by Ray Flynt
“Larry, just call your guy at KYW and find out if the anonymous caller was a man or a woman, and then alert all the local media to my 3 p.m. press conference.”
The color appeared to drain from his face, but Whitmore stood up, drew out his cell phone and paced closer to the windows to make his call.
“Jamal,” Harris began, “I’d like you to finish your work on the death certificates, preferably before my news conference.”
Across the room, Whitmore spoke softly into his phone.
Jamal stood. “Then I’d better get back to my office.” With a glance over his shoulder to make sure Whitmore wasn’t looking, he blew his wife a kiss. He grabbed his lab coat off the arm of a nearby chair and left the office.
Whitmore pocketed his phone and returned to the seating area and announced, “Paul said the caller was definitely a woman.”
“Alright, Larry, go make your calls about the press conference,” Harris said.
He nodded. “I should have a draft of your statement within the hour.”
“I’ll write my own statement.”
Whitmore rocked on his heels and glanced around the room. “Okay, I’m heading back to my office.”
Harris pressed the intercom button. “Have you located Carlton?”
“Not yet,” came Tony’s reply.
Harris looked at Brad and rolled her eyes. “What does the fact that the anonymous caller is a woman tell you?” she asked.
“I think the caller might be Crystal Himes.”
“Crystal?” Sharon said. “I thought it might be Iola T. trying to deflect any suspicion away from her husband.”
“Interesting that you should mention Iola, because, inadvertently she may have planted the seed for these calls in Crystal’s mind. Remember when Crystal helped resuscitate Dennis Ayers?” Sharon nodded. “Iola was extremely vocal that Crystal deserved credit, a commendation, for saving his life. When Larry Whitmore reported that at least one of the media callers noted an ‘attempted murder,’ that made me wonder if Crystal wanted to push her story about saving his life. Of course, all the stations seized on the word ‘murder’.”
Danita Harris asked, “Why would she want to do that?”
“Crystal was prominently mentioned in a wrongful death lawsuit filed last month at a suburban nursing home. There may be nothing to the story, and the lawsuit may end up getting thrown out one of these days. Meanwhile her reputation has been tarnished. In her mind, the call may be a simple ploy to get her good name back.”
“So she looks like a hero.” Sharon said.
“Yeah, pretty much.“ Brad turned to Harris. “Would Crystal’s job be in jeopardy if she were found out to be the person making the anonymous calls?”
Harris shrugged. “She told the truth. Our personnel policy has ‘whistleblower’ protection. As long as she’s not the murderer, her job is safe.”
“If the murderer had been the anonymous caller, she’d have correctly reported three deaths. I’d like to have Sharon talk with her, see if she can get her to own up to making the anonymous calls.”
Sharon bobbed her head, but didn’t appear enthusiastic.
“I don’t have a problem with that,” Harris said. “Looks like the two of you are making progress, while my security chief is missing in action.”
The intercom crackled. “Ed Carlton is here to see you.” Brad could hear the smile in Tony’s voice.
“Send him in,” she replied.
A sheepish-looking Ed Carlton wedged past Brad and Sharon as they were exiting the administrator’s office, and slammed the door on them. Brad waved a mock ‘bye to Tony, but before they entered the elevator lobby, just outside the glass doors of the receptionist’s office, they could hear shouts coming from inside Harris’ office.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1:22 p.m., Thursday, January 11th
I wasn’t anxious to return to the place where I’d felt incarcerated for almost a dozen hours—though it seemed much longer. My stomach felt queasy. As we rode down the elevator together, I asked Brad, “You have any suggestions on how I should handle this?”
“You’ll figure it out.” How many times has he said that to me in the years we’ve worked together?
A bell sounded and the elevator doors slid open on the seventh floor. Brad wished me luck. I took a deep breath and marched across the hall toward the nurses’ station. Only one nurse was at the station, his back toward me. I cleared my throat. He turned around and glowered.
“Back so soon?” Keith Blanton said.
Fuck you. I so wanted to verbalize it, but bit my tongue. “I’m here to see Crystal.”
“Don’t tell Crystal that I ratted her out.” He glanced down the hall in both directions, and whispered, “But you might want to check room 720.”
I managed a begrudging “thanks,” and headed down the hall musing on his ratted her out comment. Blanton had no interest in helping me, so he was somehow using me to get even with Crystal. One thing for sure: The man had a problem with authority.
I approached the room with caution, and saw that the door cracked open a few inches. I peered in and saw Crystal’s ample frame propped up in the bed. Her arms stretched out at her side, her mouth gaped as her chin touched her chest, and she wore a facemask repurposed as eyeshades. She was asleep. If I woke her, I faced a lose-lose situation. The only winner would be Keith Blanton. I realized he gave me the information so that he could get back at Crystal and make me the boogieman in the process. Shit.
I pushed the door open and entered the room, then closed it softly behind me. This was a private room, so I pulled a chair up at the foot of her bed and took a few minutes to think and develop a plan. If Brad’s theories were right, Crystal would welcome the news that the local media were about to descend on the hospital in a little more than an hour. I could picture Crystal dragging Iola in front of the cameras to praise her heroism in saving the life of Dennis Ayers. If Brad was wrong, she’d probably—literally—yawn and go back to sleep.
The curtains had been drawn at the window, and I pulled them back, seeing that for the first time in more than twenty-four hours snow no longer swirled outside. The window rattled, however, and the winds still seemed intense.
“Crystal.” I stood alongside her bed and softly repeated, “Crystal, it’s me, Sharon.”
She began to stir and uttered a few unintelligible syllables.
“I’m sorry to wake you, Crystal.”
She stretched, then pushed the makeshift eyeshades from her face. “I was just catching a few winks,” she mumbled.
“I know,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, “and I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wanted to share news.” I tried to sound excited.
“Huh?”
I wasn’t sure she was fully awake. In a normal voice, I asked, “Are you awake, Crystal?”
She groaned, propped herself up, and pulled the facemask off her head, but not before the elastic snarled in her hair.
“Let me help you with that.” I seized the chance to act as her ally and disentangled the mask.
“What’s happening?” she asked in a clear voice.
“I wanted to share important news. A TV station called. They heard about the deaths, and are planning to send a camera crew to the hospital.”
A smile showed on her round face. “Really?”
I began to sense that Brad had been right. She looked to her left and grimaced, and I realized she had seen her image in the bathroom mirror. Crystal slid her legs over the edge of the bed and prepared to stand.
“When are they coming?” she asked.
“Around three o’clock.”
She stood and straightened her uniform. “Pardon me,” she said, and hurried into the bathroom.
This gave me time to weigh my next move. I silently rehearsed my next comment, anxious to find the right tone.
Crystal emerged from the bathroom. She’d had enough time to run a comb through her hair and dab lipstick on her lips.
�
�I’d better get back to work,” she said, and headed for the door.
“No problem. I figured you’d want to hear the news,” I said, trying to keep her from leaving. “I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but I’m glad you called and reported the deaths to that TV station.”
She froze, but I kept staring at her with a benevolent smile.
“But I didn’t…” she began, unconvincingly. “What makes you think that I called those stations?”
With that statement she gave herself away, since I’d only credited her with calling one station. If she’d had more sleep, perhaps she could lie better.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I just assumed it was you,” I said, winging it. “But maybe Iola made the call. The TV station told Ed Carlton it was a woman who called, and they have caller ID and gave him the number. Ed told Brad that the call came from a number listed for the 7th floor nurses’ station. Brad told me, and the first thing I thought was ‘Way to go Crystal’!”
Crystal’s expression was half-grin/half-about-to-burst-into-tearsself-satisfied, but worried about the consequences.
“If Ed Carlton’s involved, I’m in trouble.”
“Why?” I said, “You didn’t do anything wrong. You told the truth. They can’t be upset with you for telling the truth.” I knew otherwise. She couldn’t be directly penalized, but the powers-that-be had long memories.
“I’m still in trouble.”
“No you’re not.” I put my arm around her shoulder.
“I’ve spent my whole career doing what’s right,” she said, “but got fired from a part-time job because a patient died.”
I tried to look surprised, hoping she’d share more.
She waved her hands in front of her. “You don’t need to hear about my problems.”
“Crystal, sit down.” I pulled up a chair and urged her to sit, then sat next to her.
“Now, tell me what happened.”
“I worked on the weekends at a nursing home out in West Chester. My dad is staying in that same nursing home, and I know the staff pretty well. When they found out I was a nurse they offered me a part-time job. A couple months ago we had a patienta woman, at least 90 years oldadmitted with cancer. The hospital had done all they could, and she was facing the end of her life. Doctor had prescribed morphine injections to manage her pain, and whenever I was there I administered the prescribed dose at the correct intervals. One Saturday morning, her only daughter from California was visiting. The daughter admitted it was the first she’d seen her mother in six months, and was shocked to find her all skin and bones. That morning, the daughter buzzed and said her mother seemed to be in pain. I checked the chart and saw that it had been five hours since her last morphine injection. I prepared the medication, and gave her a shot, and within fifteen minutes the woman was dead.”
I shook my head.
“The woman’s daughter started screaming at me, saying, ‘You killed her’.”
“That must have been awful.”
“Oh, it was. It gives me the willies just thinking about it. The woman’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the nursing home and me. The autopsy showed a higher than prescribed level of morphine in the woman’s system.”
I must have looked shocked, since Crystal stammered on, “There was a… y… young nurse, just out of school, who worked the night shift before me. I think she gave the woman a shot of morphine before she went off duty and never recorded it on the chart. I told the supervisors my suspicions, and they confronted her, but she denied it.”
“So they fired you?”
“Technically, they didn’t fire me, but they made my life so miserable with all the lawyer’s questions, and so on, that I quit. Then my name appeared in the paper about the lawsuit and people here started questioning me. My life has been hell, but I’m still trying to do a good job.” She sniffled.
I felt sympathy for Crystal. A nurse’s job was too often thankless, and most people only thought to complain rather than compliment. Crystal never made the connection between the call and her heroism in the Ayers case, but she didn’t have to. When the TV cameras started to roll, I’d see if Brad was correct.
I stood and hugged her. “Again, I’m sorry to have wakened you.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I should get back to work.”
“Actually, I wouldn’t have bothered you, but Nurse Blanton told me where I could find you and said—and I’m quoting him now, because I think you ought to watch your back around him—‘It’s about time that cow started helping with patients’.”
Crystal’s hell-hath-no-fury expression warmed my heart.
“Sounds just like that jerk,” she said.
Don’t I know it!
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1:30 p.m., Thursday, January 11th
It seemed to Brad that for every question he answered, two more took their place. He passed the security headquarters en route to his makeshift office, and noticed that Abu had left his post, replaced by a young African-American security guard, who eyed him suspiciously through the glass. The man didn’t look old enough to shave. Brad wondered if he was a college student or part of a high-school security internship program.
Once more, Brad turned on the laptop, and fired up the personnel records website. He typed ‘Danita’ into the employee search box and found three employees with that first name. He clicked on Danita Williams-Harris file, and verified her address. He recognized it as a posh condominium complex on the Delaware River between Penn’s Landing and Society Hill. He had a friend who lived in the penthouse in that same building and Brad remembered a contemporary design with numerous amenities. The building boasted an indoor pool, communal lounge and library off the main lobby, and twenty-four hour concierge service. Morris Williams, with an address in Chevy Chase, Maryland was her emergency contact. Brad suspected that was her dad.
Only one Jamal Dubei worked at Strickland Memorial Hospital. His address consisted of a P.O. Box in the 19147 Zip Code—the Society Hill area of the city. Tigra Dubei (sister) was listed as the emergency contact person. Brad took a few seconds to confirm Jamal’s work history and positive references from the University of Maryland Medical Center.
They’d managed to keep their marriage undetectable in the personnel records.
A few hours earlier he wouldn’t have thought of checking on the next name, but Ed Carlton had been acting more like a man trying to cover up a crime than getting to the bottom of it. He half expected to see a Brad Frame, you are not permitted access… but soon he learned that Edward Simon Carlton had joined Strickland Memorial Hospital seven years ago. He lived in Manayunk, a working class neighborhood, about a half-hour train trip from the hospital. Carlton looked younger in his photograph, with no indication of how long ago it had been taken, but it dated from before his gray hair had grown into such a mane. Edith Blaine Carlton was listed as his emergency contact, and Brad assumed that was his spouse.
Brad rubbed his forehead. He felt a headache throbbing. He’d been fighting it for a several hours and needed to find aspirin or ibuprofen, but had to finish this work first.
Carlton’s evaluations confirmed the type of man Brad had observeda retired police officer, drawing city pension, and maybe even Social Securitywho could care less about impressing anyone. He marched to the beat of his own drummer, and although he met the minimum performance standards, was deemed in various evaluations as rigid, inflexible, unable to compromise and strict. Robin Hall, Deputy Administrator for Administration, did his reviews.
Based on what he’d seen, Brad would add uncreative. It wasn’t just that Carlton had a different idea on how to find the murderer; he would never yield in the righteousness of his views, even if proven wrong. In the spring, after the snow melted, Brad decided he would arrange a lunch with Robin Hall and make a few suggestions about security systems and methods at Strickland Memorial Hospital.
While waiting for the laptop to shut down, he opened several desk drawers to see if th
ere might be a bottle of aspirin. No luck.
Brad pulled out his notebook to check for loose ends. He left his cubbyhole to revisit the seventh floor making a quick detour to the gift shop to buy ibuprofen. He shook out two pills, which he washed down with water from a nearby fountain.
Brad entered the seventh floor, wondering if Sharon had made any headway in talking with Crystal. But he didn’t see Sharon, and the nurses’ station was empty, so he headed down the corridor past Sharon’s old room in search of the janitor’s closet.
He heard the ding of an arriving elevator and glanced back to see Iola T. and a man he didn’t recognize rolling a gurney down the hall. As they got closer, Brad spotted a young man on the gurney and realized they were returning Dennis Ayers from the ICU. From an IV pole attached to the gurney hung two bags of clear fluid. The nursing staff paid no attention to Brad’s presence, but Ayers spotted him and kept staring in Brad’s direction until he was wheeled into his room. The teen appeared alert, and Brad thought it might be worth having a chat.
The janitor’s closet was easy to find. As Sharon had reported, it was one of the few doors that opened onto the hallway. The three by four-foot space contained a shallow floor sink, similar to a shower stall pan, with a faucet mounted two feet above it on the wall, from which a rubber hose was attached. A double bucket mop system mounted on wheels, with a wringer mechanism, stood nearby. The buckets could be easily filled with the hose and emptied into the floor sink.
On a hook at the back of the closet he found what he was looking for: the knit wool cap. Just as Sharon had described it, the cap was Navy blue with two white stripes. The top stripe was narrower than the bottom one. Brad lifted the cap from the hook on which it had been stored, inverted it and peered inside. The cap appeared handmade, since there were no labels. All was unremarkable until he spotted a brown hair about two and one-half to three inches long entangled in the yarn.
The image of Harold Tangiere’s personnel file photograph came into Brad’s mind. Even if Harold weren’t bald, an African-American man could not have produced the decidedly Caucasian hair that he saw inside the cap.
