Dead Folks' blues

him.

“How’s medical school?”

“Tough. I’m third year, though. So apparently I’m going to make it. A lot by now is just routine. You grind it out. Next year, I start jockeying for residencies.”

“Great. Hey, listen, where’d your dad go?”

James looked behind him. “He’s upstairs in his office, I guess. He just came up, said you wanted to talk to me. Seemed kind of tight.”

“It’s my fault,” I said, leaning against the counter and crossing my arms. “He doesn’t approve of my present career path.”

James winced. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. I hate when he does that. The old man seems to think he knows what’s best for everybody.”

I smiled at him. “He means well. I’ve just gotten myself in a mess over this Conrad Fletcher situation.”

James wrapped the towel around his head and gave it a good shake. “Yeah, it’s been all over the school. Not you, I mean. Just Fletcher getting murdered.”

“I wanted to get an insider’s point of view from you, James.”

James pulled the towel off his head and wrapped it around his shoulders. “I took classes from Fletcher. We had to. No way out of it. I’d have probably gotten him next year for surgery rotation. Whoever killed him had fabulous timing. Did us all a favor.”

“I got the feeling not many people were fond of him.”

“He was abrasive, abusive, probably a rageaholic. Popular? No, I’d have to say not.”

“Diplomat,” I commented. “Any idea who might have hated him enough to kill him?”

“God, Harry,” he sighed. “Who didn’t hate him enough to kill him?”

“James,” I said, pulling out my notebook and pen, “can you be a little more specific?”

“To begin with,” he said, pausing a long moment, “there was me.”

11

“What?” I asked, my notebook falling to the floor. I bent to pick it up.

James laid the towel across the back of his neck and pulled both ends tightly.

“When Dr. Fletcher decided he didn’t like you, you were on his list forever. And it was pretty easy to get on that list. Sometimes, you didn’t even know you’d done anything.”

“And you were on the list?”

He nodded his head. “Since first year. At the time, he taught an anatomy course. He hated it, doesn’t do it anymore.”

“Obviously,” I interrupted.

James smiled. “Yeah, that’s right. I forgot. Anyway, I was one of the herd, that’s all, and content to stay that way. Somehow, I got singled out. He used to drill us, more like law school than med school. Remember The Paper Chase?”

“Yeah.”

“He made Professor Kingsfield look like a den mother. He tore me apart one day in lecture, caught me in a weak moment. I was a target for the rest of the term. Dropped me a letter grade at the end of the semester, even though everything else I’d done was top-notch. When I went to his office to protest, he tore me apart again. Apparently, no one’d taken him on like that before. He threatened to have me thrown out of school.”

“Could he have done that?”

“I’ve seen him do it since. I think the only reason I survived is that my dad’s an alum. Still knows people. Political bullshit. That’s all it is.”

“I had no idea medical schools were such shark tanks.”

James smiled. “Grow up, Harry. A lot’s at stake. You know what a doctor’s lifetime earnings can be?”

By the time I left Dr. Hughes and Son’s an hour later, I had several pages filled in my notebook: petty jealousies, betrayals, treacheries, sexual peccadillos, resentments. The struggle for research grants, tenure, awards, and recognition brings out the worst in people. I always had this naive notion that somehow the hallowed halls of the university, where learning and knowledge were prized as ends in themselves, were free of cutthroat craziness.

Right, Ace. And where’s that oceanfront property in Arizona you want me to look at?

It was getting late, and I really needed to eat. I have this weird blood sugar thing: I never seem to get hungry, and then within the space of five minutes, I’m breaking out in a cold sweat, shaking, and I’ll eat anything in sight. I could feel the onset of another blood sugar crash. Fortunately, I was headed downtown. I made a left turn just past the park onto Elliston Place, spotted a space just coming free in front of Rotier’s, and grabbed it before anybody else had the chance.

Mrs. Rotier had been fixing double cheeseburgers on French bread for the local student population for decades. I’d been eating them since high school. She’s surrogate mother for half the under-twenty-one population of Nashville, a tiny woman with the metabolism of a runaway locomotive. Her grown kids, along with most of their spouses, work the restaurant with her. It’s one place in the ever-shifting flood of the city that never seems to change.

I slid into a red vinyl booth near the back. A couple of the Rotier’s waitresses are notoriously ill-tempered, which only adds to what’s usually called the atmosphere of the place. After all, what’s Mama going to do, fire them?

It was my luck to get one that evening. About thirty seconds after I sat down, a plastic-jacketed menu slid across the table in front of me, having become airborne from somewhere behind my left shoulder.

“Make it quick. I don’t have all night.”

I looked up to see a mass of brown hair wearing an apron, with a green order pad in one hand, a cracked Bic pen in the other. I smiled. It felt good to be home.

I flipped open the menu and scanned it. “Roast beef and gravy, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, fried okra. Unsweetened tea.” I rattled off my order as quickly as possible.

While I waited for dinner, I tried to earn my money by pondering my next move. Problem was, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I could go see Bubba-what was his last name?-Hayes. Yeah, that was it. Hayes. Or I could go track down a few of the people that James Hughes had mentioned. I opened my notebook and scanned my scribblings.

Some of them I could eliminate right off. After all, the dean of the medical school may have been hacked off about that rumor that Conrad had been sleeping with his wife, but he wouldn’t have had to kill him. There would be better, more efficient, ways for the dean of a medical school to ruin one of his professor’s lives.

I stared at two names I’d written down: Jane Collingswood and Albert Zitin. James told me they were two surgical residents who had been under Conrad’s direct supervision. There had been a lot of friction; rumor was that he was about to bust Dr. Collingswood out of the program. There’d been a blowup the day Conrad was killed. Zitin and Collingswood had gotten into a shouting match with Conrad, right out in the hall in front of patients and staff. Everybody on Four West heard it. Most uncool. That was why, in fact, James knew about it. Tension and hostility were rampant at all levels of the institution, but open warfare in front of patients was a real breach of protocol.

Another concern had been tugging at the back of my mind ever since the police questioned me. I mentioned, in relating my linear chronicle of events, the woman I’d seen step out of the room where I found Conrad. But in my memory, I seem to remember … It’s hard to say. It’s almost as if I saw a second person. Not anybody I saw clearly, you understand. But I saw this woman, an attractive, young woman in a nurse’s uniform. That is, of course, why I noticed her in the first place. But there was something else, and in my mind’s eye, I was simply unable to reconstruct it.

I heard a throat clearing behind me. “You want this or not?” I looked up to see my waitress standing behind me with a steaming plate and a drink. She’d obviously been standing there a moment or two, waiting for me to