Free Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) by Elizabeth Zelvin Page A

to a question, but mostly the unit lay quiet.
    She had been too overexcited at the prospect of this task to write down God’s full name, and it took her half an hour of racking her brains, trying to remember if it began with a B or an H, to think of calling Bruce, who supplied “Godfrey Brandon Kettleworth the Third, like the kings of England,” and pointed out that Kettleworth began with a K. It took her another hour to get through the many drawers of charts, which were filed not in alphabetical order but according to a code that the exasperated Barbara decided it would have been challenging for military intelligence to crack and that had been instituted two years after her internship. She would have liked to take a look at Elwood’s chart, too, if only for comparison, but she couldn’t remember his last name either. She decided it wasn’t worth the energy to look into a death with no real mystery about it.
    The search would have gone faster without the participation of the night nurse, who was bored enough to enter into the spirit of the hunt without asking any questions except whether Barbara had tried this unlikely location or that. Reluctant to alienate her or arouse any further curiosity, Barbara resigned herself to periodic smiles and thanks as the nurse helpfully spotted piles of charts on various desks, even though staff members were supposed to return them all to the chart room at the end of the day. In the end, she found God’s chart not in the chart room but under a stack of folders on Sister Angel’s desk.
    Sister Angel’s tiny office was minimalist—no computer, no bookshelves, no décor except for a crucifix on the wall. However, unlike the nursing station, it had opaque walls. Barbara locked the door—Look, Ma, I’m locked in with Jesus on the Cross!—and settled down to read.
    The chart had a heavy cardboard cover in an eye-zapping shade of lavender and was supposed to contain a written record of every single incident and bit of data relevant to God’s stay in detox. Each section was secured with long and wickedly sharp metal fasteners. Barbara knew from long experience that she would have to unfasten at least some of the pages and remove them from the chart in order to read everything. She had better remember to put everything back in precisely the same order. She didn’t want her presence to be noticed. One government agency or another audited the program at intervals, and every word written in the charts could and would be scrutinized. The detox could lose money or even its license if anything were found amiss. Staff did sometimes get sloppy, though. She needed to be careful.
    God’s chart was thin and in excellent condition, which indicated to Barbara’s practiced eye that he had never been in detox on the Bowery before. Some of the oldtimers’ files ran to three or four volumes, stuffed with paper and falling apart, documenting their many admissions. She opened the lavender cover to the face sheet, which held the basic information collected on admission. Name, Godfrey Brandon Kettleworth III, exactly as Bruce had told her. Domicile, an address on the East Side. Not homeless, then—if he’d really lived there. She jotted it down. Some of the men used a relative’s address to collect their welfare checks or stayed intermittently on someone’s couch but, in fact, lived on the street. Date of birth. God had been fifty-six, old enough for Vietnam, and he’d told Bruce he was a vet. Not quite too old to die young. Social Security number. Even the most brain-fried guys remembered that, Jimmy had once told her. She had found it true even on the Bowery. Jimmy claimed that he didn’t need to know his because she was so codependent she knew it as well as her own. This both amused and annoyed her, because it was also true.
    The medical part of the chart came next. Barbara flipped quickly through the lab reports. To her disappointment, the last one filed dated from December thirtieth, before