“Have you been digging through my desk?” The drawers were unlocked-Cheryl Beth never left her desk unlocked. The files on top of the desk were out of order. The normally neat desk drawers had been pawed through, though nothing seemed to be missing.
“No.”
“Somebody unlocked my desk.”
“Maybe you forgot to lock it. Anyway, there’s no way I would even go in that basement at that time of night without security with me. This place is nuts. We don’t even know who’s in these hallways half the time. Maybe it was Crazy Lennie who did it?”
Crazy Lennie was a homeless man who sometimes wandered the hospital. Security would throw him out. He would come back, sometimes when he was brought to the emergency department for his assorted ailments. Lennie was distinguished from the many lost souls that frequented the hospital by his passion to defecate in the hallways, and not in a corner but usually right in the middle of the floor. It had entered the hospital vocabulary: a pile in the hallway was a “Lennie” or, “Somebody Lennied outside the ICU.”
“Lennie’s harmless.”
Lisa looked over her glasses. “Nobody’s harmless, Cheryl Beth. Speaking of which, have you run into our newest urologist?”
“Oh, no.”
Lisa was the keeper of the FDN List, as in Funny Doctors’ Names List.
“Dr. Small! Get it?” She squealed with laughter. “He had a patient come into the ER with a hard-on he’d had for six hours. And the guy’s name was Dick Wood!”
“He did not.”
“Well, his name really is Dr. Small.”
The FDN List, lovingly maintained over the years, included Dr. Aikenhead, Dr. Dingfelter, Dr. Buderlicker, Dr. Hyman Pleasure, Dr. Pine-Coffin (a pathologist), and Dr. Cutter (a surgeon). There was Dr. Payne, of course, and Dr. Hurt.
“So back to Christine. My God! How much had she bled out?”
“Lisa, my head is about to explode right this minute.” The page from neuro-rehab rescued her. Everybody wanted to talk about the murder. Nobody else had been in that office, bloody and useless, as Christine lay dead.
“At least I may not have to go to any more of those goddamn SoftChartZ meetings,” Lisa went on.
“Lisa!”
“You know how they spell it? SoftChartZ all run together, with a capital Z on the end. Isn’t that cutting edge? Christine was really into it, but she could be such a pain in the ass. Well, she could! Gag, these endless meetings, and where’s the ‘totally digital work environment’? Lord knows how much we’re paying these smart young things from Silicon Valley to do it. They look at me like I’m an idiot. The lead guy, Josh, he’s twenty-six and rich-can you believe it? I think Christine’s slept with him.”
