Crisis

by Robin Cook

  “I borrowed one of your rings for a day to be sure of the size,” Jack admitted.

  “Not the biggest rock in the world,” Lou said. “Did it come with a magnifying glass?”

  Jack threw his napkin at Lou, who caught it before it wrapped around his face.

  “Your best friends are always honest.” Lou laughed. He handed the napkin back.

  “It’s a perfect size,” Laurie said. “I don’t like jewelry to be gaudy.”

  “You got your wish,” Lou added. “No one is going to call it gaudy.”

  “When will the big day be?” Natalie asked.

  Jack looked at Laurie. “Obviously, we haven’t talked about it, but I think I’ll leave it up to Laurie.”

  “Really?” Laurie questioned.

  “Really,” Jack answered.

  “Then I’d like to talk to my mom about the timing. She’s let me know on many an occasion in the past that she’d like me to have my wedding at the Riverside Church. I know that was where she had wanted to be married herself, but it didn’t happen. If it’s all right, I’d like her to have a say as to the timing and the place.”

  “Fine by me,” Jack said. “Now where’s that waiter? I need some more champagne.”

  (one month later)

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  October 7, 2005

  4:45 p.m.

  It had been a great workout. Craig Bowman had used the weight room for a half hour to tone up and stretch. Then he’d gotten into a series of competitive, pickup, three-on-three basketball games. By pure luck, he’d managed to be teamed up with two talented players. For well over an hour, he and his teammates had not lost and had given up the court only from sheer exhaustion. After the basketball, Craig had indulged himself with a massage followed by a steam and shower.

  Now, as Craig stood in front of the mirror in the VIP section of the Sports Club/LA men’s locker room and regarded himself critically, he had to admit he looked better than he had in years. He’d lost twenty-two pounds and an inch from his waist since he’d joined the club six months ago. Perhaps even more apparent was the disappearance of the pudgy sallowness of his cheeks. In its place was a healthy, rosy glow. As an attempt to appear more contemporary, he’d let his sandy-colored hair grow out a bit, and then had it styled at a salon such that he now brushed it back on both sides rather than parting it on the left as he’d done for as long as he could remember. From his perspective, the overall change was so remarkable that had he seen himself a year ago he wouldn’t have recognized himself. He surely was no longer the stodgy, bromidic doctor.

  Craig’s current routine was to come to the club three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Of the three days, Friday was the best, since it was the least crowded and afforded the psychological stimulus of the weekend stretching out in front of him with all its promise. As a standing policy, he’d decided to close the office at noon on Fridays and take calls with his cell phone. That way, Leona could come with him to work out. As a present for her as well as himself, he’d sprung for a second membership.

  Several weeks previously, Leona had moved in with him at his Beacon Hill home. She’d decided on her own that it was ridiculous for her to pay for an apartment in Somerville when she was staying with him every night. Craig initially had been miffed about the move, because there had been no discussion and it had been presented as a fait accompli. To him it seemed coercive just when he was reveling in his new freedom. But, after a few days, he had adjusted. He had forgotten the power of eroticism. Also, he rationalized that the living arrangement could be reversed with ease if the need arose.

  Craig’s final preparation was to slip on his new Brioni jacket. After shrugging his shoulders a few times to settle it into place, he glanced back into the mirror. Turning his head from side to side to view himself from slightly different angles, he briefly entertained the idea of studying acting instead of art. The notion brought a smile to his face. He knew his imagination was running wild, yet the thought was not completely preposterous. As well as things were going, he couldn’t help feel that the world was his oyster.

  When Craig was fully dressed, he checked his cell phone for messages. He was in the clear. The plan was to head back to the apartment, relax with a glass of wine and the newest New England Journal of Medicine for an hour or so, then on to the Museum of Fine Arts to check out the current exhibition, and finally go to dinner at a new, trendy restaurant in the Back Bay.

  Whistling under his breath, Craig walked from the locker room out into the main lobby of the club. To his left was the sign-in desk, to his right—down a corridor, past the bank of elevators—were the bar and restaurant. Muted music could be heard from the general area. Although the athletic facilities were generally not crowded on Friday afternoons, happy hour at the bar was another story and was just beginning to gear up.

  Craig checked his watch. He’d timed things perfectly. It was quarter to five: the exact time he’d agreed to meet Leona. Although they came to the club and left together, while they were there, they each did their own thing. Leona was currently into the stair machine, Pilates, and yoga, none of which thrilled Craig.

  A quick visual sweep of the sitting area confirmed that Leona had yet to emerge from the women’s side. Craig wasn’t surprised. Along with a relative lack of reserve, punctuality was not one of her strong points. He took a seat, perfectly content to watch the parade of attractive people coming and going. Six months ago, in a similar circumstance, he would have felt like the odd man out. Now he felt entirely at ease, but no sooner had he gotten comfortable than Leona appeared, coming through the women’s locker room door.

  Just as he had critically regarded himself a few minutes earlier, Craig gave Leona a quick once-over. The workouts were benefiting her as well, though, due to her comparative youth, she’d been firm, rosy-cheeked, and shapely from the start. As she drew near, he could appreciate that she was an attractive as well as a high-spirited and headstrong young woman. Her main handicap from Craig’s perspective was her Revere, Massachusetts, accent and syntax. Particularly grating was her tendency to pronounce every word ending in an “er” as if it ended in a short but harsh “a.” Believing he had her interests at heart, Craig had tried to call her attention to her habit with the hope of getting her to change, but she’d reacted angrily, venomously accusing him of being an Ivy League elitist. So Craig had wisely given up. Over time, his ear had acclimated to a degree, and in the heat of the night he really didn’t care whether she had an accent.

  “How was your workout?” Craig asked, getting to his feet.

  “Terrific,” Leona responded. “Better than usual.”

  Craig winced. The accent on terrific was on the first syllable instead of the second, and better came out as “beddah.” As they walked to the elevator, he resisted the urge to comment by tuning her out. While she carried on about her workout and why he should try both Pilates and yoga, he contentedly mused about the upcoming evening and what a pleasant day it had been so far. That morning at the office he’d seen twelve patients: not too many and not too few. There had been no rushing frantically from one exam room to another, which was the usual course of events at his old practice.

  Over the months he and Marlene, his matronly main secretary and receptionist, had developed a system of scheduling patients according to each patient’s need, based on the diagnosis and the individual’s personality. The shortest visits were fifteen minutes for rapid, return-visit checkups with compliant and knowledgeable patients, and the longest was one and a half hours. The hour-plus visits were generally for new patients with known and serious medical problems. Healthy new patients were scheduled from forty-five minutes to one hour, depending on age and seriousness of the complaints. If an unexpected problem developed during the course of the day, such as an unscheduled patient needing to be seen or Craig having to go over to the hospital, which hadn’t happened that day, Marlene would call the upcoming patients to reschedule if possible and appropriate.

&n
bsp; As a consequence, it was rare for people to wait in Craig’s office, and equally rare for him to suffer the anxiety of being behind and trying to catch up. It was a civilized way to practice medicine and far better for everyone. Nowadays, Craig actually liked going to the office. It was the kind of medicine he’d imagined when he’d dreamed of becoming a doctor. The only slight bugaboo in what was otherwise a near-perfect situation was that it had not been possible to keep all aspects of his relationship with Leona a secret. Suspicions were rampant and made worse by Leona’s youth and willfulness. Consequently, Craig had to weather an undercurrent of disapproval from Marlene and his nurse, Darlene, as well as observe their resentful and passive-aggressive behavior toward Leona.

  “You’re not listening to me!” Leona complained irritably. She leaned forward to glare at Craig. Both had been facing the elevator doors as they descended to the parking garage.

  “Of course I am,” Craig lied. He smiled, but Leona’s mercurial petulance wasn’t assuaged.

  The elevator doors opened on the valet-parking floor, and Leona stalked out to join a half dozen people waiting for their vehicles. Craig followed a few steps behind. Relatively wide swings of emotion were a trait of Leona’s that Craig was not fond of, but they were generally quick if he just ignored them. Had he slipped a few minutes earlier up in the lobby and called attention to her accent, it would have been a different story. The previous and only time he’d made such a comment had caused a two-day snit.

  Craig gave his parking stub to one of the attendants.

  “Red Porsche coming right up, Dr. Bowman,” the attendant said while touching the peak of his cap with his index finger in a form of salute. He sprinted away.

  Craig smiled inwardly. He was proud that he had what he considered the sexiest car in the garage and the antithesis of the Volvo station wagon he’d had in his previous life. Craig imagined that those waiting around him for their cars would be duly impressed. The parking attendants obviously were impressed, as evidenced by their always parking his vehicle close to the valet stand.

  “If I seem a little distant,” Craig whispered to Leona, “it’s because I’m looking forward to our evening: all of it.” He winked suggestively.

  Leona regarded him with one eyebrow raised, indicating she was only partially placated. The reality was that she demanded full attention a hundred percent of the time.

  At the same moment that Craig heard the familiar whine and roar of his car engine starting somewhere nearby, he also heard his name called out from behind him. What caught his attention particularly was that his middle initial, M, had been included. Few people knew his middle initial, and fewer still knew that it stood for Mason, his mother’s maiden name. Craig turned, expecting to see a patient or perhaps a colleague or an old schoolmate. Instead, he saw a stranger approach. The man was a handsome African American, quick-moving, intelligent-appearing, and approximately Craig’s age. For a moment, Craig thought he was a teammate from that afternoon’s three-on-three basketball marathon who wanted to gloat anew over that afternoon’s victories.

  “Doctor Craig M. Bowman?” the man questioned again as he stepped directly up to Craig.

  “Yes?” Craig said with a questioning nod. He was still trying to place the individual. He wasn’t one of the basketball players. Nor was he a patient or a schoolmate. Craig tried to associate him with the hospital, but he couldn’t.

  The man responded by placing a large, sealed envelope in Craig’s hand. Craig looked at it. His name along with his middle initial was typed on the front. Before Craig could respond, the man turned on his heel and managed to catch the elevator he’d arrived in before the doors had had a chance to close. The man was gone. The transaction had taken only seconds.

  “What’d you get?” Leona asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Craig said. He looked back down at the envelope and got his first inkling of trouble. Printed in the upper corner was: Superior Court, Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

  “Well?” Leona questioned. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “I’m not sure I want to,” Craig said, although he knew he would have to sooner or later. Craig’s eyes scanned the people grouped around him, waiting for their cars. A number were curiously looking at him after having witnessed the encounter.

  As the valet pulled Craig’s Porsche up to the stand and got out, holding the driver’s-side door ajar, Craig worked his thumb under the envelope’s flap and tore it open. He could feel his pulse quicken as he pulled out the contents. He was holding a dog-eared sheaf of papers stapled together.

  “Well?” Leona repeated with concern. She could see Craig’s exercise-induced ruddiness perceptively fade.

  Craig’s eyes lifted and locked onto Leona’s. They reflected an intensity Leona had not seen before. She couldn’t tell if it was from confusion or disbelief, yet it was clearly shock. For a few beats, Craig seemed paralyzed. He didn’t even breathe.

  “Hello?” Leona called questioningly. “Anybody home?” She waved a hand in front of Craig’s marmoreal face. A furtive glance told her that they had become the object of everyone’s attention.

  As if he were waking from a petit mal seizure, Craig’s pupils narrowed and color rapidly re-suffused his face. His hands began to reflexively crumple the papers before rationality intervened.

  “I’ve been served,” Craig croaked in a whisper. “The bastard is suing me!” He straightened the papers and rapidly flipped through them.

  “Who is suing?”

  “Stanhope! Jordan Stanhope!”

  “What for?”

  “Medical malpractice and wrongful death. This is outrageous!”

  “Concerning Patience Stanhope?”

  “Who else?” Craig demanded viciously through clenched teeth.

  “Hey, I’m not the enemy,” Leona said, raising her hands in mock defense.

  “I cannot believe this! This is an outrage!” Craig shuffled through the papers again, as if perhaps he’d misread them.

  Leona glanced over to the valets. A second attendant had opened the passenger door for her. The first was still holding open the driver’s-side door. Leona looked back at Craig. “What do you want to do, Craigie?” she whispered insistently. “We can’t stand here forever.” Forever came out as “forevah.”

  “Shut up!” Craig barked. Her accent grated against his raw nerves.

  Leona let out a suppressed, mockingly aggrieved laugh, then warned: “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!”

  As if waking a second time and becoming aware that all eyes were on them, Craig apologized under his breath, then added: “I need a drink.”

  “Okay,” Leona agreed, still miffed. “Where? Here or at home?”

  “Here!” Craig snapped. He turned and headed back to the elevators.

  With an apologetic smile and shrug for the benefit of the valets, Leona followed Craig. When she got to him, he was repeatedly punching the elevator button with a knuckle. “You have to calm down,” she told him. She looked back at the group. People quickly averted their gaze to pretend they had not been watching.

  “It’s easy for you to say to calm down,” Craig shot back. “You’re not the one being sued. And getting served like this in public is goddamn humiliating.”

  Leona didn’t try to make conversation again until they were seated at a small but tall table, apart as much as possible from the happy-hour crowd. The chairs were barstools with low backs, which accounted for the table height. Craig had a double scotch, which was hardly customary for him. Normally, he drank sparingly for fear of being called professionally at any given hour. Leona had a glass of white wine. She could tell from how he shakily handled his drink that his mind-set had transformed yet again. He’d gone from the initial shocked disbelief to anger and now to anxiety, all within the fifteen minutes since he’d been handed the summons and the complaint.

  “I’ve never seen you so upset,” Leona offered. Although she didn’t quite know what to say, she felt she needed
to say something. She was never good at silence unless it was on her terms as a purposeful pout.

  “Of course I’m upset,” Craig snapped. As he raised his drink, he was shaking enough to cause the ice to clink repeatedly against the glass. When he got it to his lips, he managed to slosh scotch over the rim. “Shit,” he said as he put the glass back down and shook the scotch from his hand. He then used the cocktail napkin to wipe his lips and chin. “I cannot believe this oddball bastard Jordan Stanhope would do this to me, especially after all the time and energy I’ve squandered on his hypochondriacal, clingy excuse for a wife. I hated that woman.”

  Craig hesitated for a moment, then added: “I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this. It’s the kind of thing doctors don’t talk about.”

  “I think you should talk about it, seeing how upset you are.”

  “The truth is that Patience Stanhope drove me crazy with her disgusting rehash over and over of every damn bowel movement she ever had, and that was on top of the graphic descriptions of greenish-yellow, gloppy phlegm she coughed up on a daily basis and even saved to show me. It was pathetic. She drove everybody crazy, including Jordan and even herself, for Christ’s sake.”

  Leona nodded. Although psychology was not one of her strengths, she felt it was important to let Craig rail on.

  “I can’t tell you how many times over the last year I had to drive out there after work or even in the middle of the night to that huge house of theirs to hold her hand and listen to her carry on. And for what? She rarely followed through with anything I suggested, including stopping her smoking. She smoked like a fiend, no matter what I said.”

  “Really?” Leona questioned, unable to contain herself. “She carried on about coughing up phlegm and continued to smoke?”

  “Don’t you remember how her bedroom reeked of cigarette smoke?”

  “Not really,” Leona said with a shake of her head. “I was too taken by the situation to smell anything.”