Devil's Waltz

25

To hell with Alexander Graham Bell.

I drove back to some hallowed halls I could see and touch.

There was one parking meter free near the university administration building. I went to the registrar’s office and asked an Indian clerk in a peach-colored sari to look up Dawn Kent Herbert.

“Sorry, sir, we don’t give out personal information.”

I flashed my clinical faculty card from the med school across town. “I don’t want anything personal — just need to know in which department she’s enrolled. It has to do with a job. Verification of education.”

The clerk read the card, had me repeat Herbert’s name, and walked away.

A moment later she returned. “I show her as a graduate student in the School of Public Health, sir. But her enrollment’s been terminated.”

I knew Public Health was in the Health Sciences building, but I’d never actually been there. Shoving more money in the meter, I headed toward south campus, passing the Psych building, where I’d learned to train rats and listen with the third ear, crossing the Science quad, and entering the Center at the west end, near the Dental School.

The long hall that led to Public Health was a quick jog from the library, where I’d just studied Ashmore’s academic history. Walls on both sides were lined with group photos of every class the medical school had graduated. Brand-new doctors looking like kids. The white-coats milling in the halls seemed just as young. By the time I reached the School of Public Health, the corridor had quieted. A woman was leaving the main office. I caught the door for her and stepped in.

Another counter, another clerk working in cramped space. This one was very young, black, with straightened hennaed hair and a smile that seemed real. She wore a fuzzy lime-green sweater with a yellow-and-pink parrot embroidered on it. The bird was smiling too.

“I’m Dr. Delaware from Western Pediatric Hospital. One of your graduate students worked at our hospital and I’d like to know who her faculty adviser is.”

“Oh, sure. Her name, please.”

“Dawn Herbert.”

No reaction. “What department is she in?”

“Public Health.”

The smile broadened. “This is the School of Public Health, Doctor. We have several departments, each with its own faculty.” She lifted a brochure from a stack near my elbow, opened it and pointed to the table of contents.

Thinking of the kind of work Ashmore had done, I said, “Either Biostatistics or Epidemiology.”

She went to the files and pulled down a blue fabric loose-leaf folder. The spine was lettered BIOSTAT.

“Yes, here we go. She’s in the Ph.D. program in Biostat and her adviser’s Dr. Yanosh.”

“Where can I find Dr. Yanosh?”

“One floor down — office B-three-forty-five. Would you like me to call and see if she’s in?”

“Please.”

She picked up a phone and punched an extension. “Dr. Yanosh? Hi. Merilee here. There’s a doctor from some hospital wanting to talk to you about one of your students... Dawn Herbert... Oh... Sure.” Frowning. “What was your name again, sir?”

“Delaware. From Western Pediatric Medical Center.”

She repeated that into the receiver. “Yes, of course, Dr. Yanosh... Could I see some identification, please, Dr. Delaware?”

Out came the faculty card again.

“Yes, he does, Dr. Yanosh.” Spelling my name. “Okay, Doctor, I’ll tell him.”

Hanging up, she said, “She doesn’t have much time but she can see you right now.” Sounding angry.

As I opened the door, she said, “She was murdered?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“That’s really ugly.”

There was an elevator just past the office, next to a darkened lecture hall. I rode it down one flight. B-345 was a few doors to the left.

Closed and locked. A slide-in sign said ALICE JANOS, M.P.H., PH.D.

I knocked. Between the first and second raps a voice said, “One minute.”

Heel-clicks. The door opened. A woman in her fifties said, “Dr. Delaware.”

I held out my hand. She took it, gave an abrupt shake, and let go. She was short, plump, blond, bubble-coiffed, and expertly made up and wore a red-and-white dress that had been tailored for her. Red shoes, matching nails, gold jewelry. Her face was small and attractive in a chipmunkish way; when she was young she’d probably been the cutest girl in school.

“Come in, please.” European accent. The intellectual Gabor sister.

I stepped into the office. She left the door open and came in after me. The room was pin-neat, minimally furnished, scented with perfume, and hung with art posters in chromium frames. Miró and Albers and Stella and one that commemorated a Gwathmey-Siegel exhibit at the Boston Museum.

An open box of chocolate truffles sat on a round glass table. Next to it was a sprig of mint. On a stand perpendicular to the desk were a computer and a printer, each sheathed with a zippered cover. Atop the printer was a red leather designer purse. The desk was university-issue metal, prettified with a diagonally set lace coverlet, a floral-patterned Limoges blotter, and family photos. Big family. Albert Einstein look-alike husband and five good-looking, college-age kids.

She sat close to the chocolate and crossed her legs at the ankles. I faced her. Her calves were ballet-thick.

“You are a physician?”

“Psychologist.”

“And what connection do you have to Ms. Herben?”

“I’m consulting on a case at the hospital. Dawn obtained a medical chart belonging to the patient’s sibling and never returned it. I thought she might have left it here.”

“This patient’s name?”

When I hesitated, she said, “I can’t very well answer your question without knowing what I’m looking for.”

“Jones.”

“Charles Lyman Jones the Fourth?”

Surprised, I said, “You have it?”

“No. But you are the second person who’s come asking for it. Is there a genetic issue at stake that makes this so urgent? Sibling tissue typing or something like that?”

“It’s a complex case,” I said.

She recrossed her legs. “The first person didn’t give me an adequate explanation either.”

“Who was that?”

She gave me an analytic look and sat back in her chair. “Forgive me, Doctor, but I’d appreciate seeing the identification you just showed Merilee upstairs.”

For the third time in half an hour I presented my faculty card, augmenting it with my brand-new full-color hospital badge.

Putting on gold-framed half-glasses, she examined both, taking her time. The hospital ID held her interest longer.

“The other man had one of these too,” she said, holding it up. “He said he was in charge of hospital security.”

“A man named Huenengarth?”

She nodded. “The two of you seem to be duplicating each other’s efforts.”

“When was he here?”

“Last Thursday. Does Western Pediatrics generally give this type of personal service to all its patients?”

“As I said, it’s a complex case.”

She smiled. “Medically or socio-culturally?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t get into details.”

“Psychotherapeutic confidentiality?”

I nodded.

“Well, I certainly respect that, Dr. Delaware. Mr. Huenengarth used another phrase to protect his secrecy. ‘Privileged information.’ I thought that sounded rather cloak-and-dagger and told him so. He wasn’t amused. A rather grim fellow, actually.”

“Did you give him the chart?”

“No, because I don’t have it, Doctor. Dawn left no medical charts of any kind behind. Sorry to have misled you, but all the attention she’s generated lately has led me to be cautious. That and her murder, of course. When the police came by to ask questions, I cleaned out her graduate locker personally. All that I found were some textbooks and the computer disks from her dissertation research.”

“Have you booted up the disks?”

“Is that question related to your complex case?”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly,” she said. “Well, at least you’re not getting pushy the way Mr. Huenengarth did. Trying to pressure me to turn them over.”

Removing her glasses, she got up, returned my ID, closed the door. Back in her chair, she said, “Was Dawn involved in something unsavory?”

“She may have been.”

“Mr. Huenengarth was a bit more forthcoming than you, Doctor. He came right out and said Dawn had stolen the chart. Informed me it was my duty to see that it was returned — quite imperious. I had to ask him to leave.”

“He’s not Mr. Charm.”

“An understatement — his approach is pure KGB. More like a policeman than the real policemen who investigated Dawn’s murder, as far as I’m concerned. They weren’t pushy enough. A few cursory questions and goodbye — I grade them C-minus. Weeks later I called to see what kind of progress was being made, and no one would take my call. I left messages and none were returned.”

“What kind of questions did they ask about her?”

“Who her friends were, had she ever associated with criminal types, did she use drugs. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to answer any of them. Even after having her as my student for four years, I knew virtually nothing about her. Have you served on any doctoral committees?”

“A few.”

“Then you know. Some students one really gets close to; others pass through without making a mark. I’m afraid Dawn was one of the latter. Not because she wasn’t bright. She was extremely sharp, mathematically. It’s why I accepted her in the first place, even though I had reservations about her motivation. I’m always looking for women who aren’t intimidated by numbers and she had a true gift for math. But we never... jelled.”

“What was the matter with her motivation?”

“She didn’t have any. I always got the feeling she’d drifted into grad school because it was the path of least resistance. She’d applied to medical school and gotten rejected. Kept applying even after she enrolled here — a lost cause, really, because her non-math grades weren’t very good and her M-CAT scores were significantly below average. Her math scores were so high I decided to accept her, though. I went so far as to get her funding — a Graduate Advanced Placement fellowship. This past fall, I had to cut that off. That’s when she found the job at your hospital.”

“Poor performance?”

“Poor progress on her dissertation. She finished her course work with adequate grades, submitted a research proposal that looked promising, dropped it, submitted another, dropped that, et cetera. Finally she came up with one that she seemed to like. Then she just froze. Went absolutely nowhere with it. You know how it is — students either zip through or languish for years. I’ve been able to help plenty of the languishers and I tried to help Dawn. But she rejected counseling. Didn’t show up for appointments, made excuses, kept saying she could handle it, just needed more time. I never felt I was getting through to her. I was at the point of considering dropping her from the program. Then she was...”

She rubbed a fingertip over one blood-colored nail. “I suppose none of that seems very important now. Would you like a chocolate?”

“No, thanks.”

She looked down at the truffles. Closed the box.

“Consider that little speech,” she said, “as an elongated answer to your question about her disks. But yes, I did boot them up, and there was nothing meaningful on them. She’d accomplished nothing on the dissertation. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t even bothered to look at them when your Mr. Huenengarth showed up — had put them away and forgotten about them, I was so upset by her death. Going through that locker felt ghoulish enough. But he made such a point of trying to get them that I booted them up the moment he was gone. It was worse than I’d imagined. All she’d produced, after all my encouragement, were statements and restatements of her hypotheses and a random numbers table.”

“A random numbers table?”

“For random sampling. You know how it’s done, I’m sure.”

I nodded. “Generate a collection of random numbers with a computer or some other technique, then use it to select subjects from a general pool. If the table says five, twenty-three, seven, choose the fifth, twenty-third, and seventh people on the list.”

“Exactly. Dawn’s table was huge — thousands of numbers. Pages and pages generated on the department’s mainframe. What a foolish waste of computer time. She was nowhere near ready to select her sample. Hadn’t even gotten her basic methodology straight.”

“What was her research topic?”

“Predicting cancer incidence by geographical location. That’s as specific as she’d gotten. It was really pathetic, reading those disks. Even the little bit she had written was totally unacceptable. Disorganized, out of sequence. I had to wonder if indeed she had been using drugs.”

“Did she show any other signs of that?”

“I suppose the unreliability could be considered a symptom. And sometimes she did seem agitated — almost manic. Trying to convince me — or herself — that she was making progress. But I know she wasn’t taking amphetamines. She gained lots of weight over the last four years — at least forty pounds. She was actually quite pretty when she enrolled.”

“Could be cocaine,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose so, but I’ve seen the same things happen to students who weren’t on drugs. The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad.”

“How true,” I said.

She rubbed her nails, glanced over at the photos of her family. “When I found out she’d been murdered, it changed my perception of her. Up till then I’d been absolutely furious with her. But hearing about her death — the way she’d been found... well, I just felt sorry for her. The police told me she was dressed like some kind of punk-rocker. It made me realize she’d had an outside life she’d kept hidden from me. She was simply one of those people to whom the world of ideas would never be important.”

“Could her lack of motivation have been due to an independent income?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “She was poor. When I accepted her she begged me to get her funding, told me she couldn’t enroll without it.”

I thought of the carefree attitude about money she’d shown the Murtaughs. The brand-new car she’d died in.

“What about her family?” I said.

“I seem to remember there was a mother — an alcoholic. But the policemen said they hadn’t been able to locate anyone to claim the body. We actually took up a collection here at the school in order to bury her.”

“Sad.”

“Extremely.”

“What part of the country was she from?” I said.

“Somewhere back east. No, she wasn’t a rich girl, Dr. Delaware. Her lack of drive was due to something else.”

“How did she react to losing her fellowship?”

“She didn’t react at all. I’d expected some anger, tears, anything — hoped it would help clear the air and we’d reach an understanding. But she never even tried to contact me. Finally, I called her in, asked her how she was planning to support herself. She told me about the job at your hospital. Made it sound like something prestigious — was quite snotty, actually. Though your Mr. Huenengarth said she’d been little more than a bottle washer.”

No bottles in Ashmore’s lab. I was silent.

She looked at her watch, then over at her purse. For a moment I thought she was going to get up. But instead, she moved her chair closer and stared at me. Her eyes were hazel, hot, unmoving. An inquisitive heat. Chipmunk searching for the acorn hoard.

“Why all the questions, Doctor? What are you really after?”

“I really can’t give any details because of the confidentiality issue,” I said. “I know it doesn’t seem fair.”

She said nothing for a moment. Then: “She was a thief. Those textbooks in her locker had been stolen from another student. I found other things too. Another student’s sweater. A gold pen that had belonged to me. So I won’t be surprised if she was involved in something unsavory.”

“She may have been.”

“Something that led to her being murdered?”

“It’s possible.”

“And what’s your involvement with all of this, Doctor?”

“My patient’s welfare may be at stake.”

“Charles Jones’s sister?”

I nodded, surprised that Huenengarth had revealed that much.

“Is some type of child abuse suspected?” she said. “Something Dawn found out about and tried to profit from?”

Swallowing my amazement, I managed to shrug and run a finger across my lips.

She smiled. “I’m no Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Delaware. But Mr. Huenengarth’s visit made me very curious — all that pressure. I’ve studied health-care systems too long to believe anyone would go to that kind of effort for an average patient. So I asked my husband to make inquiries about the Jones boy. He’s a vascular surgeon, has privileges at Western Peds, though he hasn’t operated there in years. So I know who the Joneses are and the role the grandfather’s playing in the turmoil the hospital’s going through. I also know that the boy died of SIDS and another child keeps getting sick. Rumors are floating. Put that together with the fact that Dawn stole the first child’s chart and went from abject student poverty to being quite cavalier about money, add two separate visits from professionals personally looking for that chart, and one doesn’t need to be a detective.”

“I’m still impressed.”

“Are you and Mr. Huenengarth working at cross-purposes?”

“We’re not working together.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“The little girl’s.”

“Who’s paying your fee?”

“Officially, the parents.”

“Don’t you consider that a conflict of interest?”

“If it turns out to be, I won’t submit a bill.”

She studied me for several moments. “I do believe you might mean that. Now tell me this: Does possession of the disks put me in any danger?”

“I doubt it, but it can’t be ruled out.”

“Not a very comforting answer.”

“I don’t want to mislead you.”

“I appreciate that. I survived the Russian tanks in Budapest in ’56, and my survival instincts have been well developed ever since. What do you suspect might be the importance of the disks?”

“They may contain some kind of coded data,” I said, “imbedded in the random number table.”

“I must say I thought of the same thing — there really was no logical reason for her to have generated that table at such an early stage of her research. So I scanned it, ran a few basic programs, and no obvious algorithms jumped out. Do you have any cryptographic skills?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Neither do I, though good decoding programs do exist, so one no longer needs to be an expert. However, why don’t we take a look right now, and see if our combined wisdom produces anything. After that, I’ll hand the disks over to you and be rid of them. I’ll also be sending a letter to Huenengarth and the police, carbon-copied to my dean, stating that I passed the disks along to you and have no interest in them.”

“How about just to the police? I can give you a detective’s name.”

“No.” She walked back to the desk, picked up the designer purse and unclasped it. Removing a small key, she fit it into the lock of the top desk drawer.

“I usually don’t lock up like this,” she said. “That man made me feel as if I were back in Hungary.”

Sliding open a left-hand file drawer, she looked down into it. Frowned. Stuck her arm in, moved it around, pulled it out empty.

“Gone,” she said, looking up. “How interesting.”