“I’ll call her now.”
I phoned Dr. Gold, got a male receptionist, used my title.
He said, “She’s with a patient, Doctor.”
“It’s about a patient. Ernadine Murphy.”
“Is this an emergency?”
“It’s important.”
“Hold on, please.”
Moments later: “Dr. Gold wants to know what it’s about?”
“Ernadine Murphy was murdered.”
“Oh. Hold on, please.”
Longer wait, this time. The same man came on the line. “Dr. Gold will be free at noon. You can come by then.”
The office was a sand-colored bungalow next to a Fiat mechanic. A black plastic sign to the right of the door said:
Vrinda Srinivasan, M.D.
Hannah R. Gold, M. PH., M.D.
Angela B. Borelli, M.D.
Internal Medicine, Obstetrics-Gynecology,
Women’s Health Issues
I arrived at noon, but Dr. Gold wasn’t free. Three patients sat in the waiting room- two elderly women and a starving girl around fifteen. All of them looked up as I entered. The kid kept staring until my smile made her frown in disgust and she returned to picking her cuticles.
Small, overheated waiting room, furnished with clean but faded castoffs. Framed photos of Machu Picchu and Nepal and Angkor Wat hung on the walls. Enya sang sweetly on tape.
A handwritten sign taped to the reception counter said:
We take Medi-Cal from you-
and sometimes we even get paid by the State.
Cash won’t be refused- pay what you can, or don’t
worry about it.
No glass blocking the reception area, just a cramped space occupied by a young man in his early twenties with neatly cut, prematurely gray hair. He pored over Principles of Accounting as if it were a thriller. A name tag on his plaid, short-sleeved shirt read ELI.
When I stepped up, he put the book down reluctantly.
“I’m Dr. Delaware.”
“She’s running late.” He lowered his voice: “She’s very upset by what I told her. You might not be able to tell, but she is. She’s my sister.”
Twenty-five minutes later, all three patients were gone, and Eli announced he was going to lunch.
“She’ll be right out,” he said, tucking the textbook under his arm and leaving the bungalow.
Five minutes after that, a woman in a buttoned white coat stepped into the waiting room, holding a medical chart. Young face, foxlike, the kind of bronze skin that glows naturally. Not much older than thirty but her thick, brushy, shoulder-length hair was snow-white. Genetics; Eli would get there soon. She had pale, green eyes that could’ve used some rest.
“I’m Dr. Gold.” She held out a hand, gripped my fingers defensively, the way delicately boned women learn to do so as not to be crushed. Her skin was dry and cold.
“Thanks for meeting with me.”
The sea-colored eyes were down-slanted, wide, and curious. Broad mouth, strong, square chin. An exceedingly handsome woman.
She locked the waiting room door, sat down on a worn, olive green, herringbone chair that matched nothing else in the room, crossed her legs. Beneath the white coat, she wore black jeans and gray boots. Enya’s voice mourned in Gaelic.
“What happened to Erna?” she said.
I gave her the basics.
“Oh, my. And you’re here because…?”
“I consult to the police. They asked me to talk to you.”
“Meaning the murder has psychological overtones as opposed to a dumb street crime.”
“Hard to say, at this point,” I said. “How well did you know her?”
“You don’t really know someone like Erna. I saw her a few times.”
“Here or at Dove House?”
“Once there, twice here.”
“She returned after your emergency call to the shelter.”
“I gave her my card,” she said. “I was shocked to find out she’d actually kept it.” She flipped the chart open. Inside was a single page. Upside down, I made out small, neat handwriting. “Both times were drop-ins. The first was a little over two weeks after I saw her at Dove House. Her anal fissures had started bleeding again, and she was complaining of pain. It didn’t surprise me. All I’d done the first time was a superficial exam. Someone like that, you can only imagine what’s going on internally. I urged her to get scoped, offered to arrange it for free at County. She refused, so I gave her salve and analgesics and the basic lecture on hygiene- not laid on too thickly. You have to know your audience.”
“Know what you mean,” I said. “I trained at Western Peds.”
“Really?” she said. “I did my training at County but rotated through W.P. Do you know Ruben Eagle?”
“I know him well.”
We exchanged names, places, other petty commonalities, then Hannah Gold’s face turned grave. “The second time I saw Erna was a lot more alarming. It was at night. She burst in here just as I was closing up. The staff had gone home and I was turning off the lights and the door opened and there she was, waving her hands, really out of sorts. Then her eyes got a panicked look and she reached out.”
She shuddered. “She wanted physical comfort. I’m afraid I stepped away from her. She was a big woman, my reflexive response was fear. She gave me this look, just collapsed on the floor in tears. I eased her to her feet, brought her back to my office. She was muscularly rigid and babbling incoherently. I’m not a psychiatrist, I didn’t want to fool with Thorazine or anything else heavy. Calling Emergency Services would have been a betrayal- I no longer felt threatened. She was pathetic, not dangerous.”
She closed the chart. “I gave her an IM injection of Valium and some herb tea, sat there with her for- had to be almost an hour. Finally, she calmed down. If she hadn’t, I would have called the EMTs.”
“Any idea what had upset her?”
“She wouldn’t say. Got extremely quiet- almost mute. Then she apologized for bothering me and insisted on leaving.”
“Almost mute?”
“She answered simple yes-or-no questions about nonthreatening topics. But nothing about what had brought her to the office or her physical problems. I wanted to check her out physically, but she’d have none of that. Yet, she kept apologizing- lucid enough to know she’d been inappropriate. I suggested she return to Dove House. She said that was a dandy idea. Those were her exact words. ‘That’s a dandy idea, Dr. Gold!’ When she said it she was almost… perky. She’d do that, turn cheerful without warning. But it was an upsetting cheerfulness- overwrought. Using phrases that were… too refined for the context.”
“The people at Dove House felt she’d been well educated.”
Hannah Gold thought about that. “Or faking it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you seen psychotics do that? They latch on to phrases and spit them back- like autistic children?”
“Was that your sense of Erna?”
She compressed her lips. “I really can’t claim to have a sense of her.” The down-slanted eyes narrowed. “Do you have any idea who did this to her?”
“It could be someone she trusted. Someone who used her.”
“Sexually?”
“Was she sexually active?”
“Not in the classic sense,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She licked her lips. “When I examined her, her vaginal area was raw, and she had body lice and old scars- fibrosed lesions. Those are things you expect in a street person. But then I did a pelvic and couldn’t believe what I found. Her hymen was intact. She was still a virgin. Women on the street get used in the worst ways imaginable. Erna was a big woman, but a violent man- a group of men- could’ve subdued her. I find the fact that she was never entered remarkable.”