Flashback (1988) (39 page)

He stopped in mid-sentence and looked down at her as if noticing her for the first time. Instantly, the fury in his face vanished.

“Baby. Oh, Jesus, are you all right?” he asked, moving toward her.

Lisette backed away, forcing herself not to touch the burning in her cheek.

Then she turned and bolted from the room.

24

Leigh Baron stared thoughtfully at the receiver in her hand, and then set it gently in its cradle.

“Frank just lied to me, Ed,” she said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”

As she sipped her coffee, she gazed out of her thirtieth-story office window, across Boston harbor to the airport. It was just after eight in the morning, and traffic was, as usual, badly backed up coming into the Sumner tunnel. She had spent the night in the city, working into the early morning on several impending Ultramed acquisitions and then catching a few hours of sleep on the fold-out in her office.

The RIATA CEO, still perspiring from his daily seven-mile run, scanned the list of the Davis Regional Hospital board of trustees.

“Which two did he meet with?” he asked.

“The top two on that sheet: Bourque and Crook. He told me just now that the session went well and that both men were as good as in the bag.”

“Those were his words?”

“Precisely. The only problem is that Stan Ogilvie, our man on the board, told me last night that Judge Iverson had contacted all of them, and that Bourque and Crook had both given their word to go along with anything he recommended.”

“So maybe Frank talked them into changing their position?”

“Possible, but doubtful. Ed, he’s scrambling. I just know it. He refuses to admit that he’s in over his head. No matter how big the writing on the wall becomes, he keeps thinking he’s going to pull this off.”

She filled two crystal goblets with fresh orange juice and passed one over.

“This is your baby, Leigh,” Blair said.

Leigh nodded grimly. Three more New England hospitals were close to coming over, but all of them were holding out until the Davis Regional sale was final. Blair was watching her
performance as closely as she was watching Franks. And the genius behind RIATA International was hardly one to tolerate a failure of this magnitude from anyone.

“Well,” she said, “I guess it’s time I took a little trip up north.”

“I think, my friend, that is a wise decision. You’ve done an excellent job with Frank Iverson—an amazing job, all things considered. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the man is limited. It would seem he has gone about as far as he can go.”

“And then some,” she observed. She sighed.

“What is it?” Blair asked. “Surely you can’t be upset about pulling the plug on a man who’s so blatantly put his own concerns ahead of yours or our company’s?”

“No,” she said. “But I can’t help thinking that I’ll miss him at all the regional meetings.”

“Miss him?”

“Yes.” She smiled wistfully. “Frank Iverson may be a little short on principles and a little long on ego, but he’s been great visuals.”

The pain, a gnawing, empty ache centered beneath the very tip of Franks breastbone, had begun soon after his fight with Lisette and had intensified throughout the night. He had thrown up several times, and he suspected—although he had not turned on the bathroom light to check—that the last time had been blood.

A bottle and a half of Maalox had helped calm the burning some and enabled him to shave and dress and make it to his office in reasonable shape, but he sensed that it was only a matter of time before the searing pain resurfaced.

It was Lisette’s own damn fault that he had hit her. If she had only been more patient, more understanding of the stress he was under, she could have been a wife, and not just another strain on his life.

Zack, the Judge, Mainwaring, Leigh Baron—as if he didn’t have enough balls in the air without Lisette taking potshots at him; what goddamn nerve, telling him he needed to get some help when she should have been giving it to him. It was a miracle his stomach hadn’t gotten fucked up long before this.

He snatched up the phone and dialed the hospital pharmacy.

“Sammy, it’s Frank Iverson. What’s the name of the stuff that’s good for stomach troubles? … No, no, not that stuff,
the pills … Cimetidine. Yeah, that’s it. Listen, could you bring me up a weeks supply? … I know it’s a prescription drug, dammit. I don’t need any lectures. What I need are those pills.… Good. And not a word about this to anyone, right?’ All he needed was a rumor going around that Frank Iverson had a bleeding ulcer.

He slammed down the receiver and took another long swig of Maalox, It might have been a mistake not to have leveled with Leigh Baron about Bourque and Crook, but this battle was between him and the Judge, and the encounter with those two spineless yes-men was no more than a skirmish. By the meeting, he would have more than enough votes to block the buyback.

He thought about calling Mainwaring for a progress report. If anything could help calm down his stomach, it was a few reassuring words from him. Two hundred fifty thousand back in the Ultramed-Davis account and $750,000 left over to build on. Just the notion of that kind of money was enough to ease the queasy sensation.

He simply had to calm down, ignore Lisette’s behavior, and concentrate on the Judge and the board. The ultimate success, both within the company and without, was so close he could taste it.

He culled Mainwaring’s Atlanta number from his Rolodex and was in the process of dialing when his secretary cut in on the intercom.

“Mr. Iverson, it’s Annette.”

Her voice instantly stirred up images of their sensual, uncomplicated, unselfish evenings together—evenings in sharp contrast to those he had been enduring with Lisette. Annette was the perfect low-stress woman for high-stress times, and Frank made a mental note to have her work late again as soon as possible.

“Yes, Annette,” he said, “go ahead.”

“Mr. Iverson, Dr. Jack Pearl is here to see you. He knows he doesn’t have an appointment, but he says it’s quite important.”

Pearl
. Frank could think of nothing the distasteful little fairy could have to say that he would ever possibly want to hear.

“Annette, ask Dr. Pearl if whatever it is can wait until later on this—oh, never mind. Have him just come on in.”

Pearl, looking, as usual, as if he hadn’t shaved in two days, entered Franks office with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and immediately caught his foot on
the doorjamb and stumbled, sloshing most of his coffee onto the Persian rug.

“Oh shit … oh fuck,” he mumbled, dropping to his knees and dabbing at the spill with a handkerchief that was far from virginal.

Frank was about to insist that he simply get up and leave the mess to housekeeping. Instead, he threw Pearl a towel from the bathroom and watched with some amusement as the physician crawled about the floor, alternately swearing to himself and clucking like some obscene, gigantic chicken.

“Enough, Jack, enough,” Frank said finally. “Take a seat. I’ll have Annette get you a replacement for your coffee—unless you want to wring that towel out into your cup.” He laughed heartily. “Sorry, Jack, I was just kidding, just kidding. Seriously, do you want some more?”

“N-No, Frank. No, thank you.”

“Okay, then. So, what is this matter of such earthshaking importance?”

Pearl shifted uncomfortably.

“Go ahead,” Frank said. “I’m not going to bite you.”

“There’s … um …”

Pearl coughed and cleared his throat.

“There’ve been a couple of things that have come up … problems … with Serenyl.”

Frank’s eyes grew narrow and hard.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Jack?”

The anesthesiologist began to tremble.

“Well,” he managed, “what I meant was, not problems, exactly … urn, a … more like
potential
problems. I really needed to talk to you, Frank. You haven’t been around.”

“Business, Jack, I had business. For Chrissake, get to the point.”

“I had a visitor in my office Monday morning, Frank”—his words began to come a bit more easily—“a doctor who is on the verge of figuring out that Mainwaring and I aren’t using the anesthetics my operative notes say we are.”

“That’s impossible,” Frank said, his mind already churning through the implications of discovery at this final stage of the game.

Awkward, certainly, he concluded; perhaps even expensive if some sort of payoff was needed. But not catastrophic. The testing was complete. The whole project had been designed to make Jason Mainwaring comfortable enough with Serenyl to
buy it, and in that sense, the project was already a total success.

“I warned you this might happen,” Pearl was saying. “I warned both of you.”

“What are you talking about, Jack?”

“The recovery time. I told you and Mainwaring someone might pick up on it, but you wouldn’t listen to me. And now, someone has.” His words, initially stuttered and uncertain, began spilling out like a slot machine payoff. “And that’s not all, either. There’s this kid we operated on last January for a hernia, and … and he’s been having these nightmares, and—”

“Okay, okay,” Frank said, holding his hands up, “enough of this bullshit. I want you to slow down, calm down, go back, and start at the beginning. Got that? … Good. Now, first of all, Jack, exactly who are we talking about?”

“Well, Frank, it … it’s your brother. Your brother Zachary.”

Zack again!
For Frank, the minutes that followed were the purest torture. He listened impassively, struggling to maintain his concentration and composure in the face of the grotesque little man and the fireball of hatred that was tearing at his gut.

He studied the notes Pearl had brought—Zack’s review of the gallbladder cases and the hospital record of Toby Nelms. Then he insisted Pearl go through the entire story again, step by step.

Midway through that recounting, he excused himself for a few minutes, citing the need to get some papers signed and in the mail to Boston. Then he strolled placidly through his outer office and down the hall to an empty mens room, where he threw up.

Twenty minutes later, he had picked up the Cimetidine and some more Maalox at the pharmacy and stood confronting himself in another men’s room mirror.

As a quarterback, he had learned that plays seldom went exactly as the coaches had diagrammed them in the playbook. A lineman stumbles, and everybody’s timing is thrown off; a halfback is thinking about a fight he has had with his girlfriend, and misses a crucial block.

The quarterback worth his salt always kept his head; always expected the unexpected. And it was in this area, Frank
reminded himself—the instinctive, reflex ability to react and to adjust—that Frankie Iverson had been the very best.

This time, as in so many sticky situations on so many playing fields, his edge would lie in keeping a cool head. He had picked through Pearls story a piece at a time, and realized that things weren’t yet nearly as bleak as he had initially perceived.

When he returned to his office he was scrubbed, combed, and outwardly calm.

Annette Dolan, dressed in a short-sleeved pink sweater with a band of fine beadwork flowing over her breasts, looked even more alluring than usual.

Much work to do. Keep tonight open if you can
.

Frank scribbled the words on a scrap of paper, signed the note with a smiley face, and set it by her elbow as he passed.

She glanced at it and, almost imperceptibly, smiled and nodded.

Now there
, Frank thought, as he opened the door to his office,
was an understanding woman
.

The office was empty.

“Annette, did Dr. Pearl leave?” he asked over his shoulder.

“No. Just you,” she said.

At that moment, the toilet in his private bathroom flushed. The notion of Jack Pearl sitting on his John was enough to start the acid percolating again in Franks gut. He would have to get housekeeping to scrub the whole place down before he so much as stepped foot in there again.

Pearl emerged from the room wiping his nose with one hand and tugging at his still-open fly with the other.