Doc in the Box

by Elaine Viets

  The young man seemed to tower over the tiny woman. I’d bet he was … five-eight or nine. I looked at him closer. He had gray hair, but he was way too young to be Harry the retired cop or Cal the pawnbroker. He didn’t have steely eyes, either, or eyelashes to die for, while I was checking out his eyes. I sat back and relaxed.

  The young man helped Mrs. Kaffee make her way through the crowded waiting room, pushing the old man’s wheelchair gently aside for her walker, while she talked nonstop. The man had the patience of Mother Teresa. I would have strangled the old woman after ten minutes, for the constant chatter alone. They were almost to the office door when I said to Rita, “That woman’s son is really sweet. Look how he helps her.”

  “Son?” said Rita, looking puzzled. “Mrs. Kaffee doesn’t have a son. She lives alone and comes here by cab. I don’t know who that man is.”

  As the nurse opened the door to the inner offices, it created a breeze that set the man’s clothes flapping on his thin form, and rippled the hair on his … wig. The guy was wearing a gray wig. It was obviously a wig. It had slipped slightly to one side. Where had I heard that phrase “his clothes were flapping in the breeze”? From Bill’s neighbor, Agnes. Who told me Bill liked cartoons. Classic Warner Bros. cartoons. They ended with, “That’s all, folks!”

  This man with the gray wig didn’t have long eyelashes, because he lost them to chemotherapy. Along with his curly dark hair.

  It was Bill! He was here, and he was going to kill Dr. Boltz.

  “Bill, stop! Stop!” I yelled.

  Bill heard his name and took off running into the inner offices. I ran after him, knocking Mrs. Kaffee flat on her butt. Bill was heading down a corridor toward what I presumed was the surgeon’s private office.

  “Hey!” said the receptionist, but I couldn’t tell if she was yelling at me or Bill.

  “Wait! Stop! He’s got a gun!” I said. “Call security!” I hoped they understood what I was saying.

  Now Bill was sprinting, but not for the surgeon’s office. He turned left down the hall and ran for the fire stairs. I followed. Where was security? Could the cameras see us on the stairs? Were the police waiting at the exits? I heard Bill clattering down the steps two flights ahead of me. He was running fast. The first-floor door opened with a modulated hiss. I was right behind him. He ran out on the first floor past an anonymous row of closed doors, then through the crowded hospital halls, knocking gurneys and wheelchairs aside, sending patients and visitors sprawling. A volunteer in a peach smock was knocked into the cart of flowers she’d been delivering, and water, glass, and flowers went flying. We had a near miss with a new mother and her baby, and a direct hit with a guy on crutches. He went down with a loud “oof!” and I nearly tripped on a crutch and landed on top of him.

  Where was hospital security? I didn’t want to chase an armed killer. I just wanted to keep Bill in sight. I’d be happy to let the guards tackle him.

  Bill was fast for someone who was supposed to be half-dead. I managed not to lose him, even when he cut through the cafeteria, and sent trays of beef stew, fish sticks, and red Jell-O flying in his wake. The cafeteria was a mistake. The crowds slowed Bill down. I reached out and grabbed him by the sleeve when I slid on a sweet roll. Bill shook my hand free and was gone.

  Where did he go? Through the door on the left? Out through the kitchen? Into the hall? Out the delivery entrance? There were a dozen ways he could go. Dazed people stared at the mess he left in his wake. Some were stepping over the food on the floor. Others were starting to go for help. I heard someone outside yell, “Hey, buddy, watch it.”

  Bill had ducked out a side door. I saw him running on the sidewalk. He looked back, saw me, and dashed into the street in front of the hospital, crossing against the light. A Jeep Cherokee slammed on its brakes and the driver hit the horn. I followed him, and heard an angry honk and a screech of brakes. The truck stopped so close to me, I could see my face reflected in the shiny grill, my hair hanging wildly out of that stupid turban.

  “Jesus Christ, lady, watch it,” said the driver, too frightened to be angry.

  I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. Bill would get away. I couldn’t tell if hospital security knew which direction we were going. I didn’t know if anyone had called the police. All I could do was keep running. Bill had an uncanny way of darting into unexpected places. He made it across the street, and ran into the hospital parking garage.

  Bill ran up the Down exit. I followed. The concrete ramp was freshly painted and slick with leaking motor oil. I slipped, and stopped to fling off my heels. I had better traction barefoot, but Bill was still way ahead of me. A doctor’s big silver Mercedes roaring down the ramp blared at Bill to get out of the way. The doctor gave Bill the finger—must be a proctologist. On the next level, a battered station wagon pulled suddenly onto the ramp and nearly squished him. That driver was too surprised to react. Nothing stopped Bill, not honks, curses, or rude gestures. He ran and ran and I ran after him through the permanent twilight of the parking garage, up floor after floor. Our pursuit took on a dreamlike quality, one of those dreams where you run and run and nothing happens. I saw a constantly shifting collage of car fenders and hoods and brake lights, heard my own hard breathing and the drivers’ furious honking. Then, suddenly, we were in blinding sunlight on the open upper deck. There were almost no cars up here. I chased Bill into the far corner. He must have thought there was a stairway there, but it was only a concrete storage area with a Keep Out sign on the door. He pulled on the door handle. It was locked. He looked at me. He pulled out a gun. I felt for the pepper spray in my pocket and pulled it out. Then I stood there, not moving.

  “You won’t shoot me,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

  “You’re right. I won’t. I only kill people who deserve it,” he said, but he still held the gun on me. His right hand shook, and he used his left hand to support it. He was breathing in long shuddery gasps. His wig was crooked and I saw that underneath he was totally bald. Bill caught his breath enough to continue, but his conversation was still punctuated with gasps. Once he started talking, he didn’t want to stop.

  “Francesca Vierling, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It is.”

  “I nearly killed you in the drugstore,” he said. He coughed and tried to get more air. “But I couldn’t find you and the police were coming. I ran off. Then I realized I only had so much time left. Chasing you would interfere with my mission. So I scared you a bit, to slow you down. But I let you live. Sporting of me, wasn’t it?”

  “How did you find out I was looking for you?” I said.

  “I heard you talking to that nurse, Valerie, in the chemo waiting room. I took chemo, too. It couldn’t cure me, but it keeps me alive for my mission.”

  “You were the bald man in the Cardinals cap,” I said.

  “That was me. Although some days I wore a curly brown wig, and I’ve been a blond, too. But I was bald that day. I was right there when Valerie gave you the answer.”

  “She did?” I was dumbfounded. “She was no help at all. She was just joking with me. She said for all she knew I was the killer, using Georgia as a cover to get in the doctors’ …” I stopped. No wonder he was worried. Valerie gave me the solution to the puzzle. I just didn’t recognize it.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I shot Tachman as he was unlocking his door, but I needed to get inside the other doctors’ offices, so I helped confused old people into Brentmoor’s and Jolley’s patient rooms. Once they were settled in the examining rooms, I let myself into the doctors’ private offices. I hid in the closet in Brentmoor’s office. I stood behind the door in Jolley’s. I waited an hour or two, until they came back to their offices at noon. By that time, the old people I’d helped in were long gone.

  “It was easy. I was used to waiting rooms, remember. I fit right in. I’d spent most of the last four years sitting in a chair next to a pile of old magazines, waiting for my name to be called. That’s what I was doing when I he
ard you talking to Valerie. Waiting in a waiting room. I thought a smart gal like you would figure it out after what she said. I’d already run into you in the hall that day when I was going into radiation oncology. I was afraid you might recognize me. And then when Valerie told you how I did it, I was sure you’d put it all together and identify me. I began to worry. I still had some major names on my list back then. What if you stopped me before I finished? I decided I’d stop you first. I couldn’t do anything that day. I was too sick after the chemo. But I thought about what I was going to do. I’d follow you out of your office, shoot you on the newspaper parking lot, and make it look like a holdup. It would be easy. Everyone knows the Gazette is in a bad neighborhood. I just read about those two twelve-year-olds who shot a guy at the gas station on the corner there.

  “But the next night, I was in the Emergency Room. I had a rash from that round of chemo and I couldn’t wait until morning to have it treated. I saw you sitting with that little blond woman again. I knew this was my golden opportunity. I got out of the Emergency Room before you did, but I waited. I followed you. I figured the doctor would send you to that all-night pharmacy. They almost always do.”

  “You came in there looking for me,” I blurted. “You killed the store lights.”

  “I’m very handy,” he shrugged. “I know how to do that stuff.”

  “You know how to knock around ninety-pound women, too.”

  “I’m sorry. That little store manager didn’t deserve that. I couldn’t even think of your name. Chemo does that to you. I was so tired that night I could hardly stand up. All I could think was that you were tall and that little manager kept saying there were no tall people there, which made me mad. But I’m glad I didn’t find you that night. Killing you would have been a mistake. You’ve kept me going, you know that? I couldn’t have killed all those doctors without you. It was like I had a partner to play against. Did you like the little present I left on your doorstep?”

  “Used needles and bloody IV tubing. I could have been infected with AIDS,” I said.

  “Unlikely,” he said. “The blood on the needles was not fresh. Even with fresh blood, the chances of contracting AIDS by a needle stick are point three percent.”

  “I don’t understand how you found my doorstep. My home address isn’t in the phone book.”

  “That was easy,” he said, but I could tell he was proud. “Missouri drivers’ licenses list home addresses. I called a friend who worked in a license bureau and he looked up your address for me. I told him I was giving you a present, and you wouldn’t get it if I left it at the paper. That was all true.” He laughed at his own cleverness, but the laughter turned into long, gasping coughs.

  “I’m dying. Francesca. Soon. I have more bad days than good days now. Sometimes I don’t feel like getting up at all. I’m so tired and I hurt so much, I just want to go to sleep. But knowing you might find me and stop me made me want to go on. I hit that little store manager and I regret it. That’s all I regret. The others deserved everything that happened to them.”

  He was panting again. His skin was waxy white and pale. Sweat had popped out on his forehead. The gun shook in his hands.

  “Why did they deserve it?” I said gently, hoping to keep him talking.

  “Mind if I sit and catch my breath?” he said. He perched casually on the wide wall. His gun was still pointed at me, but I wasn’t scared anymore. The stunning St. Louis skyline was at his back. It was a straight drop ten stories below him, but he had no fear. Why should he?

  “I eliminated them in different order,” he gasped, “but it will make more sense this way. Four years ago, my family doctor sent me for a sigmoidoscopy at this hospital. He said nothing looked wrong, but colon cancer runs in my family, and he wanted to be on the safe side. The doctor here made the procedure as painful as possible. He was bored and talked over me to a nurse. He hit on her while he worked on me, asking her for a lunch date. She said yes, and he turned off the sigmoidoscope light a little too early and didn’t notice the tumor. I found this out later. I mean, that he missed the tumor. The rest I saw right then and resented it, let me tell you. He gave me a clean bill of health. ‘You’re fine,’ he said. So I didn’t worry anymore.

  “My regular family doctor died soon after that, and I went to this new doctor my friends recommended, Dr. Dell Jolley. He was just like his name. He looked like the perfect family doctor. Older, gray-haired, with a face you could trust. I liked him. About three years ago, I went to him with a problem. He said it was hemorrhoids. But Dr. Jolley never performed a rectal exam on me. I learned too late that neglecting that exam was gross malpractice, like not using a lead apron shield when X-raying a pregnant woman.

  “If Dr. Jolley had given me a proper exam, he’d have detected the tumor early enough that I might have survived. But jolly Dr. Jolley didn’t like to get his hands dirty. So he treated me for hemorrhoids instead. After all, what were the chances of a man my age getting colon cancer? He gave me foam and salves and potions. Nothing much worked. I saw him at least once a month. For a whole year. I kept getting worse, and I couldn’t understand it. Finally, I was so miserable I demanded to see a specialist. Dr. Jolley didn’t like to make referrals. I found out later my HMO has an ‘expected rate of referrals.’ Doctors can refer all they want—the HMO party line is ‘oh, we don’t restrict our doctors’—but once doctors get over the magic number, guess where the money comes from? Their incentive bonus. Dr. Jolley didn’t like to lose any of that money.

  “I insisted on a referral. He handed me the HMO specialist list and said, ‘Get yourself one and I’ll write you a referral letter.’ He didn’t even tell me what kind of doctor I needed, and the HMO list didn’t say. It just had the doctors’ names and numbers. So I called twenty-five different doctors’ offices and got laughed at by receptionists: ‘We work on the other end. We’re cardiologists, hee, hee.’

  “At last, I called Dr. Boltz’s office. I had to wait a month for an appointment. Then he told me I had a large tumor and only a forty-percent chance of making it. He said I needed to be operated on immediately, and I’d have to have chemo and radiation. I sat there in his office, too stunned to move. I did all the right things. I went to all the doctors, I took all the tests, and I was going to die anyway. It wasn’t fair. Dr. Jolley had been treating me for something minor when I had cancer.”

  “I can see why you wanted to kill Dr. Jolley,” I said. “Did Dr. Boltz do a bad job?”

  “No, he was a good surgeon. I went after him for another reason. I’ll get to that in a minute. I felt better after the surgery. Even with all the pain, I knew things were improving. I had hope. I went through chemo and radiation for eight months. The chemo nurses were lovely. Radiation oncology was run like a corner of hell. But at the end, when the chemo and radiation were over, my health was coming back. I thought I was going to get my life back. Then I went for one of my checkups six months later. They found another tumor, this time in my liver. But they put a chemo pump in the liver and I thought they whipped that one, too. Then a tumor turned up again, in the one place they couldn’t do anything about—my colon. Dr. Boltz said there was nothing more left to take out. That was it. My number was up. I got this news on my thirtieth birthday. Happy birthday, huh?

  “Okay, I was going to die. I thought I could take it like a man. The one thing that bothered me was my son, Billy Junior. His mother and I are divorced, but I’m crazy about that kid. We had shared custody until I got too sick to take care of him. I’ll never see him graduate from high school. Never watch him go to the prom, or dance at his wedding, or hold my grandchild. All that was taken away from me by a lazy, greedy, incompetent doctor.

  “But I thought I could live with that, too. I was going to sue old Dr. Jolley, and I knew I’d win, and I’d leave Billy enough money for a good life. He could go to college someday. His mother could stay home and care for him instead of working as a secretary and hiring sitters. I had it all planned out. There was no future for me, may
be, but at least my son had a future.

  “Dr. Boltz ruined that. My lawyer talked to him about testifying. Boltz said that it really wasn’t Dr. Jolley’s fault. When my lawyer pressed him, he said, well, Dr. Jolley did wrong, but the extent of the damage couldn’t be proved. To me, it seemed so clear-cut. But Boltz hemmed and hawed and excused and justified and explained it away. My own surgeon. He wouldn’t testify against Dr. Jolley. He wouldn’t break the code of silence. He knew that his colleague had screwed up. But Boltz said he had to work in this community. The other doctors, who were either friends of Jolley or Boltz, followed his lead. My lawyer said the suit wasn’t worth pursuing if my own surgeon wouldn’t testify for me. Maybe, if I wanted to spend two thousand dollars for an outside expert … but where does a bus mechanic with child support payments get that kind of money?

  “Now I had nothing. No future. No money for my son. All I had left was revenge. I decided this wasn’t going to happen to anyone else. I made sure no one else would go through what I did. I started killing the bastards. I began with the radiation oncology department because they were the worst.”

  “Been there,” I interrupted. “They were mean.”

  I could hear people running up the garage stairs on the other side, and I wanted to move him on. Help was on the way, but I had to hear the rest.

  “My oncologist, Brentmoor, was another one. He wouldn’t testify for me, either. Said it was against hospital policy. But that’s not why I killed him. He didn’t have an ounce of compassion for his patients. I called his office early one morning, screaming in pain, and he never bothered calling me back. Not for eight hours. When I called again, after four o’clock, he’d left for the day. The doctor on call didn’t get to me until five-thirty. This didn’t happen once—it happened often. He was heartless.”