“A pro like you can’t sniff out a big clue?”
“Wuh clue?”
“We ain’t selling catheters, Marshal Dillon.” Out came the badge. The guard shifted just wide enough to clear the entry.
“Fast learner,” said Milo and we strode past him.
The waiting area was bright, stuffy, standing room only. Despair vied with boredom for the dominant emotion. Wheelchairs, walkers, oxygen tanks abounded. Anyone who seemed physically okay looked psychologically stricken. All the joy of death row.
The queue at the reception window was a dozen deep. Milo pushed past and rapped his knuckles on the glass. The woman on the other side kept clicking computer keys.
He rapped again.
Her eyes remained on her keyboard.
Third time’s the charm. She snapped, “Just hold on!” A speaker box transformed her voice into something metallic and unwelcoming. Or maybe that was just her.
Milo banged hard enough to vibrate the glass and the receptionist wheeled, teeth bared, ready to confront. The badge silenced her and she took it out on a button under her desktop, stabbing viciously. A door on the far side of the waiting room gave off a loud click.
Someone said, “How come he gets to jump?”
Milo said, “Because I’m handsome.”
Another large but soft guard waited on the other side. Behind him was a beige corridor lined with doors the same color. Identical hue, also, for the vinyl flooring and the plastic signs directing the infirm toward Exam 1, Exam 2… Ecru faces on the patients, as well. Welcome to Planet Bread Dough.
“Police, what for?” said the guard.
“I need to talk to Dr. Glenda Usfel-Parnell’s boss.”
The guard’s lips moved as he tried to get his mouth around the hyphenation.
Milo said, “Get me the head of nuclear medicine.”
The guard reached into his pocket and drew out a wilted piece of paper. “Um… that’s… Usfel, G.”
“Not anymore. Who’s her boss?”
“I dunno.”
“How long you been working here?”
“Three weeks tomorrow.”
“You know Dr. Usfel?”
“You don’t hardly see the doctors, they go in and out through there.” Pointing to a door at the end of the hallway.
“Who’s the big boss?”
“That would be Mr. Ostrovine.”
“That would be who you go find.”
The man who burst through the rear door wore a too-snug gray suit of ambiguous cloth, a blue shirt with a high, stiff collar, and a pink paisley tie that had never gone near a silkworm. With better fabrics, the result would’ve been foppish. This screamed Trying Too Hard.
The same went for fruity aftershave, a scary tan, and a toupee that landed well short of possible. “Mick Ostrovine. How can I help you?”
“We’re here about Dr. Usfel.”
“What about her?”
“She’s deceased.”
Ostrovine’s spray tan drained to the ambient beige. “Glenda? She worked a double shift yesterday, she was fine, what happened?”
“Someone broke into her home and killed her.”
“Oh my God, that’s insane. Her home? Some kind of home invasion?”
“We’re sorting things out, Mr. Ostrovine.”
A nearby door opened, silent as the gill-slit on a shark. A heavy woman in scrubs pushed a wheelchair toward us. Her passenger was an ancient man wrapped in a blanket, hairless, blue-veined, slumped, barely conscious.
“Hey, Mr. O,” she said. “Got all them tests run, taking him to the physical therapy for that exercise.”
“Sure, sure,” said Ostrovine.
His abruptness made her blink. As the chair rolled past, another exam room disgorged a burly man brandishing a crutch. The implement was tucked under one arm. He took a couple of unaided steps, saw us, placed his weight on the device, and assumed an exaggerated limp.
“Mr. O,” he said. “Gonna get myself some hydrotherapy.”
“Good, good,” said Ostrovine.
When a third door opened and a twenty-year-old girl came skipping out waving a shiny chromium cane like a cheerleader’s baton, Milo said, “Could we go somewhere to talk?” Nudging me. You know hospitals, handle this.
Ostrovine’s office was a beige rectangle that faced the parking lot. The rest of the hospital’s rear section housed orthopedics, nuclear medicine, physical medicine, anesthesiology, radiology.
Not a bed in sight.
I said, “You do outpatient care.”
“We’re adjunctive,” said Ostrovine, settling behind a desk, bare but for a laptop. The room looked unused.
“Meaning…”
“We fill a niche.”
“What’s that?”
Ostrovine sighed. “We’re better equipped than a clinic and more efficiently specialized than a larger institution. We don’t do E.R. so that frees us up for other modes of delivery. Our primary specialty is aftercare: pain management, disability evaluation, lifestyle readjustment.”
“What was Dr. Usfel’s specialty?”
“Glenda ran nuke med. That’s cutting-edge technology assessing how parts of the body are actually working. As opposed to conventional radiology, which is primarily static, nuke uses dyes, radioisotopes to capture ongoing function.”
He shook his head and the toupee shifted downward. He nudged it back in place without a trace of self- consciousness. “Glenda was terrific. This is horrible.”
I said, “How’d she get along with patients and staff?”
“Everyone here gets along.”
“Did she have an easygoing personality?”
Ostrovine’s jaw rotated, settled slightly left of center. “What are you getting at?”
“We’ve heard she could display a bit of temper.”
“I don’t know what you heard but it doesn’t apply to her performance here.”
“So anyone we talk to here is going to tell us she was easygoing.”
He unbuttoned his suit jacket, let out an inch of abdomen, sucked it back in, refastened. “Glenda was businesslike.”
“Efficient but not touchy-feely.”
“She never had a problem with anyone.”
I said, “You can’t think of anyone who’d resent her.”
“I cannot.”
“Who are her friends here?”
He thought. “I suppose she didn’t socialize much on the job. We’re task-oriented, anyway. A lot of our employees are floats.”
“Who’d she work with most closely?”
“That would be her technicians.”
“We’d like to talk to them.”