Obsessed

by G. H. Ephron

  “Poor Leonard,” Shands said. For a moment his eyes went empty and his face sagged. Then he shook himself out of it. “The regulators are going to be all over us.”

  Dr. Pullaski took out a container of cream from the refrigerator and added some to her coffee, licking a drop that fell on a manicured fingernail. “We’ll deal with it.”

  MacRae closed the door of the office where he’d set up shop. He’d finished with Emily and now he was ready for the next course. He had his pad open, pen poised.

  “So when did you get here?” His look said, And don’t bullshit me.

  “A little after nine.”

  “A little after…” he repeated, his face impassive except for a little twitch in the jaw muscle. “That’s after we got here—you must have broken the sound barrier getting over here.”

  “Busted my ass.”

  “And how the hell did you get in?”

  “I came up the stairs from the garage.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “The lock on one of the doors was taped open.”

  “Damn,” he said, making a note. I suspected the officers securing the scene were going to get reamed. He finished writing and slowly looked up at me. “Taped open?”

  “Go look for yourselves.”

  “We will. So Dr. Ryan doesn’t show up for an appointment, and you rush over here to investigate. You go this protective on all your post-docs?” I reminded myself he wasn’t being obnoxious just for the hell of it—it was his job to find chinks in people’s stories.

  “Look, someone’s been stalking Dr. Ryan,” I said. “She’s had several incidents, one of them here. If you don’t believe me, look it up—the police responded. Naturally we were concerned that she might be the one who was hurt.”

  “So we rushed over to save the day?”

  I knew he was jerking my chain, but that was about the size of it. I folded my arms across my chest.

  “You knew Dr. Philbrick?” he asked.

  “A little. I’d met him twice. Both times here.” I told MacRae about the scan Philbrick had done on one of our patients. Reluctantly, I gave him the patient’s name. “Jack O’Neill.”

  MacRae’s eyebrows went up. “Annie’s uncle?”

  I nodded.

  “Great guy. One of the best beat cops in Somerville. Worked with juveniles better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Used to have kids actually come to the station asking for him. Kind of took over when Annie’s dad died.”

  It bothered me a lot that MacRae knew all this. I reminded myself he and Annie had grown up together. They’d gone to the same high school; their families were close. Still, I wanted to be the one that knew what mattered to Annie, not MacRae.

  “Is he sick?” MacRae asked.

  “He’s being evaluated.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Would you let Annie know I asked after him?”

  I nodded, having not the slightest intention of doing so.

  “What can you tell me about Dr. Philbrick?” he asked, getting back to the business at hand.

  I rattled off what I knew. That he’d worked with Shands for a long time. That Dr. Pullaski said he had a sister. And he’d taken his own MRI before.

  “Do-it-yourself MRI?” MacRae said, sounding incredulous.

  “He was an expert on MRI technology.”

  “An expert.” MacRae mulled the word. “So he knew it would be dangerous to bring that oxygen tank into the room?”

  “The magnetic field is never turned off,” I said, giving an oblique answer.

  MacRae blinked at me. He knew this was important information, he just didn’t know why.

  I went on, “So you see, Dr. Philbrick couldn’t have brought that oxygen tank into the scanning room himself.”

  I could almost see the wheels turning as MacRae grasped the implications. “So someone else had to have brought in the tank while Dr. Philbrick was in the machine,” he said. He made another note. “And what was the victim’s relationship to Dr. Ryan?”

  “Professional.” I felt a bit uncomfortable adding, “And they sometimes went out after work.”

  I could tell this was something he hadn’t expected.

  “Dr. Philbrick called me three times yesterday,” I told him.

  “He did? What for?”

  “I don’t know. We never talked.”

  “Had he ever called you before?”

  “No.”

  “Did it seem odd to you, his calling you like that?”

  “Not until now.”

  MacRae scratched his head. “Did you like him?”

  It was such a bizarre question, it took me a moment to find my answer. I could hear Emily’s take on Philbrick: He’s not so weird, once you get used to him. I remembered him with Uncle Jack, how gentle and compassionate he’d been.

  “Actually, I did.”

  I drove back to the hospital in a fog, barely aware of anything outside my head. My mind kept flashing pictures of Philbrick’s body and the blood on the floor. I turned on the radio loud and tried to flood my head with music.

  When I got back I checked in with Gloria. When she heard the news, she glanced uneasily about the nurses’ station. “The minute you let your guard down, that’s when accidents happen.” She got up and checked that the door to the med room was locked. “I’m glad you went over there. Poor Emily. I hope you sent her home.”

  “I tried to. But she insisted on coming here when they finished with her. Said work was better than staying home alone.”

  “Now where have I heard that before?”

  In the weeks after Kate died, I’d stalked the unit like a zombie. Gloria and Kwan had tried to get me to go home, but alone was the last place I wanted to be.

  “How about you? You okay?” Gloria asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I actually thought I was.

  I went up to my office. A few weeks ago I would have grabbed the phone and called Annie. Now I hesitated. This news would only confirm Annie’s conviction that University Medical Imaging was an evil place where basic safety procedures were ignored, where patients came out sicker than they went in. And I’d been the one who’d recommended it.

  I dialed her number. When she didn’t pick up, I left a message for her to call me back.

  At least I had plenty of work to bury myself in. I opened a spreadsheet and started on a budget revision. The room felt stuffy. I got up and opened the window, sat down again, and tried to concentrate. We’d be increasing our patient count by two, and decreasing staff by one. Welcome to the new millennium. I adjusted the numbers. Then I had to upload the new reimbursement schedule from the main computer and generate a forecast. I knew the results were going to be depressing.

  The window shade flapped in the breeze. I got up and half-closed the window. I’d just gotten back to work again when the beep-beep-beep of a truck distracted me again. I watched out the window as it backed up to the side of the building.

  I gave up and went downstairs. I found Kwan making himself a pot of tea.

  “I can’t get any work done,” I told him.

  “Work? You do work?” he asked, in mock amazement. He must have seen something in my look because his sardonic grin vanished. “Something’s getting to you.”

  “Feels like all the stars are out of alignment,” I said, and told him about what had happened that morning.

  “She was the only one there when it happened?” he asked.

  “She says she came in after.”

  “You mean someone caused a horrendous accident and then cleared out, leaving her there holding the bag? I’m not sure we should send any more patients over there for testing.”

  Of course this was exactly what Shands and Pullaski had been concerned about. For a medical lab, an unblemished safety record was an asset as important as any state-of-the-art machine.

  Kwan urged me to go to the caf with him for an early lunch. I had a salad and an omelet that could have been made from recycled Silly Putty. When I got back, I checked to see if Annie had called. She ha
dn’t.

  I couldn’t face the spreadsheet, so I went back down to the unit. I walked the corridors, checking in on patients as I went. There was a reassuring familiarity to the routine.

  Emily was in one of the rooms working with a new patient. I caught her eye. She gave a little nod.

  I wandered down the hall and into what had been Uncle Jack’s room. We couldn’t afford to keep beds empty. A new patient would be moved in there tomorrow. The only vestiges of Uncle Jack were a suitcase into which the staff had packed his belongings, and a stack of clippings from magazines and newspapers. I suspected Gloria was responsible for saving them. The sugar-packet collection, pens, and assorted other items that he’d amassed were gone.

  The suitcase was an old leather one, good quality, plastered with peeling travel decals. Yosemite. Mount Rushmore. It occurred to me how little I knew about Uncle Jack. Only that he was Annie’s uncle, a widower, and that he’d been a cop. A good cop. I thought about all the things he’d saved in his apartment and here. Hoarding. It was like trying to keep your footprints from washing away.

  I leafed through the clippings. There was an odd assortment of stuff. He seemed to like ads with sailboats, beaches, or golfers in them. Why not? He’d just reached that point in his life when he and his wife should have been able to finally enjoy all the things they’d never had time for before. She wasn’t supposed to die, and he wasn’t supposed to come down with dementia.

  I carried the suitcase and the clippings up to my office. When I opened the door the phone was ringing. It was Annie.

  Quickly I told her Leonard Philbrick was dead, and that I’d been at the MRI lab. “Looks like he was alone, operating the machine himself.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Giving himself an MRI. They’ve got a remote control rigged up.” I knew that sounded pretty strange. “Hey, he’s a researcher. These guys are a little nuts.”

  “So who brought the oxygen tank into the room?”

  “Emily says it wasn’t her.”

  “Emily Ryan?”

  I realized I’d managed to tell my story without mentioning that Emily was the reason I’d gone over to the MRI lab in the first place.

  “We were worried when Emily didn’t show up to meet with one of her patients. Then when I called…” My voice trailed off. “Gloria thought one of us should go over and see what was up.”

  “Gloria made you do it,” Annie said. “Test magnet. Oxygen tank. Isn’t it basically the same accident?”

  “Except this time it wasn’t her.”

  “You believe her?”

  The question hung there in the air. I didn’t want to admit the truth—that I was having a hard time believing Emily’s story. There was the errant beeper that Dr. Pullaski insisted she hadn’t found. That beeper was starting to feel like a flimsy excuse for coming in early so she could “find” the body. And now with Philbrick dead, there wasn’t anyone to back up her story. Maybe there’d been some other reason that she’d gone over there so early in the morning, someone she was meeting and was now trying to protect?

  “They’re not getting their hands on Uncle Jack again. Assuming he survives,” Annie said.

  “How is he?”

  “He’s really weak. This afternoon they had him on a respirator. I talked to his doctor.”

  “And?”

  “Hang on. I had to write it down.” There was silence on the line. “Here it is. Something about an opacity in the left lower lung. Bacterial infection. Elevated white blood count.”

  None of that sounded good. “At least we caught it early,” I said, trying to keep my voice upbeat. “A bacterial infection should respond to antibiotics.”

  “That’s what the doctor said.”

  “Nothing to do now but wait.”

  “Doctor said that, too. Waiting. Now that’s something I suck at.” Annie gave a tired laugh. “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’m way behind on work and—”

  “Annie, don’t hang up yet.” There was silence on the other end of the line. “You still there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I know you’re just barely hanging on right now, between Uncle Jack being so sick and work and all”—I took a breath—“but you’re shutting me out.”

  I heard a heavy sigh. Then, “Listen, I’m beat. And I’ve got eight million things to do. I probably won’t even have time for lunch—”

  “At least let me take you to dinner.”

  “The last thing I want to do is drive anywhere.”

  “I’ll pick you up, drive you home. You have to eat anyway, right?”

  “All I’ve got with me is jeans.”

  “Jeans are fine. It’s very informal. A little place in the North End.”

  “I’m so tired. I just want to go home.”

  This time I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “You’ll see. It feels like home.”

  We stepped through the gate under a glowing red neon sign: IDA’S ITALIAN CUISINE.

  “Wow,” Annie said, looking over the fence at the back of the little alley in the North End.

  Fifty feet below us, cars streamed out of the mouth of the Sumner Tunnel like water gushing from a storm drain. Behind us Hanover Street pulsed with pedestrians in this neighborhood that still boasted Boston’s best Italian restaurants. The air was thick with the smell of garlic.

  It felt wonderful to be somewhere with Annie other than a hospital. I held the restaurant door open. The tiny place really did feel like someone’s North End apartment with its linoleum floor and red-checked tablecloths. On the walls hung framed mirrors flecked with gold, and on high shelves there were basketed wine bottles alongside piles of plastic grapes.

  “Dr. Peter,” an older man said coming to greet us, his arms outstretched. He patted me on the back and seated us in the corner at the only empty table.

  “How on earth did you find this place?” Annie asked, fingering the plastic-covered menu, her gaze shifting from what looked like a pair of well-coiffed Back Bay matrons in designer suits at one table, to a pair of scruffy older men wearing zip-up jackets and talking animatedly in Italian at another. An older couple had gotten up to leave and was getting hugged good-bye by the waitress.

  “Actually, Kate found it.” Now I had Annie’s attention. “She read that Caroline Kennedy had a party here, so she had to try it. That was about ten years ago. We came the first time, loved the food—”

  “The funky atmosphere.”

  “The food,” I said. The waitress, a smiling blond woman whom I knew was the owner’s sister, brought us a basket of bread and a chipped earthenware carafe filled with homemade red wine. I poured some into the thick wine glasses that were on the table. I lifted my glass.

  “To Uncle Jack.”

  Annie smiled. “To Kate.”

  Over the kind of antipasto and soup my mother would have made if she were Italian, Annie told me about her work. She and Chip had struggled for the first year and a half after they left the public defender’s office. Now they had more work than they could handle.

  “This is unbelievably good,” Annie said after her first bite of Ida’s famous chicken—a roll of breast meat, browned and glistening in a rich sauce, stuffed with pine nuts, spinach, prosciutto, and cheese. She took another bite, leaned back, closed her eyes, and chewed. “You were right. I needed this.”

  “I needed this, too,” I said, and looked up at her. She knew I wasn’t referring to the food.

  I told Annie about the budget I had to balance and how I was trying to convince administrators at the Pearce to let us expand some of our outpatient services. She talked about the great resumes they’d gotten for the office staff they were adding. Neither of us wanted to talk about Uncle Jack’s dementia or Leonard Philbrick’s death.

  Annie was picking the last pine nut off her plate when the waitress came and cleared.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted and crabby,” Annie said. “Everything feels so…”

  “Chaotic?”

 
“Uh-huh.”

  The waitress brought us some coffee.

  “You don’t like it when things get out of control, do you?”

  Annie sat back and gave me a wry smile. “You going to analyze me?”

  “No, just making an observation,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. “Holding me at arm’s length isn’t going to make everything else fall into line.”

  “You think that’s what I’m doing?” She thought about it for a moment. “Maybe. It’s just that I’m feeling so overwhelmed. Uncle Jack was there for me when my father died, and the years before that, too, when my father had given up on life. Now I’m losing him.”

  Annie picked up her coffee and blew on it.

  “It hurts to lose someone you care about,” I said. “But keeping yourself from caring isn’t the answer.”

  The cup hovered an inch from Annie’s mouth. She put it down.

  “Believe me. I know what I’m talking about,” I added, reaching under the table to touch Annie’s leg.

  “I know you do,” Annie said, squeezing my hand.

  Too soon, dinner was over. It felt like it had been weeks ago that I’d raced over to the MRI lab to find Philbrick dead, not just that morning.

  The waitress brought the bill. I glanced at it. I fished out my wallet and slid out my credit card. But instead of putting it on the little tray, I just hung there, staring at it. It reminded me of something. Something I’d seen that morning but couldn’t put my finger on.

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture the room. The medical examiner was standing in front of the body. He stepped aside. There was Philbrick on the table wearing his lab coat, his skull crushed, his arm hanging off the edge. On a table were Philbrick’s belongings, his shattered eyeglasses…

  “I’ll take that for you,” the waitress said, offering to take my credit card.

  Suddenly I knew what I’d noticed but failed to register.

  That night I stayed at Annie’s. We made love, and then I held her until we both fell asleep.