Projection (22 page)

He nodded.  "You're luffing."

"Bluffing? Bluffing about what?"

"No. 
Lu
ffing."

"What's that?"

"You feel OK?  You look like you're gonna faint."

"I'll be fine.  What's luffing?"

"You don't sail.  I thought being from Boston..."

I wanted to get back to the hotel.  "No.  I don't.  Listen..."

"I started last year.  It really does clear my mind.  So I bought a little wigeon.  ‘North's Star,’ out of Baltimore harbor.  That's my first name."

"North?"

He nodded.  "But that's got nothing to do with the point I'm trying to make."

He obviously wanted to tell me something, and I did owe him for letting me tag along to Hopkins, even though it turned out I had no good reason to be there.  "OK," I said, "what about me ‘luffing’?"

"It's when your sail is angled wrong, and the canvas starts flapping.  It happens when the wind shifts suddenly, or when you stray out of it, usually because you're not sure where you want to head."

"North, I don't know where the wind is, period.  I'm just trying to keep my boat afloat.  If you want to help me out, give me a ride to the hotel."

"You don't want to look for Michael before we leave?"

"He was home less than an hour ago.  I don't think he's an inpatient."

"Not today.  But maybe he was."

I started listening harder.

"Maybe he was even born here," Anderson went on.  "Maybe the whole family's been in and out of this place."

I silently chastised myself for losing faith in the power of the third ear.  It had carried me to the police station, to Anderson, to Harry and to Hopkins.  I'd given up on it because of what I had just learned about Ronnie Loomis.  But the third ear can work in mysterious ways.  What if I was standing in the building with Anderson for another reason?  "Can you get me into medical records?" I asked him.

"Nope."  He winked.  "But I'd be willing to ask Dr. Blaisdell."

"We're at Hopkins," I said.  "That's like asking to look at a safe deposit box at the Chase Manhattan Bank."

"I wouldn't be shy about asking that either, if I really needed to see what was inside."

*            *            *

The walls of Blaisdell's office were covered with gold-framed degrees and certificates of membership in medical associations.  I had planned to get mine prettied up, but had never gotten around to it.  I guess the parchments never meant that much to me.  Blaisdell was at his desk, entering a final note in Harry's chart.  He waved us in and listened to Anderson's request as he finished writing.  "Patients have rights, North," he said, swiveling to face us.  He nodded at me.  "Dr. Clevenger knows that.  I can't show you a record without a release of information."

I let Anderson do the talking.  I was till waiting for relief from the heroin I'd inhaled in the men's room a minute before.  And I was ambivalent about pushing another doctor to violate his professional ethics.

"We don't even know whether there is a record," Anderson said.  He took a seat on a small couch along one wall.  I sat next to him.  "If there is, all Dr. Clevenger wants to check is whether Michael Lucas has a brother named Trevor.  He's not interested in whether he has syphilis or was a crack baby."

Blaisdell was unmoved.

"It's important to the case he's working on.  There are hostages," Anderson said.

Blaisdell looked at me.  "I wish I could help you.  I really do.  But there's a protocol to follow here.  If the police need a chart, they go to court to get it."

"Unfortunately, there isn't time for that," I said.

"Ask for an emergency hearing.  I've seen records released in thirty minutes."

"There's not a clear enough link," Anderson admitted.  "We wouldn't get the court to act."

Blaisdell held up his hand.  "Then you shouldn't get the chart."

I focused on the sense of connectedness I felt with Blaisdell I had felt after Harry's resuscitation — a connection I continued to feel.  I knew the emotion was rooted all the way back in my medical school years.  Once doctors have dissected a human body, watched people die young and seen miraculous cures, we develop an ‘us-versus-the-world’ mentality, not unlike Marines — or cops.  It is an insular, seemingly unavoidable and potentially very destructive mind-set.  Telling Blaisdell that almost twenty people, including three nurses, a dietician, a social worker, a reporter and more than a dozen psychiatric patients, were at risk in Lynn wouldn't tap into that fraternity.  Telling him that one of the nurses was pregnant wouldn’t either.  "There's a surgeon's life at stake," was what I told him.  "If I don't get the information I'm looking for, he's going to be killed."

The resolve in Blaisdell's face began to fade.  "One of the hostages is a doctor?"

I didn't answer the question directly.  "He won't last until tomorrow morning," I said.

Anderson offered Blaisdell a way out of the stand he had taken.  "If you were to order a patient record delivered to the emergency room, that's not like giving anyone permission to look at it.  It would sit with the rest of the charts in that wire bin on the counter out front."

Blaisdell glanced at me, then stared at Anderson.  "What you do is your business," he said.  "Don't get me caught up in it."  He swiveled back around to face his desk and picked up the phone.

"Fair enough."  Anderson stood up and walked out.

I followed him to the lobby, suddenly half-filled with people who looked as desperate as the ones I had seen at the police station.  A few, too drunk or high to sit up, had draped themselves over several chairs.  A little boy and girl with soiled faces, neither of them older than six, chased one another while a woman who might have been their mother or older sister held her swollen jaw and cried.  The doors opened, and an elderly man stepped through, half his face red and droopy from what looked like a fresh stroke or a fresh beating.

"This place never stops," Anderson said.

"Neither does yours."

"That's because they're both emergency rooms.  I'm no different than that woman over there."  He nodded at the nurse interviewing the old man who had walked in.  "The people on our turf are just sick in another way.  For some reason I didn't get that when I was working the streets."

"Too busy?" I said.

"Maybe.  Maybe too angry.  I grew up on the streets myself."  He stepped over to the Coke machine a few feet away.  "Want anything?"

I wanted to be in two places at once — Hopkins and Austin Grate.  "Diet, thanks," I said.  "You think Blaisdell will get the chart for us?"

"We'll have to wait and find out.  But you did a nice job in there.  I'd be surprised if he didn’t come through," he said.  He fed quarters into the machine, handed me my drink.  I opened it and drank until my throat couldn't take the burning anymore.  He grabbed a can of Mountain Dew.  "We should get you to come in as a consultant on some of our interrogations at the station," he said.  "I could talk to the captain.  I've seen him bring in forensic experts plenty of times.  They fly you here, put you up — the whole nine yards."

"Thanks, but you might be a little late.  I think I should be out of this racket."

"Why?"

I didn't have the time or the desire to spill my guts about Trevor and Kathy and Rachel.  And I wasn't about to tell him I might be headed to jail when I landed back in Boston.  "Too much stress dealing with cops," I said.

He laughed.  What would you do instead?"

"I don't know."  Then, out of the blue:  "Get back into private practice?"

"You miss it?"

"I guess I do."

"I don't miss the streets.  I'll tell you that.  And I don't think I ever will, certainly not while my head keeps replaying horror films."

I wanted to help him talk about what had happened.  It didn't seem like the ideal time or place, but he had chosen it.  "What exactly do you see?"

"The whole scene.  I go over it and over it."

"But is it that you see yourself being hit?  Or falling to the ground?  Do you focus on yourself bleeding?"

He looked away, toward the sliding glass doors that opened on to the street.  "No."

I waited.

He glanced at me, then stared down at the floor between us.  "I see them falling."

"Them?"

"The two guys who held up the place.  I hit one in the neck after I took the first bullet to my knee.  I got the other one between his shoulder blades after I was already on the floor."  He squinted and shook his head.  "One was seventeen.  The other one was nineteen.  Tyrone Billings and Jerry Corkum.  Neither of them made it."

Sometimes people replay traumas to find out how they could have managed to change the ending.  "They were both armed?"

"Semiautomatic pistols.  Just like mine."  He glanced down at the gun on his belt.

"They fired on you first."

Anderson seemed to understand I was digging for the part of his trauma that troubled him most.  He let out a long breath.  "I got hit before I got off a round."  He paused.  "But I think the second one, Jerry, was ready to pack it in before I shot him.  I think he was going to drop his weapon.  His buddy was already down.  He had his arm at sort of a forty-five-degree angle to his body.  I didn't focus to see if his hand was letting go."

"Could you have?  From the ground?  Wounded?"

"I didn't even try."

"He had a gun.  What if he had..."

His face tightened with what looked like a combination of rage and grief.  "I wanted to kill him.  Understand?  I
wanted
him dead."

So there it was.  The center of the storm.  North Anderson had seen the darkest part of himself, and his mind's eye was stuck there, like a projector chewing on the same two inches of film.  Now the storm was sucking at me.  I couldn’t resist it.  "Yes, I think I do understand," I told him.  I remembered the fury that had possessed me as I faced Mr. Kashoor on the locked unit, just after cutting Craig Bishop.  "You figure you're a murderer at heart."

His eyes filled up.  He cleared his throat and scanned the lobby to make sure no one was looking at him.

"I'm going to tell you something, North, because I know it as a fact and because we don't have the luxury of sitting around for twenty or thirty sessions so you can slowly come upon it yourself.  Men who enjoy killing don't replay the scene over and over again unless they want to, for a good laugh or to impress a buddy or to get themselves hard so they can fuck something that isn't dead.  I've never been shot, so I don't know what would go on in my mind looking at the guy who had done it to me, especially if he still had a gun in his hand.  But my guess is I'd want to shoot the bastard where he stood.  You can go around thinking you're a murderer, tearing yourself apart because you're not a saint, or you can start admitting you're a human being and let it go at that."

He swallowed hard, nodded once.  "I never thought of it the way you're saying — that I wouldn't have flashbacks if I wasn't basically OK.  Like, I wouldn't be screwed up if I wasn't normal.  Or something like that."

"That's about right."  I felt as if I had said too much, not because North didn't need to hear it, but because it had poured out of me, which always left me feeling exposed and depleted, at least for a while.  And I didn't have energy to spare.  I started to walk away, but turned back.  I wasn't quite done bleeding my truth and still wasn't in control of how it flowed.  "I can't say if you belong on the streets now, North, but you must have been a great gift to them back then."  I smiled.  "Take that to the bank with you next time your mind wanders there."

*            *            *

Fifteen minutes later a clerk from medical records emerged from the lobby elevator and wheeled a shopping cart full of charts past Anderson and me.  We watched her continue to the front counter and check a list on the clipboard she was carrying.  She took a few minutes to select four charts from the stack in the cart and dropped them into the wire basket.

"Either it's one of those, or we struck out," Anderson said.  "Wait here.  If the nurses see two of us fishing around they might get their backs up.  At least I'm in uniform."

"I'll be over there."  I nodded at a couple of seats tucked into a corner, away from the rest of the waiting area.

Anderson walked to the wire bin on the counter and quickly rifled through the four charts.  The medical resident glanced at him as she hurried between cubicles, but didn't try to stop him.  He grabbed one folder and brought it back with him.  "Michael Lucas," he said, handing it to me.  "Nice to know that when you get a feeling, it sometimes turns out to be on the money.  Makes a believer out of you."  He sat down.

"Unless you're at the track, then it makes a degenerate out of you."  I held the thick chart a few seconds, not wanting to open it and find myself at another dead end.  "He must have been here quite a bit.  This thing's heavy."  I slowly turned back the cover.

"The demographics sheet indicated Michael Lucas was forty-three years old during his most recent Hopkins admission, from January 12, 1997 to January 16, 1997.  He lived where Cynthia had reached him — at 2304 Jasper Street.  His religion was Protestant, his insurance coverage ‘self-pay’ —hospital lingo for the uninsured.  Other dividers in he chart were for stays of about the same length of during 1995, 1992, 1987 and 1983.  A sticker on the inside back cover indicated more records were stored on microfiche.

"Tell me about Jasper Street," I asked Anderson.

"The old Baltimore.  Row houses in disrepair.  High crime.  Low rent," he said.  "It's like walking into the past."

That comment sent shivers down my neck.  I flipped back to the first admission.  My pulse quickened as I read from the “Initial History and Physical”:

January 12, 1997

Chief Complaint:  "I'm just here to finish the work on my lips."

History of Present Illness:  Mr. Michael Lucas is a 43-year-old white male with prominent facial deformities.  He is admitted to the plastic surgery service for revision of grossly disfiguring scars to his upper and lower lips.  The patient has undergone 18 previous procedures to address injuries to the head and neck caused by severe chemical burns sustained as a 5-year-old.