Flashback (1988)

by Palmer, Michael

  “Well, when Ms. Baron and her associates see the case you put together for their corporation, you will be a hero.”

  “But—”

  “That’s the way it is, Frank.”

  He swung back and replaced the photograph.

  Frank felt an all-too-familiar anger and frustration begin to well up. He cautioned himself against any outburst, and reminded himself to meet strength with strength.

  “Okay, Judge,” he said. “You obviously have your mind set on this thing.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, then, I’d like you at least to compromise on one thing—the audit. We weren’t scheduled for our general audit until next February. It will take me days to put everything together as it is, and it will throw my staff into chaos. Either cancel it or … or at least postpone it uniti next month.”

  The Judge shook his head.

  “Farley Berger says it’s got to be done in the next day or two in order for his team to have all the figures checked over by the meeting on Friday.”

  “But there’s nothing in the contract that says the audit has to be done by the board meeting. Make it two weeks.”

  Clayton Iverson thought for a minute.

  “Okay, Frank,” he relented, “you want two weeks, you’ve got two weeks.”

  That’s it, Judge, Frank thought exultantly. That’s it: that’s all I need.

  “I’m going to beat you, you know,” he said.

  “I hope so, son,” the Judge responded. “I truly do.”

  23

  For Zack, the day had resembled some of those during his residency. Two consults on the floors; assisting one of the orthopedists with a back case; admitting a three-year-old who had fallen off a swing, hit her headland then had a seizure; and finally, seeing half a dozen patients in the office. It was the sort of pace on which, ordinarily, he thrived.

  This day, it was all he could do to maintain his concentration.

  Six days had passed since his initial contact with Toby Nelms, and he was still unable to put together the pieces of the child’s diagnosis. For a time after his abortive interview with Jack Pearl, he had tried, as an exercise, to give the anesthesiologist the benefit of the doubt—to concoct another explanation that would jibe with the facts.

  He had cancelled his schedule for the day and driven to Boston for consultations with several anesthesiologists at Muni. He had also spent four hours in the Countway Medical Library at Harvard, reviewing every article he could find on Pentothal, isoflurane, and their complications.

  By the end of his search, he considered himself qualified as one of the experts in the field. Always, though, his efforts brought him back to his original hypothesis, and back to a single word: Metzenbaums.

  Now, in a few days, he would meet again with the boy and his mother. This time, Zack knew, Barbara Nelms would not settle for evasions and half-truths. The woman was desperate. She had every right to be.

  It was just after four in the afternoon. From the west, dusky mountain shadows inched up the valley toward Sterling. Zack had just finished a detailed discussion of Meniere’s disease with the last of his office patients.

  “I know exactly what you have,” he had told the elderly man, who had come because of intermittent dizziness and a persistent, most unpleasant hum in his ears. “Unfortunately, I also know there is very little we are going to be able to do beyond teaching you how to live with it.”

  He had ordered some tests in hopes of coming upon one of the rare, treatable causes of the condition, had passed on the address of the national society dealing with Meniere’s, and had expressed his regret at not being able to do more. The mans disappointment was predictable and understandable, but it was nonetheless painful for Zack.

  It’s not going to get you, Toby. Zack vowed as he watched his crestfallen patient shuffle from the office. The practice of medicine provided more than enough of the frustration and heartache that came from having no answers. In Toby Nelms’s case, the answers were there. And somehow, someone was going to supply them. Just hang in there, kid. Whatever’s going on, whatever they’ve done to you, it’s not going to get you.

  Zack sent his office nurse home early, alerted the answering service that he would be on his beeper, and spread the boys folder on his desk. Most of what he was rereading he knew by heart. After just a few minutes, he snatched up the phone and called Frank’s office. There was no alternative but to share his suspicions with his brother and try to enlist his help in another confrontation with Pearl.

  Frank was gone for the day, and his secretary had no idea where he was or when he would be back.

  A call to Mainwaring’s office gave him only the answering service, and the information he already had, that the surgeon was out of the state until the following Monday and was being covered by Greg Ormesby.

  “Answers,” he canted, drumming a pen on the edge of his desk. “There have got to be answers.… Where are you, Jason? … Who are you? … What do you know?”

  On an impulse, he checked his hospital directory and dialed the pathology department. Takashi Yoshimura answered on the first ring.

  “Kash,” he said, “if you can do it, and if it wouldn’t put you on the spot, I need a name.…”

  Ten minutes later, Zack was on the line with a Dr. Darryl Tarberry at Johns Hopkins.

  “Dr. Tarberry,” he said after explaining how he had come by the man’s name, and after listening patiently to ebullient praise of Kash Yoshimura and his work, “I am calling for a recommendation, but not for Dr. Yoshimura. Fortunately, we already have him on our staff. The man I’m interested in is Dr. Jason Mainwaring. Kash said you might have worked with him when he was at Hopkins.”

  For a few seconds there was only silence.

  “Who did you say you were?” Darryl Tarberry asked finally.

  From his recollection of the man, Yoshimura had guessed that Tarberry was in his mid-sixties by now. But from the harsh crackle in his voice, Zack wondered if he might be years older than that.

  “My name’s Iverson. Zachary Iverson,” he repeated. “I’m a neurosurgeon, and I’m on the credentials committee here.”

  Again there was a pause.

  “Mainwaring’s applying for surgical privileges at your place?” “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” Tarberry said. “Where did you say that hospital of yours was?”

  “New Hampshire, sir. Listen, I don’t want to put you on the spot, Dr. Tarberry, but we would certainly appreciate any information you can give us.”

  “This call being recorded?”

  Zack groaned.

  “No, I promise you it isn’t.”

  “I’m not putting anything on paper, now.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Mainwaring and his lawyers had this place tied up in knots for I don’t know how long. Damn lawyers. Ended up costing the hospital a small fortune to settle even though we were one hundred percent in the right as far as I’m concerned. One of my colleagues got ulcers from it. I swear he did. I don’t want that happening to me. I’m too damn old for that kind of nonsense.”

  “You have my word.”

  “Your word … Iverson, huh. That Swedish?”

  “English. It’s English,” Zack said, staring upward for some sort of celestial help.

  “Well, Iverson, I don’t know all the details.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “And as far as I’m concerned, we never had this conversation.”

  “Promise.”

  “Well,” the man said, drawing out every letter of the word, “let me tell you first that Mainwaring may be the most ambitious sonofabitch God ever put in a mask and gown, but he is one fine surgeon. Maybe the best I’ve seen, and I’ve seen plenty.”

  “Go on,” Zack said.…

  After fifteen minutes of prodding and cajoling, Zack felt he had extracted as much from Darryl Tarberry as he was likely to—at least over the phone. There was more to the story, he knew. Probably much more. But e
ven so, a huge piece had fallen into place in the puzzle of Toby Nelms.

  Zack was just finishing writing a synopsis of the interrogation when the door to his waiting room opened and closed.

  “I’m here,” he called out.

  “What a coincidence. So am I.”

  Suzanne appeared at his office door, wearing a lab coat over an ivory blouse and ainkle-length, madras skirt.

  “Got a minute?” she asked.

  “For you? Years.” He set the Tarberry notes in Toby Nelms’s folder and pushed it to one side of the desk. “Trouble with Annie?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. She’s doing amazingly well. I think Sam Christians going to do her hip tomorrow.”

  “Excellent. I’m so pissed off about what’s happened to her. Everytime I think about what Don Norman did, I want to hunt him down and flatten that pudgy little nose of his.”

  “Zack, I’m as upset as you are about Annie, but I don’t see how you can lay all the blame on Don. He didn’t do anything with malicious intent.”

  “That depends on your definition of malicious. He was sedating her so that she wouldn’t object to being sent to a nursing home, so that Ultramed could continue to rake in profits from her care. If that’s not malicious, I don’t know what is.”

  “Hey, easy does it, okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s your opinion. But it happens not to be everyone’s. Couldn’t you just let up on this place a bit?”

  “Huh?”

  “Zack, Frank just left my office.”

  “So, that’s where he’s been. I’ve been trying to reach him.”

  “He’s really upset with you.”

  “I know. Is that why he went to see you?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is. He … he wanted me to talk to you—to ask you to let up on your criticism of this place.”

  “He could have come and asked me himself.”

  “He says he tried.”

  “He was drunk. He threatened me. That’s not what I would call the optimal approach.… So, now he’s chosen to involve you. I can’t believe this place.”

  “Zachary, I didn’t come up here to pick a fight. I just wanted to do what I could to smooth things over between you two. I owe Frank a lot. I thought you understood that from all I told you of what happened to me.”

  “Sorry,” Zack mumbled. “If I’m touchy, I guess it’s that I just wish things were different between me and Frank.”

  “Well?”

  “Suzanne, I can’t help it if Frank thinks it’s my fault that the Judge is pushing the board of trustees to buy back the hospital from Ultramed.”

  It was clearly the first she had heard of that development.

  “My God, Zack, you can’t let him do that.”

  “First of all,” he said. “I have no more control over that man than Frank or anybody else does. And second, why not?”

  “Well … well because,” she stammered. “If the board threw Ultramed out, Frank would be ruined.”

  “Nonsense. He knows his job. He could do it just as well for a community corporation as he could for an operation like Ultramed. Better, probably. Suzanne, listen to me. Something’s wrong around here. Something’s terribly wrong.”

  “Dammit, Zachary, what is the matter with you? Don’t you have regard for anyone but yourself? I come here to ask you to let up on a man who is partly responsible for saving my career, to say nothing of his being your brother, and all you can do is … is tear down his hospital.”

  “It’s not his hospital. Look, I don’t want to get into a fight. I have too much on my mind.”

  “Like what?”

  Every instinct was clamoring for him to change the subject, to keep his theories to himself—at least as long as they were no more than that. He stared down at his hands. Darryl Tarberry’s revelations about Jason Mainwaring were too fresh in his mind.

  “Suzanne,” he said slowly, “I have reason—good reason—to believe that human experimentation is being conducted at this hospital.”

  “Now that is the wildest—”

  “And,” he cut in, “I have just as much reason to believe that you might have been one of the subjects.”

  Suzanne listened in wide-eyed disbelief as he recounted his experiences with Toby Nelms and Jack Pearl, his brief study of the gallbladder surgery performed by Mainwaring and Greg Ormesby, and finally, his conversation with Tarberry.

  “Apparently, a woman died of an anaphylactic reaction to a local anesthetic she received in Mainwaring’s office. Mainwaring claimed it was Xylocaine, but there was plenty of documentation that the woman had received that drug on numerous occasions with no problems. A nurse of his, who was very upset with what happened, charged that Mainwaring had been testing something out that wasn’t Xylocaine. Although investigators could never prove that was true, they did apparently discover that our friend Jason was part owner of a pharmaceutical house somewhere in the South.”

  “This is crazy!” Suzanne said. “Did that man you talked to at Hopkins happen to know what company this might have been?”

  “He couldn’t remember.”

  “He … couldn’t … remember … Zack, this is exactly the sort of thing Frank was protesting. These are terrible, disruptive charges you’re making on very little hard evidence.”

  “I’m not making any charges,” he said, feeling his composure beginning to slip. “I’m snaring a disturbing theory with a friend whose clinical judgment I value and trust. I would think you’d be frantic at the thought that someone might have been fooling around with your body while you were asleep.”

  “Well, I’m not frantic, I’m worried—about you. Zack, you’ve only been here a couple of weeks. In that time, you’ve clashed with Wil Marshfield, had words with Jason, fought with Don Norman, upset your brother, fostered a move to buy back the hospital, and now, on nothing more than the flimsiest circumstantial evidence, you’re accusing the finest surgeon and anesthesiologist on the staff of a terrible crime.”

  Zack pushed back his chair.

  “Suzanne, listen to me—”

  “No, you listen. How do you explain the fact that there hasn’t been one other case like Toby Nelms’s?”

  “I … I don’t know. Maybe it’s a rare complication of whatever it is they’re using. Maybe people have had episodes like his but they’ve happened in other places, or haven’t been brought to a doctor’s attention. Maybe there’s some sort of sensory trigger involved that just doesn’t happen to everyone. You told me yourself that you hadn’t been feeling right since your operation.”

  “I’ve been tired. That’s a far cry from having a psychotic seizure.”

  “What about that episode in the field?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You went blank.”

  “I did nothing of the sort.”

  “You did. It was as if someone threw a switch, and all of a sudden you weren’t there.”

  “Zack, this is crazy. You’ve got to back off. You’ve hit this place like an earthquake.”

  “Suzanne, that child is dying.”

  “Maybe so. But it’s not from something Jason or Jack Pearl did to him. One other case, Zachary. Just find me one other case like Toby Nelms and I’ll listen. Even then I may not believe you, but I’ll listen. In the meantime, I think you owe your brother, and all the rest of us for that matter, a little breathing room.” She stood up. “Back off, Zack. Please. Do what you can to keep your father from destroying what your brother has worked so hard to build, and give us all a rest.”

  She snatched up her handbag and, without waiting for a response, raced from the office.

  For a time, Zack sat numbly, staring out the window at the waning afternoon. A trigger, or a sequence of triggers. Perhaps that was the key. Suzanne had no recollection of the episode at the Meadows during their picnic, but something weird had happened to her. A switch had been thrown. But what? A word? A sound? A smell?

  Zack drummed h
is long fingers on the desk. He felt his thoughts darting out at the answer again and again, like the tongue of a snake. But each time not quite far enough … not quite far enough.…

  Finally, he slid Toby Nelms’s file back in front of him and opened it, once again, to the first page

  “They’re not going to get you, kid,” he whispered. “I swear, they’re not going to get you.”

  Even among the best of the old New England inns, the Granite House was special. The slanting, hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, and oddly shaped rooms, each with a stone hearth, were rated by the guides as only slightly less wonderful than the cuisine and service.

  Frank Iverson had chosen the spot carefully for his first encounter with the Davis Regional trustees; specifically, this night, a successful banker named Bill Crook, and Whitey Bourque, the rotund, often outspoken manager of the local A & P.

  The evening had gone well—better than he had dared hope.

  He had orchestrated the conversation beautifully, weaving accounts of Ultramed’s successes and plans in with reminiscences of some golf games he had shared with Crook, and some interested queries about Bourque’s daughter, Renée, one of the finest young horsewomen in the area.

  Now, as they sat in the otherwise deserted Colonial Room, sipping cognac and smoking after-dinner cigars, he felt ready to nail the two men down.

  There were twenty-one members of the board. Frank considered six of them to be all but in the bag either because of their relationship with him or because of business they would lose if Ultramed was forced out of Sterling. Allowing for two no-shows at the meeting—and given the boards track record, that was a conservative estimate—he would need only three or four more votes to block the buyback regardless of the Judges position.

  And at least half of those votes were right there at the table, sitting, it seemed, in the palm of his hand. All he needed to do, ever so carefully, was close his fingers.

  Unlimited potential …

  Frank allowed himself the flicker of a smile.

  Don’t go too far away, Ms. Baron, he thought, eyeing the two men over his snifter. I’m coming.