Chip said, “What’s going on?”
Without turning her head, a nurse nearby said, “Someone got attacked. In the parking lot.”
“Attacked? By whom?”
The nurse looked at him, saw he was a civilian and moved away.
I looked around for a familiar face. None. Too many years.
A pale, thin orderly with short platinum hair and a white Fu Manchu said, “Enough, already,” in a nasal voice. “All I want to do is go home.”
Someone groaned a chorus.
Unintelligible whispers passed through the lobby. I saw a uniform on the other side of the glass, blocking the door. A burst of radio talk leaked through from the outside. Lots of movement. A vehicle swung its lights toward the glass, then turned away and sped off. I read a flash of letters: AMBULANCE. But no blinkers or siren.
“Whyn’t they just bring her in here?” said someone.
“Who says it’s a her?”
A woman said, “It’s always a her.”
“Dinja hear? No howler,” someone answered. “Probably not an emergency.”
“Or maybe,” said the blond man, “it’s too late.”
The crowd rippled like gel in a petri dish.
Someone said, “I tried to get out the back way but they had it blocked. I’m like, this sucks.”
“I think I heard one of them say it was a doctor.”
“Who?”
“That’s all I heard.”
Buzz. Whisper.
Chip said, “Wonderful.” Turning abruptly, he began pushing his way toward the rear of the crowd, back into the hospital. Before I could say anything, he was gone.
Five minutes later, the glass door opened and the crowd surged forward. Sergeant Perkins slipped through and held out a tan palm. He looked like a substitute teacher before an unruly high school class.
“Can I have your attention for a moment?” He waited for silence, finally settled for relative quiet. “An assault’s occurred in your parking lot. We need you to file out one by one and answer some questions.”
“What kind of assault?”
“Is he okay?”
“Who was it?”
“Was it a doctor?”
“Which lot did it happen in?”
Perkins did the slit-eye again. “Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible, folks, and then you can all go home.”
The man with the white Fu Manchu said, “How about telling us what happened so we can protect ourselves, Officer?”
Supportive rumblings.
Perkins said, “Let’s just take it easy.”
“No, you take it easy,” said the blond man. “All you guys do is give jaywalking tickets out on the boulevard. Then, when something real happens, you ask your questions and disappear and leave us to clean up the mess.”
Perkins didn’t move or speak.
“Come on, man,” said another man, black and stooped, in a nursing uniform. “Some of us have lives. Tell us what happened.”
“Yeah!”
Perkins’s nostrils flared. He stared out at the crowd a while longer, then opened the door and backed out.
The people in the lobby twanged with anger.
A loud voice said, “Deputy Dawg!”
“Damned jaywalking brigade.”
“Yeah, buncha stiffs — hospital sticks us across the street and then we get busted trying to get to work on time.”
Another hum of consensus. No one was talking anymore about what had happened in the lot.
The door opened again. Another cop came through, young, white, female, grim.
“Okay, everyone,” she said. “If you’ll just file out one by one, the officer will check your ID and then you can go.”
“Yo,” said the black man. “Welcome to San Quentin. What’s next? Body searches?”
More tunes in that key, but the crowd started to move, then quieted.
It took me twenty minutes to get out the door. A cop with a clipboard copied my name from my badge, asked for. verifying identification, and recorded my driver’s license number. Six squad cars were parked in random formation just outside the entrance, along with an unmarked sedan. Midway down the sloping walkway to the parking structure stood a huddle of men.
I asked the cop, “Where did it happen?”
He crooked a finger at the structure.
“I parked there.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What time did you arrive?”
“Around nine-thirty.”
“P.M.?”
“Yes.”
“What level did you park on?”
“Two.”
That opened his eyes. “Did you notice anything unusual at that time — anyone loitering or acting in a suspicious manner?”
Remembering the feeling of being watched as I left my car, I said, “No, but the lighting was uneven.”
“What do you mean by uneven, sir?”
“Irregular. Half the spaces were lit; the others were dark. It would have been easy for someone to hide.”
He looked at me. Clicked his teeth. Took another glance at my badge and said, “You can move on now, sir.”
I walked down the pathway. As I passed the huddle I recognized one of the men. Presley Huenengarth. The head of hospital Security was smoking a cigarette and stargazing, though the sky was starless. One of the other suits wore a gold shield on his lapel and was talking. Huenengarth didn’t seem to be paying attention.
Our eyes met but his gaze didn’t linger. He blew smoke through his nostrils and looked around. For a man whose system had just failed miserably, he looked remarkably calm.
10
Wednesday’s paper turned the assault into a homicide.
The victim, robbed and beaten to death, had indeed been a doctor. A name I didn’t recognize: Laurence Ashmore. Forty-five years old, on the staff at Western Peds for just a year. He’d been struck from behind by the assailant and robbed of his wallet, keys, and the magnetized card key that admitted his car to the doctors’ lot. An unnamed hospital spokesperson emphasized that all parking-gate entry codes had been changed but admitted that entry on foot would continue to be as easy as climbing a flight of stairs.
Assailant unknown, no leads.
I put the paper down and looked through my desk drawers until I found a hospital faculty photo roster. But it was five years old, predating Ashmore’s arrival.
Shortly after eight I was back at the hospital, finding the doctors’ lot sealed with a metal accordion gate and cars stack-parked in the circular drive fronting the main entrance. An ALL FULL sign was posted at the mouth of the driveway, and a security guard handed me a mimeographed sheet outlining the procedure for. obtaining a new card key.
“Where do I park in the meantime?”
He pointed across the street, to the rutted outdoor lots used by nurses and orderlies. I backed up, circled the block, and ended up queuing for a quarter hour. It took another ten minutes to find a space. Jaywalking across the boulevard, I sprinted to the front door. Two guards instead of one in the lobby, but there was no other hint that a life had been snuffed out a couple of hundred feet away. I knew death was no stranger to this place but I’d have thought murder rated a stronger reaction. Then I looked at the faces of the people coming and going and waiting. Nothing like worry and grief to narrow one’s perspective.
I headed for the rear stairway and noticed an up-to-date roster just past the Information desk. Laurence Ashmore’s picture was on the top left Specialty in Toxicology.
If the portrait was recent, he’d been a young-looking forty-five. Thin, serious face. Dark, unruly hair, hyphen mouth, horn-rimmed eyeglasses. Woody Allen with dyspepsia. Not the type to pose much of a challenge for a mugger. I wondered why it had been necessary to kill him for his wallet, then realized what an idiotic question that was.