As I eased into traffic, I watched the crowd in my rearview mirror. People were drifting away, home to dinner, or in search of better entertainment elsewhere.
I stuck to the side streets heading back into the city. My wound, or maybe the fight, had caught up with me; I wasn’t alert enough to be safe on the expressways. I called Lotty while stalled in a backup on a bridge over the Sanitary Canal. She told me she would wait in her clinic for me.
As I drove slowly north, I wondered how I could have made so many mistakes. “You think you’re smart, but you’re not,” Xavier Jurgens had said, and I had to agree with him.
When I reached the clinic, on the western fringe of Uptown, Lotty’s clinic manager gasped in shock, as did the handful of patients still waiting for attention. “Ms. Warshawski! Dr. Herschel told me you’d been injured, but this is terrible. I’ll let Doctor know you’re here.”
Despite having known me for twenty years, Mrs. Coltrain still addresses me formally. Before she could pick up the phone, Lotty swept into the waiting room, looked at my bloodstained shirt, and ushered me back to the examining room attached to her office. I could hear one of the waiting patients grumble to Mrs. Coltrain.
While she cleaned the wound, Lotty demanded a report on how I’d come by the injury. “We don’t need stitches or staples; it’s not deep, the knife just glanced your shoulder.” She used surgical tape and carefully pulled the edges together. “You’re up to date on your tetanus, yes?”
“Yeah, when I got cut up two years ago. I’m just not up to date on my detecting skills. Maybe I can get a booster shot for those.”
Lotty wrapped a sheet around my shoulders. “A course of antibiotics. And even though it is contrary to your nature, Liebchen, some rest as well. What mistakes do you think you made this afternoon?”
“I didn’t do any homework. I’m grabbing at straws, so when I got the anonymous call about the guy’s Camaro, I raced off to confront him, instead of coming up with some other strategy.”
“What other strategy?”
“That’s part of my problem—I don’t know. Xavier Jurgens certainly has a car that he likely can’t afford, but maybe he has rich parents—I didn’t even bother to check that. Or maybe his girlfriend got some big insurance settlement. She’s on disability, for her lungs, she says.”
I leaned back in Lotty’s reclining exam chair. “The neighbors are divided. Most think Xavier got the money from stealing hospital drugs, but some think his girlfriend, or business partner, or whatever she is, has a sugar daddy. My own thought was that Wuchnik bribed Xavier to get into the forensic ward, but Jana, the girlfriend, made it clear that wasn’t the story. I started off with Xavier by asking him about the money, and that was where the conversation ended, too—he tried to fight me, and when that didn’t work, he grabbed a knife.”
“I don’t understand, Victoria. Wuchnik—he’s the detective who was found stabbed in the cemetery? Why do you think he bribed this orderly?”
“The social worker at the hospital said that Wuchnik had been seen talking to an orderly in the forensic unit. Leydon thought Wuchnik was stalking her, that her brother had sent him out to Ruhetal to check up on her, but I’m convinced he was on a different mission.”
Lotty opened a closet and handed me a white blouse. “Unless the top you wore in here is a sentimental favorite, I’d advise throwing it out. You can borrow this, if you promise not to fight anyone while you’re wearing it.”
I smiled weakly. Joke, recognized.
“And I’m driving you home to spend the night with me. Your car will be safe in the lot until morning, and I want to make sure you get soup into you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I sketched a salute, but the tension eased out of my shoulders. Even though a high-speed chase in a motor boat on the north Atlantic was safer than riding with Lotty, it still felt good to relinquish my responsibilities to her.
I was her last patient of the day; Jewel Kim was taking care of the people who’d been in the waiting room. I snoozed in the recliner while Lotty finished dictating her day’s notes.
Jewel came in to tell Lotty she’d finished, but she needed Lotty to double-check a lump in a woman’s armpit. While Lotty went off to the other examination room, Jewel looked at the job Lotty had done on my shoulder with a grudging approval: ordinarily this was the kind of injury she’d handle herself.
“You did a good job,” she said when Lotty came back. “You could be a nurse if you get tired of surgery.”
Lotty laughed but took Jewel aside to confer. My cell phone rang while Lotty and Jewel went off to talk to the woman with the lump.
It was Henry Knaub, the dean of Rockefeller, who asked politely if this was a convenient time.
I bit back a bark of sardonic laughter. “Fire away.”
“You called me last week with a quotation.”