Westermann had Morphy and Grip drop him at City Hospital before they went back to the station and then home. City Hospital seemed always on a knife’s edge, the chaos caused by the sheer number of patients threatening to overwhelm what little order the staff could maintain. In line at the checkin desk, a Negro was leaking blood from some kind of wound in his arm; a stout white woman in Gypsy clothes was kept upright by two younger men with trim beards; a drunk had his eyes swollen shut and his lips misshapen and bleeding. Maybe two dozen people sat against the walls in various states of medical distress. A baby cried. Westermann moved past them, flashing his badge. He only had a question.
“Records?”
A gray woman eyed him over her bifocals. “Fifth floor.” She nodded back toward a bank of elevators before turning to a man whose hand, Westermann saw to his alarm, was being consumed, slowly, by a large, brownish snake.
Westermann hastened to the elevators and ascended with an elderly couple who stared silently at the floor and shuffled out at the fourth floor. The fifth floor, the administrative floor, was quiet. An orderly smoked against the opposite wall, ignoring Westermann. The tentative sanitation attempted in the lower floors was absent here. The linoleum floors were filthy, the air reeked of stale cigarette smoke and urine. A second orderly made slow progress down the hall with a cart full of files. Westermann asked him for records and he pointed vaguely down the hall.
“The door says RECORDS.”
Westermann followed the corridor past dozens of closed doors. He paused at an open door, thinking he might ask directions again. Inside, two small men in white lab coats were examining a fleshy mass suspended in clear liquid in a specimen jar. The men looked up at Westermann and he saw that they must be identical twins. Westermann opened his mouth to speak, but the two men had returned to the jar.
He walked down another empty corridor, took a corner, and arrived at the door marked RECORDS. The room was huge, rows of shelves guarded by a service counter on which file folders sat piled in uneven stacks. The place hummed with the sound of the overhead lights. Westermann banged on a bell and waited. A bald kid, face scarred with burns—maybe from a grease spatter—emerged from the stacks.
Westermann flashed the badge. “I need the file for a Mavis Talley.”
The kid squinted at him. “She a patient?”
“Was.”
The kid hesitated. He hadn’t seen a warrant yet. The badge alone didn’t compel him to get the file. Westermann pulled a five from his billfold and tossed it on the counter. The kid palmed it and turned back into the stacks, walking with a strange roll to his hips, as if he were pulling his feet out of mud. Westermann leaned against the counter with his back to the files, watching as an orderly peered through the wire-reinforced window in the door, saw Westermann, and disappeared again. Westermann drummed his fingers absently on the counter until he heard footsteps from behind him and the kid returned with a file and dropped it on the counter.
“You can’t take it out of this room,” he said sullenly.
“You bet,” Westermann said, and gave a grateful smile. The kid apparently didn’t trust Westermann enough to leave him alone, so Westermann opened the file while the kid watched.
The doctors’ puzzlement was clear from the records. Mavis Talley had been admitted with a fever near 105 and pain in her abdomen and chest. She was coughing up blood. The attending doctor noted the blisters covering her body. He also detected swelling in multiple organs—spleen, liver, kidneys—during his physical exam. They took blood samples and stuck her in an intensive-care room. Shortly after, she had apparently been discharged into the care of her doctor, a Raymond Vesterhue. That was it. Westermann read through the papers again, noting that Mavis Talley was twenty-three years old, that she was born right here in City Hospital, that she was five feet five inches tall, and that she weighed ninety-three pounds at intake. Westermann flashed on the corpse in the river, how the wet dress clung to her emaciated ribs.
“It says in here that they took a blood sample from her, but there’s no report.”
“Where would that report be?”
“Probably didn’t do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s always a backlog of tests. Patient dies or is discharged, they usually don’t get done.”
“But this case, they were dealing with an unknown disease. They considered quarantining the patient. You think they’d scrap the test, even in that circumstance?”
The kid shrugged again. “Probably.”
“Any way of finding out for sure?”
The kid waited, looking at the counter. Westermann pulled a card with his name and phone number from his pocket and put it on the counter.
“You find that file, give me a call, and there’s a tenner in it for you. Understand?” Westermann couldn’t get the kid to make eye contact.
The kid picked up the card, studied it, put it in his pocket, and retreated with that peculiar walk of his, silently back into the stacks.