True-Life Adventure

wooden doors that looked as if, in less secular days, they’d opened into a chapel. The room itself was bare and a bit grim. Booker pulled a couple of straight wooden chairs close to the wall and sat down in one, facing the wall and keeping his back very straight. I sat in the other and followed suit.
    We were alone in the room, but if someone came in, all he’d see would be the backs of two serious meditators, probably with desperately ill family in the hospital. Probably he’d leave right away, embarrassed at disturbing us. Booker had thought of everything.
    At 7:59 exactly, Booker got up, motioned for me to follow, and led the way back to the men’s room. Again, no one was there, so we slipped into our respective stethoscope and coat and stepped back into the corridor.
    The next part was an unbelievable piece of cake. We just got off the elevator, turned right, and went through a door that led to a corridor with eight or ten doctors’ offices opening off it. Booker was a marvel.
    It was nothing to find Dr. Rumler’s office and walk right in, with the aid of the key of the day, selected by Booker in about one and one half seconds. Dr. Rumler had a file cabinet and three deep drawers in his desk. Terry Koehler’s chart wasn’t in it or them.
    “It’s a bust,” I said.
    “Can’t find it?” Booker’s voice was sympathetic. “Is the chart you want the only one missing? Or aren’t there any charts at all here?”
    “No charts at all.”
    “Well, never fear. They must be somewhere in the hospital. The question is where.”
    “Maybe we could just walk to the pediatrics desk and ask for it.”
    Booker shook his head. “Too risky. The nurse or whoever’s there must know what docs would be on at night. We can only get away with this if people see us at a distance. I mean, we look like we might be docs or we might be orderlies or even male nurses, I guess. But we don’t know who’s authorized to look at a chart and who’s not.”
    “What do you think we should do?”
    “Let’s just take a spin around and see what we can see.”
    “Okay.”
    We walked down the corridor with the offices and turned onto another full of rooms with sick kids in them. The light was dim and I thought it was one of the most depressing places I’d ever been. But then we came to a more depressing one— the corridor with the intensive care nursery on it. You could see the babies through the windows— most of them about the size of a football and lots of them full of tubes and needles. At the moment I wasn’t crazy about Booker’s job.
    We passed the desk and saw a rack full of blue loose-leaf notebooks that looked like charts for the patients who were currently admitted. What we didn’t see was a sort of central room where old charts were kept.
    We found yet another corridor— the floor’s main one— and gave it a whirl. It, too, housed a lot of doctor’s offices, but it also had doors with no names on them. Booker simply opened them up. But not a chart did we find.
    “That must mean,” Booker said, “that all the hospital’s charts are kept together, rather than separately by clinic. Maybe even all the charts from all the hospitals in the med center are kept together.”
    “We’ve got to find out where.”
    “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go back to Rumler’s office.” Booker’s idea was simplicity itself. He picked up Rumler’s blue med center directory and turned to Charts. That didn’t work, so he tried Records. No luck, but he was undaunted. He simply started at the beginning and read every listing, looking for a likely one. Fortunately, he only had to go halfway through the book: Medical Records had to be it.
    The only trouble was, the directory didn’t say where it was. All it had in it were phone numbers, not locations. Clearly we couldn’t ask someone in the hospital, as we were supposed to look like we knew what we were doing. Even if we got away with it, it would draw attention to us. So that was out. At least that was my theory.
    “Au contraire,” said Booker. “Asking someone in the hospital is the only way to find it. Ergo, exactly what we shall do.” He talked funny for a burglar.
    But he burgled like an angel. He motioned me to follow him to the first floor, where he found a pay phone and dialed Moffitt Hospital.
    “Hello,” he said, “can you tell me where Medical Records is?”
    The operator said something, probably, “Shall I connect you?”
    “No, thanks,” said Booker.