Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (24 page)

I didn’t plan to date Marlene for long. We both agreed we were too different to get serious. But she was affectionate, especially if bellowing like a banshee and scoring my back with trenches I could still see in the mirror three days later counts. I was glad to help her out with my favorite temp agency. I offered to meet her there the next Monday morning. I was due for a new assignment myself. What would really get her the job was her resume and her word processing test. But I could probably get her in to see my most loyal placement counselor without a three hour wait. I was even willing to give her a call when she hadn’t shown up an hour after the time she’d said she’d meet me.

The bad part started when the police answered the phone. They wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but I deduced it wasn’t good. I tried to minimize their interest in me, saying I was just a temp-agency acquaintance. It didn’t work. They told me to stay right there. Someone would come and talk to me.

A pair of cops showed up half an hour later. I had persuaded the detective on the phone to let me meet them in the lobby. I didn’t want to blow my relationship with the temp agency. It didn’t take much to make them put your resume on the bottom of the pile. The cops were one of those unmatched pairs the police go in for in the age of diversity, a big, bulky woman who looked Polish and a short café au lait guy who was probably a blend of African American and Hispanic. They told me right away that Marlene was dead. Her roommate—I didn’t know she had a roommate, it hadn’t come up—had found her strangled in her apartment. I hoped they would accept me as no more than a casual job-market acquaintance. But when I gave my name, which I certainly couldn’t refuse to do, they exchanged a glance that turned my bowels to water. Marlene had told her roommate about me. At least they couldn’t prove I’d made love to her right before her death. I hadn’t even seen her for a week. They took a swab of my cheek cells for comparison with something I didn’t want to think about. At least they didn’t send me to the restroom with a copy of
Playboy
and a paper cup. That really would have been the low point of my day.

On the bright side, the roommate’s story matched mine. I had met Marlene by chance at her boss’s funeral, which I’d attended with a friend of mine who was also a friend of his wife’s. We had impulsively gone to my apartment together. We hadn’t seen each other since, but we were friendly enough that I’d offered to help her with temping. And that was it. Marlene had told the roommate just what I’d told the cops. She’d added enough salacious detail about our afternoon in bed that it was hard to look the detective who interviewed me at the precinct in the eye. They also ran my name through the computer. They uncovered some turnstile jumping and a couple of drunk and disorderlies. I was lucky it wasn’t worse. If I still sometimes regretted every wild night and outrageous act I’d missed, at that moment I was glad I hadn’t tried them all. Especially any that, if I had, would have showed up in the police computer. I told them I was in AA, hoping that would improve the impression I made. I also said Sir a lot. Finally they let me go. They warned me not to leave town. Just like the movies. As if. And go where? Scenic Ohio?

When I got home, I called first Jimmy, then my sponsor. It felt great to have a right to two phone calls—the precious privilege of a free man. If they’d arrested me, I’d have used up my one call on Jimmy. He would do anything to help me, now that I was sober. And if he had to bail me out, Barbara would be breathing down his neck, consumed with guilt because she’d roped me into this and given me a hard time on top of it. Just as well I called Glenn too. Turned out he was a criminal lawyer. That gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling right away. My risk-taking days were over. Please, Lord, I prayed. Get me out of this, and I’ll never work without a net again. My sponsor was right. If the stakes are high enough, anyone can learn to pray.

Barbara got off the subway at Astor Place. She mingled with a crowd of playgoers heading for the Public Theater over on Lafayette and walked down past Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln had once made a speech. She felt nervous and forlorn. She had pooh-poohed Jimmy’s advice to cancel her night shift at the detox, insisting that she couldn’t go back on her promise to help Ed Bark out. But if she hadn’t been so furious at Bruce, she might have had his company tonight. She shouldn’t have accused him of thinking with his gonads. He was already freaked out enough by Marlene’s death and the police questioning. Nor could she forget, no matter how they all walked around it, the elephant in the living room: the time Bruce’s regrettable impulsiveness had led him to her own bed. It would have served her right if that incendiary piece of ancient history had come out in front of Jimmy.

Squaring her shoulders, she marched down the Bowery. One day at a time. She’d better focus on her two tasks for the evening, the one they’d pay her for and the next step in the investigation. With two members of Emmie’s family dead in addition to God, as well as an in-law’s employee, their suspicions focused on the Kettleworths. If Jimmy thought it was a family affair, she’d pointed out, they had nothing to fear in her going to the detox for one last look at the files. The trouble was, Jimmy argued, they weren’t sure. If it wasn’t the family, her snooping in the detox could put her in danger.

“I’m going so we can be sure,” she said, too caught up in the argument to listen to the flutter in the pit of her stomach. “We’ve got to rule it out.”

As usual, the elevator wasn’t working. She took the stairs up, thinking about all the stories she had heard, some but by no means all of them apocryphal. Those stairs had been the stage for a fair amount of mayhem over the years. The building was owned by the city, and not everyone who had business there was clean and sober. There had been shootings, stabbings, and countless muggings. Illicit drugs had been smuggled up those stairs and computers and other portable equipment with good resale value down them and out the door. The lights were never bright enough, and at least half of them were out at any time.

The night security man gave her a drowsy greeting and promptly disappeared. Barbara remembered he spent most of his shift either napping in the sub-basement or drinking coffee and playing the numbers at a hole-in-the-wall bodega down the block. This would be the last she saw of him that night. She had meant to borrow Sister Angel’s office again, but the door was locked, and the master key was probably in the security man’s pocket. The key box in Charmaine’s office was also locked. Bark always took his master key home with him. After making the rounds and exchanging a few words with those patients who were not already asleep, she settled down in the nursing station. She booted up the computer. She had not yet checked any of the electronic files. But first, she wanted to look at God’s chart one more time.

First, she had to find the chart. Last time, it had been on Sister Angel’s desk. If that were the case tonight, her mission had already failed. But no, a stack of charts lay heaped in a haphazard pile in a corner behind the copier. A sticky note on the topmost chart read, “Closed—file in dead storage.” Barbara blessed the blend of overwork and inefficiency that left the staff perennially weeks behind on filing. Dead storage was in the sub-basement, where stacks of file boxes piled up to the ceiling, and it took a derrick or a couple of weight lifters to shift them.

She took the chart to her desk and started to read. Instead of being overwhelmed by information, as she had on first reading, she now found the chart sketchy. She had learned more about God and his family in the interim than he had revealed in detox. She had little hope of finding anything new. Keeping her expectations low, she told herself, would spare her disappointment. So when she came upon a squeezed-in note in what she recognized as Charmaine’s handwriting, she felt an unanticipated flicker of excitement. It looked as if Charmaine had written it in later. Editing formal chart notes after the fact was against the rules—against the law, in fact. But the note had not been there when she had read the chart before.

Charmaine had used a lot of medical abbreviations: Hx for history, Sx for symptoms, Tx for treatment. Barbara frowned at “Hx sx sx, θ tx.” History, symptoms, symptoms, a Greek theta—what did that mean?—treatment. Huh? She puzzled it out. That second sx wasn’t for symptoms; Charmaine had meant sex or sexual. And the theta wasn’t a theta; it was a sloppy rendering of a minus sign enclosed in a circle, which meant something was negative or denied. God had a history of sexual symptoms for which he had denied ever getting treatment. She read on. Charmaine had written, as cryptically as possible, that a staff member had reported God’s admission of ideation—thinking about—sex with juveniles.

Had he also admitted to acting on his fantasies? Why hadn’t she blown the whistle on him? Health professionals were supposed to report suspected child abuse. If she hadn’t been sure, she wouldn’t have wanted to stigmatize someone on the brink of turning his life around. In that case, why had she gone back and added it? Barbara suspected that the seminar on ethics they had both attended had prodded Charmaine’s conscience. The omission had weighed on her, and in the end she had done the professional thing by putting it on the record. “Staff member reported…” God had talked about this not to Charmaine, but to someone else.

Who could the unnamed staff member be? Sister Angel? He might have associated a nun with confession, absolution, and confidentiality. On the other hand, Barbara had trouble imagining Sister Angel, that model of rectitude, failing to chart child molestation. What about Darryl? He was no stickler when it came to charting and reporting. But he and God had hated each other, according to Bruce. Darryl would surely have been the last person to whom God would admit his most shameful failing. Bark, then? All the patients talked to him. But he and God came from very different worlds. God would have had no particular reason to trust him. Or how about Boris? Clients trusted him too. His teddy bear physique and tuba voice made them feel safe.

She flipped through the chart again, trying to find the final lab report. Instead, she found another added note. “Lab reports bloodwork January 2 lost, computer error.” Whoever thought computers were going to solve all the problems of record keeping, she thought disgustedly, must be eating their words, and I hope they taste like iodine. They would never know now if God had picked up a drug, knowingly or not, on his last day out. This chart was not going to yield any more secrets.

Elwood’s chart was even harder to find than God’s had been. She finally located it in a drawer full of current patients’ charts. She sat down again and flipped through it. Now this was interesting. This time, Doctor Bones had
not
signed the death certificate. Because Elwood had died unattended, they had done an autopsy. Even more interesting, the old man had not died of cancer. Nor had he had a stroke or a heart attack. He had been smothered. They had found traces of fiber in his mouth and nostrils consistent with the rather coarse cotton sheets and pillowcases the detox used as bedding. That could not have happened by accident. Why had the police not followed up? Never underestimate bureaucratic incompetence, she thought.

The report indicated he had been given the usual sleeping pill. Barbara snorted, thinking of the hospital joke that sleeping pills are needed so the nurse on duty can sleep through the night. Someone in the detox had made sure he took it, maybe even given him an extra. No alcoholic or drug addict in any condition would ever refuse a pill. And then, that person had put a pillow over his face. Or maybe a wad of laundry: Bruce had found him in the laundry room. It had looked like a natural death, so the murderer had to have stayed long enough—or come back—to rearrange his body.

Why did detox staff not know this? The murderer must have gotten hold of the autopsy report when it arrived. An aide was supposed to sort the mail. But nobody, Barbara knew, had time to supervise the aide. In practice, the mail lay in a pile on the security guard’s desk, and everyone on staff helped themselves to whatever was addressed to them. Sometimes, as in this case, even if it wasn’t. The murderer had deliberately misfiled it. Why not destroy it? Its survival suggested someone who had been in the field a long time. The more experienced the professional, the more ingrained the principle: Never, never, never throw out a piece of official paper.

This revelation put the murders squarely back in the detox. Only a staff member could have killed Elwood, arranged him to look natural, intercepted the autopsy report, and hidden the chart. But it still raised a lot more questions than it answered. Why would anyone kill Elwood? He was harmless, and he was dying anyway, liable to get moved to hospice soon even if he survived longer than expected. And what did Elwood have to do with God? Barbara made a mental note to ask Bruce if he could think of anything—if he was still talking to her. But if someone in the detox killed Elwood, who had killed the old men in all the other programs, including her own? And where did the Kettleworths fit in? Or had someone else altogether killed Lucinda, Sam, and Marlene?

She put both Elwood’s chart and God’s aside and turned to the computer. She wanted to see the personnel files and any personal files the staff members kept. Jimmy had held forth many times on how predictable most people were when it came to choosing passwords. The supervisors, Bark and Charmaine, had access to all staff records. She started playing with their names and what she knew of their personal history. She had better take her time, nervous though she was. If anybody came in at the wrong moment, what she was doing would be hard to explain away. She struck out enough times for a full nine innings before the word “casino” worked: Atlantic City was the only place Bark ever went beyond a mile radius of the Bowery.

Before diving into the files, Barbara made sure the Internet connection was up. If she found anything interesting, she could upload it and email it to Jimmy. Printing would be too noisy. She glanced through the glass wall of the nursing station to the darkened ward. Everything was quiet. With luck, she would not be disturbed.