Lethal Practice (13 page)

“Did anyone ever have trouble with him when he was intoxicated?”

Despite Bufort’s previous warning against keeping secrets, I decided to minimize. I still didn’t want his men hounding the women it was rumored Kingsly had tried to paw. “He was pretty harmless. I’ve heard he made a few feeble moves on any skirt he fell over, but nothing serious. Besides, the postmortem results showed this was not the random stab of some woman defending herself against one of his advances.”

“What did you do to help him?” Bufort suddenly asked.

The nearness of his voice made me jump. He’d moved up to stand directly behind my head.

“I told the guards at the door. They usually got him home okay.”

“I know that! They didn’t find him. I meant what did you doctors do to help him? He was an alcoholic. Who was treating him?”

I was stung. I’d prepared for questions about a murder I hadn’t committed, not for a grilling about my indifference to Kingsly’s problem. “I don’t know,” I answered lamely.

“How could it be that this obvious alcoholic was allowed to continue in his job without help?” Bufort’s tone was hard, accusing.

“I told you, I don’t know. To be honest, I feel damn guilty about it now, but I guess I was just too wrapped up in my own problems with the ER.” I was hearing my words at a distance; the truth of my admission unsettled me.

“Hell, Doctor, if we had a cop in his shape, he’d be pulled from his job for treatment. Any half-decent corporation would have yanked this guy. Yet he’s been allowed to screw up here, a total incompetent from what I gather, in the middle of a sea of healers—and not one of you bothered to help him?”

His disgust fed my own. I suddenly felt compelled to explain how we ended up so callous—not as an excuse but because I needed to explain it to myself.

“Look, I know it was unforgivable.” I was finding it hard to keep my voice from shaking. “But maybe others here felt as I did—his drinking was his business. He had a family. I suppose that if I gave it any thought, I’d have guessed his wife or someone was taking care of him. He’d made such a mess of the hospital’s budget, however, I saw him more as an adversary that needed firing.”

“You never thought of going into his office yourself and urging him to get help? You never thought of organizing your colleagues for an intervention?”

I felt my face go hot. “No” was all I could say, but the question bored into the heart of my guilt.

“He was one of your own. Doctor. Why didn’t you help him?” He let the question hang.

I sat, silent, taken by surprise at the extent of the remorse and regret I felt. Then I began to feel angry. Bufort was peeling away my defenses, layer by layer, like a malevolent therapist.

“Would you answer me. Doctor?”

“I told you, I’m not proud of what I did—or, rather, what I didn’t do.” It felt like I was being skinned alive by this cop.

By now he was in front of me. He leaned toward my left ear and said very quietly, “You mean you didn’t have time for a drunk in your busy, important schedule.”

“Hey, you’re getting out of line!” I said sharply.

He reared back in a sarcastic show of surprise. “Oh, really? Since you couldn’t get rid of him, you
all
seemed to prefer him ineffectual and inebriated on the sidelines.”

I finally lost my temper. “This is really too much!” I instinctively looked over at Riley for help. I watched the muscles in the corner of his jaw tighten.

Riley cleared his throat. “Look, maybe we should get back to the night of the murder.”

There was a pause, cold as ice, before Bufort said, “I’m in charge of this interrogation, Riley.” He began pacing behind me so I’d have to keep turning my head to see him.

Across from me, the side of Riley’s jaw bulged again. He got up and walked over to a desk at the front of the room. There he half sat, half leaned on its large top, fiddling with a piece of chalk from the sill of a nearby blackboard.

Bufort now came around to where I could see him better. “Here’s my point. Doctor,” he started to say. “It seems everyone in your hospital conformed to a norm of indifference—sort of the hospital’s way of institutionalizing an acceptance of Kingsly’s alcoholism.” He sounded like he was reading from a textbook. “It certainly seems to have freed all of you from any thought of taking the trouble to help him.”

By the expectant look on his face, I figured he wanted a reply, so I confessed, or surrendered, or maybe did a little of both. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

But admitting my complicity didn’t end the ordeal. I tensed as he leaned toward me. “So who gains? Who does it serve to have the administrative head of this place continually out of it? Who could profit by that?”

The obvious name came to mind. It was the perfect time to tell Bufort about the phone call and my suspicions about Hurst. I could throw in my story about being chased by the Dobermans and let the detective make whatever he wanted of it. But even after what I’d just been through, and as tempted as I was to subject Hurst to his own ordeal by innuendo and whispered allegations, I balked. I balked at resorting to the same underhanded level of treatment he had used against me when he first pointed Bufort my way. It wasn’t altruism. Being anything like Hurst just revolted me too much. And whatever I thought he was up to, I had no proof. Until I did, if I was going to stop Bufort from subjecting me and the rest of my staff to similar cheap shots and accusations, I couldn’t very well indulge in them myself. “I don’t know!” I finally answered, my dread about Hurst and what he was capable of in full force.

The rest of the interview was mundane. Bufort asked me if I knew why anyone would murder Kingsly. I said no. Then he wanted to know if outsiders could get into private areas of the hospital at night. Sure, I told him. Sometimes street people hid out in the basement to keep warm or waited in washrooms till after visiting hours. Security wasn’t our highest priority in the ER. On the contrary our unit was—had to be—open, free-flowing, and constantly chaotic. Again I thought he was getting a little off track, given that the killer was probably a doctor, but I supposed he had to account for all possibilities.

He finished by requesting a list of the doctors I’d seen in the hospital that night, particularly between seven and midnight or so. I presumed this was the estimated time of death that Watts had given him. I said I had seen only the residents scheduled to be there. He didn’t have any questions about them as I’d feared he might, and for that, at least, I was grateful.

He didn’t once ask me if I’d killed Kingsly, or even allude to the possibility. It seemed he’d convicted me so far only of being a total shit as a doctor ... and as a human being. I felt deprived of a chance to hear his suspicions and answer allegations about me as a killer. Perhaps he’d even figured I’d feel that way, and not asking was part of his game to keep me off balance.

Riley wasn’t any help either in determining how seriously he considered me a suspect. After his reprimand from Bufort, he’d sunk into an unreadable silence on his perch at the front of the room and had given his jaw muscles a good workout.

One point Bufort congratulated me on. During their search of the hospital, they hadn’t found the room yet where the walls and ceiling had been given an unscheduled cleaning, but a sweeper had reported that when he came on duty Sunday at midnight, he had found a mop wet and recently used in his basement locker. They were checking it for traces of blood and other bodily fluids that had leaked out and squirted out of Kingsly as he died.

                                                 * * * *

Outside our department window, the afternoon light had dimmed to thin smoke. I was still stinging from the dressing-down I’d received from Bufort hours earlier, but where my own failure to help Kingsly’s alcoholism was inexcusable, it
was
passive. However, if Bufort’s line of reasoning was right. Hurst may have deliberately counted on Kingsly’s drinking going untreated to maintain his control over the hospital. The prospect of our medical vice president being that ruthless no longer surprised me.

I found Sean Carrington talking to some residents near our X ray-viewing box. He’d just plopped an odd film of spindly bones on a lighted screen and was eliciting some very puzzled expressions from his audience. I paused to watch, but when he saw me, he grinned and said, “Go away. Earl, this is private. Shoo, shoo!”

I knew what he was up to.

Recently I’d heard he’d taken to buying racehorses as a tax write-off and that his latest nag pulled up lame after her first meet. Sean had wanted to shoot her there and then, but the track authorities said he couldn’t do that. He’d have to pay a vet for arthroscopic surgery—$1800 plus boarding fees. Sean had looked up the fee for the same procedure on humans: $1200. Now he was trying to snag an orthopedic surgeon who was unfortunate enough to be passing by.

“Marty,” he called, “come here and look at this knee for me.”

Marty squinted at the films for a few seconds and then gave his opinion. “This is not a human knee.”

“So, can you operate on her?”

“Is this one of your horses?”

“Yeah, so what? Will you operate on her?”

“I’m cheaper than the vet, right?” He started turning away.

“No, no, it’s your skill. I love this animal so much, I wouldn’t trust her life with anyone but you.”

Marty chuckled. “Who’s going to give the anesthesia, you?”

A demonic light came into Sean’s eyes. “Anesthetic death! Sure! Who’d know?” He turned to one of the incredulous residents. “You want to earn fifty bucks? Look, give me an hour. You just stand there. We don’t say you’re a vet, but we don’t say you’re not. It’ll be over before you’d be expected to actually do anything. Now, we get a scope from day surgery, just to look good, and I’ll get some pentobarbitol syringes ...”

The rest was lost to me as he slipped his arm around the shaken resident and led him to a corner where, obviously, he intended to sell him on his plan.

Funny, I always found his zany performances a breath of relief compared to the pompous demeanor that masked many of our less competent yet more proper practitioners of the healing arts. But today his flash left me empty. He hadn’t been physician enough to help Kingsly either ... and his callousness about the horse disturbed me.

                                            * * * *

The sound of Carole’s long fingernails clicking on her keyboard blended with the steady patter of rain on my own office window. Here too, very little light got through the opaque square of glass. Grime or design, I couldn’t tell. The dirt on the outside pane curdled into a greasy sludge.

When Carole and I were using our desks at the same time, our two tiny adjoining offices were cramped, but that happened so infrequently, we rarely found it a problem. We usually left the door between us open so we could easily speak to each other without getting up.

Carole had given me my messages when I came in. A number of the doctors had dropped by, wanting a look at the ER study. She’d even walked in on Kradic and Green hovering over my desk, much the way I’d surprised Jones earlier that morning. Obviously, Jones had been telling everyone about it, and until I sorted out those statistics, the whole department was going to be nervous waiting for the results. It was a good thing I’d locked up the printouts.

But for now I had to deal with the injunctions. I managed to get through to a lawyer at our malpractice agency in Albany. It was an insurance company that specialized in defending doctors against lawsuits. After a few minutes of assuring ourselves we each had equal meteorological misery, the lawyer listened to my recital of our plight and a half-baked plan I’d put together. He said he’d get back to me the next day with a legal opinion.

After we hung up, I let the rain hitting the window lull me into idle thinking. A lawyer’s emergency response time could be days; a doctor’s was often measured in seconds.

Carole stopped her typing, came through our door, and handed me a stack of mail—mostly ads for equipment we couldn’t afford, and one letter from a national recruitment group offering me a career change and a job in Newark. But she’d already opened and screened them, so when she remained turned toward me, looking at her hands as she rubbed her palms together, I knew she wanted to talk. It was what she always did with her hands if something was going to be awkward.

“Okay, Carole, let’s have it.”

She smiled. “You know me too well.” She took a deep breath. “I realize you don’t need anything more on your plate right now, but I’ve heard some gossip I think you’d better be aware of.” She paused, looked back down at her hands, and kept rubbing them against each other. “Dr. Jones has been sleeping with one of the residents,” she said, obviously embarrassed.

“Oh, God!” I groaned. I definitely did
not
need this now, or at any other time, and especially not from Jones.

Residents were strictly forbidden fruit to our staff. Male doctors had learned that a decade ago, but in the last eight years at least three women doctors in the department had had to be told that sex with the students was, to say the least, inappropriate. And even then they’d been surprised it was any of my business. “It’s the whole department’s business,” I’d explained. “If you split up, and there’s any resentment on either side, it can totally poison our working atmosphere. As for evaluations, they’re completely compromised, good and bad. Hell, disgruntled residents are already taking us to court if they don’t like what we say. Don’t hand them a sexual harassment case to charge us with as well.” Those women had been reasonable after explanations of that sort. I expected no such luck with Jones.

“Who’s she sleeping with?” I asked, feeling even more tired than when I’d finished with Bufort.

“Dr. Todd,” Carole answered. Looking relieved to be free of her burden, she returned to her desk and her typing. She never told me her sources, and I never asked.

Shit! Obviously his
magic hands
did more than insert central lines. At least James Todd was a strong resident. His evaluations from the other doctors would be positive, so we shouldn’t have any problem with having to defend our credibility there. But I’d have to speak with Jones— and I dreaded doing it.