Dr. Galen's Little Black Bag

by R. A. Comunale M. D.

  The judge was very sure of his verdict. Besides, he was hungry, and his hemorrhoids were acting up. He cracked jokes with the police officers now milling around the bench.

  The arresting officer swaggered, posing muy macho in his uniform. He flashed a thumbs-up to his colleagues, another notch for his conviction record. He was batting .700, but it was professional, not personal, not malicious.

  The defense attorney shook hands with the county prosecutor and shared jokes and coffee. He would receive his fee despite the outcome.

  My patient sat in the front row, quietly stunned. He kept shaking his head and whispering “no.” He had just been convicted of being a “Peeping Tom.”

  What was the problem?

  He was innocent.

  Yes, I know, the prisons are filled with the innocent. But this time I held a personal stake in the matter. When my patient supposedly was peering through the ground-floor windows of some nearby townhouses, he and I were discussing computer systems on the telephone.

  Brad Lester was a quiet kid. The youngest of three brothers, he was ten years old when his mother, a divorced government worker, first brought him to see me. Soft spoken and shy, he watched his older brother go through the ritual torture of the yearly school physical.

  Aaron Lester was outgoing, aggressive, athletic, a non-stop talker, who only shut up when I thumped his knees with my reflex hammer. His involuntary knee jerks caused the younger boy to giggle at the jokes our bodies play on us.

  “What’s so funny, runt?”

  The twelve year-old was ready to jump off the table and pound on his sibling.

  “Sit down, Aaron,” I growled, “I’m not done yet.”

  Elder bears hold amazingly persuasive powers over pre-teens.

  Brad stuck out his tongue at his brother.

  “Don’t forget, kiddo, you’re next.”

  His tongue quickly retracted.

  It was during Aaron’s vision screening that I noticed a peculiar behavior pattern in Brad: He had become quite focused. He closed his eyes and listened intently to his brother identifying the letters on the chart and the numbers inside each of the different-colored circles.

  It was just a hunch, but I played it.

  “Brad, since you’re already in here, let me check your eyes, too. Hop up on the chair and tell me what you see.”

  He looked into the vision tester and rattled off a series of numbers. It was meant to test color vision, and his response mirrored Aaron’s. Then I asked him to read a line of letters and, once again, he gave the list Aaron had given.

  They weren’t correct—I had changed the settings on the machine.

  But he repeated Aaron’s answers word for word.

  I left the brothers in the examining room and invited their mother into my office.

  “Mrs. Lester, how are the boys doing in school?”

  “Aaron isn’t much of a student, but he’s very good at athletics.”

  “And Brad?”

  “He seems to be doing okay.”

  “Does he read at home?”

  “He likes comic books.”

  Okay, I do, too. Never could afford them as a kid, so I did some catching up in my early professional years.

  “Mrs. Lester, I think Brad has a problem. Let’s see if I’m right.”

  We re-entered the examining room just in time to stop Aaron from snapping off Brad’s neck.

  “Come here, Brad. Your mom says you like comic books. Would you read this for me?”

  I handed him a hardbound copy of a Batman story. He turned to the first page and stared at it silently.

  “Uh … Aaron’s older. Can he read it first?”

  I shook my head, and his expression moved to the verge of tears.

  “Mrs. Lester, Brad can’t read, and I think he’s color blind.”

  Her mouth dropped.

  “My father was color blind! But I don’t understand. The teachers have never said anything, and he’s in the fifth grade. He does so well with math, too.”

  Once more I played a hunch.

  “Brad, let’s see how well you know your numbers. If I say zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, what do you think the next number is?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “And the next?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Without hesitation the kid had just figured out a Fibonacci sequence, adding the previous two numbers together to get the next one. Brad was an illiterate polymath, someone whose brain circuits seemed intuitively to understand numbers. He had made it to fifth grade by listening to the other children reading in class and immediately memorizing what they said.

  It took a year. His mother and I drilled him in phonetics. Hesitant at first, he began to read—really read—for the first time in his life. In that one year the boy jumped from total illiteracy to high-school-level comprehension.

  The ugly duckling blossomed in school, and his newly acquired confidence made him insufferable to his older brother. Happily, puberty diverted Aaron’s aggressive energies elsewhere.

  “Doc, do you have a computer?”

  I had had some experience at university using an IBM Mark IV analog computer, which was nearly the size of a house. Now it was the dawn of the PC age, and Brad, having just turned fifteen, itched to learn how to use the Devil’s tool.

  “We’ve got a surprise for you.”

  His mother had brought him in for a sports physical. He was into track as well as numbers.

  What he didn’t expect was something Mrs. Lester and I had chipped in to get for him.

  “Oh, geez!”

  By the time Brad graduated from high school, he had become an expert at the various arcane computer languages and had even built his own demonic device.

  College brought new challenges. Brad was not an extrovert like his brother, but he had girlfriends and chugged down his share of the brew at college parties.

  And, as usual, I would get the middle-of-the-night phone calls:

  “Doc … uh … this girl … uh … what do I…?”

  “Doc, my head is killing me. How do I stop the pounding?”

  But his life revolved around math, computers—and running.

  I understood his routine. My own involved 4 a.m. walks. After completing his assignments, he would change into jogging clothes and run a predetermined course around his neighborhood at night. Then, like all young adults, he would work into the early morning hours with his computers.

  “Brad, I’m going to put a computer system in my office. Any suggestions?”

  I had finally succumbed. Bookkeeping with a quill pen and inkwell had become a bit cumbersome, particularly because the insurance companies demanded ever more patient data.

  “C’mon, Doc, we’ll go visit the computer center store. I’ll put a system together for you.”

  With Brad Lester’s guidance, I had joined the information age.

  “Doc, what are you doing to that poor machine?”

  “Brad, you’ve heard of people with green thumbs? When it comes to computers, my fingers are all thumbs.”

  Being a semi-moron with machinery, a modern Robert Benchley, I often called him at all hours, when the damned thing did a kluge. Somehow, magically, Brad could talk me through the labyrinth of system commands and get the Blue Screen of Death to disappear from my monitor.

  That late-July evening was no different. It took almost two hours and multiple offers by Brad to come over personally, which I rejected, much to my later regret. I wanted to be able to fix the damned machine myself, albeit with his help over the phone.

  We started at 9 p.m. It was 11 when my computer screen no longer spat out gibberish.

  “Doc, it’s time for my run. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

  I hung up and happily typed away on the keyboard.

  The phone rang fifteen minutes later. It was Brad’s mother.

  “Dr. Galen, they’ve arrested Brad. The police are here, and they want to search the house.”

 
“I’ll be right over.”

  I pulled up in front of the townhouse community where the Lesters lived. Three police cars, lights flashing blue, red, and white, sat in the parking lot. The front door of the residence was open.

  An officer stopped me.

  “What’s your business here?”

  “I’m Dr. Galen. Don’t you recognize me, Bill?”

  I had worked as the physician for the county jail a while back.

  More on that later.

  “Uh … sorry, Doc. You related to these folks?”

  “No. They’re patients of mine.”

  He waved me in.

  Brad sat on the living room couch, hands cuffed behind his back. His mother was nearly hysterical.

  “There’s some mistake, there’s some mistake!” she kept repeating.

  I approached the sergeant and showed him my ID.

  “What happened?”

  “We got us a Peeping Tom, Doc.”

  “I was just out jogging, dammit!”

  “Tell me about it, Sergeant.”

  “A call came in from one of the neighborhood folks at twenty-one thirty (9:30 p.m.). Woman said there was someone looking in her front window. We got the dogs out and scoured the neighborhood. Found this guy running from us.”

  “Sergeant, are you sure about the time of the call?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then you’ve got the wrong man. I was on the phone with Mr. Lester from twenty-one hundred to twenty-three hundred (nine to eleven p.m.).”

  “Yeah, maybe so, but he was running.”

  “He goes jogging every night.”

  “The dogs went after him,” the police dog handler interjected.

  “Doc, I was running and suddenly this pack of dogs came after me. What was I supposed to do?”

  “We flashed our red lights at him.”

  “He’s color blind, sergeant.”

  The police officer remained adamant. I could see that he wanted to close the case.

  “Isn’t it more likely that Mr. Lester continued to run because he was afraid of the dogs? Did any witness identify him?”

  No answer. The officer tried to stare me down.

  “Officer, do you have a warrant to be in Mrs. Lester’s house?”

  “She let us in.”

  “I turned toward Sheila Lester.

  “Did you voluntarily let the police in?”

  “They said I had to let them in, Dr. Galen.”

  I turned back to the arresting officer. He stood his ground.

  “Sorry, Doc, I still gotta take him in.”

  That was when Brad’s true hell began. Still in handcuffs, the officers took him to the county jail and held him until bail could be posted. The judge set a trial date when Brad refused to confess to a crime he did not commit.

  I did not sleep well for days. If only I had told Brad to come over, if only…

  When I finally did, it wasn’t restful.

  Mrs. Lester hired an attorney, and I volunteered to testify on Brad’s behalf.

  My secretary gave me a questioning look, when I told her not to book patients for an entire day.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I have to, Virginia. The kid’s innocent.”

  The bailiff told me to wait outside the courtroom until I was called. I didn’t hear the legal foreplay, the pro forma legalese that means little but is meant to impress.

  “Dr. Galen, please come in,” the bailiff finally said from the open door.

  I walked up to the witness stand next to the judicial throne.

  Yes, I solemnly swore. I also mentally swore. The whole trial was a farce.

  The defense attorney had me state my credentials and then asked the key question:

  “What is your interest in this case, Doctor?”

  “The officer told me that the complaint was phoned in at nine-thirty p.m. At that time I was in the middle of a lengthy telephone call with Mr. Lester. It began at nine and lasted until eleven.”

  Like twins, the county prosecutor and the judge interjected. The judge gave way to the prosecutor.

  “Dr. Galen, how can you be so sure of the time?”

  “I was sitting at my desk in front of my computer screen. A two-foot diameter wall clock was directly opposite me. Besides, you can check my phone records.”

  “Doctor,” the judge interrupted “I must warn you of the serious consequences of perjury.”

  Why the hell was the judge trying to intimidate me?

  “I understand, Your Honor, which is why I’m telling you what I saw and heard, and when I heard it.”

  He told me to step down. I took a seat in the back of the courtroom.

  At the end, the judge spoke those fatal words: “I find the defendant guilty.”

  I give the defense attorney credit for one maneuver. He asked the court to appoint a therapist to evaluate Brad, because the charge of Peeping Tom, or voyeurism, implied a mental problem. The judge agreed. It gave him a way out of a bad decision.

  I approached the bench after the trial. Now I could speak.

  “Your Honor,” I said quietly, “this young man is innocent. Why are you doing this?”

  “Dr. Galen, you’re no stranger to the law. I have to work with these guys.”

  He gestured with his head toward the group of officers.

  “Yes, Your Honor, I understand. But an innocent man has just been ruined by a sexual-deviance charge.”

  “Go home, Doctor.”

  He got up, tried to scratch his hemorrhoids without being obvious, and then left the courtroom.

  He was right about one thing: I wasn’t a virgin when it came to the law. One of The Three, the old doctors who had welcomed me to the area, had cured me of that.

  “Dr. Bolganich is on the phone, Dr. Galen.”

  “Galen, my wife and I are finally taking that world cruise I promised her when we got married. Can you cover for me?”

  “Sure, Nelson. Any special problems I should know about?”

  “Nope, the usual stuff. Uh … oh, there’s the jail, too.”

  As well as maintaining a private practice, Nelson was also the county-jail physician.

  “Bob, I gotta warn you. It ain’t like the hospital or your office.”

  Nelson was right.

  At that time, health-care conditions at the jail facility were third-world at best. The inmate population had problems that civilians only imagined in their nightmares.

  Try evaluating a female prisoner for PID (pelvic inflammatory disease), a condition that can cause permanent sterility.

  The guards placed the prisoner in a cage in the middle of a floor surrounded by other cells. The guards wouldn’t allow draping or covering of the open-barred walls for privacy. The only concession was that I was allowed to place a sheet over her, as I attempted a pelvic examination, while the other inmates jeered, and the guards cracked lewd jokes.

  But that paled in comparison with the legal Kabuki dance of serving on medical-malpractice committees.

  As Nelson handed me the keys to his office, he gave me a guilty look.

  “Uh … Bob, I’ve got a panel I need you to cover for me.”

  The state, in an attempt to decrease the time and expense of medical-malpractice trials, had set up a legal process, in which a panel of three doctors, three lawyers, and a judge would pre-screen complaints of medical misconduct. If the panel decided that the doctor was guilty, then they offered both plaintiff and defendant the choice of an out-of-court settlement or the prospect of a trial. If they deemed the doctor innocent, the hoped-for outcome was the dropping of the case against him, or her.

  What actually took place was a mini-trial.

  The plaintiff’s attorneys used it as practice to test their strategies. The panel decision made no difference.

  Yes, indeed, I was no legal virgin. But for some strange, foolish altruism, I still believed justice would be served.

  Three months after Brad Lester’s trial, he reappear
ed before the judge who had convicted him. He had faithfully attended the weekly sessions at the therapist’s office. The court-appointed psychologist presented his report in the open courtroom.

  “I find no evidence for a diagnosis of sexual deviance. This man is innocent.”

  The judge stared at him, then at Brad Lester, and then shook his head.

  “Thank you, Dr. Siemens, but my decision stands. I will, however, suspend jail time, provided that Mr. Lester continues to attend therapy sessions for one year.”

  “But, your honor, that would be a waste of time,” Siemens interjected.

  “Mr. Lester has a choice. He can attend sessions at your office or go to jail for one year.”

  Then the latter-day Pontius Pilate rose from the bench and left the courtroom.

  On one level I understood the judge’s hard line. At the time this legal travesty occurred, other, more serious and devastating witch trials were taking place across the country.

  Charges of sexual perversion in schools and daycare centers, led by therapists needing an outlet for their own neuroses, had resulted in people being charged with extreme perversions: demon worship, naked cabals with infants, and more.

  Reacting to the outrage, judges and prosecutors abandoned reason in the name of expediency … and votes.

  Sorry to say, I had experienced something similar during my own boyhood.

  “Pepe, don’t do it!”

  “Padre Luis said it was God’s will, Berto.”

  My friend Sal and I were standing on the bridge overpass, the same one where the dead lady had met me seven years before, caught underneath on one of its pylons. We were both fifteen years old at the time, and boys through and through. Pepe sometimes hung out with us, when his other friends were away.

  “Pepe, get down from there. Are you loco?”

  Sal and I stared, wide-eyed, as the boy had climbed up on the bridge wall and paced back and forth before stopping and staring down at the river.

  We thought it was a joke. Then I saw the tears in his eyes. He was going to jump.