Sympathy Between Humans

4

Lust may never sleep, but Sunday night is a slow night in the sex trade, too slow to waste a detective on a prostitution-decoy sting. It left me free to pursue “Cisco.” I even had an excuse to see him: my cold was in full bloom. I was coughing incessantly, congested and sniffling.

Now my problem was this: Cisco might take one look at me and see, if not an undercover cop, a middle-class individual who didn’t need to seek doctoring in a housing project late at night. His clientele probably ran to people with little money and few options in medical care- the poor and disenfranchised, illegal immigrants, maybe criminals.

Maybe hookers, too.

That’s how I ended up, on a Sunday night, wriggling into my vice-decoy clothes: this time, a shiny, sleeveless pink top and tight calf-length black pants. After applying the usual makeup, I looked at the mirror, at my artificially pale face, and felt a chill of anxiety down my spine.

A SWAT veteran had lectured my Sheriff’s academy class about on-the-job nerves. When you feel fear, try to determine its source, he’d said. Sometimes it’s not coming from where you think it is, and sometimes if you know what the fear is really about, you can defuse it.

Was I afraid of Cisco because he was, supposedly, a doctor?

My medical phobia was a specific one. I wasn’t afraid of paramedics, and I gave blood when the blood bank set up shop downtown, in a reassuring nonmedical setting. But I hated going to the doctor: that powerlessness as you waited behind the closed door, with the overhead light bouncing off the instruments and the creepy anatomical posters hanging on the wall. Down to the second, I could identify the worst part: the moment when you heard the door handle start to turn.

But Cisco’s as-yet-unseen apartment wasn’t that place. According to Prewitt, Cisco probably wasn’t even a real doctor. To us, he was a suspect.

Was that in itself frightening? This was undercover work, which is always potentially dangerous.

I nodded, as if someone were here to share my revelation. I’d located the source of my nerves: I was afraid of the unknown Cisco, of being alone with him in his apartment. Maybe I should ask for some kind of backup.

All Prewitt asked you to do was check this guy out, I reminded myself. You don’t even have to identify yourself. You’re just going to go over there and see what’s what. You want help for that?

What I was doing needed to be done. Whoever Cisco was- a med-school washout or a con artist faking it from having worked in a medical office- he was clearly fooling enough people to have a small clientele, which meant he was bleeding money off the poor and uneducated just when they were at their most vulnerable. If he hadn’t screwed up badly enough to cause permanent injury or death yet, well, it was probably just a matter of time. This guy needed to be taken off the playing field, and Prewitt had trusted me to get the job started. I couldn’t go back to my lieutenant now and tell him I wanted backup to go see a suspect armed only with a stethoscope.

The elevator in the north tower took a long time to come. There were no lighted numbers above the doors to mark its progress downward, and I whistled quietly as I waited. Such behaviors were Method acting for cops, keeping the nerves at bay.

A faint ping sounded, but for a moment nothing happened. A long moment. Then the single-panel door slid to the side. I stepped into the car and pressed number 26, for the top floor. After a moment the door slid shut, and again, nothing happened.

I pressed the 26 again. The car lurched upward. From above me, the other side of the elevator’s roof, came an odd groaning sound I’d never heard an elevator make, and underneath that sound, a squeak of cables working: screek, screek, screek. Inside the car, there were lighted numbers to allow passengers to watch their progress. For an inordinately long time the 2 stayed lit. Then 3. More rumbling from above; 4… 5… 6…

If I’d known it was going to take this long, I’d have brought something to read, I thought. The mental complaint was bravado. I rode elevators all the time at work, but this one was bothering me.

At 26, the car lurched to a halt. But for a moment, nothing happened. The door stayed closed.

“Come on,” I said under my breath. The elevator’s balky performance seemed like a bad omen for my whole visit here.

The door slid open and I stepped out into the hallway, walked down to the second door, and knocked.

What if Ghislaine misremembered which apartment this guy lives in? I thought, in the wait that followed.

The door opened about two inches, just to the end of a security chain. A slice of masculine face appeared in the gap, but about two feet lower than where I expected it. When I understood why, I found myself momentarily at a loss for words.

“Can I help you?” the man said, finally.

“Are you”- I coughed to clear phlegm from my throat-“Cisco? Ghislaine Morris gave me your name. I need to get looked at.”

Cisco closed the door in my face. Behind the wall the chain scraped, and the door swung wide. As he let me in, Cisco rolled backward in his wheelchair to give me space.

Height was hard to gauge, but he was a long, lean form in the chair, dressed in a dark-gray sweatshirt that revealed a little bit of white from the collar of the T-shirt he wore underneath. The same white T-shirt peeked out from under the sweatshirt at his hips, over his dark-blue workman’s trousers. His feet were bare. He had a lean face, with black hair that brushed his shoulders, feathery at the ends.

He certainly wasn’t hiding what he did. Beyond him, I saw low shelves lined with texts on medicine and anatomy. On the wall was a framed diploma, and where most people would have put the couch stood a long table lined with a sheet of tissue paper. It looked almost like a doctor’s examining table, except that it was lower, reflecting the level from which Cisco had to approach the world. The table was positioned just under a hanging light fixture. At the foot of the table was a chest, like a footlocker, and a little beyond that was a two-drawer filing cabinet.

“What’s troubling you?” Cisco said.

“I have a bad cold,” I said, “or the flu.”

“Mmm,” Cisco said noncommittally.

“How much do you charge?” I asked him.

“Let’s not get to that just yet,” Cisco said. “Most colds run their course within a week,” he said, “even without any kind of treatment. I’m not sure why you’re seeking help.”

Maybe this guy had the most sensitively tuned radar for cops I’d ever run across. Still, it was hard to be scared of him, given the situation. Unless he had a gun tucked under that fringe of T-shirt.

I sniffled again. “I’m never sick. That’s why this is tripping me out. I want to be sure nothing’s behind it.”

“Did your friend Ghislaine suggest I could prescribe something for you, something stronger than over-the-counter meds?” Cisco asked.

“No,” I said honestly.

“Because I can’t,” Cisco went on. “I expect Ghislaine didn’t pass along what I told her when she came to see me, so I’m going to tell you what I tell everyone. I don’t know what brought you to me in a city full of doctors’ offices; I don’t ask people that,” Cisco continued. “But this is not the ideal situation in which to get your medical care. If you have another option, you should seriously think about taking it.”

If he thinks that little speech is a disclaimer that’ll protect him from criminal charges, he’s got another thing coming.

“Understood. How much do you charge?” I said flatly.

“To look at you?” he said. “Forty.”

That’s all? I thought. It surprised me that he’d put himself at risk by doing something this illegal, and then charge relatively little for it. On the other hand, his clientele probably didn’t have much money to spare.

“Do you want me to look at you?” he asked.

“I didn’t come this far to just go away,” I told him, thinking of Prewitt.

“All right,” Cisco said. “I take the money up front. Why don’t you set it on my bookshelf over there, then take your shirt off and get on my exam table. I’ll be with you in a minute.” He rolled backward, turning the wheelchair toward his kitchen.

The money first. Cisco might be reasonably priced, but he certainly wasn’t naive. I laid two twenties on the top of the bookshelf as I’d been directed. Water ran in Cisco’s kitchen. He was at the sink, his back turned to me.

It was the first moment I’d had to regain my mental footing. The fact that he was a paraplegic had thrown me, but only momentarily. It was his behavior that I continued to find unusual. Normally, criminals, particularly con artists, are hyperalert when meeting strangers. They hide it well, but you can sense it, a kind of power-line hum that radiates off them. But Cisco didn’t seem so much alert as aware. He wasn’t nervous, and he wasn’t drunk or on anything, either. He was simply relaxed, and that was the thing that didn’t add up.

I turned to study the living room. Virtually nowhere were any personal touches. I drifted over to look at the framed diploma on the wall.

C. Agustin Ruiz, the name read. Above it, in larger letters, were the words Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons.

“Holy shit,” I said, unable to censor myself in time. The heavy paper clearly marked the certificate as nothing you could make with a home-computer word-processing program. This guy was bona fide.

“Something wrong?” Cisco said.

“That’s a good school, isn’t it?” I asked.

He turned to see me looking at his diploma. “Most people would say so,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you to take off your shirt?”

I pulled my shiny pink sleeveless top over my head and sat down on the table, feeling self-conscious in a black half-cup bra. With my hands at my sides, resting on the edge of the exam table, I noticed something about the material underneath. It was cloth-covered, rounded, and cream-colored.

“Is this a massage table?” I asked Cisco, who’d come near to take a few objects from his footlocker.

“You must have made a wrong turn on the way to Cedars-Sinai,” he said dryly.

Some bedside manner, I thought. But he was right.

Cisco rolled to the side of the exam table and turned on the overhead light with an in-line switch in the cord. A stethoscope was draped around his neck, a blood pressure cuff in his lap. He held a yellow legal pad on his lap.

“Are you going to take notes?” I asked.

“All doctors do,” Cisco said. “What’s your name?”

I tensed. Cisco noticed it. “We can do this AA style, if you like,” he said. “First name and last initial.”

“Sarah P.,” I said.

“What do you do for a living?” he asked.

I gave him a dry stare ringed heavily with black eyeliner.

Cisco licked his teeth speculatively. “Right,” he said. “Are you taking any medications currently?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you use?”

“Use what?” I knew what he meant, but felt like giving him a hard time, like Sarah P. the hooker would have.

“Drugs.”

“No,” I said.

“Date of your last menstrual period?”

“I don’t remember,” I said, “but I’m regular.”

“Any chance you could be pregnant now?”

“If I were, could you fix it for me?” I asked.

“We’re going in circles. Do you think you might be pregnant?”

I shook my head. When he didn’t move on, I said, “No. I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Cisco said. “Let’s get started.”

He laid the cool surface of the stethoscope against my sternum. He nodded. “Breathe deeply for me,” he said. I did, closing my eyes. “Again.”

A shredding sound made me open my eyes. Cisco was unwrapping the blood-pressure cuff.

“You’ve got all the equipment,” I said.

“Not nearly what I’d like to have,” he said.

Obediently I held out my arm, and he pumped air into the cuff, then let it hiss out, watching his stethoscope.

“Hundred and four over seventy,” Cisco noted. “Nice.”

He’d surprised me. On my rare visits to doctors, I’d always had high readings. White-coat hypertension, they called it, blood pressure that was only high in medical settings.

But Cisco’s place was different. He acted like a doctor, and this was an exam, yet I was clearly in someone’s home. There was a faint scent of cooking in the air, instead of that disturbing antiseptic smell of a doctor’s office.

He took my temperature, read the thermometer in silence, and shook it out. He looked in each ear with an otoscope, felt the glands at the side of my neck.

“When did you first notice the symptoms?” he asked.

“Two days ago.”

“Any reason to think you might be immunosuppressed?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you prone to ear infections?”

“No.”

“Are either of your ears bothering you?”

“No,” I said again.

Cisco rolled backward slightly. “You can put your shirt back on,” he said, giving the shiny pink thing the honor of being called a shirt, something I wouldn’t have done. I pulled the top over my head, straightened my hair with my fingers.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “You seem to be a person in good health, with a bad cold. It’s not the end of the world. Get plenty of fluids and rest, take some vitamin C, and treat the symptoms with some over-the-counter remedies.”

“All right.”

“There is one other thing.” Cisco’s tone had changed, sharpening my attention. “I’m not real happy with the way your left ear looks. We usually see infections in children, not adults, and you say it’s not bothering you, so I’m not going to worry about it too much. But if it starts to hurt you, go to a clinic. You may need antibiotics, and I can’t prescribe for you.”

“Okay,” I said.

He rolled back a few paces and retrieved something else from his chest. A red leaflet, which he came back to hand to me. It was an informational pamphlet from a walk-in sexual health clinic.

“I’m not making judgments here,” Cisco said. “But if you’re trading sex for money or drugs, then you need to get tested for HIV and other diseases. And if you test negative for everything, you need to talk to someone about how you can stay negative.”

The skin on my face felt warm and sensitized, the way it sometimes does when someone is kind to me for no good reason. I took the flyer.

“By the way, in answer to your earlier question,” he said, “I don’t do abortions.”

“Did that offend you?” I asked.

“No,” Cisco said. He did not elaborate.

I was free to go, but now that the hard part was over, my curiosity was rising. I said, “So, you went to medical school and everything?”

“Yes,” he said. He was putting away his instruments in the chest.

“But you don’t have a license?”

“I used to,” he said.

“What happened?”

“That’s a longer story than we probably have time for,” Cisco said, his tone measured. He was at his filing cabinet now, tearing the top sheet of paper off his legal pad, finding a place for it in the top drawer.

Dear God, the man kept files. When I made my report to Prewitt and we got a warrant, an extensive search wasn’t going to be necessary. Cisco was carefully documenting and organizing everything we needed to hang him.

Cisco rolled forward to collect the two twenties from the bookcase. When he didn’t take it anywhere, I understood that he didn’t want to put the money away while I was in his apartment, so I wouldn’t see where his stash was. He was careful.

“You know,” I said, “forty dollars doesn’t seem like a lot of money.”

“I don’t plan to get rich doing this.”

“Then why do it at all?” I asked.

“I fill a need,” Cisco said. “Believe it or not, people do fall through the cracks of the health-care system. Some don’t have insurance. Some are illegal immigrants. They’re intimidated by ERs, the crowds and the waits and tension there. I provide a service.”

“And, of course, they pay you,” I pointed out, playing devil’s advocate.

“I’m part of what the World Bank calls the informal economy,” Cisco said. “It’s accepted practice in many countries.”

“But you said you don’t have the equipment you’d like,” I pointed out.

“You’d be surprised what’s available from medical-supply houses,” he said. “No drugs, of course. But I’ve been able to get much of what I need for my practice here, which is mostly minor injuries, burns, things like that. I’m also able to give reassurance to people with small problems, like yours. And when people have more serious problems, I’m an early-warning system. When people come to me with symptoms that trouble me, or conditions that are beyond my capacity to treat, I tell them in no uncertain terms to get to a clinic or hospital.”

“About how many patients do you find yourself sending away to a real doctor?” I said.

The warmth died away from Cisco’s dark eyes. “I am a real doctor,” he said.

“I didn’t mean-” I said.

But it was too late; I’d said the wrong thing. “I think we’re finished here,” Cisco said, rolling backward to put a little more space between us. “Good night, Sarah.”

Shiloh and I rented the first floor of an older two-story house. It afforded more privacy than you’d expect, because behind it, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, was an open field and then the railroad tracks on their raised man-made berm. I pulled into the narrow driveway alongside the house and went in through the back door. The outer screen door gave way grudgingly, creaking. It was stiff, in need of maintenance I hadn’t yet given it.

The place had been Shiloh ’s before it had been mine, and it was still largely his personality that was imprinted throughout the gently shabby interior. Probably a number of women would have made their own mark by now, but I wasn’t one of them. I’d always felt a certain peace among Shiloh ’s eclectic paperback books and weathered furniture.

I flicked the kitchen light on and set my shoulder bag on the cluttered kitchen table, pushing aside a stack of unread mail and the legal pad on which I’d been trying to compose a letter to Shiloh. I was much more physically tired than the evening’s work accounted for, but I understood why. The visit to Cisco’s had been wearying. Genevieve, a veteran interrogator, had taught me that lying is hard on the body: it speeds the heart and demands more oxygen for the bloodstream.

I went into the bathroom, reached for the faucet handle in the bathtub, and turned on the hot water. Then, on impulse, I put the stopper in the drain rather than starting a shower. Sitting on the edge of the tub, I watched the water begin to pool.

The last piece of advice my mother ever gave me was not to take baths in motel rooms, because you never know who’s been using the bathtubs or how well they’ve been cleaned. Strange advice, but we were in a motel at the time.

It was ovarian cancer that had claimed my mother: swift, silent, deceptively painless in its early stages. After treatments at our local hospital in rural New Mexico were unsuccessful, my mother had sought treatment at a research university in Texas. My father had approved of the idea. They’ll fix you up, he’d said glibly, in denial to the end. He did not come along, but sent me to accompany her.

When my mother went in for her exploratory surgery, I waited in the oncologist’s office, drinking a Dr Pepper and looking through the glossy four-color books Dr. Schwartz kept out for visitors and their families. At nine, I didn’t read as well as I should have, but if the book had a lot of pictures, I would have my nose buried in it, looking studious and rapt to the world outside. That’s what I was doing when Dr. Schwartz returned a half hour later.

Still in his surgical scrubs, he walked past me into his inner office, picked up the phone on his desk, and dialed. At nine, I had the preternaturally good hearing that many children do, and both ends of the conversation were audible to me.

“Sandeep, it’s me,” he said. “If you want to move your schedule up a little bit, you can. I’m already done with the exploratory I had at eleven-thirty.”

“That was quick.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” my mother’s doctor said. “Totally metastasized. When I saw how far it had gone, I just closed up. We were out of there way ahead of schedule.”

Dr. Schwartz made another phone call immediately after that one, and this time, I immediately recognized the voice on the other end.

“I think it’s time you drove out here,” Dr. Schwartz said, lighting a cigarette. “I’d like to talk to you in person.”

“You can talk to me now, Doctor,” my father said. “Is my wife not in shape to travel by herself?”

“Actually, you should be prepared to stay here awhile,” Dr. Schwartz said.

A long pause. “You’re not telling me Rose’s case is terminal, are you?”

Dr. Schwartz looked up to see me looking at him. He took the phone away from his face. “Sarah, sweetie,” he said, “why don’t you run down the hall and get yourself something to drink?”

“I still have half of the Dr Pepper you bought me,” I said, pointing.

“Then can you get me a diet something? Coke or Sprite, doesn’t matter.”

In the hall, I’d asked a tall black orderly what terminal meant. He’d said, “I dunno, kid.” I’d been young enough to believe him.

A gurgling noise interrupted my thoughts. The water in the tub had reached the drainplate. I shut it off and hunted under the sink for a jar of bath salts, poured a generous amount into the steaming water, and got in. As I did, I thought for no reason of Marlinchen Hennessy, my visitor of four days ago.

The association seemed to come from nowhere, but it couldn’t have. Did the bath salts- cleanly herbal instead of cloyingly floral- bring up a scent she’d been wearing? No, that wasn’t it.

Marlinchen had told me about her mother’s premature death; I had just been remembering my mother. There was the link. She’d said her mother had died ten years ago, which would have made her seven at the time.

I had mishandled Marlinchen Hennessy. Some of that was undoubtedly due to the way she’d looked. My first impression of Marlinchen Hennessy had been of a young woman of perhaps 21, and even after she’d told me she was 17, I hadn’t really internalized it. I’d spoken to her as bluntly as I would have to an adult, forgetting that even adults are sometimes shaken up by a cop’s natural directness.

Certainly, Marlinchen hadn’t helped her own case with her evasions and defensiveness. But I’d been a cop long enough to know that sometimes people need help the most when they appear to deserve it the least. Ultimately, Marlinchen had made it clear that the burden of finding her brother had fallen on her, and had reached out to me for help, and I’d run her off.

Perhaps there was something I could do to remedy that. If nothing else, Hennepin County didn’t pay me to look the other way when one of its citizens behaved strangely, rushing away rather than answering seemingly harmless questions.