The Best Defense by Kate Wilhelm Read Free Book Online

alive.
    “What do you mean, I can’t see her?” Barbara demanded of the sergeant the next morning at ten. She had been thinking there was plenty of time to wrap this up, get the signatures, help Paula draft a letter to the court requesting a different attorney, have a bit of lunch,
    and be at the restaurant in plenty of time for her first drop-in client. She peered closer at the sergeant’s identity tag: SGT. R. T.
    PERRY.
    “Look, Ms. Holloway, I’m just following orders.
    Okay? She’s sleeping. Dr. Grayling said he’d talk to you if you want. You want to talk to him?”
    “You bet I do.”
    The sergeant began to rummage through papers on his desk.
    “Here it is. He left a card with his number and address. He’s already been here and left again, but he’ll be in the office all day and he said he’d see you between patients. That’s all I can do, Ms. Holloway. I’m sorry.”
    She believed him. He was gray-haired, florid, over weight, and, no doubt, as tough as he looked, but at the moment his expression appeared genuinely regretful.
    She wanted to ask him why Paula was sleeping at ten in the morning, but he wasn’t the one to question, she decided glancing at the card. Dr. Grayling was in the medical building across the street from Sacred Heart Hospital, where they had taken Paula to stitch up her arms. She nodded to the sergeant.
    “Thanks.”
    A freight train was howling its way through town behind the jail when she went out to her car. For a moment she thought of the prisoners up there behind narrow barred windows listening to the trains, wishing, wishing…. She shook her head and got in her car.
    From Fifth down to Seventh, which turned into Franklin, to Patterson, one more block to the medical office building. The hospital sprawled across two city blocks, and all around it, like the moons of Jupiter, satellites had appeared sometimes it seemed overnight professional buildings, pharmacies, parking structures, gift and flower shops, restaurants, wide sky ways linking buildings. The complex couldn’t spread out to the west, the university grounds started a block away; instead it was inexorably moving south and east, gobbling up neighborhoods. She drove into a parking structure; there was absolutely no parking on the street in the area. It took her longer to find a vacant slot for her car than the drive over had taken. Med biz was booming, she thought gloomily.
    She found her way to Grayling’s office, where she waited ten minutes in a large anteroom where dozens of other people were waiting to see half a dozen different doctors who shared the common reception area.
    The office she was taken to was minuscule, with hardly enough room for the two chairs opposite the doctor’s desk. Dr. Grayling was behind the desk; he made a half-hearted motion toward rising, then sat down again. If he moved back more than six inches, he would have been up against a window. His hair was a touch too long, dark and straight, and he wore horned-rimmed glasses that were too low on his nose although he pushed them up time and again. He was about forty, she decided; it was hard to tell because he looked tired and harried. He pushed his hair back, pushed his glasses back, shifted in his chair, and kept in motion.
    He didn’t register any surprise at her blue jeans and T-shirt, and she decided he hadn’t noticed. She had thought briefly of going home and changing, and had decided not to. If what she had on was good enough for the county jail, it was good enough for the jail doctor.
    “Ms. Holloway,” he said after she took one of the chairs, “you know the system we’re using over at the jail, don’t you?”
    She shook her head.
    “Tell me.”
    “Yes. Well, there are a couple of nurses on duty and a paramedic. In fact, one of the nurses is actually a paramedic. And I’m on call. You know, for things they can’t handle, or shouldn’t handle.”
    “You treated Paula Kennerman the other night? At the hospital?”
    “Yes.