Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (8 page)

“Bless your heart,” Charmaine had said. “We’d welcome you with open arms. Sylvia was so upset she’s taking a few days off, and Darryl is out too. He seems to have the flu.”

“I know Sister Angel never takes a sick day,” said Barbara, setting the hook.

“Bark and I are trying to get her to take some time off,” Charmaine said. “She was up all night that night, doing a double shift. You know her. Evil is never off duty, so Sister Angel is always on.”

“Sister Angel is amazing.”

“So she is.” A little tartly, Charmaine added, “Everybody says so.”

“Sounds like you could use some time off yourself,” Barbara said with sympathy.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Charmaine said. “Not that I’m likely to get it.”

Charmaine, however, did not work nights. Sister Angel was sitting in the small glassed-in nursing station doing paperwork when Barbara stepped off the creaking elevator. The unit was dimly lit so that the patients, who had little enough privacy and all the discomforts of withdrawal, could try to sleep. For a moment, Barbara saw the nun, alone in the brightly lit cubicle, as a starship captain keeping watch in the night. Then the fancy vanished as Sister Angel bustled out to greet her—Look, Ma, I’m hugging a nun!—and exhort her to read or take or use anything she wanted, as long as she put it away in the same place afterward. As always, Barbara was surprised by how small and solid she was. Tonight she wore one of the postmodern abbreviated habits. Barbara had seen her both swathed in full medieval regalia and shopping for secondhand dresses and silly hats in the antique clothing stores on Broadway. She had danced up a storm at the staff Christmas party the year Barbara interned. Sister Angel’s order or community functioned very much in the world. She had her own apartment and seemed to be free to do anything she wanted, except, presumably, have sex. She exuded confidence, implacability, and conscience. And she was leaving.

“I’m about to go off duty.”

“I’m disappointed. I hoped we’d get to talk.” On the other hand, it left Barbara free to take a leisurely look for and then hopefully at God’s chart, which she had no earthly reason to be interested in. On the whole, she was relieved when Sister Angel gave her a brisk pat and a mild version of her famous glare, indicating that Barbara was there to work, not to talk, although she was too nice to say so. She left quickly, not bothering with the elevator but tap-tapping briskly down the stairs, unfazed by the dim light and whatever ghosts of violence haunted the stairwell. They wouldn’t discomfit Sister Angel. They wouldn’t dare.

Barbara stashed her handbag in a drawer that locked and went looking for the chart. The night nurse, a temp who knew little about the detox beyond what she needed to do her job, had wandered in and taken Sister Angel’s place at the desk in the nursing station. She didn’t find anything odd in Barbara’s scurrying back and forth and flipping through the charts in every cabinet. The active files lived in the most accessible drawers, but because so many of the clients were recidivists, the inactive charts were almost equally important. Barbara stooped, squatted, and stretched, while the nurse unselfconsciously played FreeCell on the nursing station’s computer. Occasionally a client in pajamas wandered in, wanting a glass of juice or a pill or the answer to a question, but mostly the unit lay quiet.

She had been too overexcited at the prospect of this task to write down God’s full name, and it took her half an hour of racking her brains, trying to remember if it began with a B or an H, to think of calling Bruce, who supplied “Godfrey Brandon Kettleworth the Third, like the kings of England,” and pointed out that Kettleworth began with a K. It took her another hour to get through the many drawers of charts, which were filed not in alphabetical order but according to a code that the exasperated Barbara decided it would have been challenging for military intelligence to crack and that had been instituted two years after her internship. She would have liked to take a look at Elwood’s chart, too, if only for comparison, but she couldn’t remember his last name either. She decided it wasn’t worth the energy to look into a death with no real mystery about it.

The search would have gone faster without the participation of the night nurse, who was bored enough to enter into the spirit of the hunt without asking any questions except whether Barbara had tried this unlikely location or that. Reluctant to alienate her or arouse any further curiosity, Barbara resigned herself to periodic smiles and thanks as the nurse helpfully spotted piles of charts on various desks, even though staff members were supposed to return them all to the chart room at the end of the day. In the end, she found God’s chart not in the chart room but under a stack of folders on Sister Angel’s desk.

Sister Angel’s tiny office was minimalist—no computer, no bookshelves, no décor except for a crucifix on the wall. However, unlike the nursing station, it had opaque walls. Barbara locked the door—Look, Ma, I’m locked in with Jesus on the Cross!—and settled down to read.

The chart had a heavy cardboard cover in an eye-zapping shade of lavender and was supposed to contain a written record of every single incident and bit of data relevant to God’s stay in detox. Each section was secured with long and wickedly sharp metal fasteners. Barbara knew from long experience that she would have to unfasten at least some of the pages and remove them from the chart in order to read everything. She had better remember to put everything back in precisely the same order. She didn’t want her presence to be noticed. One government agency or another audited the program at intervals, and every word written in the charts could and would be scrutinized. The detox could lose money or even its license if anything were found amiss. Staff did sometimes get sloppy, though. She needed to be careful.

God’s chart was thin and in excellent condition, which indicated to Barbara’s practiced eye that he had never been in detox on the Bowery before. Some of the oldtimers’ files ran to three or four volumes, stuffed with paper and falling apart, documenting their many admissions. She opened the lavender cover to the face sheet, which held the basic information collected on admission. Name, Godfrey Brandon Kettleworth III, exactly as Bruce had told her. Domicile, an address on the East Side. Not homeless, then—if he’d really lived there. She jotted it down. Some of the men used a relative’s address to collect their welfare checks or stayed intermittently on someone’s couch but, in fact, lived on the street. Date of birth. God had been fifty-six, old enough for Vietnam, and he’d told Bruce he was a vet. Not quite too old to die young. Social Security number. Even the most brain-fried guys remembered that, Jimmy had once told her. She had found it true even on the Bowery. Jimmy claimed that he didn’t need to know his because she was so codependent she knew it as well as her own. This both amused and annoyed her, because it was also true.

The medical part of the chart came next. Barbara flipped quickly through the lab reports. To her disappointment, the last one filed dated from December thirtieth, before God had left on pass. She scanned the sheet for street drugs or any other substance that would not have been prescribed. Nothing, at least through two days before New Year’s. Medical history, including alcohol and drug treatment. No one who abused alcohol and drugs for long enough got off lightly, and God was no exception. He had been treated for hepatitis B, an alcohol-related liver disease, and had had a bout of pancreatitis, which she knew was not only life threatening but extremely painful. He had broken a few bones, been wounded twice in Vietnam—scars noted—and passed through various detoxes a handful of times. Two inpatient twenty-eight-day rehabs, both expensive ones. He had completed neither. Treated for venereal disease in the early Seventies, probably another legacy of Vietnam.

Next came the psychosocial, many of its staggeringly intrusive questions prescribed by state regulations. This one ran eleven pages, two more than the one used at Barbara’s outpatient clinic. Are you sexually active? What is your sexual orientation? Have you ever experienced any kind of sexual dysfunction? If so, describe. Have you ever experienced any kind of sexual abuse or trauma? If so, when? Describe. What treatment, if any, did you receive? Have you ever been the perpetrator of sexual abuse?

Since stumbling embarrassed through her first psychosocial interview here, Barbara had learned some tricks for getting the answers. One was to put the questions in plain English. Have you ever had trouble getting it up? Are you into men or women? If you just read the questions off the page, you were dead in the water. You had to sound matter of fact, compassionate, supportive, and incapable of becoming judgmental no matter what you heard. Barbara reflected, not for the first time, that most counselors had more than their fair share of empathy as well as insatiable curiosity. They certainly didn’t do it for the pay.

For many homeless alcoholics, the road to the Bowery led through crime, with or without discovery and punishment. Even the toughest clients were in a vulnerable state at the point of detox admission. Barbara had heard them reveal an astonishing amount of information. But many wanted as little as possible on the record. God had been either one of these or pure as the driven snow. No item on the psychosocial could be left blank. It was one of the regulations. But if the client wouldn’t answer, there was a formula: Denied. All the sex and violence questions: Denied, denied, denied. She would have to ask Bruce if God had mentioned any significant history in those areas, other than the war.

God had not seen a psychiatrist. The service was too expensive to squander on clients who showed no signs of mood or thought disorders. Eleven pages of questions usually offered some clues as to whether the client was irrational or suicidally depressed. Darryl had done the mental status exam, which tested the client’s cognitive functioning. Not every counselor believed that the mental status questions were a reliable guide to whether a person could still think rationally. Barbara smiled, remembering how Bark used to rant about the stupidity of the mental status. “When I lived in a box”—Bark always said “in a box,” never “on the streets” or “on the Bowery”—“I didn’t give a damn who the President was. That’s no way to decide whether a man’s got all his marbles.”

Barbara flipped through to the family history. What made God different from the other drunks on the Bowery boiled down to money. A lot of money, from what Bruce had gathered. Family money made an excellent motive for murder. To trace God’s activities on his last day, they needed as much concrete information as they could get about his family. Barbara scrabbled on Sister Angel’s desk for a lined yellow pad and a pen, annoyed at herself for not thinking sooner about taking notes. She started scribbling as she read.

Father: Godfrey Brandon Kettleworth Jr., investment banker, deceased. Died of a heart attack at age seventy-three. History of alcohol or other drug abuse or dependence, denied. Mother: Augusta Brandon. She wrote, “God’s parents—cousins?” Fundraiser, deceased. Died at age sixty-one, car accident. Took prescription pills for “nerves.” That usually meant anxiety or depression. Darryl hadn’t asked the next logical question, whether she took the pills as prescribed. It would be interesting to know if God’s mother had abused medication. She could have been an addict, however respectable, and that, in turn, would have affected the whole family. Three sisters were listed: Lucinda Kettleworth, Emily Brandon Weill, Frances Augusta Standish. Lucinda might be single or too feminist to change her name. Emily had evidently married out of the WASP enclave. Frances must have married a Mayflower descendant. Bruce might know more about the sisters.

God wasn’t the family’s only substance abuser. Both grandfathers, a maternal uncle, and two uncles on the father’s side all had alcohol problems. He had also mentioned couple of drug-addicted cousins. God’s father might have been the family hero, the one who achieved while the others screwed up. And God was the only son. In a blue-blooded patriarchal family, he might have been considered a disgrace but still gotten all or much of the money. Barbara put down the pen, stretched her fingers, and rubbed at her scalp, wondering how on earth they were going to find out about the family finances. Even if they managed to track down and meet the sisters and other family members, the Kettleworths would not show them their income tax returns. Jimmy and his Internet skills would provide their best chance to learn what they needed. Jimmy took the honesty and integrity that AA considered essential to sobriety too seriously to be an actual hacker, but it was not for lack of ability.

Barbara skipped over the goals and objectives for the future that God was now not going to have and turned to the progress notes that documented every counseling session or activity, including medical care. Besides Darryl’s, she recognized several distinctive handwritings, including Charmaine’s and Sister Angel’s. Sylvia had written a whole page documenting his death. Even in the computer age, those who worked in a health care facility of any kind became very familiar with the handwriting of everyone they worked with. All this documentation was how the team communicated. Everyone needed to know what was going on. As Carlo in the Bronx put it, “Everybody’s job is harder if you write lousy notes.”

This team’s notes varied in both legibility and expressiveness. Boris spoke English fairly well but spelled creatively, and he formed some of his letters as if he did not quite believe everything he had been taught about the Latin alphabet. Darryl’s writing looked as if he had some kind of learning disability. If so, he had done a good job of compensating well enough to pass the counseling credential exam. He knew how to write clinically, in that the focus of most of his sentences was the client, not himself. As Carlo said, “‘The client opened up to me real good’ is not a clinical note.” But Darryl’s anger and dislike of God, fully described by Bruce, came through. “Client is resistant to group process. Client still in denial about his addiction. Client displays hostility to staff and grandiosity toward his peers.” The doctor, true to the profession’s reputation, had an unreadable scrawl. Sister Angel had the clearest and most disciplined penmanship.