Today was one of her days in her storefront clinic off Irving Park Road. I had stopped by on my way from Leydon’s apartment to see if Lotty could give me any advice on how to get information about Leydon from the staff. Faith Ashford had Leydon’s medical power-of-attorney, but I hadn’t wanted to drive the forty miles to Lake Bluff to try to wheedle a signed permission to talk to Leydon’s doctors about her condition.
“You know I am not going to violate the law, especially not the law that protects confidential records, for any reason, even if you are convinced it’s in your friend’s best interest,” Lotty told me severely, when I explained what I wanted. “And I don’t know Philip Poynter, or any of the other physicians attached to the hospital.”
Poynter was the prescribing physician’s name on a bottle of Risperdal the police had picked up at Rockefeller.
I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I’ll just show Wuchnik’s photo around and see if anyone remembers him.”
“A word of advice,” Lotty relented marginally. “Don’t ask for Poynter. The doctors often don’t see the patients, they just write prescriptions. Find out who the advanced practice nurse and the therapists are and see if any of them will talk to you. Now, you’d better get going—I’m keeping patients waiting.”
“Would it violate your code of ethics to find out how Leydon’s doing? The hospital won’t tell me anything because I’m not a family member.”
“Talk to Mrs. Coltrain on your way out. Tell her I asked her to call down to the U of C for you.” She was out of her office and on her way to an examining room before I had a chance to thank her.
Leydon’s condition was unchanged, Mrs. Coltrain said, but the neurological team wasn’t optimistic.
“People do recover from head injuries, Ms. Warshawski,” Mrs. Coltrain comforted me. “Look at that congresswoman in Arizona, shot in the brain, and up and walking six weeks later.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, but I drove down to my office in a somber mood.
I used my search engines to turn up a staff directory for Ruhetal. I was starting to feel like an automaton, going through the motions of the same job over and over. Search the Web, spy on people’s private data, drive around town like a madwoman, get shot, do it all over again.
LifeStory gave me the names of the psychiatric advanced practice nurses and the social workers. It also told me a bit of the history of the place. Ruhetal had been started in 1911 by German Evangelical missionaries who had advanced notions of how to treat the mentally ill. The photographs of limestone buildings set in the prairie made it seem like an idyllic setting, and, indeed, it had been a fashionable sanitarium for writers and movie stars in the twenties.
In the thirties, it proved impossible to keep the place going. The Nazis, with their brutal ideas about murdering the mentally ill, cut off the aid coming from Germany, and the U.S. froze Ruhetal’s assets once the war started. The place might have disintegrated completely, but in the fifties, the state of Illinois bought it and turned one of the buildings into a state mental hospital with a wing for “the criminally insane.”
I looked at an aerial photo: the place was huge, with acres of grounds surrounding five buildings. In 1911, the founders had included tennis courts and a baseball field, but Google’s photo didn’t show whether they still existed.
It was late morning before I finally got on the road. I packed lunch and picked up a cortado from the coffee bar across the street. There may be good coffee in the western suburbs, but I didn’t have time to hunt for it.
By the time I reached Downers Grove, it was one o’clock. I found a park where I could eat my lunch. The park had public toilets, where I washed and fixed my makeup—even with air-conditioning, a long drive in the July heat had made me grimy.
I’d been up and down Ogden Avenue a thousand times over the years, but I’d never noticed the turnoff to the Ruhetal State Mental Hospital. I finally saw a little sign on the curb by a Ford dealership. Ruhetal sat on Therbusch Road, a small side street that ran between the dealership and a Buy-Smart superstore.
The hospital complex loomed into view as soon as I passed the parking strip. The lawns and sports facilities that I’d read about online were just a memory now. The state’s budget today could barely pay the hospital staff; no one was maintaining the grounds. Such grass as had been hardy enough to outlast the weeds formed islands in the large stretches of bare soil. The leaves on the surviving trees and shrubs were a sickly gray-green.
Ruhetal’s forensic wing was separated from the general population by three sets of fences, but the whole complex looked like a penitentiary. The state had kept the original limestone building, but they’d augmented it with the gray concrete blocks beloved of builders like Stalin. Gray fa?ades, narrow barred windows. If you weren’t already depressed when you got here, it wouldn’t take long to bring you down in a place like this.