Free Ill Will by J.M. Redmann

out for lunch? I don’t have anyone scheduled until one.”
    “Stay within beeper range—I mean cell phone—just in case something comes up. But it should be fine.”
    “Can we get you something?” Cordelia asked her as I secured the papers in an inside pocket in my briefcase.
    “Nope, brought my lunch today, but thanks.”
    I followed Cordelia, first to her office, so she could shuck the lab coat and stethoscope and get her purse and sunglasses, then out the labyrinth of turns to the elevators.
    “Thank you,” she said as the elevator doors opened and we stepped in.
    They shut and I took advantage of the privacy to lean in and kiss her.
    She kissed back long enough to let me know she appreciated my being here. We broke off in time so we were blandly standing next to each other as the elevator doors opened to let other people in.
    “Where would you like to go?” she asked as we exited the building.
    “What’s around here?” I asked. This area wasn’t my stomping grounds.
    She shrugged. “I mostly bring my lunch.”
    We settled on a bar/burger joint just down the block.
    After we placed our orders—me a decadent blue cheese burger and her a virtuous salad—I asked, “So, who are Lydia, Brandon, and Ron?”
    “I’ve tried to stay out of the politics and personalities,” was her preamble.
    “But you still know more about them than I do,” I prompted her.
    She smiled agreement. “Lydia is a nurse practitioner and probably the mainstay of the group, with the major planning and organizational skills. Ron and Brandon are both doctors. They and Tamara, the doctor on maternity leave, form one section of the group practice. There are two other sections with about four doctors each. I’ve only met them in passing.”
    “So about twelve doctors all together?” I asked.
    “Yes. I think about four of them were here before Katrina; several of their colleagues left, so it’s been pick-up sticks in personnel for the last few years. Newer doctors get stuck together, so the older doctors don’t have to deal with constant change.”
    “So why have a group practice?”
    “Sharing of resources. We have the same clerical staff, phone systems, file space, copy machines. That sort of stuff.”
    “Guess that makes sense.”
    “Brandon and Lydia have worked together for a while and I think they joined this group as a team. Ron used to work out in New Orleans East and none of his partners came back. I think he’s a good doctor, but people skills isn’t his strong point.”
    “You think?”
    “It took me a while, but I finally noticed.”
    “Think he’s not cool with gay folks? He seemed pretty taken aback that I turned out to have a vagina and not a penis.”
    “Hard to tell, his usual style would make most people think he hates them. But…he is a straight white man and he got his undergrad at Ole Miss before coming to LSU for medical school.”
    “Thank the cosmos for Mississippi,” I said. “It keeps Louisiana from always being at the bottom of everything.”
    “It doesn’t really matter, Tamara will be back from maternity leave in about a month and I’ll be somewhere else.”
    “So how legit is this finding patients thing?” I asked.
    “We can’t make people keep their appointments, and a fair number do just not show up. Most of the time, it’s on them to reschedule. But because this is sort of our fault—or at least we can’t put it in the category of the patient deciding not to show up—we brought them both up at our last case conference meeting. I mentioned that my partner was a private detective and a lot of what she—I did say ‘she’—did was find missing people and maybe she’d have some ideas.”
    “And ideas turned into me coming here and agreeing to find them?”
    “I wasn’t really expecting you to say, ‘yeah, I can do that.’ Just give us whatever the magic trick is that you know.”
    I laughed. “It’s not that big a deal. The PI equivalent of what you did for Andy,”