Джонатан Келлерман - When the Bough Breaks

“I am. And you?”

“Doing the same old thing,” she sighed.

“And doing it well, I’m sure.”

For a moment I thought the flattery was a mistake. Her face hardened and grew a few new wrinkles.

“We know,” I went on, “who really keeps things together around here.”

“Oh, go on.” She flexed her hand like an abalone tipped fan.

“It sure ain’t the doctors.” I resisted calling her Ol’ Buddy.

“Ain’t that the truth. Amazing what twenty years of education won’t give you in the way of common sense. I’m just a wage slave but I know which end is up.”

“I’m sure you could never be anyone’s slave, Cora.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Lashes as thick and dark as raven feathers lowered conquettishly.

She was in her early forties and under the merciless fluorescent lighting of the office every year showed. But she was well put together, with good features, one of those women who retain the form of youth but not the texture. Once, centuries ago, she’d seemed girlish, hearty and athletic, as we’d thrashed around the floor of the medical records office. It had been a one-shot deal, followed by mutual boycott. Now she was flirting, her memory cleansed by the passage of time.

“Have they been treating you okay?” I asked.

“As well as can be expected. You know how doctors are.”

I grinned.

“I’m a fixture,” she said. “If they ever move the office, they’ll pick me up with the furniture.”

I looked up and down her body.

“I don’t think anyone could mistake you for furniture.”

She laughed nervously and touched her hair self-consciously.

“Thanks.” Self-scrutiny became too unsettling and she put me in the spotlight.

“What brings you down here?”

“Tying up loose ends – a few unfinished charts, paperwork. I’ve been careless about answering my mail. I thought I received a notice about overdue staff dues.”

“I don’t remember sending you one but it could have been one of the other girls. I was out for a month. Had surgery.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Cora. Is everything all right?”

“Female troubles.” She smiled. “They say I’m fine.” Her expression said that she thought “they” were abject liars.

“I’m glad.”

We locked gazes. For just a moment she looked twenty, innocent and hopeful. She turned her back to me, as if wanting to preserve that image in my mind.

“Let me check your file.”

She got up and slid open the drawer of a black lacquered file cabinet, and came up with a blue folder.

“No,” she said, “you’re all paid up. You’ll be getting a notice for next year in a couple of months.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She returned the folder.

“How about a cup of coffee?” I asked casually.

She looked at me, then at her watch.

“I’m not due for a break until ten, but what the hell, live it up, huh?”

“Right.”

“Let me go to the little girls’ room and freshen up.” She fluffed her hair, picked up her purse and left the office to go into the lavatory across the hall.

When I saw the door shut after her I walked to the file cabinet. The drawer she’d opened was labeled “Staff A–G.” Two drawers down I found what I wanted. Into the old briefcase it went.

I was waiting by the door when she came out, flushed, pink and pretty, and smelling of patchouli. I extended my arm and she took it.

Over hospital coffee I listened to her talk. About her divorce – a seven-year-old wound that wouldn’t heal – the teenage daughter who was driving her crazy by doing exactly what she’d done as an adolescent, car troubles, the insensitivity of her superiors, the unfairness of life.

It was bizarre, getting to know for the first time a woman whose body I’d entered. In the scrambled word game of contemporary mating rituals, there was greater intimacy in her tales of woe than there had been in the opening of her thighs.

We parted friends.

“Come by again, Alex.”

“I will.”

I walked to the parking lot marveling at the ease with which I was able to slip on the cloak of duplicity. I’d always flattered myself with a self-assessment of integrity. But in the last three days I’d grown proficient at sneak-thievery, concealment of the truth, bald-faced lying and emotional whoring.

It must be the company I’d been keeping.

I drove to a cozy Italian place in West Hollywood. The restaurant had just opened and I was alone in my rear corner booth. I ordered veal in wine sauce, a side order of linguini with oil and garlic, and a Coors.

A shuffling waiter brought the beer. While I waited for the food I opened the briefcase and examined my plunder.

Towle’s medical staff file was over forty pages long. Most of it consisted of Xeroxes of his diplomas, certificates and awards. His curriculum vitae was twenty pages of puffery, markedly devoid of scholarly publications – he’d co-authored one brief report while an intern, and nothing since – and filled with television and radio interviews, speeches to lay groups, volunteer service to La Casa and similar organizations. Yet he was a full clinical professor at the medical school. So much for academic rigor.

The waiter brought a salad and a basket of rolls.

I picked up my napkin with one hand, started to return the file to the briefcase with the other, when something on the front page of the resume caught my eye.

Under college or university attended, he’d listed Jedson College, Bellevue, Washington.

I got home, called the L.A. Times , and asked for Ned Biondi at the Metro desk. Biondi was a senior writer for the paper, a short, nervous character right out of The Front Page. I’d treated his teenager daughter for anorexia nervosa several years back. Biondi hadn’t been able to come up with the money for treatment on a journalist’s salary – compounded with a penchant for playing the wrong horse at Santa Anita – but the girl had been in trouble and I’d let it go. It had taken him a year and a half to clear his debt. His daughter had gotten straightened out after months of my chipping away at layers of self-hatred that were surprisingly ossified in someone seventeen years old. I remembered her clearly, a tall, dark youngster who wore jogging shorts and T-shirts that accentuated the skeletal condition of her body; a girl ashen-faced and spindly legged who alternated between deep, dark spells of brooding silence and flights of hyperactivity during which she was ready to enter every category of Olympic competition on three hundred calories a day.

I’d gotten her admitted to Western Pediatric, where she’d stayed for three weeks. That, followed by months of psychotherapy, had finally gotten through to her, and allowed her to deal with the mother who was too beautiful, the brother who was too athletic, and the father who was too witty…

“Biondi.”

“Ned, this is Alex Delaware.”

It took a second for my name, minus title to register.

“Doctor! How are you.”

“I’m fine. How’s Anne Marie?”

“Very well. She’s finishing up her second year at Wheaton – in Boston. She’s got As and a few Bs, but the Bs didn’t panic her. She’s still too rough on herself, but she seems to be adjusting well to the peaks and troughs of life, as you called them. Her weight is stable at a hundred and two.”

“Excellent. Give my regards when you speak to her.”

“I certainly will. It’s nice of you to call.”

“Well actually there’s more to this than professional followup.”

“Oh?” A foxy edge, the conditioned vigilance of one who pried open locked boxes for a living, came into his voice.