A Man to Die for (7 page)

“Uh huh.” She nodded. “Don’t let me forget to write that down someplace so I won’t screw up and disappoint you when my time comes.”

Hunsacker hadn’t moved, arms crossed, head tilted in consideration, eyes watchful. Casey dropped her charts next to Steve and pulled up a chair, still wishing she could say something about what she’d just seen, and then wondering just what it was she had seen.

“Now if I’d done it,” Steve kept on, “I wouldn’t have wasted my time with a forty-five. A thirty-eight gets the job done without all that mess, and no chance of taking out the bus driver down the street. Weapon of choice, ya know?”

“Well,” Casey allowed, bent to her work in an effort to avoid Hunsacker’s gaze. “You should know.”

Steve lifted a cherubic face her way. “Did I tell you I got that Luger? The Krieghoff?”

“Oh, Steve,” Casey teased. “Now you can die a happy boy.”

“You just don’t appreciate fine weaponry.” He scowled.

“Me?” she retorted, hand to chest. “How can you say that? Guns are getting really close to motorcycles as top contributors for job security around here.”

“A Krieghoff Luger?”

Casey started. Hunsacker was right behind her. Steve turned to him, lighting up like a kid talking about trains.

“An early thirty-six,” he boasted. “Dated with plastic grips. I got it for under four thousand.”

Hunsacker matched his expression delight for delight. “You really mean it. Do you collect extensively?”

“Only enough to supply the IRA into the twenty-first century,” Marva offered as she walked by with an armload of equipment.

Hunsacker and Steve all but shivered with discovery. “I’m more of a modern aficionado than antiques,” Hunsacker admitted. “I’m fascinated by the modern police and military firepower.”

For a few moments Casey wondered whether Hunsacker was feeding Steve a line, but his jargon was too accurate. He and Steve tossed around ballistics figures and prices like arms merchants.

“If he wore yours,” Janice said suddenly in her other ear, “whose did you wear?”

Startled, Casey laughed. Neither Steve nor Hunsacker had heard. “I wore mine, too,” she admitted. “I tell you, I was to silk panties what Imelda Marcos was to high heels.”

Arms ladened with trays to be sterilized, Janice leaned against the wall and grinned, her expression still betraying astonishment. “Well, just think, though. Now they’re all yours. You could just about entertain the entire medical staff and not be seen in the same outfit twice.”

“Are you kidding?” Casey demanded. “When we split, I got the silver.
He
got the underwear. I’m back to cotton briefs and socks.”

Janice just kept shaking her head. “And it didn’t…you know, bother you to…
see
him?”

“Sure it did,” Casey admitted. “He looked better in my nylons than I did.”

Janice swiped at her, laughing, and Casey thought she saw relief.

“You busy after work?” Casey asked. “We’d have a chance to discuss this without benefit of audience.”

Janice’s expression flattened a little. She dipped her head, clutching the trays to her like high-school books. “Another night?” she asked in a small voice. “I, uh, have somewhere to go.”

Casey wanted to say something. She wanted to ease the crease that had returned to Janice’s forehead. Something about her friend’s stiff posture held her back.

“Of course.”

“Hey, who wanted isolation gowns?”

Not only Casey and Janice but also Hunsacker and Steve looked up at the strident call from the doorway out to the service hall. One of central supply’s finest stood there, several bundles in her pudgy arms, looking for all the world as if she’d just been asked to share the last of the firewood for the winter.

Casey made it a point to look at her watch. “Not bad. It only took an hour this time. Good thing we didn’t really need ’em.”

One look at her uniform belied her gracious words. Blood and Betadine spattered it like a Jackson Pollock painting. There would be little chance of getting it clean. Worse, if Mr. Tarlton had had the chance to pick up any hospital-born infections, Casey wouldn’t be able to kill off the organisms in her wash. She’d just take them home to her mother and bring them back for the next shift of patients. It was too late for frustration. She just felt tired.

“Well, I got ’em,” the tech protested. “Had to go to isolation. You want ’em?”

“Sure,” Steve agreed. “That way when isolation needs ’em, they’ll have to come to us.”

“Ya know,” Casey mused, accepting the load an hour too late. “If I come down with a bad disease, I’m gonna go right up to administration and puke on every one of them.”

Janice shook her head. “Not good enough. Wipe a pustule on Nixon’s face.”

Steve lifted a hand. “Then have Ahmed treat him. Think how long he’d suffer.”

“You guys are really into revenge,” Hunsacker offered.

“Nah,” Casey disagreed. “We’re into justice. Revenge would be making him work down here under these conditions and then having to take home my paycheck.”

“I still think you should consider my sniper idea,” Steve offered. “We could all chip in. I’m sure the floors wouldn’t mind.”

“You certainly have the equipment,” Marva agreed.

“Too impersonal,” Hunsacker said suddenly, his voice flat and hard. “Get right in and cut his heart out.”

Casey stopped breathing. She thought maybe Steve and Janice did, too. For an unbearably long moment the three of them froze, silent and waiting. Wondering how they could have just heard what they did. Wondering how they should react to a tone of voice that betrayed more than Hunsacker had intended.

Then, again, like the flick of a light switch in a darkened room, Hunsacker came to life and flashed them all a rueful grin. “At least that’s what I always said about my ex-wife. Until I found out she didn’t have a heart.”

Casey was still sitting there, an arm full of packaged gowns, her mouth open, when Hunsacker strolled off toward the elevators.

“Dr. Hunsacker, line three. Dr. Hunsacker.”

Instinctively Casey picked up the phone. It took her a minute to clear her throat to answer. “Dr. Hunsacker just left. Can I help?”

“He was down there?”

The outrage in the woman’s voice brought Casey right around. “But he isn’t now. Who’s this?”

“Labor and delivery.” Now she could hear gritted teeth. “We’ve been waiting for him for an hour to do this damn section he was so all fired to do.”

Casey couldn’t think of anything but the truth. “He was down here watching a code.”

“Well, if you see him, you tell him to get his butt up here. He scheduled this damn thing two hours ago, and he hasn’t said shit to his lady, and I’m damn well not going to get permits signed until he does. Of course, this gal’11 probably pop the kid on her own before he gets here anyway.”

Casey’s attention was caught all over again. “I thought she was a failure to progress.”

There was a small silence, and then an “Mmmm.”

Casey knew a lot about those Mmmms. She used them often enough when she didn’t need a doctor’s wrath dropped on her head for an honest answer.

“He also said he has a lady over at Izzy’s,” she offered.

“I heard it was a date with a hot nurse for a late movie.”

“Oh.”

Casey’s curiosity was piqued, now. She wanted to know more. Hunsacker certainly wasn’t the first obstetrician to schedule a cesarean for his own convenience, but something about the extent of his stories intrigued her. Most OBs would have just given the failure-to-progress line and left it at that. He’d knitted an afghan out of it.

Casey wondered for the first time whether there really was a patient at Izzy’s waiting for him, or whether it had just been another part of a good story. She wanted to know, suddenly, what the rest of the truth was.

When Casey hung up, she dialed Izzy’s.

“Hey, Casey,” Evelyn greeted her. “I was going to call you. I got some great scuttlebutt.”

“First things first. Do you have a patient of Hunsacker’s up there?”

Another one of those silences. “Why?”

“I’m just curious about something. He was just down here and said he was headed your way.”

A longer silence, a gathering of calm. “When pigs fly.” Evelyn knew she could trust Casey. “I just got threatened with my job for calling him the third time on a lady who’s spiking a temp.”

“He’s not coming out?”

“Not until he damn well feels like it. Which, he says, will undoubtedly be rounds in the morning. Until then, and I quote, I can just keep my knees together. He says he has back-to-back sections at M and M.”

It was Casey’s turn for an Mmmm.

“Yeah,” Evelyn retorted. “That’s what I thought. Well, I’ll tell you, I’m getting real close to shoving a piece of my mind straight up that man’s alimentary canal.”

“What’s the scuttlebutt?”

That switched the tone of the conversation very neatly. “Oh, yeah. You haven’t talked to Wanda Trigel over here lately, have you?”

“Wild Woman Wanda from labor and delivery? No, not since the last time I was up at Izzy’s for a transfer, why?”

“She didn’t show up for work yesterday. They called her husband, and it seems Wanda drove off and hasn’t come back.”

“Yeah, but that’s Wanda. You know how bullheaded she is. She and Buddy probably had a fight. Give her twenty-four hours like always and she’ll show up.”

“She disappeared three days ago. Buddy’s really scared.”

“What do the police say?”

“That’s the bunch out in Jefferson County. They think she ran off with somebody she probably met down at the Ramblin’ Rose. They told Buddy he’ll probably hear from her when the divorce papers come through.”

Wild Woman hadn’t been named that for nothing. Blessed with the foulest mouth this side of Eddie Murphy and a taste in cheap hair bleach, Wanda was a crack operating tech and a world-class hell-raiser. Casey couldn’t say she really disagreed with the police. “Well, Wanda’s never been known to take my counsel, but if she does, I’ll let you know.”

“Yeah, well, while you’re in a counseling mood, tell Hunsacker to stop being such a jerk. I’ve come really close tonight to using vocabulary only Wanda would be comfortable with.”

Casey grinned. “Too bad she ran off. You could sic
her
on him. It’d be a great show.”

That seemed to improve Evelyn’s mood. “Too late. She laid into him last week about something he did in a cesarean over here. I heard it was the best white trash fight L and D had seen in years. She told him she was better with a knife than he was. Then she told him half the gangs in North St. Louis were better with knives than he was.”

“Can’t fault the girl for the truth.”

“Not the way I see it.”

“Of course, with Wanda’s legendary taste, it was probably Hunsacker she met at the Ramblin’ Rose.”

“No,” Evelyn disagreed. “If Wanda had faced off with Hunsacker, he’d be the one missing.”

Casey was laughing along with her friend when Barb put an end to the conversation by announcing the arrival of the third overdose of the shift. Since Casey was the lucky winner for this particular grand prize, she hung up and pulled out a patient gown to keep a new mess from joining the one already on her uniform, all the while savoring the idea of Wild Woman facing off against Hunsacker.

Casey could just envision what their confrontation must have been like. Hunsacker might have a mean streak in him, but when Wanda was riled, she was like a pit bull. And it sounded like Wanda had been riled. It would have served Hunsacker right. Casey, for one, would have paid money to see him knocked down a couple of pegs.

It was too bad Wanda had decided to take off. Casey would have bought Wanda dinner just to be regaled with her version of the story. Wanda did have a way with words, especially when it concerned somebody she didn’t like.

Come to think of it, it probably hadn’t hurt Hunsacker at all that Wanda had disappeared so conveniently. There wasn’t any doubt that if she hadn’t developed an itch, she would have made it a point, to entertain the grapevine with a vivid blow-by-blow account of the story of Dr. Hunsacker and the scalpel. Something Casey was sure Hunsacker wouldn’t have been too fond of.

Grabbing a nasogastric tube the size of a garden hose and a couple liters of saline, Casey decided that Hunsacker must have already heard about Wanda’s elopement. That was probably why he seemed so very pleased when he made that crack about the great people over at the Palace. Wanda had forfeited the match by disappearing, so he counted it a win. Too bad. Round two would have been a killer.

Right about at that point, Casey opened the door to room three to discover just what waited for her. All she thought about after that was where she’d rather be than pumping stomachs.

ST. LOUIS IS
a city of neighborhoods. Originally defined by its immigrant populations—the Irish to the north, the Germans to the south, and the Italians in the west center—it matured into an untidy patchwork designed by parish boundaries, democratic wards, and ethnic preference. Primarily Catholic and conservative, it boasted a southern feeling of family and a northern commitment to industry.

White flight sucked away much of the population within the archaic boundaries of the city, and carried its neighborhood feel with it. Cities and villages quickly partitioned off surrounding county land and drew to themselves unique identities. Instead of considering itself a burgeoning metropolitan area, the growing population that spilled into surrounding counties continued to see itself as citizens of a small town, its loyalties and self-image tied to the neighborhood.

The Central West End was artistic, the South Side blue-collar union. Yuppies migrated to Creve Coeur and Chesterfield, and old money stayed close to Ladue. The Germans still favored Dutchtown, the best Italian restaurants were on the Hill, and the Ancient Order of the Hibernians held their St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dogtown. Blacks were seen about as often in Carondelet as whites were up on Cote Brilliant. The city was separate from the county, and surrounding counties measured their distance from the arch even as they kept their own unique flavors.

Metropolitan St. Louis was a community of settlers who never saw a reason for moving on. It was a comfortable, intimate big city with a good-old-boy network to rival the greatest societies, and a chronic inferiority complex. It was a crazy quilt of separate entities bumping and sidling against each other like passing acquaintances in a row of too-small plane seats that promote politeness but discourage curiosity.

This attitude had everything to do with why no one thought to look any sooner for Wanda Trigel. First of all, she disappeared from Arnold. A burgeoning Jefferson County city tucked into the southern side of the Meramec and Mississippi river merger, Arnold had long been one of the northern stops for migratory traffic along Highway 55. Poor, white, hard-line right-wingers, the initial core of Arnold had given the city its perception in the bi-state area.

The locals divided Arnold into three distinct areas, like the lobes of a lung. Upper Arnold was as upscale as it got, with its newer subdivisions and Walmart shopping centers. Lower Arnold, or LA, comprised an area of good old boys and girls, trailer parks and taverns. Life was hard, heads harder. Arguments were settled with pool cues and broken bottles, and the drug of choice was Busch.

The third area was UCLA, where Wild Woman had lived with Buddy. UCLA, or the Upper Corner of Lower Arnold, was where the river rats lived, the meanest form of life in the entire area. The police wore jackboots and the denizens stayed in the flood plain because they didn’t have the means or the inclination to escape. Anybody who didn’t like country music was a pussy, white supremacy was considered a religion, and the average entertainment entailed the illegal, the immoral, and the fattening. Anything went, and usually did.

The Millard boys ran that neck of the woods with brawn, bully, and the first automatic weapons south of St. Louis. Which was the second reason nobody thought much about Wanda’s disappearance. She was a Millard, and apples didn’t fall far from the tree.

The Arnold police department knew that, and so did Wanda’s friends. They’d partied with her and even followed her onto home turf on one or two unspeakably foolish occasions. If Wanda finally tired of respectability, nobody could really find themselves surprised.

But no one thought to raise an outcry. The Creve Coeur police, who patrolled the area where Wanda worked, and the Jefferson County sheriff, who had jurisdiction over the last place she’d been seen, didn’t think to get involved. It was Arnold’s problem, and Arnold’s attitude was that it was just a family problem. Just another woman who’d run out. What with the daily struggle to keep the peace in the, growing, volatile area just south of St. Louis County, the police and sheriff figured they had more important things to worry about.

As for the Millard boys, they agreed with the police.

For Casey’s part, she was a typical St. Louisan. Born and raised in Webster Groves, a solidly middle-class neighborhood in the near southwest section of St. Louis County, she had moved only as far as Creve Coeur for her freedom, and then Frontenac to marry. And now, she was home where she was perfectly comfortable shopping and entertaining within a ten-mile radius, where she was caught up more with her neighbors’ problems than the county’s, or the city’s beyond.

Wanda was consigned to another world, to Casey’s past at Izzy’s, to another county where she had no control and very little contact, to a lifestyle that Casey minimalized through indifference.

The word of Wanda’s disappearance lingered because the idea of Wanda and Hunsacker dueling was so delicious, but it didn’t capture Casey’s imagination or concern. Preoccupied with work, with her nagging disillusionment, with the spring holy days, Casey lost track of Wanda within days of her disappearance.

The Who spilled from Casey’s headset and rain seeped in around the edges of her hood. It was a drizzly day, gray and indifferent, sapping even that fresh spring green from the young trees. Casey couldn’t imagine why she wanted to be out walking. She was sweating and rain-damp at the same time, arms pumping, legs scissoring in rote movement as she ate up the sidewalk along Elm.

Casey tried to concentrate on the words to “Squeezebox,” tried to match her stride with the rhythm. Instead she kept seeing the vivid images that had followed her from sleep that morning.

The dream. Bile rose in her chest again, a red, hot gorge of terror and frustration at just the memory of it.

She’d never had the dream before. She would have remembered it. It had been in the apartment, in Creve Coeur. She could still see the spotless whites of the walls, the slash of a blood-red afghan against the black leather couch. She’d been standing close to the front door, but not too close. Not close enough to touch or escape. All the furniture looked so comfortable, but she couldn’t use it. She couldn’t sit, or lie down, or close her eyes. The door looked so inviting, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t get out. She had to stand there, alone, frightened, angry, without moving. She couldn’t rest no matter how tired she grew. She was three years old, which was stupid. She’d been over twenty when she’d first seen that apartment.

Casey couldn’t understand why she should suddenly have that dream, why she should see that room after so many years. Unless it was the fact that her mother was pressing ever closer, demanding more time, more attention, more penance. Unless it was the fact that the job was squeezing in from the other end, the frustration mounting with every petty interference she had to suffer.

She’d been called into the office the day before. Just as she’d suspected, a complaint had been lodged. Not by Ahmed, though, or even Abe for the fact that she’d been merciless in staying on his tail that night ten days earlier. Besides, Abe would have dragged her off himself and just challenged her to a duel of four-letter words if he’d seen the need.

The complaint came from the mother of the little boy she’d dragged from the hall.

“Casey,” Tom Nevers had said, fingers steepled over his ’64 Cardinals World Series baseball. “You’re in the big leagues. You know that you can’t flip the bird at the fans.”

Baseball. As far as Tom was concerned, the world had been created by Abner Doubleday and defined by Yogi Berra. A small, asthmatic man who looked more like Woody Allen than Ryne Sandburg, Tom could spend all day trying to couch unintelligible medical terms into anachronistic baseball ones.

“It’s hardly flipping the bird,” Casey reminded him, rubbing her forehead to ward away the headache this was producing. “I pulled the kid out of the way of a line drive.”

His face lit with the analogy. Casey wondered how long she could keep this up. She attended more Cardinals’ games than Tom did, but even Dizzy Dean had called a nurse a nurse—not a catcher (the unsung hero of the game, who really called the shots and made the pitcher—the doctor—look good).

“Casey, I’m afraid the fans are always right. Besides, that was Dr. Jordan’s niece. He wanted the incident on your stats. I think if you just send a nice little note to the mother, he’ll forget the whole thing. Especially since Dr. Hunsacker ran interference for you.”

Wrong game, she thought instinctively. At least get your sports analogies straight.

Then the name sank in.

“Hunsacker?” she asked.

Tom nodded, ‘a look of near reverence on his face, hands flat on the desk like a minister giving direction.

“Dr. Jordan said something about it in his presence. You know, locker-room banter. Dr. Hunsacker insisted that he’d seen the incident, and managed to call off the fine. I think you owe him a lot, Casey. He really went to bat for you.”

Casey winced. She’d been steeling herself against that one.

“Make sure you thank him, too,” Tom said, sounding much like her mother discussing the blessed virgin. “Personally. After all, Jordan is head of staff. He could be your one-way ticket to the minors.”

But she didn’t want to thank Hunsacker. She didn’t want to be in debt to him. Somehow, Casey had the feeling that he’d defended her just to see the deference in her eyes, and it pissed her off.

Casey turned the corner from Elm onto Swon and picked up the pace, instinct driving her. When she looked up to discover herself at the distinctive pink Federalist house, she understood. Without realizing it, she’d headed straight for Poppi’s.

It shouldn’t have surprised her. She always seemed to home in on Poppi when she needed a little relief from all the atonement in her life. If Poppi had ever thought it necessary to atone for anything, Casey had never heard about it.

“Are you decent?” Casey called, opening the door without invitation. Reaching a hand beneath the dripping plastic of her hood, she shoved the earphones back onto her neck and stepped in.

Silence. The first floor of Poppi’s house remained as her parents had kept it, spare and elegant in cherrywood and oriental rugs. An impressionist print over the fireplace and brass candlesticks on the lowboy in the dining room. Upstairs was the real Poppi, with the waterbed and fabric-draped ceiling and old Peter Max posters.

“Poppi? Jason?”

“Oooooh, Ca-sey!” a voice whooshed from nowhere, as if suspended in the atmosphere. “Tracers!”

Shedding her coat, Casey chuckled. So it was surrealism time at the old Henderson house. Poppi would be stretched out, timing her heartbeat to the waves on the waterbed, choreographing the dancing lights in her head.

Casey stopped long enough to purloin a soda from the fridge, shucked her rain gear, and headed for the stairs.

“Oh, what is your wisdom, my seer?” she asked.

“On final approach,” Poppi assured her in a voice that sounded like somebody being hypnotized.

She was, indeed, stretched out on the bed, eyes fixed to the gray paisley ceiling, hands tracing patterns in the air, stereo pouring out Wagner. Anybody else would have at least had the decency to trip to Zeppelin, maybe Santana. Poppi had always insisted that the classics were the really psychedelic music, since most of the composers had been crazy anyway. Listening to the muted wailing from the stereo, Casey couldn’t really argue.

Pulling over one of the beanbag chairs, Casey collapsed into it. “Are you into dream interpretation?”

Silence. Poppi’s hands drifted down. “Heavy.”

Casey focused her own eyes on the intricate Celtic knot’ of a new Irish artist Poppi favored. Never ending, never beginning, it seduced you with its flow until you found yourself completely lost within the internecine tangle of its design. Once in, never able to escape.

“What haunts?” Poppi asked.

Casey rubbed between her eyes. The rain had picked up, silvering the light in the airy room. “My apartment in Creve Coeur.”

“That makes sense. There’s an aura, you know”—the hands fluttered again, as if caught in a languid dance—“red, with shimmers of green…like your very own aurora borealis…”

Taking a long slug of soda, Casey just shook her head. “No wonder I could never understand
Magical Mystery Tour
. When do you expect touchdown?”

“Fading. In another twenty minutes I’ll be…on the phone to the League of Women Voters.” Meaning sanity was returning fast. Poppi always slid to a three-point landing from these things. She’d been studied in the seventies and warned in the eighties, a person without addictions, one impervious to the worst effects of experimentation.

“Apartment?” she asked suddenly, her head turning fractionally. “That
is
heavy. What’s it been?”

“Seven years. You know that. I dreamed I was locked in and couldn’t get out. I kept fighting, yelling, you know. Couldn’t touch the furniture, couldn’t get out the door.”

“Mmmm.”

Which meant, processing. Poppi knew Casey better than anyone. She’d been there through it all, sharing the dreams, buffering the defeats, brightening the monotony.

“Work?” she asked.

“No more ludicrous than usual. I was chastised for doing my job and praised for not rocking the boat.”

Good team playing was how Tom had put it. He didn’t like hotshot players, none of this one wing down stuff when rounding the bases. Everybody pulled together, which meant that Casey shouldn’t stand up and scream about inadequate staffing. It only reflected poorly on the rest of the club. It was a philosophy amazingly similar to that of the administration’s. The only good nurse was a quiet nurse.

“Home?” Poppi asked.

Casey snorted. “We’re into novena season there. I wouldn’t mind so much if she didn’t remind me every time she puts on her bandanna that it’s my soul she’s praying for.”

“Echoes from the past?”

“Not a one. Ed is perfectly happy pretending he never knew me.”

“Ed didn’t live with you in Creve Coeur.”

“I was getting to that.” An even more difficult memory than Ed’s massive passive-aggression. A real foray into denial. “Nothing there, either.”