There was an old clock radio on the back of the desk and I turned it on to a classical music station to fill the room with something other than the stillness that hung in the air. People in the adjacent apartment must have been more hard of hearing than my late grandmother as the noise from their television set almost boomed through the wall at me with the shrill voices of Home Shopping Network announcers. Today was obviously Capodimonte day and prices were being slashed by the minute. The neighbors couldn’t have heard me turn Gemma’s little radio knob up a notch.
I sat down again in the seat I had worked in from the day Mercer and I tried to catalogue some of the property. I could remember remarking about the lack of logic of some of the files, but there were far too many cabinets to put my finger on the ones that had stood out to me at the time.
At random, I slid open drawers and started to rifle through the subject tabs, looking for names that were now more familiar from meetings with the hospital staff and the expanded scope of our investigation. I was interested in information Dogen might have had about the men we had since interviewed and especially wanted to please Lieutenant Peterson by coming up with something that Gemma might have known about Jean DuPuy.
Inches and inches gave me nothing but medical research and clippings from journals about brain injury and surgical techniques. I checked my original notes and matched the third drawer from the left with a list that earmarked her files on “Professional Ethics.” Grabbing a handful of them, I swiveled around to place them on the desk and began to skim through them.
Some of them went back years, almost to her first days at Minuit, and none of the names they referenced had anything to do with the current staff or student body. With a red marker, Dogen had annotated the official school documents, commenting in the margins on the suitability of a candidate or her opinion of his worthiness to enter the program.
I pushed the pile to the side of the desk and reached back for a more recent assortment on the same topic. Fanning them out across the top of the blotter, I started from the rear of the pile. Midway through, the titles changed and I realized I had passed from the ethics folders into her personal records.
The tabs I was reading were labeled in Gemma’s hand with the names of sports teams. Clipped together in one lump were the Saints, the Braves, and the Redskins. I lifted the metal clasp and opened the three packets as Gemma’s filing system became obvious to me. This was her stash on John DuPre, the team name representing the city in which an academic institution or professional connection was located-Tulane was in New Orleans, his practice and lawsuit were in Atlanta, and Georgetown, where he claimed to have received his undergraduate degree, was in D.C. Somehow, she had figured the information she collected would be less obvious or desirable to an interloper if it looked like it related to a sporting event.
I thought of the briefing session at which we’d been told that one of the cops from the 17th had found file folders in a trash barrel in the hospital parking lot that bore similar labels. Perhaps this was a duplicate set that Dogen kept at home, where she had a greater assurance of privacy.
The find excited me. I dialed Chapman’s number but he still wasn’t there. I left him a message and told him to call me at Gemma’s apartment if he got in within the next hour, reading the number off the printed slot on the base of her phone. I beeped Mercer, then returned to ferreting through the drawers for more things like DuPre’s records while I waited for him to call me back.
“Who’s this?” Mercer asked when I picked up the receiver.
“It’s Alex.”
“Where are you? I didn’t recognize the number.”
“Gemma’s apartment. Peterson is going to smother us with kisses when we get through with what I’ve got here.”
“You first, Coop. That’s not exactly the reward I’ve been looking for.”
I started to explain what I had found and that I was continuing to search for more pieces. “What time are you coming back to the city?”
“You tell me.”
“Why don’t I take a few armloads of these with me, stop at Grace’s Marketplace and pick up something that you guys can feed me for dinner, and we’ll start the week off with gold stars.”
“What time is it now? Two-thirty. Plan on me gettin‘ there about seven.”
“Fine. I’m still trying to come up with the one we saw when we were here together. She had labeled it ‘Met Games.’ Remember, I remarked how out of place it was that Laura would have refiled it in better order? Only now I can’t come up with what it was stuck in between. It’s got to have something to do with her whistle-blowing, too, since she never went to a ball game.”
“It was close to something like ‘degenerates’-that’s why it stuck out in my mind.”
“That’s Sex Crimes for you, Mercer. We’ve got degenerates, medicine has ‘regenerative tissue.’ I knew you’d remember.”
“I’ll hold while you look for it.”
I put the receiver down on the desk, scanned my notes, and found the reference to the drawer that held both a series on ethics and another on specific medical topics like tissues. I opened it up and saw that crammed right in between the two was a green Pendaflex holding the file I was looking for.
I cradled the phone on my shoulder as I separated the sides of the folder and removed a thick sheaf of papers. “Curveball, Mercer. ‘Met Games’ looks like it’s all about Coleman Harper. This stuff goes back a lot longer than Dietrich’s archives do. It’s Dogen’s notes from her first year at Minuit. Harper was finishing his internship just like he told us. Only these records make it clear that Gemma’s the one who blackballed him from Mid-Manhattan and the neurosurgical program.
“Spector got him parked over at Metropolitan Hospital while he tried to appeal the decision.” I flipped through some of the documents. “Met Games is right. Spector was trying to find supporters uptown who would go to the mat for his boy Harper, and Dogen dug her heels in to track the guy’s every move. It’s too much to skim through right now but it looks like she’s been documenting every mistake Harper’s ever made in the past ten years-and there are plenty of them.”
“Like what?”
“She’s got a few things circled in red ink-someone up at Met who wasn’t happy with his technical skills in the operating room, another one complaining to Spector that Harper had a poor medical knowledge base. And it’s clear they weren’t going to keep him there, either.”
I looked at Dogen’s meticulous handwriting in the margin of the files. “Her notes read like Coleman Harper had something on Spector-like some secret about his personal life. At least, that’s why she thinks he’s backing Harper for admission, even though by most accounts he wouldn’t make it at Minuit.”
“Good hunting.”
“Look, I’ll bring these with me. And I think I’ll swing by Minuit on my way home. I’ve got my ID with me so maybe someone from security can let me in Gemma’s office. That way I can examine her folders there before Spector gets on to us during the week.”
“No. That’s a serious, emphatic, Battaglia-inspired capitalN, capitalO. There’s absolutely no way of knowing who’s around there on a Sunday afternoon and who you’re gonna bump into. Remember, we know we’ve got one loose cannon running around out of control. Who knows whether DuPre left anything at the hospital that he’s coming back for.”
“Mercer, I can’t get in there on a Sunday unless someone from security opens the door for me. It’s not exactly a big risk to take in the middle of the day-”
“No! Get it? First of all, a lady was killed in that room just a couple of weeks ago, remember? Second, we don’t know who to trust in that entire hospital, do we? Go directly home. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and definitely do not stop at Minuit Medical College. Am I understood?”