Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

  Shit! Enough with the gloomy woulda, shoulda, coulda crap. He didn’t feel like just rolling over and going to sleep either. He grabbed the New York Magazine by his bed and flipped through the theater section. But it was long past curtain time, both on and off Broadway. Ought to kick himself in the ass for not having planned ahead and at least given himself a show.

  Then he had an idea.

  A crazy idea, but one that would be exactly the no-strings-attached, one-night-only encounter he felt in the mood for.

  “Could you connect me with the home of Dr. Melanie Collins, please,” he said, having contacted an operator at New York City Hospital. “It’s Dr. Mark Roper.”

  “The Chief of Internal Medicine?”

  He hadn’t known that about her. “Is there another Melanie Collins?”

  “I’ll see if she’ll take your call,” said the man on the other end. He didn’t sound very hopeful.

  “Dr. Roper,” Melanie said, when he was plugged through to her. “This is a surprise.”

  “It is for me, too. I had to stay over unexpectedly. If you have time, I wondered if we could continue our conversation about Kelly?”

  She gave a throaty chuckle that made more than his hopes rise. “Sure, if you like. But I just ordered some Chinese food. Say, why don’t you come on over here and share it with me – they always send too much – and I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

  It was so blatant a response to his overture, despite its being exactly what he had in mind, he went briefly dumbstruck. What was his problem? Seconds ago he’d wanted her to say yes. Now he balked. Why? He certainly had no hang-ups about women who took the initiative, in fact, quite enjoyed them. The age difference? No, he’d been there, too. Yet from the place in his stomach that turned when he encountered a bad taste or a foul smell, he once again felt a slight revulsion. This wasn’t right for him. “Oh, thank you, that’s really generous, but I’ve got an early meeting, which is why I’m staying over. I was hoping we could talk on the phone.”

  “I see.” Her tone of voice had cooled to about minus twenty. “Of course. What did you want to know?”

  Chapter 7

  Sunday, November 18, 6:55 A.M.

  The wind buffeted Mark as he jogged across Fifth Avenue toward the side entrance of the Plaza, but he didn’t feel cold. His run up to the reservoir and back had left him hot and sweaty. A funnel of gold leaves spiraled to the ground and swirled around his feet. Looking over his shoulder to the east, a streak of dawn bright as a polished steel blade hurt his eyes. He hurried inside and, when he got to his room, showered for a long time. Needles of steaming hot water pelted his skull as he lost himself in the din. Then he turned the cold on full.

  An hour later he was ready, his head buzzing from the cups of black coffee he’d downed thanks to room service. Carrying his briefcase, he arrived at the Palm Court early only to find Earl already seated at a table reading the Sunday Herald while sipping a cup of coffee. Earl looked rested, clear-eyed, and calm – everything Mark wasn’t.

  He’d been on the Internet until two-thirty, having gone back to learn more about Earl in preparation for their meeting. The man was impressive. Stellar in the field of emergency medicine. A long string of journal publications bearing his name. And a nose for rooting out trouble. More than once he’d made national headlines for his part in exposing deadly malfeasance in the health care field, often at great personal risk. Definitely not the sort to bend under pressure, cow before danger, or compromise to save his own skin. But he might do the right thing on behalf of Kelly.

  “Morning,” Earl said, appraising him with the thousand-yard stare Mark would expect from someone who’d survived over twenty years in the pit and thrived on it. Gone was any hint of the sadness he’d seen at Kelly’s wake. This was a guy on full alert.

  Mark slid into the chair opposite. “Morning.”

  This early on a Sunday the ornate, gold-and-cream room was nearly empty. Waiters in green-striped vests descended on them, handing them menus, filling their water glasses, offering coffee, juice, croissants, jams, and butter, then suggesting a selection of entrées to start.

  “I’m fine,” Earl said

  Mark ordered tea.

  The staff retreated, disappointment etched on their faces.

  Before Mark could say a word of his carefully prepared intro that he hoped would ease the tension, Earl spoke. “If you’re here as a cop, Mark, get on with it, and I don’t talk to you without a lawyer present.” His voice was calm, his manner pleasant, but his gaze rock hard.

  Shit! “Please, Dr. Garnet. I’d prefer we keep this informal, off the record, and that you simply tell me your take on what I found in my father’s files.”

  Earl studied him, eye to eye, but said nothing.

  Mark opened the briefcase, retrieved a copy of Kelly’s letter from a manila folder, and placed it in front of him. “To begin with, here’s what she wrote about you.”

  Earl regarded it skeptically.

  “Just take a look. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about any of it, I go my way and do what I have to do. You do the same. But I think we can avoid that.”

  He didn’t make a move.

  “Dr. Garnet, I figure there are two possibilities here. Either you’re the good man that letter and your record say you are, or you’ve been a brilliant fraud, and should be made to answer to the police about your affair with Kelly and what part it played in her disappearance. Me, I’m betting on the first.”

  Earl picked up the sheet of paper and began to read intently, the tension draining from his face. Within moments, he was trying to fight back tears.

  Her words on paper sounded as clearly in Earl’s head as if she spoke them in his ear. From the secret place his memories of her had hidden themselves over half a lifetime ago came a rush of forgotten sensations – the musical sound of her voice, her scent, the electric feel of her fingers on his flesh. And his agony after her disappearance.

  I’ve met a man.

  A wonderful, caring man who loves me, and I love him.

  What a release it is to be cherished, respected, and liked. I feel as if all the other garbage has fallen away, and I’m free, with a new life ahead of me. Whether it will be with him or not, I don’t know, but I’m full of hope. I haven’t decided yet what to do about it all, and look forward to talking over possible strategies with you. But I am ecstatic!

  In a scar so hardened with time that he barely knew it was there, something gave. It felt as real to him as if withered bands of connective tissue no longer able to hold their burden had split open, and a release he’d never expected to find spread through him. Decades after the doubts stopped mattering, he finally learned she’d loved him.

  Logically he knew that after all these years he shouldn’t have been affected so deeply. Not until he brought his hand to his mouth in a reflex of disbelief and felt his tears did he realize he’d involuntarily begun to cry. “Excuse me,” he said, hastily dabbing his eyes with his napkin. “This took me by surprise.”

  “I understand.”

  In Mark’s quiet voice Earl recognized the same nonjudgmental tone he’d often used himself to encourage a distraught patient to talk. Damned effective. He found himself wanting to explain his reaction, especially to someone who’d known Kelly. That Mark was also the son of Cam Roper, the man in whom she’d confided, made it seem even more like speaking directly to a link with her. “I thought she just ran out, on me, on medicine, everything. That I loved her more than she loved me. That she simply wanted to disappear…” He wiped his eyes again. “Sorry. The human heart can be a sneaky organ.”

  “We both lost a lot that summer.”

  Earl tabled the napkin. “Yes, you said she was like a sister to you.”

  Mark seemed about to say something, but instead reached into his briefcase and placed a file on the table. “This contains photocopies of everything in my father’s chart on Kelly.” He flipped open the cover. “What do you make of that?”

 
Earl glanced down at the page and found himself looking at a record of Kelly’s visit to Cam Roper as a little girl. Soon hard clinical logic displaced the emotional quicksand of the last few minutes – ER had trained him to make that kind of quick change with personal feelings – and he studied it with his full concentration. Reaching the end, he flipped the paper over. “No follow-up?”

  “Apparently not.”

  He needed only a few seconds to piece together his initial opinion. “I’d suspect the symptoms were functional, possibly stress-related, just as your father did. I’d also agree with his insinuation in the margin that the mother played a big part in the problem. Clearly she ran from doctor to doctor, probably needing excessive reassurances that her daughter was okay. Except…” He trailed off, interrupted by the memory of Kelly arching against him, making love with the lights off. Always with the lights off because of the scars. But he could feel them – a bad job by whoever had closed the wounds, both of them being as rough and wide as a small rope. On their first night together when he asked about it, she grew embarrassed. “I had problems when I was a kid. It’s over now. Please, don’t talk about them. They’re so ugly.” But of course he’d eventually seen them, catching glimpses in the ambient light through the window and once by a full moon, when she fell asleep lying on her back with the covers half off. They looked like sterling ridges on a silver tray.

  “Except what?” Mark asked.

  “Those scars bothered her, even into adulthood. I’d say they were left by a surgeon who could have used some practice.”

  He flipped ahead, seeing entries indicating Cam Roper had provided Kelly with support therapy over several years, from 1970 until 1974. “Obviously these sessions involved other kinds of scars. Invisible ones. God knows Chaz gave her enough cause for grief, and Samantha wasn’t exactly a mother of the year.”

  Mark nodded.

  “What are these doing here?” Earl asked, finding what he immediately recognized from their format as reports from NYCH Death Rounds.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look at them too closely – figured they must have been misfiled.”

  Earl riffled through them. After years of auditing his own department, he could read the chart of a resuscitation and run it like a movie in his head. He just didn’t glean information; he could place himself in the middle of the action and sense whether the team had worked together with grace or in utter discord. Most telling was the order sheet. The time entries indicated what drugs they gave in what sequence and revealed not only whether they’d done the right things, but if they’d been fast enough doing them. In minutes he had both cases pegged and more. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Mark.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes.” He spread the papers out between them. “First the cases themselves. Both received the right treatment in a timely enough way, but the woman was a close call. Initially, whoever ran the arrest almost fell into the trap of ordering more digoxin. See where the order’s been written, then canceled?” He pointed at the appropriate line. “One person figured out what was really going on in the nick of time. After that, everything went like a charm.”

  “Okay, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Kelly-”

  “Not so. Look at this signature on one of the orders.”

  Mark peered at the paper. “I can’t make it out.”

  “Not surprising, given how we all scrawl our names.” said Earl. Doctors’ signatures were always indecipherable. That’s why residents and physicians had to enter their training or license numbers after anything they wrote in a chart. “But some of these stand out to me because we were in a study group together all through med school. I’d recognize them as surely as if I’d gone through a yearbook of old class photos.” He picked up the photocopy of Kelly’s letter, folded it to the bottom third where she’d signed Kelly, and shoved it beside the order sheet. “Recognize the handwriting?”

  Mark grabbed both papers and held them up together. “My God, it’s her signature!”

  “She was there, Mark.” He pushed the order sheet for the man who’d died toward him. “And at this patient’s resuscitation as well. Her name appears several places.”

  “My God.” Mark looked up from studying the papers. “But you said they managed this guy fine from the get-go, besides the fact he died.”

  “Right. His was the more typical, straightforward presentation of digoxin toxicity, the usual slow heart rate that, when a patient’s on the medication, immediately makes us all think of the right diagnosis. So everybody was on the ball with him.”

  “So why would my father keep a copy of either case in her file?”

  “Look at the staffman’s initials on both order sheets.”

  State regulations demanded that all orders by trainees must be countersigned by their supervising physicians. Most scribbled only their initials and license number.

  Mark once more peered at the entries. “C. B. – Chaz Braden?”

  “We can check his license number to be sure, but I’d say that’s the reason these files were with your father.”

  “Because they were Chaz’s cases?”

  Earl leaned back and took a sip of what by now was cold coffee. “Because Kelly feared Chaz,” he said.

  Mark stopped midway reaching for his teacup. “Pardon?”

  Earl leaned forward. “Think about her preparing to run from a man who might come after her. Maybe she brought his M and M cases to your dad and asked him to check them out, hoping to find if hubby had screwed up, trying to get something that would have given her leverage over him. She might have figured on using it to keep him at bay, making it easier for her to leave.” He picked her letter up from the table and pointed to where she’d written:

  Regarding the other two matters, we must discuss those. Whatever I plan for myself, I can’t leave and let them go unresolved.

  “She could be referring to something her husband did wrong with these two cases.”

  “But you just said, apart from a close call, they were free from screwups.”

  “That brings us back to your original question – why your father would bother to hang on to them. He must have still thought something seemed wrong. After all, even a case review can miss mistakes.”

  “Not often.”

  “They would if the doctor in question was an amoral son of a bitch intent on covering them up and had successfully falsified the records. Maybe Kelly and your father wanted to subject Chaz’s work to a bit more scrutiny.”

  Earl knew he’d made spectacular leaps in logic to entertain such an extraordinary set of conclusions. He also knew they’d have to go through the original files in their entirety to ever prove what he’d just suggested. Even then, supposing his hunches were correct, they still might not find anything incriminating if Braden had covered his tracks well enough. But this was the first sign that evidence against Chaz might exist after all – evidence that would show he’d made lethal mistakes, then tried to hide them, and that Kelly found out, perhaps confronted him – he grabbed the order sheet from Mark, his excitement growing.

  “I think I can make out a few other names from my class. Two of them, Tommy Leannis and Melanie Collins, attended the memorial service. And check this out. According to her signature here, Melanie seems to be the one who counteracted the order for digoxin and saved the day. With the license numbers of the people I don’t recognize, I could track them down for questioning as well. Maybe a few of them will tell me whether they remember anything screwy about working with Braden on cases involving digoxin. Most of us recall errors by our former professors, though we wouldn’t dare talk about it much at the time.” As he spoke, a sense of exhilaration swept through him. After nearly two weeks of holding his breath, helpless to do anything – the worst kind of agony for someone whose every instinct in a crisis is to act – he had something concrete to pursue.

  “Wait a minute,” said Mark. “I’m the one to follow up on that. You and Kelly weren’t as discreet as you think.�
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  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the last thing you need is for one of your former classmates to put two and two together the way I did and nail you as the mystery man. Somebody is liable to do exactly that if you show undue interest in solving Kelly’s murder. I can just hear Chaz Braden suggesting the idea that his wife had realized she’d made a mistake having an affair, but you killed her when she tried to break it off. The NYPD would be back in the case and on your ass in a flash.”

  “And I’ll say the mistake she made was to tell Braden she intended to leave him, and he killed her for it.”

  “Terrific. The cops will throw you both in jail-”

  “Mark, I’m doing it, and that’s that. The only hope I have of ever getting free of this mess before it destroys my whole fucking life is to catch the real killer, presumably Chaz Braden. The people we need to talk with at NYCH – classmates, nurses, and doctors – they’re all of the era when I did my training there. Chances are they’ll still consider me one of them and will open up, despite pressure from the Bradens on everyone to keep their mouths shut. Even the ones who think they don’t have any information, if I can get them reminiscing, might spill something useful.” He turned back to Kelly’s file. Nothing but a bunch of newspaper clippings remained. “Now what the hell are these?” he said, picking them up. Unaccustomed to being opposed or explaining his actions once he’d made up his mind, he considered the issue of who would do what closed. The sooner Mark realized that asking Earl Garnet to stay hands off and lay low was tantamount to telling him not to breathe, the better the two of them would work together.

  “Articles about the good works of the Braden bunch,” Mark said in a quiet voice, the argumentative tone from seconds ago vanished.

  Obviously a fast learner.

  Earl skimmed through them as best he could, the faded cuttings not having reproduced well in the photocopier. They seemed unremarkable. “Mean anything to you?” he asked.