“I had no idea medical schools were such shark tanks.”
James smiled. “Grow up, Harry. A lot’s at stake. You know what a doctor’s lifetime earnings can be?”
By the time I left Dr. Hughes and Son’s an hour later, I had several pages filled in my notebook: petty jealousies, betrayals, treacheries, sexual peccadillos, resentments. The struggle for research grants, tenure, awards, and recognition brings out the worst in people. I always had this naive notion that somehow the hallowed halls of the university, where learning and knowledge were prized as ends in themselves, were free of cutthroat craziness.
Right, Ace. And where’s that oceanfront property in Arizona you want me to look at?
It was getting late, and I really needed to eat. I have this weird blood sugar thing: I never seem to get hungry, and then within the space of five minutes, I’m breaking out in a cold sweat, shaking, and I’ll eat anything in sight. I could feel the onset of another blood sugar crash. Fortunately, I was headed downtown. I made a left turn just past the park onto Elliston Place, spotted a space just coming free in front of Rotier’s, and grabbed it before anybody else had the chance.
Mrs. Rotier had been fixing double cheeseburgers on French bread for the local student population for decades. I’d been eating them since high school. She’s surrogate mother for half the under-twenty-one population of Nashville, a tiny woman with the metabolism of a runaway locomotive. Her grown kids, along with most of their spouses, work the restaurant with her. It’s one place in the ever-shifting flood of the city that never seems to change.
I slid into a red vinyl booth near the back. A couple of the Rotier’s waitresses are notoriously ill-tempered, which only adds to what’s usually called the atmosphere of the place. After all, what’s Mama going to do, fire them?
It was my luck to get one that evening. About thirty seconds after I sat down, a plastic-jacketed menu slid across the table in front of me, having become airborne from somewhere behind my left shoulder.
“Make it quick. I don’t have all night.”
I looked up to see a mass of brown hair wearing an apron, with a green order pad in one hand, a cracked Bic pen in the other. I smiled. It felt good to be home.
I flipped open the menu and scanned it. “Roast beef and gravy, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, fried okra. Unsweetened tea.” I rattled off my order as quickly as possible.
While I waited for dinner, I tried to earn my money by pondering my next move. Problem was, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I could go see Bubba-what was his last name?-Hayes. Yeah, that was it. Hayes. Or I could go track down a few of the people that James Hughes had mentioned. I opened my notebook and scanned my scribblings.
Some of them I could eliminate right off. After all, the dean of the medical school may have been hacked off about that rumor that Conrad had been sleeping with his wife, but he wouldn’t have had to kill him. There would be better, more efficient, ways for the dean of a medical school to ruin one of his professor’s lives.
I stared at two names I’d written down: Jane Collingswood and Albert Zitin. James told me they were two surgical residents who had been under Conrad’s direct supervision. There had been a lot of friction; rumor was that he was about to bust Dr. Collingswood out of the program. There’d been a blowup the day Conrad was killed. Zitin and Collingswood had gotten into a shouting match with Conrad, right out in the hall in front of patients and staff. Everybody on Four West heard it. Most uncool. That was why, in fact, James knew about it. Tension and hostility were rampant at all levels of the institution, but open warfare in front of patients was a real breach of protocol.
Another concern had been tugging at the back of my mind ever since the police questioned me. I mentioned, in relating my linear chronicle of events, the woman I’d seen step out of the room where I found Conrad. But in my memory, I seem to remember … It’s hard to say. It’s almost as if I saw a second person. Not anybody I saw clearly, you understand. But I saw this woman, an attractive, young woman in a nurse’s uniform. That is, of course, why I noticed her in the first place. But there was something else, and in my mind’s eye, I was simply unable to reconstruct it.
I heard a throat clearing behind me. “You want this or not?” I looked up to see my waitress standing behind me with a steaming plate and a drink. She’d obviously been standing there a moment or two, waiting for me to come back to earth.
“Oh, sorry.” I scooted out of her way and pulled my notebook off the table.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “Here. You need anything else?”
I looked down at the plate. It was all there and looked great. “Everything’s fine. Thanks.”
She broke what appeared to be a human smile, “Good. Knock ya’self out,” she instructed.
The food was exquisite, like dinner at home back when my mother still cooked. Meat-and-three, it’s called down South, and there’s nothing like it for finding a little bit of comfort in a lousy, grown-up world.
The sun had long since set even on this late summer evening when I turned left off 21st Avenue onto Division and headed toward Music Row. Way before I got there, though, I found a parking space on the street beneath an enormous umbrella of maple whose branches hung drooping and heavy out over the near lane of traffic. This part of Division was quiet at night, far from the packs of tourists that crowded the Country Music Hall of Fame, Barbara Mandrell Country, and the line of tacky souvenir shops that lined the streets all the way down to I-40. I swear, it seems that the first thing every truck driver from Tupelo who comes to Nashville and gets a recording contract does is buy himself a gift shop. Go figure. It gave new meaning and depth to the word kitsch, and there’d been many a time I had to slam on my brakes to keep from smashing into some hairy-legged, knobby-kneed geek in Bermuda shorts who wandered out into traffic because the sign that read HERE ONE DAY ONLY-ELVIS’S CADILLAC had caught his eye.
And they call L.A. La-la land.
Two punkers with safety pins through their cheeks walked past in the darkness. This town was joining the twentieth century fast, but we were still sufficiently out of it to find safety pins through cheeks shocking. I watched them walk far enough up the sidewalk to where I was sure they weren’t going to turn around and mug me, then I crossed the street. Ahead of me a block or so was the bright neon sign in the small parking lot of Bubba’s market.
BUBBA’S! YOUR 24-HOUR CONVENIENCE MART, the sign flashed, its blue and red blazing like a visual Islamic call to prayer for those bereft of cigarettes, beer, disposable diapers, and munchie relief. Below that, in bright, steady white, the guarantee: WE NEVER CLOSE!
I stepped through the heavy metal and glass doors onto the dirty linoleum floor of Bubba’s. The place was your basic redneck all-night market. Disposable lighter displays carried photos of half-nude women, Confederate flags, and my personal favorite: the broken down old Rebel soldier with a drink in one hand and the Stars and Bars in the other with the caption, “Forget, Hell!” Beer coolers lined the entire length of the wall opposite the entrance. Wire cage displays held every kind of gooey snack cake, processed cracker morsel, and potato chip variation imaginable. The place was a cathedral of cholesteroclass="underline" potted meat product, deviled ham, beef stick, beef jerky, pickled pig’s feet, Vienna sausages, on and on and on, ad-quite literally-nauseam.
A skinny white dude with greasy hair, wearing a dirty T-shirt that exposed tattooed arms, stood behind the counter. He was barely visible below an overhead rack full of cigarettes, but I got a good enough look at him to guess that he was probably a recent graduate of the Tennessee Department of Corrections. I moseyed up to him and tried to look casual.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.