Marla shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I’m loving it,” I told Frances tartly. “A woman is dead. Plus my son’s suffering pretty badly, especially after his father called from jail yesterday. Arch is down there visiting him right now.”
Too late, I realized I should have kept my mouth shut. Frances and I were friends, but nothing came before a scoop. She dug frantically in her voluminous black handbag, yanked out a pen and a grimy pad of paper, and began to scribble. “What did Korman say in this phone call that upset Arch?”
“Nothing! Please, stop taking notes. For crying out loud, Frances, this is personal.”
Chris mumbled, “Maybe we should talk about something else, Frances. I don’t think ? “
She gestured imperiously. “It’s always personal for somebody, Goldy.”
“Don’t give me that low-brow journalistic jive. Please. If you want me to stay here and visit, promise not to print anything about my son.”
She kept on scribbling, pursed her lips, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Okay, I won’t if you’ll let me run some stuff by you. Besides, I’m sure you’ll want to hear all I’ve learned about this Craig business. Chris here” ? she flapped a casual hand in his direction ? “is an insider. There’s all kinds of scuttlebutt. You know this town. Once something happens, it’s like a …” She closed her eyes and sought the perfect simile. “Like a … volcanic energy erupts around the desire to know what’s going on.”
Chris took a deep breath and shifted his weight uncomfortably. Tina sipped some water. Marla, of course, was all ears. But Mount Saint Frances calmly lit a cigarette. My attempt to ask Frances a few delicate questions was going awry pretty quickly.
“Run some stuff by me?” I echoed. “Such as?”
“Okay, this is top secret. If somebody comes up to the table here and wants to know what we’re talking about, we say I’m interviewing Tina for the doll show.”
“So what are you running by me?”
“ACHMO is planning a raid,” she informed me blithely, her tone a shade lower. “On John Richard Korman’s office. Tomorrow morning.”
Marla shrieked with glee. I said, “A raid? Frances, what on earth are you talking about?”
Our food arrived and I was thankful for the momentary distraction. A raid? What were they looking for? And why would ACHMO raid anyone’s office? This could not be true. I assumed an expression of polite interest and, because the waitress hovered over us, attempted to change the subject.
“How’s your ankle coming along?” I asked Chris. “I should have asked after church.”
He smiled shyly. “I’ll be kicking field goals in no time.”
Frances took three bites of her sandwich; pushed it away, and relit the half-finished cigarette she had carefully squashed out when the food arrived. “So. You want to hear about the raid or not?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” urged Marla, eyes sparkling. “Why don’t you just tell the police about it?” I asked. The Linzertorte was delicious, a crunchy crust covered with jewel-colored raspberry jam. “A raid by the HMO has got to be illegal, Frances.”
“But it isn’t.” Chris’s surprisingly powerful baritone commanded attention. “We do it all the time. Usually we call first, which is what we’ll do tomorrow. We come in to check information in the files.”
“What?” Marla exclaimed. “What about patient confidentiality?”
Chris readjusted his ankle and went on. “Marla. Goldy. May I call you by your first names?” Frances nodded, I noticed, before we had the chance. “It’s in our contract,” he continued. “We can visit any practice we own. A nurse, a doctor, someone with medical training who’s working for the HMO, comes in. It’s not really a raid” He grinned indulgently at Frances, who was lighting her second cigarette. “We just want to check how certain procedures get billed, and we do it by going through individual files. The provider’s office has to let us have what we want.”
Well, my curiosity was piqued, no question. John Richard in jail and ACHMO was going to crash into his office to go through his files. Small wonder that Frances was interested, too.
“What are you going to be looking for tomorrow morning? Something related to Suz Craig?” I asked mildly.
“And may I come?” demanded Marla.
Chris’s reply was matter-of-fact. “No, oh, no. And actually, Suz is ? was ? -the one who ordered this visit. It’s been planned for a while, but we were C waiting until Korman was called out on a delivery. Now we’ve got a perfect opportunity to go in. And it’s not what the Medical Management person will say she wants that matters. Or what I say, as head of Provider Relations. Since she’s a nurse and I’m a doctor, that’s how ACHMO gets around the patient confidentiality issue. But in this case what we say we want and what we’ll actually be after are two entirely different things.”
“What is it you’ll actually be after?” I inquired innocently. “And why are you telling us this?”
Chris tugged on his beard. “What we’ll be looking for are personal notes from Korman about the McCrackens’ suit. At least, that’s what Suz, and now the chief honchos at ACHMO, want us to be looking for. And those would be illegal for ACHMO to lift. The corporation is trying to cover itself, and it’s taking the opportunity of Korman being out of the way to be thorough. Frances will tell you about it. She’s going to write an article exposing the whole thing.”
“Frances is going to write an expose?” I said, wide-eyed.
“Imagine that,” commented Marla. “And will this expose help or hurt the no-good doctor in jail for murder?”
Frances scowled as she crushed out her cigarette and lit another. She muttered, “The timing could be a little better. The angle I’m going to be looking for is: Did Korman have a clue that Suz Craig had this raid on his records planned?”
“What do you get out of this, Chris?” I asked. “Don’t you still work for ACHMO? Won’t this article get you into trouble with them?”
“I want people to know what the HMO is up to,” he answered darkly. “You shouldn’t be able to just go through people’s files whenever you want. And Frances is going to keep my identity a secret. I can’t afford to lose my job.”
“But ACHMO wouldn’t have killed one of their own, would they?”
A pained expression wrinkled the heavy folds of his face at my question. “I don’t think so. Neither does anyone I’ve talked to. You can imagine, Goldy, all of our phones have been ringing off their hooks ever since the captain down at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department called ACHMO’s chief honcho in Minneapolis yesterday. One of my higher-ups at corporate called and said now was the time to go through Korman’s records, the way Suz planned. So that’s why they’re sending me in tomorrow ? to find any personal notes Korman might have left in his office.” He paused and blinked at me. His eyelashes were so pale, they were invisible. “Everyone at ACHMO is convinced your husband beat Suz to death.”
“He’s my ex-husband,” I said quietly. Why did no one seem to remember this?
“My ex-husband, too,” said Marla defiantly. “So get your facts straight before you go off insulting us.”
Frances leaned affectionately toward Chris and whispered something in his ear. Tina fluffed the lace on her Icelandic Babsie blouse. And I sat back and thought that now I had one more thing for the sheriff’s department to ask John Richard: Know anything about Suz’s dirty little scheme to betray you?
“Look, Goldy,” Frances said, “there are two things we want to talk to you about. First of all, Patricia McCracken. Seen her lately?”
“As a matter of fact, I catered a party for her last night.”
“Is that where you got banged up?” I nodded and pretended not to notice the way the two Coreys stared at my face. I concentrated instead on the sky, where layers of pink cloud were again gathering in the west.
Frances persisted. “Now we all know Patricia got dumped by a doctor, then married a dentist. She doesn’t have the kind of money she used to, since there are at least fifty dentists in Aspen Meadow. Back in the old days she had a way of displaying the three things she bought with her divorce-from-the-doc settlement: a too-large diamond ring, a sapphire bracelet removed and perpetually left behind in exercise class, and an always-filthy white Triumph whose leather seats her son, Tyler, had smeared with fingerpaints when he was a toddler.”
“She just sold the Triumph to pay her lawyer’s retainer,” Marla interjected. “Everybody in town knows that.”
“Have you met Tyler?” Frances asked, unfazed. “He’s a five-year-old monster.”
“I know him,” Marla said. “He’s a brat.”
“Oh, no,” said Tina. They were her first words in a while. “He’s extremely creative. He used to help me with
