The Chairmen

by Robert I. Katz

  “Sure,” Levine said.

  An hour later, the patient was safely in recovery. Kurtz had a headache. He glanced at the clock. An hour to grab some lunch, then office hours.

  The first patient of the afternoon was named Shirley Bannon, a small woman with light brown hair, blue eyes and a beaten down look. Her husband was tall and skinny, dressed in a three-piece suit with a real watch chain across the vest. She had gallstones. He had attitude. “I want you to know that if anything goes wrong with this operation, you’ll regret it,” he said.

  Kurtz knew without having to be told that he would regret it if anything went wrong with this or any other operation. The guy seemed to mean it a little differently than usual. “How so?” Kurtz asked.

  The guy’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll let you figure it out.”

  Kurtz tapped his pen on the desk, considering. The surgery was elective. If she had come into the emergency room, Kurtz could not have turned her away, this being Federal Law in the United States of America, but they were sitting in his office after a routine evaluation. “How about we do it this way,” Kurtz said, “turn around, go away, and find yourself another surgeon.”

  They both looked startled. “What do you mean?” the guy said.

  “I mean that I don’t do surgery on people who threaten me. It’s a little quirk of mine.”

  The guy’s face was suddenly ugly. “You can’t do that,” he said.

  “Sure, I can,” Kurtz said.

  “I’ll get you,” the guy said. His breath came suddenly faster and he leaned forward across the desk. “Don’t think that I won’t.”

  The woman looked at her husband, shook her head and sighed.

  Kurtz picked up the phone and punched in his secretary’s number. She picked up after one ring. “Mrs. Schapiro?” Kurtz said. “Please call the police.”

  Suddenly, the guy looked concerned. “Now wait a minute,” he said. “We can work something out here.”

  “The only think we’re going to work out,” Kurtz said, “is how long it’s going to take for you to get out of my office.”

  They guy seemed about to say something when the woman put her hand on his arm. “Jimmy, for Christ’s sake, forget it,” she said. She looked at Kurtz sadly and for a moment he almost changed his mind. “Let’s go,” she said. “There are plenty of other fish in the sea.”

  Evidently, the woman knew her husband. Within a minute she had hustled him out through the door. After they had gone, Kurtz put his head in his hands and rubbed his temples. His headache, having temporarily abated, was threatening once again to pound a spike into his skull. He glanced at the clock. Two thirty. Four patients to go. Thank God, he had the evening off. He needed a hot shower and a cold drink.

  Oh, well, he consoled himself, these things happen. He just wished that they would happen to somebody besides him.

  At seven fifteen in the evening, they called an emergency Caesarian section on a woman named Cecelia DeJesus. It wasn’t an emergency in the sense that anything was wrong with the baby. It was an emergency because she had been in labor for fifteen hours, was only four centimeters dilated and was evidently not making any progress. Enough, in the opinion of her obstetrician, was enough. Time to get the baby out, call it a night, and go home.

  At seven thirty-five, the spinal was in, the patient was numb from the sternum down and the surgeon was poised to begin. A nurse on the opposite side of the OR opened a pack of instruments and something wet and very red plopped out onto the floor. The nurse gave a little shriek, quickly stifled. The surgeon glared at her. “Did you stub your toe?” The surgeon nodded toward the end of the table, where Cecelia DeJesus’ head was concealed by the drapes, and raised his eyebrows. The nurse closed her eyes, drew a deep breath and visibly shuddered. The neonatologist, John Crane, who had been standing toward the side of the operating table, waiting for the new baby to make its appearance, looked down at what was sitting on the floor and pursed his lips. “Better get a new pack,” he said. “This one’s contaminated; and when the case is finished, call Security. And don’t touch this or the rest of the pack that it came in. It’s evidence.”

  Harry Moran appreciated the thought but quickly realized that murder was not the correct word for it. The blob on the floor turned out to be a dead baby, which was exactly what it had appeared to be, but the baby was dead from natural causes. Every once in a while, for reasons that could only be surmised, a full-term infant died in utero. The theory was that the umbilical cord wrapped around the infant’s neck or otherwise became compressed and the infant died from lack of oxygen. The previous evening, a lady named Amanda Thomasson had given birth to just such a stillborn infant. Mrs. Thomasson was resting under sedation on the Fifteenth Floor and the dead infant had been taken to pathology.

  Somebody, evidently, had removed the infant from pathology.

  “Pretty sick joke,” Kurtz said. When Kurtz had first appeared on the OB floor, Moran had ignored him. Kurtz did not take offense at this. He did not delude himself that his status as the Dean’s personal investigator extended to investigating a murder, despite the previous three murders that Kurtz, Barent and Moran had investigated. Once it became apparent that the crime was more in the nature of a practical joke, Moran had deigned to talk to him.

  Glumly, Harry agreed. “But not murder.”

  Patrick O’Brien, who had given Kurtz the call and who was standing silently by while the NYPD took point, looked at him and silently shook his head.

  “Still a crime, though,” Kurtz said.

  “Not much of one.” Moran shrugged. “So, who had access to the pathology lab?”

  “Probably everybody,” O’Brien said.

  “You’re probably right. Let’s find out.”

  It wasn’t quite everybody, but near enough. The lab was kept locked at night, but almost anybody could wander through during the day. Everybody who worked there, the pathologists, the lab techs, the cleaning staff, all had keys. Security had never been a consideration. And why should it be? Most people avoided the place. Not only might you run into something gross like a disembodied brain, an eviscerated liver or a dead baby, but the place smelled bad. A faint undercurrent of decay mixed with phenol was ineffably present.

  “Anybody see anybody unusual?” Harry asked.

  Bob Josephs was the Chief Pathologist, a lean guy with thick, brown hair, pale skin and a ready smile. At the moment, he was not smiling. He puffed up his cheeks and gave Kurtz a gloomy look, evidently wondering what Kurtz was doing there but too polite to ask. “How should I know?”

  Good question, Kurtz thought.

  “Let me rephrase that,” Moran said, “did you, personally, see or hear about anything unusual?”

  “No.”

  Of course not. A bull elephant wandering through might be considered unusual. An ordinary person who looked as if he had some business there? Forget it. But propriety demanded that the forces of justice at least pretend to take it all seriously. Harry Moran sighed. He had more important things to do, but he was already on the scene. Might as well go through the motions. “I’m going to have to talk to your people,” he said.

  “Is that absolutely necessary?”

  “I’m afraid that it is.”

  Josephs shrugged.

  They started with the seven pathologists, went on to the fifteen lab techs and then the six cleaning staff. Nobody knew anything. Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything.

  Oh, well.

  The surgical storage area was a bit more fruitful. Surgical packs were prepared in a locked area on the fourteenth floor. The instruments were cleaned, gathered together according to the type of surgery intended, wrapped and then sterilized. The sterilized packs were stored on shelves and sent up on a dumbwaiter when requested, either to obstetrics or to the OR.

  “Yeah, I saw somebody.” Irene Garcia was a plump, middle-aged Hispanic lady with a grumpy attitude and an excellent work record. She looked at Kurtz with evident suspicion but at least seemed inclin
ed to cooperate.

  Moran raised an eyebrow. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “It was yesterday afternoon. Some guy dressed in scrubs. I’d never seen him before. He was wandering around in the storage room.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I asked him who he was. He said that he was a new OR tech and he wanted to see how the instruments were processed.”

  “Did that sound reasonable to you?”

  “It was unusual but it wasn’t nuts. I mean, the man works here. It’s only natural to be curious.” Irene Garcia shrugged. “I told him that nobody was allowed in without authorization and he better leave.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He left.”

  “Okay,” Harry said. He rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. Maybe they were finally getting somewhere. “What did he look like?”

  “Sort of on the tall side, I guess. Slim. He was white, I could tell that much.”

  Harry looked at her. “What do you mean? Wasn’t that obvious?”

  “He had scrubs on, including an OR cap and a mask.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “In the store room? Yeah. The instruments are sterile. You’re not supposed to breathe on them.”

  “So you couldn’t see his face?”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Okay, what could you see?”

  Irene Garcia gave a tiny shrug, as if she hadn’t really noticed and didn’t really care. “He had brown hair.”

  Kurtz wrote white, above average height, slim, brown hair in his notebook. “Fine. What shade of brown: light, medium or dark? Was it curly or was it straight?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was brown. Medium, I guess. I couldn’t tell if it was straight or curly. Most of it was tucked under the cap.”

  “How about his eyebrows? Same color as the hair?”

  Irene Garcia frowned. “Probably. I didn’t notice.”

  “How about his eyes? Did you notice the color.”

  She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “No,” she said.

  “How about his skin. Dark? Pale?”

  “Sort of pale. He had some freckles on his arms.”

  “Arms? You could see his arms and not his face?”

  “Surgical scrubs have short sleeves. I told you he was wearing surgical scrubs.”

  “Yes, you did,” Harry said. “That’s great. Did you notice anything else? Scars? Tattoos? Anything?”

  “Not that I noticed, no.”

  “How about his voice? Anything distinctive? Was it deep? How about an accent?”

  “It was a voice. It wasn’t deep. I didn’t notice any accent.”

  “And after he left, did you report the incident?”

  “No.” Irene Garcia shook her head. “It’s not as if we have drugs in here. I mean, there’s nothing worth stealing. I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Well, thank you,” Harry said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “I have? How?”

  Harry smiled at her. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s confidential.”

  Irene Garcia sniffed and walked off.

  “He’s escalating,” Kurtz said.

  Harry shrugged. “It’s still petty harassment and I have real crimes on my plate.” He did sound a bit hesitant, though, which Kurtz noted with some satisfaction.

  “It’s petty harassment, so far, but it’s escalating. You want to bet that it will stay petty harassment?”

  Moran grunted. “True,” he said grudgingly. Then he gave a half-hearted grin. “Lucky for us we have two guys with your experience permanently on the scene.” O’Brien made a gagging motion behind his hand.

  “Thanks,” Kurtz said. “Thanks a lot.”

  Kurtz sipped his coffee, surreptitiously glanced at the clock hanging on the cafeteria wall and wondered when he had become Steinberg’s psychiatrist. It seemed that Steinberg had spoken with Stewart Serkin yesterday regarding the new call arrangements. To Steinberg’s chagrin, it turned out that Kyle Lerner had been correct. There had never been any intention to restrict night cases to life threatening emergencies. Of course, urgent cases were also going to be done. How could there have been any doubt?

  “Except that he specifically called me the day before the OR Committee,” Steinberg said. “He told me what the policy was and he ordered me to present it exactly the way I did.” Steinberg stared down at his coffee. His eyes were wide, his hands trembling.

  Serkin, in the interim between instructing Steinberg to promote and defend the new policy, and the morning of the OR Committee meeting, had conveniently decided to amend the policy, and had neglected to inform Steinberg of this fact. This, at least was Steinberg’s interpretation. Serkin’s interpretation, the official interpretation, was that Steinberg had misunderstood the new policy from the beginning. The scary thing about Serkin was that he actually seemed to believe his own bullshit. And at this point, even Steinberg was uncertain of what had really happened. “One week on the job and already I look like a goddamn idiot. I’m damned sure certain of that, at least.” He shook his head. “Jesus.”

  “Has it occurred to you that maybe that was the plan?” Kurtz asked.

  Steinberg drew a deep breath and gave a wan smile. “I think it was Napoleon who said, ‘Do not readily attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.’ So deliberately making me look like an idiot was probably not Serkin’s plan.”

  “Probably,” Kurtz said.

  “Yeah,” Steinberg said. “Probably.”

  “Or probably not.”

  Steinberg frowned. “Now you’re confusing me,” he said.

  Kurtz smiled. “That was the plan.”

  Maurice Sexton arrived back for his second interview on the following Monday. This time, he was scheduled to meet with the hospital director, the CFO, the departmental administrator, the chief of professional billing, the chief of cardiology and all of the surgical chairmen. Now, it was time to get serious.

  Mrs. Sexton came along with him, as well as the oldest Sexton child, a boy of fifteen. If Maurice Sexton became chairman, the family would have to move from Cleveland to New York. It was a big decision, a decision that involved the entire Sexton family. The Dean’s administrative assistant, a sharp-eyed woman named Marcia Cohen, was assigned to show Mrs. Sexton the available housing, the choicest neighborhoods and the best schools.

  Maurice Sexton was as affable as he had been on his previous visit, but it quickly became apparent that Maurice Sexton was a mistake. He had apparently not bothered to read the packet of information that he had been sent, which outlined the departmental budget, the administrative organization, the list of HMO contracts, the NIH grants and the biographies of the departmental staff. He claimed, in an easy, almost bored tone of voice, that he had never received it. This might have been chalked up to a postal error, except that Mrs. Sexton, apparently not realizing the implications of what she was saying, told Marcia Cohen that the information packet had been received at the Sexton household the week before. Maurice Sexton nodded politely when he was spoken to but was quite obviously just going through the motions. He had no plans, no ideas, and no questions beyond the obvious.

  “The guy is a jerk,” the Dean declared.

  “He doesn’t want the job,” Marcia Cohen said. She had dropped Mrs. Sexton off at their hotel an hour before and come back to report to her boss.

  “Then why did he interview for it? He’s wasting everybody’s time, including his own.”

  “This isn’t the only chair he’s looking at. He’s probably already negotiating with Duke or Harvard or UCSF.”

  The Dean glared at her. “So, we’re a negotiating chip? I want a chairman who’s interested in us.”

  “We’ll get one,” Marcia Cohen said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Right,” the Dean said, and glumly nodded.

  Chapter 11

  “My mother has bought herself a computer,” Lenore said.

  �
��Uh-oh,” Kurtz said.

  Lenore nodded. “An iMac G5. Aunt Sylvia insisted. A successful real estate agent has to stay connected to the market.” Lenore’s face was grim. “It wouldn’t be too bad if she just used it for business, but she’s discovered online shopping.”

  Kurtz shook his head. “Tough one. Let’s hope she doesn’t stumble on the porn.”

  Lenore winced. “Did you know that there are web sites devoted to planning weddings?”

  “I never thought about it.” Kurtz shrugged. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “She’s been bombarding me with phone calls.” Lenore shook her head. “I keep telling her; it’s a small wedding. One of the photographers in my office does weddings on the side. I’ve already asked him. One of my friends from college, Jennifer Schaefer, runs a catering business. I’ve already booked her. It’s true that we haven’t registered our patterns and I don’t have a dress, yet, but she’s hyper-ventilating.”

  “Patterns? What patterns?”

  “Dishes, silverware, cutlery, tablecloths. We’re supposed to register our patterns so people will know what to give us.”

  “Oh.” They didn’t register patterns where Kurtz came from, West Virginia being a bit less formal than Brooklyn. Then again, maybe they did. Kurtz was not exactly an expert on the etiquette of a modern, up-to-date wedding.

  Kurtz scratched his head. “The rabbi seems nice.”

  Rabbi Shmuel Levy, Congregation Beth Shalom. They had met with him in his office two weeks previous. The rabbi had smiled benignly at them both and said to Lenore, “Your mother gave me a call the other day. An interesting woman.”

  Lenore made a small distressed sound. Kurtz suppressed a chuckle. Lenore glowered at him.

  “In your mother’s opinion,” the Rabbi said, “Reform Judaism is a perversion of the natural order, just this side of Unitarianism.”

  “Wasn’t Thomas Jefferson a Unitarian?” Kurtz said.

  The Rabbi shrugged. “Beats me. Anyway, I did my best to reassure her that the Lord will nevertheless smile on your nuptials.” The Rabbi grinned. “I get the impression that she actually likes you but she doesn’t want to say so, you being of a scandalously un-Jewish persuasion. She has to maintain her status in the neighborhood.”