We didn’t eat until late, and Lucy’s glass of wine turned out to be a good thing. By the time I was clearing the table, her eyes were half shut and she was definitely ready for bed, despite her unwillingness to say good-night to Bill, who had completely won her heart.
“That was rather amazing,” I said to him after I’d tucked her in and we were sitting at the kitchen table. “I don’t know how you managed it. I was worried about her reaction . . .”
“You thought she’d view me as competition.” He smiled a little.
“Let’s just put it this way. Her mother’s in and out of relationships with just about anything on two legs.”
“Meaning she doesn’t have much time for her daughter.” He refilled our glasses.
“To put it mildly.”
“That’s too damn bad. She’s something, smart as hell. Must have inherited your brains.” He slowly sipped his wine, adding, “What does she do all day long while you’re working?”
“Bertha’s here. Mostly Lucy stays in my office hours on end banging on the computer.”
“Playing games on it?”
“Hardly. I think she knows more about the damn thing than I do. Last time I checked, she was programming in Basic and reorganizing my data base.”
He began studying his wineglass. Then he asked, “Can you use your computer to dial up the one downtown?”
“Don’t even suggest it!”
“Well.” He looked at me. “You’d be better off. Maybe I was hoping.”
“Lucy wouldn’t do such a thing,” I said with feeling. “And I’m not sure how I would be better off were it true.”
“Better your ten-year-old niece than a reporter. It would get Amburgey off your back.”
“Nothing would get him off my back,” I snapped.
“That’s right,” he said dryly. “His reason for getting up in the morning is to jerk you around.”
“I’m frankly beginning to wonder that.”
Amburgey was appointed in the midst of the city’s black community publicly protesting that the police were indifferent to homicides unless the victims were white. Then a black city councilman was shot in his car, and Amburgey and the mayor considered it good public relations, I supposed, to appear unannounced at the morgue the next morning.
Maybe it wouldn’t have turned out so badly had Amburgey thought to ask questions while he watched me perform the autopsy, had he kept his mouth shut afterward. But the physician combined with the politician, compelling him to confidently inform the press waiting outside my building that the “spread of pellet wounds” over the dead councilman’s upper chest “indicates a shotgun blast at close range.” As diplomatically as possible, I explained when the reporters questioned me later that the “spread” of holes over the chest was actually marks of therapy made when ER attendants inserted large-gauge needles into the subclavian arteries to transfuse blood. The council-man’s lethal injury was a small-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head.
The reporters had a field day with Amburgey’s blunder.
“The problem is he’s a physician by training,” I was saying to Bill. “He knows just enough to think he’s an expert in forensic medicine, to think he can run my office better than I can, and a lot of his opinions are flat-out full of shit.”
“Which you make the mistake of pointing out to him.”
“What am I supposed to do? Agree and look as incompetent as he is?”
“So it’s a simple case of professional jealousy,” he said with a shrug. “It happens.”
“I don’t know what it is. How the hell do you explain these things? Half of what people do and feel doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. For all I know, I could remind him of his mother.”
My anger was mounting with fresh intensity, and I realized by the expression on his face that I was glaring at him.
“Hey,” he objected, raising his hand, “don’t be pissed at me. I didn’t do anything.”
“You were there this afternoon, weren’t you?”
“What do you expect? I’m supposed to tell Amburgey and Tanner I can’t be in on the meeting because you and I have been seeing each other?”
“Of course you couldn’t tell them that,” I said in a miserable way. “But maybe I wanted you to. Maybe I wanted you to punch Amburgey’s lights out or something.”
“Not a bad idea. But I don’t think it would help me much come reelection time. Besides, you’d probably let my ass rot in jail. Wouldn’t even post my bond.”