“Of course. Why do you ask?”
“Sounds like you’ve moved away from Munchausen and think it’s genuine.”
“Well,” she said, “it would be nice for it to be genuine. And treatable. But even if that is the case, we’re probably talking chronic disease. So they can use the support, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“Thanks much.”
Down the stairs. At the next floor I said, “Could Cindy — or anyone else — have somehow caused the hypoglycemia?”
“Sure, if she gave Cassie a middle-of-the-night shot of insulin. I thought of that right away. But that would have required a lot of expertise with timing and dosage.”
“Lots of practice injections?”
“Using Cassie as a pincushion. Which I can buy, theoretically. Cindy has plenty of time with Cassie. But given Cassie’s reaction to needles, if her mom was sticking her, wouldn’t she be freaking out every time she saw her? And I’m the only one she seems to despise... Anyway, I never noticed any unusual injection marks when I did the physical.”
“Would they be obvious, given all the other sticks she’s had?”
“Not obvious, but I’m careful when I do my exams, Alex. The kids’ bods get gone over pretty thoroughly.”
“Could the insulin have been administered other than by injection?”
She shook her head as we continued to descend. “There are oral hypoglycemics, but their metabolites would show up on the tox panel.”
Thinking of Cindy’s health discharge from the army, I said, “Any diabetes in the family?”
“Someone sharing their insulin with Cassie?” She shook her head. “Back at the beginning, when we were looking at Cassie’s metabolics, we had both Chip and Cindy tested. Normal.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good luck pinning it down.”
She stopped and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. “I appreciate your comments, Alex. I’m so thrilled to be dealing with biochemistry, I run the risk of narrowing my perspective.”
Back on the first floor I asked a guard where to find the Personnel office. He looked me over and told me right here, on the first floor.
It turned out to be exactly where I remembered it. Two women sat at typewriters; a third filed papers. The filer came up to me. She was straw-haired and hatchet-faced, in her late fifties. Under her ID was a circular badge that looked homemade, bearing a photo of a big hairy sheepdog. I told her I wanted to send a condolence card to Dr. Laurence Ashmore’s widow and asked for his home address.
She said, “Oh, yes, isn’t it terrible? What’s this place coming to?” in a smoker’s voice, and consulted a folder the size of a small-town phone book. “Here you go, Doctor — North Whittier Drive, over in Beverly Hills.” She recited a street address in the 900’s.
North Beverly Hills — prime real estate. The 900 block placed it just above Sunset. Prime of the prime; Ashmore had lived on more than research grants.
The clerk sighed. “Poor man. Just goes to show you, you can’t buy your safety.”
I said, “Isn’t that the truth?”
“Isn’t it, though?”
We traded wise smiles.
“Nice dog,” I said, indicating the badge.
She beamed. “That’s my honey — my champ. I breed true Old English, for temperament and working ability.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It’s more than that. Animals give without expecting anything in return. We could learn a few things from them.”
I nodded. “One more thing. Dr. Ashmore had someone working with him — D. Kent Herbert? The medical staff would like him to be informed of the charity fund the hospital’s establishing in Dr. Ashmore’s honor but no one’s been able to locate him. I was appointed to get hold of him but I’m not even sure he’s still working here, so if you have some sort of an address, I’d be much obliged.”
“Herbert,” she said. “Hmm. So you think he terminated?”
“I don’t know. I think he was still on the payroll in January or February, if that helps.”
“It might. Herbert... let’s see.”
Walking to her desk, she pulled another thick folder from a wall shelf.
“Herbert, Herbert, Herbert... Well, I’ve got two here, but neither of them sound like yours. Herbert, Ronald, in Food Services, and Herbert, Dawn, in Toxicology.”
“Maybe it’s Dawn. Toxicology was Dr. Ashmore’s specialty.”
She screwed up her face. “Dawn’s a girl’s name. Thought you were trying to find a man.”
I gave a helpless shrug. “Probably a mixup — the doctor who gave me the name didn’t actually know this person, so both of us assumed it was a man. Sorry for the sexism.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I don’t mess with all that stuff.”
“Does this Dawn have a middle initial ‘K’?”
She looked down. “Yes, she does.”
“Then, there you go,” I said. “The name I was given was D. Kent. What’s her job description?”
“Um, five thirty-three A — let me see...” Thumbing through another book. “That looks like a research assistant, Level One.”
“Did she transfer to another department in the hospital, by any chance?”
Consulting yet another volume, she said, “Nope. Looks like a termination.”
“Hmm... Do you have an address for her?”
“Nope, nothing. We throw out personal stuff thirty days after they’re gone — got a real space problem.”
“When exactly did she terminate?”
“That I can tell you.” She flipped a few pages and pointed to a code that I couldn’t comprehend. “Here we go. You’re right — about her being here in February. But that was her last month — she gave notice on the fifteenth, went officially off payroll on the twenty-eighth.”
“The fifteenth,” I said. The day after pulling Chad Jones’s chart.
“That’s right. See right here? Two slash fifteen?”
I stuck around for a few more minutes, listening to a story about her dogs. But I was thinking about two-legged creatures.
It was 3:45 when I drove out of the parking lot. A few feet from the exit a motorcycle cop was giving a jaywalking ticket to a nurse. The nurse looked furious; the cop’s face was a blank tablet.
Traffic on Sunset was obstructed by a four-car fender-bender, and the accompanying turmoil wrought by rubberneckers and somnolent traffic officers. It took almost an hour to reach the inanimate green stretch that was Beverly Hills’s piece of the boulevard. Tile-roofed ego monuments perched atop hillocks of Bermuda grass and dichondra, embellished by hostile gates, tennis court sheeting, and the requisite battalions of German cars.
I passed the stadium-sized weed-choked lot that had once housed the Arden mansion. The weeds had turned to hay, and all the trees on the property were dead. The Mediterranean palace had served briefly as a twenty-year-old Arab sheik’s plaything before being torched by persons unknown — aesthetic sensibilities offended by puke-green paint and moronic statuary with blacked-in pubic hair, or just plain xenophobia. Whatever the reason for the arson, rumors had been circulating for years about subdivision and rebuilding. But the real estate slump had taken the luster off that kind of optimism.
A few blocks later the Beverly Hills Hotel came into view, ringed by a motorcade of white stretch limos. Someone getting married or promoting a new film.
As I approached Whittier Drive, I decided to keep going. But when the letters on the street sign achieved focus, I found myself making a sudden right turn and driving slowly up the jacaranda-lined street.
Laurence Ashmore’s house was at the end of the block, a three-story, limestone Georgian affair on a double lot at least two hundred feet wide. The building was blocky, and impeccably maintained. A brick circular drive scythed through a perfect flat lawn. The landscaping was spare but good, with a preference for azaleas, camellias, and Hawaiian tree ferns — Georgian goes tropical. A weeping olive tree shaded half the lawn. The other half was sun-kissed.