Code Blues (30 page)

I turned to my patient's chart, smoothing
the crease down the middle. "Do you do that often?"

"Check the clock?" When I raised my head,
she was smiling at me almost maternally. "You're fun to tease."

I flapped the chart closed. "Really? 'Cause
I don't like it."

"That's why," she replied. Her eyes
glittered with amusement, although her mouth stayed sober. "To
answer your real question, Tucker and I both like Buffy. But we've
never done what you and Alex probably did. Satisfied?"

I felt guilty. "Do you want to?"

She raised her eyes to the ceiling. "Can I
plead the Fifth?"

"We're not American. But I guess I can let
you off the hook this time." I toyed with my pen, twirling it
between my fingers. I wasn't laughing anymore. "You know how you
said Alex was charming?"

She suppressed a sigh and nodded.

"Was that from...personal experience?"

Her eyes were amused and sad at the same
time. "No."

It was pathetic, but I breathed easier.

She added, "I have a healthy sense of
self-preservation." She stood, smoothing her hemp-colored shorts.
"Dr. Levine wants to see you before you go."

My mouth hung open a little. I wanted to
tell her I used to have a fine sense of caution and sanity. I used
to be a good girl. Just like you!

She touched my shoulder lightly. "Okay?"

She wasn't asking about Dr. Levine. I had to
admit, Tori was more tough-love than I'd realized. But maybe it was
a good thing. I exhaled. "Yeah. Okay."

It turned out Dr. Levine was dying to give
me his son's futon. "Just let me call my wife. We'll work something
out. We'll borrow a truck!"

I had to laugh. "The Zippy Moving Company
has sworn to send me my things today. If not, I'll call you."

He wrote down his numbers for me. I wondered
if he'd always been this helpful, or if he, like Tori, was trying
to fill some of the void Kurt had left behind. Not a bad legacy
after all.

Tori suggested we go out to dinner. I shook
my head. "Moving van time." It was just an excuse. I wanted to see
if Alex had left a message. At the very least, I could pull the
sleeping bag over my head and leave the world behind.

"I'll walk you home," she said. It was
easier to say yes than to keep fighting her. I definitely needed a
refill on my bug juice.

We walked to the Mimosa Manor in silence,
our feet tapping on the sidewalk. The day had clouded over and the
air was heavy. We walked faster. Summer storms could be super
soakers.

As we turned down Mimosa, I could see a
white van blocking the laneway. I stopped dead. Then I shook my
head. The lettering was for a Montreal company, not Zippy.

Tori said, "I bet it's for you." Before I
could stop her, she ran up to the passenger side and accosted a van
guy in quite good French. She turned to me with a radiant smile.
"Your company gave these guys the contract after their truck broke
down. You have a bed!"

The van guy, who was
wearing a dirty orange baseball cap over his scraggly blond hair,
turned to me and said, "
Appartement cinq?
'Ope Zee?
"

"That's me!" I burst out. Maybe my luck was
finally turning. It was a sign. I had an entire wardrobe again. I
could sleep in a proper bed. I could brush my hair instead of
combing it. My DVD's were back. I clasped my hands together. I
wanted to hug this heavy metal moving dude. "Thank you, thank
you!"

As he stared at me, nonplused, thunder
rumbled in the distance and I felt the first drop of rain on my
arm.

The moving guy raised his
eyes to the grey skies and summarized our feelings.
"
Tabarnouche
."

Chapter 17

I managed to get through the next few days
without seeing Alex, which gave me both a fierce satisfaction and a
burning epigastric pain whenever I was at the hospital. I'll never
make fun of someone with reflux or an ulcer again, I vowed to
myself. It hurts.

Still, I knew Alex would be at Grand Rounds
on Wednesday. No matter what rotation you were on, you were
supposed to attend family medicine Grand Rounds.

"I wonder what they're going to do for it,"
Tori had mused to me as she helped me unpack my living room on
Monday. "Kurt was supposed to present on partner abuse. He'd been
researching it for months. He showed us a stack of articles he'd
printed out. He asked if anyone knew graphic design and could help
make a pamphlet for the FMC to hand out. Robin told him that child
or elder abuse should have a higher profile in our community, but
Kurt was adamant. 'This is a still an under-recognized problem. If
family doctors don't tackle domestic abuse, who's going to do it?
Not the dermatologists or the cardiac surgeons! We're the ones who
follow people for years. If you want to do a presentation on child
or elder abuse, Robin, I'll be happy to clear some rounds time for
you.'" She smiled. "That made Robin very quiet."

I laughed and slit a box open with my Exacto
knife. "Really? I'd have thought he'd jump at the chance."

She laughed with me. "That's true. Maybe he
was trying to think of some good articles for it."

It was mean to make fun of Robin, but I
needed my jollies where I could get them. I sighed. "At least if he
was in our group, he'd volunteer to do all the presentations."

She shook her head, a dimple peeking in her
left cheek. "Don't worry. Dr. Callendar would never let him get
away with it."

"Figures. He wants to spread the pain." I
lifted the flaps of the box. Med school notes. Just about useless.
I pushed the box under my desk.

Tori just smiled and shook her head. I was
no closer to figuring out how she got into that demon's sweet spot.
She twirled a screw in my pine Ikea bookcase and made a face at the
divots and scrapes. "It's too bad the moving people ruined your
furniture. They banged up the front and back, so there's no good
side."

I threw up my hands. "I'm so happy to have a
bookcase, I don't care!" It made me think of Alex again. I so
wanted a boyfriend, I latched right on to him. Did he just seem
irresistible because I was desperate?

I remembered the way he touched my breasts
and blushed. No. It wasn't just desperation.

Tori clucked her tongue. "Ahem. Do you want
medical books in here or regular books?"

I shook my head. "Sorry. Yeah. I mean,
medical books. I'll keep regular books in the bedroom."

Her dark eyes were sympathetic. "You know,
he doesn't deserve you."

My face looped in a half-smile. "That's what
I keep telling myself." I picked up Henry. "Is he more
acceptable?"

She tilted her head to one side,
considering. "He is rather wooden." She smiled when I giggled. "But
I definitely admire his flexibility and his poker face. Yes, he's a
keeper."

We laughed as I went to help her figure out
how to space the shelves.

On Wednesday, Kurt made
the front page of both the Gazette and
La
Presse
. The Gazette lamented the belated
police investigation as too little, too late. A suspicious death is
a suspicious death. They should have erred on the side of caution
instead of assuming it was an accidental insulin overdose.
La Presse
did a sort of
obituary, talking about how Kurt had tried to overhaul St. Joe's,
but really exposing our fleabag quarters. They quoted a patient as
saying, "It doesn't inspire confidence when the curtain gets stuck
halfway around when you're getting an internal examination." I
wondered if it was my patient from Friday.

Funny. St. Joe's FMC was a splintering mess,
but I was already getting used to it. After Dr. Levine assisted me
with a pelvic exam, I now knew to caution the patient, "The curtain
may not work, sometimes it gets stuck, so I'll knock before I come
back. I have to go outside the soak the speculum in warm water.
I'll help you on to the table. The lamp may be broken..." Already,
I was adapting instead of outraged. I wondered if it was a good
thing.

For once, I had the morning off. I checked
my e-mail at the hospital, because my high-speed still hadn't been
hooked up at home. One of my Western friends sent me her new
address. My mother asked if I could make it to Kevin's end of
summer school play. Kevin said basically the same thing: HI. COME
HOME!!!!

I wrote back to all of them. Then I sat in
the residents' room, listening to the buzz of the computer and the
occasional footsteps in the corridor. Everyone else was hard at
work. It was weird to be here.

The room didn't smell as bad as usual. The
trash had been emptied. There were still cafeteria trays and
dishes, but it was all stacked on top of the fridge. There was even
a new ficus tree beside the computer. I touched the leaves. Fabric,
but still. Someone cared. I understood a bit why Kurt had tried. If
we all pitched in, we could do something about this place.

Kurt. I looked back at my computer screen.
"Click here to return to Yahoo! Mail."

I clicked. Back to the sign-in screen.
Instead of using my own ID, I typed in the one from the memo:
dr-kurt.

Yahoo was a public webmail system. If I
could figure out his password, I could access his e-mail. Of
course, if he was at all clever, I'd never be able to figure out
his password. I tried all the usual things: dr-kurt, kurt, vicki,
even mireille, under various capitalizations. I dug through my bag
for the orientation package and tried his phone numbers. If I knew
his birthday, I'd have tried that, too.

No dice.

The police had taken away all his personal
papers. The computer had been wiped. But the Internet had been
created to survive a nuclear attack. The information was waiting in
cyberspace, if only I could reach it.

I wanted to bang my head on the beige
monitor. For all I knew, the police had cracked his e-mail and were
even now tracking all the people who had met with him and talked to
him. But from what everyone said, it was a mammoth task. I just
wanted to take a look. See what didn't fit. That was the key in
detective books. They're always slipping you red herrings and
trying to make you suspect the most obvious person, but I could
usually spot the murderer because the person does something that
catches my eye. I'm no good at tracking alibis and calculating
motives, but I can still finger the guilty party.

The combination clicked behind me. I zapped
the screen closed just before Stan Biedelman threw open the door
and stared at me. "Hey. What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for rounds."

He gestured at the computer. "I'll go to the
library. I can pull a Robin and live there, researching useful
stuff like how speed can give you a headache and that's why doctors
shouldn't take drugs, even if you've been up for 36 hours."

"No, it's okay. I'm done." I stood up and
migrated to one of the couches. "How are you doing?"

He grinned at me. "I only have half a day of
internal medicine, and I get free food today. How do you think I'm
doing?" He settled down at the computer and opened Explorer. It
came up with the default window of St. Joe's hospital.

I laughed, relaxing. "Is the food
kosher?"

He waved his hand. "I eat the vegetarian
stuff. It's fine. I'm not that observant, anyway. I eat shrimp and
lobster." He started typing.

"Oh." I tried not to stare
at his
yarmulke
.

He chuckled and swiveled to look at me. "So
you're wondering why I wear the funny hat on my head?"

"Oh. No. Nothing like that." I brushed some
crumbs off the back of the sofa.

He roared. "Sure you are! It's okay. I'm
used to it. My family's more observant. So I do the Friday night
Sabbath with them and I wear this." He touched his head. "It
doesn't hurt anyone."

I was distracted by the alibi. "You do the
Sabbath on Friday nights?"

"Yeah. See, Saturday's our holiday—"

"I know that." At his
mock-astonished face, I said, "I used to read these books as a kid
about the
'All of a Kind Family.'
They were Jewish. But the point is, you were
celebrating Friday night? All night?"

He nodded, face clearing. "Yeah. So you can
count any observant Jews out. It's family night. We weren't out
murdering any goyim. So it wasn't me or Dr. Levine." He grinned at
my face. "You didn't know? Levine's a Jewish name and he's more
observant than me."

"I didn't consider Dr. Levine." I dug my
nail into the burgundy vinyl of the couch.

"So who are you considering?"

I didn't want to name Mireille or Alex, but
now that he'd mentioned it, they probably weren't Jewish. Certainly
Alex didn't have any family here, or a proper alibi after 10 p.m.
Every time I uncovered more information, it just opened a new,
Costco-sized can of worms. I covered my eyes. Now I'd be spying on
them during Grand Rounds. No wonder police did this as a full-time
job.

Stan started typing again. "Fine. You're
going to crack this case and don't want to share the evidence with
me. I understand."

I jumped.

Stan laughed. "Did you hear all the latest
shit? How they think it was an insulin overdose, but his drug
screen came back positive, so they're not sure?"

I gaped at him.

He cracked up. He even swiveled away from
the computer so he could pound his hand on the desk and cackle.
"Hey, detective, you should see your face!"

I shut my mouth with as much dignity as I
could muster. "Just tell me 'the shit,' Stan."

"All right, Sarge." He dialed down the
laughter. The flush in his face died down, too, and he shifted in
his chair. "I guess it's not that funny, but the way you talk about
excrement kind of is. You must have a lot of fun with your
patients. Anyway, these are all rumors, but the word on the street
is that they found GHB and excess insulin in his system and they
think the time of death was around 2 a.m, give or take a few
hours."