Silent Treatment

by Michael Palmer

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then that’ll be our goal. You told me who this Erdman is, and I know Sam Rennick. Who are the other guys?”

  “Bob Lord is the chief of staff. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He resents that I led the fight to continue to allow GPs to put simple, nondisplaced fractures in casts without referring our patients to a specialist. He’s very much into who’s got the power and who doesn’t, and I think he’s pretty tight with the surgeon Evie was involved with. I can’t imagine him siding with me on anything. Josephson and Atwater are a different story. They’re about the best friends I have around here. Steve—that’s Josephson—is the acting head of the family medicine department until Grace Segal gets back from a maternity leave. Atwater and I are both jazz nuts. We go to clubs together once in a while, and sometimes he comes to hear me play.”

  Harry expected the usual questions, like “Oh, what instrument do you play?” or “You play professionally? Where?” Instead, Wetstone straightened his notes and stood up.

  “I want to see if I can speak with Sam Rennick before we go in there,” he said. “I left a message for him to call my pager, but he hasn’t.”

  “You said you knew him. Perhaps he’s afraid of you.”

  Wetstone grinned, but his small, dark eyes were cold—all business.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but he should be.”

  There were fifteen floors in the Alexander Building. The elevator down was nearly full when it reached the seventh floor. By the time it reached the lobby, it was packed. A sign on the wall of the car warned passengers to guard their valuables against pickpockets. After thousands of trips, Harry had already reflexively shifted his wallet from his hip pocket to the front. He thought about what it would be like to work in a scrubbed little rural hospital with no crushes of people and no pickpocket warnings. He doubted that there was a single scrubbed little rural hospital this side of Bora Bora that would take him, should he be removed from the MMC staff.

  The conference room adjacent to Owen Erdman’s office featured a long, highly polished cherrywood table with rounded corners and an inlay of the MMC crest at the center. The twelve matching, high-backed chairs each had an identical crest in miniature inlaid at the top. Harry had been in the room once some years before, but was certain the remarkable set had not been there. He tried briefly to guess its value, then gave up when he realized he had absolutely no reference point. Evie would have known, he thought. Possibly to the dollar.

  Steve Josephson, Doug Atwater, and the orthopedist Bob Lord were there when Harry and Wetstone arrived.

  “How’re you doing?” Steve asked.

  Harry answered with a How do you think? shrug.

  “Do you have any idea who could have been responsible for doing this to Evie?” Doug asked.

  “Not really,” Harry said, careful to stop there.

  Wetstone had cautioned him against sharing his theory with anyone, even his allies.

  “Remember that party game of Telephone we used to play as kids?” the attorney had asked. “Well, take it from the voice of experience. No matter how well-meaning people are, the moment words are out of your mouth and into their ears, the original version begins to change.”

  Despite Wetstone’s caveat, Harry would not have hesitated to share the details of Evie’s secret life with either Josephson or Atwater had Bob Lord not been there. Instead, there was an uncomfortable minute and a half of silence before Erdman and the hospital counsel entered the room. With them was a trim, businesslike woman introduced as Ms. Hinkle, the hospital’s head of public relations. Harry shook her hand and felt as if he had grasped a Popsicle.

  “Dr. Corbett,” Sam Rennick began, “we wondered if you might start by reviewing the events—as you see them—from the night of your wife’s death.”

  “Now just a minute, Sam,” Wetstone rejoined immediately. “I thought we decided on what the ground rules were going to be here.…”

  Feeling strangely distant and distracted, Harry listened as two attorneys whom he had not even known before today debated his situation. From time to time, one of the others at the table spoke up. He even heard himself once or twice. But the voices seemed distorted, the meaning of their words often lost. The whole situation was just too surreal. Instead of being keen and focused, Harry’s thoughts were drifting. He tried to imagine how many hours—hundreds of hours, perhaps—he was now destined to spend in one type of legal proceeding or another. He had been thrust through the looking glass into a world where anything—however illogical or bizarre—was possible.

  Inexplicably, with the discussion of his professional future raging about him, he found himself thinking about a patient of his, a teenager named Melinda Olivera, whose severe mononucleosis he had recently diagnosed and treated so aggressively that within a day, she was able to attend her junior prom. Doctoring had always seemed so straightforward to him. A patient shows up sick and you do the best you can to fix them up. Now, suddenly, there were lawyers and administrators and public-relations directors.

  “I absolutely disagree.” Doug Atwater’s sharp words pierced Harry’s mental fog. Harry had no idea what was being discussed. “I have already reviewed matters with the CEO at Manhattan Health, and he has spoken with the medical director and several other key personnel. There has never been even one complaint about Dr. Corbett—his manner of practice, his fees, or his conduct. We see no reason why he shouldn’t continue to be on Manhattan Health’s role of providers.”

  “But what will the public think if—”

  Doug cut Ms. Hinkle short.

  “Please, I don’t mean to be rude, Barbara, but what we need is some sort of strong statement from the hospital that Dr. Corbett has been formally charged with nothing as yet, and we at this hospital …”

  Harry heard little of what followed, but not because his mind was wandering. He had reached inside the right-hand pocket of his sports jacket for a pen. There was none. What he felt instead were two objects he knew had not been there when he put the jacket on that morning. In fact, he knew they had not even been in his possession. Slowly, he clenched his fist around them and brought them out onto his lap.

  “It’s agreed, then,” Mel Wetstone was saying. “The hospital’s posture will be one of support for a respected staff member who has not been convicted of or even charged with a crime. For his part, Dr. Corbett will refrain from any public statements without clearing them with Ms. Hinkle. And his admitting and treatment privileges at this hospital will remain intact. Does that sound okay with you, Dr. Corbett?… Dr. Corbett?”

  “Huh? Oh, yes. Thank you all. That’s excellent.”

  He barely managed to pull his attention from his hand, now open on his lap. On his palm lay his watch and Evie’s rabbit’s-foot key chain and keys, gone when he awoke in Desiree’s apartment. At some point that morning, perhaps in the crowded elevator, Evie’s murderer had been standing behind him, or maybe even right next to him. The keys were meant as a reminder of how vulnerable he was—a warning to be very careful what he said and to whom. But there was also another possibility, he acknowledged, even more disturbing and chilling—the possibility that he was nothing more to his wife’s murderer than sport, a pawn in some macabre game.

  “Pardon?” Wetstone asked.

  “Excuse me?” Harry replied, again realizing he had drifted.

  “Harry, you just said something like, ‘I’m not going to be that easy.’ What did that mean?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Harry said, slipping the watch and keys back into his pocket. “Nothing important.”

  * * *

  Coroner Rules Manhattan

  Reporter’s Death a Homicide

  Kevin Loomis stared at the headline in the Times. The photo of Evelyn DellaRosa was the same as the one in her obituary. He tried, as he had for the past week, to convince himself that her resemblance to Desiree was coincidental. But deep inside, he knew the truth. A month and a half ago, wearing nothing but a bra and panties, she had kn
elt astride him, kneading the tightness from his back as she asked in a most flattering, disarming way about him and his life.

  Kevin read through the article. His hands were shaking so hard he had to keep the paper pressed to the table. At the last meeting, Desiree had been more or less dismissed as not a serious threat to The Roundtable. Then, just a few days later, she had been murdered in her hospital bed. Her doctor husband was a suspect, but no arrest had been made. Maybe that was because he hadn’t killed her.

  Kevin felt squeamish. Throughout the ride to the city, he tried to convince himself that he was reacting this way because of the intimacy, however artificial, that he had shared with the woman not so long ago. The newspapers—and by now he had read the account in all of them—told of marital problems. The Daily News alluded to a lover. Evelyn DellaRosa or Desiree or whoever the hell she was had been murdered by her husband, and that was that.

  Kevin did not remember making even one of the turns that took him from his driveway to the Crown Building in midtown Manhattan. He parked in the underground space with his name stenciled in blue on the wall and took the elevator up to his office on the thirty-first floor. Brenda Wallace was waiting for him, barely able to contain her enthusiasm as she told him the news, “Your wife called a few minutes ago, Mr. Loomis,” she said, breathless with excitement. “She said the people buying your house have gotten their mortgage and the bank has approved the deal for your new house in Port Chester.”

  Standing in the doorway behind her, Burt Dreiser gave Kevin a wink and a thumbs up. His expression left no doubt that he had played a role in expediting the sale.

  “I’m pretty good at finding ways to solve problems,” he had said that day on his boat.

  “The closing’s scheduled for Wednesday,” Brenda gushed on. “Mrs. Loomis says you can call her at the office if you want. She’ll be there until five. She also said to tell you that the house is really no big deal, and you don’t have to go through with it, but that next to the day you two got married, this is the happiest day of her life.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Maura Hughes’s apartment was on the Upper West Side, half a block from Morningside Park. Harry walked there from the office, hoping that Maura had been able to honor her promise to stay sober. Practicing in a fairly indigent area, he had encountered the disease of alcoholism in its most virulent, lethal form, as well as in its many other guises. It would be no exaggeration to say that he had seen even more tragedy caused by the bottle than he had seen in eighteen months in Nam. And it was hardly reassuring to have his future bound to a woman who had almost lost her life to drinking. Even sober, her credibility was thin. If she started drinking again, it was nonexistent.

  With Maura’s claims of a mystery doctor and no physical evidence connecting Harry to the Aramine injection, Dickinson had been denied an arrest warrant. But Mel Wetstone supported the detective’s assertion that based on the impressive circumstantial evidence, a grand jury would produce an indictment. The attorney seemed aroused by the prospect of defending Harry in what might well become a trial of Von Bülow proportions. Sex, adultery, insurance money, a beautiful reporter’s secret life, prostitution, arcane poisons, physicians. Ringmaster of a media circus at an hourly rate of $350. Harry tried to recall if he had ever considered attending law school.

  He passed a florist, debated picking up an assortment, then quickly rejected the notion. Flowers were too reminiscent of the hospital and too open to misinterpretation. Not that Maura Hughes had seemed the least bit interested in him as anything other than a source of Southern Comfort. But he had, over the years, endured unpleasant experiences with patients of both sexes who had misread the meaning of his commitment. In one case it was a concerned after-hours telephone call to a woman whose infatuation with him he had completely missed. Another was an extended late-night conversation at a young man’s hospital bedside.

  Harry finally settled on a box of chocolate-covered mints. If Maura was typical of someone newly sober, her desire for alcohol had been sublimated at least in part by a craving for sweets.

  The homes improved measurably as he approached Maura’s block. The apartment buildings had doormen, and a number of the brownstones were well maintained. It was nearing seven-thirty, but the evening was warm, cloudless, and quite light. Harry paused by a playground where a group of kids—black and white—were playing pickup basketball on a scarred blacktop court. They were mostly in their early teens and had no concept of teamwork, but their skills made them a joy to watch. He breathed in the energy of the city and felt some of the tension begin to ease from what had been an absolutely horrible day. The only bright spots were Doug Atwater’s successful efforts to keep him, at least for the time being, on the active staff at the hospital, and the almost continuous calls and gestures of support from his patients.

  Although he had no idea what to expect from Maura Hughes, he realized that he was looking forward to her company. He had played bass with the guys at C.C.’s once since Evie’s death, but most of his evenings had been spent alone.

  Her house was a neat four-story brownstone with six broad cement stairs rising from the sidewalk to an ornate mahogany door. There was a floor at street level, with no outside entryway and windows protected by heavy wrought-iron grates. Harry suspected this basement apartment was Maura’s. He was surprised to find that of the three bells, the topmost one was hers. He identified himself through an intercom, and she buzzed him in.

  “Head of the stairs,” she said.

  Her voice sounded sharp and animated—a hopeful sign. Harry mounted the stairs feeling some relief. As much as he needed company, having to babysit an actively drinking alcoholic was not the way he wanted to spend his free time. Maura was standing in the doorway to her apartment. His image of her from the hospital was of someone quite short. Actually, she was tall, five-nine or-ten, with a regal bearing and a willowy body that looked perfect in sneakers, worn jeans, and an oversized cotton shirt. She wore a white turban and no jewelry other than a pair of large hanging earrings—colorful chips of enamel delicately wired to one another so that they changed like a kaleidoscope with every movement of her head. She looked somewhat drawn and ill at ease. Her hand, thin and smooth, was cool. Except for the headdress, there was no way Harry could connect the lithe, unaffectedly elegant woman with the restless, wild-eyed patient he had known.

  He handed her the mints. She thanked him with a thin smile that had more sadness than mirth.

  “Come in. Come in, please,” she said.

  “Those earrings are really beautiful.”

  “Thanks. I made them.”

  Harry followed her into an expansive living room—a bright and airy square, perhaps thirty feet on a side. The narrow oak flooring was urethaned to a high gloss and scattered with Oriental area rugs. The ceilings were high, with recessed, indirect lighting that had to have been designed by a specialist in the craft. This was hardly the dingy, depressing two-room walk-up he had envisioned.

  “Surprised?” Maura said, reading his expression.

  Harry gestured to the walls, which were filled with wonderful paintings. The canvases were generally large and mostly oils or some kind of acrylic. But there were also watercolors and a few collages. Some, primarily portraits, were sad and starkly realistic. But the rest were abstract—dynamic worlds of color and shape, of meticulous organization and absolute chaos. Harry had never been a student of art, but he had always been affected by it. What he was sensing now was a remarkable vibrancy and an intense, overwhelming anger.

  “These are incredible,” he said, walking slowly about the room.

  “I don’t paint like that anymore. Not that I don’t want to.”

  “These are all yours?”

  “Even drunks can do things,” she said coolly.

  “Hey, I’m sorry if it sounded like that’s what I meant. It’s not. These paintings are really striking.”

  “Thanks. You want something? A Coke? Some wine?”

  “Coke would be
great.”

  Harry stopped himself at the last moment from commenting on the danger of keeping alcohol in the house. He followed her to the kitchen, which was small, but designed for someone who cared about cooking. To the left of it, he could see another huge room—a studio with several easels, stacks of canvases, and a large skylight. In the far corner, beneath a packed floor-to-ceiling bookcase and surrounded by ferns and various palms, was Maura’s bed.

  “Look, I—I’m sorry if I seem tense or nervous,” she said, her back to him as she filled two glasses. “It’s just that I am. I probably should have called and canceled.”

  She handed him his glass, led him back into the living room, and motioned him to a sofa opposite her chair. On the glass-top end table to her left was the Times, open to the article about Evie. Harry gestured toward the paper.

  “I guess if I was having a murder suspect over for a Coke, I’d be a little nervous, too,” he said.

  “I hope you know that isn’t it. You and I both know you didn’t give that drug to your wife.”

  “What then?”

  “Dr. Corbett, just why are you here?”

  “Look, please. My name’s Harry. Once I leave the office, I stop being Dr. Corbett.”

  “And have you?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Left the office. Dr. Corbett … Harry … my brother told me what you said to him about your being some sort of expert on alcoholism, and about how you have people who will help me and take me to AA meetings and all. If you’re here to save my soul, I think I can save both of us a long, uncomfortable evening. My soul is in the mood to be pickled, not saved.”

  “Hey, I don’t know exactly what I said to your brother, but I’m not an expert on anything, except maybe taking care of sick people.”

  “Then that’s not why you’re here? You’re not here to ensure that I don’t drink?”

  “I didn’t say that either. Tell me something. If you believed I was coming over to save your soul, as you put it, why did you say yes?”