V.I. Warshawski 04 - Bitter Medicine (26 page)

“Just a minute.” She put me on hold. I lay on my back, looking at the ceiling, wishing there were some way I could be present if Dick learned about the conversation‘.

“Harriet? Mr. Humphries says he went through all that with Mr. Yarborough-that the bill is to come directly to him, but here at the hospital. He wants to talk to you.”

“Sure, Jackie-oh, just a second, Mr. Yarborough is buzzing me-can I call you right back? Great.”

I cut the connection. So now I knew. Or had it confirmed. Friendship was paying Dieter Monkfish’s bill. But why, for heaven’s sake? Maybe Alan Humphries was a fanatical member of the so-called right-to-life movement. But presumably Friendship performed therapeutic abortions; many hospitals do, at least in the first trimester. Maybe Friendship did and Humphries writhed in anguish over it: this was his conscience money. After all, he was paying Dieter’s bill himself, instead of slipping it in with the hospital account.

But that left a painful question unanswered. What was Peter’s connection with this? The only reason I’d checked out Friendship was because Peter had been at my place the night I’d brought home the IckPiff files. But why did he care? Beyond an ethical dislike of burglary, that is.

Reluctantly, I phoned his office at Friendship. His secretary informed me that he was in surgery-was there a message?

I could scarcely say, “Yeah, I want to know whom he hired to beat up Mr. Contreras,” so I fell back on asking for Consuelo’s hospital record.

“Doctor didn’t leave me any instructions about this,” she said dubiously. “What’s your name?”

Receptionists calling the doctor “Doctor” are like grownups who talk about their fathers as “Daddy.” Like he’s the only one in the world, you know. God didn’t leave me any instructions.

I gave her my name and asked her to have Peter call me when he came back from surgery. After hanging up, I paced tensely around my ravaged apartment, wanting to act, but not sure how. Not sure I wanted to find out anything else.

Finally I returned to the phone to call Murray Ryerson, head of the crime desk at the Herald-Star. The paper had done a small story on the Monkfish robbery in the “Chicago Beat” section. When the news of my break-in came through the crime desk on Friday, Murray had called me with high hopes of a major story, but I’d told him that I wasn’t working on anything.

This morning I reached him at the city desk. “You know that burglary at IckPiff headquarters?”

“You’re confessing,” he said promptly. “That’s not news, V.I. Everyone knows you’re a great second-story woman.”

He thought he was being funny; I was just as glad he couldn’t see my face. “Dick Yarborough at Crawford, Meade is Dieter’s attorney-you know that? I looked into my crystal ball a few minutes ago, and it told me that Dick will have the missing files sometime today. You might call and ask him.”

“Vic, why the hell are you telling me this, anyway? IckPiff losing some files is not a big deal. Even if you did steal them and are planting them at the lawyer’s-what’s his name? Yarborough?-it’s not interesting.”

“Okay. I just thought it might be a fun little paragraph, rounding out the burglary story. I don’t have the stuff, by the way, and I don’t know who does. But I think Dick will have it by tomorrow at the latest. Bye-bye.”

I was about to hang up when Murray suddenly said, “Hey, wait a minute. Monkfish led a mob into Lotty Herschel’s clinic a few weeks ago, didn’t he? And Yarborough’s the guy who bailed him out. Right. Got it here on the screen. And then his place was broken into. Come on, Warshawski, what’s going on?”

“Hey, Murray. IckPiff files are not a big deal. If I may quote you on that. Sorry to bother you. I’ll call the Trib.” I laughed into his squawking voice and hung up.

I went over to the clinic to see how Lotty was holding up. Business had been slow for the first few days after she reopened, but this morning every seat in the waiting room was taken. Children, mothers with screaming infants, pregnant women, old women with their grown-up daughters, and one lone man, staring stiffly at nothing, his hands trembling slightly.

Mrs. Coltrain ran the place like an expert bartender with a nervous crowd. She smiled at me professionally, and her panic of a few weeks earlier slid from my memory. She said she would tell Dr. Herschel I was here.

Lotty saw me on the fly, in between two waiting rooms. She must have lost five pounds over the weekend; her cheekbones jutted out sharply below her thick black eyebrows.

I told her about my efforts to get the Friendship records. “I’m trying Peter again this afternoon. If he doesn’t deliver, do you want to get Hazeltine to call?” Morris Hazeltine was her real lawyer.

Lotty grimaced. “He isn’t representing me on this-I have to go through the insurance company and use the lawyer they come up with. I’ll mention it to them-they’re most annoyed with me for losing the records.”

She suddenly smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Strain is making me lose my wits. The state-the Department of Environment and Human Resources-they make an on-site, unannounced visit to any hospital where there’s been a maternal or infant death. They should have some report on Consuelo and at least what Malcolm did.”

“What do you do-call up and ask for it?” My experience with the state didn’t lead me to think they’d be too helpful.

Lotty looked smug. “Ordinarily not. But I trained the woman who’s now an assistant director there-Philippa Barnes. She was one of my first residents at Beth Israel. A very fine one, too-but that was in the early sixties-it was hard for women to go into private practice, and she was black to boot. So she went to work for the state… Look- I’ve got at least four hours of patients to see here. If I called to tell her to expect you, would you mind going to see her?”

“Be a pleasure. I’d like to think there was something active I could do-I feel like the two of us have been those little ducks they used to line up for you to shoot at in Riverview.” I told her about Dick and Dieter Monkfish. “What do you make of that?”

Her thick black brows snapped together to form a line across her nose. “I never did understand why you married that man, Vic.”

I grinned. “Immigrant inferiority complex-he’s the complete WASP. But why Friendship?”

She echoed my earlier thoughts. “Maybe conscience money for doing abortions there- people are strange.” Her mind was clearly back in the examining room. “I’ll call Philippa now.”

She squeezed my arm briefly and moved back down the short corridor to her office-like a cat-so quickly she was there one instant and gone the next. It was a relief to see her back to her old self.

My friends and I have financed one of the worst monstrosities known to woman on the northwest corner of the Loop. That is, we kicked in the revenues through our tax bills, and Governor Thompson allocated $180 million of them to a new State of Illinois building. Designed by Helmut Jahn, it is a skyscraper made of two concentric glass rings. The inner one circles a block wide open rotunda that runs the height of the building. So not only did we get to finance the construction, we get to pay to heat and cool a place that is mostly open space. Still, it won an architectural award in 1986, which I guess proves how much the critics know. I rode a glass elevator to the eighteenth floor and got out onto the corridor that circles the rotunda. All the offices open onto it. It looks as if the state ran out of money when they got to the doors, so working space flows into the hallways. You’re supposed to think this creates a feeling of openness between state employees and the people they serve. But if you had private documents-or had to work late- you’d probably like a little more protection between you and the lunatics who roam the Loop.

I went into the open space marked Department of Environment and Human Resources and gave my name to the middle-aged black receptionist. “I think Dr. Barnes is expecting me.”

The receptionist gave the sigh of one asked to perform work beyond the call of duty and dialed the phone. “Dr. Barnes will see you in a minute,” she announced without looking at me. “Have a seat.”

I flipped through a pamphlet describing the symptoms of AIDS and what to do if you suspected you might have it and read another on teenage pregnancy-a noncommittal piece, since the state isn’t allowed to advocate birth control-before Dr. Barnes appeared.

Philippa Barnes was a tall, slim woman of around fifty. She was very black; with her hair cropped close to the head on her long slender neck she looked like a swan. Her movements flowed as though water were her natural element. She shook my hand, looking at a gold watchband floating on her left wrist.

“Ms. Warshawski? I just talked to Dr. Herschel. She told me about the dead girl and the lawsuit. I’m trying to squeeze you in between two other appointments, so forgive me if we rush. I want you to talk to Eileen Candeleria-she’s the public health nurse who actually schedules our on-site inspections.”

We were about the same height but I almost had to jog to keep up with her long, smooth stride. We went back away from the corridor through a maze of offices and half-private cubicles to a room overlooking the Greyhound Bus Terminal on Randolph. One hundred eighty million hadn’t paid for much soundproofing; the noise easily traveled the eighteen stories up to us,

Dr. Barnes’s desk was a piece of working furniture. Made of scarred oak, it was covered with papers. She sat behind it in a leather swivel chair, moved some of the documents to one side to create a blank place for working, and spoke into an intercom, asking for the nurse.

While we waited, she gave me a rapid rundown on the department. “The Department of Environment has an enormous responsibility, which ranges from approving and certifying hospitals to making sure schools aren’t contaminated with asbestos. I’m in the Health and Human Services division. I trained with Lotty-Dr. Herschel-in obstetrics, but in fact my responsibility is for state-run clinics and hospitals. We have another assistant director who is in charge of the whole hospital certification program. Nurse Candeleria works for both of us-she heads investigative teams that go into hospitals and clinics when we feel the need for an inspection.”

Nurse Candeleria came in on cue. She was a plain white woman around Dr. Barnes’s age, with a strong, intelligent face brightened by a hint of humor in her brown eyes. She carried a thick file, which she shifted to her left hand so she could shake hands with me when Dr. Barnes introduced us.

“Cindy told me you wanted to talk about Friendship Hospital, PhiJ, so I’ve pulled their file. What’s the question?”

“They had a maternal and neonatal death out there- when, Ms. Warshawski?-four weeks ago tomorrow. Have you sent a team out there yet? Can I see the report?”

Ms. Candeleria tightened her lips. “I got the report of the death”-she looked in the file-“fifteen days ago. I was scheduling a site visit for later this week. Tom told me he would take care of it himself, to cancel my team. I’ve diaried it to talk to him tomorrow, but I don’t think he’s been out there.”

“Tom Coulter,” Dr. Barnes said. “He’s in charge of hospital certification programs-master’s in public health, not a doctor. MDs make him feel inferior and he’s not madly in love with professional women.”

She quickly punched the buttons on her phone. This is

Dr. Barnes-let me talk to Mr. Coulter, Cindy, Tom-can you stop into my office for a moment? I’ve got a question about Friendship. Yes, I’m busy, too. I’m backing up two people who flew in from Carbondale just to see me, so you could make their lives easier by getting this over with quickly.“

She hung up. The bureaucracy in a place like this just about kills you. If I had charge of the whole program, instead of just a piece of it-“ She folded her lips, cutting off the sentence. We all three knew that having a sex-change operation-and perhaps dying her skin-was the only way that would happen.