Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense (5 page)

We were living in a two-bedroom, second-floor apartment on Armacost Avenue in West Los Angeles. The place was called the Tropic Sands and was built around a concrete courtyard and two palm trees planted in a sand box. On sunny afternoons, residents scooted lounge chairs under the trees, sat in the shade, and used the sand box as an ashtray. Our rent was sixty dollars a month and we were roller-skating distance from the hospital. I know, because when it wasn't raining, that's how I'd get to work.

In fact, a lot of people who worked at the hospital lived in the neighborhood. If a kid scraped his knee on the side walk, he could count on at least two doctors rushing out to treat him and someone from the accounting department making sure his parents got billed.

On that day in February, I straggled home around midnight, dead tired and completely drenched from the pouring rain. I made myself a sandwich and ate it as I stripped out of my wet clothes. I flopped into bed still chewing on my last bite, doing my best not to wake up Katherine, who was sleeping so peacefully on the other side. I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

It seemed like an instant later when the alarm jolted me awake again at five thirty a.m. I was alone in bed. Katherine was already up, and I could smell bacon sizzling in the pan. I threw off the sheets, put on a bathrobe, and lumbered into the living room, which was also our dining room, family room, and kitchen.

Katherine was sitting at our new dinette set, reading the newspaper. We got the set by trading in twenty-two books of Blue Chip stamps we'd saved up from grocery shopping. She was real excited about the table because it had a textured, laminated plastic top that looked like wood but was supposedly heat, stain, and scratch resistant. I say "supposedly" because I eventually decided to test that claim and managed to completely destroy the table.

She was freshly showered and wearing a pink bathrobe, an apron tied over it at the waist and neck. Her hair was wet, bound up in a towel using a technique that completely baffled me. I have no idea how it stayed in place.

I came up behind her and gave her a big kiss on the neck, where I knew she was especially ticklish. She smelled like a flower bed, and when she smiled it lit up her whole face. Her cheeks flushed, her nose crinkled, and her eyebrows arched in glee. I loved it and it only made me want to amuse her even more.

Katherine squirmed away from me, giving up her seat.

"Stop it," she said, still smiling.

I swiped her chair at the table and sat down. "I can't help myself," I said.

I fell in love with her the first time I saw her singing at the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. The problem was she was engaged to someone else at the time. I couldn't help myself then either.

"That's your excuse for everything." She gave me a kiss on the cheek and went to take care of breakfast.

I looked at her standing there at the stove, the apron over her bathrobe, her hair wound up in that towel, her feet in those big fuzzy slippers, and it brought tears of happiness to my eyes. No woman on earth could possibly have been more beautiful than she was at that moment.

"You'll never guess what I found in bed this morning," she said, cracking some eggs in a bowl.

"An incredibly handsome young doctor with the body of a Greek god?"

"Half of a roast beef sandwich," she said.

"That was for you," I said. "In case you woke up in the middle of the night to feed Steve and wanted a snack."

"You're so thoughtful," she said. "Was it raining hard when you came home last night?"

"Noah waved at me from the ark," I said, beginning to browse the newspaper.

"I read in Hedda Hopper's column that Alfred Hitchcock believes the twist is responsible for all the rain we're having. He says it's a pagan rain dance."

"He must be joking," I said, though I wasn't entirely sure he was. Rock music was being blamed for everything from drug addiction to communism. Pretty soon, I was sure, they'd start prosecuting people just for listening to it.

That very week, a bookseller was being tried in Los Angeles for obscenity for selling Henry Miller's novel
Tropic of Cancer
in his Hollywood store. There was an article in the paper right in front of me that recounted a psychologist's testimony that the book was "the perverted, irrational babbling of an unhealthy mind." I don't know what that said about me, since I had a copy of
Tropic of Cancer
sitting on my nightstand.

While Katherine prepared bacon and eggs for us, I glanced at the headlines. A hundred and twenty people had to flee their homes when the LA River overflowed and flooded the streets. The U.S. Navy was testing its first nuclear-powered ship. Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller had moved to Nevada to begin her six weeks of compulsory residence before filing for divorce from the governor of New York. A landslide on the Pacific Coast Highway swept several cars out of traffic and onto the beach. Construction workers were rushing to finish the Space Needle in time for the Seattle World's Fair. And astronaut John Glenn was preparing to take off and orbit the earth in a space capsule, weather permitting.

I noticed Katherine had bent the corner down on an advertisement for new homes in the valley. She must have been waiting for me to get to it because no sooner had I arrived at the page than she placed my breakfast in front of me and said, "Did you read about the beautiful ranch-style homes they're building in Encino?" She went back into the kitchen area for the coffeepot. "All the homes have three bedrooms, two baths, sliding glass doors, and thermostatic heating."

"They start at eighteen thousand," I said. "We can't afford that."

"Not yet," she said, pouring me a cup of coffee. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't start thinking about it."

"Dreaming is more like it," I said.

"Dreams have a way of coming true." She set the coffeepot down on her new heat-resistant dinette table and gave me a big kiss. "Look at the two of us."

That's when Steve started crying. It wasn't something you could ignore. I couldn't believe a human being, especially one so small, could make a screech as earsplitting as that. It sounded like some enraged cheetah on a megaphone.

Katherine sighed, gave me another kiss, and went back to the kitchen. "Would you mind seeing to Steve? I'll get his milk ready."

I shoved a piece of bacon in my mouth and went to his room. Steve was in his crib, wailing. He was a chubby little baby. We affectionately called him the Tank. I picked him up and took him to the changing table.

Nothing in medical school had prepared me for changing Steve's diapers. It was like some six-hundred-pound grizzly bear had been wearing them instead of my son. Every time I had to do it, I found myself longing for g1oves and a nurse to swab my forehead.

Somehow I managed. He stopped crying and gave me a smile he'd obviously inherited from his mother. I couldn't resist tickling him either. He giggled and kicked and squirmed with delight. I carried him into the kitchen and gave him to Katherine, who had a bottle ready.

And that was when I saw the time. It was already after six. I couldn't possibly eat, shower, get dressed, and make it to the hospital on time. And I couldn't be late—not again. Not unless I wanted to face the wrath of Dr. Alistair Whittington.

Have you ever tried eating scrambled eggs while taking a shower? Let me tell you, it's not easy. But I'm proud to say I'm one of the few people who has mastered the art.

You can tell a lot about a person by the kind of car he drives. I was driving a two-door 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne, which I bought used with a loan from Katherine's parents. It had two gigantic horizontal rear fins that looked like mischievously arched eyebrows over a pair of teardrop-shaped taillights. The combined effect was like a big steel-and-chrome happy face.

By comparison, the car I almost smashed into as I sped, tires squealing, into a parking space at the hospital was a brand-new 1962 Chrysler Imperial Crown Southampton. In name alone, it perfectly summed up the personality and bearing of the man who owned it, Dr. Alistair Whittington, who had been recruited from England by the trustees to run the hospital and its nursing school.

The Imperial was elegant and imposing, with an aggressive face, stylish detailing, and enormous power. The same could be said of Whittington, who stood glaring at me from under his pearl-handled umbrella as I emerged from my car. It was the same umbrella he deployed on sunny days for his midday "constitutional."

He wore a dark Trilby hat, a single-breasted jacket, a white Tumbull and Asser tailored shirt, red-and-black- striped Oxford University tie, a four-pocket vest, and dark, crisply pleated pants neatly cuffed above polished shell cordovan shoes. Dr. Whittington exuded class and authority. I imagined he exuded it even when sitting on the toilet. He remained resolutely British at all times and in everything he did, refusing to bow to California's casual lifestyle or American customs.

"Good morning, Dr. Whittington," I said as I opened my umbrella, which had two broken spokes and sagged on one side. Somehow I turned into a hapless clown whenever he was around.

He looked at me with undisguised contempt. Then again, it was hard to say, since he seemed to regard every thing about America and Americans with contempt. Or maybe it was just everything about me.

"Are you familiar with Oscar Wilde, Dr. Sloan?" he asked with a heavy, upper-class British accent.

"'I have nothing to declare except my genius,'" I said. Then I caught the glower on his face.

"Is that so?" Dr. Whittington said. I wanted to disappear.

"I didn't mean I'm a genius, of course," I stammered.

"I should hope not," he said.

"I was quoting something Oscar Wilde said to show that I was familiar with him, when I suppose I just should have said yes."

"A lesson you should take to heart more often. Oscar Wilde said, 'A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.'" Whittington cleared his throat. "I do wish you'd take that step."

I looked down at my tie. It looked tied to me, though not as tightly and efficiently as Dr. Whittington's knot. But when I checked out my tie, I also saw my feet and, with rising embarrassment, realized that he'd seen them, too.

"Nice to see that your shoes match for a change," Whittington said. "Perhaps someday you will accomplish the same with your stockings."

In my rush to get out of the house, I'd put on two different socks. One white. One black And of course he'd noticed. He noticed everything I did wrong.

"I suppose I should be grateful that at least you aren't wearing roller skates," he said.

"I only roller-skate to work when it's sunny," I said, as we started walking toward the entrance to the hospital. "But it's interesting you should mention that, sir. I've been thinking I could accomplish more if I wore them in the hospital. We all could. Imagine how much more quickly we could get around if we were all on wheels."

He stopped and looked at me incredulously. "You'd like me to imagine a hospital full of roller-skating doctors?"

When he said it that way, it didn't sound quite the way I'd intended it. Before I could reply, he shook his head and marched on.

"You terrify me, Dr. Sloan," he said. "I fear that some day you're going to destroy this hospital. I just hope I'm not here to see it."

I didn't know it then, but he was right on both counts.

CHAPTER SIX

I fully expected Dr. Whittington to walk off without saying another word to me, but as we stepped into the emergency room, he did something surprising. He stopped, reached into his jacket pocket, and handed me an envelope.

"I'm having a little informal mixer at my home this Saturday," he said. "I hope you and your wife will come. And do try to wear matching socks."

He continued on, leaving me standing there in shock.

"Don't you just love it? We finally get a day off and we have to spend it with him," Dan Marlowe said, putting his arm around my shoulder. He looked pretty much the same then as he does now, only with a full head of hair and not a hint of gray.

"But he hates me," I said.

"He doesn't hate you, Mark," Dan said. "Whittington hates all of us."

I went to the doctors' locker room to change out of my wet clothes and swap my busted umbrella for my stethoscope. I was rooting around for an extra white or black sock when I noticed another colleague of mine, Dr. Chet Arnold, sitting on a bench snoring, with his forehead against his locker.

Chet was at the end of his shift and was so tired he'd fallen asleep before he could even open his locker. I thought I had it bad, but he had it worse. He had a wife and two toddlers at home.

The nurses called him Troy because he looked like Troy Donahue and had a movie star's natural charisma, but his bedside manner still put all his patients to sleep. He was an anesthesiologist.

I gently nudged him awake and he jerked as if electrocuted.

"Oh hell," he said. "I'm still here."

"Where did you think you were?" I asked.

"In my car, driving home," he said. "I was almost at my front door when you woke me up. I could practically smell my wife's pot roast."

"Now you have something to look forward to," I said. "Speaking of which, did you get invited to Dr. Whinington's party?"

Chet nodded and opened his locker. "You're looking forward to that?"

"Maybe he's more relaxed in a casual setting," I said.

"I doubt it," Chet said, taking off his lab coat and his shirt. "I think he's just lonely. His wife and kid have been visiting family in London for weeks."

My locker was a disorganized mess overflowing with files, books, dirty clothes, roller skates, newspapers, two lab coats, some magic tricks I was practicing, and a few sack lunches I'd never gotten around to eating.

Chet's locker was the model of organization. He had two or three sets of shirts and pants, a selection of ties, and several pairs of socks in assorted colors, all folded and rolled into neat rectangles for easy stacking.

"You mind if I borrow a pair of socks?" I motioned to my feet. "Either black or white will do."