Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (6 page)

“Because of the name?”

“No, I vaguely remember some ongoing animosity. I steered clear of the whole thing.” Avoiding gossip and criticism was supposed to be good for your sobriety. Also, Jimmy wasn’t that interested in twentieth- or twenty-first century people. “After a few months he stopped coming to that meeting, and that was the end of it.”

“Would you remember who they are? The guys who didn’t like him?”

“If I think about it, probably. Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s bugging me. There was no reason he should have died. I have a feeling about it.” I handed Jimmy another garbage bag.

“You have a feeling? Tell me about it.” No question, living with Barbara has had an impact.

“I don’t know how. I’m only eleven days sober.”

“Asshole,” he said with affection.

“Creep.” We had been doing that routine since we were eight.

But I meant it. Not that Jimmy was a creep. That God’s death bothered me. Not just uncomplicated mourning, as Barbara called it, but the puzzle of it. I couldn’t figure it out. Had he overdosed on some drug he’d taken while he was out? Could something he’d eaten have killed him? Had he had some kind of medical problem I didn’t know about? I hadn’t heard the staff talking about anything like that. They’d seemed as surprised as I was. People die for all kinds of reasons. God could have gotten beaten up on the subway. I’d known a guy that had happened to. He’d died of a brain hemorrhage a CAT scan hadn’t detected. But God hadn’t come back looking damaged. Besides, if he’d had a random confrontation, he would have mentioned it. A fight with someone he knew, though, he might have kept to himself.

“They’ll do an autopsy, won’t they?” Jimmy tied off the top of the first bag expertly and heaved it in the general direction of the door.

“I’m not sure. They send him to the morgue without his designer label, they don’t think of arsenic and old lace. Did Barbara tell you about the old guy I found?”

“The one with cancer? Yeah. You gotta watch where you put your feet, fella.”

“Hey, I was doing my laundry. Being a good boy for once.”

“Grandmother, what a big halo you have!”

“Yeah, yeah. About God, though, the doctor probably signed the death certificate without thinking twice. If we want to know for sure, I know how we can find out.”

Jimmy caught the gleam in my eye.

“Oh, no.” He waved his finger at me for emphasis. “Oh, no, you are not roping Barbara into this.”

“You know she’ll love it. She loves snooping. She’ll thank me.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“All she has to do is get the head nurse or Sister Angel talking. She gets them complaining about the paperwork, they’ll open right up.” I was on a roll. “And she can check God’s chart. Death certificate, labwork. They urined all of us when we got back that day. Barbara could find out about the lab results. They’d grab her if she offered to work a night shift.”

Jimmy groaned.

“What if I say don’t ask her, as a favor to me? Please?”

I grinned. Jimmy knew better than I did that Barbara could outdo the Energizer Bunny when she got going.

“Come on, big guy. Do you really think she’ll wait to be asked?”

Going to meetings didn’t pay the rent. I needed a job. Jimmy didn’t need any help being a computer genius. So I drove up to the Bronx with Barbara a few days after New Year’s. She thought her hospital might be able to use a peon with a college degree. Well, not exactly a degree. More like a resume with a few exaggerations and a couple of outright lies. Alcoholics lie. Recovering alcoholics tend to stop lying when they work the Steps. But I figured I had a grace period. Besides, the trip uptown gave me an opportunity to run my ideas about God’s death by Barbara. No doubt she saw it as an equally golden opportunity to unveil her plan for my continued sobriety.

I hadn’t counted on the fact that Barbara listened to the radio when she drove. She had it preset on a country station in New Jersey. Pretty funny, Barbara going for an art form that consisted almost entirely of stories about alcoholism, infidelity, and domestic violence. But she knew all the words. She even sang along.

Nor had I counted on my own fuzziness at seven in the morning. It had been so long since I’d gotten up early that I’d forgotten how at that hour my brain resembled a stack of IHOP pancakes. The few thoughts that trickled through the fluff were thick and sluggish as cheap syrup. Her heater was on the fritz, so it was cold. We could both see our breath. I kept my hands in my pockets. Barbara had thick mittens on and had to concentrate to compensate for the clumsiness of her steering. So we rode mostly in silence, apart from the yodeling and steel guitars.

“You can come up to my unit first,” she said during a lull, when she had turned a particularly obnoxious car commercial down to barely audible. “There’ll be coffee and donuts at the staff meeting. There are always donuts in a hospital.”

“Like police stations.” I’d seen more of those than hospitals.

“You’ll have to leave, though, when we start to discuss clients. I’ll get someone to show you where the Human Resources office is. They don’t get in till nine, anyhow.”

Fine with me. The thought of hearing what the professionals thought of guys like me gave me the creeps. Barbara’s unit was outpatient, not detox. But it was still too close for comfort. She went back to Nashville and I retreated into my own not particularly cheerful thoughts until she turned in at a set of massive gates at the entrance to the hospital campus.

“That’s it? Looks more like an Art Deco hotel than a hospital.”

“It’s the balconies,” she said. “It was built as a TB sanitarium back in the Thirties, when the only remedies they had were fresh air and sunshine.” She maneuvered between two gas guzzlers with vanity plates parked way too close together. “Let’s make a left here, maybe it’s not too late to get my favorite parking spot. Oops! Now what?”

A hospital security guard barred our way, holding up a big gloved hand, palm out. Barbara rolled down the window, stuck her head out, and called, “Good morning! What’s the problem?” To me, she added, “Only an idiot makes enemies in the parking lot.”

The guard strolled up to the car. He was securely wrapped in heavy fleece-lined leather. A bright red and green scarf circled his neck at least three times. It looked like his elderly mother had knitted it for him for Christmas.

“Sorry, miss, you’ll hafta wait. We just found a body in the Dumpster over there.” With the chattiness of a born gossip in a job that probably lacked excitement most of the time, he added, “I always say they got some nerve leaving it there permanent like. Takes up half the spaces in that row.”

“I know what you mean,” Barbara agreed. “How many times have I been late because I had to circle around and around looking for an empty spot? But how awful!” She meant the body. “Who was it? Do they know?”

“An old guy, musta been out there all night. He musta climbed in there, looking for a place to sleep, maybe. One a them homeless. They’re everywhere these days. Covered with vomit. Nearly upchucked my own breakfast when I went ta take a look.”

Thank you for sharing, as they say in AA.

“Not a patient?”

The guard shrugged. “Had his clothes on, anyhow.”

“He could have been one of our outpatients,” she told me. “Our clients don’t wear hospital gowns.” To the guard, she said, “Do you know if they’ve identified him?”

The guard snorted. “Think them high and mighty cops are gonna tell us?” Hospital security ranked lower on the totem pole than the NYPD, and it obviously rankled.

“Stank a booze, all right.” The guard answered her next question before she asked it. “Pee-yew. I don’t envy the guys who gotta cart that meat away.”

A Mercedes with MD plates blatted a demand for attention.

“All right, all right, there, hold your horses!” He swaggered away to engage in a power struggle with the driver. Dr. Big couldn’t see why he should have to wait like us mortals while the ambulance loaded up the dead man and took him away.

Barbara grinned when security won.

“Only an idiot or an arrogant doctor,” she said.

The meeting had already started when we finally got there. A burly, silver-haired, hawk-nosed guy who looked like a kindly banker and talked like a movie mafioso seemed to be leading it.

“Carlo, the head counselor,” Barbara murmured in my ear. “Drug addict, been in NA for decades, used to be a loan shark.”

Carlo stopped talking and raised an eyebrow.

Barbara waved a casual hand at me.

“My friend Bruce. He’s going down to HR as soon as they open. Okay if he stays till we get clinical?”

“Sure. Hi, Bruce. Have a donut,” he said.

I nodded my thanks. Someone handed me a jelly donut and a Christmas napkin. Someone else kicked a chair my way. Barbara had already found a seat. She inched it over so I could squeeze in next to her. Locating the coffee urn across the room, I poured a stiff one for each of us before I sat. I sipped mine gratefully. With luck, I might even wake up soon.

“Okay, people,” Carlo said, “we’ve got an audit coming up next month. Supervisors, you’d better do a spot check of everybody’s charts. If there are too many gaps, we’ll form a chart review committee to check every chart.”

This was evidently unwelcome news. Groans resounded all around the room, and three people sought consolation by taking another donut. Barbara took advantage of the ensuing pause.

“Do you guys know they found a dead man in the parking lot?”

More groans. Several people offered tales of woe involving parking, interrupting each other and, in a couple of cases, spraying powdered sugar all over their front. I could see how Barbara felt at home here.

“Forget the parking, guys. I was thinking—could he be one of ours?”

A slightly shamed silence fell.

“He is one of ours.” A severely dressed woman in her forties stood in the doorway. She had a British accent and the face of a well-bred horse.

“Dr. Arnold. Unit chief,” Barbara whispered. “Brilliant neurologist. Knows all about addictions. Looks scary, but she’s a pussycat.”

Dr. Arnold stalked over to the coffee table and plunked down a large box of Krispy Kremes. I shrank down in my chair like Frodo hiding from the Eye of Sauron. I didn’t want to get kicked out just when it was getting interesting.

“A client? Who was it?” someone asked.

Barbara’s running commentary got softer, hardly more than a warm breath in my ear. “Sister Perseverance. Nursing nun, been here even longer than Carlo. They call her Sister Persistence.”

In turn, I put my lips to Barbara’s ear.

“Not to her face, I assume.”

“Persy, I’m sorry,” Dr. Arnold said. “It was Nick.”

“Oh, no!”

“What a shame!”

There was a general outcry. The dead guy, Nikolai, was a Russian immigrant who had been in and out of the clinic for years. They thought he must have crawled into the Dumpster either with or in pursuit of a bottle of vodka and gotten too sick to climb out or shout for help. Or he might have passed out and gotten sick later on. Security guards patrolled the grounds at night, but they’d missed him. They had a lot of territory to cover. Security was understaffed, like every other department in the hospital.

“We won’t get autopsy results for a while,” Dr. Arnold said. “We all know how it is around the holidays.”

“The staff are as bad as the patients,” Sister Perseverance sniffed. “It should be a holy time. There’s altogether too much whoop-de-do in this hospital.”

Barbara snorted coffee out her nose at that one. A couple of other people snickered too.

“How many Christmases had Nick spent in this program?” someone asked.

“Fourteen, I believe,” said the nun.

Barbara whispered, “They don’t call her Sister Persistence for nothing.”

“And damn few of them sober,” Carlo said.

Dr. Arnold frowned at him. “And some of them were sober. Give yourself—and Nick—credit for that.”

“He had cirrhosis,” another woman said. “Even if he’d stayed sober, he couldn’t have lasted forever.” Liver damage past the point of no return. I’d been lucky so far. It could have been me.

“Did he have family?” someone asked.

“No,” Carlo said. “A sister in Brooklyn, down around Sheepshead Bay, died a couple of years ago. He lived in an SRO.”

A welfare hotel. Poor Nick. What a depressing life. What a lonely, humiliating death. I was almost glad that Dr. Arnold noticed me at that point and kicked me out. Barbara told me later that I didn’t miss anything. Silence had descended, and then the whole group sought comfort by finishing off the donuts.

Barbara had the rest of my day all planned. Rather than let me go back to Manhattan after I filled out the job application, she pointed me at a lunchtime AA meeting within walking distance of the hospital and ordered me to go to the Bronx Zoo in the afternoon.

“Panda therapy?” I inquired.

“There are no pandas at the Bronx Zoo,” she said.

“Gorilla therapy, then.”

“It will do you good. Just do it.”

It was cold at the zoo, and a lot of the animals that were usually outside were inside. But to my surprise, I enjoyed it. I spent a long time gazing at the gorilla. I couldn’t decide if he was sad or pissed off, but he looked like he needed a meeting. When Barbara got off work, I met her at the hospital and we drove downtown, past a helluva lot of commuter traffic going the other way, to their apartment on the Upper West Side.

It was the first time I had been invited to their place in years. They may have thought I hadn’t noticed, but I had. Jimmy would talk to me on the phone for hours, or he would meet me at a meeting, and Barbara would meet me for coffee any time. But neither of them wanted to be around me when I drank. Jimmy knew my altered states on everything from ’ludes to speed. He could always tell. So I hadn’t been there in a very long time.

They lived in one of those prewar buildings that had never had any pretensions to being classy but was built for solid comfort and never came anywhere near going downhill. A genuine live elevator man ran the elevator. All Albanians, Barbara told me, because the current super was Albanian. The guy who was on when we got there had limited English and a terrible sense of humor. I guess he told us an Albanian joke. He wouldn’t open the elevator door until he’d reached the punch line. Talk about a captive audience. I didn’t understand a word he said, but he found himself excruciatingly funny. We had to wait politely until he stopped laughing and slid open the cagelike grill to let us out.