Angel of Mercy

by Andrew Neiderman

  “How bad is this hyper … whatever?”

  “Well, it won’t stop you from performing your ordinary day-to-day activities. The condition becomes dangerous, however, when you engage in strenuous physical activity. As you’ve discovered,” he added dryly.

  “So I got a fat heart, huh?”

  “Well, not fat as such. It’s more analogous to the stretching of a thick rubber band compared to the stretching of a thin one. Your heart has a difficult time relaxing.”

  “My heart? Hell, my heart’s always relaxed, isn’t it, Jen?”

  “This isn’t funny, Frankie.”

  “I’m really not laughing. Okay, Doc, what do we do next?”

  “After a few more tests, I anticipate recommending a permanent pacemaker,” Dr. Pauling said.

  “Pacemaker? Jesus.” It was as if all of his years had hit him at once.

  “The procedure requires only a local anesthetic. We will implant the device under your collarbone with a wire leading to the bottom of your heart. The pacemaker will reverse the contraction wave of your heart and as a result, ease the obstruction caused by the backup of blood.”

  Frankie just stared, wishing he were dreaming. Dr. Pauling turned to Jennie as if he saw that Frankie had fallen into a daze and was no longer listening.

  “Usually, pacemakers are used to regulate the speed of the heart, but in this case it would simply alter the contraction pattern of the heart muscle.”

  Jennie nodded and Dr. Pauling turned back to Frankie.

  “After I run you through a few more tests, you can go home for a while. We’ll schedule the procedure in a week or so. In the meantime you will have to avoid any really strenuous physical activities.”

  “He will,” Jennie promised. She glared at him. Frankie let his head drop to the pillow.

  “I’ll look in on him shortly,” Dr. Pauling said as he left.

  “Nolan’s going to pressure me to retire now,” Frankie moaned. “How can I be a cop with a pacemaker?”

  “He doesn’t have to pressure you, Frankie. You’ll do it on your own,” Jennie predicted. He widened his eyes and gazed up at her.

  “Oh really?”

  “Frankie, most people don’t get second chances, especially at …”

  “At my age? Go on, say it.” He turned away. He hated feeling sorry for himself, but at the moment it seemed impossible to do otherwise. “Did you call the counselor?”

  “What do you think?” Jennie replied. He turned back to her.

  “Maybe he was in court.”

  “No, he was in the office. He should be arriving any minute.”

  Frankie pretended to be upset, but he was actually looking forward to seeing his son, Stevie. At twenty-eight, he was the youngest junior partner at Klein, Clapper, and Brogen, a prestigious corporate law firm in Los Angeles. Stevie’s wife, Laurel, was a beautiful five-foot-ten-inch California blonde with a dark complexion and Wedgwood-blue eyes. She could have easily been in the movies, but instead was a production assistant for one of Hollywood’s biggest producers.

  “He said he’s bringing Beth,” Jennie added after a moment. Frankie turned his head and raised his eyebrows. He and his daughter seemed always at odds with each other these days. If she wasn’t off marching and protesting with her chapter of NOW, she was carrying picket signs on Wilshire Boulevard in front of the federal buildings protesting the violation of animal rights or U.S. involvement in South America. Whatever cause it was, Frankie believed it was simply compensation for the early failures in her life, which included a fourteen-month aborted marriage and dropping out of college to work with a holistic doctor in Santa Monica.

  Frankie felt himself sink deeper into the bed as if it were made of sponge. He sighed and shook his head.

  “So what am I going to do, Jen, retire and take up golf?”

  “You’ll do what you have to do, Frankie. And you won’t give me a hard time about it,” she added firmly. “I never complained much all these years when you were on stakeouts that kept you away for days on end. I barely uttered a sound when you were shot at and when that teenager tried to carve you with a hatchet, or when that man on crack cocaine deliberately crashed his pickup truck into your car. I swallowed my fears, told myself this is what I took on when I married a policeman, and accepted. Now it’s time for you to accept, Frankie.”

  “I don’t know who’s worse, you or that horse’s ass we have for a chief of detectives. Since he was appointed, the whole atmosphere’s changed at the department. He’s got everyone growling at everyone.”

  “So maybe it’s a good thing you get out now,” Jennie said. She sighed, relaxing her shoulders. “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. Rosina’s still outside waiting to see you.”

  “Send her in,” Frankie said.

  Jennie leaned over to kiss him softly on the lips. For a moment she lingered, her hands gripping his shoulders.

  “I thought I was going to lose you this time for sure,” she whispered tearfully.

  “You’re not losing me, Jen. You might be sorry, but you’re not.”

  She wiped her tears away and smiled. It rained sunshine down on him. How had he been lucky enough to have this beautiful, gentle woman fall in love with the likes of him? He never stopped being in awe of it.

  A moment after Jennie left, Rosina Flores stepped into his room. She was a striking woman with olive-brown skin and hazel eyes. She kept her ebony hair cut just beneath her ears. Hardened by the difficulties she had endured struggling against prejudice and poverty, the twenty-five-year-old Mexican-born woman had excelled in public school and graduated as her class valedictorian. Like a star running back in football eluding tackles, she had held off the suitors who would confine her to a home and children, and went on to study law enforcement. Her initial goal had been to become a California highway patrolwoman, but her superior mental abilities found more challenge first in forensics and then in detective work.

  “¿Cómo está, stupido?”

  “Terrific.”

  “I told you to get back into the car and we’d cut him off at the pass. But no, not Palm Springs’s Charlie Bronson.”

  “Not you, too, Flores. Por favor. What happened to the perp?”

  “Cathedral City police picked him up walking along Highway One-eleven.”

  “Great.”

  “Nolan wants a full report by oh eight hundred.”

  “He just loves that military shit, doesn’t he? Oh eight hundred. Did you salute?”

  “He’s on your case, Frankie.”

  “I expect so.”

  “He spoke to your doctor at length out in the corridor. How bad is it?”

  Frankie described hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, using the rubber-band analogy.

  “And just when you were supposed to teach me how to be a real detective, street smart.” She smiled. “I’m just glad you’ll be okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’d better get to that report,” she said as she started to leave.

  “Hey, Flores.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I still think you ought to marry that accountant and raise a flock of chicks.”

  She laughed and left the room. Frankie turned toward the wall. Alone for the moment, he permitted a small tear to emerge out of the corner of his eye, his way of saying goodbye to the young, determined, and dedicated policeman who had once inhabited his body. All the time he’d been in law enforcement, he’d worried about taking a bullet from the gun of some street punk, but now the bullet had come from within himself instead.

  Where does our youth go when it evaporates, he wondered as he lay back, waiting for his doctor’s return.

  2

  The heart monitor beeped weakly and then suddenly went into a flat line. Faye Sullivan ran to the door of the hospital room and screamed: “Stat.” The unlucky intern on the floor, Dr. Brad Hoffman, looked up from the chart he was casually perusing and mouthed, “Oh, no.” It was, after all, his first emergency, his first time all alone.
He dropped the chart and turned from the elderly man who had been staring at him with liquid, dark eyes and hurried down the floor to the private room in which Sylvia Livingston had been recuperating. Faye was performing CPR, but stepped back respectfully as soon as Hoffman appeared.

  The young intern looked at the monitor and at the patient and screamed for the defibrillator. Before he could request it, Faye Sullivan handed him a hypodermic of adrenaline. She smiled at him warmly and he gazed at her for a moment. Later, he would recall that smile. It was almost as if they were in the cafeteria and she had just handed him a cup for his coffee. There was also something very sexual about the way she focused on him and pursed her lips. It had made him hesitate a moment to gather his thoughts. Then he pulled back the sheet and injected the medicine directly into Sylvia Livingston’s heart muscle.

  The defibrillator was quickly wheeled in. He stared up at the heart monitor, hoping for a miracle before he began, but there was none visible. The line was deadly flat. He turned the defibrillator up to two hundred and placed one pad over Sylvia Livingston’s right breast and one just under her left.

  “Clear,” he cried. The jolt lifted the fifty-five-year-old woman off the bed, but the line on the monitor remained flat. He glanced frantically at Faye. Again she wore a soft expression, her eyes gentle, but this time her smile calmed him. He knew she was an experienced nurse, and he thought she was attractive, even beautiful in an angelic way. At that moment she looked just like a competent special-duty nurse should look, he thought: no panic in her face, no flood of emotion in one direction or another, just a quiet efficiency. It filled him with renewed purpose and he attempted to revive his patient again, turning the defibrillator up to four hundred. Once again, nothing changed. He tried again, and again it was in vain.

  When he looked at Faye this time, she shook her head softly. Just to go through the motions and convince himself and her he was doing all that he had to, he made one final attempt. The flat line didn’t change a split second. Hoffman stepped back.

  “We lost her,” he announced.

  “She looks peaceful,” Faye said, gazing down at the dead woman. No matter how many times she confronted it, Death was still fascinating. Sylvia Livingston’s eyes glimmered like stones under a cool mountain stream.

  Hoffman stared at Faye for a moment and then looked at the expired patient. Faye was right. There wasn’t any grimace; the patient’s face was in repose, the eyes glassy and still. Death had already made its claim and turned her into a specimen, Hoffman thought. She was quickly beginning to resemble the cadavers upon which he had practiced and studied: anonymous bodies without names, without histories, without bereaved relatives.

  Faye Sullivan closed Sylvia Livingston’s eyes and stood beside her with her own eyes closed as though she were offering some last rites. Then she turned abruptly to Dr. Hoff man, her eyes so bright and excited that now she looked like a little girl about to open her birthday presents.

  “I’ll call Mr. Livingston,” she said. “He just went down to the cafeteria to get a bite.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” Hoffman said. He felt this need to apologize to someone and was glad it was the private-duty nurse and not the patient’s husband. “She’s been out of CCU for what, a little more than a day?” he asked. Faye nodded.

  “Twenty-nine hours,” she said. He shook his head.

  “I’m sure her husband wasn’t expecting this,” he said sadly.

  “No, but you did very well, Doctor. I’ll be sure to tell him,” she added.

  Brad Hoffman smiled gratefully. Yes, he had done everything he had been trained to do. It wasn’t his fault. He barely knew this patient, and despite the new emphasis on bedside manner and personalizing medical treatment, he was grateful for his ignorance about the woman and her family. It would make it easier for him to forget, if he ever could forget that cold, icy stare.

  “Thank you. Er … if you need me when Mr. Livingston comes up, I’ll be finishing up my rounds,” he said.

  “I won’t need you, Doctor,” Faye said confidently. She gazed at Sylvia Livingston’s corpse one more time and when she looked at Brad Hoffman again, he looked like he really appreciated her. Couldn’t she fall in love with such a man and couldn’t he fall in love with her? But then again, all the unmarried nurses she knew fell in love with doctors and wished doctors would fall in love with them.

  She grimaced and took on her professional, stoic look. “Unfortunately, I’ve had more than my share of these,” she added, and then left to call Sylvia’s husband.

  Tommy Livingston had just sat down with his tray in the hospital cafeteria. He had taken only a cup of coffee and a bran muffin, confident that he would not even eat much of that. His stomach felt full, tight, and his chest had turned to iron, making every breath an effort. He had this thing about hospitals. The moment he stepped through the entrance, he felt queasy. He tried to hide it from everyone, especially his sons, but he had always had an anxiety about hospitals and rarely visited anyone there if he could help it, even members of his own family.

  Of course, he couldn’t avoid coming to see Sylvia. She had come so close. At one point her life had been down to a trickle; each beat on that monitor sounding like the drip, drip, drip from a melting icicle. He could literally feel the wintery air surrounding her in the CCU. Death was weaving its cocoon. He had been present at his own mother’s final moments and still vividly recalled the way she had turned her eyes toward him and smiled just before she expired.

  If I went to a psychiatrist, he’d probably tell me that was why I have this thing about going to hospitals, he thought.

  But the boys don’t have this problem. They should be here more often. Then he wouldn’t feel so guilty about avoiding the place, he decided. Sylvia doted on the two of them anyway and had long since devoted more of herself to their sons than she did to him. She was a mother before she was a wife. He shook his head at the thought. Ridiculous, being jealous of my own children.

  Anyway, it really was unfair to expect two men in their mid-thirties, both successful and busy, one an accountant in a major agency, the other owning and operating one of the biggest real estate firms in the Coachella Valley, to just sit around day and night in a hospital lounge or at their mother’s bedside while she slept. For him time wasn’t a concern; it didn’t matter. As an architect, he had made plenty during the boom construction days in the desert communities. Now, he worked only when he felt like it. He could sit here for weeks, months. He just hated it.

  Tommy sat forward and sipped some of his coffee. He started to cut a piece of muffin when one of those senior-citizen hospital volunteers tapped him on the shoulder. She was a short, gray-haired lady, someone’s grandmother, with the pink uniform draped over her dress.

  “Are you Mr. Livingston?” she asked. Her lips were curled in a friendly smile, but her eyes were a deep, dark gray, the eyes of someone who had been summoned to do a sad deed.

  “Yes.”

  “I have a message for you to return to the step-down floor immediately,” she said.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head and stepped back as if making any physical contact with him would infect her with his sadness and misery.

  “They just asked me to find you. Maybe nothing’s wrong,” she said.

  “But, they told you … immediately?” he said, flustered for a moment.

  The old lady didn’t reply. She pressed her lips together to seal in her true thoughts.

  He rose to his full six feet, but his shoulders refused to straighten. For a moment he gazed stupidly down at his coffee and muffin.

  “I’ll take care of that for you,” the elderly volunteer said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I hope things turn out all right for you,” she said. He nodded at her and started away, his legs carrying him as if they had a mind of their own and his torso had lost all control. He stabbed the button by the elevator with his right forefinger and waited impatiently, his heart poun
ding. The door opened and two nurses stepped out laughing. They didn’t seem to notice him and for a moment, he did feel invisible. Alone in the elevator, he felt like he was being swept up in a dream and when the doors opened again, he would simply wake up.

  But when they opened, he found Faye Sullivan standing there, waiting for him. He didn’t have to ask. The sadness in her soft blue eyes, the way she tilted her head just a bit to the left and pressed her lips together told him. He didn’t need to hear her say it.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Livingston,” she began. “Your wife was one of the most courageous patients I ever had.”

  “What happened?” he demanded. “What …”

  “She must have had another seizure. The doctor on the floor did all he could.”

  “You mean, she’s … gone?” He realized he had to hear it spoken after all. A part of him refused to believe it any other way.

  “She’s expired, Mr. Livingston,” Faye said. That was just the way the doctor had put it to her father when he had described what had happened to her mother. “Expired.” As if her time had run out on the meter of life.

  The words fell thunderously through Tommy Livingston’s ears and sent his blood raging to his face. In fact, he felt as if all of his blood were spilling onto the hospital floor. He actually gazed down to see if he were standing in a pool of red.

  “I’ll take you to her,” Faye said, and she marched ahead of him to his wife’s room.

  No matter how much Tommy had tried to prepare himself for such an event, he was still utterly devastated to stand at Sylvia’s bedside. She already looked different to him. Without the spark of life, her face seemed more like a mask now, a replication. He hated looking at her, but even though his chest ached as sharply as it would have if someone had driven a knife into it, he didn’t cry. He closed his eyes instead and felt himself sway until Faye Sullivan took hold of his arm.

  “Here, sit down,” she told him as she led him to the seat.

  He started for it, then stopped.

  “No, I’ve got to call my boys … Perry and Todd … and I’ve got arrangements to make …”