“All right. How about we get together later tonight, trade miseries. Eight okay?”
“Eight’s fine. Thanks again.”
“Don’t thank me. We’re a long way from feeling good about this one.”
29
The General Peds receptionist said, “Dr. Eves stepped out. Let me page her.”
I waited, looking out through the clouded walls of the phone booth at traffic and dust. The equestrians came into view again, cantering up a side street, heading back from what must have been a circuit. Slim jodhpured legs clamped around glistening torsos. Lots of smiles.
Probably heading back to the club for cold drinks and conversation. I thought of all the ways Cindy Jones could have chosen to fill her time.
Just as the horses vanished, the receptionist came back on the line. “She’s not answering, Doctor. Would you like to leave a message?”
“Any idea when she’ll be back?”
“I know she’s coming back for a five o’clock meeting — you might try her just before then.”
Five P.M. was almost two hours away. I drove down Topanga thinking of all the damage that could be done to a child in that time. Kept heading south to the on-ramp.
Traffic was backed up to the street. I nosed into the snail-trail and oozed eastward. Nasty drive to Hollywood. At night, though, the ambulance would fairly zip.
I pulled into the doctors’ lot just before four, clipped my badge to my lapel, and walked to the lobby, where I paged Stephanie. The anxiety that had hit me only a week ago was gone. In its place, a driving sense of anger.
What a difference seven days make...
No answer. I phoned her office again, got the same receptionist, the same answer, delivered in a slightly annoyed tone.
I went up to the General Peds clinic and walked into the examination suite, passing patients, nurses, and doctors without notice.
Stephanie’s door was closed. I wrote a note for her to call me and was bending to slip it under the door when a husky female voice said, “Can I help you?”
I straightened. A woman in her late sixties was looking at me. She had on the whitest white coat I’d ever seen, worn buttoned over a black dress. Her face was deeply tanned, wrinkled, and pinch-featured under a helmet of straight white hair. Her posture would have made a marine correct his own.
She saw my badge and said, “Oh, excuse me, Doctor.” Her accent was Marlene Dietrich infused with London. Her eyes were small, green-blue, electrically alert. A gold pen was clipped to her breast pocket. She wore a thin gold chain from which a single pearl dangled, set in a golden nest like a nacreous egg.
“Dr. Kohler,” I said. “Alex Delaware.”
We shook hands and she read my badge. Confusion didn’t suit her.
“I used to be on the staff,” I said. “We worked together on some cases. Crohn’s disease. Adaptation to the ostomy?”
“Ah, of course.” Her smile was warm and it made the lie inoffensive. She’d always had that smile, wore it even while cutting down a resident’s faulty diagnosis. Charm planted by an upper-class Prague childhood cut short by Hitler, then fertilized by marriage to The Famous Conductor. I remembered how she’d offered to use her connections to bring funds to the hospital. How the board had turned her down, calling that kind of fund-raising “crass.”
“Looking for Stephanie?” she said.
“I need to talk to her about a patient.”
The smile hung there but her eyes iced over. “I happen to be looking for her myself. She’s scheduled to be here. But I suppose our future division head must be busy.”
I feigned surprise.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Those in the know say her promotion is imminent.”
The smile got wider and took on a hungry cast. “Well, all the best to her... though I hope she learns to anticipate events a bit better. One of her teenage patients just showed up without an appointment and is creating a scene out in the waiting room. And Stephanie left without checking out.”
“Doesn’t sound like her,” I said.
“Really? Lately, it’s become like her. Perhaps she sees herself as having already ascended.”
A nurse passed by. Kohler said, “Juanita?”
“Yes, Dr. Kohler?”
“Have you seen Stephanie?”
“I think she went out.”
“Out of the hospital?”
“I think so, Doctor. She had her purse.”
“Thank you, Juanita.”
When the nurse had gone, Kohler pulled a set of keys out of a pocket.
“Here,” she said, jamming one of the keys into Stephanie’s lock and turning. Just as I caught the door, she yanked the key out sharply and walked away.
The espresso machine was off but a half-full demitasse sat on the desk, next to Stephanie’s stethoscope. The smell of fresh roast overpowered the alcohol bite seeping in from the examining rooms. Also on the desk were a pile of charts and a memo pad stuffed with drug company stationery. As I slipped my note under it I noticed writing on the top sheet.
Dosages, journal references, hospital extensions. Below that, a solitary notation, scrawled hastily, barely legible.
B, Brwsrs, 4
Browsers — the place where she’d gotten the leatherbound Byron. I saw the book, up in the shelf.
B for Byron? Getting another one?
Or meeting someone at the bookstore? If it meant today, she was there now.
It seemed an odd assignation in the middle of a hectic afternoon.
Not like her.
Until recently, if Kohler was to be believed.
Something romantic that she wanted segregated from the hospital rumor mill? Or just seeking out some privacy — a quiet moment among the mildew and the verse.
Lord knew she was entitled to her privacy.
Too bad I was going to violate it.
Only a half-mile from the hospital to Los Feliz and Hollywood, but traffic was lobotomized and it took ten minutes to get there.
The bookstore was on the west side of the street, its facade the same as it had been a decade ago: cream-colored sign with black gothic letters spelling out ANTIQUARIAN BOOK MERCHANT above dusty windows. I cruised past, looking for a parking space. On my second go-round I spotted an old Pontiac with its back-up lights on, and waited as a very small, very old woman eased away from the curb. Just as I finished pulling in, someone came out of the bookstore.
Presley Huenengarth.
Even at this distance his mustache was nearly invisible.
I slumped low in the car. He fiddled with his tie, took a pair of sunglasses out, slipped them on, and shot quick looks up and down the street. I ducked lower, pretty sure he hadn’t seen me. He touched his tie again, then began walking south until he came to the corner. Turning right, he was gone.
I sat up.
Coincidence? There’d been no book in his hand.
But it was hard to believe he was the one Stephanie was meeting. Why would she call him “B”?
She didn’t like him, had called him spooky.
Gotten me thinking of him as spooky.
Yet his bosses were promoting her.
Had she been talking the rebel line while fraternizing with the enemy?
All for the sake of career advancement?
Do you see me as a division head, Alex?
Every other doctor I’d spoken to was talking about leaving, but her eye was on a promotion.
Rita Kohler’s hostility implied it wouldn’t be a bloodless transition. Was Stephanie being rewarded for good behavior — treating the chairman’s grandchild without making waves?
I remembered her absence at the Ashmore memorial. Her showing up late, claiming she’d been tied up.