Side Effects (1984)

by Palmer, Michael

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Sheila muttered.

  “Pardon, ma’am?”

  “Oh, nothing, dear. Listen, you’ve been turning the wrong way at that corridor back there. Come, I’ll show you.” She handed back the vials and the requisition and then guided the girl to the door of her office. “There,” she said sweetly. “Just turn right there and go all the way down until you see a cloudy-glass door like mine with Special Chemistries written on it. Okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you, ma’am.” Robyn Smithers raced down the corridor.

  “Glad to help … you dumb little shit.”

  Sheila listened until she heard the door to Special Chemistries open and close; then she went to her phone and dialed the cubicle of Marvin Grimes. Grimes was the department’s deiner, the preparer of bodies for autopsy. It was a position he had held for as long as anyone could remember.

  “Marvin,” Sheila asked, “could you tell me the names of the cases we autopsied today?”

  “Jes’ two, Ms. Pierce. The old lady Partridge ‘n’ the ball player.”

  “No one named Schultz?” Sheila pictured the bottle of Wild Irish Rose Grimes kept in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk; she wondered if by the end of the day the old man would even remember talking to her.

  “No siree. No Schultz today.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Wait, now. Let me check. Nope, only McDonald, Lacey, Briggs, and Ca … Capez … Capezio. No one named … what did you say the name was?”

  “Never mind, Marvin. Don’t worry about it.”

  As she replaced the receiver, Sheila tried to estimate the time it would take the technicians in Special Chemistries to complete a stat screen for drugs of abuse.

  “Curiouser and curiouser and curiouser,” she said.

  The dozen or so buildings at Metropolitan Hospital were connected by a series of tunnels, so tortuous and poorly lit that the hospital had recommended that its employees avoid them if walking alone. Several assaults and the crash of a laundry train into a patient’s stretcher only enhanced the grisly reputation of the tunnel, as did the now classic Harvard Medical School senior show, Rats. Kate, unmindful of the legends and tales, had used the tunnels freely since her medical student days, and except for once coming upon the hours-old corpse of a drunk, nestled peacefully in a small concrete alcove by his half-empty bottle of Thunderbird, she had encountered little to add to the lore. The single greatest threat she faced each time she traveled underground from one building to another was that of getting lost by forgetting a twist or a turn or by missing the crack shaped like Italy that signaled to her the turnoff to the administration building. At various times over the years, she had headed for the surgical building and ended up in the massive boiler room, or headed for a conference in the amphitheater, only to dead end at the huge steam pressers of the laundry building.

  Concentrating on not overlooking the landmarks and grime-dimmed signs, Kate made her way through the beige-painted maze toward the computer suite and Marco Sebastian. Nurses in twos and threes passed by in each direction, heralding the approach of the three o’clock change in shift. Kate wondered how many thousands of nurses had over the years walked these tunnels on the way to their charges. The Metro tradition: nurses, professors of surgery, medical school deans, country practitioners, even Nobel laureates. Now, in her own way and through her own abilities, she was becoming part of that tradition. Jared had to know how important that was to her. She had shared with him the ugly secrets of her prior marriage and stifling, often futile life. Surely he knew what all this meant.

  In typically efficient Metro fashion, the computer facilities were situated on the top floor of the pediatrics building, as far as possible from the administrative offices that used them the most. Kate paused by the elevator and thought about tackling the six flights of stairs instead. The day, not yet nearly over, had her feeling at once exhausted and exhilarated. Three difficult surgical cases had followed the Geary autopsy. Just as she was completing the last of them, a Special Chemistries technician had dropped off the results of Geary’s blood test. The amphetamine level in his body was enormous, quite enough to have thrown him into pulmonary edema. Before she could call Stan Willoughby with the results, she was summoned to his office. The meeting there, with Willoughby and the detective, Martin Finn, had been brief. Evidence found on a careful search of Bobby Geary’s condominium had yielded strong evidence that the man was a heavy amphetamine user. It was information known only to the three of them. Finn was adamant—barring any findings suggesting that Geary’s death was not an accidental overdose, there seemed little to be gained and much to be lost by making the revelation public. The official story would be of a heart attack, secondary to an anomaly of one coronary artery.

  The elevator arrived at the moment Kate had decided on the stairs. She changed her mind in time to slip between the closing doors. Marco Sebastian, expansive in his white lab coat and as jovial as ever, met her with a bear hug. She had been a favorite of his since their first meeting, nearly seven years before. In fact, he and his wife had once made a concerted effort to fix her up with his brother-in-law, a caterer from East Boston. After a rapid-fire series of questions to bring himself up to date on Jared, the job, Willoughby, and the results of their collaborative study, the engineer led her into his office and sat her down next to him, facing the terminal display screen on his desk.

  “Now then, Dr. Bennett,” he said in a voice with the deep smoothness of an operatic baritone, “what tidbits can I resurrect for you this time from the depths of our electronic jungle? Do you wish the hat size of our first chief of medicine? We have it. The number of syringes syringed in the last calendar year? Can do. The number of warts on the derriere of our esteemed administrator? You have merely to ask.”

  “Actually, Marco, I wasn’t after anything nearly so exotic. Just a name.”

  “The first baby born here was …” He punched a set of keys and then another. “… Jessica Peerless, February eighteenth, eighteen forty-three.”

  “Marco, that wasn’t the name I had in mind.”

  “How about the two hundredth appendectomy?”

  “Nope.”

  “The twenty-eight past directors of nursing?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m sorry, Marco.”

  “All this data, and nobody wants any of it.” The man was genuinely crestfallen. “I keep telling our beloved administrator that we are being underused, but I don’t think he has the imagination to know what questions to ask. Periodically, I send him tables showing that the cafeteria is overspending on pasta or that ten percent of our patients have ninety percent of our serious diseases, just to pique his interest, remind him that we’re still here.”

  “My name?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m sorry. It’s been a little slow here. I guess you can tell that.”

  “It’s Rittenhouse, Ginger Rittenhouse. Here’s her address, birthplace, and birthdate. That’s all I have. I need to know if she’s ever been a patient of this hospital, in or out.”

  “Keep your eyes on the screen,” Sebastian said dramatically. Thirty seconds later, he shook his head. “Nada. A Shirley Rittenhouse in nineteen fifty-six, but no others.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Sebastian gave her a look that might have been anticipated from a judge who had been asked, “Do you really think your decision is fair?”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Of course, she still could have been a patient of the Omnicenter.”

  Kate stiffened. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the Omnicenter is sort of a separate entity from the rest of Metro. This system here handles records and billing for the Ashburton inpatient service, but the Omnicenter is totally self-contained. Has been since the day they put the units in—what is it?—nine, ten years ago.”

  “Isn’t that strange?”

  “Strange is normal around this place,” Sebastian said.

  “Can’t you even plug this system into the one over th
ere?”

  “Nope. Don’t know the access codes. Carl Horner, the engineer who runs the electronics there, plays things pretty close to the vest. You know Horner?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Kate tried to remember if, during any of her visits to the Omnicenter as a patient, she had even seen the man. “Why do you suppose they’re so secretive?”

  “Not secretive so much as careful. I play around with numbers here; Horner and the Omnicenter people live and die by them. Every bit of that place is computerized: records, appointments, billing, even the prescriptions.”

  “I know. I go there for my own care.”

  “Then you can imagine what would happen if even a small fly got dropped into their ointment. Horner is a genius, let me tell you, but he is a bit eccentric. He was writing advanced programs when the rest of us were still trying to spell IBM. From what I’ve heard, complete independence from the rest of the system is one of the conditions he insisted upon before taking the Omnicenter job in the first place.”

  “So how do I find out if Ginger Rittenhouse has ever been a patient there? It’s important, Marco. Maybe very important.”

  “Well, Paleolithic as it may sound, we call and ask.”

  “The phone?”

  Marco Sebastian shrugged sheepishly and nodded.

  * * *

  DEAD END. Alone in her office, Kate doodled the words on a yellow legal pad, first in block print, then in script, and finally in a variety of calligraphies, learned through one of several “self-enrichment” courses she had taken during her two years with Art. According to Carl Horner, Marco Sebastian’s counterpart at the Omnicenter, Ginger Rittenhouse had never been a patient there. Tom Engleson had succeeded in contacting the woman’s roommate, but her acquaintance and living arrangement with Ginger were recent ones. Aside from a prior address, Engleson had gleaned no new information. Connections thus far between the woman and Beverly Vitale: zero.

  Outside, the daylong dusting of snow had given way to thick, wet flakes that were beginning to cover. The homeward commute was going to be a bear. Kate tried to ignore the prospect and reflect instead on what her next move might be in evaluating the microsclerosis cases—perhaps an attempt to find a friend or family member who knew Ginger Rittenhouse better than her new roommate. She might present the two women’s pathologies at a regional conference of some sort, hoping to luck into yet a third case. She looked at the uncompleted work on her desk. Face it, she realized, with the amount of spare time she had to run around playing epidemiologist, the mystery of the ovarian microsclerosis seemed destined to remain just that.

  For a time, her dread of the drive home did battle with the need to get there in order to grocery shop and set out some sort of dinner for the two of them. Originally, they had tried to eschew traditional roles in setting up and maintaining their household, but both rapidly realized that their traditional upbringings made that arrangement impractical if not impossible. The shopping and food preparation had reverted to her, the maintenance of their physical plant to Jared. Day-to-day finances, they agreed, were beyond either of their abilities and therefore to be shared. Again she checked out the window. Then after a final hesitation, a final thought about calling home and leaving a message on their machine that she was going to work late, she pushed herself away from the desk.

  As she stood up, she decided: if it was going to be dinner, then dammit, it was going to be a special dinner. In medical school and residency, she had always been able to find an extra gear, a reserve jet of energy, when she needed it. Perhaps tonight her marriage could use a romantic, gourmet dinner more than it could her moaning about the exhausting day she had endured. Spinach salad, shrimp curry, candles, Grgich Hills Chardonnay, maybe even a chocolate soufflé. She ticked off a mental shopping list as she slipped a few scientific reprints into her briefcase, bundled herself against the rush-hour snow, and hurried from her office, pleased to sense the beginnings of a surge. It was good to know she still had one.

  In the quiet of his windowless office, Carl Horner spoke through his fingertips to the information storage and retrieval system in the next room. He had implicit faith in his machines, in their perfection. If there was a problem, as it now seemed there was, the source, he felt certain, was human—either himself or someone at the company. Again and again his fingers asked. Again and again the answers were the same. Finally, he turned from his console to one of two black phones on his desk. A series of seven numbers opened a connection in Buffalo, New York; four numbers more activated the line to a “dead box” in Atlanta; and a final three completed an untraceable connection to Darlington, Kentucky.

  Cyrus Redding answered on the first ring.

  “Carl?”

  “Orange red, Cyrus.” Had the colors been reversed, Redding would have been warned either that someone was monitoring Horner’s call or that the possibility of a tap existed.

  “I can talk,” Redding said.

  “Cyrus, a woman named Kate Bennett, a pathologist at Metro, just called asking for information on two women who died from the same unusual bleeding disorder.”

  “Patients of ours?”

  “That is affirmative, although Dr. Bennett is only aware that one of them is. Both women had autopsies that showed, in addition to the blood problems, a rare condition of their ovaries.”

  “Have you asked the Monkeys about them?”

  “Affirmative. The Monkeys say there is no connection here.”

  “Does that make sense to you, Carl?”

  “Negative.”

  “Keep looking into matters. I want a sheet about this Doctor Bennett.”

  “I’ll learn what I can and teletype it tomorrow.”

  “Tonight.”

  “Tonight, then.”

  “Be well, old friend.”

  “And you, Cyrus. You’ll hear from me later.”

  4

  Wednesday 12 December

  “Coronary Strikes Out Bobby.” Kate cringed at the Boston Herald headline on her office desk. The story was one of the rare events that managed to make the front page in both that paper and the Boston Globe. Though the Globe’s treatment was more detailed, the lead and side articles said essentially the same thing in the two papers. Bobby Geary, beloved son of Albert and Maureen Geary, son of the city itself, had been taken without warning by a clot as thin as the stitching on a baseball. The stories, many of them by sportswriters, were the heart-rending stuff of which Pulitzers are made, the only problem being that they weren’t true.

  The storm, which had begun the evening before, had dumped a quick eight inches of snow on the city before skulking off over the North Atlantic. However, neither the columns of journalistic half-truths nor the painful drive into the city could dampen the warmth left by the talking and the sharing that had followed the candlelight meal Kate had prepared for her husband. For the first time in years, Jared had talked about his disastrous first marriage and the daughter he would, in all likelihood, never see again. “Gone to find something better” was all the note from his wife had said. The trail of the woman and her daughter had grown cold in New York and finally vanished in a morass of evanescent religious cults throughout southern and central California. “Gone to find something better.”

  Jared had cried as he spoke of the Vermont years, of his need then to break clear of his father’s expectations and build a life for himself. Kate had dried his tears with her lips and listened to the confusion and pain of a marriage that was far more an act of rebellion than one of love.

  Kate was finishing the last of the Globe stories when, with a soft knock, a ponderous woman entered carrying a paper bag. The woman’s overcoat was unbuttoned, exposing a nurse’s uniform, pin, and name tag. Kate read the name as the woman spoke it.

  “Dr. Bennett, I’m Sandra Tucker. Ginger Rittenhouse was my roommate.”

  “Of course. Please sit down. Coffee?”

  “No, thank you. I’m doing private-duty work, and I’m expected at my patient’s house in Weston in half
an hour. Dr. Engleson said that if I remembered anything or found anything that might help you understand Ginger’s death I could bring it to you.”

  “Yes, that’s true. I’m sorry about Ginger.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “We had shared the house only for a few months.”

  “I know.”

  “A week after she moved in, Ginger baked a cake and cooked up a lasagna for my birthday.”

  “That was very nice,” Kate said, wishing she had thought twice about engaging the woman in small talk. There was a sad aura about her—a loneliness that made Kate suspect she would talk on indefinitely if given the chance, patient or no patient.

  “We went to the movies together twice, and to the Pops, but we were only just getting to be friends and …”

  “It’s good of you to come all the way down here in the snow,” Kate said in as gentle an interruption as she could manage.

  “Oh, well, it’s the least I could do. Ginger was a very nice person. Very quiet and very nice. She was thinking about trying for the marathon next spring.”

  “What do you have in the bag? Is that something of hers?” A frontal assault seemed the only way.

  “Bag? Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Dr. Engleson, what a nice man he is, asked me to go through her things looking for medicines or letters or doctors’ appointments or anything that might give you a clue about why she … why she …”

  “I know it was a hard thing for you to do, Miss Tucker, and I’m grateful for any help.”

  “It’s Mrs. Tucker. I’m divorced.”

  Kate nodded. “The bag?”

  “My God, I apologize again.” She passed her parcel across the desk. “Sometimes I talk too much, I’m afraid.”

  “Sometimes I do, too.” Kate’s voice trailed away as she stared at the contents of the bag.

  “I found them in the top of Ginger’s bureau. It’s the strangest way to package pills I’ve ever seen. On that one sheet are nearly two months worth of them, packaged individually and labeled by day and date when to take each one. Looks sort of like it was put together by a computer.”