Murder Inside the Beltway - Margaret Truman [63]
Hatcher arrived at the doctor’s building early and sat in his car until it was time for his appointment. The receptionist greeted him and asked that he fill out some forms.
“I already did that,” Hatcher protested.
“I see that that was almost four years ago, Mr. Hatcher. You’ll have to fill them out again.”
Hatcher did as instructed and returned them to her desk. Fifteen minutes later, fifteen minutes past his appointment, a nurse ushered him into an examining room and told him to strip to the waist and to slip on a skimpy hospital gown that tied at the back. After taking his blood pressure, temperature, and an EKG, she left him sitting on the edge of an examination table. Another fifteen minutes passed before the doctor appeared.
“Well, Mr. Hatcher, where have you been?”
“What’a you mean?”
“It’s been a long time since I last saw you.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been busy.”
“How’ve you been feeling?”
“Pretty good, except I have this damn headache, and sometimes I get nauseous.”
“Every day?”
“Pretty much.”
“Your blood pressure is elevated. It’s quite high.”
“It’s the job.”
“You’re a detective.”
“Right, but not for much longer. I’m getting ready to pack it in and take the pension.”
The doctor ignored him as he listened to Hatcher’s chest and back through a stethoscope, and looked down his throat. “Your EKG shows some abnormalities, Mr. Hatcher.”
“But it’s nothing, right?” Hatcher said.
“We won’t know until we do a battery of tests, a CAT scan, MRI, an echocardiogram and a carotid artery test. I’ll also order an angiogram.”
“What do you do, Doc, get paid by the test?”
The doctor flipped through Hatcher’s chart again. “I see that I ordered tests four years ago. You never followed up.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But you will follow up this time.”
“Sure. If you say so, Doc.”
As Hatcher was about to leave, the doctor, whose years of intense medical training had left him personality-challenged, said gravely, “I don’t like what I see, Mr. Hatcher. It’s vitally important that you have these tests.” He handed him a prescription, on which he’d written the ones he’d recommended. “Please schedule these as soon as possible. My assistant at the desk will help you book the appointments.”
Hatcher went to the desk and showed the assistant the paper. “The problem is,” he said, “I don’t have my calendar with me. I’m pretty tied up these days. I’ll call you when I get home this afternoon.”
“All right,” she said, eyeing him suspiciously and handing him a card with phone numbers on it.
After Hatcher was gone, the doctor came to the desk and said, “Make a note to call Mr. Hatcher in a week to schedule tests. The man’s a walking time bomb.”
TWENTY-ONE
Hall contacted Patmos’s two alibi witnesses, both of whom confirmed that he’d been at the fundraiser.
“Was he there all night?” Hall asked each.
One of them laughed. “How should I know?” he said. “There were hundreds of people milling around. I saw Jimmy at the start of the evening. I think I saw him at the end when he left with Senator Barrett.”
“And in between?”
“I’m sure he was there.”
“Because you saw him there all evening?”
“No. I mean, why would he leave? Hey, what’s this all about? Is Jimmy in some kind of trouble?”
“No, not at all,” Hall said. “Just a routine inquiry. Thanks for your time.”
“He doesn’t have an alibi,” she told Jackson after ending the second call. “He could have skipped out of the event for hours without anybody noticing.”
“He’s like the rest of the men who we only know were involved with her because they showed up on tape. Buying her services as a hooker is one thing, coming up with evidence that they were involved in her murder is another. Know what I think? I think that the Curzon murder is never going to be solved, not unless one of her johns has a burst of conscience and strolls into Metro pleading to be locked up.”
“That’d be nice,” Mary said.
“I suppose we might as well go back to Curzon’s apartment building,” Jackson said through