  It was nearly ten o’clock. I hadn’t eaten since lunch, hadn’t slept well in a week, and I still had reports to file with Tim and Herb Verlach. I also had a bunch of messages waiting for me on the cell phone, which I listened to as I started the car.

  The first message was from John Myers, saying he had gotten a call from Tim Lancaster, but not to call him because he was fucking exhausted and he was going to bed. He’d call me in the morning. The second was from Brooke, saying she was home and to call her. The next message was from Harriet Tobel. The time stamp was an hour before.

  “Nathaniel, please call me when you get this message. I don’t care what time you call; it’s very important. Call me at home. I’ll be here.” She left the number.

  The final message, too, was from Dr. Tobel. This time her voice sounded taut and she said tersely
, “Ivory Coast, Nathaniel.”

  Strange, I thought. Very strange. It seemed that Dr. Tobel was finally going to tell me what she was thinking, that whatever she’d been holding back earlier in the day was going to be revealed to me. Fine. But “Ivory Coast”?

  The phrase—the place, Ivory Coast—was not quite as random as it seemed. Years before, after the disciplinary committee (of which Harriet Tobel was a member) suggested I leave school, I was sitting in her office, crying like a jilted teen. She hadn’t fought for me to stay in school. I told her I felt betrayed. She shook her head and said, “Your time is finished here, Nathaniel. For better or worse, you’ll never be able to crawl out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. But this doesn’t mean your life is over. Far from it.”

  She was the person who suggested I leave California. She suggested I apply for the Peace Corps. Unable to see any path now that the narrow road of medicine had been barricaded, I realized it was either that or . . . what? I was assigned to a rural area in Ivory Coast, a tragic country in West Africa. For two years, I helped local and foreign doctors set up clinics to battle the explosion of AIDS in that country. It was there, in the wilds of Africa, that I stopped regretting what had happened to me and started regretting who I had been. The only contact with my previous life was through rare e-mails to Dr. Tobel.

  Watching hundreds die alone, rolling around on mattresses soaked in their own diarrhea, flesh bursting in bedsores and cancer, fired my robust anger at disease. Having given up on medicine, I felt an MPH and a degree in foreign relations might be the best way for me to continue the fight. I wrote to Dr. Tobel about this, and she suggested I not entirely give up on being a doctor. She might be able to do something for me. As I said, she had come to California from Baltimore, from a faculty position at Hopkins. She was unable to persuade her former colleagues there to give me a chance; the stature of that place meant they would never have to take a risk on someone like me. She gave up on Hopkins—“Their arrogance is unbelievable,” she’d said—but pushed like hell at the University of Maryland. Why? I wondered.

  She told me on a call the day before my interview at Maryland. “Because, Nathaniel, you have purpose. Unlike so many students who blow in and out of my office, you have purpose for good.”

  Purpose.

  I should mention something here. Despite Dr. Tobel’s lauding of my newfound purpose, the fact any medical school in the country even considered my overtures—after I’d been booted from another school—was astonishing. Normally, my application would have found its way, very quickly, into the recycling bin. CDC, Boy and Girl Scouts that they are, would have incinerated the app lest they be contaminated by any grime adhering to it or to me. Nobody in medicine wants tainted goods.

  So, how did a liar and a fighter like my former self worm his way back into med school and into squeaky-clean CDC?

  During the deliberations at school about how, exactly, they could best rid themselves of me, Dr. Tobel intervened. As I said, she was on the disciplinary committee, and wielded an extraordinary amount of influence there and in the school as a whole. She prevailed upon her colleagues, who probably wished the rack were still a legal form of punishment, to expunge my record of its nastier elements. To wit: Expulsion was changed to Indefinite leave of absence as per student’s request. When CDC called my reference from my former med school—Harriet Tobel, of course—she told them I’d left school to serve the underserved in Africa. Her little manipulations, her application of muscle on my behalf, saved my career in medicine—literally.

  When I was in my residency at UNC, after a particularly grueling month during which I doubted my mettle as a physician, I called her and asked why she’d done so much for me. I asked why she’d helped me remain in a profession that seemed too complicated, too demanding, for someone as flawed as I was.

  She listened to my griping, then said, “Nathaniel, I think you have the potential to be a truly great doctor. There’s a problem in medicine when physicians feel they are different from those for whom they care. When they feel they’re more capable, not just at doctoring, but at the rest of life as well. Ours is not a path that allows for an honest appraisal of our own weaknesses, so we come to believe we don’t have them. You have been forced to face your failings. And this brings you and your patients to the same level. You are human, they are human. It would be a great loss to this profession if, after all you’ve learned, you were to choose another path.”

  I wondered then if she didn’t see some parallel between herself and me. Her crippled body, my crippled character.

  So, back to Ivory Coast. After a nice bout of soul-searching and a few more e-mail exchanges with Dr. Tobel, I pursued medicine once again. I spent a week in the big city Abidjan, making hundreds of dollars’ worth of international phone calls, gathering the necessary documents from my undergrad and medical school days, faxing my transfer application materials from a tiny, cramped travel office in the center of town. Three months later, Maryland admitted me as a third-year medical student.

  That was Ivory Coast. But what the hell did it have to do with anything? Why was Harriet Tobel saying the name into my voice mail? It was odd; I was worried.

  I dialed her number and the answering machine picked up. I hung up, waited a few minutes, and dialed again. Still the machine.

  “Dr. Tobel, it’s Nathaniel McCormick.” I waited. Nothing. “Please give me a call on my cell phone when you get this message. I was interviewing, so I didn’t have the phone on, but it’s on now. Call me as late as you like.”

  I fished out the number for Tobel’s lab. After a few rings, the call rolled over to another line. A woman answered. In fifty years, after my brain is riddled with Alzheimer’s plaques and I’ve forgotten my own name, I will remember that voice.

  “Hi,” I said.

  There was a pause, then “Nathaniel.”

  “The one and only.” Lame, Nathaniel.

  “That’s true.”

  It was my turn to talk but, damn it, I came up with nothing. Finally, Alaine said, “What’s up?”

  “Not much.” I didn’t want to ask for Dr. Tobel yet; I wanted to keep Alaine talking, spend a little more time with that voice. “Just working on some things.”

  “Harriet said you’re out here on an outbreak investigation. How’s it going?”

  “Brilliantly. The bugs are gone, the bad guy’s in jail, and I finished it all before lunch.”

  “Really?”

  “No. The bugs are still out there, we don’t know if there are any bad guys, and it’s well past my dinnertime.”

  She laughed and I think said my name. I guess I was getting my groove back.

  “Harriet’s not here,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. That was disturbing, but while I still had Alaine on the line . . . “How are you?”

  “Working. Always working.”

  “All work and no play, Alaine . . .”

  “I’ve always been dull.”

  “Right. Just like Mata Hari.”

  “What?”

  “Bad choice of exciting historical female.”

  “Truly. Okay, Nathaniel. I’ll tell Harriet you called.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I don’t. She left early.”

  “She still lives in Atherton? Same place?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause in which the conversation was supposed to end. Instead of ending it, I said, “I’m heading back east tomorrow.”

  “Well, have a safe flight.”

  “I’d love to catch up.”

  “I thought we just did.”

  “Come on, Alaine.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She exhaled a soft breath. “Nathaniel, I’m engaged.”

  For a moment, I thought she meant she was engaged in some other activity the next morning. Then I realized she meant engaged engaged.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh . . . I’m, ah . . . I’m very happy for you.”

  “Thank you.”
/>   “Who’s the lucky man?”

  “You wouldn’t know him.”

  “Try me.”

  “His name’s Ian Carrington.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “See?”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a venture capitalist.”

  “He still has a job after the bubble?”

  “Yes, he does—”

  “I thought all those guys were driving taxis now.”

  “He’s very smart.”

  “I’m sure he is.” There were about a dozen other things I thought Ian Carrington was, but I kept them to myself. I said, “All right. Tell Dr. Tobel I called.”

  “I will.” I was about to hang up when Alaine said, “Nathaniel.”

  “What?”

  “It was good to talk to you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and hit End on the cell.

  CHAPTER 50

  By the time I reached Dr. Tobel’s Atherton neighborhood, I managed to calm down a little. By a little, I mean I wasn’t thinking homicidal thoughts about Alaine’s beau anymore. But I was still pissed off.

  I wound the car slowly through the dark streets. Unlike many of the nouveau riche hamlets on the Peninsula, Atherton had been dripping in money since the beginning of the last century. Immense houses were closed in by even bigger oak and palm trees, so that the houses seemed to shrink back from the road behind their walls of vegetation. It was not a welcoming neighborhood; it was the kind of place where driving around aimlessly might generate the interest of the police.

  I drove around aimlessly for a few minutes until I got my bearings; I wasn’t stopped by the police. In fact, I didn’t see another car until I pulled into the semicircular driveway in front of Dr. Tobel’s house. There was a big Lexus in the carport—Dr. Tobel’s, I assumed. The other bay was packed with gardening paraphernalia.

  The house was a bit smaller than its neighbors, but still too large for one person; Dr. Tobel’s husband had passed away a number of years before, and I guess she never got around to moving to a smaller place. White stucco walls and a low-slung roof gave the place a welcoming, Spanish feel.