Nothing Personal (10 page)

Kate nodded as she passed. He never saw her, which was interesting considering the fact that there couldn’t have been too many bald women in scrubs, crutches, and Seattle Mariner caps roaming Administration. Any other time, Kate might have forced the issue. Instead, she just kept on walking. She’d had enough for one day.

By the time Kate made it back upstairs, her head was throbbing and the room was spinning. She probably should have crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head, but she couldn’t seem to gather the energy to do even that.

She just dropped into the wheelchair that had been scooted over by her bed and faced the blank wall by her headboard and listened to the sounds of the hospital as the evening shift took hold.

She expected B.J. to be the one to find her there. He didn’t. Jules did, flipping on the light
and catching Kate as she sat staring at a perfectly empty brown wall.

“I hate this fuckin’ place,” Kate said, not caring who it was who answered at this point.

Jules plopped herself down on the bed and pushed the controls to raise the head. “Figuratively, generally, or specifically?” she asked, as the bed whirred and the intercom announced interfaith services in the chapel.

“All three. If I had a half a brain, I’d just quit.”

Jules plumped the pillows and stretched out on Kate’s bed so she was facing the opposite wall where game shows ruled on the television. “You used to have half a brain,” she said evenly. “I think the Bagel Man sold it to one of the South Side restaurants for sandwiches.”

Kate lifted her hands in listless agreement. “I knew there was a reason I kept accepting those invitations to be a carpet tester.”

A hospital term for visiting Administration, the only hallway with the good plush stuff. The wags said it was because it saved wear and tear on the knees.

Jules didn’t move. “Again? Shit, girl, what’d they do, offer you a job?”

At least Kate could still laugh. “Oh, yeah. They want me to take over that hospitality position. You know, the one that teaches all the good little nurses how to be sensitive to their clients. Said I was a natural.”

“I’ll believe that about the time I believe Gunn takes the vow of poverty.”

Kate grinned. “Or Weiss takes the vow of chastity.”

“Or you take the vow of obedience.”

“Up the rebels.”

“Up the rebels.”

For a minute the two of them simply rested where they were, Kate with an unblocked view of her oxygen and suction outlet, and Jules watching the tinny excitement as a construction worker from Peoria spun the wheel. Kate imagined people were jumping up and down on the screen.

“What did they want this time?”

Kate sighed. Her first instinct was to unload. Any other time, Jules would have been the first to hear of Kate’s latest foray into the land of the plush rugs. Kate knew her friend would be good for a little commiseration, a little outrage on Kate’s behalf. But then it sank in what they’d just said. What it could mean. What that little visit downstairs had really been about.

Up the rebels.

Kate looked over at her friend to find Jules transfixed by the action on television.

“Buy a vowel, you jerk,” the big woman offered laconically, not even noticing how silent Kate was.

Kate opened her mouth and then closed it again. She wondered just what to say. She wondered, for the very first time, who really could have killed Mrs. Warner.

Jules had been the one to say it: Damn near any person on seven floors could have killed the supervisor. The word about those MAO inhibitors had been on the grapevine ever since Evelyn had bitched to the people in the cafeteria that she had
a tough time eating there because the cheeses they insisted on using were strictly against her new diet regimen. The diet regimen that was enforced because of her medication. It hadn’t been too tough to come up with the corresponding chemical group.

All somebody would have had to do was check the
Physician’s Desk Reference
kept at each and every nursing station in the hospital to see what else Evelyn couldn’t mix with her medicine. The list was long enough and the contraindicated medications unrestricted enough that anybody with a modicum of initiative could have gotten his or her hands on them and mixed the lethal cocktail.

It wasn’t that Mrs. Warner was dead that finally upset Kate. It wasn’t really that she had been murdered. It was that any of Kate’s friends could have been the culprit.

Any of them.

Jules looked over finally, a small frown marring her high forehead. “Kate?”

What did she say? God, what did she say, knowing the note was hidden in her nightstand drawer waiting for B.J.? Knowing whoever had written it had given it to Kate as a gift. Knowing there were a limited number of people in this hospital who would give Kate a gift of any kind.

“They want me to help them catch whoever offed Mrs. Warner,” she said, hating herself because she watched Jules for her reaction.

Jules didn’t disappoint her. She did probably the most classic double take recorded west of Burbank.

“You?” she demanded. “Good God, why?”

“I don’t know.” Maybe because they think I know the murderer. Maybe to prevent me from protecting him. Or her. “I think they just want John to keep an eye on me.”

Jules’s grin was purely salacious. “He could keep an eye on me, that’s for damn sure.”

“And what about those eight kids he has?”

“I’d make each of them cute little moccasins with skunk fur. They’d be the hit of their class.”

Kate turned her attention to the closed drawer in front of her. “Who do you think it was?” she asked.

Jules didn’t even bother to lift her head from Kate’s pillow. “You mean who might have been pissed enough at Warner to box and bag her? You want the list alphabetically or chronologically?”

Kate simply settled her aching head onto her hand. “Yeah,” she admitted. “That was kind of my reaction.”

“They really think it was one of us?”

Up the rebels
. Kate’s favorite term. One many of the crowd in ICU and ER had picked up. A message within a message.

“You got any better ideas?”

“What about her husband? Her mother, her sister, her brother? Didn’t anybody have any insurance on her or anything? I heard the reason for the antidepressants was that her husband walked out on her. Maybe this was his way of getting a good divorce settlement.”

Once again, Kate tested herself for reaction to Mrs. Warner’s death. Nothing but a growing dis
tress that she was going to know who the murderer was. That she was going to like the murderer better than the victim. “Unless her husband is a drug salesman with samples falling out of his pockets, I don’t think he had opportunity.”

Jules went back to Vanna White. “Good point. Well, I feel sorry for John. He’s gonna have to wade through about eight hundred staff members if he wants somebody with an itch against Warner.”

“What about Attila?”

That got brand-new attention. “What about Attila?
You
killed
her
.”

“Maybe not.”

“You mean we bribed Security for a copy of those Polaroids for nothing? Three people on day shift were going to erect a shrine to you.”

For some reason, this was the moment Kate first really became afraid.

“Knock it off, Jules. Attila didn’t deserve that.”

“Of course she did,” Jules retorted briskly. “You didn’t see the way she bounced you around when you were up there. She had all the compassion of a pit bull and half the brains.”

“And that’s a reason for murder?”

Jules didn’t answer right away. The action must have been intense on the television, because the light flickered across her eyes like heat lightning. “All I know is that a lot of people out there have been feeling vindicated in the last couple of days. I’ve even heard the term Robin Hood bandied about.”

“Robin Hood stole money. He didn’t commit murder.”

Jules shrugged, her eyes serious. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry. The preachers in my church have a great line in holy vengeance, and I think those two bats deserved a little.”

It wasn’t the time for B.J. to show up. He did anyway.

“Shout a little louder,” he suggested dryly, strolling in with Chinese food. “The crowd in radiology probably missed that last part.”

Jules wasn’t in the least perturbed by the interruption. “Do you think I should feel guilty for not being upset that Warner’s dead?” she demanded.

“Fuck guilt,” B.J. said simply. He set the food down and pulled over another chair. His hair was down tonight, which meant he was off call. It made him look like a pirate, especially since he’d evidently decided not to shave. He was wearing old boots, older jeans, and a fairly new Grateful Dead T-shirt. Kate passed a moment considering the fact that as a psychologist he made a great steamroller.

“See?” Jules demanded of Kate with a wave in B.J.’s direction. “What’d I tell you? And this is a man who deals with murder and mayhem for a living.”

“I hear from my sources that you have been approached to play Nancy Drew,” B.J. said. “What did you tell them?”

Kate did her best to smile. “To fuck off.”

“Really? That’s not the way it sounded just now.”

“So tell me,” she said. “Should I feel guilty because I’d rather protect my friends than find a murderer?”

“You’re not going to do it?”

She closed her eyes. She shook her head. “Nope.”

She heard B.J. dig into the bag of food. Then he offered his best couch-side manner. “Fuck guilt.” This time it wasn’t enough.

“You can’t mean to drink that shit with Chinese food,” Jules objected.

Kate didn’t even have to look to know what she was talking about.

“I drink it with everything but whiskey,” B.J. answered equably.

Jules shook her head. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s an acquired taste. Like fine wine.”

“Flat Doctor Pepper?”

He popped the screwtop on the plastic two-liter bottle. The hiss of escaping carbonation was conspicuously absent. “Shaking out the bubbles is a great stress reducer.”

He’d gotten addicted to it in ’Nam. Flat, warm Dr Pepper, his taste of home, because nobody else in the world drank it, and that was the only way he could get it over there. He’d told Kate one night when he’d been three or four sheets to the wind. Since she understood the need for security perfectly well, she’d been the only one never really to harass him about it.

B.J. made the mistake of thinking he could dig into his Szechuan chicken without interference.

“
Code blue, physicians’ lounge, first floor. Code blue, physicians’ lounge, first floor
.”

All three of them looked up at the ceiling at once, as if waiting for explanation.

“The doctors’ lounge?” Kate demanded. “What the hell’s going on?”

Codes happened in the ER, surgery, or the units. A code in the invitation-only world of the private doctors’ lounge meant just one thing.

“
Doctor O’Brien, please call extension one-four-four-five stat. Doctor O’Brien, call extension one-four-four-five stat, please
.”

“I’m off!” B.J. snapped, as if that would settle it. Even so, he reached around Kate and picked up the phone.

“That’s the doctors’ lounge number,” Kate advised tersely, her palms suddenly sweating.

“I hope it’s somebody worthwhile,” Jules muttered, her attention finally pulled from the game show.

“John?” B.J. barked into the receiver. “You know damn well I’m not on. You already called the investigator. Just pretend you didn’t see me in the hall.” He was frowning. The frown deepened as he listened. Then he sighed. Kate could hear the dissonance of disaster even through the earpiece. “Oh, all right. I’ll be down.”

“What?” Jules demanded as he hung up. “What?”

But it was Kate whom B.J. faced with the news, his expression bemused. “You know a Doctor Fleischer?”

Kate did her best to breathe past the sudden anxiety. “Sure, we’re old friends. Why?”

“He just had a cardiac arrest while talking to John McWilliams about a certain nurse who can’t seem to get it into her head not to buck the system.
John figured, since I’d handled the other two staff deaths, I should probably just make it a hat trick.”

Kate realized she had placed her hand on her chest, much as Sister Mary Polyester was so fond of doing. She didn’t even think to ask why they’d been talking about her.

“He thinks somebody tried to murder Fleischer?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I’d think his drinking finally caught up with him…. No, I’d guess I’d hope it had. Is he…?”

B.J. shrugged. “Every chief of service in the hospital is down there working on him.”

It was left to Jules to state the obvious. “Then he doesn’t stand a chance in hell.”

JULES WAS RIGHT
. She and Kate followed B.J. downstairs in time to see Parker screaming that he was only going to take orders from one doctor at a time, he didn’t care how many initials they had behind their names. Considering the fact that the heads of neurology, urology, psychiatry, and pediatrics were all trying to give orders as fast as the code team and chief of medicine, Parker had his work cut out for him.

Kate had witnessed a few disasters in her time. This was an out-and-out cluster fuck. She could see well-shined tassel loafers sprawled out next to the coffee table. The rest of the patient was camouflaged by one of the techs doing CPR, three nurses from ER trying to squeeze the red crash cart into a fifteen-by-fifteen room with all the milling degrees and half the administrative staff, who stood in a kind of desperate tableau, as if just the collective cost of their suits could somehow provide critical mass and get the heart started.

There was more shouting than in the bleachers at a Cardinals game, and certainly worse language.
At one side, Tim was valiantly trying to convince the honchos to move the patient to ER for the rest of the code. Across the room, the chief of urology was screaming for a catheter, and Parker was ignoring him as he rifled through the crash cart for drugs. The only one seeming not to get much attention, except from the poor tech who was by now perspiring onto his patient, was the body attached to the loafers.

John McWilliams met them in the doorway, looking more irritated than upset. “You believe dis, doc?”

B.J. didn’t bother to go in and add his two cents’ worth to the rest of the useless advice that ricocheted around the carpet-and-leather-decorated room. Instead, he took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth without lighting it.

“What happened?”

“We was discussin’ a question ’bout a certain employee, who should
not
be here to complicate t’ings, Kate Manion.”

Kate didn’t bother to take her eyes off the action, using a crutch to hold her place against two guys from housekeeping who were trying to get a peek. “Nice to see you too, John.”

Gunn had just showed up. Trailed by several of his nervous minions, he parted the crowd before the door like Moses hitting the edge of the Red Sea, his sole reaction to the disaster an impatient frown.

“This had damn well better be an accident,” he warned blackly, as if it would make a difference. “I already have three reporters in my office
about the last one…. Does that nurse have on
knee socks?
”

“And what?” B.J. prodded John, not even noticing as the retinue swept past.

“Dis Fleischer, he offer me a cup of coffee in here. Says he has to meet somebody else here anyway, and he hasn’t had a chance to fill his own mug yet today. So we’re talkin’ ’bout five minutes, an’ he suddenly starts wheezin’. Pulls at his tie. Gets all bug-eyed and goes down twitchin’ like a landed carp, you know what I mean. Den ever’body in the room yells, “‘Oh, shit—’”

Kate nodded. “That’s medicalese for ‘I think he’s in trouble. Somebody call a code.’”

B.J. was still watching. “Nothing suspicious?”

“He scowled at his coffee, like it was too strong.”

“You have any?”

“Yeah. Was fine.” John held up the paper bag he’d been carrying. “I got his mug stashed before all dese nice people show up.”

“Suspicious little puppy, aren’t you?” Jules asked, without looking away from where the chiefs of cardiology and medicine were arguing over recommended doses of steroids.

John’s smile would have made Kate nervous if she didn’t know he hated the sight of dead animals. “It’s why I be de best, little girl.”

“Wheezing,” B.J. mused.

“Anaphylactic reaction?” Kate asked.

“Anybody know if he was allergic to anything?” B.J. asked.

“Sure. Everything. He ended up in the ER after dosing himself for the clap once.”

B.J. seemed to slump. “Great. Just great.”

Kate shook her head in wonder. “If this is our killer again, it’s definitely an inside job. And he’s better than we thought.”

Everybody turned to her on that one. Kate turned to Jules.

“If you wanted to make sure a doctor died, where would you have him drop over?”

Jules’s grin was damn near malicious. “Doctors’ lounge. He’d be dead before they could agree who goes first.”

Which was precisely what happened to Dr. Fleischer. By the time they had a clear-cut chain of command, he was in irreversible shock. It took them another full hour to pronounce Fleischer dead, simply because every physician in the room saw himself or herself lying there. By that time, Kate was long since back up in her room considering the vagaries of fate and justice.

“What do you think?” she asked in a very small voice, some ninety minutes later.

B.J. didn’t bother to look up from the paper that swung gently from the forceps he’d swiped. He shook his head.

“Aren’t you a lucky girl? Seems like everybody has something to say to you.”

Kate rubbed a hand over her face. She’d waited for the dust to settle downstairs before paging B.J. back upstairs to where his dinner still waited for him. In point of fact, she’d half hoped she’d waited long enough for John to have decamped along
with the medical examiner’s van. One step at a time. One fight at a time.

She’d spent the last two hours trying her best to envision any of the people she knew as a coldblooded killer, somebody careful and quiet and determined. She couldn’t. The people she knew who could be frustrated enough even to consider something this drastic all had good hearts. They simply weren’t the kind of people to destroy.

But then she’d looked at it from the other side. Which of the people she knew could have been driven to something like this? Who could be so angry, so burned out, so disillusioned that he or she would think the only way to change the status quo would be with poison?

When she did that, she realized almost any of them qualified, herself included.

She was certainly no stranger to the cold rage that bubbled so close to the surface most days it only needed one very small catalyst to simply explode. She’d certainly plotted her share of revenge against the interchangeable herd of MBAs who seemed to have collectively ruined the practice of modern medicine. She knew, even though she would never tell John, that she’d probably made the same threats on the night when that little boy had lain dying in her ER—and had meant every word.

She wanted to hide the note, to protect a person she might know too well. She did the next best thing. She made sure it was B.J. who saw it first.

He was the one sitting in the wheelchair now,
his feet propped on the end table, his Szechuan chicken in his lap, the evidence dangling dangerously close to the hot sauce.

“Tell me it’s nothing,” Kate begged.

“It’s nothing,” he lied obligingly. “You didn’t tell John about it yet, did you?”

Kate concentrated a moment on the Pig Nurses cap she held in her hand. “No. I wanted to talk to you first. And then Fleischer got nailed.”

B.J. actually looked over. “I do bodies, Kate, not this shit. What did you think I was going to say to you?”

“That it was a sick joke or something, I guess. That it isn’t somebody I know doing this.”

He went back to chewing and studying. “Not this time. The ‘up the rebels’ part is a dead give-away.”

Kate shut her eyes. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

She thought of the pandemonium at McGurk’s, glasses lifted, eyes bleary, voices raspy and off-key. She was furious that one of them might have betrayed them all by turning their personal battle cry against them.

“Any ideas?”

She shook her head. “Not one. I don’t suppose somebody could think I was the one really doing this and just want to comment, could they?”

“Possible. According to John, the only real message he’s gotten so far from this is that no matter who’s suspected there will be plenty of help making bail.”

“You didn’t tell me you were reopening
Attila’s file. Do you really think there could be some relationship?”

B.J. went about dropping the note back into the bag and gingerly setting it on the nightstand. “Maybe not. Wouldn’t we look stupid if there was and we missed it, though? Especially now that we have a third suspicious death at the hospital to investigate.” He went back to his dinner, as if his next question weren’t that important. “Why won’t you help the investigation?”

“Because I don’t have a mother I can go home to who’ll make me feel better,” she said quietly. “I only have you guys.”

B.J. considered her as he pulled out a cigarette and rolled it around between thumb and index finger. “And what if one of us is a murderer?” he asked.

She couldn’t help it. Faces flashed in her mind. Jules and Tim. Sticks and Parker and Edna. Suzie. Hetty. Weiss and Beller and a hundred others. People she thought she knew, people she liked or didn’t like, trusted or resented or respected. People she’d come to need in her own way, kept carefully at arm’s length with humor and challenge so they couldn’t be disappointed and turn her away. Friends where she needed family and had none. She simply could not allow one of them to be a criminal.

“I’m not sure I care.”

He just nodded. “I think for your own sake you should probably think about it, but if you can’t, you can’t.”

“Why?” she asked immediately. “Why for my sake?”

Little flakes of tobacco drifted down to B.J.’s lap as he gave up molding the cigarette and slid it over his ear. “Because whether you like it or not, your name is still at the top of the file for both Attila and Warner. Because you were seen altercating with Fleischer, whose dying words happened to be a hope that he could yank your license. It just might not hurt for you to keep abreast of things.”

She couldn’t tell the truth, even to B.J. No one but Kate Manion knew how tenuous her foothold was on the future right now. No one would understand why. She was so afraid of so many things. Of losing the drive to do her job. Of losing the only place she considered home because of it. Of losing the friends she relied on by betraying them. Of being coerced against her will toward any decision, good or bad.

“No.”

“Then no it is.”

Kate knew that wasn’t the end of it. B.J. knew it too. He turned his full concentration on his dinner. “Aren’t you due to pay obeisance to the wicked witch about now?”

“I should have been there last week.” The loan was due, a five-thousand-dollar payment on freedom meted out to her paternal aunt, whom, if Kate had her way, she’d only see at gunpoint.

“What did she say when you told her why you weren’t there?”

“I haven’t told her. I never talk to her if I don’t have to.”

“She hasn’t called my mother. Has she called you at Tim’s?”

“She doesn’t know about Tim.” She knew as much about Kate’s current life as Kate’s current friends knew about her aunt: nothing. Only B.J. knew, from a time when Kate had briefly stayed with his mother. Kate’s marriage had been breaking up and B.J. had still been in Philadelphia. His mother, a sweet, intense air force pilot’s widow, had needed company, and Kate was delighted to provide it. In return, Sarah O’Brien had somehow found out about Kate’s aunt. The aunt Kate never saw, except to make payments on the loan. The aunt who had finished raising Kate after her mother died, who during those long and barren years had cemented Kate’s self-image.

“Need a ride?” B.J. asked.

Kate sighed. She hated the idea of taking advantage of him like this. She hated depending on someone else.

“I guess the Bagel Man won’t let me near my Mustang for a while, huh?”

“I think they already had Tim hide the distributor cap.”

It was a joke. Even so, Kate’s temper flared without warning. How dare they? It was her car, her freedom, waiting any time she needed it. Her escape.

This time Kate recognized her shortening fuse. She did her best to hide the flash of rage and fear beneath a methodical pressing of the ball-cap bill between her hands. Careful. Controlled. It seemed suddenly as if it was getting more difficult to regain equilibrium.

“Kate?”

“They say the emotions can be labile after a head injury,” she said, with a deprecating wave of her hand. “I found there for a minute I wanted to rip out your lungs.”

“Feeling a little cornered?”

She laughed. “Feeling treed like a possum with two legs chewed off.”

“You’re getting out tomorrow. Won’t that help?”

She concentrated on her hat again, on the white edge to her knuckles as she thought of what it was going to be like once she had nothing but the four walls of Tim’s apartment to look at, no one but herself to listen to. Help? It was the worst fate she could think of.

“Kate?” His voice was soft, a friendly nudge. Kate wondered if even B.J., who never allowed another living soul into his house, would understand. She looked up to realize that he at least empathized.

“Tell me again,” she said. “Tell me it was worth coming back.”

For a minute B.J. didn’t answer. He just sat there, as still as Kate had ever seen him, his eyes shadowed and distant. “Sometimes,” he finally said, never once pulling his gaze away, “the only thing that got me through was that flash when I was dead and it all made sense. Sometimes I think if I hadn’t had that I wouldn’t have stuck around for the rest.”

He had never once referred to the rest, no matter that everyone who’d ever come into contact with him had known there had to have been
a hell of a lot of it. Kate held her breath against what he was exposing.

He shrugged, as if his pain was no worse than anyone else’s. “At seventeen, most boys are getting laid and getting drunk, not necessarily in that order. I was stuck out in the bush for seven months with a squad of marines, almost without relief. I saw what people were capable of doing to each other. I participated. It’s not something that digests well, no matter how old you are. It’s especially tough when you’re seventeen and you’re stupid enough to think you can handle anything anybody throws at you.”

Or you insist on being idealistic enough to think that whatever you do can change it, Kate thought. No wonder she and B.J. had kept managing to find each other over the years. She saw her own history in his eyes, only hers had happened before her fifteenth birthday.