The crowd at Crustacean evinced Beverly Hills's notion of upscale-cell phones and silk shirts, movie moguls, and the occasional high-priced call girl. Peter's unusual gait caught a few glances, but most people had directed their attention elsewhere by the time he passed.
They reached the base of the stairs and the hostess turned, flustered. "I'm sorry, but the table is upstairs. I can see how long the wait is down here. I didn't know… when you made the reservation no one told us that… "
"Actually," Peter said, with a smile and an aristocratic tip of his head, "I prefer upstairs."
He gripped the banister, but seemed displeased with its height. He beckoned David with a hand and David turned around, making his shoulder available. Peter's oversized hands were unnaturally strong, and David was grateful for his blazer's shoulder padding. Leaning over, Peter readjusted his loafer around the curved base of his leg brace. The metal had stretched and distorted the mouth of the shoe, lining the oxblood leather with tan wrinkles.
Turning sideways, both hands on the curved banister, he swung one stiff leg out behind him, hooked it on the first step, then pivoted his hips so his other leg followed. He slid his hands about a foot up and repeated the motion. Step number two.
The hostess glanced nervously up the curved length of the staircase. There were over thirty steps to the top. David took the menus from her with a smile.
"It's the table for two in the back corner," she said.
David kept a few steps behind Peter as he worked his way up. Peter was winded when he reached the top, and he mopped his brow with a floppy white handkerchief.
A paddle fan turned slowly above their table. An effeminate waiter took their order with his hands clasped together, leaning forward as if into a strong gust of wind.
Peter pulled off his coat and hung it over the back of his chair. His black hair, shot through with gray, was unruly and animated-the hair of a composer. David knew Peter was at least twenty years his senior, though they'd never arrived at his age conversationally. Along with Peter's disability, which he never expounded upon, his age was simply off-limits.
"Your mother would have captured the bastard herself," Peter said. "Bound him with her stethoscope and dragged him kicking and screaming to a seclusion room in the NPI."
The Neuropsychiatric Institute's nascence had occurred under David's mother's tenure. She'd been actively broadening psychiatry's horizons, back when most practitioners of the field were busy merely scrubbing off the stains of witchcraft and mysticism. Peter had known her since his young days as a fledgling urologist.
"Dr. Evans called me this morning," David said.
"How is our vibrant chief of staff?"
"Charming but hard-assed, as usual. Wanted to ensure I was keeping on top of the ER, leaving no loose ends for the press to grab hold of."
"Our alkali thrower has captured LA's imagination. The media loves gory details."
"Fuel for a city characterized by ADD. But I suppose it beats hearing about Jennifer Aniston's hair." David set down his menu and aligned it neatly with the edge of the table. "We just can't let all this slow the hospital down."
"It's a nightmare," Peter said. "Last night, I had a nine-hour standing surgery that got out after one in the morning. They made me wait nearly forty minutes so a security guard could walk me to my car. Forty minutes."
The smell of garlic heralded dinner's arrival. Two steaming plates of king prawns resting on beds of swirled linguini. Peter reached to center his plate before him but withdrew his hand quickly, a flash of panic lighting his eyes. He spilled some ice water on his hand where it had touched the plate, though there was clearly no sign of redness or swelling.
David continued the conversation as the waiter served-a rudeness in which he did not usually indulge, but the waiter had annoyed him earlier by asking twice if he was sure he didn't want wine.
"It has been wretched," David said, realizing with some amusement that he'd inadvertently mirrored Peter's tone of faux-English prissiness. "Now that it's confirmed that the attack on Nancy wasn't an isolated incident, I've been assured that the hospital's security level will go through the roof." He shook his head. "One of my medical students almost maced a homeless man in the ambulance bay. She was wearing scrubs-he was approaching her for help."
"One can hardly blame her," Peter said. He manipulated his knife and fork gracefully, hands turning in deft, fluid motions. It was a pleasure to watch him dine.
"The last thing we need is a war mentality on the floor," David said. "Especially with the demographic moving through there. And people are angry." Absentmindedly, he tapped the tines of his fork against the plate. "God, are they angry."
"And why shouldn't they be? Two lovely young practitioners mauled and mutilated. At the place where they render medical care."
"Yes, thank goodness they weren't homely sewer workers."
Peter regarded David humorlessly. "You understand what I'm saying," he said. "This business is vile. Simply vile."
"I'm taking that as a given," David said. "And believe me, I knew both these women, and treated them when they came in. What I'm saying is, we need to look closer. Violence should not attenuate our medical empathy."
"Bah!" Peter said. Peter was the only person David knew who said "Bah." "A little anger is a good thing." Peter fiddled with his wire-rim glasses, cleaning the circular lenses with a corner of his napkin. The clipped, meticulous movements of his hands betrayed his irritation. "This man-he's the result of what? A bad tour of duty? Castration threats from an unloving mother? It's not an excuse. None of the hands we are dealt contain a Get-Out-of-Morality card. We grow and we fight and we cope." His finger, pointing down into the tablecloth, grew white around the knuckle. "This man is deserving of our anger."
"He has my anger," David said. He set down his fork, resting the neck on the lip of the plate. Peter watched him closely, intelligently. "I'm sorry," David said.
Peter nodded, his mouth drawing down in a thoughtful frown. "As physicians, when confronted with someone like this assailant, we're instinctively drawn to explanations involving psychopathology or mental illness. But we shouldn't fool ourselves." He raised his fork, coiled with linguini, and pointed it at David. Something in the gesture gave it monumental weight. "Odds are, he's a malicious, sadistic bastard, whether he's sick or not."
"I know that," David said.
Peter twirled his fork, capturing more linguini. "Do you?"
They ate in silence for a while. David stifled a yawn with his napkin.
"You look like hell," Peter said. "Burning it at both ends?"
David nodded wearily. "I can't work the way I used to."
"You're getting old." Peter's eyes twinkled when he laughed. "When I used to work the Air Force base down in Riverside, I'd get these young macho pilots in for vasectomies. Married a few years, knocked out a few kids, didn't want to worry about impregnating their wife or anyone else with whom they happened to be sleeping. I'd get them done, and afterward I'd tell them to be careful and use protection because they were still shooting live rounds for another thirty ejaculations. And they'd just smile and say, 'Thirty squirts? I'll get that taken care of this weekend, Doc.' "
David laughed.
"Do you know what the moral of that story is?" Peter asked. He drew out the pause dramatically. "You can't go like you used to."
An attractive middle-aged woman walked past their table, adjusting a satin spaghetti strap on her dress. David felt a rush of melancholy. There was no wine to blame it on. "If I ever lost this, my work, I'd.. I don't know."
"Lose your work? You're at the height of your career."
"I can't work ninety-hour weeks anymore."
"I never could."
"But I could. I could."
Peter leaned back in his chair, as if that provided a better vantage from which to regard him. "You inherited your mother's vanity."
David rubbed the bridge of his nose with a knuckle. "I inherited the runoff."
&nbs
p; "She was a great woman, your mother, but she was cruel in the way great people are cruel. You have none of that." Peter picked at a prawn with his fork, but did not spear it. "Do you know why great people are cruel? They have so much of themselves to protect." He reached down and adjusted one of his leg braces. David caught a flicker of a grimace before Peter replaced it with a smile. "We all have our limitations," Peter said.
Peter insisted, despite David's protestations, on picking up the check-a habit he'd developed when David had been a penniless intern and persisted in, David believed, to perpetuate an air of affectionate condescension.
David folded Peter's jacket over his arm and waited patiently for him to rise. It took them nearly five minutes to make it down the stairs and to the lobby.
Chapter 16
Bronner scooped the wedge of tobacco dip from his lower lip with a curled finger and flicked it out the window. Jenkins sat rigidly in the passenger seat, watching the sun dip to the horizon. They headed up Veteran, the rolling hills of the cemetery sprawling to their left. The white posts of the soldiers' graves rose like glowing pickets into the dusk.
They turned on Weyburn, heading into Westwood Village, the large tower of the hospital looming to the east. Students clustered around the outdoor tables at the Coffee Bean on the corner. UCLA blue and gold was everywhere-backpacks, sweatshirts, hats, jerseys. Apparently unable to find a chair, a girl with exceedingly long legs bent over a fluorescent blueberry laptop. A pair of jean cutoffs were stretched tight over her rear end, the bottom curves of her buttocks just in view beneath.
Bronner cleared his throat and got a good phlegm rattle. "I remember when computers were new. I remember when they were tan or white. Now they got all these damn colors. Don't know whether to boot 'em up or hang 'em on a Christmas tree."
Jenkins looked from the girl's high hard ass to Bronner's face. "And that's what you find worthy of comment?"
"Easy there, young Jedi. I so much as double-take, my old lady'll fly over here on her broomstick and staple my eyelids shut." Bronner turned the plain gold band on his ring finger. "Twenty-three years of wear and tear, and the fucker still fits snug as a hair in an ass crack. It's on till the finger falls off."
"You never cheated on her? Even when you were younger?"
Bronner shrugged. "I didn't inhale."
The light changed and they pulled forward. A UCPD car passed them, and the driver and Bronner exchanged nods.
"Jesus Christ," Jenkins said. "How many do they have running?"
"Called additional units down from UCSB and Irvine. A little extra backup."
"As long as Dalton and Yale have lead on the case, they can call in the Police Explorers for all I give a shit."
"You want to go visit Nancy?"
Jenkins glanced in the direction of the Medical Plaza. Night had fallen quickly, and the windows of the hospital shone as floating squares in the distance. "No," he said.
They patrolled the campus perimeter twice in silence before coming up behind a beat-up van with tinted back windows on Sunset. "That's a DLR," Bronner said.
Jenkins pushed himself erect in his seat. "You're right," he said. "That fucker Don't Look Right at all."
Based on the open layout of the streets surrounding the hospital and the speed of the suspect's departure, Yale had laid down the hypothesis that the suspect had used a vehicle to get to and from the crime scene. Jenkins and Bronner had spent the last twelve hours looking for DLRs.
Bronner steered into the other lane and pulled up to the van's blind spot. FREDDY'S INDUSTRIAL CLEANING was written on the side in chipped white paint.
Jenkins's jaw tightened. "Let's jack him up."
"Probable cause?"
"Rear license light?"
Bronner leaned his head to the window, checking. "Yup. Rearview mirror?"
"Yup. Pull forward." Bronner did, but the van sat too high for them to see the driver through the passenger window. "Front plate?" Jenkins asked hopefully.
"Yup." Bronner's eye picked over the car exterior. "Bingo. Cracked windshield." He fisted the radio and it chimed its distinctive LAPD chime, prompting him to speak. "LA, Eight Adam Thirty-two, traffic."
The van turned down Hilgard, and they followed a half block before Jenkins switched on the lights. Sorority row flew by as the radio crackled its response: "Eight Adam Thirty-two, LA. Advised traffic."
The van pulled to a halt in front of two enormous garbage cans at the curb.
"Eight Adam Thirty-two, traffic," Bronner said. "Eight hundred block south Hilgard on a black Chevy van, possibly mideighties. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, please. License plate two Nora six eight one four two. Code four at this time."
He angled one spotlight into the driver's side mirror. Because the van's back window was tinted, he couldn't get the second one on the rearview mirror, but he put it through the back window anyway. They sat in the car for a moment, gathering themselves. Jenkins unsnapped his holster, then snapped it shut again. "A fucking industrial cleaner's truck. Isn't that perfect?"
They stared straight ahead, letting the suspect get nervous, waiting for traffic to clear.
Jenkins pulled out a small tape recorder, hit RECORD, and quickly rattled off the Miranda rights. He clicked the tape recorder off and turned a quick grin to Bronner. "Glad we got that out of the way."
Bronner cleared his throat, then took on a newscaster's intonation. "Why did you shoot the suspect, Officer Jenkins?"
"I feared for my life and the life of my fellow officer. Why did you shoot the suspect, Officer Bronner?"
Bronner cracked a grin. "I was concerned for my safety and the safety of others."
"Ready?" Both doors opened simultaneously, and the officers came up on the van on each side. They did not cross their paths.
The driver squinted into the flashlight, which Bronner held about two feet away from his face. Bronner's radio cord ran from his hip up his back, away from grabbing hands, the unit hooked over his shoulder. On the other side of the van, Jenkins shined his light through the tinted back windows, trying to get a look at the dark interior.
"What'd I do, man?" The driver, a heavyset man with wide, doughy cheeks and heavily gelled curls of hair, raised an arm to the flashlight's glare.
"License, registration, proof of insurance," Bronner said. Behind him, a broken sprinkler spurted a thick two-inch fountain that turned the lawn sleek like pelt. The runoff had left the sidewalk wet and spotted with snails. "Keep your left hand on the dash or steering wheel and reach with your right hand to your glove box."
"What are you-?"
"Don't make me ask again."
The driver leaned toward the glove compartment, his thin polyester snap-up pulling up out of his jeans. He did not seem to be concealing any weapons on his body. His sleeve rode up on his right shoulder, revealing a tattoo of Mickey Mouse. Perhaps through her panic haze, Nancy had mistaken Mickey Mouse for a skull. "Slowly," Bronner added.
The driver handed him the documents, then dug in his pocket for his wallet. Bronner held the flashlight to the registration but kept his eyes on the driver's hand until it emerged from his pocket. He glanced at the license. Frederick Russay.
Bronner clipped the license and registration to his shirt pocket, sliding it beneath the protruding pen cap.
"Is there some problem, officer?" A little more polite this time.
"Are you aware that you have a cracked windshield?" Bronner asked.
"Yeah, I guess. Is that like some big deal or something?"
"Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle please?"
"Why?"
"For our safety."
When Russay hunched forward, his shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.
"Get out of the vehicle," Bronner said, a bit more firmly.
"For a cracked-?"
"Get out of the vehicle immediately."
Russay scrambled quickly out onto the curb, leaving his door open. "Look, man, I don't know what's going on here, but I didn't-"
> Bronner spun him and pushed him forcefully up against the side of the van. He patted him down, even checking his crotch for a piece dangling from a belly band. He found nothing. "Is there anyone else in the vehicle?"
"No."
"Mind if we take a look?" Bronner kept his forearm across Russay's back, pressing him forward into the side of the van.
"No. I guess not."
Bronner caught Jenkins's eye through the open passenger window and signaled him with a jerk of his head. Jenkins walked back to the rear of the van, snapping and unsnapping his holster. The street grew suddenly quiet. He threw open one door, and light fell into the van's dark interior from a nearby streetlight. The van smelled of Clorox, coffee, and wet rags. The flashlight's beam picked over the mounds of gear. Mops in dirty buckets, several coiled drain snakes, piles of dirty overalls. In the back, half hidden by an open toolbox, was a container of Red Devil Drain Cleaner.
The muscles stood out on Jenkins's jaw like walnuts.
He walked around and stood beside Bronner. "He's got lye back there."
"Could be legit if he is a cleaning guy," Bronner muttered.
"Could be," Jenkins said. "If."
Bronner nodded. "We'll know soon enough."
Russay moved his head, trying to turn around. "What are you guys-?"
A burst of static came through Bronner's portable, then it squawked, "Eight Adam Fourteen Los Angeles." Bronner walked a few yards up the curb. Jenkins kept Russay up against the side of the van, hands and legs spread.
"Eight Adam Thirty-two, LA," Bronner said. "Go ahead."
"Vehicle has no wants, no warrants. Vehicle comes back to Frederick Russay's Industrial Cleaning Corporation, one-two-two-five Armacost number two-ten, LA."
Do No Harm Page 9
