Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 14

I drove to the hospital, parked in the staff lot, clipped on my faculty badge, and walked to the outpatient clinic on the ground floor of the main building.

Poor people often use emergency rooms as general practitioners. It ties up the E.R., makes triage a challenge, and saps hospital budgets. But doctors and nurses don’t ask for financial reports when it comes to sick kids.

Ruben Eagle was Western Pediatric Medical Center’s attempt to solve the problem, with nurse practitioners serving as first-line screeners and interns and residents doing much of the diagnosis and treatment. But demand always outstrips supply and at Western Peds, the result can be a human logjam.

Ruben’s waiting room was filled with small humans and those entrusted to care for them. No clear pathway to the reception window but I squeezed through sniffles, coughs, and cries and finally got there. The harried-looking woman was someone I’d never met but my badge caused her to nod.

“Dr. Eagle, please.”

“He’s with a patient. What shall I say it’s about, Doctor?”

“Follow-up on Thalia Mars.”

“Miss Mars,” she said, peering at the badge. “Psychology. She was your donor, too? We’re all going to miss her.” She pushed a button, talked, listened, turned back to me. “I was wrong, he’s actually rounding on Four West. He says for you to meet him in the doctors’ dining room in five minutes, he’s due for breakfast.”

The clock behind her read one P.M.

She laughed. “He likes breakfast food and never has time for it so they save him oatmeal.”

The doctor’s dining room is a pocket of oak-paneled calm tucked into a corner of the hospital basement. The rest of the floor reeks of chemicals and the morgue is steps away. No one’s appetite seems affected.

The only vacant table was near the silverware bins. I helped myself to turbo-boosted coffee and sat. Ruben’s five minutes turned into fifteen and I was on my second cup when the door opened and he charged in, white coat flapping, Coke-bottle eyeglasses slipping low on an aristocratic nose. He looked around, saw me, mouthed, Sorry, and hurried over.

Ruben’s a slim, finely boned man with a wiry gray beard. His parents escaped from communist Hungary in ’56. Ruben was born in L.A. but a couple of older sisters were smuggled out of Budapest in packing crates. One of them was mentally disabled from birth, and during the journey they put her on chloral hydrate.

Ruben tells the story with wonderment but no bitterness. His parents are gone and he’s been Magda’s primary emotional and financial support for as long as I’ve known him. She lives with him and his wife, a Chilean-born dentist, and the youngest two of their five children, in a far-too-small Sherman Oaks ranch house. Ruben drives a dented old Toyota and manages to look well groomed despite no interest in clothing. He runs marathons to raise money for his clinic, lifts weights on off days, and never works less than a hundred hours a week, divided between treating the poor and training student doctors. He wins teaching awards regularly. Everyone likes him. You can’t not like him.

Let’s see what his nonverbals had to say this afternoon.

He pumped my hand and sat down. “Alex, great to see you. Considering the circumstances, that is.”

A waiter brought him a pot of hot tea and said, “The usual, Doctor?”

“Yes, please. That’s oatmeal for me, Alex, I’m still making a go at breakfast. What can I get you?”

“A salad’s fine.”

The waiter said, “One usual, one green-s,” and left.

Ruben said, “Doris told me you want follow-up on Thalia. I think I told you everything.”

Calm steady eyes, the skin above the beard was smooth, the forehead unlined.

“Just trying to see if anything else came to mind.”

“At your cop friend’s request? Don’t imagine you have time to be running around randomly.”

“It’s a tough one, he’s trying to be thorough.”

“Well,” he said, “after we spoke on the phone, I did try to see if I could come up with anything that could be helpful. I couldn’t, Alex. Thalia was one of our best donors but I spent very little time with her.”

“She didn’t need to be stroked.”

“Just came by with the check.”

“She could’ve mailed it,” I said.

“She wanted some kind of personal contact? Guess so. But not more than once a year. We kept sending her invitations, anyway. Last time she showed up I asked her if getting mail from us was bothersome. She said not at all, but she didn’t believe it was a two-way transaction. I said I appreciated that but if she changed her mind, we’d all enjoy having her here. She said that was unlikely, her entertainment days were over. And then she winked.”

“Plenty of partying when she was younger.”

“That’s how I took it, Alex. Could that help?”

“Everything’s got potential, at this point. Did she tell you anything about her past?”

“Other than that comment and the wink, not a hint.”

“Bring the money and run.”

He laughed. “I’m sure most division heads would consider her a dream donor. But now, looking back, I wish I’d been more assertive trying to get to know her. Not out of charity, she must’ve had an interesting life, don’t you think? That age, all the history she’d lived through.”

The food arrived. Ruben added brown sugar, milk, and raisins to his oatmeal. Put his spoon down. “The thought of someone murdering her is beyond the pale but I suppose anything’s possible. Couple of weeks ago, we had a family, Mom poisoned all four kids with windshield washer fluid in their juice. Because the father left her for another woman.”

I shook my head. He ate a spoonful of oatmeal.

“We haven’t located any family.”

“Maybe she was the last woman standing,” he said. “I had a great-aunt, never married or had kids, moved to Rome and stayed there rather than come to the States with the rest of our family. She lived to a hundred and two, crazily healthy almost to the end, alone by choice. When my mother called her, Aunt Irma made her feel she was intruding. You’d probably have a diagnosis for that. Mom said she was the last woman standing because she never caught germs from anyone.”

I said, “Isolation as a wellness technique.”

“It wouldn’t work for me, but all types, right? Though the few times I saw Thalia she was friendly, nothing antisocial about her.”

I said, “The doctor who sent Thalia to you—”

“Belinda Wojik. No idea how she knew her. Your call got me curious but I didn’t try to contact her, don’t want to get in the way of the investigation. If I had to guess, I’d say something to do with show business. It strikes me that Thalia could’ve been an actress, no? She did have a theatrical side to her — the flamboyant clothes, the easy manner. That wink? And Belinda had something to do with the movies before she became a physician.”

“From screenplays to pediatrics?”

He smiled. “The opposite of what usually happens, no? All those docs think they can get rich with screenplays. Belinda went back to college for a post-bac in her forties, then med school.”

“Impressive.”

“She’s super-smart, Alex. Did a year with me then a fellowship in cardiology over at County, I figured she’d concentrate on research. Then she had a chance to take over a practice in Beverly Hills — Simon Webster.”

“Pediatrician to the stars,” I said. “A showbiz connection would help scoring something like that.”

He ate a bit. “Something just occurred to me. Thalia having money, Belinda working in B.H. What if one of her patients was Thalia’s great-grandniece or — nephew or something along those lines?”

His pager went off. He called in, listened, stood. “A real one, I’m afraid. Whooping cough in a six-month-old, so many people aren’t vaccinating, the infection vector’s screwed up.” Eyeing his bowl, he bent and took another spoonful. “Nice seeing you, hope you find whoever killed Thalia. I really liked her. Such a refined woman.”

I sat there as he whooshed out of the room, wondering how he’d react about the huge money coming his way.

Assuming he didn’t already know.

No reason to think otherwise, nothing I’d just seen or heard made me uneasy about him. I texted Milo to that effect, received no reply, looked up Belinda Wojik, M.D.’s office number and phoned.

Voicemail delivered in a sultry female voice offered a host of possibilities. I pushed 0 in order to talk to a human being and was entertained by the soundtrack from Annie before a woman with a Russian accent said, “Dr. Wojik’s office.”

“This is Dr. Delaware calling Dr. Wojik.”

“In regard to what patient?”

“Thalia Mars but she’s not a patient.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then what?”

“Miss Mars is a mutual acquaintance of Dr. Wojik and myself.”

“It’s personal?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell her but she may not be able to get back until the end of the day. What’s that name again?”

Just as I got home, a text dinged on my phone.

Milo: call me in the office.

I said, “You got my message about Ruben.”

“No. What, you just learned he’s a sure-bet serial killer, we’re closing the case? — ah, here it is. Nothing iffy, huh? Too bad. Reason I called is the autopsy results on Thalia just came in. Definitely asphyxia, pathologist said she was amazingly healthy for any age, let alone hers. The one new thing he found is bruising on both sides of her torso, like she got squeezed. Hard enough to crack one of her ribs. Which he described as ‘pickup sticks.’ Best guess is whoever covered her nose and her mouth did it while straddling her.”

“Oh, man. You know what I’m going to ask.”

“Nope, zero evidence of sexual assault. Pathologist also said there’s a decent chance she never woke up because the bruises were faint, there wasn’t a lot of stress hormone in her blood and no signs of a struggle.”

“A decent chance,” I said.

“You know those guys, commitment issues. Anyway, it doesn’t tell us much and so far I can’t find anyone from Gerard Waters’s past who fits the toothsome-twosome, just a few petty miscreants and drunks locked up in local jails the same time as him.”

“What about his stretch in prison?”

“Still waiting for a callback. Still waiting for lots of callbacks. So Eagle really is a saint, huh?”

“Would you settle for decent human being?”

“Guess there are a few.”

I told him about Thalia’s “entertainment days” comment and wink.

He said, “Sounds like she was flirting with him.”

“She did have that quality.”

“You, too, huh?”

“It could mean something,” I said. “Belinda Wojik — the doctor who referred her to Ruben — used to work in motion pictures and now has a big B.H. practice. He wondered if Thalia had once been an actress. His other guess was that one of her great-grandnieces or — nephews was a patient of Wojik’s and that’s how they met.”

“Our girl did the starlet thing before switching to accounting? Talk about shifting gears.”

“My initial search on her pulled up nothing along those lines. Nothing, period. But if her work predated the Internet by decades and she never starred in anything, that could explain it.”

“She seem the type? Beyond being flirty.”

“She did have a presence,” I said. “Meet her and you wouldn’t think ‘municipal clerk.’ ”

“Guess I should talk to Dr. Wojik.”

“I left a message with her receptionist.”

“Thanks,” he said. “How about you start with her, she has anything juicy to say, let me know. I’m gonna try the prison again, someone’s gotta know who Waters’s K.A.’s were. All of Thalia’s stuff was packed and carted a few hours ago. When the place was empty, I had a third go. No hidden cubbies, trapdoors, or buried treasure. Only thing I figure was worth much were those few pieces of jewelry and the Tiffany lamps, if they’re real.”

“I only saw one Tiffany, blue with dragonflies.”

“There was a standing one, too, kinda red, pretty.”

Bubbled shade, to my eye, crude compared with the dragonfly lamp. Not the time for a discussion on decorative arts.

I said, “When can she be buried?”

“Ricki Sylvester just called to ask the same thing. I said it would have to wait. So would finalizing the estate. She accepted it but I was b.s.’ing, can only delay up to a point. So eventually, Dr. Big Bird and all those other charities are gonna get a windfall. Too bad he didn’t twang your antenna.”