A Man to Die For Page 9

  "Uh huh. So what did Jawaralal say to April's mom?"

  "He said in that wonderful lilting little accent of his, so that the girl's mama doesn't even know what he's talking about, 'Excuse me to contradict you, my dear Mrs. Smith, but it is my personal opinion that your daughter has serviced more men than Central Hardware.'"

  "How did you interpret it for her?" Casey asked. Interpretation was one of their most important functions, from Pakistani to street black and back again, from hoosier to French. It was too bad they didn't need dialect translators in the U.N., Casey'd be a shoo-in for the job.

  "You kiddin'?" Marva demanded, downing the rest of her beer in a gulp. "'Mrs. Smith,' I says, 'little April here's been in an accident with her bicycle at some time, hasn't she?'"

  Casey chuckled. "God save me from OBs everywhere."

  Her beer glass was empty. So, in fact, was Marva's. Casey decided that this needed rectification. It took the body an hour per drink to work off alcohol, and she had no intention of driving home drunk. If she had another drink, she'd have to stay till closing.

  "I heard you and Hunsacker went a couple of rounds tonight," Marva offered.

  Casey smiled. That would take her nicely to closing. "Let's get another round."

  They elbowed their way to the bar, their swinging purses deadlier—and heavier—than any blackjack.

  Brando the bartender saw them coming and turned for the appropriate tap.

  "What do you think of him?" Casey asked, setting her empty stein down on Brando's spotless, gleaming oak bar.

  Marva laughed, a rich contralto music that was always a surprise coming out of that pencil-thin body and angular face. "I been wonderin' when you'd finally ask me that."

  Doing her best to ignore the pushy SICU nurse behind her who thought elbows were part of line courtesy, Casey blinked up at Marva.

  "Why?"

  Marva laughed again and held out a hand for her beer. Brando dropped it right into place and did the same for Casey. Casey led the way back to their little table.

  "Because," Marva enlightened her back, "you been askin' everybody was they impressed with the man or not? All 'ceptin' me."

  Marva had achieved her Masters in Nursing on full scholarship at Northwestern. She could quote Jane Austen and Eudora Welty, and wrote choral music on her off hours. Raised by professional parents, she'd never set foot near the projects in the inner city. But she could call up the patois when she thought it might serve. Evidently, it served tonight.

  Casey shot her a wry glance over her shoulder. "Well?"

  "Shit," Marva spat, although it actually sounded more like "Shee-it," which made it all the more emphatic. "What I want with his skinny white ass? He so busy lookin' in his mirror, I wouldn't have a chance at it."

  Casey brightened even more. "You don't like him?"

  Marva's grin was conspiratorial and sly. "We black chilluns knows how to play the game, Missy Casey. We jus' smile and shuffle and get along."

  Casey climbed the rungs of her stool and sat down. It seemed Marva just bent a little. "God, Marva," Casey complained, "you're beginning to sound like Poppi. Just say it, will you?"

  "I like my job," Marva answered, expression settling into that curious passivity that meant she was serious. "Where else can I have this much fun and not get arrested? If the hospital doesn't get me to quit in the next year, I'll be tenured, and I'm the only one around to put my children through college. Hunsacker's not important. He's dangerous, sure, but so is most of the staff at M and M. He's a little spooky with that 'pass the Kool-Aid' voice of his. But who cares? We don't have to deal with him enough to jeopardize our jobs by antagonizing the man. Ignore him and he'll go away." Taking a hefty hit of her new beer, Marva waved it in a signal of finality. "Shit, you let people know you'd rather somebody else assist him, the hall will look like a piranha fight over red meat."

  Casey thought about it. The driving rock 'n' roll rhythm was numbing her brain and deadening her mission. The beer was buffing the edge off her anger. And Marva's wonderful pragmatism was cooling the fire of her zeal.

  "Why is it that we're the only ones not dancing attendance then?" she asked.

  Deeply involved with her beer, Marva just shrugged. "Nobody else down there is as strong as we is, child. They all jus' lookin' for somebody to tell 'em how wonderful they are."

  Considering where her thoughts had been straying lately, Casey had to smile. "Yeah," she said with a wry nod. "You're right. I'm so strong, I don't need nobody."

  For a minute she just let Bruce Springsteen fill her in about life in the steel towns. It was hard, real hard, and there was no place else to go. A man had to do what he had to do.

  "I don't know," she admitted morosely. "I wish he were just stupid or obnoxious like the rest of the staff. Then I could blow him off in peace. But he's..." She shook her head, wishing she could verbalize the queasiness that had bloomed within the whispery terror of Hunsacker's threat. Wishing she wouldn't ever have to worry about it again. "I just wish I knew what to do," she finally admitted. "He threatened me tonight. Really scared the shit out of me."

  Marva's eyebrows lifted. "You?"

  Casey nodded, not facing her friend, the disquiet swelling again. "If it had been anybody else I could say he was just being a jerk. With Hunsacker, I really had the feeling that he came within about an inch of really hurting me."

  Marva just shook her head. "You gotta learn to control those opinions of yours."

  Casey looked up instead. "He was like a cat, Marva, and I kept feeling like the baby rabbit. What the hell am I supposed to do the next time we have a difference of opinion? I can't let him hurt his patients just to prove he's the one in charge."

  "You can't let him get your job, either."

  "So, what do I do?"

  "I told you. Let somebody else take care of his patients."

  "Well, that doesn't stop him, does it?"

  "You got nothin' on paper, girl. When you do, that might change things... or is that what we're waitin' for your friend for? Did I end up in a plot to overthrow OB?"

  Casey stiffened, shot a look at her watch. Oh, Lord, she'd forgotten about Evelyn. It was already almost twelve, and she hadn't heard from her. Maybe she should call and find out if Evelyn had gotten away from work. Maybe she should just tell her to make it another night.

  "I'll be right back," she mumbled and slid back off the stool.

  The phone was back by the rest rooms, sandwiched in between the cigarette machine and the two pressboard doors that never seemed to stay at rest. Popping in her quarter, Casey did her best to squeeze out of the way so she could let the steady flow of traffic through. After all, she figured, it would just take a minute.

  She didn't know how worked up Evelyn was.

  "This is it!" the nurse promised fifteen minutes into explaining why she was sending a patient to surgery instead of drinking beer with Casey, her voice brittle and trembling. "I'm filing a complaint. I've documented myself to death on this one, and I'm not going to take the fall for it. He didn't listen to me simply because I won't play his game, and now his lady's crumping. Damn it, and nobody pays any attention!"

  "How much longer are you going to be?" Casey asked, finger in her free ear as she sidestepped the swinging door and tried to ignore the grappling couple in the back corner.

  Evelyn sighed. "I have no idea, Casey. Could we maybe do this some other time? By the time I get out of here, the only thing that's going to be open will be on the East Side."

  "You're going there?" Casey didn't mean to sound so astounded, but Evelyn wasn't the type to frequent the wide-open clubs that stayed open all night across the river.

  "I don't know. A couple of people have suggested it. I really need to work some of this shift off, that's for sure."

  "I can wait."

  "No. I'll call you later."

  "Well, go get 'im, girl. And if you really do go over, be careful."

  "I will. Bye."

  She and Marva broke it up so
on afterward. They both had to be back at the pit the next day, and the adrenaline high from the last shift had finally faded. It was time to crash among friends.

  Casey only had home to go to. Her mother was asleep, but her cat, a female tabby of impressive proportions that usually never left Helen's room, was, unfortunately, in heat. So, Casey found herself wading through preening, screeching toms on the way into the house and absently wishing that one of those toms had two legs. Or one leg. She wasn't proud. Just enough equipment to make her yowl again.

  The impromptu concert between Pussy (how did she explain to her mother that nobody named their cats that anymore?) and her admirers kept Casey up for most of the night, and a run up to the Catholic Supply House took up her morning, so that it wasn't until she was halfway through her shift at work that afternoon that she heard the news. Evelyn had never made it to the bar on the East Side the night before. Sometime around one-thirty AM, she had been shot to death at a stoplight in East St. Louis.

  Chapter 5

  It was poppi who told her. Casey was in trying to get the whalebone girdle off a three-hundred-pound woman who was complaining of chest pain when the call came in. One foot up on the stretcher for leverage, and both hands somewhere amid folds of pale, cheesy-smelling skin, Casey knew she wasn't going anywhere fast.

  "Hey, somebody answer that for me, will you?"

  "Be careful," the patient gasped. "That's my best girdle."

  It's my best back, Casey wanted to counter. It was no wonder the woman had chest pain. Between the weight of those tatas, a girdle built for someone a hundred pounds lighter, and a bra straight out of the Inquisition, she probably couldn't exchange enough air to keep her hair growing.

  "We should have it off in a minute," Casey panted back, giving another mighty yank.

  "A Dr. Leary for you?" Michael the tech offered, leaning in the door.

  Casey almost grinned. Poppi and her codes. The staff wasn't allowed personal phone calls, so it usually took a certain amount of subterfuge to make contact. "I'll call her back, Michael. Would you have EKG and lab come in when I have Mrs. Heilerman assessed?"

  Casey's back was to the door. Even so, she knew how much trouble Michael was having keeping a straight face. She didn't blame him. If anybody else were stuck doing this, she'd laugh, too. Unfortunately, it was her fingernails up in territory not seen by sunlight since the last world war. She just knew she was going to come away with her own supply of mushrooms.

  Well, it could be worse. She could be Marva, who was next door with a foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old who'd chugged a bottle of Southern Comfort, and was in the process of puking it back up as noisily as possible, probably all over Marva.

  When the girdle gave, it sprang Casey back almost to the wall. Mrs. Heilerman took her first good breath of the decade, and Casey was left with something that looked like a cross between a standing rib roast and a tent for munchkins.

  The worst over, she did a quick physical assessment on the now-smiling woman and ordered a basic cardiac workup so the doctor would have normal figures to support his suggestion that Mrs. Heilerman ditch the girdle.

  "Is this the eminent Dr. Leary?" Casey asked a moment later, phone balanced on a shoulder as she dried her hands. She'd washed them twice trying to get rid of dead skin before dialing Poppi's number.

  Normally Poppi would have giggled. The fact that she didn't should have warned Casey. But Casey was being entertained by Marva and young Mr. Personality squaring off in room five. There were motherfuckers flying everywhere and remnants of the young man's last meal decorating one wall.

  "Hey, I heard about Evelyn," Poppi was saying. "I'm sorry, Case."

  Casey's attention snapped back to her call. "Evelyn?" she asked, premonition flaring in her gut. "What about Evelyn?"

  A little silence, the background filled with the lush strings of Debussy. Music to deliver bad news by. "You didn't know? Evidently she made a wrong turn last night and ended up at a stoplight in East St. Louis. Somebody shot her,"

  Casey didn't even realize she'd sat down. Suddenly she was holding on to the phone with both hands, as if she'd drop it, elbows propped on a pile of unfinished charts. "Come on, Poppi. That's not funny. I was just talking to her last night at midnight."

  "It happened around one-thirty they say, Case. No witnesses. Evidently she was headed over to Sauget and got lost?"

  Casey's head sank. One hand cupped her eyes so no one in the lane could see the sudden tears. At the last minute she pulled over a drug company scratch pad to save the charts from water damage. "Uh, yeah, I know. She... uh, told me." She focused on the innocuous printing, anything but what she was hearing. Take two in the PM for a BM in the AM, it said. Somebody had scribbled in, "Better than having Ahmed's finger up your ass."

  Casey had told Evelyn to be careful. Instead, Evelyn had ended up in the worst war zone in the bi-state area. Resembling Dresden after the firebombings, East St. Louis was a city bereft of middle class, business, and life. A wasteland within sight of the Gateway Arch, it had a mayor with bodyguards and a police force so strapped that men who wanted radios in their cars brought their own. Anybody out on the streets after dark was fair game. And it only took one wrong turn off the highway to land in no-man's-land.

  "They don't have any idea what happened?"

  Poppi's laugh was dark. The situation, as far as anybody in the area was concerned, was self-evident. "The cops figure somebody's financing a crack habit with her twelve dollars and forty-two cents."

  "Casey," Barb announced from the end of the hall. "Dr. Rosario's coming down to set the arm in room nine. And your labwork's back on six."

  Casey nodded, waved a little without looking up. She had to regroup before facing everybody. She had to get away.

  "Thanks, Poppi."

  "Later?"

  "Yeah."

  Hanging up the phone, Casey grabbed a handful of tissue and tried to stem the damage. Evelyn. Honest, reliable, responsible Evelyn. They hadn't been best friends. They had been, like most coworkers in emergency rooms, tight in the face of overwhelming odds. Like battlefield friendships, golden at the moment, surrounded, embattled, completely codependent, only to find not that much really in common once the war was over. But whenever the need had been there, because of what they'd shared, because of the people they were, they had come through.

  "Where's that list of worst smells? I got a new one."

  Blowing her nose, Casey looked up to see Marva, bedraggled, pungent, and scowling after her run-in with the Southern Comfort.

  "SC, Big Macs, and onion rings. It beats the Ripple and navy bean soup all to hell... Casey?" Marva never invaded another person's space. Rather than touch or hold, she just stood, waiting. "What's wrong?"

  Casey's smile was thin. "The other nurse we were going to meet at the Body Shop... uh, she was killed last night. Can you... can you watch my people for a minute?"

  Marva never wasted her time with redundancy. The eloquent brown of her eyes said everything that needed saying. "Get out," she commanded, and gave Casey a push.

  * * *

  The grounds of Mother Mary had once been a private high school. Even though the drone of highway traffic filtered through the trees, it was still a pretty campus, landscaped with dogwoods and redbuds for the spring and sugar maples for the fall. The walks between buildings were lined with flowers. The grass was lush and thick, and quaint stone benches had been placed to face the best view.

  After twenty minutes spent trying to walk off the surprise, Casey finally found one of the benches and watched the sun set over the highway. The day was hot, the first real taste of St. Louis summer, too early in April, with the humidity almost as high as the temperature. It softened the air somehow, hazing the sun and diluting the deepening green of the trees. The sky to the west was a heavy crimson, with jet trails slashing north in fire, and the moon hovering into sight like a ghost.

  For a long time, Casey just sat, silent and overwhelmed.

  There was a rock
in her chest. A hot heaviness that bore as much guilt as grief. She should have insisted Evelyn meet her. She should have intercepted her. If there was one thing Helen had taught her well, it was to take responsibility for every calamity, and Casey was ready to shoulder her burden.

  But there was more. There was something stuck in Casey's craw, something more than just Evelyn's death. More than the senseless, random violence of it.

  Casey was, by nature, an orderly person. Her job was to bring chaos into recognizable pattern. To identify, to assess, to correct. To do it all within the space of no more than three minutes. When she couldn't do that, she fretted and bitched and paced. And she felt like pacing now.

  There was something more to this, an instinct that argued against simple bad luck, and she couldn't quite define or justify it.

  "Why, hello, Casey. What are you doing out here?"

  Chill chased recognition. Refusing to slow her pace, Casey turned, her hands shoved in her lab-coat pockets, her posture stiff. Hunsacker was closing fast, dressed for success today in a lightweight wheat double-breasted suit, blue shirt, and old school tie. Must have had a departmental meeting or something.

  Last night, he'd fought with Evelyn. If he hadn't, she would have left work on time and sat with Casey for an hour or two and then gone safely home. She wouldn't have left the hospital late and found herself lost and alone in the middle of nowhere.

  She wouldn't be dead.

  Casey's step slowed with sudden, irrational anger. It was all his fault. "Hello, Dr. Hunsacker. How's your patient over at Izzy's?"

  He frowned handsomely. "My patient? Which one?"

  "The one you took to surgery last night. I was talking to Evelyn."

  Why didn't he at least look surprised? Casey saw him consider her statement, saw the shocked concern flood into his expression right on cue as he slid his hands into his pockets and bent his head. But beneath it, she was plagued by the feeling that not only had he not been surprised, he'd been counting on her question. Casey couldn't say why, but she thought she detected a smug satisfaction behind the facade he was projecting.