Doc in the Box (6 page)

If my grandmother were alive, I wouldn’t have this problem. She was a superb cook. Of course, she never used recipes. She never even measured. She’d take a handful of flour or sugar, a lump of butter, a pinch of salt, or a dash of vanilla and whip up the best pies, cakes, and biscuits. I tried to watch and duplicate what she did, but I never could. I guess my hands weren’t the right size. Once I asked her for her recipe for biscuits. Her scratch biscuits were like fresh-baked clouds, light, fluffy, and warm. She handed me a box of Bisquick and said, “Don’t waste your time. Here’s your old family recipe.” I followed the directions on the box and made something that tasted like crunchy hockey pucks.

Where was I going to find a St. Louis recipe? I grew up in the old German section, but strudel or sauerkraut were beyond me. I certainly couldn’t whip
up something French as a tribute to our earliest settlers, or make collards and cornbread to honor our black population. A stove was foreign territory. I had till tomorrow to think of something, or I was condemned to serve on that mindless Dialog St. Louis page.

Well, I’d think of some way out. I’d been at the paper less than half an hour and managed to get myself in trouble. It was ten-forty, time to pick up Georgia. I told Scarlette the department secretary that I was at the library doing research. That was the
Gazette
code for ducking out of the office. Once I actually ran into another reporter at the downtown library and we were both really doing research. It was very embarrassing.

I blinked in the strong sunlight when I stepped outside the
Gazette
building. It was one of those heartbreakingly beautiful spring days. The trees were that tender yellow green you see only in spring. The white dogwoods were lush, romantic drifts of pearly petals. The pink dogwoods were like cotton candy. Even the dandelions looked perky on the fresh green lawns. I wondered why they were branded as weeds. I liked dandelions. There was still enough cold air under the warm spring day to remind you that a sudden cold snap could take everything away. I shivered. I didn’t need any reminders. Not when I was taking Georgia to buy a wig.

When I picked her up in front of her building, she seemed surprisingly chipper. On the drive there, she talked about buying her wig. She was definite about what she wanted: “My hairdresser says I should have some fun, and get a couple of wigs in different styles.
A long one, maybe, or something red and curly instead of my usual straight blond hair. I know she was being nice and trying to cheer me up, but I don’t want anyone to notice any difference. If I show up with red hair, Charlie will figure I’ve flipped, and start scheming to put me out to pasture.

“So I want two wigs, both the same color and style as I have now. That way I can have one washed and set while I’m wearing the other.”

She talked matter-of-factly. There were no tears or self-pity. Hair loss was a problem, but it was one she could solve, and right now so many of her problems had no answers. Tarkington’s Fine Wigs and Hair Fashions, a few blocks from the hospital, was exactly the right place to go. It was dignified and low-key. The quiet, helpful, older woman with the light blue eyes was used to dealing with chemo patients. Her voice was soft and soothing. “Are you in therapy, dear?” she asked, then sat Georgia down before a flattering mirror and showed her wigs that were the same shade as her own hair. I wandered around the store, looking at wild red wigs and a fascinating black Morticia Addams number. I longed to try on a jolly Dolly Parton wig and see how I’d look as a trashy blonde, but it seemed too frivolous under the circumstances.

After about twenty minutes, Georgia found a short blond wig that could easily be trimmed into her regular style. The saleswoman made it fit nicely, then brought another one just like it. She also sold Georgia several turbans and a blue paisley scarf with blond bangs, “because nobody wants to wear a wig twenty-four hours a day, dear, and you can just throw these on if the UPS delivery person is at the door.
Turbans are so glamorous, don’t you think? They always make me think of marabou and movie stars.”

I loaded the wigs, stands, boxes, and packages into Ralph’s trunk. We still had plenty of time to get to the hospital for her radiation appointment.

“That was painless,” Georgia said, combing her hair back in place with her fingers. I couldn’t believe it would be gone soon. It seemed so solidly rooted to her head. She must have seen me staring at it.

“It just comes out, you know, all at once,” she said. “That’s what the chemo nurses told me. I’ll probably find it all over the floor of the shower one morning. All your hair falls out. Everything. Everywhere. Eyelashes, eyebrows, pubic hair, armpits, legs. It all goes. My eyelashes are so pale they’re hardly there anyway, and I think I can hide my missing eyebrows with big Sally Jessy glasses. I’ve been putting off getting my prescription changed for too long. This will give me an excuse to get new frames.”

“Your arm and leg hair goes, too?” I said.

“All of it,” she said.

“Wow! Then you won’t have to shave your legs,” I said.

“That’s what I like about you,” she said. “Always looking on the bright side.”

I started laughing. She did, too. I could hardly drive the car around the parking garage, we were both laughing so hard. Snort. Giggle. Guffaw. It wasn’t that funny, but I had tears in my eyes. When I almost sideswiped a minivan pulling out of a parking spot on level six, I finally straightened up and behaved myself. I also grabbed the minivan’s spot.

“This day isn’t going to be so bad after all,” I
thought, as we headed for the hospital elevator. I was wrong again.

Georgia had chemotherapy once every three weeks. She had radiation every day for six weeks. This was only the second radiation treatment, and I felt sick walking into the hospital. It was the smell. It hit me when the automatic doors opened. I felt my stomach lurch. It must have bothered Georgia, too. I could feel her stiffen beside me, but she didn’t say anything. What was that odor? Some compound of chilled air, cherry-scented disinfectant, something chemical, and something else—hospital lotion? A bleach-based cleaner? Whatever it was, the separate smells weren’t bad, but mixed together, they turned my stomach.

We followed the blue line and opened the door to the radiation oncology waiting room. This time, the nasty receptionist wouldn’t let Georgia walk back into the patients’ waiting room. She had to wait with me. No reason was given, just a rude “you can’t go back there now.” It was almost noon, and the department must close around twelve or twelve-thirty for a lunch hour. The dreary pink “caregivers” room was empty except for the two of us and the exhausted magazines. We sat with our backs to the receptionist, so we wouldn’t have to look at her, but we could still hear her talking on the phone to a friend about her date last night. I heard her say, “…  and then I said, ‘Listen, I just met you. What makes you think I’m so hard up, I’d …’ ”

“Can you do me a favor?” Georgia asked, and I abandoned my easy listening.

“Sure,” I said.

“Would you go to the cafeteria and get me a Coke? I have this funny chemical taste in my mouth and soda helps get rid of it.”

“Sure. I have to make a call and see if Leo’s turned up yet, anyway. I’ll be back in five.”

I was back in fifteen, actually. The cafeteria was busy. The Heart’s Desire phone was busy. Everything took longer than I expected. A skinny bald guy in a hurry brushed by me and I knocked part of Georgia’s Coke down the back of a tall blond woman. I apologized, but her even bigger blond husband looked like he wanted the death penalty for spilling a spoonful of Coke on a silk blouse. At least I missed the woman in the wheelchair. The boney guy pushing her gave me a dirty look.

I balanced the rest of the Coke on a metal shelf at a pay phone, dug out my phone card again, and called the Heart’s Desire, hoping I could get my two questions answered: Where did Leo go to school? And what made him start stripping? Damn, I was getting careless. I’d spent all that time with the guy and didn’t bother to ask. I wanted to believe it was because I was worried about Georgia. But there was no point in being noble. I knew the sight of a seminude stripper had shorted out my brain cells.

I finally got through to the Heart’s Desire and talked with Steve the manager. No one had seen hide nor hair of Leo D. Nardo. He hadn’t called in yet, Steve said. Officer Friendly was scheduled as the main act for that evening, unless they heard from Leo, of course. Marlene had raised my consciousness, and I was really starting to worry. This was a long time for Leo to be missing: two days at the rate of twelve hundred dollars minimum. This vacation was
costing him at least twenty-four hundred in lost income. I wanted him back for purely selfish reasons. If he didn’t show up soon, I’d have to do a day in another stripper’s life.

It was twelve-fifteen when I made it back to radiation oncology. I opened the door, balancing the Coke carefully. The place was dead quiet. No patients were in the waiting room. Georgia was not in her chair. They must have called her inside, finally. I went to ask the receptionist how long it would be. She was sitting at her desk, with an open romance novel in front of her. She didn’t look up.

She never would again. She’d been shot in the back of the head.

“Oh, my god,” I said, the horrifying sight finally registering. “Oh, my god. Georgia! Georgia! Where are you, Georgia?”

I ran inside to the patients’ waiting area, but she wasn’t there. I ran down the inner hall, calling her name, and threw open the door to the radiation therapy room. The flirtatious radiation therapist from yesterday was lying on the floor, shot in the chest. A doctor was lying crumpled behind him, shot in the head. It looked like the doctor had his hands on the therapist’s shoulders. Had he been using the therapist as a human shield? If so, it didn’t work.

There was a funny fresh smell, a rusty smell. The floor and walls were splashed and spattered with blood. For one weird moment, I thought of a charity paintball game I’d covered, where grown guys ran around and shot each other with red paint. Then I saw the pooled blood on the floor and remembered that wasn’t paint.

“Georgia!” I screamed. No one heard me. We were
cut off from the rest of the hospital, and the office was supposed to be closed for lunch. No one would come through the doors anytime soon, except maybe the killer. I ran blindly through the warren of rooms and halls, and somehow came back out into the waiting room, where I heard a mewling whimper, and found Georgia curled into a ball under the magazine table. She looked so tiny and helpless. “He didn’t kill me,” she kept saying. “He killed everyone else but he didn’t kill me.”

I pulled her out. She sobbed on my shoulder and I rocked her in my arms like a baby. I was bewildered. The fiercest woman I knew had become this soggy, sobbing creature. I don’t know how long I sat on the floor with her, but it was probably only a minute or so. I felt oddly calm, like I was moving in slow motion. I had to get help. How do you do that in a hospital? Call 911 and tell the police to follow the blue line to radiation oncology? Run screaming down the hall? Wait. The hospital had a switchboard operator. She would know what to do. I used the receptionist’s phone and told the operator three people in radiation oncology had been shot and I thought they were all dead. My voice only shook a little. Next, I called the
Gazette
city desk and gave them a brief account of what I knew, which wasn’t much. By that time I heard the hospital operator say, “Code Yellow, Radiation Oncology. Code Yellow, Radiation Oncology,” and the first of the hospital security came running through the door.

Soon the place was crawling with police in uniforms, homicide detectives, police brass, evidence techs, police photographers with regular and video cameras. The EMTs couldn’t do anything but fuss
over Georgia. The other three were beyond help. The police blocked off the hall and the emergency exits, but the TV reporters, the
Gazette
staffers, the weeklies, the AP stringer, even the radio stations, were all there, waiting in the main corridor for the body bags to be hauled out and yelling questions that nobody could answer every time they saw someone. But that was their job.

This was going to be a high-profile case, and I was right in the middle of it. Mark Mayhew was one of the homicide detectives. We’d known each other a long time, but he was all business today. He took me to an empty office down the hall, and kept asking me questions. I repeated my story until I was sick of it. I hadn’t seen anyone. I hadn’t heard anyone. I hadn’t heard anything, period. By the time I’d come back with Georgia’s Coke, the shooting was all over.

Mayhew had plenty of evidence to corroborate my story. I was still clutching the cafeteria receipt with the time (12:03
P.M
.) printed on it, although I’d dropped the Coke by the receptionist’s desk. My bloody footprints were all over the back rooms and hall, trampling the crime scene, so he could see I’d run around there like a chicken with its head cut off.

From the questions he asked, I knew one thing puzzled Mayhew: Why didn’t anyone hear the shots?

I wasn’t surprised. The radiation oncology department was isolated in a separate wing, off a dead-end hallway. There were no phones, restrooms, or other reasons to wander down there. There weren’t even any benches to sit on. The heavy wooden door was always closed. It was easy to pass by this grim department, when the main corridors were bright and noisy
with people talking, babies crying, and food carts rattling by.

A uniformed officer poked his head in the office and asked Mayhew to come with him.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Why don’t you write down what you just told me? And don’t leave.”

I finished writing my statement, and he wasn’t back yet. I shivered in the uncomfortable chair for a while, and when I got tired of that, I got up and looked down the hallway. It was still blocked off, and I figured the bodies hadn’t been moved yet. I heard the police photographers talking in the hall. They’d seen the same thing I did: the doctor had used the radiation therapist for a human shield. He’d died a coward, and everyone knew it. I wondered: If the doc had dropped the therapist and run for it, would he have made it out the door and lived?