Devil's Waltz (30 page)

“Maybe he’s no better than they are,” I said.

“Family of psychos?”

“Where do you think it starts?”

“I don’t know—”

“Maybe Chuck Jones was an abusive father and that’s where Chip learned it. The way he’s tearing down the hospital sure doesn’t make him Mr. Compassionate.”

“Corporate greed is one thing, Alex. Watching your granddaughter get messed with to the point of epileptic seizures is another.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s probably all fantasy — getting far afield. Would you please eat? Your pickiness is making me nervous.”

He smiled for my benefit and took fork in hand. Both of us faked fascination with our food.

“Huenengarth,” he said. “Don’t imagine there’d be too many of that name on file. What’s the first name?”

“Presley.”

He smiled. “Even better. Speaking of which, I ran Ashmore and Steph. He’s clean except for a couple of traffic tickets that he didn’t get around to paying before he died. She’s been clean for a long time, but a few years ago she had a DUI.”

“Drunk driving?”

“Uh-huh. Caused a collision, no injuries. First offense, she got probation. Probably got sent to AA or a treatment center.”

“So maybe
that’s
why she’s changed.”

“Changed how?”

“Got thin, started putting on makeup, got into fashion. Image of the young professional. She has a designer coffee maker in her office. Real espresso.”

“Could be,” he said. “Strong coffee’s part of the reformed alkie thing — to replace the booze.”

Thinking of his off-and-on flirtation with the bottle, I said, “You think it means anything?”

“What, the DUI? You see any evidence she’s still boozing?”

“No, but I haven’t been looking for any.”

“Any clear relationship between alcoholism and Munchausen?”

“No. But whatever problem you’ve got, booze makes it worse. And if she had the typical Munchausen background — abuse, incest, illness — I could understand her hitting the bottle.”

He shrugged. “So you answer your own question. At the very least it means she’s got something she’d like to forget. Which makes her like most of us.”

As we left the restaurant Milo said, “I’ll try to find out what I can about Dawn Herbert, for what it’s worth. What’s your next step?”

“Home visit. Maybe seeing them in their natural habitat will give me
some
kind of insight.”

“Makes sense. Hell, while you’re out there you can do a little snooping — you’ve got the perfect cover.”

“That’s exactly what Stephanie said. She suggested I nose around in their medicine cabinet. Half-joking.”

“Why not? You shrinks get paid to poke and probe. Don’t even need a search warrant.”

On the way home I stopped off at the Ashmore house — still curious about Huenengarth and wanting to see how the widow was doing. A black wreath hung on the front door and no one answered my ring.

I got back in the car, cranked up the stereo, and made it all the way home without thinking about death and disease. I checked in with my service. Robin had left word she’d be back around six. The morning paper was still on the dining room table, neatly folded, the way she always left it.

Recalling Dan Kornblatt’s peevish comment in the cafeteria, I paged through the paper, trying to find what had upset him. Nothing in the front pages or Metro, but it jumped out at me from the second page of the Business section.

I never read the financial pages, but even if I did, I could have missed it. Small piece, lower bottom corner, next to the foreign exchange rates.

The headline read
HEALTH CARE IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR
:
THE OPTIMISM FADES
. The gist of the article was that the for-profit hospital business, once seen by Wall Street as a rich financial lode, had turned out to be anything but. That premise was backed up by examples of hospitals and HMOs gone bust, and interviews with financial honchos, one of them George Plumb, formerly CEO of MGS Healthcare Consultants, Pittsburgh, and currently CEO of Western Pediatric Medical Center, Los Angeles.

Pittsburgh… The outfit revamping the library with an outmoded computer system — BIO-DAT — was from Pittsburgh too.

One hand feeding the other? I read on.

The honchos’ main complaints centered on government meddling and “market-restricting” fee schedules but also touched upon difficulties dealing with insurance companies, the skyrocketing cost of new technologies, the salary demands of doctors and nurses, and the failure of sick people to behave like statistics.

“One AIDS patient, alone, can cost us millions,” lamented one East Coast administrator. “And we still haven’t seen the light at the end of that tunnel. This is a disease no one knew about when any of the plans were put together. The rules have been changed in the middle of the game.”

The HIV epidemic was cited repeatedly by executives, as if the plague were a bit of naughtiness devised to throw the actuaries off track.

Plumb’s special contribution to the gripe-fest had to do with the difficulties of running inner-city hospitals due to “unfavorable demographics and social problems that seep into the institution from the surrounding neighborhoods. Add to that, rapidly deteriorating physical plants and shrinking revenues, and the paying consumer and his or her provider is unwilling to contract for care.”

When asked for solutions, Plumb suggested that the wave of the future might be “decentralization — replacing the large urban hospital with smaller, easily managed health-care units strategically located in positive-growth suburban areas.”

“However,” he cautioned, “careful economic analyses need to be done before planning anything of that magnitude. And nonpecuniary issues must also be considered. Many established institutions inspire a high degree of loyalty in those whose memories are grounded in the good old days.”

It sounded awfully like a trial balloon — testing public opinion before proposing radical surgery: putting the “physical plant” up for sale and heading for suburban pastures. And if cornered, Plumb could always brush off his comments as detached expert analysis.

Kornblatt’s remark about selling off the hospital’s real estate began to sound less like paranoia and more like an educated guess.

Of course, Plumb was only a mouthpiece. Speaking for the man I’d just proposed as a possible murder contractor and accessory to child abuse.

I remembered what Stephanie had told me about Chuck Jones’s background. Before becoming Western Peds’s chairman of the board, he’d managed the hospital’s investment portfolio. Who’d know more about the precise value of Western Peds’s assets — including the land — than the man who kept the books?

I visualized him and Plumb and the gray-twin numbers crunchers, Roberts and Novak, hunched over a moldy ledger, like predators out of a Thomas Nast cartoon.

Could the hospital’s dismal financial situation be due to more than unfortunate demographics and shrinking revenues? Had Jones mismanaged Western Peds’s money to the point of crisis, and was he now planning to cover his losses with a flashy real estate sale?

Adding insult to injury by taking a nice fat commission on the deal?

Strategically located in positive-growth suburban areas.

Like the fifty lots Chip Jones owned out in the West Valley?

One hand feeding the other…

But to pull off that kind of thing, appearances would have to be kept up, Jones and company exhibiting unwavering loyalty to the urban dinosaur until it drew its last breath.

Pulling the chairman’s granddaughter out of treatment wouldn’t be part of that.

In the meantime, though, steps could be taken to hasten the dinosaur’s death.

Shut down clinical programs. Discourage research. Freeze salaries and keep the wards understaffed.

Encourage senior doctors to leave and replace them with inexperienced help, so that private physicians lost confidence and stopped referring their paying patients.

Then, when redemption was out of the question, give an impassioned speech about insoluble social issues and the need to move fearlessly into the future.

Destroying the hospital to save it.

If Jones and his minions pulled it off, they’d be viewed as visionaries with the courage and foresight to put a tottering almshouse out of its misery and replace it with healing grounds for the upper middle class.

There was a certain vicious beauty to it.

Thin-lipped men planning a war of attrition with flow-charts, balance sheets, computer printouts.

Printouts…

Huenengarth confiscating Ashmore’s computers.

Was he after data that had nothing to do with sudden infant death syndrome or poisoned babies?

Ashmore had no interest in patient care, but a
strong
attraction to finance. Had he stumbled upon Jones’s and Plumb’s machinations — overheard something down in the sub-basement, or hacked into the wrong data base?

Had he tried to profit from the knowledge and paid for it?

Big leap, Milo would say.

I remembered the glimpse I’d caught of Ashmore’s office before Huenengarth shut the door.

What kind of toxicology research could be carried out without test tubes or microscopes?

Ashmore, crunching numbers and dying because of it… Then what of Dawn Herbert? Why had she pulled a dead infant’s chart? Why had she been murdered two months before Ashmore?

Separate schemes?

Some sort of collusion?

Big leap… And even if any of it was true, what the hell did it have to do with Cassie Jones’s ordeal?

I phoned the hospital and requested room 505W. No one answered. Dialing again, I asked to be put through to the Chappy Ward nursing desk. The nurse who picked up had a Spanish accent. She informed me the Jones family was off the floor, taking a walk.

“Anything new?” I said.“In terms of her status?”

“I’m not sure — you’ll have to ask the primary. I believe that’s Dr….”

“Eves.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I’m just a float, not really familiar with the case.”

I hung up, looked out the kitchen window at treetops graying under a descending lemon-colored sun. Mulled the financial angle some more.

I thought of someone who might be able to educate me financially. Lou Cestare, once a stocks-and-bonds golden boy, now a chastened veteran of Black Monday.

The crash had caught him off guard and he was still scouring the tarnish from his reputation. But he remained on
my
A list.

Years ago I’d saved up some cash, working eighty hours a week and not spending much. Lou had given me financial security by investing the money in pre-boom beachfront real estate, selling for healthy profits and putting the gain into blue-chip securities and tax-free bonds. Avoiding the speculative stuff, because he knew I’d never be rich from practicing psychology and couldn’t afford to lose big.

The income from those investments was still coming in, slow and steady, augmenting what I brought in doing forensic consults. I’d never be able to buy French Impressionist paintings, but if I kept my life-style reasonable, I probably wouldn’t have to work when I didn’t want to.

Lou, on the other hand, was a very wealthy man, even after losing most of his assets and nearly all of his clients. He split his time now between a boat in the South Pacific and an estate in the Willamette Valley.

I called Oregon and spoke to his wife. She sounded serene, as always, and I wondered if it was strength of character or a good facade. We made small talk for a while and then she told me Lou was up in Washington State, hiking near Mount Rainier with their son, and wasn’t expected until tomorrow night or Monday morning. I gave her my want-list. It didn’t mean much to her, but I knew she and Lou never talked money.

Wishing her well and thanking her, I hung up.

Then I drank another cup of coffee and waited for Robin to come home and help me forget the day.

She was carrying two suitcases and looking cheerful. A third valise was down in her new truck. I brought it up and watched her unpack and hang her clothes. Filling the space in the closet that I’d left empty for more than two years.

Sitting down on the bed, she smiled. “There.”

We necked for a while, watched the fish, went out and had rack of lamb at a sedate place in Brentwood where we were the youngest patrons. After returning home, we spent the rest of the evening listening to music, reading, and playing gin. It felt romantic, a little geriatric, and very satisfying. The next morning, we went walking in the glen, pretending we were birdwatchers and making up names for the winged things we saw.

Sunday lunch was hamburgers and iced tea up on the terrace. After we did the dishes she got involved in the Sunday crossword puzzle, biting her pencil and frowning a lot. I stretched out on a lounge chair, feigning relaxation. Shortly after 2:00
P
.
M
. she put the puzzle down, saying, “Forget it. Too many French words.”

She lay down beside me. We absorbed sun, until I noticed her starting to fidget.

I leaned over and kissed her forehead.

“Ummm… anything I can do for you?” she said.

“No, thanks.”

“Sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

She tried to sleep, grew more restless.

I said, “I’d like to get over to the hospital some time today.”

“Oh, sure… As long as you’re going out, I might as well get over to the shop, take care of a few odds and ends.”

Cassie’s room was empty, the bed stripped, the drapes drawn. Vacuum tracks striped the carpet. The bathroom was bare and disinfected; a paper runner was wrapped around the toilet.

As I stepped out of the room a voice said, “Hold it.”

I came face to face with a security guard. Wetsanded triangular face, grim lips, and black-framed glasses. Same hero I’d met the first day, enforcing the badge law.

He blocked the doorway. Looked ready to charge San Juan Hill.

I said, “Excuse me.”

He didn’t move. There was barely enough space between us for me to glance down and read his badge.
Sylvester, A.D.