which I should do without authorization. But nobody is watching so I go with my gut.
“Fine. We’ll meet you after work.”
“Where?”
“Someplace we can get a meatball sub.”
• • •
As soon as we leave the hospital Walker peels off, claiming to be going back to the office to start checking for duplicate records of the prescriptions Claudia Van Hoven had filled at the Bay Pharmacy, but I am certain he ducked into the nearest sports bar and is still there.
I have some time, so I explore the area. You can see that a lot of professionals live around the hospital complex. I follow Huntington Avenue past fashionable old apartment houses — one like a Tudor mansion a block long, another with a fantastic Renaissance gingerbread roof — the people so conservative in their corduroys and backpacks and skirts down to the calf, the streets so clean and fancy-Dan it’s almost laughable to the dulled-out California eye, a cliche of the comfortable highbrow life, what do they do all day, go to the Boston Symphony? However, when I turn east on Massachusetts Avenue, according to Kathy’s directions, things change fast. I sit up and pay attention. Suddenly the income level has dropped like a plane catching wind shear, plummeting into poverty in the space of ten seconds.
The larger stores are all boarded up or barricaded by heavy gates, leaving Mom and Pop bodegas the only ones still open for business. Men sit in groups with their backs against the buildings or huddle in doorways of redbrick row houses scarred with graffiti. I look straight ahead because I don’t want to be a witness to a drug deal.
Suddenly figures are ahead of me. At thirty miles an hour I have to slam on the brakes. Two black teenage girls have picked this moment to waltz across the street against a red light, moving as slowly as humanly possible, close enough to my car to languorously run their long curved fingernails painted Day-Glo purple over the hood, challenging me through the windshield with burning eyes. I put my face in neutral and keep both hands on the wheel, although I know precisely where my weapon is on the right side of my belt and how long it will take to draw it.
I wait them out, aware of the screams of multiple sirens crisscrossing the neighborhood. Finally the girls realize I will not take the bait and run the rest of the way across the street, dodging speeding cars. I drive on but now I am alert and it stays with me all along Columbia Road, past torched buildings and vacant lots and the occasional graceful private residences, relics of a lost time, everything tarnished by a murky haze. The sky is a dirty white, lit from behind as if through a scrim. Here there is no long spring sunset. Instead, as the raw afternoon drains toward night, it seems that all the color is being sucked out of the world until the streetscape looks like a photo printed in metallic grays, the working-class enclave of Savin Hill perched on a rise over Dorchester Bay reduced now to silver faces of shingled homes with dead black window eyes, and tangles of tree branches in burned-out brown, only the signs of neighborhood bars lighting up the monotonous dusk with the promise of cherry red.
I park in front of St. Paul’s Church across from the Three Greeks Submarine Shop. A cold wind whips off the water. Ten blocks away the churches are storefronts with hand-lettered signs in Spanish; here they are Gothic brick but their rooflines are swayed as if their backs had finally been broken. I can see by the old ladies in shapeless coats and kerchiefs pulling empty shopping carts, and the ten-year-old American cars rotting away with salt, that this is a hardworking but tired place depleted by the endless Massachusetts recession, attacked by hostile neighbors, backed up against the bay with nowhere to go. It holds on only because its roots go very deep. Incidents of domestic violence must be through the roof.
Nurse Kathy is waiting for me inside the Three Greeks, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback of poetry by Robert Frost. She has changed from hospital greens into denim and looks like a female truck driver.
“I had to look in on my mother and father,” she tells me first thing. “Make sure they get their dinner.”
“You live with your parents?”
“They own their own house and they’re getting on. Frankly, they’re too old to move.”
She stubs the cigarette out in a gold paper ashtray and looks at me. Just looks. The place is overly warm and smells of yeast. I shrug out of my raincoat.
“So, Kathy,” I say pleasantly, figuring I’d better try to establish some kind of a rapport, “what do you like about being a cardiac nurse?”
“It’s intense. You’re on your toes. You have to make decisions quick, like if someone has ventricular tachycardia you have to decide whether to give them a precordial thump.”
She is showing off. The Robert Frost book is part of it. She is trying to say that she is really a smart, sensitive person trapped inside a toad’s body. Now she is giving me that toad look again. Sly. Unblinking. Hostile.
‘Was Claire Eberhardt a good cardiac nurse?”
“Very good.” She nods slowly. “She could take the pressure. She liked the adrenaline rush. Nice with the patients, a good care provider. But she was feisty. She’d argue with the doctors.”
“About what?”
“Medication. Whatever. If she thought the patient wasn’t getting what he needed. We get to know the patients a lot better than the doctors.”
“Did she argue with Dr. Eberhardt?”
“Why should she argue with him? He was taking her to California.”
“Is that the reason she got married?”
“I dunno.” Nurse Kathy laughs. “Seems like a good reason to me. Want to get something to eat?”
Donnato was right. The Boston Italian meatball sub made by a Greek in an Irish neighborhood is a unique experience. There is something special about the way the red sauce dissolves the bun into a spongelike mass and something exciting about the pursuit of the meatball when it drops out onto the paper plate, forcing you to get up and go to the counter for a fork with orange grease running down your chin, twenty napkins glued to your fingertips. I vow to bring one back on the plane and force him to eat it during a squad meeting.
“My parents’ house is around the corner from here.” Kathy settles back with a paper cup of black coffee and another Parliament. “Claire’s folks still live two houses away.”
“You two were best friends?”
“I wouldn’t say best. She hung out with the cheerleaders, with those freckles and that cute body. I hung with the nerds, obviously. But we went through a lot. We both grew up very Irish. Oppressively Irish. I even took a course in the sociology of drinking — I could discuss that deeply, if you’re interested,” she says with bitter irony.
“Sure.”
But she shakes it off. “Claire and I were both the first ones in our families to go to college. Then nursing school. There was never even a consideration that we could go to medical school.”
“But she got out.”
Kathy takes a long draw on the cigarette. “She got out.”
“And you hate her fucking guts.”
“I don’t hate her fucking guts,” she says, unnerved. “I wish her the best of luck out on the coast.”
I let her sit with her anger for a moment. Then,
“What if I told you Randall Eberhardt has been accused of overprescribing narcotics?”
Kathy answers quickly, unthinkingly, “I wouldn’t believe it.”
“No?”
“No. Randall’s a good guy.”
“You don’t think he might have changed out in California? Life in the fast lane?”
“Randall’s the type of person who is very happy with himself. Why would he change? Unless there was a money problem or something unforeseen. Or someone’s setting him up.”
“So maybe the person who changed was Claire.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe she wanted the fast life.”
