A Family Business (12 page)

As he pulled out of the driveway, Tim was confronted with a new worry. It was a forty-five-minute drive from Susan’s house in Malibu to his parents’ house in Camarillo, and he wasn’t sure he could make it without having to find a gas station with a rest room. But there was nothing he could do about it, Tim told himself. If he didn’t show up for Easter dinner, his mother would never let him forget it.

When he got there, miraculously without having to stop en route, his mother had not yet returned from church. After greeting his father, he went into the room that had been his as a child and stretched out on the bed.

A few minutes later Mary Lou Waters pulled into the driveway. When she saw Tim’s station wagon outside, she felt more than slightly relieved. He had sounded so bad over the phone, she wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it. After telling her husband she was back, Mary Lou walked down the corridor and opened the door to Tim’s room. Immediately, the comfort she had felt on seeing his station wagon vanished. Taking one look at her son, she gasped. “You’re deathly pale,” she said, shocked at how drained he looked. He was not at all the bubbly young man she had seen only a few days earlier. All color was gone from his face, and his eyes were circled with deep shadows. When he tried to smile, it looked more like a grimace.

“I’m going to call a doctor,” she said, turning on her heel.

“Wait,” Tim called after her. “Don’t do that. I’m going to be all right, I don’t need a doctor. Just let me take a quick nap,” he begged, “and after that I’ll feel better. Then we can talk.”

Reluctantly, she left the room. As she walked down the hall, Tim closed his eyes. His heart was thumping wildly and his head was spinning; he knew he was losing consciousness. It was like the time he was going under the anesthetic for an operation to remove a growth from his neck: He had no control over his body. This is it, he told himself. I’m going to die.

When he awoke after a short sleep, he felt somewhat better, at least good enough to drag himself out of bed and into the kitchen, where his mother was preparing an Easter feast for thirty people.

“There’s something I want to tell you, Mother,” he said.

Startled by his tone of voice, Mary Lou Waters stopped sticking cloves into the Easter ham. “What is it?” she asked uncertainly, noticing that Tim’s appearance had not improved; he still looked like a refugee from the intensive care unit.

Unsteady on his feet, Tim pulled up a chair. As he made himself as comfortable as he could, he told her that after the two goons had come bursting into his office and attacked him, seemingly without reason, breaking his nose, he decided to make a will.

In the weeks since the attack, Tim had been reflecting on the incident. His intuition told him that the attack had been intentional. The reason behind it may not have been obvious at first, but the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it had to do with his business and the nature of the fiercely competitive mortuary industry in Southern California. He had stepped on one set of toes too many, Tim conceded, and he had to pay for it. But how much did he have to pay?

The possibility that his current illness might also be related to his business had flicked through his thoughts as well, but he had dismissed the idea. Thinking
that
way, he had decided, would really make him paranoid.

But as he mechanically ticked off the details of his simple will to a flabbergasted Mary Lou, Tim’s thoughts drifted back over the events leading up to the holiday weekend. Maybe it wasn’t so farfetched after all to suspect that he may have been poisoned. That’s dumb, he told himself, again pushing the idea away. I must be going crazy. He told himself it was just too preposterous to believe.

“You and Dad get everything,” he told his mother, and then explained where the document could be found in case anything should happen to him.

A discussion about death and wills and the possibility of losing her only son were things that Mary Lou definitely did not want to discuss on Easter Sunday. That kind of talk frightened her. Fleetingly she wondered if Tim was trying to make a joke. That would be in character for her fun-loving son. But when she saw how serious he was, she became very agitated. Tim had never acted like this before. He was usually cheerful and optimistic, even when he had the surgery on his neck a year and a half earlier, even when the biopsy report had come back saying that the growth had been malignant. “Cancer isn’t going to get me,” Tim had predicted. In that case he had been right. The doctors had kept a close watch, and there was never any indication that the disease had spread. But even then Tim had never talked about dying. So why should he feel that way now, she asked herself, when all he has is a bad case of intestinal flu?

“Don’t talk like that, Tim,” she admonished him, speaking more sharply than she intended. “You’re not going to die. Everything is going to be fine.”

Tim smiled weakly and went back to bed.

By the time the guests had arrived, Tim was feeling so much better that he decided to join them. Clad in a pair of dark pants and a white shirt, which made him look even more pale, Tim circulated among the family friends and tried feebly to join in the festivities. Pulling Susan into a corner, he apologized for leaving the broken glass on the floor of the garage. “Be careful when you drive in,” he cautioned her.

When Mary Lou called everyone to dinner, Tim sat down as well. Others had wine or something stronger, but Tim stuck to 7-Up. He never drank alcohol anyway, and with his stomach rebelling the way it was, he had no intention of starting then. Sipping slowly from his glass of soda, Tim picked dejectedly at his food.

His mother glanced worriedly at him. Tim did not get to be almost 300 pounds by being a finicky eater. But he was just too sick to care. Every few minutes, he excused himself and hurried to the bathroom. Then, before the dishes could even be cleared away and the party could really get going, Tim kissed his mother good night. “I’ll be back to normal by morning,” he said, with little conviction.

When Mary Lou entered the living room on Monday morning, she brightened. Tim was sitting on the couch trying to make jokes with his cousin and her boyfriend, who had stayed over the night before. Her son was still incredibly pale, but Mary Lou noted happily that he must be feeling better; he was making an effort at humor. Then he shivered, shaking visibly.

“I’m so cold, Mother,” he said. “Will you get me an afghan?”

“It isn’t cold in here, Tim,” she replied, examining him closely, “but I’ll get one for you.”

When she returned, Tim was on his feet. “I’d better…I’d better go lay back down,” he said weakly. “I think I’ll go in Dad’s bed.”

He started toward his parents’ room and stopped. “I’ll bet you’ve made it already,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“That doesn’t matter, Tim,” Mary Lou replied. “We’ll unmake it.”

As his mother fussed with a blanket, Tim lay back and tried to smile. His gaze drifted upward until he was staring at the ceiling. His heart hammered in his chest. As Mary Lou Waters stood there, gazing anxiously at her son, his eyes rolled back in his head. “Stop it!” she screamed, thinking at first that he was teasing her. When she saw he wasn’t, she screamed again.

The paramedics arrived minutes later. Bustling about with their equipment, they tried vigorously but unsuccessfully to get Tim breathing again. Handling his huge bulk as delicately as they could, they wrestled him onto a gurney and into the ambulance. They made good time getting to Pleasant Valley Hospital, where emergency room personnel tried to triumph where the paramedics had failed. They made an incision in his throat and jammed a tube down his windpipe. They attached various pieces of shiny equipment to sundry parts of Tim’s enormous body. They did everything it was possible to do. But it wasn’t good enough. After a while they gave up. Shaking his head, the attending physician picked up a pen and scribbled three initials on the form shoved into his hand: DOA.

12

In efforts to save his life, Tim had been pummeled, probed, and prodded, all to no avail. But even in death his indignities were not yet over. Before he could be laid to rest, there was one final humiliation to be imposed. Since he was not under the care of a physician at the time of his death, he had to undergo a postmortem as well. It was the law. In Tim’s case, since he had been formally pronounced dead in a hospital in Camarillo, in Ventura County, the task fell to Dr. John E. Holloway, an assistant county medical examiner.

The process began at 10:35
A
.
M
. on Tuesday, April 9, in the morgue in the basement of the Ventura County Medical Center. On the plus side, there was never any question about Tim having fallen into inexperienced hands: Holloway had been a practicing physician for more than thirty-one years. All of that time, except for three years as a researcher in nuclear medicine, had been spent as a pathologist. Holloway had autopsied thousands of bodies before Tim’s, and there would be a lot more afterward.

A pathologist is, in essence, as much a specialist as a surgeon. But a pathologist is a medical investigator, a physician disciplined to look at the evidence left behind and come to a reasonable conclusion about what caused the death. In performing this task, the pathologist calls on training, experience, skill, and a wealth of modern technology.

To begin, a pathologist examines the entire body, from the crown of the cadaver’s head to the soles of the feet, searching for clues. Sometimes the signals blink like a neon sign: maybe a bullet hole in the head. Sometimes they are not so obvious, such as a needle prick between the toes, under the tongue, or beneath the breast. And sometimes there are no external signs at all, as would prove to be the case with Tim, unless his severe obesity counted as a clue. As far as Holloway was concerned, it did.

Once the exterior of the body is examined, the pathologist looks inside. Plainly put, the body is cut open and the major organs removed, one by one. Each is examined for signs of disease, defect, or damage, called trauma in medical terminology. Such examinations, for example, typically turn up evidence of heart disease, strokes, or kidney failure. To help in this stage of the examination, the pathologist performs a microscopic inspection of tissue, which frequently reveals clues not apparent to the naked eye.

The third and sometimes most meaningful examination includes toxicological studies of bodily fluids: blood, urine, bile, and stomach contents, to name four. These studies are helpful in determining, for example, if the deceased was drunk or drugged at the time of death, and if the intoxication was sufficient to kill.

Not all three examinations are always performed. Sometimes a pathologist will become so convinced after completing the first two phases that the third is unnecessary. If a cadaver is brought in and examination of the heart reveals evidence of a massive coronary, so massive that death was both inevitable and quick, then the pathologist may not order toxicological studies, figuring that even if the deceased had been drunk or under the influence of drugs, neither of those conditions killed him. But regardless of whether the third phase is carried out in a competent autopsy, the first two, virtually without exception, are.

While donning his gown and gloves, Holloway, who had seen bodies of all shapes and sizes over the years, took one look at the sheet-covered mound that had been Tim Waters and thought, my God, he’s a big one. Although there were no body scales in the morgue, Holloway, who was no flyweight himself, estimated Tim weighed a minimum of 300 pounds.

Sighing, he flicked on his tape recorder—a pathologist’s notebook—and began dictating a visual report of Tim’s condition.

Tim had been lying in the morgue for almost twenty-four hours when Holloway began his autopsy, and the pathologist noted the signs:
Breakable rigor is present…Lividity is dorsal and blanching…The fingernails reveal marked cyanosis of the beds…The pupils are equal and dilated
…Translation: Rigor mortis had obviously set in and, since the body had been supine, the blood had settled in the lower half, giving Tim’s back a purplish cast. By the same token, his fingernails were a slatelike color because there was no blood circulating beneath them.

Having gotten on the record the fact that Tim was undeniably dead, Holloway noted evidence of Tim having undergone recent resuscitation attempts:
An endotracheal tube is present in the appropriate anatomic location. There are six monitor patches, including one at the left anterior deltoid region, two in the corresponding region on the right, and one each in the infraxyphoid and bilateral upper quadrants of the abdomen
. Tim had clearly received expert medical help either at the time of death or shortly afterward, a fact the pathologist already knew.

As he examined the body, Holloway remarked on the outward indications of normality, which was necessary to show that there were no readily apparent signs of what had killed him.
No scleral or conjunctival lesion is seen
…Translation: Tim’s eyes were not damaged.
The external ears are free from hemorrhage…The nose is symmetrical and shows no hemorrhage…The lips, buccal mucosa, and tongue show no intrinsic lesion…The teeth are natural and in good repair…The scalp shows no evidence of trauma…All anatomic structures of the neck are intact…The bony framework is well-developed and well-retained
…Whatever had killed Tim, Holloway was saying, he had not been beaten to death. So far, as well as the pathologist could tell, there were no signs that Tim had met a violent death.