Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (20 page)

“And intrusive,” Barbara agreed. “You’re right, Bruce, it’s unlikely anyone would tell at that point. But the questions do get asked, because if not, the program could lose its license and funding. And when you ask the same tough questions day in and day out, you get a feel for when there’s a story. So you persist. And sooner or later, you’d be surprised how many of them tell. They do come to trust us, you know, once they figure out we really care. At least the ones who actually want recovery do.”

“God was smarter than most of those guys. He’d make sure he didn’t drop any hints.”

“Smart don’t cut it for an alcoholic,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But he wasn’t brain fried.”

“So maybe smarter meant he had a guilty conscience. He might have needed to confess.”

“Amen,” said Jimmy softly. You could never quite take the Catholic Church out of the boy.

“So maybe one of the counselors suppressed the information,” I said. “What better way to protect confidentiality than not to write it down.”

“You’re not supposed to do that,” Barbara said. “You’re supposed to document everything and then guard the paperwork like the crown jewels.”

But we’d already proved that we could get at the charts. If we could, so could others.

“It would feel like a betrayal,” I said.

“For the client or the counselor?”

“Both.”

“Not writing down the hot stuff would be a kind of enabling,” Barbara said, “protecting the alcoholic from consequences.”

“So we’re back at codependency again, huh?”

“Well, we are,” Barbara said. “It’s an occupational hazard. The more intimate you are with an alcoholic or addict, the more you tend to rescue and enable. And what could be more intimate than a relationship that actually requires you to ask the person if he’s a child molester?”

“I’m stumped,” I said.

We all were. Who did this information point the finger at? It could have been a motive for anyone in the family. Brandy was Emmie and Sam’s son. Frances had said “we.” The family knew. How many of them subscribed to Frances’s view that he was “evil”? What did that mean to any of them? Not fit to live? Undeserving of the family money? Hadn’t they already hated how he squandered that in the course of going to hell?

“It’s all suggestive,” Jimmy summed up. “But we’ve still got questions, not answers.”

Barbara slammed the apartment door, stormed into the living room, and banged her backpack down on the coffee table so hard I jumped. I was having a nap on the couch while Jimmy improved his already encyclopedic knowledge of archery online. Had he ever shot an arrow from a bow? No, but he had designed more than one computer game about medieval warfare. If you asked him whether he liked Agincourt or the Norman Conquest better, he got the same ravaged look on his face that he used to as a kid if you told him he could choose between a Snickers bar and a Baby Ruth. How could you
choose
?

“Do you live here now?” Barbara snarled.

“Whoa, don’t shoot! I’m innocent! Do you want me to go home?”

“Hey, peanut, did you have a bad day? Sit down and tell us about it,” Jimmy urged pacifically. In real life, where he spends hardly any time, he’s the world’s most peaceful guy. “Bruce will get you a Diet Coke.” She lived on the stuff. I was so busy wondering how she could stand the chemical taste and lack of any interesting ingredients, such as hops or barley, that it took me a moment to realize he’d volunteered me. Jimmy could be sneaky.

“Double whoa,” I said. “I’m resting from a long day staying sober.”

Barbara laughed, thank goodness, and shoved me upright so she could plump herself down next to me on the couch. Our shtick entertains her almost more than it does Jimmy and me.

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to make the Long March to the kitchen. I’m just tired and cranky from my own long day.”

“More than usual?”

“Oh, I wasn’t at work. After needing us so badly I couldn’t go to Ohio—”

“Scenic Ohio,” I interjected.

“Right, scenic Ohio. Anyhow, somehow they found the time to send us all to this ethics workshop. I couldn’t say no because I need the continuing education hours for my counselor credential renewal.”

“You don’t like ethics?” I asked. “That sounds more like me.”

“Of course I like ethics—silly, I mean I take my professional ethics seriously and it can be interesting to talk about and definitely relevant to stuff that actually happens at work. But as a rule, I care more about the relational aspect of these workshops than the content.”

“She means she really goes to these things to see her friends and schmooze,” Jimmy explained.

“I did know most of the people there,” she said. “And that part was fun.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Bruce knows Charmaine from the Bowery. And Jimmy, you’ve met my friends Ruth and Eileen. They both work in outpatient programs like mine,” she said.

“What did they talk about?” Jimmy asked.

“It was a whole day! Actually, the part about Tarasoff was kind of interesting.”

“What’s that? Sounds like a number the Rockettes would do. Or a dish they’d serve at the Russian Tea Room.”

“Goofball,” said Barbara. “Duty to warn.”

“Warn me to shut up or you’ll do what?”

“No, idiot! Tarasoff. The therapist’s duty to warn a murder victim.”

“That would make it awfully easy to catch the murderer,” I remarked. “Much easier than how we’re doing it, running all over the city and going to Ohio and all.”

“Before, dodo. You’re the therapist. The client tells you in a session he plans to kill his ex-wife. You have to break confidentiality and warn the wife. There was a case in California where the family sued the therapist.”

“I know there’s a catch in there somewhere, but I can’t think what it is.”

“Well, it’s an ethical dilemma, which is why we spent more than half an hour discussing it. They also talked about child abuse. And sex offenders.”

“Did you bring up the thing about God?”

“I did. I fudged the details, said it was a case in my agency a couple of years ago.”

“And did the others think it was plausible a counselor might have kept that information secret, not put it in the chart?”

Barbara waggled her hand from side to side.

“Some did, some didn’t. The whole point of a workshop like this is to stir up controversy and discussion. Ethics is all about gray areas, really. Or at least you have to think harder about the gray areas than the black and whites.”

“What would be a black and white?”

“Oh, sex with a client.”

“Not like in the movies?”

“Definitely not like in the movies!”

“One of her pet peeves,” Jimmy added. “Anything else interesting?”

“Yeah, at lunch Charmaine got to talking about your corpse, Bruce—don’t look at me that way, I meant the old man in the laundry room, not God. I said we’d had a couple of unexpected deaths. And Ruth and Eileen said they’d had some in their programs too, clients who unexpectedly developed symptoms and didn’t make it in spite of every effort. Eileen was there when they did CPR. She made it quite a story, with Sister Agnes from her unit doing the mouth part and the janitor, who luckily had taken the training along with the clinicians, doing the chest compressions. She said he’s this stocky, very hairy guy and the sweat was pouring off his forehead onto his hairy arms, and he cracked two ribs—the client’s, not his. Eileen said they popped. And the client died anyway.”

“I wish you hadn’t shared that,” I said.

“Oh, no, Bruce, I’m sorry, I forgot you went through that with God.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t do the CPR, I was just there.”

“So was Eileen. She was terrified it would be up to her, because she hadn’t had the training for almost a year, and she wasn’t sure she would have remembered what to do. I could imagine. They make us take it too, and I always wonder if I’d rise to the occasion.”

“Not everyone can be a hero,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, and in the training film, the real-life CPR stories all have happy endings. I guess they don’t want to scare us. Anyhow, I don’t mind not being a hero as long as I’m not the damsel in distress.”

“Not much chance of that,” said Jimmy comfortably.

“I take that as a compliment,” Barbara said. “Oh, I almost forgot. Another client died at my place over the weekend. They told me when I called in. This is getting monotonous. He’s another oldtimer who came in drunk on Friday.”

“One of your own clients?” Jimmy asked.

“Carlo and I both worked with him,” she said, “and we referred him to the detox in our own hospital. Jeremiah—another alcoholic who outlived his liver. He got someone to sneak him in a fifth of vodka and managed to kill himself while the nurses’ backs were turned. Acute alcohol poisoning, cirrhosis, and kidney failure.”

“Three in your program,” Jimmy said, “two on the Bowery, and now your friends tell you other agencies are losing clients over the odds as well.”

“You say that as if it means something,” Barbara said. “Does it? And if so, what?”

“Let’s make a list,” Jimmy said.

Barbara and I went over and looked at the computer screen over his broad shoulders. He doodled on a graphics program as we talked. We watched him draw a little cartoon of a man dead in bed with a bottle lying beside him. He opened a spreadsheet and typed in “Dead Clients” in bold at the top of the first column. “Tell me the names you know.”

“Nick, in the Dumpster up at work,” Barbara said. “Old Daniel the following week, and this new one, Jeremiah, this past weekend.”

“On the Bowery,” I added, “Elwood and then God.”

“Eileen had one, when the janitor did CPR but it didn’t work, and Ruth said one at her program, I think, maybe more. I can call and ask.”

“Wait a sec, I’m filling in the agencies. If you can give me a bit more data, we may see a pattern. How about age?”

“I can’t give you numbers there. But all of them were older than God.”

“What do you call old?” I asked. When I was twenty, I thought everybody over thirty should be dead. But sobriety was giving me a new perspective.

“At the hospital,” Barbara said, “they’ve started calling fifty-five and over geriatric. You should have heard Carlo on the subject. He’s fifty-six, same age as God, and he had a fit. I learned a few Italian words I wouldn’t use in the Vatican.”

Jimmy gave her one of his Catholic looks.

“How about cause of death?” I asked.

“I’m thinking,” Barbara said. “Oh, they found alcohol and barbiturates in Nick. I didn’t mention it because we didn’t consider it as murder. We know he had a bottle, and he probably crawled in there to drink it in peace and then sleep it off.”

“Alcohol and barbiturates will kill you all right,” I said. “He did OD? Kind of old- fashioned combo these days, what with crack and the designer drugs.”

“Easy to get in a hospital, though,” she said. “Dilantin is a barb, and I bet three quarters of our folks have been on it at one time or another. Plenty of seizure disorders, whether they’re epileptics or have alcoholic seizures. And so are Fiorinal and Fioricet, which are painkillers—caffeine and aspirin or Tylenol with a barbiturate. They figure he got them on the street, but I bet they started out in the hospital. He didn’t have a prescription, that’s for sure.”

“All this fancy medical info,” I complained, “makes my head spin. Where I come from, we just said, ‘Gimme the blue pills, gimme the red pills, gimme the ones that’ll mellow me out and the ones that’ll blow my mind.’”

“Long ago and far away,” said Jimmy.

“Stop showing off,” Barbara said. “This is serious. Cause of death, overdose. He did have cirrhosis of the liver. Make a column for life-threatening illness. Let’s see if it’s separate from the cause of death for any of the others.”

“Didn’t you say he had liver failure?” Jimmy asked.

“No, that was Jeremiah. Although his cause of death was acute alcohol poisoning. It is confusing, that’s why we’re writing it down.”

“Okay, okay, I’m getting it,” Jimmy said. “And Daniel?”

“Now he had a seizure disorder,” Barbara said. “He would have had a prescription for barbiturates. In fact, he had a seizure on the unit on Friday. But they say he died of acute and chronic alcoholism. His organ systems collapsed. He drank on top of his Dilantin, too.”

“How about the old man on the Bowery?” Jimmy asked.

“Terminal cancer,” I said. “He was about to go to hospice.”

“Charmaine assumed he died of that,” Barbara said. “Maybe I should take a look at his chart too. They can’t screw up every Bowery autopsy, can they?”

Jimmy looked worried. “I don’t know if you should be wandering around there yammering about murder to all and sundry.”

“Yammering?
Yammering?
James F. X. Cullen, you are about to get your head handed to you.”

Jimmy did his imitation of a monolith. It’s as close as he gets to cowering.

“Okay, okay, unfreeze, I’ll let you live this time. Will you please restate your concern?”

“Yes, dear,” he said. “Because I love you so very much, I feel anxious when you investigate possible felonious acts in the very workplace of the possible felons. While I understand that you take every precaution, and that you are not only awesomely discreet but fully capable of protecting yourself from any possible menace, I wish to hell you’d take a bodyguard.”

Some days I’m glad I’m single. Most days.

We finished the spreadsheet after Barbara phoned Ruth and Eileen and got the missing information. Multiple deaths had occurred recently in both their agencies. And they’d heard of others from friends in other programs. These folks all tended to know each other. We could see a pattern. People who were expected to die eventually—except for God—had died sooner than expected, many of them from drinking and drug overdoses or some kind of lethal bellyache.

“What they really have in common,” said Jimmy, frowning, “is that they all died in the hospital or some kind of alcohol clinic. I know hospitals kill thousands of Americans every year, but it’s still odd.”

“I think so,” Barbara said. “Clients die, all right, but it used to happen when they
weren’t
in treatment. They’d relapse and disappear from the program. Usually, they don’t want to know us as long as they’re drinking.”