“That guy you let up here, the deliveryman? Have you seen him go out?”

“Yeah, he came out of the back elevator while you was on your way up, I guess. Still had a bag in his hand. Said he had the wrong building-off by a block. I shoulda checked that, Miss Cooper, sorry.”

I slammed down the phone and sat on the sofa. No point spoiling Chapman’s foreign affair at this hour or bothering Battaglia until morning. The reason I paid the ridiculously high rent I did each month was for the security of a luxury building. Someone was obviously trying to put a scare into me. He was succeeding.

COURT OFFICERS ON THEIR HANDS AND knees were backing out of the row of sickly looking shrubs that lined the front of the Criminal Courts Building when I got out of the cab at eight-thirty on Monday morning. It was a well-kept secret that one of the best places in Manhattan to find a loaded gun was behind those pathetic bushes, some civil servant’s ludicrous notion of urban landscaping.

Directly inside the main doors of the building were groups of metal detectors set up to screen everyone who passed through. Each day hundreds of present and future felons arrived in the halls of justice to appear for the calendar call of their cases. Many of them were too dense to realize, at least on the first visit, that they would have to be searched and scanned. Occasionally, throughout the day and night, you could watch men and women mount the stairs, then turn back and step behind the scrawny growth to deposit guns, knives, and assorted homemade weapons.

Those who entered via the front but failed to anticipate they might be leaving the building through the back door-in a green bus with caged windows, courtesy of the Department of Correction-regularly deposited their debris behind the greenery. Two or three court officers who swept the area several times a day retrieved the overflow.

“Find anything good?” I called out to Jimmy O’Mara as he stood up and dropped some items into a leather bag.

“Two automatics and a box cutter. Slow night, Alex.”

I ran into Sarah at the bagel cart. We bought our coffee and went upstairs together to open the office. Chapman had beat me to it and was sitting in my chair, feet up on the desk, laughing hysterically into the phone. He slammed down the receiver when we entered and stood up, his voice booming in his best imitation of a television announcer.

“No more calls, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The hospital follies have reached a new height and Detective Forester may have snagged the big one.”

I winced at the idea that Maureen had been in any danger while I was enjoying my evening with Drew. Sarah and I spoke over each other as we asked what happened to Mo.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing. She’s fine. Had the husband and kids with her all day. Right before it’s time for lights out, the nurse comes in with an order to give Maureen an enema before bedtime. From her doctor.

“Mo knows it’s not possible ‘cause her doctor’s out of town until today. The R.N. was insistent, so she and Maureen battled back and forth for twenty minutes while the broad goes to get her supervisor.

“Meantime, half an hour later Maureen’s phone rings. Man introduces himself as Dr. Haven. Says he’s covering for the night and her doctor left orders for a soapsuds enema. Mo pretends to go along with him. Says she just had it. Then the guy starts asking her all kinds of weird questions, telling her to describe how it felt-I mean, he wanted detail.”

Sarah shook her head and eased herself into one of the chairs.

“While Mo has him on the phone, she signals the guys on the monitor to trap the call. Little does this idiot know he’s talking to the one patient who’s wired up. She jerks the guy around for eight minutes, he thanks her for the information and hangs up.” New technology allows us to literally trap the source of incoming telephone calls and recover the originating number.

“Let me guess. Someone on the staff at Mid-Manhattan?”

“Don’t be silly. The call came from the private line, home office, of Arthur J. Simonsen. 710 Park Avenue.”

“Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Mr. Simonsen is the president and CEO of PILLS-Pharmaceutical Industry Life Line Support. Biggest distributor of capsules and tablets in the country.”

I groaned at the thought of what the tabloids would do when they got hold of this story.

“Not a first, ladies. Peterson reached Bill Dietrich a little after eleven last night to tell him the facts. Apparently, the same scam’s been going on here, at Lenox Hill, and at Mount Sinai. At least half a dozen hospitals. Dietrich knew all about it but the administrators had been trying to keep it quiet.

“Because of the business they’re in, Simonsen’s company gets the patient logs from each of the medical centers, which also tell who the attending physician is. Then he goes through the lists, apparently, and looks for names of women in private rooms. He calls the nurses’ station in the early evening, when the doctors have all made their rounds and left. Says he just got a call from the attending who admitted the patient or examined her-and orders the enema and a rectal thermometer.

“He gives himself about an hour until he calls the patient, assuming the procedure’s been done. What he wants is to make the patient describe it back to him in exquisite detail, while he listens and, well-who the hell knows what he’s doing on the other end of the phone.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to take the next step and find out exactly what the thrill of this little prank is. I’m leaving that to Mickey Diamond.”

Diamond, the veteran courthouse reporter for theNew York Post, thrived on the bizarre and berserk. “He’ll be breaking his neck to get this on page one, for his wall of shame,” I added. Mickey’s office was papered with the yellowed remains of headlines trumpeting the city’s most outrageous crimes. Sarah and I were cover girls in his world, since our cases drove his stories from the middle of the crime section to the front of the sheet.

“Don’t worry, Mickey beat you here by fifteen minutes. Got the info from headquarters this morning. He’s going with ENEMA MAN IN HOSPITAL HOAX.

“And the patient? How’s Maureen in all this?”

“She’s great, naturally. Nobody laid a glove on her and she broke the whole thing with one phone call. Simonsen admitted everything. They’ve got him under a suicide watch at Central Booking. They’re going to use the witnesses from the other hospitals, along with his confession, so Mo doesn’t have to be identified at this point.

“She’s happy as a clam. Waiting for your pal David Mitchell to come back, eating bonbons in her fancy robe and reading murder mysteries faster than we can bring ‘em in to her. Give her a call. I know she wants to hear your voice.”

Mike shifted his remarks to Sarah. “What are you looking so glum about this morning?”

She rubbed her hands over her stomach and laughed. “Just thinking. I was going to quit working three weeks before the baby was born so I didn’t go into labor on my way to the office on a subway car. You know, then we’d have to name the kid Vito or Jesús after my fellow straphangers who deliver him and wrap him in a slightly usedDaily News from the day before. But with all these things going on in hospitals, a subway birth may be the way to go.”

“Hey, you know Warren Murtagh’s rules.” One of my friends, the longtime chief of a trial bureau, had created a set of canons that seemed to apply to a wide range of office events. “Murtagh’s Rule Number Nine: ‘All nuts congregate in the same time, place and case.’ So far, we’re on a roll.”

I was still standing. “Figure this one out.” I removed the sheet of paper from my pocketbook and handed it over to Mike.