Bitter Medicine (21 page)

“I’m his only daughter, aren’t I? But he has to go following you around like a sheep. Every time I go see him, it’s Miss Warshawski this, Miss Warshawski that, till I’m ready to throw up when I hear your name. You like her so much, you marry her—that’s what I said. The way you talk, you might as well not have a family—that’s what I told him. Joe and I suddenly aren’t as good as this college-educated lawyer, is that it? Ma wasn’t good enough for you? Is that what you’re trying to tell us?”

Her son kept bleating, “Ma, please,” to no avail. He and his brother shrank as far away from her as they could, looking around them with the doubtful expressions people often have in hospitals.

I was reeling under the flow of words. She’d certainly inherited her dad’s oratory style.

“They won’t let me go in to see him, but if you tell the receptionist you’re his daughter, she’ll get the resident in charge to take you in. Nice to meet you.”

I fled the hospital, half laughing, but unfortunately
she’d put into words the guilt I’d been feeling. Why the hell hadn’t the old man minded his own business? Why had he gone barging up the stairs to get brained? He had been injured trying to look after me. Swell. That meant I damned well had to find out who had broken into my place. Which meant competing with the police on a task for which they had all the resources. The only thing I knew about that they didn’t was the missing Ick-Piff files. I had to find out who was paying Dick’s bill.

If I wasn’t so well known to the partners at Crawford, Meade I’d try getting hired as a secretary. As it was, I didn’t think I could suborn any of the office staff. Too many of them knew me by sight; if I started asking questions it would get right back to Dick.

I wandered out to the back of my building and climbed the stairs to the kitchen entrance. My apartment seemed unbearably dispiriting. It wasn’t just the wreck; without Mr. Contreras popping his head out the door the building felt empty, lifeless. I stood on the back porch, watching the Korean boys play ball. They were running through the tomatoes now that the guardian was away. I took the splintered wood that had been my door and carried it down to the little garden. As the solemn-eyed brothers watched, I built an impromptu fence around the plants.

“Now, your playground is outside the fence. Got it?”

They nodded without speaking. I climbed back upstairs, feeling better because I’d made something, put some order into life. I started thinking again.

Mr. Contreras recovered consciousness late on Sunday. Since they were keeping him in intensive care for another twenty-four hours, I couldn’t see him myself, but Lotty told me he was vague about the accident. He could remember making supper and going line by line through the racing results in the paper—his evening ritual—but he could not remember climbing the stairs to my apartment.

Neither she nor the neurologist she’d gotten to look at him could offer the police any hope that he would ever remember his assailants—that kind of traumatic episode was frequently blocked by the mind. Detective Rawlings, whom I ran into at the hospital, was disappointed. I was just thankful the old man was going to make it.

Monday morning my pal from the Downers Grove box factory decided he was ready to pay my tariff; someone had smashed a forklift truck into the side of the
building Saturday morning, doing about five grand in damage. The supposition was that the driver was toked out of his mind on crack. The owner balked when I told him it would be another week before I could be there personally, but he agreed in the end to start with the Streeter brothers. Two of them were available to go to Downers Grove the next day.

Fixed now with a paying customer, I turned my attention to my own problems. My suspicions of Peter embarrassed me, and when I thought of our last phone conversation I squirmed a bit. But my questions wouldn’t go away. I needed to demonstrate clearly to myself that he’d had nothing to do with lifting the Ick-Piff files from my living room.

Dick’s secretary. I lay on the living-room floor in the midst of the books and records and shut my eyes. She was in her forties. Married. Slender, polished, efficient, brown eyes. Regina? No. Regner. Harriet Regner.

At nine, I dialed Friendship’s number in Schaumburg and asked for Alan Humphries, the administrator. A woman’s voice answered, announcing that I had reached Mr. Humphries’s office.

“Good morning,” I said in what was supposed to be a pleasant, earnest, busy voice. “This is Harriet Regner, Mr. Yarborough’s secretary at Crawford, Meade.”

“Oh, hi, Harriet. This is Jackie. You have a good weekend? You sound a little under the weather.”

“Just hay fever, Jackie—that time of year.” I put a tissue to my nose to make my voice more snuffly. “Mr.
Yarborough needs one small piece of information from Mr. Humphries…. No, you don’t need to put him on—you can probably tell me yourself. We weren’t sure if me billing for Mr. Monkfish was to go on to the Friendship corporate account, or to be listed on a separate invoice and sent to Dr. Burgoyne directly.”

“Just a minute.” She put me on hold. I lay on my back, looking at the ceiling, wishing there were some way I could be present if Dick learned about the conversation.

“Harriet? Mr. Humphries says he went through all that with Mr. Yarborough—that the bill is to come directly to him, but here at the hospital. He wants to talk to you.”

“Sure, Jackie—oh, just a second. Mr. Yarborough is buzzing me—can I call you right back? Great.”

I cut the connection. So now I knew. Or had it confirmed. Friendship was paying Dieter Monkfish’s bill. But why, for heaven’s sake? Maybe Alan Humphries was a fanatical member of the so-called right-to-life movement. But presumably Friendship performed therapeutic abortions; many hospitals do, at least in the first trimester. Maybe Friendship did and Humphries writhed in anguish over it: this was his conscience money. After all, he was paying Dieter’s bill himself, instead of slipping it in with the hospital account.

But that left a painful question unanswered. What was Peter’s connection with this? The only reason I’d checked out Friendship was because Peter had been at
my place the night I’d brought home the IckPiff files. But why did he care? Beyond an ethical dislike of burglary, that is.

Reluctantly, I phoned his office at Friendship. His secretary informed me that he was in surgery—was there a message?

I could scarcely say, “Yeah, I want to know whom he hired to beat up Mr. Contreras,” so I fell back on asking for Consuelo’s hospital record.

“Doctor didn’t leave me any instructions about this,” she said dubiously. “What’s your name?”

Receptionists calling the doctor “Doctor” are like grown-ups who talk about their fathers as “Daddy.” Like he’s the only one in the world, you know. God didn’t leave me any instructions.

I gave her my name and asked her to have Peter call me when he came back from surgery. After hanging up, I paced tensely around my ravaged apartment, wanting to act, but not sure how. Not sure I wanted to find out anything else.

Finally I returned to the phone to call Murray Ryerson, head of the crime desk at the
Herald-Star.
The paper had done a small story on the Monkfish robbery in the “ChicagoBeat” section. When the news of my break-in came through the crime desk on Friday, Murray had called me with high hopes of a major story, but I’d told him that I wasn’t working on anything.

This morning I reached him at the city desk. “You know that burglary at IckPiff headquarters?”

“You’re confessing,” he said promptly. “That’s not news, V.I. Everyone knows you’re a great second-story woman.”

He thought he was being funny; I was just as glad he couldn’t see my face. “Dick Yarborough at Crawford, Meade is Dieter’s attorney—you know that? I looked into my crystal ball a few minutes ago, and it told me that Dick will have the missing files sometime today. You might call and ask him.”

“Vic, why the hell are you telling me this, anyway? IckPiff losing some files is not a big deal. Even if you did steal them and are planting them at the lawyer’s—what’s his name? Yarborough?—it’s not interesting.”

“Okay. I just thought it might be a fun little paragraph, rounding out the burglary story. I don’t have the stuff, by the way, and I don’t know who does. But I think Dick will have it by tomorrow at the latest. Bye-bye.”

I was about to hang up when Murray suddenly said, “Hey, wait a minute. Monkfish led a mob into Lotty Herschel’s clinic a few weeks ago, didn’t he? And Yarborough’s the guy who bailed him out. Right. Got it here on the screen. And then
his
place was broken into. Come on, Warshawski, what’s going on?”

“Hey, Murray. IckPiff files are not a big deal. If I may quote you on that. Sorry to bother you. I’ll call the
Trib.
” I laughed into his squawking voice and hung up.

I went over to the clinic to see how Lotty was holding up. Business had been slow for the first few days
after she reopened, but this morning every seat in the waiting room was taken. Children, mothers with screaming infants, pregnant women, old women with their grown-up daughters, and one lone man, staring stiffly at nothing, his hands trembling slightly.

Mrs. Coltrain ran the place like an expert bartender with a nervous crowd. She smiled at me professionally, and her panic of a few weeks earlier slid from my memory. She said she would tell Dr. Herschel I was here.

Lotty saw me on the fly, in between two waiting rooms. She must have lost five pounds over the weekend; her cheekbones jutted out sharply below her thick black eyebrows.

I told her about my efforts to get the Friendship records. “I’m trying Peter again this afternoon. If he doesn’t deliver, do you want to get Hazeltine to call?” Morris Hazeltine was her real lawyer.

Lotty grimaced. “He isn’t representing me on this—I have to go through the insurance company and use the lawyer they come up with. I’ll mention it to them—they’re most annoyed with me for losing the records.”

She suddenly smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Strain is making me lose my wits. The state—the Department of Environment and Human Resources—they make an on-site, unannounced visit to any hospital where there’s been a maternal or infant death. They should have some report on Consuelo and at least what Malcolm did.”

“What do you do—call up and ask for it?” My experience
with the state didn’t lead me to think they’d be too helpful.

Lotty looked smug. “Ordinarily not. But I trained the woman who’s now an assistant director there—Philippa Barnes. She was one of my first residents at Beth Israel. A very fine one, too—but that was in the early sixties—it was hard for women to go into private practice, and she was black to boot. So she went to work for the state…. Look—I’ve got at least four hours of patients to see here. If I called to tell her to expect you, would you mind going to see her?”

“Be a pleasure. I’d like to think there was something active I could do—I feel like the two of us have been those little ducks they used to line up for you to shoot at in Riverview.” I told her about Dick and Dieter Monkfish. “What do you make of that?”

Her thick black brows snapped together to form a line across her nose. “I never did understand why you married that man, Vic.”

I grinned. “Immigrant inferiority complex—he’s the complete WASP. But why Friendship?”

She echoed my earlier thoughts. “Maybe conscience money for doing abortions there—people are strange.” Her mind was clearly back in the examining room. “I’ll call Philippa now.”

She squeezed my arm briefly and moved back down the short corridor to her office—like a cat—so quickly she was there one instant and gone the next. It was a relief to see her back to her old self.

My friends and I have financed one of the worst monstrosities known to woman on the northwest corner of the Loop. That is, we kicked in the revenues through our tax bills, and Governor Thompson allocated $180 million of them to a new State of Illinois building. Designed by Helmut Jahn, it is a skyscraper made of two concentric glass rings. The inner one circles a block-wide open rotunda that runs the height of the building. So not only did we get to finance the construction, but we get to pay to heat and cool a place that is mostly open space. Still, it won an architectural award in 1986, which I guess proves how much the critics know.

I rode a glass elevator to the eighteenth floor and got out onto the corridor that circles the rotunda. All the offices open onto it. It looks as if the state ran out of money when they got to the doors, so working space
flows into the hallways. You’re supposed to think this creates a feeling of openness between state employees and the people they serve. But if you had private documents—or had to work late—you’d probably like a little more protection between you and the lunatics who roam the Loop.

I went into the open space marked Department of Environment and Human Resources and gave my name to the middle-aged black receptionist. “I think Dr. Barnes is expecting me.”

The receptionist gave the sigh of one asked to perform work beyond the call of duty and dialed the phone. “Dr. Barnes will see you in a minute,” she announced without looking at me. “Have a seat.”

I flipped through a pamphlet describing the symptoms of AIDS and what to do if you suspected you might have it and read another on teenage pregnancy—a noncommittal piece, since the state isn’t allowed to advocate birth control—before Dr. Barnes appeared.

Philippa Barnes was a tall, slim woman of around fifty. She was very black; with her hair cropped close to the head on her long slender neck she looked like a swan. Her movements flowed as though water were her natural element. She shook my hand, looking at a gold watchband floating on her left wrist.

“Ms. Warshawski? I just talked to Dr. Herschel. She told me about the dead girl and the lawsuit. I’m trying to squeeze you in between two other appointments, so forgive me if we rush. I want you to talk to Eileen
Candeleria—she’s the public health nurse who actually schedules our on-site inspections.”

We were about the same height but I almost had to jog to keep up with her long, smooth stride. We went back away from the corridor through a maze of offices and half-private cubicles to a room overlooking the Greyhound Bus Terminal on Randolph. One hundred eighty million hadn’t paid for much soundproofing; the noise easily traveled the eighteen stories up to us.