Killing Cassidy (22 page)

“Actually, I do have a reason for being here. One of the doctors has disappeared.”

“Oh, yeah, Dr. Boland. Everybody's talking about it. I even got to hear about it up here in my cubicle.”

“Ray, I have some ideas about why he disappeared. I can't go into them now, but I'm one of those trying to find him.”

“Why?”

“I can't tell you that, either. But you could be a big help to me, if you would.”

His brow furrowed. “How?”

“It looks like your computer's working all right. The ones over at the university are all down. Is this one just internal, or will it access the Internet?”

“I only use it for staff records.”

“I know that, but
could
you use it to get on the Net?”

“Well, sure. It's a terminal like all the rest.”

“There's a national database for doctors' records. Their own records, I mean, not their patients'. Do you know how to get into that, or is it confidential?”

“No—no, I don't think so. I mean, yeah, I can get in it. I don't, much, but I can. And no, it isn't confidential. Anyhow, nobody ever told me it was.”

“That was the impression I got, too. I have to tell you I just read up about this at the library, so I don't know much about it myself. Ray, you'd be doing me a real favor if you'd look up Dr. Boland for me.”

Ray, would you like to clean the blackboard for me? Ray, could you take this message to the office? Oh, Ray, thank you! You did a beautiful job straightening that cupboard.

And Ray would tuck his chin into his collar and mumble something, and go back to his desk looking mildly pleased.

“We-ell …”

“I wouldn't ask if it weren't important. I don't know anybody else who could do this for me. I gather not just anyone has the access.”

He sat up a little straighter. “Well, I guess it's okay. You wouldn't ask me to do something that wasn't. But I'm not sure how—I'll have to look it up.” He opened a drawer and pushed the crowded contents around, finally coming up with a rather grubby pamphlet titled “A Guide to HCH Data Systems.”

I longed to take it from him and find the instructions myself. He was still a slow reader. I managed to hide my impatience while he read a section aloud and put the information into action.

It was all worth it, though. When he finally negotiated the complexities of logging on to the database, and finally found Jim Roland's file, he let out a whistle.

“Gosh!”

“What? What did you find?”

“Gosh, he's been in a lot of trouble!”

He swiveled the monitor up and around so that I could see.

There it was. Dr. Boland's guilty past. The malpractice suits, the judgments against him, the out-of-court settlements. The information he was required to report when requesting residency in any hospital.

“Can you print it out for me?”

“Sure. Gosh, though! Whoever would've thought?”

He handed me the printouts.

“Ray, this is just what I needed. You've been an enormous help!”

“Gee, I'm glad I could help. This is all kind of exciting, huh?”

“It is, indeed. But Ray—our secret for now, right?”

“Right!” He grinned shyly at me, tucked his chin into his collar, and went back to his work, looking mildly pleased.

I
walked straight to Doc Foley's office.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, and it's not a medical emergency, but I need to see him, just for a few minutes. Tell him I'm here, will you? And tell him it's about Dr. Boland. I'll be glad to wait.”

The office was full, as it almost always was. Doc was the sort of doctor who made you feel, when you got into his office, that he had nothing more important to do than listen to you tell him just what the trouble was. That, combined with the fact that he never refused a new patient who was really sick, and the only way his old patients ever left him was in a coffin (despite his best efforts), meant that you usually had to wait.

Thus I was not popular when, about five minutes later, the nurse called me in ahead of at least three people.

“I'm sorry,” I said to all and sundry. “I really won't be a minute.”

None of them looked any happier.

He was waiting for me at his desk. “This better be good, kid.”

“I know. You have an office full of patients ready to lynch me. Doc, look at this.”

I pulled the printouts out of my purse.

He read them, looked up at me, read them more carefully, and finally laid them on the desk. He pulled off his glasses, rubbed the corners of his eyes, and sighed.

“Well? How did a man like that ever get a practice in Hillsburg?”

“Appearances can be deceiving, you know. Some of these cases may not be anything like as serious as they look.”

“He caused an aortal aneurysm, Doc! He made a hole—well, almost—in somebody's aorta, for Pete's sake! The poor woman's probably an invalid for life, and it was supposed to be just a routine angioplasty!”

“Aneurysms can almost always be repaired, Dorothy. And doctors are human. We make mistakes. Oh, we'd like to pretend it isn't so, but accidents happen. One accident doesn't mean somebody's a bad doctor, just that he was unlucky.”

“Not as unlucky as the patient,” I said tartly. “And there's sure more than one in this record.”

He looked at it again. “Hmmm. The illegible prescriptions—common enough, but careless, certainly. The forgotten allergy—that's more serious. Dorothy, I'm not saying Boland is a man I would have chosen for Hillsburg, if I'd known about all this.”

“But you didn't.”

I must have sounded accusing, because I could hear the effort it took Doc not to lose his temper.

“Dorothy, I don't sit on the credentials board. I can't personally check up on every doctor who wants to practice in this town. There's a shortage of doctors willing to serve as family practitioners in a small town.”

“Now, see, that's another thing I don't understand. Why Hillsburg? He's kept on going to smaller and smaller towns. And why did he change from his cardiac specialty to family practice?”

“Oh, that's easily explained. After the angioplasty that went wrong in Virginia, he probably wanted to get out of cardiology. So he took some courses, boned up on family practice, and went to a smaller town in Ohio. Apparently he had some problems there, too, so he came to us.”

“And Kevin died.”

“Now, look here, Dorothy! Once and for all, get it out of your head that Kevin died because of Boland's care! He did everything anyone could. How many more times—?”

“Then why did he leave town?”

Doc was silent.

“Doc, I know I'm being a pest, and your patients are going to lose their patience in about a minute. Just tell me one thing. Who could have known about his record?”

“Anyone with access to that database. It's fairly expensive to subscribe to, but every hospital has access, and most big clinics. We share information.”

“But not to laymen.”

“Well—laymen could get to it if they wanted to.”

“They'd have to know about it.”

“True.”

After a moment I stood up and gave Doc my hand.

“Thanks. I haven't worked it all out yet, but this means something. And by the way, if you still want to, I think I know where to find Dr. Boland!”

I left him with that to think about.

I stretched out on the bed when I got back to the hotel, thinking to rest my back and knees and puzzle over my information. Alan woke me out of a sound sleep.

“Productive afternoon, love?”

I yawned and sat up, piling pillows behind my back. “You can keep the sarcasm out of your voice, thank you. I had a very productive afternoon indeed, and I can't have been asleep more than half an hour. Anyway, I deserved a nap after last night's excursion. How about you? You look as though somebody's given you a present.”

“I think you'll agree that somebody has. But I want to save it. Tell me what you've learned.”

I told him, leaving out no detail.

“The guilty secret,” he said when I had finished. “The only trouble being that it's not a secret at all.”

“Well, that
is
a problem. But I'm not sure it's such a big one. Sure, the Hillsburg Hospital people certified him, or whatever the term is. They admitted him as a resident. Doc implied that they might have been pretty hard up for doctors and ready to take somebody whose record was more than a little doubtful. But what would have happened if there'd been a malpractice suit here, and the press had gotten hold of the thing? They could have. Newsmen know how to find out things; they probably know all about that database.”

Alan shook his head slowly. After a moment I leaned back against the pillows and sighed. “It's not enough, is it?”

“It's not enough, I think, to make a motive for murder. Your idea, I take it, has been that Kevin found out and told Boland he would have to tell—tell whom?”

“I don't know. I suppose I had thought the hospital authorities. But of course they already knew. So …” I raised a hand and let it drop. “I guess I didn't accomplish anything this afternoon, after all.”

“You settled the matter of Dr. James Boland for certain,” Alan said calmly. “We now know why he left town.”

“We do?”

“He left for the same reason he left Richmond and Youngstown, or almost the same. There hadn't been a malpractice suit yet, but he felt one was in the offing. He might have thought you planned to file one on Kevin's behalf. Whatever his reasoning was, he was certain that Hillsburg had become one more place where he could no longer practice medicine. So he left.”

“But he didn't kill Kevin or Jerry. And we're no nearer knowing who did.”

“You've eliminated one suspect. And I, my dear, have eliminated another.”

I forgot my disappointment and sat up again. “You have! Who?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Let me tell it my way. You told me I looked as though I'd been given a present. I feel that way, I admit. I went to talk to Father Kennedy, to see if I couldn't pin him down to some dates.”

“The dates when things happened to Kevin?”

“Yes. He wasn't a great deal of help, actually, though he tried hard. I wasn't surprised. One doesn't remember the exact date when things happen, especially at an age when one's memory begins to be unreliable about everything.”

I made a small noise of rueful agreement. “But you said you were able to eliminate one suspect. How, if you couldn't establish any more dates?”

Alan smiled with satisfaction. “I couldn't establish dates, no. But I did establish a connection. We talked, Father Kennedy and I, about all the incidents. I thought something might trigger a memory. We talked about the telephone problems, and I propounded my theory of how they might have been caused and where someone might have gotten the idea. We went from that to the fire, since the telephone, as you may remember, was out of order then. Father Kennedy said again that Kevin had managed to put it out himself before much harm had been done.

“And did the police investigate the fire? I asked him. Somehow neither you nor I had thought to ask that before. And he said—wait for it—he said that the police had been notified, but that nothing much had been done, because the police were overworked just then. The chief was on holiday, and nothing seemed to be going well for them.”

He paused to watch my reaction. “The chief was on holiday! Only I bet Father Kennedy called it vacation. Where, did he know?”

“No, I asked him. But it was easy enough to find out.”

“How?”

“I went to the police station and asked.”

“You asked Darryl where he went on vacation? Alan, you didn't!”

He laughed and patted my knee. “No, I didn't. I asked that nice young officer who took care of Kevin's cats. Of course I didn't ask him, baldly, where his chief went for his holidays. I told him I had dropped in to ask after the cats. They're fine, by the way. Three of them have already been adopted.”

“The little gray one?” I asked anxiously. “I liked her the best.”

“Yes, the little gray one. That led to a discussion of his own cats, and I talked about ours, and the difficulty of arranging for their care when we went away. Of course, that made it natural to speak of journeys and traveling, so I mentioned that I didn't know this part of the country at all, and asked where the popular holiday spots were.”

I was the one who laughed at that. “And he told you there weren't any.”

“He was quite polite about it, said that people usually went to Disney World or Las Vegas. Pressed a bit, he said that he and his wife didn't like that sort of thing, that they would camp up in Michigan or walk the Appalachian Trail. Do you, by the way, know about the Appalachian Trail?”

“Not from personal experience,” I assured him.

“Well, it doesn't sound the sort of thing a policeman would do voluntarily, at least not one who had walked a beat in his early days as I did. I told the officer that, and he laughed and said that his chief was of the same opinion. That, of course, gave me the opening I needed.”

“So you asked.”

“So I asked. And he told me that the chief, for his last three holidays—sorry, vacations—had taken his family to one of the national parks. Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon were mentioned.”

I fell back against the pillows in relief. “So Darryl's out of it for sure.”

“It would certainly seem so. Unless, of course, the origin of the fire turned out to be electrical or some other accidental cause—” He dodged the pillow I threw at him. “All right, all right! I don't really believe that. I believe we've exonerated the police chief. And I would suggest that our first call tomorrow morning be at the police station.”