Jonathan Kellerman - Devil's Waltz

Milo looked down at his plate. Finally ate. Quickly, mechanically, without much apparent pleasure. I knew how much food meant to him and felt bad for ruining his dinner.

“Intriguing,” he said, “but it’s still one big if. ”

“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s give it a rest.”

He put his fork down. “There’s a basic flaw with all of it, Alex. If Grandpa knew about Junior and/or Mrs. Junior killing Chad, and cared enough about hushing it up to pay blackmail money and hire a killer, why would he allow Cassie to be brought back to the same hospital?”

“Maybe he didn’t know, until Herbert and/or Ashmore put the arm on him.”

“Even so. Why not send Cassie somewhere else for treatment? Why run the risk of dealing with the exact same doctors who’d treated Chad and having them make the same connection the blackmailers had made? It’s not like the family wouldn’t have been justified. Cassie isn’t getting any better — you yourself said Jones Junior’s talking about medical errors. No one would blame them for getting a second opinion. Also, it’s one thing to say the parents are abusers and Grandpa’s protecting them, even to the point of eliminating a blackmailer. But if Grandpa knew Cassie was being poisoned, wouldn’t he want to step in and stop it?”

“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.