Walkers

Chapter 15

Dr. Hovde sat on a metal stool in his examination room facing his patient, Mrs. Helen Ingalls. She perched on the edge of the table, holding her right arm gingerly out in front of her.

"It hurts from about here," she pointed to a spot on her lower triceps, "all the way through the elbow and down to my forearm."

The doctor passed his fingers lightly along the woman's arm. There was no swelling, no discoloration. He applied a little pressure.

"Ouch," she said.

Dr. Hovde nodded, satisfied.

"It hurts especially when I serve," she said, "and when I have to reach for a backhand."

"It looks like you have a classic case of tennis elbow," Hovde said. "How long have you been playing the game?"

"Twenty years, for Christ's sake."

"Have you made any changes in your game lately?"

Mrs. Ingalls gave an embarassed shrug. "Well, I have been trying to improve my serve. I mean, with the little pitty-pat delivery I've been using, I'm a sitting duck for a winner off the return. Don has been making excuses to get out of being my partner in doubles."

Dr. Hovde shook his head at the folly of a man and wife teaming up to play tennis. He said, "What kind of a change did you make in your serve?"

"The thing is, I've been watching Martina Navratilova, and she really powders the ball. I'm trying to serve more the way she does it, and I've only just started getting results."

"I'll bet," Hovde said. "And one of the results you're getting is the tennis elbow. Remember, Helen, Martina Navratilova is a professional. She is also six inches taller than you, at least forty pounds heavier, and she's left-handed. I suggest you pick somebody else to model your new serve after. In the meantime, go back to pitty-pat."

Helen Ingalls frowned. She was an attractive fortyish woman with tied-back blonde hair and crinkly blue eyes. "Don isn't going to like it."

"Let him play with Martina. If you take a couple of aspirins before you play and wear an elastic brace, it will cut down on the pain, but that's all I can do for you except to tell you to forget the cannonball serve."

Mrs. Ingalls sighed and pulled on her jacket. "I'll think it over."

Dr. Hovde left the examination room and walked back to his office in the renovated old house. He went into the washroom and scrubbed his hands at the sink. Out on his desk the telephone buzzed. He dried his hands and walked back to pick it up.

"Yes, Carol?"

"There's a Dr. Breedlove calling."

Dr. Hovde was instantly alert when he heard the pathologist's name. "I'll talk to him."

The line clicked and Hovde said, "Hello, Kermit?"

"Hi, Warren. You busy?"

"No more so than usual. What's up?"

"A customer came in downstairs last night that you might be interested in."

A knot clenched in Hovde's stomach. "Who is it?"

"Name's Edward Frankovich."

Hovde ran the name through his mental file.

Nothing clicked. "I don't know the name," he said.

"It's not him, it's the place where he died. A house up on Beachwood Drive. The girl who lives there is Joana Raitt."

"Joana? Is she all right?"

"As far as I know. Just the same, there are some peculiar things about Frankovich's death that I thought you'd be interested in."

"For instance?"

"For instance, the guy seems to have died twice."

There was a moment of silence on the wire before Hovde replied. "Are you going to be around there for a while?"

"Where else would I be?"

"I'll be down as soon as I can. I want to talk to you about this."

Dr. Hovde hung up the phone and sat for a moment pulling on his lower lip. He badly wanted a cigarette. He picked up the receiver again and buzzed the receptionist. "What do we have going for the rest of the afternoon, Carol?" he asked.

The receptionist ran down the list of patients scheduled for afternoon appointments, and their respective complaints. The more urgent cases Hovde arranged to send to a colleague who had a clinic just a block away. The others he told Carol to reschedule wherever possible for later dates.

Dr. Hovde changed from the white jacket into his old tweed and slipped out the back door, leaving Carol to deal with the patients in the waiting room.

It was most unprofessional behavior, he told himself sternly, but the circumstances were extraordinary. The message from Dr. Breedlove had triggered all sorts of unpleasant thoughts, but Hovde forced himself to draw no conclusions until he had all the facts.

It was two o'clock when he pulled into the doctors' parking lot at the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. He jogged to the Emergency entrance, nodded to the doctors he knew on the ward there, and rode the elevator down to the sub-basement.

The chill of the air crawled in through his clothes as it always did down here. It was an unnatural cold, the cold of a place that has never been warm. The cold of death. Dr. Hovde hurried past the row of refrigerated drawers to the pathology lab.

Kermit Breedlove sat at a battered old desk in one corner of the room. His chair was tilted back, his long legs stretched out with the feet propped on a pulled-out lower drawer. He was reading a paperback Western. The ever-present toothpick jiggled in a corner of his mouth.

On one of the autopsy tables lay a human form covered with a sheet. Dr. Hovde judged it to be a man, six feet five or six feet six, and about 240 pounds.

"Hello, Kermit," Hovde said. He gestured at the sheeted body. "This the one you told me about?"

Dr. Breedlove turned down a page comer and laid the paperback aside. "That's him." He got up and ambled over to the table where he stood beside Hovde. "I opened him up this morning and found some mighty interesting things inside."

"Can we have a look at him?"

"Sure." The pathologist grasped the sheet at the top of the table. Then he hesitated and said in a tone that was more serious than his usual offhand banter. "This is a bad one, Warren."

Hovde nodded his understanding and stood back to watch while Breedlove peeled away the sheet.

The body was a big man, thick through the waist and powerfully muscled at the chest and shoulders. The Y-shaped autopsy incision across the chest and abdomen had been closed and stitched together. All these details Hovde took in on his second and third impressions. All he could look at when the sheet was stripped away was the man's head. It was battered and crushed like a rotten melon. The face was all askew. All traces of blood had been washed away, and the splintered skull was clearly visible through the lacerated scalp. The brain, Hovde could see, must have bulged through half a dozen fissures before it was removed for the autopsy.

"No need to ask the cause of death on this one," he said.

Breedlove eyed him cagily. "You think not? Would you like to make a little bet?"

Hovde recalled the pathologist's words over the phone: "The guy seems to have died twice." He said, "Tell me about it."

"They brought him in about midnight last night. Apparent homicide. When I came in this morning I didn't like the looks of the body at all. And I don't mean the head."

"What do you mean?" Hovde prompted.

"The condition of the corpse didn't jibe with the time of death on the report. I don't know why nobody else picked up on it. They probably never looked past the busted-open skull."

"I can understand that," Hovde put in.

"Right away I saw there were signs of postmortem decomposition that wouldn't have been evident until a body was dead at least twenty-four hours. Want me to run over them for you?"

"I know the signs of putrefaction on a dead body." Hovde said.

"Okay. His identity was established through papers he was carrying-driver's license, credit cards, and that stuff. We verified it by checking his fingerprints with the DMV. When we knew there were no close relatives, I cut into him."

Breedlove paused to probe at a molar with the toothpick."

"Kermit, will you get on with it?"

"Sure, sure. When I got inside I found the gastrointestinal evidence and the degree of blood-cell breakdown confirmed what I thought when I first saw him. The guy died some time Friday, and not Sunday night. I don't care how many witnesses there were. Then I remembered the similar case of the crazy woman driver in Westwood, and it occurred to me that the name of the girl in the house was the same as the one the woman almost ran over. Your patient. So I gave you a call."

"I'm glad you did," Hovde said. He gazed down at the dead man with the long, roughly sewn scar running down the middle of his trunk. "If the blows to the head didn't kill this man, what did?"

"Suffocation."

"You're serious?"

"Serious as the Pope. You can see that the face, what's left of it, still has the dusky plum color associated with asphyxiation. The organs I took out were cyanotic and congested. There were small hemorrhages in the thymus, lungs, pericardium, and pleura. Internal bruising of the larynx suggests to me that he choked on something he swallowed."

"No foreign material in the laryngeal aperture?"

"Not when I opened him, but I'll guarantee something was in there and cut off his air long enough to kill him."

"On Friday."

"No later."

"Do you have the police report handy?"

Dr. Breedlove strolled back to the desk and shuffled through the papers scattered haphazardly across the top. He came up with a carbon copy of the typed police report and handed it to Hovde.

Slipping on his reading glasses, Hovde skimmed through the information in the blocks at the top of the sheet. He confirmed that the apparent homicide did indeed occur at an address on Beachwood Drive occupied by Joana Raitt. He read quickly through the narrative description, then stopped suddenly.

"Glen Early," he said aloud.

"What's that?" said Breedlove.

"The 'assailant' here, the one who delivered the blows to the head, I know him. He lives in the same apartment complex that I do."

"Some coincidence."

"Not really," said Hovde, more to himself than to the pathologist. "No coincidence at all."

He quickly finished reading the report, then went back and read it again more thoroughly.

When he had finished, Hovde laid the report flat on one of the unoccupied autopsy tables and thought about it. This new attack on Joana, following the woman in the car last Thursday, plus the accident in the swimming pool and Joana's weird story, added up to a conclusion he did not like, but one he could no longer deny. Whatever was going on here was beyond the scope of medicine, or any other of the natural sciences. There was only one possible conclusion. Walking dead people were trying to kill Joana Raitt.

"Peculiar set of circumstances, isn't it?" said Dr. Breedlove.

"Peculiar, to say the least," Hovde agreed. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Do? What do you mean do about it?"

"Jesus, Kermit, you've got findings here to show that this man, as you put it to me on the telephone, died twice. Same thing with the woman driver last week. Aren't you going to take this to the Board?"

"Hell no. I don't want any part of it."

"How can you say that? This could be one of the biggest medical stories of our time."

"Yeah, and it could be a great big can of worms. Leave me out."

"That's a hell of an attitude."

"Maybe so, but that's the way I feel." The pathologist pretended to get busy with some of the papers on his desk, but when Hovde continued to stare at him he turned back with a sigh of resignation. "Look, Warren, I could take this to the Board, sure. 'Excuse me,' I say, 'I've got a couple of people on ice downstairs who appear to have been walking around and doing things for quite some time after they were dead. Then they died again and were brought in here, and I thought I'd mention it.'

"I see two possible reactions from the Board. One, they fall all over each other laughing, or, two, they schedule me for a rubber room and one of those jackets that buckle in the back. No, make that three possibilities. They might listen to me, believe every word, then tell me to forget it if I want to keep my job here. Don't make waves."

Hovde started to argue, but he realized that what Breedlove said was essentially true. It was an outlandish story to lay on anyone cold. And the Board of Directors of the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital were not the most open-minded of bodies. They put great store in not making waves.

"You could take the story to somebody else," he said. "The newspapers. Television."

Breedlove took the toothpick out of his mouth and spoke seriously. "Warren, I am happy doing what I am doing. Chief Pathologist right here at West LA. is it for me. I have a nice home and a nice wife and a nice quiet life away from the hospital. I want to continue. I do not want to be a media star."

"All I'm suggesting is that you report what you've found here," Hovde said mildly.

"Can you imagine what Eyewitness News would do with this story? Or the Herald-Examiner? Or, God help us, the National Enquirer?"

"You've got a point," Hovde admitted.

"I do my job, and I do it well," Breedlove said. "I put my findings in my reports, I pass my reports on through channels. If anybody up the line wants to make something out of them, they're welcome to the whole stinking mess. Do you want to make something out of it?"

"No," Hovde said slowly. "I guess I don't."

There was a short, uncomfortable silence between the two doctors.

"Warren, can I make a suggestion?" Breedlove said.

"Go ahead."

"This friend of yours, this patient, Joana Raitt…"

"Yes?"

"I'd tell her to be damned careful walking past cemeteries."

Hovde regarded the pathologist for a long moment and saw that he was serious. "I'll do that," he said.

He scanned the police report one more time and saw that the case had been assigned to Detective Sergeant Dan Olivares. Hovde knew the name. He had worked with the policeman the year before on a series of grisly rape murders in the Venice area. The two men had got along well.

He handed the report back to Breedlove. "Thanks for calling me on this, Kermit. Let me know if…" He did not know how to finish the sentence.

"If I get another one?" Breedlove supplied. "I'll be happy to."

Hovde left him there with the corpse and took the elevator back upstairs. He was grateful for the rush of warm air that met him when he stepped out into the hallway. At one of the nurses' stations he used the telephone to call the Police Building in downtown Los Angeles. He asked for Sergeant Olivares in Homicide. The instrument buzzed once and a pleasant baritone answered.

"Olivares."

"Dan, this is Warren Hovde."

"Good to hear from you, Doctor. How are you?"

"Fine, fine. Dan, there's a case you're working on that I'd like to talk to you about."

"What case?"

"Edward Frankovich, homicide victim Sunday night in Hollywood."

"Oh, yeah, that was a messy one. I've got the sheet in front of me now. Was he a patient of yours?"

"No, but the girl is. The one who lives in the house where it happened."

There was a rustle of paper on the other end of the line.

"Joana Raitt," said Olivares.

"Yes, that's the girl."

"It says here her boyfriend, Glen Early, was the one who did Frankovich in."

"Yes, I know Glen too," said Hovde.

"I wouldn't worry about him, if that's why you called. I don't think he's in any trouble. We've got an apartment house full of witnesses ready to swear he acted in defense of his life and the girl's. This Frankovich was clearly freaked out. I make him a psycho or a doper."

"I'm glad to hear Glen's in the clear," Hovde said, "but that's not all I wanted to talk to you about."

"Do you have some information?" Suddenly the official tone of the policeman was in Olivares' voice.

"I'm not sure. Can we get together?"

"Early and the girl are due down here in a little while to enter their statements on the record. Would you like to sit in?"

"I would, if you don't mind."

"Come on down. I'll have a visitor's badge waiting for you with the guard downstairs."

Dr. Hovde hung up the phone and walked slowly down the antiseptic corridor and out of the hospital. There was no backing out now, he was in this business with both feet, whether he wanted to be or not. Walking down the steps outside the building, he thought about how simple his life had been just a week ago. All he had to worry about then was sore throats, broken bones, and his impending divorce.

The good old days, he thought sourly, and climbed into his car.