Read Online Devil's Waltz by Jonathan Kellerman - Free Book Online Page B

my worst enemy.”
    He jabbed the elevator button, glanced at his watch. “Looks like we caught the local, Doctor. Anyway, we were just coming out of it — Cindy and I. Pulling ourselves together and starting to enjoy Cassie when
this
mess hit the fan… Unbelievable.”
    The elevator arrived. Two candy-stripers and a doctor exited, and we stepped in. Chip pushed the ground-floor button and settled with his back against the compartment’s rear wall.
    “You just never know what life’s going to throw you,” he said. “I’ve always been stubborn. Probably to a fault — an obnoxious individualist. Probably because a lot of conformity was shoved down my throat at an early age. But I’ve come to realize I’m pretty conservative. Buying into the basic values: Live your life according to the rules and things will eventually work out. Hopelessly naïve, of course. But you get into a certain mode of thinking and it feels right, so you keep doing it. That’s as good a definition of faith as any, I guess. But I’m fast losing mine.”
    The elevator stopped at four. A Hispanic woman in her fifties and a boy of around ten got on. The boy was short, stocky, bespectacled. His blunt face bore the unmistakable cast of Down’s syndrome. Chip smiled at them. The boy didn’t appear to notice him. The woman looked very tired. No one talked. The two of them got off at three.
    When the door closed, Chip kept staring at it. As we resumed our descent he said, “Take that poor woman. She didn’t expect that — child of her old age and now she has to take care of him forever. Something like that’ll shake up your entire worldview. That’s what’s happened to me — the whole child-rearing thing. No more assumptions about happy endings.”
    He turned to me. The slate eyes were fierce. “I really hope you can help Cassandra. As long as she has to go through this shit, let her be spared some of the pain.”
    The elevator landed. The moment the door opened, he was out and gone.
     
     
    When I got back to the General Peds clinic, Stephanie was in one of the exam rooms. I waited outside until she came out a few minutes later, followed by a huge black woman and a girl of around five. The girl wore a red polka-dot dress and had coal-black skin, cornrows, and beautiful African features. One of her hands gripped Stephanie’s; the other held a lollipop. A tear stream striped her cheek, lacquer on ebony. A round pink Band-Aid dotted the crook of one arm.
    Stephanie was saying, “You did great, Tonya.” She saw me and mouthed, “My office,” before returning her attention to the girl.
    I went to her consult room. The Byron book was back on the shelf, its gilded spine conspicuous among the texts.
    I thumbed through a recent copy of
Pediatrics
. Not long after, Stephanie came in, closed the door, and sank into her desk chair.
    “So,” she said, “how’d it go?”
    “Fine, outside of Ms. Bottomley’s continuing antagonism.”
    “She get in the way?”
    “No, just more of the same.” I told her about the scene with the nurse and Chip. “Trying to get on his good side but it probably backfired. He sees her as a shameless ass-kisser, though he does think she takes good care of Cassie. And his analysis of why she resents me is probably right-on: competing for the attentions of the VIP patient.”
    “Attention seeking, huh? There’s a bit of Munchausen symptomology.”
    “Yup. In addition, she did visit the home. But only a couple of times, a while back. So it still doesn’t seem likely she could have caused anything. But let’s keep our eyes on her.”
    “I already started, Alex. Asked around about her. The nursing office thinks she’s tops. She gets consistently good ratings, no complaints. And as far as I can tell there’s been no unusual pattern of illness in any of her patients. But my offer’s still open — she causes too much hassle, she’s transferred.”
    “Let me see if I can work things out with her. Cindy and