Cold Winter Rain by Steven Gregory

cars lined up in single file, exhausts making steam clouds in the cool damp air.
    I  needed to return to lower Alabama, to the boat and the bar for more clothes and to take down more systems for a longer absence.
    I had time to get back to the hotel for lunch and to pick up the files Kramer gave me, then I had one more appointment on the Southside of Birmingham before I drove to the airport.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TEN
    Smolian Psychiatric Clinic perched on Seventh Avenue South in the complex of buildings known locally as UAB, seventy-five city blocks on the south side of the railroad tracks that run northeast to southwest through Birmingham and bisect the city as the Thames bisects London.
    America remembers Birmingham for Bull Connor and his fire hoses, “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”  But that was nearly fifty years ago.  For two decades Birmingham’s mayor has been African-American.
    Old Birmingham called itself The Football Capital of the South.  The stadium with that slogan painted on the bottom of the upper deck sits quietly rusting on the west side of I-65.  In the new Birmingham, neither Auburn nor Alabama has played a football game for years.
    Birmingham reinvented itself as the medical center and engineering capital of the South.  The UAB Health Services Foundation built the "third-largest ambulatory clinic in the world," as I once heard it described at a cocktail party by the gushing wife of the financial VP of the foundation.  I.M. Pei designed the building.  It was called the Kirklin Clinic after the famous heart surgeon George Wallace lured there from the Mayo Clinic in the sixties.
    The state built the clinic and created the foundation so the school could continue to attract famous M.D.'s who expect to make a million dollars a year, minimum.  Alabama could never afford to allow Alabama citizens, forty per cent of whom did not graduate from high school, know that it was paying that kind of money to employees, even doctors.
    So they set the clinic up as a private foundation, and the foundation paid most of the good doctors' salaries.  Off the school's books, off the tax rolls, perfectly legal -- and out of the public eye.
    The Smolian building was not designed by I.M. Pei.  Psychiatry doesn't attract the revenue stream to justify expensive clinical offices.  Smolian’s architecture was more 1950s-public-clinic than 1990s-famous-architect.
    Dr. Beverly Adams’ office was on the third floor.  The geriatric elevator opened a dozen feet in front of a glass cubicle housing reception and billing.
    The only other persons in the lobby were a small family, mother, father, and pre-school son, talking quietly in a corner.
    Renee, the receptionist, greeted me with her usual smile that managed to convey warmth and professional distance simultaneously.  “Good afternoon, Mr. Slate,” she said.  “Please sit down.  Dr. Adams will be available in just a few minutes.”
    It was four minutes by the big clock above the reception window.  It had never been more than eight.  Punctuality was one advantage of consulting academic physicians.  Their government salaries diminished the need to overbook private patients.
    “You can go back now, Mr. Slate,” Renee said with that schizophrenic smile.
    My psychiatrist was waiting for me at the door of her office down a corridor along the outside of the building.
    Bev Adams was forty-five, tall but not angular, with blonde hair worn at chin length and gray eyes.  She had graduated second in her undergraduate class at Cornell and in the top ten at Harvard medical school.
    She hadn’t told me that herself, but I’d learned all I could about her before my first appointment.
    The corridor was lined with windows; Dr. Adams’ tiny office, just large enough for her desk and its chair, a filing cabinet, and a chair for her patients, was windowless.  I followed her into the office, and we took our places.
    “ How are you?” she said.
    Every