inspected the pattern on my tie. Touched his belt on the holster
side.
“Visitors badges are over at Registration,” he said, hooking a thumb at
one of the dense queues.
He crossed his arms again.
I smiled. “No way around it, huh?”
“No, sir.”
“Just past the chapel?”
“Just past and turn right.”
“Been having crime problems?” I said.
“I don’t make the rules, sir. I just enforce them.”
He waited a moment before moving aside, followed my exit with his
squint. I turned the corner, half expecting to see him trailing, but
the corridor was empty and silent.
The door marked SECURITY SERVICES was twenty paces down. A sign hung
from the knob: BACK IN above a printed clock with movable hands set at
9:30 A.M. My watch said 9: zo. I knocked anyway. No answer. I looked
back. No rent-a-cop. Remembering a staff elevator just past Nuclear
Medicine, I continued down the hall.
Nuclear Medicine was now COMMUNITY RESOURCES. Another closed door.
The elevator was still there but the buttons were missing; the machine
had been switched to key-operated. I was looking for the nearest
stairway when a couple of orderlies appeared, wheeling an empty
gurney.
Both were young, tall, black, sporting geometrically carved hip-hop
hairstyles. Talking earnestly about the Raiders game. One of them
produced a key, inserted it into the lock, and turned. The elevator
doors opened on walls covered with padded batting. Junk-food wrappers
and a piece of dirty-looking gauze littered the floor. The orderlies
pushed the gurney in. I followed.
General Pediatrics occupied the eastern end of the fourth floor,
separated from the Newborn Ward by a swinging wooden door. I knew the
outpatient clinic had been open for only fifteen minutes but the small
waiting room was already overflowing. Sneezes and coughs, glazed looks
and hyperactivity. Tight maternal hands gripped babes and toddlers,
paperwork, and the magic plastic of Medi-Cal cards. To the right of
the reception window was a set of double doors marked PATIENTS REGISTER
FIRST over a Spanish translation of same.
I pushed through and walked past a long white corridor tacked with
safety and nutrition posters, county health bulletins, and bilingual
exhortations to nurture, vaccinate, and abstain from alcohol and
dope.
A dozen or so examining rooms were in use, their chart-racks brimming
over. Cat-cries and the sounds of comfort seeped from under the
doors.
Across the hall were files, supply cabinets, and a refrigerator marked
with a red cross. A secretary tapped a computer keyboard. Nurses
hustled between the cabinets and the exam rooms.
Residents spoke into chin-cradled phones and trailed after faststepping
attending physicians.
The wall right-angled to a shorter hallway lined with doctors’
offices.
Stephanie Eves’ 5 open door was the third in a set of seven.
The room was ten by twelve, with institutional-beige walls relieved by
bracket shelves filled with books and journals, a couple of Miro
posters, and one cloudy window with an eastern view. Beyond the glint
of car-tops, the peaks of the Hollywood hills seemed to be dissolving
into a broth of billboards and smog.
The desk was standard hospital-issue phony walnut and chrome, pushed up
against one wall. A hard-looking chrome and orange-cloth chair
competed for space with a scuffed brown Naugahyde recliner.
Between the chairs a thrift-shop end table supported a coffee maker and
a struggling philodendron in a blue ceramic pot.
Stephanie sat at the desk, wearing a long white coat over a
wineand-gray dress, writing on an outpatient intake form. A chin-high
stack of charts shadowed her writing arm. When I stepped into the room
she looked up, put down her pen, smiled, and stood.
Alex.”
She’d turned into a good-looking woman. The dull-brown hair, once worn
shoulder-length, limp, and barretted, was short, frosted at the tips,
and feathered. Contact lenses had replaced granny glasses, revealing
amber eyes I’d never noticed before. Her bone structure seemed
stronger, more sculpted. She’d never been heavy; now she was thin.
Time hadn’t ignored her as she entered the dark side of thirty; a mesh
of feathers gathered at the corners of her eyes and there was some
hardness at the mouth. Makeup handled all of it well.
“Good to see you,” she said, taking my hand.