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

every chart.”
    This was evidently unwelcome news. Groans resounded all around the room, and three people sought consolation by taking another donut. Barbara took advantage of the ensuing pause.
    “Do you guys know they found a dead man in the parking lot?”
    More groans. Several people offered tales of woe involving parking, interrupting each other and, in a couple of cases, spraying powdered sugar all over their front. I could see how Barbara felt at home here.
    “Forget the parking, guys. I was thinking—could he be one of ours?”
    A slightly shamed silence fell.
    “He is one of ours.” A severely dressed woman in her forties stood in the doorway. She had a British accent and the face of a well-bred horse.
    “Dr. Arnold. Unit chief,” Barbara whispered. “Brilliant neurologist. Knows all about addictions. Looks scary, but she’s a pussycat.”
    Dr. Arnold stalked over to the coffee table and plunked down a large box of Krispy Kremes. I shrank down in my chair like Frodo hiding from the Eye of Sauron. I didn’t want to get kicked out just when it was getting interesting.
    “A client? Who was it?” someone asked.
    Barbara’s running commentary got softer, hardly more than a warm breath in my ear. “Sister Perseverance. Nursing nun, been here even longer than Carlo. They call her Sister Persistence.”
    In turn, I put my lips to Barbara’s ear.
    “Not to her face, I assume.”
    “Persy, I’m sorry,” Dr. Arnold said. “It was Nick.”
    “Oh, no!”
    “What a shame!”
    There was a general outcry. The dead guy, Nikolai, was a Russian immigrant who had been in and out of the clinic for years. They thought he must have crawled into the Dumpster either with or in pursuit of a bottle of vodka and gotten too sick to climb out or shout for help. Or he might have passed out and gotten sick later on. Security guards patrolled the grounds at night, but they’d missed him. They had a lot of territory to cover. Security was understaffed, like every other department in the hospital.
    “We won’t get autopsy results for a while,” Dr. Arnold said. “We all know how it is around the holidays.”
    “The staff are as bad as the patients,” Sister Perseverance sniffed. “It should be a holy time. There’s altogether too much whoop-de-do in this hospital.”
    Barbara snorted coffee out her nose at that one. A couple of other people snickered too.
    “How many Christmases had Nick spent in this program?” someone asked.
    “Fourteen, I believe,” said the nun.
    Barbara whispered, “They don’t call her Sister Persistence for nothing.”
    “And damn few of them sober,” Carlo said.
    Dr. Arnold frowned at him. “And some of them were sober. Give yourself—and Nick—credit for that.”
    “He had cirrhosis,” another woman said. “Even if he’d stayed sober, he couldn’t have lasted forever.” Liver damage past the point of no return. I’d been lucky so far. It could have been me.
    “Did he have family?” someone asked.
    “No,” Carlo said. “A sister in Brooklyn, down around Sheepshead Bay, died a couple of years ago. He lived in an SRO.”
    A welfare hotel. Poor Nick. What a depressing life. What a lonely, humiliating death. I was almost glad that Dr. Arnold noticed me at that point and kicked me out. Barbara told me later that I didn’t miss anything. Silence had descended, and then the whole group sought comfort by finishing off the donuts.

Chapter Nine
    Barbara had the rest of my day all planned. Rather than let me go back to Manhattan after I filled out the job application, she pointed me at a lunchtime AA meeting within walking distance of the hospital and ordered me to go to the Bronx Zoo in the afternoon.
    “Panda therapy?” I inquired.
    “There are no pandas at the Bronx Zoo,” she said.
    “Gorilla therapy, then.”
    “It will do you good. Just do it.”
    It was cold at the zoo, and a lot of the animals that were usually outside were inside. But to my surprise, I enjoyed it. I