Coma (34 page)

“Excuse me, but we have a problem,” said Susan, addressing the plainclothes officer. “Dr. McLeary left tonight without returning some charts to 10 West. And we cannot medicate the patients without the charts. Can you people open his office?”

The security man gave Susan a tenth of a second with his eyes, then returned to the power play in progress. He spoke without looking up.

“Sure. Lou, go up with the nurse here and open the office she needs.”

“In a minute, in a minute.”

All three watched intently. Susan waited. A commercial came on. The guard leaped to his feet.

“OK, let’s get this office open. Let me know if I miss anything, you guys.”

Susan had to run a few steps to catch up with the great determined strides taken by the guard. En route he began sorting through an immense collection of keys.

“The Bruins are down by two. If they drop this one too, I’m movin’ to Philly.”

Susan didn’t answer. She hurried along with the guard, hoping that no one would recognize her. She felt a slight sense of relief as they entered the office area. It was deserted.

“Goddamn, where’s that key?” cursed the guard as he had to try almost every key on his ring before finding one which would open McLeary’s door. The delay made Susan rather nervous, and she began to look up and down the corridor, expecting the worst at any moment. As he opened the door, the guard reached in and flicked on the light.

“Just pull the door closed when you leave. It will lock by itself. I’ve got to get downstairs.”

Susan found herself alone in the outer room of McLeary’s office. Quickly she entered the inner room and turned on the light. Then switching off the light in the outer room, she closed herself in McLeary’s inner office.

To her dismay, the charts were no longer on the shelf where she had seen them in the morning. She
began to search the office. The desk was first. No sign of them. As she closed the center drawer, the phone immediately under her arm began to ring. In the silence the noise seemed earsplitting and it startled her. She looked at her watch and wondered if McLeary often got calls in his office at a quarter of eight in the evening. The sound stopped after three rings, and Susan recommenced her search. The charts were of sufficient bulk so that they could not be hidden in many places. As she pulled out the last drawer of the file cabinet she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the hall. They grew louder. Susan froze, not daring to push the drawer back into the file cabinet for fear of the sound.

To her consternation she then heard the footsteps, and a key go into the lock in the outer door. Susan looked around the room in a panic. There were two doors, one to the outer office, another presumably to a closet. Susan glanced at the position of the furniture, then she snapped off the light. As she did so she heard the outer door open, and the light went on in the outer office. Susan moved toward the closet door, feeling the perspiration appear on her forehead. A metallic sound came from the outer office, then another. The closet door opened easily and Susan eased herself in as quietly as possible. With difficulty she closed the closet door. Almost simultaneously the door to the inner office opened and the light went on. Susan expected the closet door to be yanked open at any second. Instead she heard footsteps going toward the desk. Then she heard the desk chair squeak, as someone sat in it. She thought it was McLeary and she wondered what he was doing in his office at this time. What if he discovered her? The thought made her weak. If he opened the door, Susan decided she would try to bolt.

Then the phone was taken off the hook and Susan heard the familiar sound of dialing. But when the person phoning spoke, the voice confused her. It was female. And the caller was speaking in Spanish. From her own meager Spanish Susan was able to make out a part of the conversation. It was about the weather in Boston, then in Florida. All at once Susan realized that a cleaning lady was plopped down in McLeary’s office using the hospital phone to make a personal call to Florida. Maybe that explained hospital overhead.

The call lasted almost a half-hour. Then the cleaning lady emptied the wastebasket, turned out the light, and departed. Susan waited for several minutes before opening the closet door. She headed in the direction of the light switch but her shin thumped painfully into the open file cabinet drawer. Susan cursed and
realized what a terrible burglar she would make.

With the light on again Susan resumed her search. Out of curiosity to see where she had been hiding, she checked the closet. On the lowest shelf, stacked among boxes of stationery, she found the charts she wanted. She wondered if McLeary had actually tried to hide them. But she did not dwell on the mystery. She wanted to get out of McLeary’s office.

Drawing on her basic resourcefulness, Susan piled the charts into the freshly emptied wastebasket. Then she left the office, unlocking the door. And as she had done in the dorm, she placed a minute wad of paper between the door and the jamb.

Susan carried the charts up to Beard 5 and entered the lounge. She got out her black notebook and poured herself some coffee. Then she took the first chart and began extracting it, as she had done with Nancy Greenly’s.

When D’Ambrosio returned to the medical school dorm, he had no particular plan in mind. His usual method of operation was to improvise, after having observed his quarry for a period of time. He already knew quite a bit about Susan Wheeler. He knew that she rarely went out, once back in her room. He was quite sure she would be there now. What he couldn’t be sure of was whether Susan had told the authorities about his initial visit. He decided there was a fifty-fifty chance. If she had told them, there was only a ten percent chance that they would take her seriously or at least that had been D’Ambrosio’s experience. And even if they did take her seriously, there was probably only a one percent chance that they would put her under guard. The risk factor was well within D’Ambrosio’s normal range. He decided that he would return to her room.

From a telephone in the corner drugstore D’Ambrosio rang Susan’s room. No answer. He knew that did not mean anything. She could be there but just not answering. D’Ambrosio could handle the lock on the door; he had determined that in the afternoon. But the bolt; she’d probably have the bolt thrown, and that would be noisy. D’Ambrosio knew he’d have to get her out of her room somehow.

He walked back to the dorm and into the parking lot. Her light was on. He then entered the quad as he
had done that afternoon, by picking the padlocks on the gate in the archway. It was a lock with only three tumblers. It was amazing where the university decided to save money.

He mounted the creaking wooden stairs quickly. D’Ambrosio did not look it, but he was in top physical condition. An athlete, a psychopath. Quickly, he moved over to Susan’s door and listened. There were no sounds. He knocked. He was confident she would not open the door without speaking. But at this point D’Ambrosio first wanted to find out if she were there. If she answered, he intended to make it sound as if he were going back down the stairs. That usually worked.

But there was no answer.

He tried again. Still no answer.

He picked the lock in seconds. The door opened. The bolt was off. Susan was gone.

D’Ambrosio checked the closet. The wardrobe had not changed. The two suitcases he had seen on his earlier visit were still there. D’Ambrosio was always thorough and it paid off. He knew, with high probability, that Susan had not left town. That meant she would be back. D’Ambrosio decided to wait.

February 25

10:41 P.M.

Bellows was exhausted. It was going on eleven, and he was still at it. In fact he had not made rounds yet on Beard 5. He had to do that before he left for home. At the nurses’ station he got the chart rack and wheeled it toward the lounge. A cup of coffee would help him get through the work. Opening the door, he was genuinely surprised to find Susan in the lounge; she was hard at work.

“Excuse me. I must be in the wrong hospital.” Bellows pretended to go back out through the door. Then he looked back at Susan.

“Susan, what in hell’s name are you doing here? I was told in no uncertain terms that you had become persona non grata.” Without meaning to, Bellows’s voice reflected some irritation. It had been a terrible day—with the low spot being his discovery of Walters.

“Who, me? You must be mistaken, sah. I’m Miss Scarlett, the new nurse on 10 West,” said Susan, feigning a higher voice with a southern accent.

“Christ, Susan, cut the bullshit.”

“You started it.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Polishing my shoes, what does it look like I’m doing?”

“OK, OK. Let’s start again.” Bellows came into the room and sat on the countertop. “Susan, this whole scene has become very serious. It’s not that I’m not happy to see you, because I am. I had a fabulous time last night. God, it seems like a week ago. But if you’d been around when the shit hit the fan this afternoon, you’d understand why I’d be a little on edge. Among other things I was told that if I continued to cover and aid you in your, quote, ‘idiotic mission,’ I’d be out looking for a new residency.”

“Ah, poor boy! May have to leave Mama’s warm womb.”

Bellows looked away for a moment, trying to maintain his composure. “I can sense this conversation is going nowhere. Susan, you cannot understand that I have more to lose in this affair than you do.”

“Like hell you do!” Susan’s face lit up with sudden anger. “You’re so Goddamned self-centered and worried about your residency appointment that you couldn’t see a conspiracy if it involved your . . . your mother.”

“Jesus Christ! The thanks I get for helping you. What the hell does my mother have to do with all this?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just couldn’t think of anything else which would come close to your residency in your warped value system. So I took a chance on your mother.”

“You’re making no sense, Susan.”

“No sense, he says. Look, Mark, you’re so worried about your career that you’re blind. Do I look different to you?”

“Different?”

“Yeah, different. Where’s that old clinical expertise, that keen sense of observation that you’re supposed to have absorbed during your medical training? What do you think this is here under my eye?” Susan pointed to the bruise on her cheek. “And what do you think this is?” Susan garbled the last few words as she held out her lower lip, exposing the laceration.

“It looks like trauma. . . .” Bellows extended his hand to examine Susan’s lip more closely. Susan fended him off.

“Keep your cotton-pickin’ mitts off. And you say that you have more to lose in this whole thing. Well,
let me tell you something. I was attacked and threatened this afternoon by a man who scared the shit out of me. This man knew about me and what I’ve been doing these last few days. He even knew about my family. He even included my family in the threat. And you say that you have more to lose!”

“You mean somebody actually hit you?” Bellows was incredulous.

“Oh come on, Mark. Can’t you say something intelligent? Do you think these are self-inflicted wounds to make people feel sorry for me? I’ve stumbled into something big, that I can tell you. And I have a scary feeling that it’s some large organization. I just don’t know how or why or who.”

Bellows looked at Susan for several minutes, his mind racing over her story, which seemed incredible, and his own experience that afternoon.

“I don’t have any literal wounds to show, but I had one hell of an afternoon as well. Remember those drugs I told you about? The ones that were found in a locker in the OR doctors’ lounge? They were found in a locker assigned to me, as I told you. Like it or not, I was immediately implicated. So I decided that I had to settle the whole thing once and for all by getting Walters to explain why I was still assigned to that locker when he had given me another.

“But Walters didn’t come in today. First time in I-don’t-know-how-many years. So I decided to visit him.” Bellows sighed and poured himself some coffee, remembering the grisly details. “The poor bastard committed suicide over this thing, and I had to be the guy who found him.”

“Suicide?”

“Yeah. Apparently he’d learned that the drugs had been found, and he decided to take what he considered the easy way out.”

“Are you sure it was suicide?”

“I’m not sure of anything. I didn’t even see the note. I called the police and have gotten the details from Stark. But don’t suggest it wasn’t suicide. God, I couldn’t handle that. I’d probably be considered a suspect. What on earth could make you suggest such a thing?” Bellows was intense.

“No reason. It just seems another strange coincidence to have happened at this time. Those drugs that were found may be important somehow.”

“I was afraid that your imagination would suggest that they were important. That was one of the reasons why I hesitated to tell you about the drugs in the first place. But look, all this is somewhat peripheral to the present problem, namely your presence here at the Memorial at this rather sensitive time. I mean, Susan, you are not supposed to be here. It’s as simple as that.” Bellows paused and picked up one of the charts Susan had been extracting. “What the hell are you doing anyway?”

“I finally got some of the charts of the coma patients. Not all of them, but some of them.”

“God, you really are amazing. After getting yourself kicked out of the hospital, you still manage to have the balls, so to speak, to come back here and find a way to get these charts. I don’t imagine that they leave them lying around for anybody to look at who happens along. How did you manage to get them?”

Bellows looked expectantly at Susan, sipping his coffee and waiting for a response. Susan only smiled.

“Oh no!” said Bellows putting his hand to his forehead. “The nurse’s uniform.”

“Yup, worked like a charm. Great idea, I must admit.”

“Wait a minute. I don’t want any credit for it, believe me! What did you do? Get security to open McLeary’s or whoever-it-was’s office?”