A Man to Die for (17 page)

Casey was getting tired of the way her chest caved in when he did that. She wanted to get a good breath again, and knew she wouldn’t until he left the work lane. She wanted to be able to get through a day where her hands didn’t sweat and she didn’t feel as if somebody had just stripped her bare in public.

And to think that it was just all beginning.

That ubiquitous little notebook in his hands, he strolled toward her. Casey scuttled over to the supply cart and began filling her arms with equipment to resupply her room. She could feel him approach, heard his footsteps like the lap of a deadly flood at her doorstep. Still she worked, crouched down to pull out catheter kits, fighting to overcome the urge to look around, to look up and discover that he knew she’d gone to the police.

Then the back of her neck signaled his proximity. She climbed back to her feet, unwilling to allow him a superior position.

“Been a busy night, I hear,” he greeted her, with a smile that put Casey in mind of Pussy in sight of a mouse.

Casey clutched her equipment and straightened, willing herself to answer his smile with a cool one of her own. “You weren’t in the lounge talking about how quiet it had been today, were you?”

It seemed he wasn’t in the mood for small talk. His eyes promised meaning beyond his words, teased and tormented like a lover holding a surprise behind his back.

“Have there been any more good murders?”

Casey almost dropped the IVs. Instead she fixed her smile in place and headed back to the room. “I don’t know,” she answered, her own audacity clogging in her throat. “Have there?”

Hunsacker reached across her to push the door open. Casey balked at his proximity. She didn’t want to accidentally brush against him, or let him close enough to sense the adrenaline that throbbed through her. Yet she couldn’t afford to falter.

“Thanks,” she allowed and glided past him, her breath dead still in her chest.

Still insulated in the now-silent room, Marva looked up. Casey saw the brief flash of surprise in her eyes, the retreat as she bent back over her notes.

“Good grief.” Hunsacker grinned at the sight on the table. “Abe said something about an affair to remember, but you really get the full effect in person, don’t you?”

“We ain’t chargin’ admission here,” Marva announced without looking up.

Casey dropped her load on the counter and went to better cover the patient. Hunsacker didn’t move from the door.

“I was over at St. Isidore’s the other day,” he said to her, his voice caressing her like a soft hand. “Understand you were married to Ed Baker.”

Casey reacted before she thought of it, spinning around to face him. She saw him glance over to where the garish leopard-skin and lace attire lay hidden beneath the drab green sheet.

“Nice guy,” he said. Then Hunsacker lifted his gaze to Casey and let it rest there, his new smile feral and knowing. Before Casey could think to counterattack, he walked out.

Casey couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Outrage spilled through her like hot lye. Fury, frustration. Impotence. She’d just been violated as surely as if he’d had his hands on her, and nobody had known it. He’d just slid a knife in her and slipped out the door.

Damn him. Goddamn him. How did he find out about Ed? How did he know about their marriage, and why taunt her with it? And if he knew about that, what else did he know?

“Casey?”

Casey didn’t even hear Marva’s concern. She couldn’t drag her eyes away from the closed door.

“Casey, honey, what happened?”

Casey flinched at Marva’s touch. Startled, she looked up to remember that her friend had witnessed Hunsacker’s actions. Marva had overheard a threat she didn’t understand.

“Sweet Jesus, girl, you look like you daddy just came back from the dead.”

Casey shook her head, struggling to voice her distress. Tears blurred her vision. She couldn’t make Marva understand the poison in Hunsacker’s words unless she explained about Ed. And that was just too much for her right now.

“He knows,” she said instead, suddenly certain. “Hunsacker knows I suspect him.”

BARB SLAPPED OPEN
the door. “What are you guys doin’ in here,” she demanded, the cacophony of a full work lane spilling in behind her. “Getting fashion tips?”

“Get out,” Marva commanded, her hand on Casey’s arm, her eyes never leaving Casey’s stony face.

Barb stiffened with outrage. “Don’t you give me—”

Now Marva did lift her gaze and it landed square on Barb. “I said get out.”

Barb got out. Casey barely heard her. She was still trying to settle down, trying her best to regain control over her temper.

“Now,” Marva said quietly, still holding Casey in place, Mr. B a mute witness over her shoulder. “You wanna tell me what that was all about?”

“I wondered before,” Casey admitted with a shaky breath. “Whether he knew I suspected him. I’m sure he does now. He just…I think he gave me a kind of warning.”

Marva looked around her as if she’d missed something and could still find it amid the litter of the code. “Warning? What about?”

Casey’s smile was grim. Poor Ed. He wasn’t getting any anonymity tonight. “Remember the underpants on our friend there?”

“So?”

“Ed has much worse taste. He buys his lacy things at Frederick’s.”

Marva took another look at the anonymous mass on the cart, and then back to Casey. “Sweet Jesus.”

“Nobody knows. I mean nobody. Hunsacker just told me that that’s all changed. I think it was a threat about what kind of adversary he’s going to be.”

“What are you gonna do?”

Casey took the time to drag in a few more breaths. She focused on the red of the needle disposal box at the back of the counter. “I don’t know,” she admitted in a small voice.

“Tell Tom,” Marva insisted, her grip tightening.

Casey swung on her. “Tell him what?” she demanded. “That Hunsacker knows my ex-husband liked pretty things more than I did? Tell him that I think Hunsacker’s offing nurses who piss him off, and that now he knows I know? You tell me, Marva. What is Tom going to say to that?”

“But he threatened you, girl.”

“You were standing right there. Did it sound like a threat to you?”

“The look on your face sure sounded like he gave you a threat.”

Casey shook her head, knowing she had no choice. Caught tight between her suspicions and Hunsacker’s power over her, Casey knew she had no one who could help her.

The door swung open behind her. “I can’t field a team with only one player,” Tom announced in a clipped voice.

“Listen, Tom—” Marva started.

Casey silenced her. “We’ll be right out,” she said. “We were just cleaning up.”

“You aren’t the only two players on the team,” he threatened. “Just remember, Keith Hernandez was traded, and you can be, too.”

Casey looked up to see the pique in his eyes and knew just how far a complaint to him would go. She already had a reputation as a shit-disturber. All she’d need was to lodge a complaint against the hospital’s favorite doctor and she’d land on her butt in the proverbial snow. Especially since it seemed the doctor in question knew just how to play this game.

All Casey could do was learn to play it better.

“Dr. Hunsacker was asking me about somebody I knew over at St. Isidore’s,” Casey lied with an utter sincerity that threatened to make her nauseous. “A nurse who was murdered. We’re thinking of setting up a memorial fund for her, and he wanted to know about it. I’m sorry, Tom.”

His posture of vexation crumbled halfway through her little speech. By the time she offered him a wan smile, he was ready to reach into his own pocket.

“Oh, that’s fine, Casey. I’m sorry,” he conceded. “Barb just didn’t know what you were so upset about. It’s tough when you have to, you know, bang the drum slowly for a teammate.”

Casey was glad he left then. She didn’t want to laugh in his face.

“Thank God he’s off the work lanes.” Marva chortled. “Can you imagine him dishin’ that kinda crap to Mrs. B out there? He’d get to the part about banging’ slowly and find himself airborne.”

Casey shared the laughter. “God, he’s getting bad. Now he’s using clichés from baseball
movies
. Next we’ll hear how he’s the luckiest guy in the world.”

Marva shook her head, amazed. “How did you do that? You switched gears so fast I got left in the dirt.”

Casey’s smile died into real sincerity, the kind that darkened her features into conviction. “I’ve decided to study the Handbook of Social Success by Dr. Dale Hunsacker. I won’t be able to outdistance him if I’m thrown out of the race.”

Marva stared. “You’re serious. You’re not going to quit?”

Casey turned back to finishing her job. “I’ve already been screwed. The least I can do is deserve it.”

Casey wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to get out of her lunch with Betty Fernandez. She needed to keep some kind of contact with St. Isidore’s, since any information she could get about Evelyn or Wanda would have to come through that particular grapevine. She needed to hear another view of Hunsacker. Maybe he didn’t sit so high over at Izzy’s where they had some real doctors. Maybe somebody else over there saw him for what he was.

Well, if somebody did, it wasn’t Betty.

A tall, thin, nervous woman with more sincerity than brains, Betty was one of the myriad ex-wives of Dr. Fernandez the Obstetrician. Casey remembered Betty as coming away from her divorce confused and shaken. She didn’t look as if six years had settled her in any. Now the focus of her distress was Evelyn.

A memorial, she thought, would be lovely. Casey mapped out a quick idea that put most of the effort neatly in the hands of Izzy’s staff and then settled down to the time-honored lunch dialogue—grapevine update. It didn’t take much to get the subject around to the holes in the fourth-floor staff.

“Poor Ev,” Betty mourned, her salad almost untouched and her wine almost gone. “She loved nursing so much. It’s like having a family member die.”

“Did you ever find out what happened that night between her and Hunsacker?” Casey asked, her salad gone and her wineglass full. “It still bothers me, thinking about how upset she was over her patient.”

Betty emptied her glass and looked vaguely around for more. Casey thought of trading hers for the empty one, but figured that would be a little too obvious.

“I didn’t sleep for three nights after the wake,” Betty admitted. “You know, after you’d said that you’d talked to her and all.” Betty’s long forehead creased with hesitation a moment, and then she leaned in a little to share her confidence. “I even read through Mrs. Baldwin’s chart. I didn’t want to think that Ev had made a mistake, and I knew Dr. Hunsacker wouldn’t.”

Casey leaned in a little on her side, clasping her hands at the edge of the table to keep them still. “I’d sure feel better knowing that Ev wasn’t wrong. She called him, didn’t she?”

Eyes wide and moist, Betty nodded. “Five times. It’s all in the chart. I think she and Dr. Hunsacker must have just misunderstood each other. They had a terrible argument. I’ve never seen him so upset. But he had Mrs. Baldwin in surgery within twenty minutes of showing up. Evelyn was just upset about Mrs. Baldwin, I’m sure. She never would have argued with somebody as nice as Dr. Hunsacker otherwise.”

Casey nodded in sympathy. “Did she chart what she told him on the phone?” She paused, the next question too important to lose. “Could she have really not told him how badly Mrs. Baldwin was bleeding?”

This time Betty shook her head. “She just charted that she called him, and that he said he wasn’t coming in. Poor thing. She must have been too upset…”

Poor Evelyn, she must have been wrong
. Casey fought down her anger, suddenly sure that the only mistake Evelyn had made that night had been not charting exactly what she’d said to Hunsacker. He must have threatened her in that silky, sneaky way of his to leave the matter alone, and she’d ignored him.

Betty was actively dabbing at her eyes now. Casey didn’t blame her. Evelyn’s death was more tragic than anybody understood yet.

“And Hunsacker stayed with Mrs. Baldwin the rest of the night?”

Betty nodded. “His last note was at about one-fifteen, when she was in recovery.”

One-fifteen. Casey’s hopes fell. The perfect alibi, in print, in a legal document. How could he have possibly reached the exact spot where Evelyn would become lost in fifteen minutes, when it took at least twenty just to make the Mississippi River? Casey had thought he must have followed Ev off the parking lot. The notes said that instead he’d ‘returned to the floor.

Casey had been running on instinct until now, sure somehow that Hunsacker had been angry enough to hurt Ev, smart enough to learn where she was going and follow, somehow rerouting her into the very place where if she were shot, no one would ever think to point an accusing finger back at an angry doctor twenty miles away. She knew he was smart enough to do it. Way deep inside her where her most primal instincts resided, she felt he was capable of it.

Casey had just figured that once she got the proof that Hunsacker could have been physically tied to the murder, somebody else could come up with the specifics. She’d been outmaneuvered, though.

It still didn’t occur to Casey that he couldn’t have done it.

“We’ll never know,” she admitted out loud.

“No,” Betty agreed, still thinking of the question of Evelyn’s culpability. “Poor thing. I still think of what she must have faced. She was so distraught she must have taken a wrong turn. And died like that. With a weapon that horrible.”

Casey looked up, remembering. “Didn’t you know?” she asked. “It wasn’t an AK47. It was a twenty-two. Saturday Night Special.”

Betty’s face puckered. “Well, they’re not the same at all, are they?”

Which just proved that she was a postpartum nurse and not a trauma nurse.

“No,” Casey allowed evenly. “They’re not.” She refrained from saying that both could get the job done. That was something you said to other trauma nurses, who would nod and commiserate. Postpartum nurses were spoiled with their easy compassion.

“How could he make a mistake like that, I wonder,” Betty asked. “He knows so much about guns.”

That got Casey’s attention. “Who?”

Betty lifted perplexed eyes. “Dr. Hunsacker. I remember he was the one who told us, because he was talking about how the gun was a favorite gang weapon.”

Casey flirted with elation, but it did her no good. Why would Hunsacker make a mistake like that? It served no purpose.

“Reports like that always get confused,” she simply said. It seemed to satisfy Betty.

Casey shook off her frustration and returned to her purpose. “Dr. Hunsacker really likes you guys up at Izzy’s. He was telling me the other day.”

Betty fidgeted a little more, reminding Casey suddenly of Helen. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “He hasn’t been bringing his patients up to Izzy’s as much in the last couple of weeks. I miss him.”

Casey admitted her surprise. “He hasn’t? How come?”

Betty shrugged and went after her water glass, her eyes still moist and uncertain, her distress over Evelyn permeating the atmosphere around their little table. “We don’t know. We were afraid it was, you know, the Evelyn thing.” Another shrug, this more uncomfortable. “It might be Peter, though. Sometimes he can be difficult, you know.”

Peter. Dr. “Wanna Be My Wife?” Fernandez. A rat on the domestic scene, but the kind of administrator who demanded the best from his crew and usually got it. A well-respected bastard.

And Betty thought Hunsacker was having trouble with him. At last Casey was getting somewhere.

“I can’t imagine Dr. Hunsacker having trouble with anyone,” Casey said. She finally had to lift her wineglass on that one, just to grease the words past her protesting throat.

“Medical egos, I guess. Although the hall gossip is that Dr. Hunsacker had been seeing Peter’s latest mistress.” Finally something besides distress. Casey caught a definite glint of self-righteous satisfaction on the woman’s features. Betty had been Peter’s second wife, an upgrade from the waitress who’d worked him through med school. Betty had lasted until Peter had discovered the younger, more passive model.

“That’d explain it,” Casey admitted with a grin.

She was gratified to see Betty allow herself to grin back. But grins didn’t seem to last long on Betty. Suddenly her forehead crumbled into distress again.

“Of course, I’m sure he’s not seeing her anymore. I mean, why would he?”

Casey wasn’t exactly sure how to answer. Betty seemed so intent on her message. “I don’t know, Betty.”

Picking up her fork once again, Betty shook her head with some resolve. “I just wouldn’t want you to, you know, get the wrong impression.”

Casey wasn’t sure why she needed to reassure Betty, but she did. “Of course not.”

Lunch lasted another half hour, during which time they covered old gossip, new gossip, and the vagaries of hospital politics.

Casey learned that nothing more had been heard from Wanda, and that the hospital had waited a total of forty-eight hours after her disappearance to advertise for a replacement. When cleaned out, her locker had given up a number of Elvis pictures, four cartons of cigarettes, and a Tupperware container full of earrings for the four holes she’d punched in each ear. Buddy had wanted to leave her things where they were, sure she was coming back. The hospital administration had insisted, and he’d walked away with her small cache, head bowed so no one saw his tears.

Betty misted up all over again for poor Buddy, sure Wanda was white trash for walking out on her husband that way. Casey kept her silence. She hoped Clyde and the folks down at the Rose had begun their search.

Casey left Betty with promises to get together again over the memorial project and walked back through the mall alone. She was still thinking about Evelyn, about how there should be some way to sit down and figure a way for a white doctor from West County to travel twenty miles in about ten minutes, murder a lone white woman on a corner in East St. Louis, and escape unseen.

Her head was down, her purse swinging in lazy rhythm with her stride. Mall walkers passed her at a fast clip, and the elderly coagulated in slumped knots along benches and planters, which was the closest anybody could get to watching the world go by anymore. Casey smiled at a couple and received courteous nods. She sidestepped a stroller with twins and stopped at a pet-store window to watch puppies.