“So,” Emily Carvalho said, “you’re going to be here for just six weeks. Is that so?”
“Yes. I got talked into it.”
“We don’t get a lot of visiting surgeons here. I’ve been the chief nurse for over five years. You’re the first one.”
Kurtz shrugged. “It was convenient for both the practice and myself. I haven’t been home in a long time.”
“How well do you know your partner? Jerry Mandell?”
“I’ve only spoken to him by phone.”
Emily Carvalho blinked. A crease appeared in her forehead. “Oh…”
Kurtz raised an eyebrow. “Something the matter?”
“No,” she said hastily. “Nothing at all.”
Kurtz looked at her. She looked back, something that might have been amusement on her face. Kurtz sighed. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” he said.
The town of Clinton served as the County Seat for Clark County, but it had a population of barely six hundred, mostly clustered into what was euphemistically referred to as “Downtown,” which contained the county office buildings, about fifty houses, twenty small shops, three art galleries, seven restaurants and three bars on four small streets surrounding a small, well-groomed town square. Farmland and forests clustered close on all sides.
When New Yorkers thought of West Virginia, which they almost never did, they thought of the state as an impoverished wasteland, a place that time and culture had passed by. This, as Kurtz well knew, was typical big city BS. The industrial base of small factories had eroded over the years. There were a lot of farmers, some of whom were barely getting by, and plenty of mountain folk, who didn’t have much money but who eked out a reasonable living by hunting and fishing and tending their own gardens. Otherwise, the economy of West Virginia was well diversified, being a global or at least national hub for chemicals, biotech and energy, and having a significant presence in aerospace, steel, telecommunications, automotive and healthcare, not to mention hunting, fishing, skiing and tourism in general.
The town itself appeared to be mostly empty but this was an illusion, since most of the people who lived here were either kids in school or their parents, who were gainfully employed at the nearby University, considered to be among the top one hundred in the country and one of the state’s largest employers. Once school was out and the workday ended, these empty streets would come alive.
Many of the houses doubled as offices, including those of the late Donald Stewart and his partner, Jerry Mandell. A small parking lot sat to one side of the house. There were three cars sitting in the lot when Kurtz pulled in and parked.
Kurtz was not looking forward to this. According to Emily Carvalho, Jerry Mandell had been acting…strangely for the past year, whatever that meant. “He’s a good surgeon,” she had hastened to add. “It’s just that he’s been…strange.”
“Strange,” Kurtz said.
She nodded. Her face serious. After a moment, Kurtz said, “Strange, how?”
A pained expression crossed Emily Carvalho’s face. “I think you’d better see for yourself.”
Clearly, she did not intend to say anything more.
The front porch was clean, white and recently painted, containing a wooden bench and two rocking chairs. The door was unlocked. A receptionist, sitting at a desk behind a half-wall that led into a back hallway, raised her head when Kurtz walked in. She had a round, smiling face with short, curly gray hair. She reminded Kurtz of his secretary back in New York, Mrs. Schapiro. “Can I help you?”
“Yes. I’m Richard Kurtz.”
She gave him a blank look.
After a moment, he said, “Doctor Richard Kurtz. I’m Doctor Stewart’s replacement.”
She continued to look bewildered. Finally, she cleared her throat. “Dr. Mandell didn’t mention you. We’re supposed to be getting Dr. Philips but not until next month.”
Kurtz blinked. “I’m temporary. I’m filling in until Dr. Philips arrives.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Please sit down,” she said. “I’ll let Dr. Mandell know you’re here.”
She got up from her chair and waddled quickly into the back.
Not exactly the reception Kurtz had been expecting. A moment later, a tall, thin, middle-aged woman in a white nurse’s uniform came into the room from the back. “I’m Maggie Callender,” she said. “And you are?”
“Richard Kurtz.” He waited. Maggie Callender stared at him. “Surgeon,” Kurtz said.
“Oh,” she said faintly.
“Look,” Kurtz said, “there seems to be a misunderstanding.”
She continued to stare.
“Obviously,” Kurtz said, “you didn’t know I was coming.”
She blinked and cleared her throat. “Dr. Mandell said something a few weeks ago about finding a replacement for Dr. Stewart. We assumed he was talking about Dr. Philips.”
“He’s contracted with me to supply surgical services for the next month and a half.” Kurtz glowered at her, at which her face turned scarlet. “For which,” he added, “I am to be suitably paid.”
“I think you had better discuss this with Dr. Mandell,” she finally said.
“Yes,” Kurtz said. “I think I had better.”
“It’s a wonder the guy can see straight,” Kurtz said, “let alone operate. He’s totally senile.”
Lisa smiled and passed a platter of sliced brisket to Lenore. Gary planted his chin on his palm and smiled around the table, evidently enjoying the simple domesticity of dinner with the family.
“He forgot to tell his staff I was coming.” Kurtz shook his head, amazed. “He can barely remember his own name.”
“Potatoes?” Lenore said.
“Please,” Kurtz said.
“I’m sure he remembers his own name,” Gary said. “It’s your name that he doesn’t remember.”
“He did tell the hospital, though,” Lenore said. “They were expecting you. That’s a plus.”
“And you are pretty forgettable,” his father said.
A word starting with f was about to emerge from Kurtz’ mouth. He noticed his father’s raised eyebrow and stifled it. “It’s gonna be a long six weeks…” he muttered.
The city of Charleston was officially established in 1794, through an act of the Virginia General Assembly. At that time, the new municipality comprised thirty-five people living in seven houses, spread over forty acres. Today, Charleston is the largest city and the capital of the state of West Virginia.
Ray Darling had been a haberdasher, never a particularly lucrative profession but one that he had been proud to share with President Harry Truman, one of his boyhood heroes. Sadly, however, this profession is today nearly extinct, since the custom of men wearing hats has largely gone out of fashion. Ray Darling had been saved from financial ruin when his shop closed in 1998 by being elected the sole representative for Clark County to the Virginia House of Delegates.
Darling considered himself a lucky man. He had a wife and three children and was fond of all of them. He had a job that he considered important and he took his responsibilities seriously. He went to Church most Sundays, liked to hunt and fish and enjoyed a pint with the boys after work, or rarely, on a Saturday afternoon following a round of golf. He lived a simple but fulfilling life.
His secretary had already gone home when Ray Darling left his office in Building Number 1 of the Capital Government Complex at 5:15 in the evening. He locked the door and walked over to the covered parking lot.
Ray Darling had read somewhere that the Ford Focus was the most popular car in West Virginia. He figured if that’s what his constituents liked to drive, then he should drive it as well, particularly since his brother-in-law, a car salesman for Ford, had gotten him a good deal.
He pulled out of the lot and set off for home, an old farmhouse in the nearby suburb of Clendenin. He never noticed the beaten-up Toyota Corolla that pulled out of the lot at the same time.
No matter how grand his prior reputation, there i
s always doubt and suspicion among the hospital staff when a new surgeon begins work. There are many ways to pad a CV, after all. Maybe the guy was great at diagnosis but not so great at cutting and sewing. Maybe he had been carried by his residents or his junior partners, who had taken pity on the barely competent schmuck. Maybe he’d done nothing but inguinal hernias since finishing his residency. Maybe he used to be cutting edge but had stopped reading his journals fifteen years in the past.
And maybe, just maybe, his glowing recommendations came from colleagues who were desperate to get rid of him.
Kurtz didn’t like it but he knew enough to expect it. He tried not to let it bother him.
Jerry Mandell, despite having his head in the clouds, was, Kurtz had to reluctantly admit, a decent surgeon. His hands went where they were supposed to go. His knots were tight and evenly placed. He was fast, always a good thing. Years ago, one of Kurtz’ instructors had said to him, “There’s no such thing as slow and good.” Kurtz had often had occasion to observe the truth of this statement. Far more often than not, slow surgeons were slow because they either didn’t know what they were doing or they had lousy hands, and even the rare exceptions tended to have a higher than normal incidence of wound infections, deep venous thrombosis, muscle injury, ischemic neuropathy and pulmonary emboli. Jerry Mandell, thank God, was not slow.
Every surgeon was used to assisting on other surgeons’ cases. This did not bother Kurtz. What bothered him was being treated like an intern or a surgical tech.
“Tie here,” Jerry Mandell said. Sighing, Kurtz placed a tie.
“Cut.” Wordlessly, Kurtz cut.
And so it went, a routine open cholecystectomy that Kurtz could have done in his sleep but one where his job was to stand there and do as he was told. When the skin was finally sutured and the last bandage put in place, Jerry Mandell said, “Why don’t you write the orders while I dictate the case?”
“Sure,” Kurtz said.
Mandell frowned behind his mask, perhaps suspecting a bit of sarcasm in Kurtz’ tone.
“Office hours start at 1:00 PM,” Mandell said. “Try not to be late.”
“I’ll do my best to be on time,” Kurtz said. A very long six weeks, indeed…
For whatever reason, Ray Darling’s car had run off the road, wrapping itself around a tree and killing Ray Darling instantly. The road didn’t get a lot of traffic and the wreck had been discovered by a passing motorist a half hour or so after it happened. The motorist had called it in and now Abner Cole, Sheriff’s Deputy, was inspecting the scene while the fire department manipulated the jaws of life over the car, preparing to rip off the roof so that the body could be removed. There was no hurry. An EMT had already crawled into the wreck and verified that the driver was dead, not hard to determine since the steering column was sticking through his chest.
Abner Cole sadly shook his head. There are over fifty thousand highway fatalities each year in the United States. No reason to consider this one special or out of the ordinary in any way.
The people of Clark County (and of course, the victim’s family, let’s not forget the victim’s family…) would not be pleased. Since Ray Darling was a Republican, it would now be the responsibility of the Clark County Republican Party to select a slate of three candidates (all Republicans, presumably) from which the governor would pick a replacement, who would then serve until the next election.
It was tough, Abner Cole thought. You leave for work in the morning and wind up dead on the side of a road. He closed his notebook and put it away in his pocket. Abner Cole, not an insensitive man, sighed. Unfortunately, he thought, those were the breaks.
Chapter 3
“No,” Seamus Sullivan said.
No was a word that the face in the computer screen rarely heard. The face frowned at him. Idly, Seamus Sullivan wondered if it was a real face or some sort of computer simulation.
“You know my rules,” Seamus Sullivan said.
“This will have to be an exception.”
“No,” Seamus Sullivan said. “It won’t. A man doesn’t shit in his bed.”
The face frowned harder.
Seamus Sullivan had managed to complete high school and then two years of college before being kicked out for assaulting another student. He no longer remembered what the other kid had done to offend him but he knew that it had probably been minor.
Seamus Sullivan was a sociopath, and perhaps also, in a small way, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. He knew this about himself but the knowledge bothered him not in the slightest. His mother had been a sociopath, as well, and of course, an alcoholic. A beautiful woman, she had married a much older, somewhat wealthy man and proceeded to make his life miserable, drinking, doing drugs, throwing tantrums, spending insane amounts of money on clothes and jewelry and having numerous hushed up affairs.
The old bitch didn’t have a lot of impulse control but she certainly had enjoyed her life, Seamus thought.
Until she didn’t.
She had disappeared one day, presumed dead, after Seamus strangled her and dropped her body to the bottom of the Sea of Cortez. The old man had died soon after, of natural causes, somewhat to Seamus’ regret. He would have enjoyed doing it himself but the police were already sniffing around.
Seamus had drifted for a few years. He found that he had a talent for conning people. He was a handsome young man. He was intelligent, and he had learned to fake a sense of humor…he didn’t have a lot of emotion, but sociopaths rarely did, and he learned to fake that, too. He also learned that he liked to kill things. There was something about that thin divide between this world and the next (not that he believed in either a heaven or a hell), something about that frantic look on their faces as their eyes glazed over and they drew their last breath, that just turned him on.
Like many serial killers, Seamus Sullivan started out as a child, pulling the wings off birds and crushing squirrels’ heads with pliers. He had joined a gang, more as a lark than anything else, and then a larger gang, and then, one day, he received a visit from a man in a suit, who represented a different sort of gang. Seamus, fairly well educated and his father’s son, knew how to speak to people who wore suits. This man made him an offer. Seamus laughed, and accepted.
That had been over twenty years ago.
“These people know me,” Seamus Sullivan said. “There is no way I could operate with impunity in this area. I’m not going to compromise my cover.”
The face in the computer drew a deep breath while it considered this. “We’ll send someone else,” the face finally said.
Seamus nodded. “Good.”
“Meanwhile, we do have another job for you.” The face smiled. “One where you’ll have to travel.”
“Excellent,” Seamus said. “You know that’s the way I like it.”
“Yes,” the face said. “We do.”
Gary Kurtz stared down at the envelope in his hands, rolled his eyes and cracked the seal. “Those jackasses,” he muttered.
Lisa, who had just sat down at the table with a cup of coffee, said, “Hmm?”
Gary shook his head and passed the envelope to Lisa. At that moment, Lisa’s daughter, Sharon, a thin, somewhat Goth brunette, with a golden stud through the side of her nose and two more piercing the corner of her left eyebrow, came to the table, yawning.
Lisa gave a small laugh and poured cream in her coffee.
Sharon, not asking for permission, picked up the letter. She glanced at Gary. “You?” she said.
“‘If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I shall not serve.’ Who said that?”
“William Tecumseh Sherman,” Lisa said.
“Sherman. Yeah, that’s right.”
“Maybe you should re-think your position. A political career might be good for you. Think of all the graft.”
Lenore, wandering in from the bedroom, said, “Graft?”
Lisa glanced at her. “Gary has been nominated to the West Virginia House of Delegates.”
“Shit,�
�� Gary said.
Six weeks, Kurtz told himself. At least Maggie Callender and the plump secretary, Mary Reaves, seemed to have warmed up to him. Jerry Mandell seemed to be doing his best to ignore his temporary associate. The patients, however, seemed to appreciate his presence. The OR, on the other hand, continued to regard him with some suspicion.
Kurtz, who in his once and future career, had become accustomed to being considered a clinical super-star, found this lack of confidence somewhat annoying. Kurtz had been a good student, a good athlete, a good soldier, a highly rated amateur fighter with a hard-earned black belt in taekwando and he was a damn good surgeon, thank you very much. Not that Kurtz was conceited, but he had never been filled with an excess of self-doubt.
Also, he was kind to children, little old ladies and all those less fortunate than himself. And he was humble, not the least of his personal attributes.
He sighed. It was not, he had to admit, that this treatment was anything unusual, or even unexpected. It takes a little while for a new dog to blend in with the pack. It always does. Kurtz knew this, but he was doing them all a favor just by being here and maybe a little gratitude might be in order.
“You,” Lenore said, “are just grumpy.”
Kurtz grunted. He was grumpy. He didn’t like feeling like a third wheel. The fact that Jerry Mandell’s patients, most of whom had known him for years, seemed just a bit relieved to be seen by the new doc, who none of them knew at all, was more than worrisome. That afternoon, his second patient, a farmer named Elvin Frank, who appeared to have a recurrent umbilical hernia, had been visibly tense until Maggie Callender told him that he was going to be seen by Kurtz. He refused to explain why.
So far, on his fourth day, Kurtz had seen a total of twenty-seven patients and had assisted Jerry Mandell on one gallbladder, one pilonidal cyst and two hernias. There had also been a peri-rectal abscess that Jerry Mandell had graciously allowed Kurtz to do by himself. Thanks a lot. There may have been more method to Jerry Mandell’s madness than Kurtz had initially assumed, however, since on this latter case the team was orienting a new scrub nurse, a middle-aged woman who had recently moved from the West Coast, and they were a lot slower than usual to hand him the instruments he requested.
If a Tree Falls Page 2
