Bitter Medicine (25 page)

I seemed to be in an outpatient area; ten or so other people, mostly women, were scattered against the wall in the cheap vinyl chairs, waiting their turns to see the doctor. I took off the white coat, folded it, returned it to the little briefcase, and bent over a stack of papers I’d stuck into it at random.

Around twelve-fifteen, when the cadre in the hall had turned over completely, Ruth Ann Motley reemerged from the records room. She came up the hall toward me but apparently intended to go to the bathroom rather than accost me. When she came out, she headed back down the stairs. I gave her five more minutes and figured she was at lunch.

I strolled down the hall to the records room, looking as official as I could. Inside was the busiest setting I’d yet seen in the hospital. A half-dozen desks stood piled high with files. On each desk sat a computer terminal. Beyond lay the records, row on row of shelves packed with color-coded folders.

Only two people were at work, covering the place during the lunch hour. Both were women, one perhaps my age, the other a young girl handling her first post-high school job. I went to the older one, an overweight, uncertain-looking person in a salmon-colored shirtwaist dress.

I gave the brief smile of someone in a great hurry. “I’m Elizabeth Phelps, State of Illinois. We’re doing some surprise inspections around the state to make sure medical records are secure.”

The woman blinked watery blue eyes at me. Hay fever or a cold seemed to be attacking her. “You—uh—you’d have to talk to the director about that. Ruth Ann Motley.”

“Great,” I said briskly. “Take me in to her.”

“Oh. Oh, she’s at lunch right now. She’ll be back in forty-five minutes if you’d like to wait.”

“I wish I could but I’ve got to be in Downers Grove at one o’clock. I don’t want to see any patient records, just see whether patient confidentiality is protected here. Why don’t you look up a patient record for me. I brought some names with me of people who’ve been admitted here.”

I flipped through the portfolio. “Oh, yes. How about Consuelo Hernandez. You don’t think Ms. Motley will object to your just showing me the system is secure by looking up one patient, do you?”

The two clerks looked at each other. Finally the older one said, “I guess it can’t do any harm. What we do is we access the system through a password. Each of us has her own password, and I can’t tell you mine because I’m not supposed to let anyone else know it.”

I came around and stood behind her. She typed a few strokes that didn’t show up on the screen—a protected password. A menu came up.

“I can only get at two menu functions. Patient number by name, and file location. Do you want to spell the name of the person you’re looking for?”

I obligingly spelled out Consuelo’s name for her. She slowly typed it in and hit the return key. After a few seconds lines of type moved across the screen: Consuelo’s name, her admission date, and the record number: 610342. I memorized it and asked if she could show me the file status.

She typed a few more commands and the screen responded: File charged out on 8–25 to Administration.

“Thanks very much.” I smiled. “You’ve been most helpful, Ms.”—I squinted at the nameplate on her desk—“Digby. I don’t think we’ll have to come back here. You can tell Ms. Motley we’re impressed with the management of security here.”

I made my way briskly down the stairs and back out of the hospital. It was only twelve-forty-five. I had a good long time to wait before I could go on with my agenda and I wasn’t much in the mood for more food. I drove around aimlessly for a while and happened on a public swimming pool, a beautiful, Olympic-length faculty.

I went into one of the malls that dot the suburban countryside and bought a bathing suit, a towel, and a few toilet articles, including a heavy sunscreen for my face, which still needed protection against midday rays. With these and the latest junk book from the bestseller rack, I was ready to while away the afternoon in best suburban style.

At eleven o’clock I returned to Friendship. In the dark the star-shaped building loomed like a giant sea monster, the few lighted windows, its malevolent eyes. The visitors’ lot had emptied out and I could park close to the front entrance, the mouth of the beast.

I slipped on Lotty’s white coat and walked in, frowning, moving quickly: Doctor is worried about a patient and shouldn’t be disturbed. Few people were about. The information desk where I’d sought directions in the morning was vacant. A couple of orderlies chatted quietly in one corner. Ahead of me a janitor moved desultorily with a mop. With the bright neon lights, the periodic announcements over the intercom, and the empty halls it reminded me of O’Hare in the middle of the night. There is no more desolate place than an empty building that is normally crowded.

The administrative offices where I’d talked with Mrs.
Kirkland and Alan Humphries lay near the stairwell I’d taken this morning to the records room. The door leading to the suite of offices was locked, an ordinary push-button lock. I pulled out my collection of keys, found one of the right make, and fiddled in the door with it. It turned after an agonizing few moments during which I expected one of the orderlies to notice me or a nurse to pass by and accost me.

Mrs. Kirkland’s little office lay directly in front of me. A black plastic label etched with white letters announced her name and title: Director of Admissions. I slipped on a pair of Lotty’s gloves and tried the doorknob out of curiosity; her room was locked. The corridor to Alan Humphries’s office ran parallel to her cubicle, with his office suite at its end. Two other doors, also locked, led off the hallway to the right.

The privacy of the hallway made it possible to relax; I opened Humphries’s office suite easily. A small outer room was clearly the secretary’s—Jackie Bates, to whom I’d spoken yesterday morning. She had a utilitarian desk, a state-of-the-art word processor, and her own photocopy machine. The back wall was lined with filing cabinets. If Consuelo’s file wasn’t in Humphries’s office I’d have to bite the bullet and go through every drawer.

The door to Humphries’s inner sanctum was made from a heavy slab of real wood, perhaps rosewood. Once I had the lock undone and was inside, I felt I was truly in the for-profit part of the hospital.

Instead of the general-issue linoleum, real wood parquet covered the floor. On top of that lay a rug, Persian by the looks of it, big enough to let you know it had cost a whole bunch, but not too large to obscure the inlaid wood. Astride the rug stood an antique desk, the double-sided kind, soft red leather inset into the top, gold marquetry all down the legs and in the drawers. Brocade drapes covered the glass that separated his office from the parking lots outside.

The desk drawers weren’t locked, a relief since forcing them might damage the beautiful old wood. I sat in a spacious leather chair and carefully worked my way through them, trying hard not to disturb the order in which papers lay. For someone of my untidy habits, the invisible-search part of the detective’s job was perhaps the most difficult.

Consuelo’s file was not among Humphries’s open papers, but I did find the organization and ownership of the hospital. Behind it was a folder labeled “Monthly Operating Reports.” I pulled both into one thick stack. I was tempted to steal it rather than spending the time on photocopying, but virtue triumphed and I went to Jackie’s antechamber and switched on the machine.

While waiting for it to warm up, I turned my attention to the discreet wooden filing cabinet built into the wall behind Humphries’s desk. This was locked, but like all the Friendship locks it yielded easily. When you live in Schaumburg and don’t expect to be burglarized, you make the detective’s job infinitely simpler.

Consuelo’s file was in the front of the cabinet’s top drawer. I sucked in a breath and opened it. I was expecting something dramatic—Lotty’s missing records or some striking statement about Consuelo’s treatment. Instead, a few skimpy pages announced her arrival at the hospital: female Hispanic patient, aged sixteen, presented on July 29 unconscious and in labor…. From there it deteriorated into medical jargon, which Lotty would have to interpret. The three pages were typed, apparently from Peter’s dictation, and dated and initialed by him.

I weighed the file in my hand, frowning. Somehow I’d expected more than this. I went slowly to the ante-chamber, where I copied both it and the massive documents relating to the hospital organization. When I was putting the three sheets back into the folder I noticed a small piece of paper stuck inside, one of those dark sheets that’s labeled “A memo from,” in this case Alan Humphries.

The only thing on it was a phone number, no area code, so presumably 312, and no name or address. I copied it, then restored everything to its original upright position, carefully switched off the machine, turned out the lights, and headed back to the main part of the hospital.

At the door leading back to the hallway I paused for a moment, listening to make sure no one was standing on the other side, then slipped into the main wing. Two nurses were walking toward me, deep in conversation.
They didn’t seem to notice that I’d been where I oughtn’t, and didn’t give me even a cursory glance. I headed on up the hallway to the obstetrics wing.

It was always possible that Peter was making a late-night delivery. Better to be safe than sorry. I found a pay phone in a waiting area and dialed his home number. He answered the phone immediately, so he wasn’t asleep. I hung up without saying anything, just the usual annoyance call we all get from time to time.

I had never been to Peter’s office, but knew from his conversation that it was in the same general area as the labor and delivery rooms. These were on the second floor of the wing where Consuelo had been treated. I climbed the stairs, only to be faced with a double door informing me that I had to be gowned and masked to pass that point. I returned to the ground floor and walked down the corridor until I came to another stairwell. This one entered the second floor on the other side of the restricted zone.

The hall here was deserted, lighted dimly by occasional emergency bulbs. I had arrived in an office area; with luck no one would appear before morning. A large Xerox machine stood at about the halfway point of the floor.

Peter’s office was the fourth door down. His title, Director of Obstetrics, was lettered neatly below his name on the glass door. I unlocked it and went in.

Like Humphries, Peter had a small suite for a secretary and himself. While Jackie and her boss lived in
opulent tidiness, here everything was bright colors and chaotic. A rack of gaily colored brochures invited me to make Friendship my full-service obstetrical care provider. Pictures of beaming mothers nestling wholesome infants stared at me from the walls. A poster with an illustration of a stork perched happily on top of the starfish-shaped hospital showed what a great place this was to give birth.

A little row of keys hung next to the desk. One was labeled “Dr. Burgoyne’s office”; another was for the photocopier. The secretary’s desk was crammed with patient files and other documents. A row of filing cabinets was covered with paper as well. I gave them a jaundiced look before taking the key to Peter’s office door.

Parquet apparently was an executive perk at Friendship—secretarial linoleum ended abruptly at Peter’s office door and the expensive wood began. The floor looked funny at the join, but we can’t let the hired help forget their place. And with his door shut, you couldn’t tell. Peter had not furnished his office with the opulence favored by Humphries. An ordinary modern wooden desk, also covered with stacks of paper, was in the middle of the room. A few plain chairs were placed for patient consultations; his own was a standard-supply vinyl-covered swivel chair. A large picture of his retriever made the sole personal contribution to the decor.

Once more donning my rubber gloves, I started through the papers on the desk top, skimming them briefly to make sure they held no reference to Consuelo.
Finished with the top layer, I made my way through the drawers.

Peter kept everything—mementos of infants he’d delivered, correspondence with drug companies, reminders from MasterCard that his bill was overdue. In a file marked “Personal Papers” I found the original agreement between him and Friendship five years earlier. I raised my eyebrows at the terms—no wonder it had been more attractive than a perinatology residency at Beth Israel. I put it to one side for photocopying.

A report on Consuelo lay at the bottom of the last drawer. It was written in a tiny, illegible hand—his, I presumed—I’d never seen his writing. To my untutored eye it was incomprehensible:

At 1430 called Dr. Abercrombie

At 1500 began IV administration of mg. sulf.

I scanned the difficult script and saw where the baby had been born, efforts to revive it, death at 1810. Then Consuelo’s death the following day at five-thirty.

I frowned with incomprehension. One more for Lotty. I debated whether it would be better to take the originals, running the risk that Peter would miss them, or stand at the machine in the hallway with the possibility that a nurse or doctor might come by and question me. Reluctantly I decided this was my one shot at burglarizing the files. I couldn’t very well return them in the mail.

I stopped at the secretary’s desk to get her key to the photocopier, then turned out the lights and closed the doors behind me without locking them. The hallway was still deserted when I went over to the switch on the community copier. A half dozen unlabeled locks in the back of the machine presumably belonged to the different offices on the floor. I tried the key in each; it turned in the fourth slot and the machine came to life.

A dead photocopier can take five or more minutes to warm up. While I waited for this one, I hunted in the hallway for a bathroom. The women’s room was next to the stairwell. I was just opening the door when I heard someone coming up the stairs. I couldn’t very well go back to turn off the machine; nor did I wish to be found standing in the hallway with a fistful of Friendship files. I moved into the bathroom, not turning on the light.