Loving Time

fifty-two

The sound of the radiator in Harold Dickey’s office sounded like a hammer pounding on a lead pipe in an echo chamber. It felt about the same to April as Chinese water torture. She wondered how anyone could think in such a place. The radiator clanked relentlessly all through Saturday as she moved around the office sorting through the scattered personnel files while Mike sat at Dickey’s desk retrieving and printing out what Dickey had labeled “special cases” from the dozens of documents in his laptop computer.

The laptop had been impounded to certify the chain of evidence. The D.A.’s office and the hospital lawyers had ruled that nothing in the computer could be tampered with or changed, nothing removed from it without being initialed by witnesses. That meant Maria Elena Carta Blanca was there with them all day, hanging on Mike’s neck and peering over his shoulder at the screen, clicking her tongue at the sensitivity of the material that she had to initial as it spewed forth from the printer.

April glanced up from her perch on the ugly green couch from time to time to observe Maria Elena’s large breasts grazing at Mike’s shoulder like some hungry animal. By midafternoon April had a bad headache. Most parts of her job she enjoyed, but she was not enjoying today. The files she was searching represented disharmonies of monumental proportions. She was also sickened by Maria Elena’s blatant play for Mike.

The sheets of papers from the files were a hopeless tangle of reports to and from and about social workers, nurses, nurse’s aides, residents, supervisors, attendings, and private physicians. They involved case accidents with outcomes of varying degrees of seriousness and contained some hair-raising stories. Dickey’s notes in the computer revealed his own thoughts about the more egregious cases of staff negligence—and a completely different set of cases involving young doctors.

“Listen to this, querida,” Mike said in a rare moment in the early afternoon when Carta Blanca was out of the room relieving herself and they were alone.

“ ‘Second day of July.’ That was last summer. ‘Resident with one day of experience screens a suicidal person in ER. Suicidal person had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and numerous visits to ER. Resident wrongly diagnoses situation, discharges patient who walks out of hospital and suicides an hour later.’ ”

Clank, clank, clank from the radiator and not the slightest hint of warmth. April shivered. “What was the outcome for the resident?” she asked.

“Not a thing. Dickey says, ‘Why ruin a young doctor’s whole career?’ ”

“What did they do, alter the chart?”

“Looks that way. Here Dickey says about the suicide, ‘I hate these Goddamn coke addicts fucking up the system.’ I guess they protected the resident.”

“You see anything in there about a resident or a doctor being dismissed?”

Mike gazed at her contemplatively, stroking his mustache seductively. He shook his head. “Not so far. The disciplinary action seems limited to the staff.… And they say we’re a blue wall.”

“You find anything about Boudreau in there?” April was thoughtful, too. Dickey had collected these personnel files because he was concerned about another patient’s death. So far, they hadn’t found the details of the one they were looking for.

April sat cross-legged on the green couch used by patients telling about their dreams and desires—their sex lives. She had read about therapy in psychology courses she’d taken at John Jay. It sounded disgusting. The last file listed off her lap. She held the papers down with one hand.

“Oh, yeah, here it is. Dickey writes, ‘That troublemaker Boudreau has really done it this time.’ Yeah, this is it. Unipolar depressive, sixth floor north, checked in Monday A.M. At four P.M. guy goes manic, walks off the ward in his pajamas to the next floor. That’s the manics-on-lithium floor. Door’s locked, he can’t get in, trots down another floor. It’s an office floor, stairway door is not locked. The patient goes to the end of the hall, where there are French doors and a small terrace. It’s a beautiful day and the doors are open. Apparently smokers go out to that terrace to smoke. Guy walks out on the terrace, jumps off before anyone can stop him, and hits the spikes on the fence around the garden. Guy’s impaled on the spikes. According to Dickey’s notes here, guy came down by the windows of the adolescent outpatient clinic, where a dozen kids saw the body. Boudreau was the one who gave him the overdose that made him manic. Dickey says, ‘Bobbie Boudreau can’t weasel out of this one. No one trusts him. It’s just the last straw.’ Well, there’s more …” His voice trailed off, and he suddenly looked sad.

“What?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing. I may not be at the Two-O for long. I’ll miss this.”

“Oh.” For a few seconds April’s headache had eased. Now it started pounding again.

“But then, neither will you,” he added with a smile.

The son of a bitch. April’s head split in half. “We going somewhere, Sergeant?” she said, struggling for calm.

“Maybe, baby,” he teased.

“You going to tell me where?”

“You want the short-term or the big picture?”

Who had Mike gone to? What had he asked for? How could he make requests on her behalf when she didn’t even know what she wanted? She stared at him, furious. “How do you know these things?”

“After you’ve been around for a while, you get a few friends. Some of them move up.” He shrugged again. “You have some friends, too. You just haven’t discovered it yet.”

April’s cheeks burned. Hijo de puta jumped into her head. She didn’t say it. Mierda. It occurred to her that she knew Spanish.

“Pendejo,” she muttered.

Mike laughed uproariously, almost exploding with mirth.

“What’s so funny?” April put the file down carefully.

“Pendejo, querida? You think I’m a pendejo?”

April lifted a shoulder. “What’s it mean?”

“I’m a pubic hair? I’m a good-for-nothing, a coward, a pubic hair? Is that what you think?” Now the laughter was gone. Mike’s voice rose with anger at his injured honor.

The door to the tiny office swung open. It wasn’t the pushy Latina lawyer. It was the pushy FBI. Special Agent Daveys shoved himself into their space, his humorless face gray as stone. “Hi, kids. What’s up?”

“Just wrapping for the day.” Mike checked his watch.

“Did you find that file on the boy nurse?”

“I told you it wasn’t here,” April said.

“Bastard must have taken it.”

“Yeah,” April muttered. Or someone else had. Gunn had sworn Dickey never mentioned Boudreau. She tapped her fingers on the files. Time to go.

“There’s a neat coffee bar over on Broadway. Let’s go there and make a plan of action,” Daveys said. It was not an invitation.

Mike glanced at April. “We’re still investigating. We’re not ready for action yet.” He pushed a few buttons to shut down the computer.

“All the same, it’s time to powwow.”

“You going to tell us something we don’t know, Daveys?”

“Many things, many things, children. This way to truth and justice.” Turning around, Daveys bumped into Maria Elena, who was charging through the doorway.

“Oops, sorry.” She backed her breasts out of Daveys’s chest with a big smile.

“All yours, sweetheart. You can lock up now.” Daveys swept by without even a peek at what he was missing.