One door opened and a heavy, bespectacled woman around sixty held it ajar and stuck her head out. She had short, gray, curly hair and a round, pink face that wasn’t jolly. Her eyeglasses were steel-rimmed and square. She wore a dark green sweater, blue jeans, and sneakers.
“Dr. Delaware? I’m Marge,” she boomed. “I’m tied up, gimme a minute.”
As the door closed, the women in the waiting room looked up.
Closest to me was a black girl around eighteen, with huge, wounded eyes, meticulous cornrows, and tightly clenched lips. She wore the uniform of a fast-food outlet and clutched a Danielle Steel paperback in both hands. Across from her were what looked to be a mother and daughter: both blond, daughter fifteen or sixteen, Mom an old forty, with black roots, pouchy eyes, sunken body and spirit.
Maybe Daughter had something to do with that. She looked me straight in the eye and winked, then licked her lips.
She had an unusually narrow face, off-center nose, low-set ears, and a slightly webbed neck. Her hair color looked natural except for the hot-pink highlights at the tips. She wore it long and teased huge and flipped back. Her Daisy Duke cutoffs barely covered her skinny haunches, and a black halter top exposed spaghetti arms, a flat, white midriff, and minimal shoulders. Three earrings in one ear, four in the other. An iron nose ring, the skin around the puncture still inflamed. High black boots reached midway up her calves. Black hoop earrings were the size of drink coasters.
She winked again. Gleefully furtive crossing of legs. Her mother saw it and rattled her magazine. The girl gave a wide, naughty smile. Her teeth were blunt pegs. One hand finger-waved. Foreshortened thumbs.
It added up to some kind of genetic misalignment. Maybe nothing with an official name. What used to be called syndromy back in my intern days.
Her legs shifted again. A hard nudge from her mother made her sit still and pout and look down at the floor.
The black girl had watched the whole thing. Now she returned to her book, one hand rubbing her abdomen, as if it ached.
The door opened again. Marge Showalsky motioned me in and led me down a hall of examining rooms.
“Lucky for you it’s a quiet day.”
Her office was large but dim with moisture stains on the ceiling. Random furnishings and bookshelves that didn’t look earthquake-safe. Half-open blinds gave a striped view of the asphalt lot.
She settled behind a desk not much wider than her shoulders. Two folding chairs. I took one.
“Used to be an electronics factory. Transistors or something. Thought we’d never get rid of the metal smell.”
Two posters hung on the wall behind her: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at a cafe table, under the legend GIRLTALK. A Georgia O’Keeffe skull-in-the-desert print.
“So you work for the police. Doing what?”
I told her, keeping it general.
She righted her glasses and gave a bearish grin. “You give good bullshit. Best I’ve had this week. Well, I can’t tell you much either. The women who come here have very little left except their privacy.”
“The only person I’m interested in is Hope Devane.”
She smiled again. “You think I don’t know who you are. You’re the shrink who works with Sturgis. Anyway, in answer to your anticipated questions: Yes, we do terminations when we can find a doctor to perform them. No, I won’t tell you which doctors do them. And, finally, Hope Devane wasn’t involved with us much, so I’m sure her murder had nothing to do with us.”
“Not involved much,” I said. “As opposed to Dr. Cruvic.”
Her laugh could have corroded metal. She opened a drawer, pulled out a rough-textured briar pipe, rubbed the mouthpiece. “Mike Cruvic is an M.D. with excellent credentials willing to make a regular commitment to women in need. Want to guess how many other Hippocratic types are standing in line to do that? This place is run from month to month. Mostly it’s nurses on their off-hours. A machine answers our phone and we try to listen for emergencies. Maybe next month we’ll get voice mail: “If you are dying, press one.’ ”