“He looks like an enforcer,” I said. “Muscle for those who don’t pay
their bills?”
She laughed. “That wouldn’t be so terrible. The hospital’s bad debt
is over eighty percent. No, he doesn’t seem to do much of anything,
except follow Plumb around and lurk. Some of the staff think he’s
spooky.”
“In what way?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. “His manner, I guess.”
“You have any bad experiences with him?”
“Me? No. Why?”
“You look a little antsy talking about him.”
“No,” she said. “It’s nothing personal-just the way he acts to
everyone. Showing up when you’re not expecting him. Materializing
around corners. You’ll come out of a patient’s room and he’ll just be
there.”
“Sounds charming.”
“Tres. But what’s a girl to do? Call Security?”
I rode down to the ground floor alone, found Security open, endured a
uniformed guard’s five-minute interrogation, and finally earned the
right to have a full-color badge made.
The picture came out looking like a mug shot. I snapped the badge onto
my lapel and took the stairs down to the sub-basement level, heading
for the hospital library, ready to check out Stephanie’s references.
The door was locked. An undated memorandum taped to the door said new
library hours were three to five P.M Monday through Wednesday.
I checked the adjoining reading room. Open but unoccupied. I stepped
into another world: oiled paneling, tufted leather chesterfields and
wing chairs, worn but good Persian rugs over a shoe-buffed herringbone
oak floor.
Hollywood seemed planets away.
Once the study of a Cotswolds manor house, the entire room had been
donated years ago-before I’d arrived as an intern-transported across
the Atlantic and reconstructed under the financial guidance of an
Anglophile patron who felt doctors need to relax in high style. A
patron who’d never spent time with a Western Peds doctor.
I strode across the room and tried the connecting door to the
library.
Open.
The windowless room was pitch-dark and I turned on the lights.
Most of the shelves were empty; a few bore thin stacks of mismatched
journals. Careless piles of books sat on the floor. The rear wall was
bare.
The computer I’d used to run Medline searches was nowhere in sight.
Neither was the golden-oak card catalogue with its handlettered
parchment labels. The only furniture was a gray metal table.
Taped to the top was a piece of paper. An inter-hospital memo, dated
three months ago.
To: Professional Staff FROM: G. H. Plumb, MBA, DBA, Chief Executive
Officer SUBJECT: Library Restructure In accordance with repeated
requests by the Professional Staff and a subsequent confirmatory
decision by the Research Committee, the Board of Directors in General
Assembly, and the Finance Subcommittee of the Executive Board, the
Medical Library reference index will be converted to a fully
computerized system utilizing Orion and Melvyl-type standard library
data search programs. The contract for this conversion has been put
out to competitive bid and, after careful deliberation and cost/benefit
computation, has been awarded to BlO-DAT, Inc of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, a concern specializing in medical and scientific research
probe systems and health-care workstation integration.
BIO-DAT officials have informed us that the entire process should take
approximately three weeks, once they are in full receipt of all
relevant data. Accordingly, the library’s current card files will be
shipped to BIO-DAT headquarters in Pittsburgh for the duration of the
conversion process, and returned to Los Angeles for purposes of storage
and archival activity, once the conversion has been terminated.
Your cooperation and forbearance during the conversion period is
solicited.
Three weeks had stretched to three months.
I ran my finger along the metal table and ended up with a dustblackened
tip.
Turning off the light, I left the room.
Sunset Boulevard was a bouillabaisse of rage and squalor mixed with
immigrant hope and livened by the spice of easy felony.
I drove past the flesh clubs, the new-music caverns, titanic show-biz
billboards, and the anorexically oriented boutiques of the Strip,
crossed Doheny and slipped into the dollar-shrines of Beverly Hills.
Passing my turnoff at Beverly Glen, I headed for a place where serious
research could always be done. The place where Chip Jones had done
his.
The Biomed library was filled with the inquisitive and the obligated.