The Quiet Boy Read online

  “Yes, right, of course. Marina.” Shenk could not keep these women straight, but he didn’t need to. He had but one nurse. He had Malloy the Boy.

  “All right, then, so where does Rosa work? Providence? In Burbank?”

  “Naw, man. Valley Village.”

  Shenk nodded, jotting away. At some point he had planted himself in his office chair, and his restless right foot bobbled while he wrote. Valley Village Methodist was a midsize not-for-profit, located in North Hollywood despite the name. It had a bustling ER, a regionally regarded practice in ortho and peds, and a total operating revenue northward of $665 million per annum. Valley Village was covered for both general liability and medical malpractice by the Wellbridge Insurance Group, Shenk was pretty sure, but he could look that up. He made a note to look it up.

  Shenk had been doing this for nineteen years, since he came out from under the wing of the cantankerous sharpshooter J. J. Barnes, and he could give you the lowdown on every sawbones, on every hospital and clinic and urgent care in Southern California. Which doctors dispensed opioids like they were Peanut M&Ms? Which doctors couldn’t resist trying out their charms on the nurses, opening themselves up to harassment claims and distracting themselves from their life-or-death work? Who among the preening cohort of Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeons had a heavy hand with the Botox, and whose breast implants burst most frequently? Which ERs, though so alluringly busy, were naught but a constant churn of immigrant laborers with ladder falls or gardening accidents, none of whom had so much as a Medi-Cal card in their pocket?

  Malloy the Boy’s knowledge was similarly encyclopedic, and he shared Shenk’s appreciation for all the variety and nuance of their distinct but overlapping trades, which was part of what had made their partnership so efficient and remunerative lo these many years. In their time together, Malloy had directed Shenk’s keen attention toward the wounded, toward the grieving next of kin, in every corner of the Golden State.

  Most recently had been one Marvin Thomas III, a handyman whose pelvis had been shattered by a three-story fall he took, through no fault of his own—the fault lying entirely, or so Jay successfully argued, with the wobbly stepladder produced by a deep-pocketed Canadian steel-machining company. When all was said and done, Newfoundland Tools had been good for $250,000, negotiated out in a pretrial settlement, meaning without any trial costs, meaning a cool eighty grand and change for Shenk & Partners. A few weeks after he deposited that check, during a wholly unrelated social call to Malloy the Boy’s surprisingly tasteful gay-bachelor pad off Sunset Boulevard, Shenk had absentmindedly left behind a doughnut box containing a half dozen of Gloria’s most glorious, along with four grand in tightly rolled hundred-dollar bills.

  Not that all the Boy’s phone calls ended in clover—not even close. Medical malpractice claims in particular are trickier than they look, as Shenk liked to tell his son, Ruben, when he was reading him the specs on a case, testing its soundness out loud for the boy’s edification: you gotta show a specific doctor was responsible for care, and that the doctor failed to deliver that care up to the standards of the field, and that the failure caused an injury, and that actual damages resulted from the injury.

  “And that, my love,” Shenk would say, spreading the file out over the kitchen table, “is a lot of ands.”

  Meaning a lot of solid-looking med-mal cases melted under the heat of close scrutiny. The potential payout would be too low to make it worthwhile, or the victim or victim’s kin would lack the stomach for a fight. Or, worst of all, one of his shark-suit scumbag competitors would snake in first and snatch the prospect before Shenk could make his pitch.

  This one, though—this call—there was something special here.

  Gleaming up from among the Boy’s handful of details, there was an undeniable sense of potential. Elusive but brightly present, like the fairy glow from a forest floor.

  Shenk, with two fingers of his right hand on his carotid, feeling his pulse begin its post-run descent toward normal levels, ran his left hand very gently over his notes, tenderly touching the individual pieces of information like children.

  “All right, man,” said Bobby into Shenk’s thoughtful silence. “Lemme know how it turns out.”

  “You know I will. Thanks a ton, my brother.”

  “I live to serve.”

  Shenk closed the flip phone and stood gazing out at Palms, just giving the moment its moment, tilting his chin up slightly so the sunlight could catch him on both cheeks. Maybe he’d cut Malloy a little something extra on this one. Yeah—probably he would. Shenk lived with a constant low fear of Bobby’s getting restless, finding himself some other lawyer to whisper to, in some other second-floor office.

  Shenk peeled off his undershirt and mopped sweat out of his chest hair, which had lately begun a midlife transformation from pure black to a pleasing manly color, like dark slate. He looked at his watch, calculating how long it would take to run home, grab a shower, and get on the 405, and was disappointed to find it was before two o’clock.

  Ah, well. Without letting the thought take conscious root, he had been hoping it was after three fifteen, when he would have been able to scoop up his son, Ruben, from school and bring him along for the ride out to the Valley. Let the kid play wingman while he ran this thing down.

  Should he wait the hour and a half? Maybe even go over to the school and pull him early? Rubie was a freshman at a small and mildly shmancy private high school in Playa Vista called Morningstar, where the administration was always touting the importance of teaching “the whole child”—a dictum Shenk was often tempted to interpret as a mandate to educate his son on the workings of the law.

  No, he thought. Don’t do that. Leave him be.

  The wisest voice in his head still spoke after all these years in the raspy-sweet tones of his Marilyn, of blessed memory. The voice reminded him that school came first, and that after school Monday/Wednesday/Friday Ruben had his poetry-club thing, and he shouldn’t miss.

  Jay smiled, tightening his little ponytail. He was so proud of that boy. Tonight they would have dinner together, just the two of them, and Ruben would fill him in on his busy little life, and Jay would tell his son about the new case.

  The humdinger, Shenk thought. Hoped. Believed.

  Trotting down the metal staircase outside his office, waving to Gloria behind the counter of her eponymous doughnut shop. A real humdinger.

  2.

  Shenk in a hospital lobby was Shenk in full: chin angled up, chest thrust forward, ponytail dancing at his nape, marching forward like a man at the head of a parade.

  Shenk was an aficionado of hospital lobbies, of their informational kiosks and layered odors and vast, soaring atriums. How many times had he passed through the whoosh of automatic doors, strode along the speckled linoleum tiles and down the beige hallways, past the seascapes and the still lifes and the soft-light portraits of elderly philanthropists?

  He loved all the lobbies, without prejudice or discrimination. He loved the slick modern lobbies with their ergonomic furniture and meditation gardens and minimalist sculptures; but just as fervently did he love the humble old-school lobbies, like this one at Valley Village—with its dribbling water fountain and analog signage, with its dreary little gift shop, offering generic teddy bears and individual Mylar balloons, each balloon tethered limply to its cardboard stick.

  And the people! As Shenk bounded through the Valley Village lobby, his heart swelled with love for the hospital people. Here, a clutch of prideful doctors in sneakers and scrubs, speaking softly to one another by an elevator hallway; here, a small, cheerful legion of nurses in six shades of hospital green; and here, a bulky orderly in repose, fists wrapped around the handles of an empty wheelchair, awaiting his next charge.

  But whom did Shenk love the most? Most of all, Shenk loved the clientele—the consumers—the customers. The sick and the families of the sick, murmuring and muttering, worried and weary, leaning on the walls or wandering confused in search of a vendin
g machine or a bathroom. Or just slumped in those lumpy overstuffed lobby sofas, under the too-bright lights, hungry but unable to eat, weepy but unable to cry. They were alone or stood in groups of two and three, clutching at scraps of tissue and sipping lukewarm coffee and staring wanly out the tinted glass, in baffled contemplation of a loved one’s mortality and, inevitably, their own. They sat grimly, waiting for news; they made exhausted phone calls, keeping someone out there in the loop or keeping themselves tethered to the rush of life that continued while they were in here, in the tedious no-time of hospital waiting.

  “No,” a woman was saying—shouting—at some pinhead administrator she’d buttonholed, backed up against a door to a NO ACCESS hallway. “That is unacceptable. That’s not gonna cut it.” He tried to answer, but the woman wouldn’t let him. She jammed her finger into the man’s chest, her pocketbook bouncing angrily on her shoulder, her voice rising and rising. The administrator raised his hands in the air, placating or protesting or just protecting himself from being hit.

  Shenk loved this lady. He loved the terrified administrator too. He loved them all. As he made his way to the massive semicircular Volunteer Desk, Shenk’s spirit flew out to all of them—all the hospital people gathered in the purgatorial half-light of the lobby—his own heart a corona of empathy expanding outward through the damaged world.

  “Good morning,” said a very old woman as Shenk laid his hands flat upon the shining surface of her information desk, as he tilted himself forward toward her. “Do you need some help today?”

  “I do, yeah, thank you.” Shenk offered a concerned, anxious smile to the white-haired Samaritaness, who peered back at him stoically through tinted bifocals. A small gold badge declared her name to be MRS. DESMOND.

  “I’m looking for a patient.”

  “All righty.” Mrs. Desmond arranged her fingers on her keyboard. “What name?”

  “Now, that’s the funny part,” said Shenk, and dialed the smile down from nervous to sheepish. “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Desmond’s squint deepened suspiciously.

  “He’s a boy,” Shenk continued. “Or a teenager, actually, I guess. He’s in ninth grade—that’s a teenager, right? And he had some kind of accident at school and they brought him over here.”

  Mrs. Desmond sucked at her teeth, which were slightly loose in her mouth, and before she could ask the obvious question he asked it for her.

  “How do I not know his name, right? Well, it’s a funny story.” He grinned. Mrs. Desmond did not. “I’ve got this friend at work, Daryl, and he’s got a golfing buddy, and that guy’s on a three-day business trip, and apparently he—not Daryl, the golfing buddy—apparently he got a call about his kid, but the message was garbled somehow? All I know for sure is, he was at school, one of the big high schools out here, and he had some kind of bad fall.”

  Shenk was tossing out the few bread crumbs Malloy had provided, waiting to see some kind of recognition light up in Mrs. Desmond.

  “But yeah, so, I don’t know much more than that. That’s kind of the sticking point.”

  Mrs. Desmond remained silent, examined him with her pinched expression, presumably deciding among the many very obvious holes in this story to poke at.

  Shenk had, over the years, curated a private typology of Old Dames Who Volunteer in Hospitals. You had your basic cookie-cutter grandmas, with the dimpled cheeks and the baby-powder smell, the blue hair rinse, little old ladies from picture books. Shenk called these the Permanent Widows, who had suffered the loss of dear Harvey or Stan, who after months of hanging around at the hospital had just sort of decided to make a career of it.

  Then by contrast you had the Semi-Pros, retired church secretaries or executive assistants, who brought the brisk efficiency of their professional life into the new milieu. More rare were the Grief Vampires, who took an odd and quasi-perverted pleasure in wading all day through other people’s pain.

  Everything about Mrs. Desmond, though, seemed to place her in Shenk’s least-favored class of hospital-lobby matron: Disapproving Headmistress. She studied him with pursed lips, her red-tinted glasses making her eyes look gigantic. Her head was craned forward on her thin neck, avian and wary, and her clean white eyebrows were so sparse you could count the hairs individually.

  “And your business friend, he didn’t tell you the child’s name? Not even the last name?”

  “No, I know, it’s crazy,” Shenk said, shaking his head at how crazy it was. “But, seriously, all I really need to know is if the kid’s been admitted, and if so, then what room, so I can tell Daryl, so he can tell the dad. If that”—he smiled, one more time, let his voice rise into a question—“if that makes sense?”

  Shenk waited, his fingertips sweaty on the desk. He needed to get that room number; that’s all he needed. He needed to get it before some scumbag ambulance chaser caught a whiff of this thing. There were some bottom-feeding monsters out there, there really were, who would just sail up and down hospital hallways, peeking into windows.

  But Mrs. Desmond wasn’t playing ball. “This is a large facility, sir. We see many, many patients here.”

  “Oh, I can see that,” said Shenk, breaking in. “I can see that.”

  The truth was, Valley Village Methodist was large by national standards but decidedly midsize, as far as Southern California was concerned, especially for a Trauma 1. But there wasn’t really any need to get into all that with the Lady Desmond. He had his methods to get around obdurate old sweethearts like this one, of course, these petty martinets with their CVS reading glasses and blockish white sneakers. Shenk was the sweetest of sweet talkers, an endlessly inventive fabricator, and, all else failing, a dexterous hand with a palmed twenty. Many people would be surprised, Shenk knew, that your average dowager in lipstick was as open to simple street bribery as a crooked cop or maître d’.

  But there were different faces for different conversations. Different tones of voice. Different tilts of the head.

  There have to be. Being a lawyer, like being a person in general, comes down to a series of performances: improvisatory or scripted, linear or non-, experimental or traditional, high-flying or grounded in the pedestrian rhythms of the everyday.

  “Listen. Ma’am. I’m just trying to be a good guy here. You know what I mean? I’m a”—he sighed, opened his hands as if revealing a gemstone he’d been hiding in his palms—“I’m a father myself, and I just hate the idea of this guy, my buddy’s buddy, not knowing what’s going on, you know what I mean? That’s the part that kills me. The not knowing.”

  Shenk paused to move a tear, a real one, from the corner of one eye. He was a father. He really did feel bad for this friend of Daryl’s, even though he himself had invented Daryl and Daryl’s friend just a few minutes ago. “I’m sure the guy’s just going crazy, you know?”

  Mrs. Desmond huffed a little, shaking her head, but then—wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles—she softened. Just enough to ask, “What about the injury? Can you provide any information about the injury?”

  “Yes!” Shenk practically shouted. “I can!”

  Mrs. Desmond, taken aback by the enthusiasm, chirped a little “oh” and even smiled, a tiny and nervous smile. They were getting closer, the two of them. Something was happening here. Soon they would marry, he and Mrs. Desmond, and start a life together, find a place down in Laguna, maybe, a one-bedroom with ocean views, with gentle seaside breezes to soothe their old bones.

  “Kid fell down. Knocked his head. Here.” Shenk tapped his forehead, right between the eyes. “And I guess the nature of it was, they had to operate on him, straightaway. Right when he came in.”

  “Huh,” said Mrs. Desmond, still with no light in her eyes, but then—then—then came a sharp hissing—hiss—from the farther arm of the big horseshoe desk. A second volunteer, who had seemed not to be listening, who had been tapping with rigorous care at her own keyboard, had looked up sharply. Now she came over and stood just behind Mrs. Desmond.

  “Are yo
u talkin’ about the Keener boy?”

  “I—” Shenk’s heartbeat burst into a gallop. The Keener Boy. He didn’t know. And yet, he did know. That was it. The Keener Boy.

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds right. Keener.”

  “Beverly?” Mrs. Desmond said to her colleague, turning her head, plainly irritated at the interruption. Shenk could see, in that one sharp look, a whole rivalrous history between these two volunteer deskmates, some passive-aggressive struggle over scheduling, or appropriate attire, or God knows what else.

  Beverly was short and squat, with a round face covered brightly in pink makeup, and a shiny pile of elaborately salon-treated hair, stiff and glassine as ribbon candy. She would have looked ridiculous, another paragon of hall-lobby biddy, if not for the grave way she was staring at Jay Shenk.

  “The patient he’s looking for is named Keener,” Beverly informed Mrs. Desmond. “Wesley Keener.”

  Wesley Keener. The name glowed to life. It burned like a little sun.

  Beverly bent and whispered to Mrs. Desmond, who became wide-eyed and solemn in her turn.

  Shenk strained to hear the whisper, across the width of the desk, but could get nothing.

  Mrs. Desmond’s authoritarian sternness melted off her face. She looked at him straight on, pity filling her eyes.

  “Ninth floor,” she said, and Beverly nodded and confirmed: “Nine.”

  “Oh gosh, thank you so much,” said Shenk. “Really. And is there a, uh, a room number?”

  Beverly shook her head. She reached out and, very softly, touched her fingers to the back of Shenk’s hand.

  “Just go up. Just go on up to nine.”

  The elevator rose, the bell binged, and the doors rattled open onto dead quiet.

  Shenk stepped off the elevator. He looked around.

  He thought, and may even have said: “Where is everybody?”

  Normally, of course, you come off a hospital elevator in the middle of an afternoon and there are people everywhere: it’s a blur of motion, it’s masks and sneakers and hollering, How is she holding up? and How ya feeling this morning, Mr. Jones? and How many milliliters? and everybody is hustling this way and that.