Devil's Waltz

12

After Plumb left, the meeting lost its steam. Some of the doctors stayed behind, clustering in small discussion groups, but most disappeared. As I exited the auditorium I saw Stephanie coming down the hall.

“Is it over?” she said, walking faster. “I got hung up.”

“Over and done. But you didn’t miss much. No one seemed to have much to say about Ashmore. It started to evolve into a gripe session against the administration. Then Plumb showed up and took the wind out of the staffs sails by offering to do everything they were demanding.”

“Like what?”

“Better security.” I told her the details, then recounted Plumb’s exchange with Dan Kornblatt.

“On a brighter note,” she said, “we seem finally to have found something physical on Cassie. Look here.”

She reached into her pocket and drew out a piece of paper. Cassie’s name and hospital registration number were at the top. Below was a column of numbers.

“Fresh from this morning’s labs.”

She pointed to a number.

“Low sugar — hypoglycemia. Which could easily explain the grand mal, Alex. There were no focal sites on the EEG and very little if any wave abnormality — Bogner says it’s one of those profiles that’s open to interpretation. I’m sure you know that happens all the time in kids. So if we hadn’t found low sugar, we would have really been stumped.”

She pocketed the paper.

I said, “Hypoglycemia never showed up in her tests before, did it?”

“No, and I checked for it each time. When you see seizures in a kid you always look at sugar and calcium imbalance. The layman thinks of hypoglycemia as something minor but in babies it can really trash their nervous systems. Both times after her seizures, Cassie had normal sugar, but I asked Cindy if she’d given her anything to drink before she brought her into the E.R. and she said she had — juice or soda. Reasonable thing to do — kid looks dehydrated, get some fluids in her. But that, plus the time lag getting over here, could very well have messed up the other labs. So in some sense it’s good she seized here in the hospital and we were able to check her out right away.”

“Any idea why her sugar’s low?”

She gave a grim look. “That’s the question, Alex. Severe hypoglycemia with seizures is usually more common in infants than in toddlers. Preemies, babies of diabetic mothers, perinatal problems — anything that messes up the pancreas. In older kids, you tend to think more in terms of infection. Cassie’s white count is normal, but maybe what we’re seeing are residual effects. Gradual damage to the pancreas brought about by an old infection. I can’t rule out metabolic disorders either, even though we checked for that back when she had breathing problems. She could have some sort of rare glycogen-storage problem that we don’t have an assay for.”

She looked up the hall and blew out air. “The other possibility’s an insulin-secreting pancreatic tumor. Which is not good news.”

“None of them sound like good news,” I said.

“No, but at least we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

“Have you told Cindy and Chip?”

“I told them Cassie’s sugar was low and she probably doesn’t have classical epilepsy. I can’t see any reason to go into any more detail while we’re still groping for a diagnosis.”

“How’d they react?”

“They were both kind of passive — wiped out. Like, Give me one more punch in the face.’ Neither of them got much sleep last night. He just left to go to work and she’s bunked out on the couch.”

“What about Cassie?”

“Still drowsy. We’re working on getting her sugar stabilized. She should be okay soon.”

“What’s in store for her, procedure-wise?”

“More blood tests, a tomographic scan of her gut. It may be necessary, eventually, to open her up surgically — get an actual look at her pancreas. But that’s a ways off. Got to get back to Torgeson. He’s reviewing the chart in my office. Turned out to be a nice guy, really casual.”

“Is he reviewing Chad’s chart too?”

“I called for it but they couldn’t find it.”

“I know,” I said. “I was looking for it, too — for background. Someone named D. Kent Herbert pulled it — he worked for Ashmore.”

“Herbert?” she said. “Never heard of him. Why would Ashmore be wanting the chart when he wasn’t even interested the first time?”

“Good question.”

“I’ll put a tracer on it. Meantime, let’s concentrate on Ms. Cassie’s metabolic system.”

We headed for the stairs.

I said, “Would hypoglycemia explain the other problems — breathing difficulties, bloody stools?”

“Not directly, but all the problems could have been symptoms of a generalized infectious process or a rare syndrome. New stuff is always coming at us — every time an enzyme is discovered, we find someone who doesn’t have it. Or it could even be an atypical case of something we did test for that just didn’t register in her blood for some God-knows-why reason.”

She talked quickly, animatedly. Pleased to be dueling with familiar enemies.

“Do you still want me involved?” I said.

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

“Sounds like you’ve moved away from Munchausen and think it’s genuine.”

“Well,” she said, “it would be nice for it to be genuine. And treatable. But even if that is the case, we’re probably talking chronic disease. So they can use the support, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

“Thanks much.”

Down the stairs. At the next floor I said, “Could Cindy — or anyone else — have somehow caused the hypoglycemia?”

“Sure, if she gave Cassie a middle-of-the-night shot of insulin. I thought of that right away. But that would have required a lot of expertise with timing and dosage.”

“Lots of practice injections?”

“Using Cassie as a pincushion. Which I can buy, theoretically. Cindy has plenty of time with Cassie. But given Cassie’s reaction to needles, if her mom was sticking her, wouldn’t she be freaking out every time she saw her? And I’m the only one she seems to despise... Anyway, I never noticed any unusual injection marks when I did the physical.”

“Would they be obvious, given all the other sticks she’s had?”

“Not obvious, but I’m careful when I do my exams, Alex. The kids’ bods get gone over pretty thoroughly.”

“Could the insulin have been administered other than by injection?”

She shook her head as we continued to descend. “There are oral hypoglycemics, but their metabolites would show up on the tox panel.”

Thinking of Cindy’s health discharge from the army, I said, “Any diabetes in the family?”

“Someone sharing their insulin with Cassie?” She shook her head. “Back at the beginning, when we were looking at Cassie’s metabolics, we had both Chip and Cindy tested. Normal.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good luck pinning it down.”

She stopped and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. “I appreciate your comments, Alex. I’m so thrilled to be dealing with biochemistry, I run the risk of narrowing my perspective.”

Back on the first floor I asked a guard where to find the Personnel office. He looked me over and told me right here, on the first floor.

It turned out to be exactly where I remembered it. Two women sat at typewriters; a third filed papers. The filer came up to me. She was straw-haired and hatchet-faced, in her late fifties. Under her ID was a circular badge that looked homemade, bearing a photo of a big hairy sheepdog. I told her I wanted to send a condolence card to Dr. Laurence Ashmore’s widow and asked for his home address.

She said, “Oh, yes, isn’t it terrible? What’s this place coming to?” in a smoker’s voice, and consulted a folder the size of a small-town phone book. “Here you go, Doctor — North Whittier Drive, over in Beverly Hills.” She recited a street address in the 900’s.

North Beverly Hills — prime real estate. The 900 block placed it just above Sunset. Prime of the prime; Ashmore had lived on more than research grants.

The clerk sighed. “Poor man. Just goes to show you, you can’t buy your safety.”

I said, “Isn’t that the truth?”

“Isn’t it, though?”

We traded wise smiles.

“Nice dog,” I said, indicating the badge.

She beamed. “That’s my honey — my champ. I breed true Old English, for temperament and working ability.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It’s more than that. Animals give without expecting anything in return. We could learn a few things from them.”

I nodded. “One more thing. Dr. Ashmore had someone working with him — D. Kent Herbert? The medical staff would like him to be informed of the charity fund the hospital’s establishing in Dr. Ashmore’s honor but no one’s been able to locate him. I was appointed to get hold of him but I’m not even sure he’s still working here, so if you have some sort of an address, I’d be much obliged.”

“Herbert,” she said. “Hmm. So you think he terminated?”

“I don’t know. I think he was still on the payroll in January or February, if that helps.”

“It might. Herbert... let’s see.”

Walking to her desk, she pulled another thick folder from a wall shelf.

“Herbert, Herbert, Herbert... Well, I’ve got two here, but neither of them sound like yours. Herbert, Ronald, in Food Services, and Herbert, Dawn, in Toxicology.”

“Maybe it’s Dawn. Toxicology was Dr. Ashmore’s specialty.”

She screwed up her face. “Dawn’s a girl’s name. Thought you were trying to find a man.”

I gave a helpless shrug. “Probably a mixup — the doctor who gave me the name didn’t actually know this person, so both of us assumed it was a man. Sorry for the sexism.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I don’t mess with all that stuff.”

“Does this Dawn have a middle initial ‘K’?”

She looked down. “Yes, she does.”

“Then, there you go,” I said. “The name I was given was D. Kent. What’s her job description?”

“Um, five thirty-three A — let me see...” Thumbing through another book. “That looks like a research assistant, Level One.”

“Did she transfer to another department in the hospital, by any chance?”

Consulting yet another volume, she said, “Nope. Looks like a termination.”

“Hmm... Do you have an address for her?”

“Nope, nothing. We throw out personal stuff thirty days after they’re gone — got a real space problem.”

“When exactly did she terminate?”

“That I can tell you.” She flipped a few pages and pointed to a code that I couldn’t comprehend. “Here we go. You’re right — about her being here in February. But that was her last month — she gave notice on the fifteenth, went officially off payroll on the twenty-eighth.”

“The fifteenth,” I said. The day after pulling Chad Jones’s chart.

“That’s right. See right here? Two slash fifteen?”

I stuck around for a few more minutes, listening to a story about her dogs. But I was thinking about two-legged creatures.

It was 3:45 when I drove out of the parking lot. A few feet from the exit a motorcycle cop was giving a jaywalking ticket to a nurse. The nurse looked furious; the cop’s face was a blank tablet.

Traffic on Sunset was obstructed by a four-car fender-bender, and the accompanying turmoil wrought by rubberneckers and somnolent traffic officers. It took almost an hour to reach the inanimate green stretch that was Beverly Hills’s piece of the boulevard. Tile-roofed ego monuments perched atop hillocks of Bermuda grass and dichondra, embellished by hostile gates, tennis court sheeting, and the requisite battalions of German cars.

I passed the stadium-sized weed-choked lot that had once housed the Arden mansion. The weeds had turned to hay, and all the trees on the property were dead. The Mediterranean palace had served briefly as a twenty-year-old Arab sheik’s plaything before being torched by persons unknown — aesthetic sensibilities offended by puke-green paint and moronic statuary with blacked-in pubic hair, or just plain xenophobia. Whatever the reason for the arson, rumors had been circulating for years about subdivision and rebuilding. But the real estate slump had taken the luster off that kind of optimism.

A few blocks later the Beverly Hills Hotel came into view, ringed by a motorcade of white stretch limos. Someone getting married or promoting a new film.

As I approached Whittier Drive, I decided to keep going. But when the letters on the street sign achieved focus, I found myself making a sudden right turn and driving slowly up the jacaranda-lined street.

Laurence Ashmore’s house was at the end of the block, a three-story, limestone Georgian affair on a double lot at least two hundred feet wide. The building was blocky, and impeccably maintained. A brick circular drive scythed through a perfect flat lawn. The landscaping was spare but good, with a preference for azaleas, camellias, and Hawaiian tree ferns — Georgian goes tropical. A weeping olive tree shaded half the lawn. The other half was sun-kissed.

To the left of the house was a porte-cochere long enough to shelter one of the stretches I’d just seen at the hotel. Beyond the wooden gates were treetops and the flaming red clouds of bougainvillea.

Prime of the prime. Even with the slump, at least four million.

A single car was parked in the circular drive. White Olds Cutlass, five or six years old. A hundred yards in either direction the curb was vacant. No black-garbed callers or bouquets on the doorstop. Shuttered windows; no sign of occupancy. The placard of a security company was staked in the perfect, clipped grass.

I drove on, made a U-turn, passed the house again and continued home.

Routine calls from my service; nothing from Fort Jackson. I called the base anyway and asked for Captain Katz. He came on quickly.

I reminded him who I was and told him I hoped I hadn’t interrupted his dinner.

He said, “No, that’s fine, I was going to call you. Think I found what you’re after.”

“Great.”

“One second — here it is. Influenza and pneumonia epidemics over the last ten years, right?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, far as I can tell, we only had one major flu epidemic — one of the Thai strains — back in ’73. Which is before your time.”

“Nothing since?”

“Doesn’t look like it. And no pneumonia, period. I mean, I’m sure we’ve had plenty of isolated flu cases, but nothing that would qualify as an epidemic. And we’re real good about keeping those kinds of records. Only thing we usually have to worry about, in terms of contagion, is bacterial meningitis. You know how tough that can be in a closed environment.”

“Sure,” I said. “Have you had epidemics of meningitis?”

“A few. The most recent was two years ago. Before that, ’83, then ’78 and ’75 — almost looks cyclical, come to think of it. Might be worth checking that out, see if someone can come up with a pattern.”

“How serious were the outbreaks?”

“Only one I observed personally was two years ago, and that was serious enough — soldiers died.”

“What about sequelae — brain damage, seizure disorders?”

“Most probably. I don’t have the data handy but I can get hold of them. Thinking of changing your research protocol?”

“Not quite yet,” I said. “Just curious.”

“Well,” he said, “that can be a good thing, curiosity. At least out in the civilian world.”

Stephanie had her hard data, and now I had mine.

Cindy had lied about her discharge.

Maybe Laurence Ashmore found some data too. Saw Cassie’s name on the admission and discharge sheets and got curious.

What else could have caused him to take another look at Chad Jones’s chart?

He’d never be able to tell me, but maybe his former assistant could.

I called 213, 310, and 818 Informations for a listing on Dawn Kent Herbert and got nowhere. Expanded my search to 805, 714, and 619 with the same result, then phoned Milo at Parker Center. He picked up and said, “Heard about your homicide last night.”

“I was at the hospital when it happened.” I told him about being questioned, the scene in the lobby. Feeling as if I’d been watched when I left the parking structure.

“Be careful, bucko. I got your message on Bottomley’s hubby, but I’ve got no domestic violence calls to her address and there’s no one on NCIC who could be her hubby. But she does have a troublemaker living there. Reginald Douglas Bottomley, D.O.B. ’70. Which would probably make him her son or maybe an errant nephew.”

“What’d he do to get in trouble?”

“Lots — he’s got a sheet long enough to cover Abdul-Jabbar’s bed. Sealed juvenile file, then a bunch of DUIs, possession, shoplifting, petty theft, burglary, robbery, assault. Lots of busts, a few convictions, a teensy bit of jail time, mostly at County. Got a call in to a detective over at Foothill Division, see what he knows. What’s the relevance of Bottomley’s home situation to the little kid?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Just looking for stress factors that might get her to act out. Probably because she was getting on my nerves. ’Course, if Reggie turned out bad because Vicki abused him, that would tell us something. Meanwhile, I’ve got something that definitely is relevant. Cindy Jones lied about her military discharge. I just talked to Fort Jackson and there was no pneumonia epidemic in ’83.”

“That so?”

“She might have had pneumonia, but it wasn’t part of any outbreak. And she made a point about the epidemic.”

“Seems a stupid thing to lie about.”

“The Munchausen game,” I said. “Or maybe she was covering up something. Remember I told you the discharge seemed a sensitive topic for her — how she blushed and yanked her braid? The public health officer at the army base said there was an epidemic in ’83 — just about the time Cindy would have been in. But it was bacterial meningitis. Which can lead to seizures. Giving us a link to another organ system Cassie’s had problems with. In fact, she had a grand mal seizure last night. In the hospital.”

“That’s a first.”

“Yup. First time anyone but Cindy saw it.”

“Who else did?”

“Bottomley and the ward clerk. And what’s interesting is, yesterday Cindy was talking to me about how Cassie always gets sick at home, then recovers right away in the hospital. So people start thinking her mother’s crazy. And here we are, a few hours later, with eyewitnesses and chemical corroboration. The lab tests turned up hypoglycemia, and now Stephanie’s convinced Cassie’s really sick. But hypoglycemia can be faked, Milo, by anything that alters the blood sugar, like a shot of insulin. I mentioned that to Stephanie, but I’m not sure she’s hearing it. She’s really geared up, looking for rare metabolic diseases.”

“Pretty sharp about-face,” he said.

“I can’t say that I blame her. After months of dealing with this, she’s frustrated and wants to practice medicine, not play psychological guessing games.”

“You, on the other hand...”

“I’ve got an evil mind — too much time hanging around you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I can see your point about the meningitis, if that’s what the mom had. Seizures for all — like mother, like daughter. But you don’t know that yet. And if she was covering up, why would she bring up the discharge in the first place? Why even tell you she was in the army?”

“Why’d your confessor make up his story? If she’s a Munchausen, she’d get off on teasing me with half-truths. It would sure be nice to get hold of her discharge papers, Milo. Find out exactly what did happen to her in South Carolina.”

“I can try, but it’ll take time.”

“Something else. I went looking for Chad Jones’s post-mortem chart today but it was missing. Pulled by Ashmore’s research assistant in February and never returned.”

“Ashmore? The one who was killed?”

“The very same. He was a toxicologist. Stephanie had already asked him to review the chart half a year ago, when she started getting suspicious about Cassie. He did it reluctantly — pure researcher, didn’t work with patients. And he told her he’d found nothing. So why would he pull the chart again, unless he discovered something new about Cassie?”

“If he didn’t work with patients, how would he know about Cassie in the first place?”

“By seeing her name on the A and D’s — the admission and discharge sheets. They come out daily and every doctor gets them. Seeing Cassie on them time after time might have finally gotten him curious enough to review her brother’s death. The assistant’s a woman by the name of Dawn Herbert. I tried to get hold of her but she quit the hospital the day after she pulled the chart — talk about more cute timing. And now Ashmore’s dead. I don’t want to sound like some kind of conspiracy nut, but it’s weird, isn’t it? Herbert might be able to clear things up, but there’s no address or phone number listed for her from Santa Barbara down to San Diego.”

“Dawn Herbert,” he said. “As in the other Hoover.”

“Middle name of Kent. As in Duke of.”

“Fine. I’ll try to squeeze in a trace before I go off shift.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Show it by feeding me. Got any decent grub in the house?”

“I suppose—”

“Better yet, haute cuisine. I’ll pick. Gluttonous, overpriced, and on your credit card.”

He showed up at eight, holding out a white box. On the cover was a cartoon of a grinning, grass-skirted islander finger-spinning a huge disc of dough.

“Pizza?” I said. “What happened to haute and overpriced?”

“Wait till you see the bill.”

He carried the box into the kitchen, slit the tape with his fingernail, lifted the lid, removed a slice from the pie, and ate it standing at the counter. Then he pulled off a second wedge, handed it to me, got another one for himself, and sat at the table.

I looked at the slice in my hand. Molten desert of cheese, landscaped with mushrooms, onions, peppers, anchovies, sausage, and lots of things I couldn’t identify. “What is this — pineapple?”

“And mango. And Canadian bacon and bratwurst and chorizo. What you’ve got there, pal, is authentic Spring Street Pogo-Pogo pizza. The ultimate democratic cuisine — little bit of every ethnicity, a lesson in gastronomic democracy.”

He ate and spoke with his mouth full: “Little Indonesian guy sells it from a stand, near the Center. People line up.”

“People line up to pay parking fines too.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and dug in again, holding one hand under the slice to catch dripping cheese.

I went to the cupboard, found a couple of paper plates, and put them on the table, along with napkins.

“Whoa, the good china!” He wiped his chin. “Drink?”

I took two cans of Coke from the fridge. “This okay?”

“If it’s cold.”

Finishing his second slice, he popped his can and drank.

I sat and took a bite of pizza. “Not bad.”

“Milo knows grub.” He guzzled more Coke. “Regarding your Ms. Dawn K. Herbert, no wants or warrants. Another virgin.”

He reached into his pocket, took out a piece of paper, and handed it to me. Typewritten on it was:

Under that was an address on Lindblade Street, in Culver City.

I thanked him and asked him if he’d heard anything new on the Ashmore murder.

He shook his head. “It’s going down as your routine Hollywood mugging.”

“Right guy to mug. He was rich.” I described the house on North Whittier.

“Didn’t know research paid that well,” he said.

“It doesn’t. Ashmore must have had some sort of independent income. That would explain why the hospital hired him at a time when they’re getting rid of doctors and discouraging research grants. He probably brought some kind of endowment with him.”

“Paid his way in?”

“It happens.”

“Let me ask you this,” he said. “In terms of your Ashmore-getting-curious theory. Cassie’s been in and out of the hospital since she was born. Why would he wait until February to start snooping?”

“Good question,” I said. “Hold on for a sec.”

I went to the library and fetched the notes I’d taken on Cassie’s medical history. Milo had sat down at the table and I joined him, turning pages.

“Here we are,” I said. “February 10. Four days before Herbert pulled Chad’s chart. It was Cassie’s second hospitalization for stomach problems. The diagnosis was gastric distress of unknown origin, possible sepsis — the main symptom was bloody diarrhea. Which could have made Ashmore think of some specific kind of poisoning. Maybe his toxicology training overcame his apathy.”

“Not enough for him to talk to Stephanie.”

“True.”

“So maybe he looked and didn’t find anything.”

“Then why not return the chart?” I said.

“Sloppy housekeeping. Herbert was supposed to but didn’t. Knew she was leaving and didn’t give a damn about her paperwork.”

“When I see her I’ll ask her.”

“Yeah. Who knows, maybe she’ll give you a ride in her Miata.”

“Zoom zoom,” I said. “Anything new on Reginald Bottomley?”

“Not yet. Fordebrand — the Foothill guy — is on vacation, so I’ve got a call in to the guy who’s catching for him. Let’s hope he cooperates.”

He put the Coke down. Tension wounded his face and I thought I knew why. He was wondering if the other detective knew who he was. Would bother to return his call.

“Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”

“De nada.” He shook the can. Empty. Leaning on the counter with both elbows, he faced me.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“You sound low. Beaten down.”

“Guess I am — all this theorizing and Cassie’s no safer.”

“Know what you mean,” he said. “Best thing’s to stay focused, not drift too far afield. It’s a risk on cases with bad solve-prospects — God knows I’ve had plenty of them. You feel powerless, start throwing wild punches and end up no wiser and a helluva lot older.”

He left shortly after that and I called Cassie’s hospital room. It was after nine and direct access to patients had been cut off. I identified myself to the hospital operator and was put through. Vicki answered.

“Hi, it’s Dr. Delaware.”

“Oh... what can I do for you?”

“How’s everything?”

“Fine.”

“Are you in Cassie’s room?”

“No — out here.”

“At the desk?”

“Yes.”

“How’s Cassie doing?”

“Fine.”

“Sleeping?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about Cindy?”

“Her too.”

“Busy day for everyone, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Has Dr. Eves been by recently?”

“Around eight — you want the exact time?”

“No, thanks. Anything new, in terms of the hypoglycemia?”

“You’d have to ask Dr. Eves that.”

“No new seizures?”

“Nope.”

“All right,” I said. “Tell Cindy I called. I’ll be by tomorrow.”

She hung up. Despite her hostility, I felt a strange — almost corrupt — sense of power. Because I knew about her unhappy past and she was unaware of it. Then I realized that what I knew put me no closer to the truth.

Far afield, Milo said.

I sat there, feeling the power diminish.