Dodds said, “So how’d this guy get in the hospital with a knife, now that you got respect and all.”
“Welcome to my world.” Berkowitz opened his hands and smiled gently. “We do a lot of Medicaid cases here. This isn’t Indian Hill. We knew about Lennie, of course. Leonard Snowden Williams Jr.-he sounds like chairman of Procter and Gamble, huh? He had been a patient. He was homeless. He would sometimes get inside. That’s not uncommon, especially in the wintertime. We have to run them out of the old boiler room, the closed wings. We do what we can, what with budget cuts and all. We had to lay off nine security officers last year. There’s no money for screening devices at the doors. That wouldn’t be practical anyway. There’s always risks. We have a risk-management officer, know that? Some things fall between the cracks.”
“Like security for the basement wing where Dr. Lustig was killed,” Will said.
Berkowitz shifted his jawline to Will. “What the hell happened to you, Borders?”
“Bad back,” Dodds said, studying the knife through the plastic of a large evidence bag. Will stared at it, guessing it was a Ka-Bar brand, carbon steel blade, maybe seven inches long. It looked smaller in the bag than when it was being thrust over his head. He realized he hadn’t exhaled.
“We thought Lennie was harmless…” Berkowitz started.
“Did you know Christine Lustig?” Will asked.
Berkowitz paused, seemed thrown off stride. “Sure. They wrote her up in last month’s newsletter, the big computer project she was doing. She was a surgeon. So I saw her around. And, well. She was…well, hell, she was an attractive woman. You know how it is. I noticed her.”
“Did she know Lennie?”
Berkowitz pushed out his chest, knocking his tie aside. “What the hell, Borders, you’re a patient. Why are you asking questions?”
“Indulge us,” Dodds said.
“Oh, I get it, the great salt-and-pepper homicide team, back together again. How would I know if she knew him?”
“Maybe,” Will said, “you could check his records here, see if she ever treated him. Maybe there was a connection.” Will was surprised Dodds was letting him talk. He already knew there was no chance Lennie had killed Christine Lustig. He said, “Did you investigate any threats against Dr. Lustig in the months before she was murdered?”
“I thought the hospital president himself had already talked to the police. He came down here the night Dr. Lustig was, well, killed.”
“I didn’t see you that night,” Dodds said.
“The president talked to me. We thought everything that could be done was being done. I didn’t need to be in the way… You wouldn’t believe the bureaucratic crap we have here. Just like being with the cops, only more meetings. Anyway, I thought this was already resolved. You’ve got the man. It was obviously Lennie.” Berkowitz shifted imperceptibly, pushing back the chair slightly and running a hand across his congressional hair. Will had learned how cops showed discomfort during interviews.
“So what about it, Stan? Had she?” Dodds’ large almond eyes were innocent with inquiry. Suddenly it felt to Will like the old days, where they would double-team a suspect.
“Well, I’d have to check the records.”
“Didn’t you do that after the murder?” Will asked.
The sweat appeared on the sides of Berkowitz’s neck, an odd place. But it was definitely sweat. “Damn, do you have any idea? Can we go off the record here?”
Neither Will nor Dodds spoke, but just as they knew he would, Berkowitz filled the gap of silence. “There’s a huge issue of liability for the hospital here. Do you have any idea how much we could be sued for if it came out that Lustig had been threatened and the hospital didn’t do enough to protect her? You know how lawyers twist everything.” He swiveled toward Will and his mouth crooked down. “You know, you got kicked out of homicide and ended up on the rat squad. You twist cops’ words all the time. Why am I even talking to you?” By now he was sweating enough that it had broken through the light-blue dress shirt.
Will said, “So she had been threatened?”
“Phone calls, all right. Somebody was calling her office line. Mostly hang-ups.”
Dodds said, “Mostly?”
Berkowitz leaned forward, his face pinched. “We’re off the record, remember? Right? I’ve got a good thing here.”
“What is mostly?” Will demanded. Berkowitz’s youthful face started dissolving into wrinkles.
“I don’t even know if it was real, understand? She came to me about a month ago and said she was getting calls, down in her office. The phone would ring and she’d answer and nobody would be on the line. I mean, nobody talked. But she was convinced they were there, just listening to her. She was a babe, okay? So what babe hasn’t gotten a breather at some point in her life? Anyway, talked to the telecom people, and we ran the times of the calls. They weren’t coming from inside the hospital. So all we could do was complain to the phone company and change her extension. We had a work order for that when she was killed.”
“That doesn’t sound like something a homeless guy would do,” Will said.
Dodds said, “Go back, Stan. You said ‘mostly.’”
He was hunched forward, his hands clenched together.
“About three days before she was killed, she came back to me and said there had been a call. Started out same as the rest. She answers and it’s dead air. Then she hears a whisper. Says she’s going to die. Hangs up. She was shaken up. I offered to call the police for her. But then she just changes, gets really icy. Says to forget it.”
“And you did.”
He nodded.
“I don’t know what it all means.” He sat back up and fanned his coat jacket. “It’s not going to be a problem, right? You’ll test the blade of Lennie’s knife. You’ll find Dr. Lustig’s blood on it. Look, I’ve got a meeting.” He stood. “What I told you was all off the record. I’ll deny it if you try to screw me, and you can just deal with the hospital’s lawyers.”
The door closed and Dodds shook his head. “Stan ‘Don’t Call Me David’ Berkowitz. The assholes always land well. It’s a shame he wasn’t good enough to get into homicide. Would have loved to have a homicide cop named after a serial killer.” Dodds folded Lennie’s weapon inside the evidence bag and yawned.
Will said quietly, “That’s not the knife.”
Dodds’ artillery shell of a head swiveled. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not the knife. Did you really check her office? Like under the desk?”
Dodds stared at him. He’d seen the look before. Then Dodds stood, like a redwood suddenly appearing full-grown, and roughly grabbing the handles of Will’s wheelchair, rushing him out of the room, nearly banging his feet on the doorjamb. They burst into the hallway, nearly T-boning a patient bed being wheeled by, then almost running down two nurses who jumped aside. Dodds pushed the wheelchair fast while he bent down to Will’s ear.
“You fucker, you cocksucker, damn you all to hell, you’d better be pulling my chain. You’d better be in some drug-induced hallucination…”
“You know better. Slow down.”
“God damn you to hell, Borders.”
Dodds flashed his badge at the elevator bank, people cleared out, and they got a down-bound car all to themselves. “I ought to bring you up on charges, if you’ve been meddling in a crime scene. Bastard, bastard, bastard…” The doors opened into the darkness and Dodds sped them toward Lustig’s office, past the single bank of overhead lights. He stopped the wheelchair so hard Will was thrown forward.
“Don’t apply to be an orderly,” he said.
“Fuck you, fuck, fuck you,” Dodds mumbled. “Crime scene seal broken. Son of a bitch. There’s no chain of custody now, whatever the hell we find. This is worse than a rookie mistake. Without the seal on the door, any defense lawyer can say we just planted the evidence. We can’t prove chain of custody. The DA would have our jobs-what the hell am I saying: my job. I ought to use this Ka-Bar on you myself.”