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He patted her shoulder and spoke quietly. “Nobody thinks you would hurt Christine.” He paused. “I do have to say, jeez, baby, Gary Nagle? If you were going to do that, I should have been hitting on you harder all these years.”
“Yeah, yeah. Hell, does everybody in the hospital know about this?”
“Of course not.” He waited a beat. “Of course.”
She laughed with him but felt the rough stone of exposure pulling her down. What an insane thing, getting together with Gary, going for a drink with him that windy spring night, letting him kiss her underneath the streetlight. She tried to push the memory away.
“Maybe you need a vacation,” he said. “I can’t afford you to burn out.”
Her immediate reaction was defensive, but she knew he meant her well. “Oh, Dr. Carpenter, you know how it is. Sometimes it’s so sad. Sometimes something wonderful happens. A patient gets good news or makes you laugh. I always think, no matter how bad the news, at least I can control their pain.”
They walked again, in the direction of the cafeteria, moving to the edge of the hallway as five people walked past, closely bunched together. It was obviously a family, three generations of women, the oldest looking a little older than Cheryl Beth. Eyes red with tears and faces stretched with fatigue, they bunched together in their thick winter coats as if any straggler would be pulled irretrievably into the deep space.
“Dr. Carpenter, who would want to hurt Christine?”
“Want me to make a list?”
“I’m serious.”
He said nothing until they were in an empty hallway again. “Christine was a big personality, as you know. People loved her or hated her. Well, no, that’s not true. People tolerated her or hated h
er. She didn’t have many friends. You tangled with her, remember? When you were trying to get us away from using so much Demerol, using all your charm and all your data, she went ballistic. That was classic Christine.”
“I’d actually forgotten that. There was another time, too. She told me her patient was being a problem, and I said, ‘Dr. Lustig, the problem is how you’re writing the orders.’ She was way under-prescribing for this particular patient, who was just moaning, really hurting. The nurses were afraid to cross her. I wanted to say, ‘You’re killing people with these PCAs,’ but I didn’t. Great. These will be more reasons for the cops to suspect me.”
He chuckled. “If arguing with Christine Lustig was a crime, I’d be under the jail. I knew her for fifteen years, and I can’t think of one day when she wasn’t after somebody. The truth is, she was brisk…well, beyond brisk, because usually she was right. I saw her stand toe-to-toe with the big guys many times, and that wasn’t easy for a female doc of her generation. On top of all that, she was gorgeous and knew it. My God, those cheekbones…”
He stared wistfully. “She felt entitled and she was incredibly competitive. She and Gary were both that way. It’s amazing they didn’t kill each other. Guess I shouldn’t say that. I thought she was a gifted surgeon, especially on gall bladders and GI stuff. But she was kind of a technician, if you know what I mean. Her people skills with patients sometimes left a lot to be desired. Let’s just say she didn’t have your emotional IQ. Not to speak ill of the dead.”
“Is that why she was put on the computer project?”
“You mean to get away from patients for awhile? Maybe. She actually asked for the assignment, and she became a real advocate. I called her Tech Head, she became such a geek. She traveled to other hospitals and studied their systems. SoftChartZ is pioneering electronic patient records. Digital medicine. Christine was a believer. Don’t kid yourself. This is what’s got Stephanie’s panties twisted, that the project might be delayed now. Not that she gives a damn about how much paperwork you do. But the docs in the neurosurgery practice are screaming for computerized records, and they’re the ones who still bring real money into this benighted place.”
“So who in this long list of enemies was capable of killing Christine?”
“Oh, Cheryl Beth. How would I know that?”
“Because you know everything, Dr. Carpenter.”
“What, you’re a detective now?”
“Someone has to be. This cop, Dodds—I have a really bad feeling about him. He just looks at me like he thinks I did it, like I’m hiding something.”
“Are you?”
A shot of defensiveness stiffened her before he laughed.
“I’m serious, doctor. I feel like I need to do something, get him some information. And Stephanie, too. You should have seen how she went off on me.”
“The detective talked to me. I told him you couldn’t have done it.”
“See! He has it in his head that I killed her!”
“Cheryl Beth, this is a big old urban hospital. And we have all the problems of an urban hospital. Yesterday, I saw a guy in a stairwell, dressed in rags, just walking up and down the stairs. He said his dead mother was chasing him, and didn’t I see her? He was shaking and bawling. Scared the hell out of me. I called security, and it turned out he was just another street person who wandered in here for warmth. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, off his meds, hearing voices. Good Lord.”
He stopped. Then, “Do you know how much of this hospital has been closed down the past decade? There are old, abandoned parts of this place that I’ve never even been to, that the security guards don’t even know about.”
“They’re probably all my old shortcuts,” she said.
