Chapter 22

Harry Billings was an older man. Alex's age, Jessica guessed. He had the look of a retired military or law enforcement type.

He pulled a couple of chairs away from his desk to give them room to sit, steadying Alex's chair until he was firmly seated. He certainly had no disabilities of his own. Slim and just a couple of inches above average height, he moved with an efficiency of motion.

Moves like a big cat. Younger than me, year or two maybe. Outdoor type?

"Arthur said I'd be interested in talking to you." He said. "Apparently it's related to your situation, Alex."

Jessica handed him a folder with the same contents as the one she had left with Dr. McFarland. They waited while he read it. Like Dr. McFarland he seemed to do it thoroughly but relatively quickly. When he finished he looked up, studied them briefly.

Cop? Or former cop? Cautious type, maybe so. Experience.

"I'm a free-lance investigator." he said. "I have an Arkansas PI license, for whatever that's worth. I don't do divorces, stuff like that. So I'm not likely to interact with law enforcement, at any level, for that's my official status. As to what I do work on, at the moment it's things like this."

He tapped the folder.

"This is pretty.... I don't know, I've never seen anything like this. Before we start.. hang on.. I'm a retired Arkansas state police CID investigator. I'm guessing you know what CID is."

Pause. Jessica nods. What?

"Criminal Investigation Division." Jessica said. "Alex has some memory problems just now..."

Nodding at the folder.

"I understand. As I said, this is pretty explosive stuff. Anyway, I have to get some things set up here. First, what is your relationship?"

Jessica looking over at me.

"Alex and I were talking about when we'd get married, but that was as far as it went. We'd been, as they say, in a relationship for about... about five or six years."

"That long?"

"What are your ages?"

"I'm thirty-one, Alex is sixty-five. We worked together, and were deciding whether to wait until he retired before we got married."

"Any next of kin? Legally?

"Alex has two sisters. Both older. Sam, the younger, has a guardianship, we've kept it in place for now."

"I take it you're his main contact then?"

"Yes. I'm waiting for Alex to recover his memory, if possible. For now it works."

"So you're all on good terms?"

"Yes."

Learning more about myself every day. OK, I see... something. Not sure what.

"I'm guessing Arthur gave you, at least, something of his idea about the medical industry." Harry said. "I've been working on something, about a year now. I had several requests to investigate this hospital, Arkansas Continued Care Hospital, here in Jonesboro. People who had family members who died there. They thought something was going on there, but weren't sure what. After a couple of them, I decided to take a deeper look. I decided to ask Arthur about it a while back, checking into the local hospitals. As they say, where there's smoke..."

Harry paused, looked down at the folder.

What?

"As Arthur probably told you, the medical industry is a dirty business. But you may not know how dirty.

"You understand that it's all big business, nothing more and nothing less. Money. How to get more of it. Mergers and acquisitions, building empires. It's unfortunate, but there seems to be no solution, given the nature of human behavior. You can't trust government to run it, that makes it as bad or worse, just in a different way. The little people, the ones who provide the revenue, are expendable in the big picture. So you get what we have now.

"As to whether leaving it to private enterprise is better, worse, or the same? I don't see much difference.

"Any way you look at it, it's a rigged game. I guess you're thinking about suing the hospital."

"That was the general idea." Jessica said.

"You can do that," Harry said, "or I should say, you can try. If you can find a lawyer."

"You know of any?" Jessica asked.

"No lawyer in Jonesboro will sue a Jonesboro hospital." Harry said. "You should know that."

"None? At all?"

"Only if you could find one sufficiently desperate, pay him by the hour to file the case, do the grunt work yourself. Maybe." Harry said. "But the fact is, lawyers have plenty of work. Easy work. And they don't have to, to be crude, shit in their own nest to make a living. You don't want to be a Jonesboro lawyer suing a local hospital. Makes golfing and holiday parties awkward, if you know that I mean. And you don't want to find your self in an ambulance some day, chest pains, headed for that hospital."

All a game. Play by the rules, you're OK. Get out of line...

"Maybe one in Little Rock, or Memphis, but even that is iffy. Unless you have a slip-and-fall - those are pretty much automatic settlements - or maybe a high-school cheerleader who was with mom and dad and got rear-ended by a drunk banker and left a paraplegic, with her quarterback boyfriend dead for extra points, pardon the expression - it's going nowhere. Try, but don't expect results. As I say, the game is rigged so even the players don't even know who's controlling it. They just follow the rules."

Who is controlling it?

"Who... nevermind, I see."

Jessica always gets it.

"Satan, ultimately." Harry said. "But the players, except maybe the ones at the top, and I don't know about them, don't know. They just react to the situation they're in, in their own best interests as they see it. But don't get me started."