Concourse, p.24
Concourse, page 24
part #2 of Bill Smith & Lydia Chin Series
From her office window I could see nothing but more tan brick buildings, the rest of the Samaritan complex. Something was ringing a small, tentative bell in the back of my mind; I wanted time to listen to it. “I’ve learned more in the last few days about nonprofit institutions than I ever wanted to know,” I said.
“And you’re disillusioned.”
“I suppose I am.”
“Everyone is, at the beginning. But the rules are what they are. I’m sure there are regulations in your field that you find arbitrary and counterproductive. But your choices are few: live with them, find a way to change them, or find a new profession. Most of us do the first. Many of us do the last.”
“And few of us ever change anything,” I finished for her. “Your contract with Helping Hands—does it involve money?”
“No. Who would pay whom? It’s just a mutual guarantee of performance.”
“Do you have an account at Emigrant Savings Bank?”
She frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
“Emigrant Savings.” I rattled off the account number from the card in Henry Howe’s toilet tank.
“Are you asking whether that’s my account? I do my banking at Chase. Why do you want to know?”
“How about the hospital?”
“Our checking accounts are with Chemical and our pension fund is with a private insurer. I really don’t understand why you’re asking this.”
“I don’t either. Your name was mentioned in association with that bank-account number.”
“By whom?”
“I’m not sure of that either.”
“Mr. Smith,” she smiled, “don’t you think it’s odd that you should come asking questions that you don’t know the reason for, or even the meaning of?”
“Yes, but I do it all the time. What if I were to tell you that checks with your signature, drawn on Samaritan Hospital accounts, were regularly deposited in that account at Emigrant?” Or what if I were to tell you the moon was made of green cheese?
She tapped the corner of my card on the desktop. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” she said, “but we write a lot of checks. One rarely knows where one’s checks are deposited.”
“This is a big hospital.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You must have an entire financial department. Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll, the whole thing. Why is your signature on any checks at all?” Jesus, Smith, I thought. First you make up a story and then you ask someone to explain it to you.
She explained it. “I have a discretionary account. To buy birthday presents for the staff, put on cocktail receptions for potential donors, things of that sort. Why is this your business, Mr. Smith?”
“Because someone was blackmailing a number of people connected with the Bronx Home over a number of different things. I think this Emigrant account was part of that.”
“You think that I was making blackmail payments?” Her voice held amusement. “Well, it’s a more interesting class of crime than we usually see at Samaritan. Generally it’s limited to gunshots, stab wounds, and drug overdoses.”
“No,” I said slowly. I was working this out as I went along. “I don’t think you were paying blackmail. I think you were paying for something else, and someone else was being blackmailed.”
Margaret O’Connor’s smile flickered. She stopped tapping my card. The little bell in my mind was playing a tune, a theme from the Second Mephisto Waltz.
“You’ll have to explain that,” she said.
And you’d better get it right the first time, I told myself.
“What happens,” I asked her, “if you fall below the eighty-percent mark?”
“I told you. We risk the loss of certain funding.”
“No. I mean what happens if you see that happening?”
She frowned as if she didn’t understand, but she didn’t say she didn’t.
“Here’s what I think happens,” I said. “I think when you see your beds emptying you call the Bronx Home and they send you patients. For tests, or for elective surgery, or for no goddamn reason at all. What’s the big deal, everyone figures. Most of those people are ga-ga anyway, and all of them have something wrong with them. No surprise to anyone if they pop up in the hospital a couple of times a year. Am I right so far?”
Margaret O’Connor said nothing.
“You need a doctor to admit them here. That was Dr. Reynolds. ‘Go ahead, Margaret, keep ’em as long as you need ’em.’ He had that reputation around the Home, always sending people to the hospital. He even sent me for X rays I didn’t need.” I stopped to think some more; she didn’t interrupt me.
“I was in and out fast, too. I would guess policy is to treat people from the Home with special care, so they don’t start demanding another hospital. I had a feeling something was wrong, and I made a big deal about making sure my insurance would pay, but that was only because I couldn’t think of any other scam, and I wasn’t even sure how that one would work. But I’ve got it now, don’t I?”
Silence.
“Isn’t that how it goes?” I pushed. “And Samaritan’s funding stays solid, and Dr. Reynolds receives little tokens of gratitude out of the Administrator’s discretionary fund.”
Margaret O’Connor still said nothing. Maybe I’d have done better telling her about the green cheese.
“It can’t be that hard,” I said, “for the police to subpoena that bank account. They may have done it already.” If they’ve stuck their hands in the toilet tank.
Her face grew hard. She snapped my card down on the desk. “You’re one of those righteous people.” Her voice was sharp. “One of those people who thinks there are no excuses. I’ll bet you despise people weaker than yourself, and I’ll bet you see a lot of those.”
“Tell me about the excuses.” My face flashed hot but I kept my voice level.
“Do you know whom we service here?” Her eyes glowed with anger. “There’s a sixteen-year-old boy brought in yesterday, shot for winking at a girl from a different high school. He’ll live, but he won’t walk again. We have an entire ward of children dying from AIDS. Some of their families don’t even visit anymore. We see malnutrition on a level unknown since the Depression. TB is a new epidemic, but mostly it’s run-of-the-mill rape, child abuse, shootings and stabbings and beatings. This is a war zone, Mr. Smith. We’re a field hospital. Our mission is to provide care to whoever can make it to our door.”
I said, “And to do that, if a couple of old men and old ladies get scared half to death, spend a few days disoriented and uncomfortable, have minor surgery they don’t need, well, what’s the difference, right?”
“If those old men and old ladies expect to have a hospital to come to when they really need one, maybe they should consider this their contribution to the war effort.”
I looked at her, erect in her chair, her jaw held tight. “I know a cop you’d like,” I said.
“Is that a threat?”
“No. No, not at all. I think it might have been a compliment.” I scanned the room again. The disinfectant smell was really getting to me. “Can I smoke?”
After a brief moment she yanked open a desk drawer, pulled out an ashtray and a pack of Gauloises. I struck a match before she did, lit hers for her. I wasn’t sure she was happy about it but she wasn’t rude enough to stop me. She nudged the ashtray between us on the desk.
“Ms. O’Connor,” I said, lighting a Kent, “I don’t know if what you’re doing is right, or can be justified. I don’t even know how to think about it. Right now I’m going to deal with it by not dealing with it, except for this: three men are dead. Their deaths seem related to various illegal operations involving the Bronx Home, and this was one of those operations. I want to know how it ties in to those deaths.”
“This may surprise you.” She tilted her head back to avoid exhaling directly at me. “But if that’s true, I’d like to know, too.”
“Then help me.”
Her beautiful gray eyes regarded me without blinking. She wasn’t a doctor; the degrees on her walls were all management degrees. Still, I felt like a specimen of something unlucky enough to be caught on a glass slide.
“I want you to understand,” she said, “that my first priority is this hospital. If I help you, I want a guarantee that you won’t go to the authorities with anything I tell you.”
“I can’t give you that. Anything that will help solve these murders I won’t keep to myself. But I haven’t told them any of this yet.” Because I only just figured it out, I thought to myself, and there’s never a cop around when you need one.
We smoked in silence for a while, alternating using the ashtray. Finally Margaret O’Connor said, “Well, there isn’t very much more in any case. Samaritan’s arrangement with the Bronx Home is largely as you describe. It’s part of a broader contract with Helping Hands, as I said, to provide all hospital-related care, including ambulance and outpatient services. Like your X rays. It was only a short step from Samaritan providing services because we needed the patients, to the Home providing patients. Both inpatients and people like yourself.” She smiled. “I hope you weren’t terribly inconvenienced.”
There was a self-mocking tone to her words that kept me from an angry answer.
“And you recruited Dr. Reynolds for this?”
She glanced up quickly from tapping cigarette ash. “Good grief, no. It was his idea.”
“The whole scheme?”
“Our contract with Helping Hands was in place when Dr. Reynolds came to the Home. After a few months he came to me and offered this increase in sensitivity to Samaritan’s needs.”
“This what?”
“That’s what he called it.” The ironic tone, again.
“And in return Samaritan was responsive to Dr. Reynolds’s needs?”
“He was taking a risk, though I couldn’t see that it was ever a big one. After all, there was no way to prove that any particular patient he sent here didn’t actually need hospitalization. The worst he could have been accused of was bad judgment. But on the other hand, the payments we made weren’t big either.”
“So the account at Emigrant was his?”
“I couldn’t tell you that. But the checks we wrote were to an entity called Medical Services, Inc.”
“Why not directly to him? He was a doctor. It wouldn’t have necessarily looked strange for you to be making payments to him.”
“To our auditors, no. But that was Dr. Reynolds’s idea.”
“A man full of ideas.”
Margaret O’Connor had smoked her unfiltered cigarette down to a half-inch butt. She jammed that into the ashtray with her thumb. “I got the feeling,” she said as she settled back in her chair, “that Dr. Reynolds was not making this up as he went along.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it was all very well organized, and if you looked into that account, you would find more money than Samaritan was ever the source of. Did you know him well?”
“We met once. The time he decided I needed X rays.” And then once more, when he was in no position to decide anything at all.
“Dealing with him was distasteful,” she said. “He was similar to some of our donors. Outwardly quite charming, but I don’t value charm. There are other qualities I value, such as perseverance and honesty.” My face must have changed. She smiled again. “You have a right to disbelieve that, after what you’ve heard, but honesty is a complicated virtue.”
“I always thought it was one of the simpler ones.”
“None of the virtues is simple,” Margaret O’Connor told me. “Only the sins.”
THIRTY-SIX
There were no gypsy cabs outside Samaritan. The sky was a soft blue-purple, and the light it reflected improved everything, even the tan brick, as long as it lasted; but it didn’t last long. Sodium streetlights built up slowly, efficient but finally harsh, draining everything of color. I caught a bus up the Concourse, watched the buildings slip by in place as they were slipping by in time, part of a past that was getting harder and harder to see.
By the time I got off it was night, a starless night of high haze and chill air. I zipped my jacket, crossed the street to the Home. My car was in the back lot; I’d put it there on purpose just after Robinson came, for the reason I’d told Lydia. I wanted to make sure, when I was ready to come back, that the Wells Fargo guys had a legitimate reason to let me in.
I reached the garden gate, lifted the latch.
“Yo.” The voice came from a shadow that detached itself from the shadows around it, stepped forward. A small kid, baseball cap turned backwards. It took me a second.
“Speedo?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Snake want to see you.”
“To see me?”
“Yeah. I take you there.”
“Where?”
“Where Snake be waitin’.”
“He tell you why?”
“Naw. Just to bring you.”
I looked at him, the baseball cap, the cocked head, the aggressive lean to his shoulders. No, I wanted to say, Speedo, there’s no future with Snake. Find another dream, something else you can practice being that will let you grow up. But a voice in my head said, Like what, Smith? Where is he going to look for something else, and what chance does he have of getting it if he finds it?
“Okay. I have to do something first, in here. I’ll be right back out.”
He stepped between me and the gate. “Snake say now.”
“And I say later. Ten minutes. I’ll meet you back here.” I stepped past him, opened the gate.
“On the corner,” Speedo yelled after me as the gate clanked shut. “Meet me across there, on the fucking corner.”
Yeah, I thought, okay. You got the last word, Speedo. You’re still in charge.
I went in, down, out the back swiftly, greeting the guards but not stopping. They didn’t seem particularly interested in me. Either Mrs. Wyckoff had forgotten about banning me, or Bruno’s instructions overrode hers, at least as long as she wasn’t around.
Out in the parking lot I left my gun and holster under the seat of my car. If Snake checked my gun at the door I had a feeling I’d have more trouble getting it back than I’d had at Samaritan Hospital. And I couldn’t imagine him neglecting to ask.
I checked the piano parlor and the dining room for Lydia, but it was too early for dinner and the parlor was empty. If I’d found her I’d have told her where I was going, how long to give me before she called Robinson and the Marines; but I didn’t find her and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time looking. I didn’t want to keep Speedo waiting; I had a few questions for Snake myself and this was a good time to ask them, unless Speedo got offended and split on me. I walked out, crossed to the opposite corner. Speedo sat waiting under a streetlight, with a Coke, a comic book, and a scowl.
* * *
I recognized the doorway from the photos in the toilet tank. The building was two blocks down the hill, and the apartment Speedo led me to was on the first floor. We didn’t have any trouble getting in the building; the guy in the hooded sweatshirt on the stoop nodded to Speedo with no change of expression, and Speedo affected the same hard face as he returned the nod, pushed open the door.
The hallway was dark, two broken lightbulbs overhead, a working one down the other end. The air was stale and reeked of garbage. Speedo pounded a coded knock on a scarred door. It opened on darkness; we stepped inside. The door clicked shut, softly and finally.
There were shadowy figures, not much light in the room. A slight, broad-nosed guy, who might be fifteen or he might be twenty, blocked my path.
“Hands on the wall!” he snapped. “Spread ’em!”
They must hear that on these blocks as often as most people hear “Have a nice day.” I turned, planted my feet wide, palms on the wall. Speedo, looking as though he hoped no one would notice him to throw him out, strutted casually across the room, dropped onto a couch. The wall was spray-painted with silver-and-gold grafitti; it glinted in the light from the streetlamps outside.
The broad-nosed guy went over me expertly, the small of my back, my ankles, my crotch. He kept a hand on my shoulder as he said, “Okay, Snake. He clean.”
Lights went on behind me and footsteps came forward. I started to turn.
It was a mistake. A fist slammed above my kidney, arching me with pain and surprise. I spun, made a grab for the guy who did it, but Broad-nose and someone else locked onto my arms, yanked me around, and I was face-to-face with Snake.
Now there was light. Now I could see two guys with guns across the room. Speedo sat forward on the couch, eyes bright. A round-faced guy sat next to him, relaxed with a beer, and a guy in a baseball cap leaned on a windowsill. There were the two guys holding me, and there was Snake. That made a lot of them.
“What the hell was that for?” I asked Snake.
“ ’Cause you kept my man Speedo waiting. And ’cause I don’t like you.”
“Okay,” I said. “I got it.”
“No, you ain’t got it.” A flash of gold-wrapped knuckles; pain burst in my jaw. The second punch was to my stomach, knocked my breath out. The guy pinning my right arm laughed. As I raised my head to look at Snake I tasted a salty trickle from my lip.
Snake stepped back, rubbed his left hand over the gold rings on his right. “Okay.” Gold gleamed from his grin. “Now I b’lieve you got it.”
The guys on my arms released me, but the guys with the guns didn’t put them down.
I looked around. A kitchenette stood against one wall, cluttered with pizza boxes, beer cans, wadded napkins. The chairs, lamps, couch were sprung and broken down and smelled of mildew, but the stereo was new. A doorway led to a bathroom and beyond it a bedroom; I could see a bare mattress on the floor. Some of the impassive faces watching me I recognized from the other times. Some were new to me.
