Poor Leydon! A spasm of anger against her brother rose in me. How could he put his sister in such a place? Maybe Sewall really was stealing from her trust fund. Maybe I’d have to find a way to inspect his finances—although the probability was that he stuck Leydon here out of a punitive rage.
Acres of asphalt, easier to maintain than grass, surrounded the buildings. Cars that looked as tired and dirty as the hospital filled the parking lot. It was a busy place. The lot was full; I had to drive around for ten minutes until I found a space a quarter mile from the administrative wing.
I wasn’t the only one arriving, either. Cars kept pulling into the lot, some even left, and I noticed a Pace bus drop off a clump of people outside the main gate. I had to wait in line for several minutes just to get into the front door. When I explained that I wanted to talk to Alvina Northlake, the head of the social work department, the woman guarding the entrance told me to step aside.
“You need to talk to Mr. Waxman.”
“And I can find him where?”
“You can’t. He’ll find you. Step aside and let me deal with the rest of this line.”
She was in her fifties, an experienced bureaucrat who enjoyed the opportunity to control people’s lives. And where better to control them than in a state psychiatric hospital, where people were depressed or confused and very likely poor. If I showed any resentment or sarcasm, she’d take it out on me by not calling Mr. Waxman, so I wandered over to look at portraits of the founders that hung in the entryway.
They had been a serious bunch, those Brenners and Altmans and Metzgers. They looked at us without smiling, men and women both, yet with a certain ardor in their faces. They had been successful in setting up compassionately run mental health hospitals in Hesse and Niedersachsen, the plaque said, and they were sure they could succeed in Illinois.
I looked at the scuffed linoleum on the floor and the painted cinder-block walls and wondered what Dr. and Frau Brenner would have made of Ruhetal’s current incarnation.
“Miss!” my bureaucrat shouted at me. “Do you want to see Mr. Waxman or not?”
“I do, I do,” I said hastily. “And does he want to see me?”
“Want? That I can’t tell you, but he will see you.” She scanned my driver’s license and printed out a pass for me. “Down corridor A on your left, and then turn right when you get to corridor D, follow that up the stairs to two, and you’ll find corridor K. Mr. Waxman’s is the second door on your right.”
When I’d followed the yellow brick road to Waxman’s office, I decided the hospital tucked the senior administrators out of sight so that patients and their families couldn’t see how much more money was spent on their maintenance than on the patients themselves. Corridor K was carpeted, the lights in the hall were in sconces, not overhead fluorescent banks, and the walls were painted a soft yellow.
Eric Waxman’s door card identified him as deputy chief of operations. A deputy chief gets a secretary, a bottle blonde about my own age, who sat at a faux-wood desk so crammed with paper there was barely room for her computer and phone.
She looked up and demanded my business with Mr. Waxman.
“I’m a lawyer, Ms.”—I squinted at her nameplate—“Ms. Lilyhammerfield. A lawyer and a licensed investigator. I want to talk to Alvina Northlake about a client of mine who was recently a patient here.”
“And your client’s name?”
“This is a confidential inquiry, Ms. Lilyhammerfield—”
“My name is Lily Hammerfield. They put it all together as one word when they made the nameplate.”
“Sorry. Ms. Hammerfield. This is a confidential inquiry. I can rely on your discretion?”
“I see confidential papers day in and day out. I wouldn’t have lasted my first year here if I had a big mouth, and I’m coming up on twenty.”
Twenty years fielding inquiries about patients or budgets, or whatever it was that Eric Waxman did all day long. I hoped Ruhetal employees got a discount on Prozac.
“Well, this has nothing to do with litigation, Ms. Hammerfield. It concerns some of my client’s visitors. As soon as I can talk to Ms. Northlake, I’ll be gone. If you’ll direct me to her office?”
Eric Waxman stepped out of the inner office. He was a young man, in his early thirties, with a tan mustache that was groomed to curl at the ends, making him look like an advertisement for the wax he was named for.
“What’s going on out here, Lily?”
Maybe it was my calling her by her last name, maybe it was his officious tone—the little woman can’t handle a simple query without management direction—but Lily Hammerfield smiled and said, “This woman is looking for Alvina Northlake’s office, Mr. Waxman. I was just giving her directions.”