On Call: An Original Short Story (2 page)

Work got in the way, and it wasn’t until eight o’clock that night when I finally got a chance to go looking for Annabelle, who was staying around as chief until Paul’s replacement could be selected. A telemetry nurse thought she might be taking a nap in one of the on-call rooms. Despite laws designed to protect the house staff and patients from excessive hours on the job, no one stopped when they were supposed to, and everyone was in a chronic state of exhaustion.

Most departments have an on-call room where house staff can grab a few hours—or even minutes—of sleep. The rooms are often little more than glorified closets, but they’re clean and the beds are comfortable enough. Besides, most docs simply don’t care where they collapse. The chief resident is covering the whole hospital, and has no specific on-call room. If Annabelle was taking a nap somewhere, it might be in one of the resident on-call rooms on, like, orthopedics or cardiology. More likely, though, she’d take a stab at the legendary On-Call #6, so that’s where I headed.

On-Call #6 is located on the fourteenth floor of the Strother Building, but to get there, you have to take an elevator to the thirteenth floor, and then a flight of stairs that opens up into a back corridor. In contrast to the other on-call rooms, On-Call #6 has a queen bed, locker, shower, and freshly stocked linens. There’s even a linen closet with a lot of sheets, and a metal hamper outside the room to dispose of dirty laundry. By tradition, the janitorial staff doesn’t go into this room. The rules governing use are pretty simple: If you use the room, you clean the room. It’s an honor code system that nobody, at least to my knowledge, has ever violated.

Since it’s also known as the Love Shack, it is well understood that sleep is usually the last thing that happens in On-Call #6. For this reason, I checked to make sure the brass number
6
on the door was not flipped to a
9,
which would indicate that the room was in use. Maybe Annabelle was so tired, she forgot to flip the number. That’s happened several times to the embarrassment of the couple within, who forgot that the keypad could open the door even if it’s locked from the inside. I knocked, first gently, then loudly. No response. Getting the combination to On-Call #6 is a rite of passage at Eisenhower, and though I’ve been so tired, I sometimes couldn’t remember where I lived, I’ve never forgotten the code.

I opened the door just a crack and peeked inside. Early evening light from a single small window bathed the otherwise unlit space. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. I saw a motionless figure on the bed and figured it was Annabelle, sleeping off some of the stressful events swirling about all of us. Then I noticed that her arm was dangling in an odd way off the side of the bed. I called to her tentatively.

“Annabelle? You awake?”

No response. My doctor radar went from dormant to white-hot in a blink. I flipped on the light as I called out her name again. My breath caught in my throat. The sight was one that will live inside me forever. Annabelle Stern lay on her back, gazing sightlessly at the ceiling. Her clinic coat was thrown over the single chair, her blouse partially torn open with two buttons ripped off. Her eyes, normally bright and absolutely riveting, were foggy. Her mouth had fallen open as though begging for one last gasp of air. I could see the welts, red and raw, around her neck where somebody had choked the life out of her. Not believing what I knew was fact, I raced over and checked for pulses in her carotid and radial arteries. Her skin was cool and slightly mottled, her limbs totally limp.

I had seen death before, many times, in fact.

But this was my very first murder.

The police, of course, interviewed me. I went voluntarily to the station to give my account of the incident. Two detectives joined me inside the interview room. One, who was there for Paul’s arrest, looked like he could have eaten the other—the Abbott and Costello of law enforcement. The large one was Detective Anderson and the slighter of the pair was Detective Rodriquez. I told them why I went to On-Call #6, and that got their attention.

“So your friend Lou Welcome recently broke things off with Annabelle?” Rodriquez asked.

“He said he had reservations about the relationship.”

“Did he know that Paul Brosnan was also interested in Annabelle?”

The cramped room, with two-way glass, whitewashed concrete brick walls, and a pine-top desk, instantly got a whole lot smaller and more than a pinch hotter. I swallowed hard, sensing the coming storm. My feet tapped a nervous rhythm against the gray, nappy carpet.

“Paul is dating Annabelle’s roommate, a woman named Victoria,” I said.

“Well, Annabelle kept a diary, or a notebook,” Anderson said, interlocking his meaty fingers. “We found it locked in her gym bag. There are a bunch of entries about your pal Lou and another bunch about Brosnan. Only her version is different from yours. She wrote that she broke things off with Welcome. I don’t think they had even gotten laid when she did.”

“And Paul?”

“Looks like he came on to Annabelle pretty hot and heavy while she was still seeing your pal.”

“Some friend,” Rodriquez added.

“Anyway, from the diary entries at least, Annabelle was pretty clear with Brosnan. She wasn’t interested. Did the victim and Brosnan work together?”

“No,” I said, “except that she was his chief resident.”

“What about this Victoria person? Did Annabelle hook them up?”

“No, Paul met Victoria at the hospital cafeteria. She’s a physical therapist here at Eisenhower.”

“But he’s probably been to Annabelle’s apartment a lot, to hang out with Victoria, I mean,” Rodriquez said.

“Probably,” I said. “You’ll have to ask Paul.”

“We did,” Anderson said.

I got the feeling that I’d sidestepped a trap.

“So, do you think Welcome knew about Brosnan coming on to the victim?” Anderson asked.

“He never said anything about it.”

“Is Welcome the sort of jealous man who wouldn’t want the victim to have anybody else?”

“He broke up with Annabelle, remember?”

“That’s not what she wrote in her diary,” Rodriquez said.

My blood pressure spiked. “Are you asking me if I think Lou killed Annabelle? That’s crazy! He wanted me to go find her and reason with her. Why would he do that if he had something to do with her murder?”

“So he could strengthen his alibi,” Anderson suggested.

Rodriquez looked over his notes. “You said it was like six hours between the time Welcome asked you to go look for the victim and when you found her body.”

“Plenty of time to commit murder,” Anderson added.

“Also, Welcome might have been pretty pissed at her,” Rodriquez said. “Wasn’t the deceased spreading rumors about him? That’s what you said, right?”

“He thought she was,” I clarified.

It was Anderson’s turn. They were the tag team detectives. “What about Brosnan? Did he ever mention wanting to hurt the victim?”

“He rarely talked about Annabelle. He’s in love with Victoria.”

“Did you know he was dealing drugs?” Anderson asked.

“No. Frankly, I don’t think he was.”

“So maybe you don’t know everything about your pal.”

“Maybe not…”

“Forensics found tissue samples under the deceased’s fingernails. Seems like she put up a fight before she died. We’ve got Brosnan’s DNA on file now. Welcome has just made an appearance on our list for the same treatment. How about you?”

I found myself fixated on the scratches on Lou’s hands. His rats, he’d said.

“Doc?…Doc.”

“Huh?”

“We asked if you’d be willing to give us a DNA sample.”

“Of…of course.”

Paul a drug dealer. Lou a killer. My brain couldn’t wrap itself around either possibility. All I could think of at that moment was getting the hell out of Washington and back to my horses.

The next morning my apartment buzzer woke me an hour before my alarm. I lived in a nice enough brownstone on Thirteenth Street Northwest, but it wasn’t a palace by any means. Groggy and stiff, I went to the intercom and was surprised to hear Paul’s voice. I buzzed him in and waited as he climbed the stairs to my third-floor one bedroom. At least he was classy enough to bring two coffees from Starbucks.

“Victoria and I broke up,” he said. “We got into a huge screaming fight about Annabelle.”

“I guess she heard about the diary,” I said.

“Sorry to bug you so early, but I need to talk.”

“No drugs,” I said. “I can’t have you here if you’re high.”

“Gabe, for chrissakes, I’m clean. I swear. Somebody set me up. Except for like a few tokes of pot a month, I don’t use drugs at all, let alone deal them. Surely you know that.”

Do I? Can I really trust you? At this point, can I trust my own judgment about anything?

I parked my lingering doubts and took my sorry-to-bug-you coffee. In just a week, Paul’s clean-cut good looks had soured, leaving him with sunken eyes and sallow skin. He slumped down on the couch while I took a seat on the wonderful, ratty armchair across from him—a gift to myself from the thrift store when I threw away my last stuffed animal and moved to the city.

“Okay, buddy, I believe you. How do you explain the drugs?”

“Annabelle,” Paul said.

“Pardon me for stating the obvious, but that’s a very convenient choice.”

“She came on to me, Gabe. I swear she was, like, possessed.”

“That’s not what the police think.”

“I know. That’s why Victoria and I got into a fight. Victoria’s a sensational woman and a great person, but she has a problem that sometimes gets in the way. She can be insanely jealous. She is—was—especially jealous of Annabelle and the way men tripped all over themselves to get her just to smile at them. In fact, even before she and I decided to explore moving in together, she had decided to get out of their apartment. Then, when the police questioned her about Annabelle’s murder and dropped this bombshell about Annabelle’s diary—kaboom.”

“So you’re saying that Annabelle made it all up about you coming on to her?”

“I don’t think anybody has ever said no to her before,” Paul explained. “She’s used to getting what she wants when she wants it. I don’t think she knew what to make of my rebuff.”