you pick her up?”
“She was a weird one,” the driver replied. “You know her?”
“Yes. Sort of.”
“Well, she flags me down about two blocks away, tells me to pull over just up the street there, wait with the meter running all the time while she’s sitting back there, doing nothing ’cept staring out the window and keeping a cell phone pinned to her ear, but not talkin’ to nobody, just listening. All of a sudden, she says ‘Pull over there!’ and points to where you was. She sticks a twenty through the glass and says, ‘That man’s your next fare. Got it?’ I says, ‘Whatever you say, lady,’ and does like she says. So now you’re here. She was some looker, that lady. So where to?”
Ricky paused, then asked, “Didn’t she give you a destination?”
The driver smiled. “She sure did. Damn. But she tells me I’m supposed to ask you anyways, see if you can guess.”
Ricky nodded. “Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The outpatient clinic at 152nd Street and West End.”
“Bingo!” the driver said, pushing down the meter flag and accelerating into the midmorning traffic.
Ricky reached for the newspaper resting on the cab’s backseat. As he did so, a question occurred to him, and he leaned forward toward the plastic barrier between driver and passenger. “Hey,” he said, “that woman, did she say what to do if I gave you a different address? Like, someplace other than the hospital?”
The driver grinned. “What is this, some sort of game?”
“You could say that,” Ricky answered. “But no game you would want to play.”
“I wouldn’t mind playing a game or two with that one, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes you would,” Ricky said. “You might think you wouldn’t, but trust me, you would.”
The man nodded. “I hear ya,” he said. “Some women, look like that one, more trouble than they’re worth. Not worth the price of admission, you could say…”
“That’s exactly right,” Ricky said.
“Anyways, I was supposed to take you to the hospital whatever you said. She tells me that you’d figure it out when we got there. Woman handed me a fifty to take you on the ride.”
“She’s well financed,” Ricky said, leaning back. He was breathing hard, and sweat still clouded the corners of his eyes and stained his shirt. He leaned back in the cab and reached for the newspaper.
He found what he was looking for on page A-13, written in the same red pen in large block letters across a lingerie ad from Lord amp; Taylor’s department store, so that the words creased across the model’s slender figure and obscured the bikini underwear she was displaying.
The simple rhyme, like before, seemed mocking, cynical in its childlike pattern. He thought it a bit like the exquisite torture of the kindergarten playground, with singsong taunts and insults. There was nothing childish about the results that Rumplestiltskin had in mind, however. Ricky tore out the single page from the
The cab dropped him on the sidewalk outside the huge hospital complex. He could see an emergency entrance down the block, with a large red-lettered sign and an ambulance in front. Ricky felt a chill sweep down his back despite the oppressive midsummer heat around him. It was a cold defined by the last time he had been at the hospital, which corresponded to visits to accompany his wife, while she was still fighting the disease that would kill her, still undergoing radiation and chemotherapy and all the other attacks against the insidious happenings within her body. The oncologists’ offices were in a different part of the complex, but this still didn’t remove the sense of impotence and dread that resurfaced throughout him, no different from when he’d last been on the streets outside the hospital. He looked up at the imposing brick buildings. He thought that he’d seen the hospital three times in his life: the first time, when he worked in the outpatient clinic for six months, before going into private practice; the second time when it joined the dismaying array of hospitals that his wife trudged to in her futile battle against death; and this third time, when he was returning to find the name of the patient whom he’d ignored or neglected, and who now threatened his own life.
Ricky trudged forward, heading toward the entrance, curiously hating the fact that he knew where the medical records were stored.
There was a paunchy middle-aged male clerk, wearing a garish Hawaiian print sport shirt and khaki pants stained with what might have been ink or the remains of lunch, standing at the records storage bank counter who looked at him with a bemused astonishment when Ricky first explained his request.
“You want exactly what from twenty years ago?” he said with undisguised incredulity.
“All the outpatient psychiatric clinic records from the six-month period I worked there,” Ricky said. “Every patient who came in was assigned a clinic number and a file was opened, even if they only came in one time. Those files contain all the case notes that were worked up.”
“I’m not sure those records have been transferred to the computer,” the clerk said reluctantly.
“I’ll bet they have,” Ricky said. “Let’s you and I check.”
“This will take some time, doctor,” the clerk said. “And I’ve got lots of other requests…”
Ricky paused, then thought for a moment, finally picturing how easy it seemed for Virgil and Merlin to get folks to perform simple little acts by waving cash in their direction. There was $250 in his wallet, and he removed $200, placing it on the counter. “This will help,” he said. “Perhaps put me at the head of the line.”
The clerk glanced around, saw that no one else was watching, and scooped up the money from the countertop. “Doctor,” he said, with a small grin, “my expertise is all yours.” He pocketed the cash and then wiggled his fingers in the air. “Let’s see what we can find out,” he said, starting to click entries into the computer keyboard.
It took the remainder of the morning for the two men to come up with a viable list of
