The Pain Nurse (6 page)

Chapter Eight

There are two kinds of nurses: scrubs and suits. Stephanie Ott, RN, MSN, emphatically fell into the latter category. Stephanie was even wearing a suit that day. Combined with her short dark hair and angular features, the suit’s red coat and shoulder pads gave her the appearance of a toy soldier, or, Cheryl Beth thought, a nutcracker.

Suits and scrubs. The best nursing administrators maintained the fine balance. Stephanie Ott, RN, MSN, seemed to have little interest in such esoterica. After five years as vice president for nursing, she had yet to visit many of the wards and departments at Cincinnati Memorial. Most of the nursing staff had never seen her outside the large meetings or video-casts that usually announced an unpleasant new policy or staff cutback. She probably hadn’t touched a patient in years, but her ability to reach out with vengeance was legend. One victim was Cheryl Beth’s friend Denise, who had kicked an obnoxious film crew out of the ICU. Denise was one of the best ICU nurses Cheryl Beth had known, and she couldn’t have cared less that the crew worked for an advertising agency owned by a member of the hospital’s board. Stephanie Ott cared, and the next day Denise was banished to the overnight shift on a patient floor.

Now Ott was leaning against an L-shaped desk covered with thick reports constrained by colored binders, blue, taupe, yellow, orange, sage. A small Christmas tree anchored one corner of the desk. As Cheryl Beth entered, she stood, crossed the carpet and took both her hands, leading her to a nearby sofa.

“How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay. It’s been a rough few days.” She sat and relaxed a bit.

“I can only imagine.” Ott sat precisely in a nearby armchair. “Finding her that way.”

Cheryl Beth’s native volubility deserted her. That had been happening a lot the past week.

“What in the world were you doing down there, at that time of night?”

The question was in the same conversational tone, but Cheryl Beth’s initial caution returned. She explained about Christine’s message, told more than was needed about the deserted hallway, the bloody body, the phone ripped from the wall and the inability of cell phone signals to escape that damned basement. Ott continued to look at her, but her attention shut off, as if on a timer. Cheryl Beth shut up.

“I got a call this morning from one of our board members. She told me that a friend of hers was brought here from an auto accident, and the emergency room had run out of stretchers.” A harder tone slowly took over her voice. “Ran…out…of…stretchers. Can you believe it?” Cheryl Beth nodded sympathetically. The ER often ran out of stretchers. Memorial was the primary caregiver for thousands of low-income and indigent people. It also operated a Level One trauma center. The hospital had been through years of budget cuts that had not just made it hard to buy new equipment, but had even reduced the nursing staff. Cheryl Beth could see it on nearly every floor, the nurses overworked, understaffed. It was a wonder they did so well.

“This hospital is in trouble,” Stephanie said. “I’m told this used to be the top hospital in the city, the place where the rich came for treatment. Now we have a great neuro-science unit. We’re still a teaching hospital. Then, well, what’s left is pretty much a welfare hospital.” Her eyes narrowed. “There’s talk of merging with University Hospital, if they would have us. Or simply shutting down. Do you know that?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Cheryl Beth, of course, had heard all the gossip. She also had been approached several times about joining University Hospital, which made her even less afraid of Stephanie Ott.

The suit kept talking. “It doesn’t help that the black ministers have been holding a vigil outside every night this week, because of that boy, I mean, young man, whom the police shot. Do we need this kind of trouble? Why are they singling us out? I just don’t understand this sense of grievance.”

“Well, I’m not black,” Cheryl Beth said. “So I can’t see it through their eyes. There’s a lot of hurt…” She stopped herself.

Ott looked at Cheryl Beth as if she should say something, to make sense of all this…to take the blame? She said, “Why are you telling me this, Stephanie?”

The woman stood and strode to her window, staring out at the black scrimshaw of winter trees. “I’ve always had my reservations about you. You like to make your own rules.”

“I can play well with others,” Cheryl Beth said lightly.

“You didn’t want to stay on the pain management committee…”

“I just thought I could use those eight hours a week to be helping people.”

“Yes, well. We’d all like to stay in our comfort zones.” She turned back and stared at Cheryl Beth. “You do things you shouldn’t. Doctors complain.”

“Who? What?” Cheryl Beth demanded, unable to control her temper. “I work directly for Dr. Ames and Dr. Carpenter. I’m certified with advanced practice credentials.” Just like her grandmother, she talked, shouted, with her hands. “Docs sign off on my orders. I work with them. My record is totally clean. The only ones who complain are the same bastards who say ‘pain isn’t an emergency’ and let their patients hurt. They say, ‘This namby-pamby patient’s still moaning seven days after surgery and needs to get a grip.’ And too many nurses are terrified to say anything about it. That’s not me.” She made herself calm down and put her hands obediently in her lap.

Ott was nearly shaking with anger. She took several deep breaths, sat at her desk, and rearranged a pile of papers. Her head shook fiercely. “My God, Cheryl Beth, what were you thinking?”

“What?”

“You’re involved in a homicide investigation. You have involved this hospital in a homicide investigation.”

“I found her,” Cheryl Beth said heatedly. “She was murdered here.”

“That’s not what Detective Dodds tells me. They are looking at you, Cheryl Beth. You. And to have become romantically involved with Dr. Nagle. That’s terribly unprofessional. Just…unconscionable.”

Cheryl Beth felt a burning on her ears and cheeks. She said nothing.

“Why did you go to Dr. Lustig’s office that night?”

“She left word for me. I told you. She asked me to come down.”

“In the middle of the night?” Ott’s voice rose. “So you were fighting with her over Dr. Nagle?”

“No. That was over a long time ago.”

“So what did she want?”

Cheryl Beth shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Dr. Lustig was a key member of our technology committee. She was working directly with SoftChartZ to bring this hospital into the twenty-first century. Now she’s gone.”

Cheryl Beth made herself say nothing. Any words bubbling up inside her would only make things worse, especially the ones that were careening around in her head at that moment.

Stephanie stared at her. “You have charmed a lot of the physicians here. I don’t get it, but that has given you tremendous freedom. But you have never charmed me. You’re a bull in a china shop with some powerful protectors. I’m going to be watching you even more closely.” Her shoulder pads quivered. “And if this matter is not resolved quickly… I will not tolerate this.” She leaned forward. “You are not to discuss Dr. Lustig’s murder with anyone: colleagues, patients, and absolutely not the press.”

Stephanie Ott turned to her computer screen and began furiously typing. “You can leave now.”

***

Cheryl Beth left the office and walked directly to the parking garage, barely containing her angry tears. God, she hated it when she cried. It made people think she was weak. Certain people. She had to get away from the hospital for a while. This, even though the work allowed her to momentarily forget Christine and the blood, that night in the basement, the yawning canyon in her life “before” and “after.” When she was helping patients she could be herself again. She tried not to think how badly she wanted a glass of whiskey. Five minutes later, she was back home.

Cheryl Beth’s small house backed up to a thick stand of trees. Beyond that, a park fell off toward Over-the-Rhine and downtown. But the incline began in her driveway. Her old, wooden garage was lower than the house, the result being that in the cold months she often parked nearer to the street, to keep from being stranded in the garage by an overnight ice or snowstorm. An oak stood in her small backyard, its branches overhanging the old garage. The location made her uneasy late at night. The park attracted unsavory characters, so even before Christine’s murder Cheryl Beth had avoided the tree line after dark.

So it had been days since she had pulled down the driveway. She went all the way down today and walked back through the cold, crisp air. She looked back at the house and felt centered again. She would get through this, through the horrible discovery in the basement of the hospital, and through the debris of her breakup with Gary. She would live in this house, enjoy her music and her gardening, watch the tiny perfection of birds from her porch, forget about men. No more blind dates set up by friends. No more waiting for the phone to ring. No married men, ever. She walked up the incline of the drive, admiring the flower beds that she had cleared of leaves. Even on her small city lot, she could fill dozens of bags with leaves every fall. The flower beds were the last touch. At least one thing in her life was neat, she thought, even as Stephanie Ott’s words burned inside her head. Maybe next year she would plant gardenias.

The indentations on the ground. She noticed them only on a second look, the realization that comes when the brain processes a mundane scene, one noticed a thousand times before, but this time something is subtly different.

She walked slowly back to the flower beds that stood beside the house. It was unmistakable, two footprints dug deep into the soil, just behind the hedge that stood at the corner of the house. They might as well have been the first footprints on Mars for the primal force with which they hit her. They were large footprints, fresh since she had cleared out the leaves. Someone had been standing there, easily concealed by the hedge. Since Christine had been murdered. Standing there where he could look through the large bay window into her living room.

Chapter Nine

The city rolled out beneath his feet, the bare, black trees thick on hills tumbling down to the Ohio River, the sky a dirty white blanket. Landmarks sprouted comfortingly: Carew Tower, a baby Rockefeller Center, dominating the jewel box of downtown skyscrapers, just as it had all of Will’s life, all his parents’ lives. The massive deco band-shell shape of Union Terminal stood against the Western Hills. The tower of St. Peter-in-Chains Cathedral. Closer in, the huge windows of the hospital solarium gave him a view of the crescent of tilting roofs of 150-year-old row houses, punctuated by all manner of church steeples. The vast rail yards connecting north and south ran along Mill Creek, and, beyond them, stood the old neighborhoods of the Germans and the Appalachian briars. All the green was drained out of the hills.

Down the hill was Over-the-Rhine, the old immigrant German neighborhood. The Germans were long gone and it was one of the toughest ghettos in the Midwest, a fact barely belied by its impressive architecture and dense, mystical streets. Many of the buildings had been left to rot and drug dealers ran the street corners. The mentally ill homeless roamed the sidewalks and camped in decaying Italianate landmarks. Years before, the city had stowed most of the social services in OTR. Tote up all the calls, all the cases, and Will had spent years of his career there. Main Street and a few other places were being gentrified and celebrated in the newspapers. Soon all those grand old row houses would be restored and gleaming, they said. But Will knew something the white chamber of commerce types didn’t: OTR was defiantly black territory. Lots of hardcore Over-the-Rhine residents regarded the renovations and teardowns and Saturday night bar traffic by the westside white kids as an invasion. Cross Central Parkway south and you were in the white territory of downtown. But the north side of Central Parkway was an invisible boundary.

Cincinnati was good at boundaries. Interstate 75 was the Sauerkraut Curtain: to the west lay Price Hill and, beyond, the neat houses to which the German families had moved in the 1930s and 1940s as they grew more prosperous. East, beyond downtown, ranged the once-grand neighborhoods of Mount Auburn and Walnut Hills, now decrepit and dangerous. Once-grand estates had been subdivided into a dozen rat-infested apartments, and the teenagers carried guns like white kids carried cell phones. Then, another boundary, and you slipped into the leafy affluence of the old gentry in Hyde Park and Mount Lookout and Indian Hill. It was a nice polite midwestern city on the surface. Anybody who paid attention knew better. Neighborhood was identity, and some of the neighborhoods were lethal.

The leaves were all gone. Nothing could conceal Cincinnati: half its population decamped for the suburbs or the Sunbelt, leaving lovely old buildings and trees that had lost their leaves. His best friend from high school had left last year to sell houses in Arizona. The stubborn ones stayed and loved the city. Sometimes he felt that Cincinnati was a museum that was building new stadiums, a torn and wounded city without even knowing it, old money and denial being the camouflage, the best pain drug. Will knew better. Every place he looked he remembered trouble. It was the cop’s lot. In college, he had taken a course on urban planning where the books would inevitably talk about this or that city as a “contradiction.” Cincinnati was different. It was one reinforcement laid upon another, like the levees that held back the Ohio. Yet the great river still had its way.

Still, to Will’s wonder Cincinnati looked luminous. Cindy looked luminous.
He was alive
. He had held her for long minutes. She was still as slender as the first day he had met her, and he could still touch his elbows with his hands when he embraced her. She kept trying to pull away gently and he knew he must smell rank, but he just held on, feeling her sharp shoulder blades, the firm warmth of her breasts. For those minutes it all went away, the hospital, the killing, the pain.

She had pulled away before he could kiss her. Now he wheeled the chair around from the big windows and faced her. She wore her new charcoal gray suit. She had come straight from work. Her blue eyes that were startling in their intensity, and her chestnut hair looked the same color as when she was twenty-two, because or in spite of those expensive trips to the salon that they had once bickered over. So much money for such a severe hairstyle. He loved her hair natural, parted in the middle, and slightly wild as it hit her shoulders. She had said she couldn’t look like a high school girl and be taken seriously at the bank. Just as she had said, after being promoted to senior vice president, that she would prefer to be known as Cynthia. He had squirmed when she wanted him to go with her to the symphony or the May Festival. Baseball bored her. It all seemed foolishly trivial now.

“You look beautiful.”

She patted his knee. He couldn’t really feel it.

“Cindy, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

He knew he had blurted out the words with too much desperation. He looked down, slowed his breathing. He laughed and spoke in a slower voice.

“It’s been nearly two weeks. Now-a-days they kick people out in two days after major surgery, but I’m stuck here.” As he talked, he could hear the anxiety taking control again. “I feel like I’m in prison. I can’t sleep. I can’t get better.”

He glanced up and she had an utterly foreign look on her face.

“Let me come home, please.”

“You don’t even like the house.” She gave a light laugh. “‘Out in Maineville, middle of nowhere.’ That’s what you used to say. What’s the first thing you did when we separated? Moved back here to the city. Do you know how dangerous it is? A girl from our department had her purse snatched by a black kid just yesterday. I was walking down Court Street and there was this group of young, black men ahead of me. One of them bent down and a gun fell out of his pants! He just picked it up like nothing had happened. I dread the drive in here every day. But somehow you like it.”

“I say a lot of silly things.” Will smiled and looked down again, studying the bruises on his hands and forearms left by needles from IVs and blood tests. “My roommate needs constant care. Poor guy. They come in every hour to give him treatments. I can’t sleep at night.”

“Honey, I can’t handle you. You can’t even walk.”

“I’m going to walk. I stood up today.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“They rolled me onto this platform with parallel bars, and one physical therapist on each end, and I was actually able to stand. I’d almost forgotten I was tall. I thought about the movie where the mad scientist says,
‘It’s alive!’
’” She didn’t laugh.

He sat there remembering the strange triumph, of doing something people do unthinkingly, the feeling of a stranger’s legs lifting him, very tentatively, as if they could change their muscled minds at any moment and return to the stranger, leaving him with the dead weights attached to his torso and the long fall to the floor.

“You’re doing great,” she said, not meeting his eyes. Her smile didn’t seem genuine. He used to kid her and call it her “sales smile” for the bank. Then even the sales smile vanished. “Julius came to see me today. At the bank. He said you’re trying to investigate the murder of that doctor.”

“Did Dodds tell you that he missed the knife that was hidden in her office? Some well-meaning, hospitalized cop guided him to it. He might have found it the first time if he’d looked a little harder.”

She didn’t meet his smile. Only he thought it was amusing that he had beaten the legendary J. J. Dodds at the game, and he was still a patient. He spoke in a serious voice.

“Cindy, the knife matters. That’s the same MO as the Slasher. He would clean the weapon and hide it. We never told the media about that.”

“Will…”

“This guy also cut off her ring finger, just like the Slasher. Nobody knew that but the killer and the cops. Don’t you see, Cindy? It’s the same guy.”

“Will! This is not your problem!” She shouted a whisper, then looked around to see if anyone noticed. They were nearly alone. Across the room an old woman wheeled an old man. He had braces on his legs and looked miserable. He had once been young and virile. He had walked fast and made love to the young girl who was now old, too.

Will looked back over his shoulder at the dense cluster of buildings on Mount Adams, rising just east of downtown. Even from the solarium he could pick out the row house where Theresa Chambers had been slaughtered. When he turned back, Cindy had her arms crossed.

“I used to ask you not to tell me about your job.” Her voice was severe, impersonal, as if she were talking to one of her employees.

“And I didn’t.” Will felt anger replacing his anxious fever to get out. He pushed it down, down into the seat of the cursed wheelchair. “I’m trying to make you understand that I’m not some hotdog trying to do Dodds’ job. I just need him to understand what he’s dealing with.”

“Will, the Mount Adams Slasher died in prison! It makes my skin crawl just to say that name. You and Julius drove up to Lucasville to see the body, God knows why. This terrible thing that happened to this doctor, it can’t be related. It’s just another awful city crime. It’s none of your concern.”

“It’s not that simple, Cindy. I’m the one who screwed up with Craig Factor, me and Dodds. We’ve got to put it right. He’ll kill again. He’s got a taste for it. The next woman was killed just a week after Theresa Chambers. All his victims looked like Theresa, and so did this doctor! Now he’s at work again. Don’t you see? He’s going to kill again.”

“No, no. Will, you’re sick. You’ve been through a lot.”

“I’m still a sworn officer. I have a duty…”

“Now stop.” She shook her head adamantly. “Julius asked me to talk to you. Stop this nonsense. Will, you’re not the same. You’re going to be…handicapped.”

The word fell on him heavily.
Handicapped.
That wasn’t him. That was the person in the wheelchair on the street corner, pitiful, avert the eyes… Will was still himself inside.

“I know that.”

“Do you?” she asked harshly. “That means you won’t be a policeman anymore.”

“I can use my brain. They need me.”

“Is that what your commander is saying?”

Will didn’t answer, recalling the conversation with Scaly Mueller.

“I didn’t think so. You’re in denial, about a lot of things. That’s understandable, but I am not going to enable it.”

“And I’m not going to argue with your self-help books.”

Her eyes flashed, but then she just shook her head. “Will, Will… I never understood your world. But it seemed to me that within the police department you had a good job as a homicide detective. I never understood why you left it to go to internal affairs. The officers hate internal affairs.”

“The chief asked me to do it.”

“You went to the chief.”

“It was a little bit of both.” His back was starting to throb. “I did it to make a better police department.” He had explained himself so many times.

“You did it,” she said vehemently, “because of what happened between you and Julius, over Bud Chambers.”

“That was part of it.” She was twisting time, twisting what really happened. She seemed so strange to him now, but, in reality, he knew that had been true for years. He fought those feelings. How did two people grow to be at such odds?

“This is what Julius was afraid of. Your going off half-cocked. He’s really agitated about it. He was a good friend to you.”

“I was his friend.”

“Was.” Cindy shook her head. “You don’t make friends, Will. You don’t know how. You didn’t like my friends. I tried to open doors for you. You didn’t have to work in the sewer every day, making no money. I introduced you to people, my friends. But you wouldn’t even try.”

Her words stung him into silence.

Her gaze roved past him. “Will, you need someone to talk to. Doesn’t the hospital have…?”

“A shrink? Oh, there’s one exclusively for neuro-rehab. Lauren something. She’s been watching me, waiting for the big blowup. I don’t feel that way. I just want to get my life back. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been wheeled down that hallway that night, hadn’t seen it. But that woman’s dead. And who will speak for her? J. J. Dodds? He just wants to be chief.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“Who spoke for Theresa Chambers? Nobody. We messed up. Bud killed her. He got away with it because he was a cop.”

“Theresa Chambers was killed by Craig Factor, Will. You know that.”

“Bud Chambers had been separated from his wife. She had a restraining order against him. He had beaten her up once, and the patrol guys let it go. We fucked this one up, Cindy.”

She winced from his profanity, or maybe because he called her Cindy. He couldn’t tell which.

“I understand how strongly you feel.” She touched his knee again. “But just because a cop is separated from his wife doesn’t mean he should be a suspect. We’ve been separated for more than a year.”

He realized she was making a joke. He forced himself to laugh even as his stomach dropped. It was time to shut up.

“I’ll try to do better. I won’t bother Dodds.”

They sat quietly, more aware of the overhead lights as the city was overtaken by the early dusk.

“I talked to the woman in charge of rehab today,” Will said. “She said you could talk to her about starting the process to get me out of here, bring me home.” He laughed. “Everything’s a ‘process’ now.”

Cindy sighed and nervously tugged at her skirt.

“It would be nice to come home for Christmas.”

“This is too soon,” she said. “I see how you need help to even get into your wheelchair. We’d have to modify the house with ramps…”

“So I’ll get a couple of big cops to wrestle me into a car.”

“And what about when you’re home? I can’t even begin to…”

He reached over and took her hand. “You won’t have to. I can be very self-sufficient. You’d be amazed at what I can accomplish just here in the hospital. I won’t be trouble. Pretty soon I’ll be walking.”

Her gaze moved past him, again. “We haven’t lived together in a long time.”