V.I. Warshawski 04 - Bitter Medicine (5 page)

Anger glittered in Lotty’s eyes. “Carol Alvarado is more than my nurse. She is a good friend and an invaluable assistant. This is her mother, not any bereaved parent”

I rubbed the heels of my hands into my blurry face. “If I wasn’t so groggy-and upset myself-I wouldn’t have spoken so bluntly. But Lotty, you didn’t give Consuelo diabetes. You didn’t impregnate her. You treated her to the best of your ability.

“In your head now you’re thinking, If only I’d done this instead of that, if only I’d been there instead of Malcolm- but you can’t. You can’t save the world. Don’t go on a doctor trip about how omniscient you are and how omnipotent that should have made you. Grieve. Cry. Scream. But don’t act out a play for me because of Mrs. Alvarado.”

The black brows snapped shut over the strong nose. She turned on her heel. For a moment I thought she was going to walk out on me, but she went to the window instead, stumbling on a stray running shoe as she went. “You should clean up in here sometime, Vic.”

“Yeah, but if I did, my friends wouldn’t have anything left to complain about.”

“We might find one or two things.” She nodded a few times, her back still turned to me. Then she returned and held out her hands. “I was right to come to you, Vic. I don’t cry or scream anymore-those are skills I’ve long forgotten. But I need a little grieving time.”

I took her with me to the living room, away from the unmade bed, to a big chair like the one Gabriella used to hold me in when I was a child. Lotty sat with me a long while, her head pushing into the soft flesh of my breast, the ultimate comfort, spreading through giver and receiver both.

After a time, she gave a deep shuddering breath and pulled herself upright. “Coffee, Vic?”

She went with me to the kitchen while I put water on to boil and ground beans. “Malcolm called me last night, but he only had a few minutes, he could only give me highlights. He says they gave her ritodrine to retard the onset of labor before he arrived-they pump in steroids to help the baby’s lungs develop lipids if they can hold off delivery for twenty-four hours. But it wasn’t working and her blood values were getting bad, so they decided to take the baby and do the best they could and concentrate on her diabetes. It sounds right. I don’t know why it didn’t work.”

“I know you can do a lot with high-risk deliveries. But some of them must still have this kind of outcome.”

“Oh, yes. I haven’t gone that far overboard with my doctor’s omnipotence. And she may have had scarring from that cyst surgery we did two years ago. I was monitoring her pretty closely just in case…” Her voice trailed off and she rubbed her face tiredly. “I don’t know. I’ll be anxious to see the autopsy report-and Malcolm’s-he says he dictated most of it in the car driving back. But he wanted to check a few things with Burgoyne before he finished it.” She grinned briefly. “He was on call at Beth Israel last night after spending the day in Schaumburg-who’d be young and a resident again?”

After Lotty left I wandered aimlessly through the apartment, picking up clothes and magazines, not feeling like running, not knowing quite what to do with myself. I’m a detective, a professional private investigator. So that’s what I do-detect things. But there was no action I could take now. Nothing for me to find, nothing to figure out. A sixteen-year-old girl was dead. What else was there to know?

The day dragged on. Routine phone calls, a case report to complete, a few bills to pay. The oppressive heat continued, making all activity seem futile. In the afternoon, I paid a condolence call on Mrs. Alvarado. She sat in state with a dozen or so friends and relations in attendance, including a wilted Carol. Because of the need for a postmortem, the funeral was postponed until the following week. It was to be a double funeral, for Consuelo and the baby. It didn’t sound like a function I could bear to attend.

The next day I went in to the clinic to give Lotty a hand. With Carol away, she had hired a nurse from a temporary agency, but the woman didn’t have Carol’s skills, nor, of course, knowledge of the patients. I took temperatures and weighed people. Even with my help, the day didn’t end until after six.

As Lotty bade me a tired good-night, I remarked, This helps convince me that I made the right choice in going into law, not medicine.“

“You’d be a good pathologist, Vic,” she said seriously. “But I don’t think you have the temperament for clinical work.”

Whatever that comment meant, it didn’t sound like much of a compliment-too detached and analytical to be good with people? I wrinkled my face-what a commentary on my character.

I stopped at my apartment to change into a bathing suit and cutoffs and then headed to the Montrose Avenue park- not the beach, where lifeguards assiduously keep you from going farther than knee-level into the lake, but the rocks, where the water is clear and deep. After swimming a half-mile circuit of the buoys strung out to keep boats off the rocks, I floated on my back and watched the sun set behind tire trees. When the oranges and reds had faded to a purply-pink I swam slowly back to shore. Why live in Barrington when you could have the lake for nothing?

Back at home I prolonged my cocoonlike state with a long shower. I fished half a bottle of Taittinger’s from the jumbled cupboard in my dining room that serves as a liquor cabinet and drank it unchilled with some fruit and pumpernickel. At ten, I decided to tune back in to the city by turning on the least offensive of Chicago’s TV news shows.

Mary Sherrod’s sophisticated black face filled the screen. Serious look. Top-breaking story is sad. I poured the last drops of wine into my glass.

“Police tonight say they have no suspects in the brutal murder of Chicago doctor Malcolm Tregiere.”

It took the close-up of Malcolm’s thin, fine face-his medical-school graduation photo-and the next few sentences for the news to register. A close-up of Malcolm’s apartment. I had been there, but it hadn’t looked anything like this. His family was Haitian and the place he’d rented on the fringes of Uptown had been furnished with many artifacts from his homeland. On the television screen, it looked like the aftermath of Tet-the few pieces of furniture were smashed, the masks and pictures had been pulled from the walls and shattered.

Sherrod’s voice continued mercilessly. “Police suspect that housebreakers surprised young Dr. Tregiere, who had spent a grueling twenty-four hours on call at Beth Israel Hospital in Uptown and was home sleeping during the day, at a time when most apartments are vacant. He was found beaten to death at six this evening by a friend who expected to join him for dinner. By air time at ten tonight, no arrests had been made.”

The picture changed to an anorectic, hysterical woman excited about lean sausage patties. Malcolm. This didn’t happen. I made it up-it was as real as the grinning woman and her frenzied children eating sausages. I turned off the TV and turned on WBBM, Chicago’s all-news station. The story was identical.

My right leg felt damp. I looked down and saw I had dropped my wineglass. Champagne had soaked my jeans and the glass lay in chunks on the floor-cheap five-and-dime crystal, it didn’t shatter, just fell apart.

Lotty wouldn’t know, not unless the hospital had called her. She had a streak of European intellectual arrogance in her-she never read Chicago papers, never listened to Chicago news. All the information she had about the world came from The New York Times and The New Statesman. We’d argued about it before-that’s swell if you live in New York or Manchester. But Chicago doesn’t exist around you? You walk around with your nose in the air and your head in the clouds because you’re too good for the city that gives you your living?

I realized with a start that I was screaming at Lotty in my head, screaming with a rage that had nothing to do with her and little to do with The Times. I had to be angry with someone.

Lotty answered on the first ring. Dr. Hatcher had phoned her from Beth Israel a few minutes earlier. The news had taken a while to reach the hospital because the friend who found him was an artist, not part of the medical community.

‘The police want to talk to me in the morning. I was his supervising physician, I and Dr. Hatcher together-I guess they want to talk to us about whom he knew-but how could this be done by anyone he knew? Are you free? Can you come with me? Even on such a matter I do not like talking to the police.“

Lotty had grown up in Nazi-dominated Vienna. Some-how her parents had managed to ship her and her brother to English relatives in 1938, but men in uniform still made her uneasy. I agreed reluctantly-not because I didn’t want to help Lotty but because I wanted to stay far from the Alvarados and the dead baby, and that meant from Malcolm, too.

Just as I was climbing into bed my phone rang. It was Carol, troubled about Tregiere. “Diego and Paul and I have been talking, Vic. We need your ideas. You don’t think it could have been Fabiano, do you? He was so crazy the other night. You don’t think he would kill Malcolm because of Consuelo and the baby, do you?”

I smiled sardonically to myself: No one was going to let me stay away from the murder. “You know, Carol, I really don’t believe he would. How much did he care for Consuelo? And the baby-he was the strongest advocate for an abortion, remember? He didn’t want a child, didn’t want responsibilities. I think he’d be glad to be free of the whole situation.”

“You would think so, yes, Vic, because you are very rational. But however much people joke about machismo, it is a real thing to some men-he may well feel that a man of honor would act such and such a way, drive himself to a frenzy, and do it.”

I shook my head. “I can see him having a fantasy about it. But I can’t see him doing it. Still, if you like, I’ll talk to him. Didn’t he hang around with one of the street gangs? Ask Paul-he’ll know.”

A buzz of talk in the background, then Paul’s voice came on. The Lions. He wasn’t exactly a heavy member-ran errands on the fringe. You don’t think he’d get them to do a killing for him, do you?“

“I don’t think anything. I’m talking to the police in the morning-until then I only know what I saw on TV-and that could mean anything.”

He hung up reluctantly. I frowned at the phone. Not just at the Alvarados but at the idea of getting back into the muck I’d left behind when I quit being a public defender. It was all going to rise up to greet me.

I slept restlessly, haunted again by Consuelo’s baby. It had rained heavily. The streets in South Chicago were flooded and I made my way to my parents’ house with difficulty. When I came into the living room, a crib stood in the corner with a baby in it. She lay very still, not moving, staring at me with large black eyes. I realized it was my child, but that she had no name, that she would come to life only if I gave her my name.

I woke at five with a shudder, drenched with sweat. I lay with burning sleepless eyelids for almost an hour, then staggered out for a run to the lake. I couldn’t make myself move at more than a shuffling jog.

The sun had been up for perhaps half an hour. Lake and sky were bathed in coppery red, a dull angry color you might expect at the end of the world, and the air hung heavy. The water was mirror still.

A fisherman stood about twenty feet up the rocks, paying me no attention. I took off my shoes and socks and jumped in in my shorts and T-shirt. Some action of wind and water in the night had stirred the cold depths of the lake and brought them to the surface. I gasped with shock as the freezing water hit my skin, chilling my blood, and I flailed my way back to shore. The fisherman, no doubt thinking drowning a fitting end for those who disturb the perch, continued to concentrate on his line.

The cold water left me shivering despite the heavy air, but it also cleared my head. By the time I picked Lotty up at her apartment a mile north of me on Sheffield, I felt reasonably able to confront Chicago’s finest.