Do No Harm (31 page)

David stepped around them, entering the prep room and closing the door behind him. Horace looked up from the body he was working on, bloody saw in hand. A goofy smile lit his face. "Hey, Dr. Spier, how ya doing?" He offered David a blood-caked glove but then glanced down at it and withdrew it before David had to protest. Bits of gray matter clung to his eye shield, which he shoved atop his head with a forearm. His eyes were large, buglike, and somehow endearing. "Good to see you. Goddamn, has it been crazy in here. The kids are hyper because it's their last day of anatomy, on top of which the cops had me sealed out for four hours this morning. Dusting and picking and prying. Then the questioning." He rolled his eyes. "I guess after all that, they didn't find a single goddamned print they liked."

A police flier sat on the wooden desk, the composite of Clyde staring up from it. Horace followed David's eyes and nodded. "The cops brought that with them. I guess they went out through the hospital, but I haven't picked up my mail yet today."

"So he does work here?"

"Worked here. Crazy, huh? I always knew the guy was a few nerves short of a full plexus."

David's mouth went dry. "What's his name?"

"Douglas DaVella. He worked here up until a few months ago, as an orderly. His job was to bring the corpses up from the hearses and help me hang 'em."

So Clyde was a fake name, as David had considered. "What else did he do?"

"He ran specimens, got them to the appropriate labs."

That would mean he'd had a worker's pass, and would have known the codes to most of the Omnilock doors in the facility. Running deliveries--moving from stretch of corridor to stretch of corridor--would've taught him his way around the hospital. Transferring cadavers had been how he'd learned to operate a gurney; David had been wrong in making inquiries about the orderlies who dealt with patients.

Horace walked over and opened a cabinet below the sink, removing a plastic container of DrainEze. He plunked it down on the embalming table beside the cadaver lying inert and gray, a fresh hole sawed through its chest. "Trade secret." He grinned. "I have to special-order it. Which means Douglas probably stole it right from here."

"What was he like?" David asked. "DaVella."

Horace shrugged. "Not much into hygiene, if you catch my drift. For our lower-skilled positions, we like to hire people a bit disadvantaged." A glint of pride showed in Horace's face, the pride of a self-taught man who has pulled himself up the job ladder. "I'll tell you, he smoked with a vengeance, two at a time sometimes. You know, like trying to calm himself down. Willing himself to hold together. But he didn't."

"What happened?"

"He started coming undone. Showing up late. Not reporting back from runs. I found him once in the crypt, standing among the bodies. Wasn't doing anything weird, just swaying on his feet. Said the stillness calmed him."

"Any trouble with the corpses? Any of them . . . violated or anything?"

"No, no. Nothing like that." Horace drew back his head as if he'd just been exposed to a bad odor. It was the first time David had seen him wear an expression of disgust.

"Was he fired?"

"I finally had to let him go," Horace said. "I didn't have a choice," he added defensively. "Things weren't getting done."

David wondered if Clyde was avenging the fact he'd been fired. He'd told David, I just want them to be sorry. "Did he seem pissed off when you fired him?"

"No. Not really. Kind of sad, maybe."

"Did he interact well socially?"

"Boy, you ask a different breed of question than the cops," Horace said. David resisted the urge to ask him what Yale and Dalton had inquired about, letting Horace continue. "Douglas avoided students like the plague. Especially the girls. He liked to come in during off hours, when the place was empty." He gestured to the door, behind which the lab clamored with students picking at bodies. "They harassed him, now and then. Pretty upsetting, when you think about it, them being future doctors. But I'll tell you, doctors ain't the picture of empathy these days. Not like it used to be." He nodded deferentially.

"How would they harass him? The students?"

"Well, it didn't happen much, to be fair. But now and then they'd stop him, try to get him to talk, assess his speech patterns, posture, things like that. You know how med students are--thought they were being subtle and helpful. He found the scrutiny unbearable. A girl tried to practice on him with her ophthalmoscope once. Reduced him to tears. She got apologetic after, of course, but it didn't seem to help." Horace's eyes traced over the split body before them. "Poor bastard."

When Horace looked up, David was surprised to see that he seemed upset.

"I've worked hard for this job. Hard like you wouldn't believe. And when Douglas started going loose on me, I had to protect my position. There was nothing else I could have done." His face looked tired, maybe from his working on guilt, or guilt working on him.

Before David could respond, Horace revved up the saw and turned back to the body. David left quietly.

He found Ralph down in the ER, leaning against a cart, arms folded across his chest. He seemed perturbed and didn't look over when David stood beside him.

"Goddamn cops," Ralph said. "Get a guy in that uniform, takes about two days before he's a USDA-certified prick."

"What happened?" David asked.

"They just want what they want, and they want it immediately. No consideration for the fact that I've got other responsibilities here. I'm running security for this facility, I'm not an errand boy for LAPD." Ralph jerked his thumb at his chest. "I was Third Battalion, Second Marines, Charlie Company. Two tours. Two fucking tours, and some doughnut-muncher expects me to how-high his shit."

"Who?"

"Yale. Dalton."

"What did they want?"

Ralph cast a look in both directions, and David took a step closer so Ralph could lower his voice. The conspiratorial nature of the exchange diluted Ralph's anger considerably. "They confiscated records on a dude, name of Douglas DaVella," Ralph said. "He's a suspect, I guess. Used to work upstairs with Horace the Hacker."

"Oh? Anything interesting?"

Ralph homed in on David's interest like a dog spotting prey. "Oh no, Doc. You don't want to step into this too far. You're playing with a new brand of fire here."

David studied Ralph closely. "I was in over my head before I knew what was going on. I can either sink or swim. What would you do?"

Ralph rubbed his nose and it gave easily, the cartilage flexible from a few breaks. He studied David's face for a moment and seemed to reach some conclusion. "They were mostly after his address and phone and stuff," he said. "But the guy was a bit uneven. He had a couple of complaints filed against him. Nothing I investigated personally, but the records were there."

A few interns walked by without saying hello to David. For the first time, he appreciated the privacy his estrangement from the staff permitted him. "What were the complaints for?" he asked.

"He got a bit uppity once when confronted by a gal over in Human Resources. Something about him taking too many sick days. Turned out to be nothing. She claimed he got aggressive, but he was settled down by the time it was checked out. Afterward, she couldn't point to anything concrete. Then there was another complaint, from a patient over in the NPI, just before DaVella got fired. Guy's a real whackjob, I guess--six fingers on each hand. He said Mr. DaVella was trying to steal his meds, but the guy's a bit cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, so no one took the complaint too seriously."

"What was DaVella doing over at the NPI? As a transporter of body parts, the psych ward should've been the last place he wound up."

"He said he got lost coming back from making a delivery to the Reed Institute next door. I know--it's kinda loose. But he was pretty cooperative during questioning, and the patient had some type of paranoid disorder, so it all kind of washed out."

"Who questioned Mr. DaVella?"

"A fellow named Tommy Jones was point on both complaints."

"Can I talk to him?"

"Moved to Baltimore. Divorced. Fell out." Ralph shrugged. "You know how that tune spins."

Diane swept past them in the hall, did a double take, and stopped. "Oh. Glad you're here. We need you in Four."

"I'm off today." David was anxious to get over to the Neuropsychiatric Institute to follow up on the complaint that had been issued there.

"I know, but it's Alberto," Diane said. "Sore throat. He said he'll only see you--you know how he is."

During the summer months, Alberto followed his father, who was a gardener for UCLA, around campus on his skateboard, causing damage to stairs, curbs, and himself. David had always treated him warmly, and Alberto sometimes made up excuses to come in and talk. David excused himself and headed down the hall, walking beside Diane.

"I hear they ID'd someone," she said. "You have something to do with that?"

He nodded. "Fill you in later. What time are you off?"

"Six. Then I'm on again at ten, filling in for Marcy."

"Okay. Let's meet over at Carson's around six-thirty. Make sure he still has his head screwed on."

"Ever try to suck your own dick, Doc?" The boy's smooth-skinned face looked up at David. Alberto wore his hair long in the back, and it bunched above the collar of his jacket. Sitting on the examination table with a beat-up skateboard across his lap, he looked even younger than his twelve years. His eyes always squinted, ever so slightly, as if needing constant protection.

"Not recently, no," David said. "I have a bad back." He walked over and closed the door, then studied Alberto. The boy was clearly sick, his face pale and tired, except where his lips were stained purple from some candy he must've eaten earlier. "Something you want to talk about?"

Alberto shrugged. "I tried once," he confessed. His heels drummed against the base of the examination table. "Does that make me gay?"

David touched Alberto's forehead--hot--then walked his fingertips up along the back of Alberto's jaw, feeling for swollen glands. "Why would that make you gay?"

Alberto pulled away. "Well, I like girls. I'm dying to get laid, even. I don't want to be gay." His eyes pooled with concern. "But, I mean, I almost had a dick in my mouth."

David inhaled deeply and held it for a moment. "Well," he began, in a textbook voice, "gender roles are a complicated and . . . " He paused, then rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "No, Alberto, it doesn't make you gay."

The relief in Alberto's eyes was palpable.

"Now can we focus on your sore throat?" David felt again for Alberto's glands, and Alberto winced slightly when David found them. David grabbed a tongue depressor from a Pyrex beaker. "Open up. Open." Alberto refused, and David squeezed his cheeks gently until he complied. Red beefy throat, enlarged tonsils with exudate mucus--what David's mother would have called "angry throat." "Oh boy, kiddo. We have some activity going on in here. Does it hurt?"

"I had to spit into a bag last night because it hurt too much to swallow."

"Why didn't you come in?"

Alberto looked down. One of his untied shoelaces trailed along the tiled floor. "We don't got insurance no more. My dad got laid off, and I didn't want to cost him nothing more."

David crouched, resting his hands on Alberto's knees. "Alberto, listen to me. If you ever feel sick, you come in here. Don't worry about money. Okay? Now say aah."

Alberto opened his mouth, and before he realized what was going on, David had already swabbed him with the elongated Q-tip. He handed it to Jill outside. "Let's get a Rapid Strep on this."

He ducked into the doctors' lounge and called Carson but got the machine. Someone had taped Clyde's police composite to the wall, and David studied it as he left a message. "Carson, it's Dr. Spier. I hope you're doing all right. I'm going to stop by around six-thirty, and I hope we'll be able to talk then."

Jill met him in the hall on his way back to Alberto's exam room and walked alongside him. "It's positive," she said. "First strep of the day."

"All right. The patient has a penicillin allergy. He's also got no insurance, but I just met with a rep from Biaxin, and I stowed a bunch of samples in the locked drawer in Three. Would you mind grabbing them for me?"

David swung into the exam room and faced Alberto with a resigned smile. "You have group A betahemolytic streptococci, aka strep throat. I'm going to get you some antibiotics. You'll take one in the morning, one at night, for ten days. Now, this particular drug has a side effect. It'll give you a dry metallic taste in your mouth, so you'll want to get some Altoids or strong suckers so you can-- " He froze.

Two minutes later, having paged Ed three times consecutively from the doctors' lounge, he had him on the phone. "I have something," he said.

"L' Ermitage. Twenty minutes."

A man impeccably dressed in a charcoal suit with a shimmering blue tie, his gray hair coifed, paused in front of David. Still dressed in his scrubs and white medical coat, David slumped on a leather couch in the elegant cocktail lounge of the modern, upscale hotel. A fire flickered beneath the screen to his right, though it was August. Before him, on a simple glass table, sat a tray containing jars of wasabi peas, Parmesan twists, and herb-cured olives.