Silent Treatment (13 page)

“Hey, do you two know why the Irish got the whiskey and the A-rabs got the oil?” he asked suddenly. “Give up? It’s becuz the Irish got to pick first.”

He was launching into another mucous laugh when Maura spat at him. From eight or so feet away she missed by only a foot.

“Bitch,” Dickinson muttered, checking to be sure he hadn’t been spattered.

“Pinhead,” Maura shot back.

The night-shift nurse interrupted via the intercom.

“Is there a Detective Dickinson in the room? If there is, you were supposed to check in at the nurse’s station before going into any patient room. Also, Dr. Sidonis is here to see you. He’s in the conference room by the nurse’s station.”

Dickinson looked at Harry. “Don’t go away, Corbett,” he said. “You neither, Yalie.”

He shoved his notebook in his suit-coat pocket and left the room. Tom waited until he was certain the man was out of earshot.

“This is not going to be fun,” he said. “Dickinson is totally burnt-out. He wouldn’t go an extra inch to help his own mother.”

“But he’s on a panel that picks who’s going to make detective.”

“NYPD logic all the way. I’ve been told I’m the leading candidate to get the promotion, but as you just heard, you never know. I really could’ve done without this little encounter with Albert D.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. Look, don’t worry about him. Albert’ll annoy you with a few questions from the detective’s how-to manual just to have something to put on his report. Then, when he realizes there isn’t any reason to suspect foul
play, he’ll leave and spend the next hour or two at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“But there is,” Harry said.

“Is what?”

“Reason to suspect foul play.”

Harry recounted in detail for Tom Hughes his call to the anesthesiologist and his review of Evie’s chart. He was just finishing when Evie was wheeled back in. Shaken by the sight of her, Harry realized that he had already begun to think of her, of their life together, in the past tense. To all intents, the woman he had been married to for nine years was dead.

“The EEG showed a little activity,” Richard Cohen reported as she was being reconnected to the monitoring and respiratory systems, “but not much. Certainly not enough to keep the various teams from moving forward if you give the word. As you know, time is pretty crucial here. Organs do begin to break down.”

“I know,” Harry said. “When do you plan to do a second EEG?”

“Ten in the morning.”

Harry looked down at his wife. Over his twenty-five years as an M.D., he had shared every conceivable experience
involving death and bereavement. But none of those experiences prepared him for this. A few short hours ago, she was the most important person in his life. A few short hours ago, Sidonis or not, they still had the chance to turn their marriage around, to make it work again. But suddenly, it was over. And now, he was being asked to validate Evie’s death by authorizing the donation of her vital organs. He had always been supportive to families in such situations. When he needed them, the right words had come. But he had never had to make the decision himself.

“Leave the papers at the nurse’s station,” he heard himself say. “I’ll sign them before I leave. But I want to see her in the morning before anyone moves ahead with this.”

“I’ll see to it.”

Cohen thanked him, murmured a brief, somewhat uncomfortable condolence, and left the room. Moments later, her adjustments on the ventilator completed, the respiratory technician followed. Sue Jilson checked Evie’s blood pressure and monitor pattern, and then turned to Harry.

“The CT tech took this off your wife,” she said coolly, handing Harry the diamond pendant from Tiffany’s. “I didn’t see any sense in putting it back on her.”

Harry looked at her stonily.

“I do,” he said.

He hooked the necklace back in place. When he turned around again, he and Tom Hughes were alone with the two patients. Maura continued her almost nonstop prattle, pausing only to pick tormentors off the bedclothes. The ventilator connected to Evie again was whirring softly as it provided oxygen to organs that were now of value only when considered individually.

Tom turned off the overhead light, leaving, only the dim over-the-bed fluorescents.

“I’m really sorry for everything you’re going through,” he said.

Harry glanced over at his wife.

“Thanks,” Harry managed to say.

“If you want to talk some more about it, I have the time, and I’m not at all tired.”

“In the hall, maybe,” Harry said. “Not in here.”

They dragged their chairs outside the door. The corridor was dimly lit and silent, save for the white noise of night in the hospital.

“You don’t have to keep talking about your wife if it’s too hard for you,” Hughes said.

“It actually might help.”

“Okay. Just don’t be embarrassed to tell me to shut up. I confess that as a cop, what little you’ve told me so far has me intrigued. What do you think is going on?”

“I have no idea. There’s probably a stupid, simple explanation for everything. The nurse who took the telephone order got the anesthesiologist’s name wrong.… Some M.D. friend of ours was on the floor seeing another patient and stopped by to see Evie—”

“That’s
two
simple explanations. In my experience, when you need to invoke more than one explanation for things happening coincidentally, none of them is the true story. Would you mind going back into the room with me for a minute?”

Harry considered the request, then followed him in.

Hughes began pacing deliberately around first Maura’s bed, then Evie’s, checking the walls, the light switches, and the beds themselves. Maura watched him curiously.

“Rather than assume the most benign explanation,” Tom said, continuing his inspection, “for the moment let’s assume the worst. Some doctor—or perhaps someone planning to pose as a doctor—called in an order to have an IV started in your wife’s arm and gave the real anesthesiologist-on-duty’s name. Later, he entered this room, unseen by the nurses, spoke to my sister, then administered a pressor drug to your wife. Then he left the floor, again managing to avoid being spotted by anyone. We need a motive for why he would have done such a thing, and an explanation as to how he could have made it on and off the floor without being spotted.”

“Dickinson made it in here without being seen.”

“One way, he did. The nurses were in their change of shift report when he came on the floor. But having
two
such opportunities—onto the floor, then off again—let alone planning on them, is asking a bit much.”

“So what are you looking for now?”

“Places where our mystery doctor might have left a fingerprint or two. Too bad we don’t have prints of every M.D. on the—”

“Okay, Dr. Corbett,” Albert Dickinson cut in. “I guess it’s time you and I had a little talk.” The detective, leaning against the doorjamb, sighed wearily. “I’m required to tell you that you have the right to remain silent, but that anything you choose to say may and will be used against you in a court of law. You—”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “Why are you reading him Miranda? Is he being arrested?”

“Not yet, but he will be. I just thought I’d get through the formalities.”

“Lieutenant Dickinson,” Hughes went on, “there are some things you don’t know about what’s gone on here.”

“You wanna know what I
do
know, Yalie? I know that no matter how much they got—sex, money, power, drugs, or whatever—doctors always want more. That’s just the way they are. Give me an unsolved crime where one of ten suspects is a doctor, and my money’s on the doe every time. Now, Dr. Corbett, if you’d like to—”

“Lieutenant, another doctor came in to see Mrs. Corbett after Harry left here tonight,” Tom Hughes said.

“There was no one. The next person to come on this floor after Dr. Corbett left here was you. And by that time, Mrs. Corbett was already on the chute. I checked with the nurses. They have all visitors logged.”

“Well, the nurses are wrong. Someone was here. A white male in his forties wearing a white clinic coat. Five eight, brown hair, brown eyes.”

“Who says?”

Tom’s expression suggested that he was expecting the question but still had found no easy way around having to answer it.

“My sister,” he said boldly. “The man spoke to her,
then went around the curtain to Mrs. Corbett, and then left. It was soon after that her aneurysm ruptured.”

Dickinson smirked. “Is that what you saw, little lady?”

“Pinhead. You know, you should fire whoever made you that toupee. I could paint a piece of lettuce with shoe polish and have it look more realistic.”

Dickinson smiled blandly but it was clear he had been skewered. Harry realized only then that the man
was
wearing a hairpiece. Score one more for Maura Hughes’s power of observation.

“Why don’t you have another drink, little lady,” Dickinson said.

“Maura,” Tom pleaded, “would you please stop with the wisecracks and just tell the detective what you saw?”

Maura brushed at something on her shoulder but said nothing.

“Don’t bother,” Harry said. “I don’t think the detective is going to pay much attention. Come on, Lieutenant. Let’s get this over with.”

“Lieutenant Dickinson,” Tom asked, “do you think it would be worthwhile calling someone over from forensics?”

“For what?”

“Maybe the doctor who was here left some prints.”

“Fingerprint a hospital room, huh. Sounds like a great idea to me, Yalie. I mean there couldn’t have been more than, oh, one or two hundred people in here over the last day.”

“Almost everyone who’s been in this room, including the doctors, has a set of fingerprints on file with hospital security,” Harry said. “It’s been hospital policy for years, ever since a convicted child molester lied on his application and got a job as an orderly on the pediatric unit.”

“Great. I’m sure forensics will be thrilled to come out on a night like this because a woman in the goddamn DTs claims she saw someone that not a single other person on this whole floor saw.”

“I’m telling you, I know my sister, and I know that there was someone here.”

“And I’m telling you, spiders and ants and giant snakes
don’t leave fingerprints. Now, Corbett, let’s get this over. You’ll feel much better when you get everything off your chest.…”

It was well after midnight by the time Harry finished responding to Albert Dickinson’s unemotional and uninspired interrogation. The detective had dearly made up his mind that the scenario fed to him by Caspar Sidonis was the correct one. Harry, unwilling to allow his wife to run off with another man, had administered a blood-pressure-raising agent to her. Her death would appear to be due to the rupture of her aneurysm, and no questions would be asked. Now, samples of her blood were being sent to the state lab for analysis. If any unusual substances were found, especially ones related to raising blood pressure, there was a good chance that a warrant would be issued for Harry’s arrest.

“Motive, method, opportunity,” Dickinson said. “Right now, all we’re missing is the method.”

Harry saw no point in telling the hostile detective about the telephone order to start an IV on Evie. Pramod Baraswatti would undoubtedly check with the floor first thing in the morning. An incident report would be filed, and sooner or later, word would trickle back to Dickinson. His conclusion would, of course, be that Harry had made the call himself, setting up a port for his lethal injection.

Motive, method, opportunity
.

He followed Harry back to the room.

“Yalie, I want a cop here as long as she’s alive and he’s on the floor.”

“She’s already been pronounced clinically dead,” Hughes said.

“Look, are you gonna make me send someone else in here, or are you gonna show us that you’re a fucking team player?”

“Some team,” Hughes muttered.

“What did you say?”

“I said I’ll stay here and protect her.”

“That’s what I thought. I’ve already told the nurses that I don’t want him alone with her as long as she’s alive.”

“But—”

“Is that clear?”

“Sure, Lieutenant.”

Harry followed Dickinson down the hall and watched until the elevator doors closed behind him.

“He gone?” Hughes asked when Harry returned.

“For now. He says that as soon as anything shows up in Evie’s blood, I’ll be arrested.”

“Do you think something will?”

Harry rubbed at the persistent stinging in his eyes.

“I don’t know what the hell to think,” he said. “What an asshole that man is. I mean, the least he could have done was call someone in for the fingerprints. I agree it’s a long shot, but it’s a no shot at
all
if—”

“We don’t need him,” Tom said, leading Harry back toward the elevators.

“What?”

“We’ve got the Dweeb. He’s on his way up right now.”

At almost that moment, the elevator doors glided open and a slight, almost frail-looking black man emerged. He was wearing a Detroit Tigers jacket and a Detroit Lions cap, and was carrying a briefcase in one hand and a large fishing-tackle box in the other.

“Did he see you?” Tom asked.

“Nope. Walked right past me, too. I swear, Albert wouldn’t see a corpse if it was hanging from his ceiling.”

“I appreciate this. I really do,” Tom said. “Harry Corbett, meet Lonnie Sims, also known as the Dweeb.”

Sims set his tackle box down and shook Harry’s hand with a linebacker’s grip.

“He’s with us,” Tom said to the night-shift nurse as they hurried past her. “Another detective.” They entered room 928. “Lonnie and I were classmates at NYU when I got my master’s in criminology,” he explained. “He’s the best crime-scene man that school’s ever produced. And he loves doing fingerprints.”

“That’s true, my man,” Sims said, setting his tackle box on a chair and snapping it open. “That’s true.”

“One of my friends, Doug Atwater, has a lot of clout here,” Harry said. “Actually, Tom, you probably saw him. He was here a while ago.”

“Tall, good looking, sort of blondish hair?”