CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (21 page)

“How do you know it isn’t Margaret O’Connor’s?”

“Because I called and said I was Citibank and she’d given Emigrant as a reference for a loan. They said there was such an account, but that wasn’t the name on it. They wouldn’t tell me the name, though, and I didn’t want to make them suspicious by calling back with some other gag right away. I’ll have to think of something else.”

“Well, I’m sure you will.” I signaled the waiter for more coffee. “So. Where the hell are we? Howe was killed by someone he knew. Reynolds was killed by someone. Someone put the cops onto Carter, with faked evidence, for some reason.”

“Assuming,” Lydia said, gently but precisely, “that Carter’s really innocent.”

“Yes. Assuming that.” I went on, listing what I thought we knew as though, like practicing a new piece, I could consolidate ground and move on to another level. “Portelli was running a stolen-goods racket out of the Home, Madsen was stealing drugs and needles, Howe was blackmailing them both.” I looked at Lydia. “Well? What do we have?”

“What is it you people say? A nest of worms?”

“A can of worms. Or a nest of vipers.” I sighed. “Okay. Let’s get back to work.”

“What do you have in mind?”

I checked my watch; three-thirty. “Samaritan’s right down the Concourse from here. I think I should go see Margaret O’Connor, before she quits for the day.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“My first choice is always for you to come with me. But I think maybe you should go back to the Home. As the daughter of a prospective resident. Talk to Mrs. Wyckoff, and whomever else will talk to you. Just get a feel. I’ll meet you back there later.”

“You’ll just get thrown out again.”

“Maybe. Or maybe Mrs. Wyckoff will go home without remembering to tell the guards about me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh. Well, my car’s there. They have to let me back in to get my car.”

“Is that why we walked here?”

“We walked here because you wanted to see the neighborhood.”

She said, “Uh-huh.”

T
HIRTY
-F
IVE

I
paid the check, walked out with Lydia into the fading day. The sun hung low in the haze over the ranks of brick buildings, and the light it gave was gold shot through with red glints. I looked around, long and carefully. I didn’t see either the tan Dodge or the green Chevy. I didn’t see anything that looked like it was following me.

“I talked to Nathan, by the way,” Lydia said as she zipped her leather jacket. “He went over to the precinct and worked things out with Carter. The arraignment will be this afternoon—maybe it’s been already. Nathan thinks bail will be high.”

“I think he’s right. Maybe I should go see Carter’s grandmother and the kids.”

“Nathan called them. Carter asked him to.”

“Good.”

We scanned the street for cabs. “Nathan had trouble finding the police station,” Lydia said. “He says it’s a good-looking building
if you like police stations but it’s nowhere near the old one. Why do you suppose they did that?”

“Moved it? To shore up the neighborhood, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“The neighborhood around the old forty-first was pretty much burned out. The new building is in a neighborhood that could go either way. I guess the City wants to stabilize it.”

“Does the City really think like that?”

I nodded. “Dave and Bobby and their cop friends used to gripe about it, every time a new station house was planned.”

“Because the City was messing with police buildings for non-police reasons?”

“It’s not just police buildings; the City does it all the time, sort of maximizing resources. No, I think they were just cynical.”

“Were they right, or does it work?”

“Sometimes, I guess. As a seed sort of thing. A City building opens, there’s more investment, property values go up, which brings more investment, stuff like that.”

“How come they don’t do it in Chinatown?”

“Because you people are doing fine all by yourselves.”

“Only the big-money interests.”

“Okay,” I said. “Call the Mayor. Tell him what you want. I’m right behind you. There’s your cab.”

Lydia and I caught separate gypsy cabs—regular yellow cabs don’t cruise the Bronx—and she headed north. I went south down the Concourse, checking the traffic out the rear window periodically. I knew Lydia was doing the same, watching her back.

Cars came and went, but nobody stayed with me long enough to be tailing me. Unless the guy had a relay team, he wasn’t here. Whatever he was up to, it would have to keep.

Margaret O’Connor was fiftyish, athletic-looking, with short gray-streaked black hair and beautiful gray eyes. She put me in an upholstered chair on one side of her desk, seated herself in a leather chair on the other. I told her who I was and what I was working on. She told me she would like to help.

“Though I don’t know how.” Her voice was deep and slightly hoarse. I didn’t see any ashtrays but I wondered if she smoked. “I don’t really know why you’ve come to me.”

I looked around the office: pale pink walls—pink makes everyone look healthier—and strong, simple furniture, good but not new. It could have been any office, anywhere, except for the disinfectant smell faintly tingeing the air. “You’re a private investigator,” she said, fingering my card. “Might I ask for whom you’re working?”

“I knew the first victim.”

“The young man?”

I nodded.

“It’s a terrible tragedy, dying that young,” she said.

“So is murder, at any age. You knew Dr. Reynolds?” I asked.

She gave me a strange look; maybe I was being obnoxious, aggressive, and abrasive. “Of course. He had privileges here. We have a contract with Helping Hands, which includes the Bronx Home.”

Warm it up a little, Smith. I tried to change the tone of my voice. “What sort of contract?”

“They send us patients in need of hospital care. We provide it.”

“Why does that need a contract?”

“They’re assured of a bed for any patient at any time; we guarantee that. We’re assured a steady stream of patients. It helps keep us above the eighty-percent mark.”

“The eighty-percent mark?”

She smiled. Her smile was both efficient and comforting. Comforting, maybe, because it was efficient. No sentimentality, no illusions; we’ll do what we can, and then we’ll move on to the next thing. Enough time in a hospital in the Bronx might give you that smile. “You’re not in the health-care field, are you, Mr. Smith?”

Hardly, I thought. The question was rhetorical but I answered it. “No, I’m not.”

“In this field, there are many government regulations. One of them holds that in order to receive certain funding, our beds must be maintained above eighty-percent full. The thinking is if we can’t do that, we’re not needed in the community. Clearly we are, but percentages are tricky for a crisis-oriented institution to achieve. There are epidemics, or just bad flu seasons. Or Saturday night.” She smiled again. “The capacity we have to handle those times can make us appear underutilized at other times. Helping Hands’ patients, because they tend to be hospitalized on a nonemergency basis—though not always, of course—help us even out those peaks and dips.”

From her office window I could see nothing but more tan brick buildings, the rest of the Samaritan complex. Something was ringing a small, tentative bell in the back of my mind; I wanted time to listen to it. “I’ve learned more in the last few days about nonprofit institutions than I ever wanted to know,” I said.

“And you’re disillusioned.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Everyone is, at the beginning. But the rules are what they are. I’m sure there are regulations in your field that you find arbitrary and counterproductive. But your choices are few: live with them, find a way to change them, or find a new profession. Most of us do the first. Many of us do the last.”

“And few of us ever change anything,” I finished for her. “Your contract with Helping Hands—does it involve money?”

“No. Who would pay whom? It’s just a mutual guarantee of performance.”

“Do you have an account at Emigrant Savings Bank?”

She frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“Emigrant Savings.” I rattled off the account number from the card in Henry Howe’s toilet tank.

“Are you asking whether that’s my account? I do my banking at Chase. Why do you want to know?”

“How about the hospital?”

“Our checking accounts are with Chemical and our pension fund is with a private insurer. I really don’t understand why you’re asking this.”

“I don’t either. Your name was mentioned in association with that bank-account number.”

“By whom?”

“I’m not sure of that either.”

“Mr. Smith,” she smiled, “don’t you think it’s odd that you should come asking questions that you don’t know the reason for, or even the meaning of?”

“Yes, but I do it all the time. What if I were to tell you that checks with your signature, drawn on Samaritan Hospital accounts, were regularly deposited in that account at Emigrant?” Or what if I were to tell you the moon was made of green cheese?

She tapped the corner of my card on the desktop. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” she said, “but we write a lot of checks. One rarely knows where one’s checks are deposited.”

“This is a big hospital.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You must have an entire financial department. Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll, the whole thing. Why is your signature on any checks at all?” Jesus, Smith, I thought. First you make up a story and then you ask someone to explain it to you.

She explained it. “I have a discretionary account. To buy birthday presents for the staff, put on cocktail receptions for potential donors, things of that sort. Why is this your business, Mr. Smith?”

“Because someone was blackmailing a number of people connected with the Bronx Home over a number of different things. I think this Emigrant account was part of that.”

“You think that I was making blackmail payments?” Her voice held amusement. “Well, it’s a more interesting class of crime than we usually see at Samaritan. Generally it’s limited to gunshots, stab wounds, and drug overdoses.”

“No,” I said slowly. I was working this out as I went along. “I don’t think you were paying blackmail. I think you were paying for something else, and someone else was being blackmailed.”

Margaret O’Connor’s smile flickered. She stopped tapping my card. The little bell in my mind was playing a tune, a theme from the Second Mephisto Waltz.

“You’ll have to explain that,” she said.

And you’d better get it right the first time, I told myself.

“What happens,” I asked her, “if you fall below the eighty-percent mark?”

“I told you. We risk the loss of certain funding.”

“No. I mean what happens if you see that happening?”

She frowned as if she didn’t understand, but she didn’t say she didn’t.

“Here’s what I think happens,” I said. “I think when you see your beds emptying you call the Bronx Home and they send you patients. For tests, or for elective surgery, or for no goddamn reason at all. What’s the big deal, everyone figures. Most of those people are ga-ga anyway, and all of them have something wrong with them. No surprise to anyone if they pop up in the hospital a couple of times a year. Am I right so far?”

Margaret O’Connor said nothing.

“You need a doctor to admit them here. That was Dr. Reynolds. ‘Go ahead, Margaret, keep ’em as long as you need ’em.’ He
had that reputation around the Home, always sending people to the hospital. He even sent me for X rays I didn’t need.” I stopped to think some more; she didn’t interrupt me.

“I was in and out fast, too. I would guess policy is to treat people from the Home with special care, so they don’t start demanding another hospital. I had a feeling something was wrong, and I made a big deal about making sure my insurance would pay, but that was only because I couldn’t think of any other scam, and I wasn’t even sure how that one would work. But I’ve got it now, don’t I?”

Silence.

“Isn’t that how it goes?” I pushed. “And Samaritan’s funding stays solid, and Dr. Reynolds receives little tokens of gratitude out of the Administrator’s discretionary fund.”

Margaret O’Connor still said nothing. Maybe I’d have done better telling her about the green cheese.

“It can’t be that hard,” I said, “for the police to subpoena that bank account. They may have done it already.” If they’ve stuck their hands in the toilet tank.

Her face grew hard. She snapped my card down on the desk. “You’re one of those righteous people.” Her voice was sharp. “One of those people who thinks there are no excuses. I’ll bet you despise people weaker than yourself, and I’ll bet you see a lot of those.”

“Tell me about the excuses.” My face flashed hot but I kept my voice level.

“Do you know whom we service here?” Her eyes glowed with anger. “There’s a sixteen-year-old boy brought in yesterday, shot for winking at a girl from a different high school. He’ll live, but he won’t walk again. We have an entire ward of children dying from AIDS. Some of their families don’t even visit anymore. We see malnutrition on a level unknown since the Depression. TB is a new epidemic, but mostly it’s run-of-the-mill rape, child abuse, shootings and stabbings and beatings. This is a war zone, Mr. Smith. We’re a field hospital. Our mission is to provide care to whoever can make it to our door.”

I said, “And to do that, if a couple of old men and old ladies get scared half to death, spend a few days disoriented and uncomfortable, have minor surgery they don’t need, well, what’s the difference, right?”

“If those old men and old ladies expect to have a hospital to
come to when they really need one, maybe they should consider this their contribution to the war effort.”

I looked at her, erect in her chair, her jaw held tight. “I know a cop you’d like,” I said.

“Is that a threat?”

“No. No, not at all. I think it might have been a compliment.” I scanned the room again. The disinfectant smell was really getting to me. “Can I smoke?”

After a brief moment she yanked open a desk drawer, pulled out an ashtray and a pack of Gauloises. I struck a match before she did, lit hers for her. I wasn’t sure she was happy about it but she wasn’t rude enough to stop me. She nudged the ashtray between us on the desk.

“Ms. O’Connor,” I said, lighting a Kent, “I don’t know if what you’re doing is right, or can be justified. I don’t even know how to think about it. Right now I’m going to deal with it by not dealing with it, except for this: three men are dead. Their deaths seem related to various illegal operations involving the Bronx Home, and this was one of those operations. I want to know how it ties in to those deaths.”

“This may surprise you.” She tilted her head back to avoid exhaling directly at me. “But if that’s true, I’d like to know, too.”

“Then help me.”

Her beautiful gray eyes regarded me without blinking. She wasn’t a doctor; the degrees on her walls were all management degrees. Still, I felt like a specimen of something unlucky enough to be caught on a glass slide.

“I want you to understand,” she said, “that my first priority is this hospital. If I help you, I want a guarantee that you won’t go to the authorities with anything I tell you.”

“I can’t give you that. Anything that will help solve these murders I won’t keep to myself. But I haven’t told them any of this yet.” Because I only just figured it out, I thought to myself, and there’s never a cop around when you need one.

We smoked in silence for a while, alternating using the ashtray. Finally Margaret O’Connor said, “Well, there isn’t very much more in any case. Samaritan’s arrangement with the Bronx Home is largely as you describe. It’s part of a broader contract with Helping Hands, as I said, to provide all hospital-related care, including ambulance
and outpatient services. Like your X rays. It was only a short step from Samaritan providing services because we needed the patients, to the Home providing patients. Both inpatients and people like yourself.” She smiled. “I hope you weren’t terribly inconvenienced.”

There was a self-mocking tone to her words that kept me from an angry answer.