The Motive (34 page)

“She sounds so sad,” Catherine said. “It could be one of my daughters. That’s what I’m missing the most. The kids.” She took a deep breath. “It’s bad enough now, with them having to deal with all that high school nastiness, with their mother in jail, what they must be going through day to day. But what I really agonize about is how it’s going to affect them in the long run, if I wind up…” She stared at her hands in her lap.

“That’s not going to happen,” Hardy said. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

Down the hall, they heard the crying voice suddenly change pitch and scream, “No! No! No!” and then the clank of metal on metal. From out of nowhere, at the same instant, their bailiff opened the courtroom door at the mouth of their cage. “You want dinner, we better get you changed,” he said.

Wordless, Catherine hesitated, let out a long sigh. Then, resigned, she nodded, stood up and held out her hands for the cuffs.

T
he pediatric heart specialist at Kaiser, Dr. Aaron Trueblood, was a short, slightly hunchbacked, soft-spoken man in his mid- to late sixties. Now he was sitting across a table from Glitsky in a small featureless room in the maternity wing, his hands folded in front of him, his kindly face fraught with concern.

Treya had been a trouper. They got to the hospital well before nine o’clock that morning, and after eight hours of labor, Glitsky breathing with her throughout the ordeal, she delivered an eight-pound, two-ounce boy they would call Zachary. Crying lustily after his first breath, he looked perfectly formed in all his parts. Glitsky cut the umbilical cord. Treya’s ob-gyn, Joyce Gavelin, gave him Apgar scores of eight and nine, about as good as it gets.

In a bit under an hour, though, the euphoria of the successful delivery gave way to a suddenly urgent concern. Dr. Gavelin had the usual postpartum duties—the episiotomy, delivering the placenta and so on—during all of which time Zachary lay cuddled against his mother’s stomach in the delivery room. The doctor released mother and baby down to her room in the maternity ward, and Glitsky walked beside the gurney in the hallway while they went and checked into the private room they’d requested, where the hospital would provide a special dinner and where he hoped to spend the night. After making sure that Treya and Zachary were settled—the boy took right to breast-feeding—Glitsky went down the hall to call his father, Nat, to tell him the good news and check up on Rachel, who was staying with him. Everything was as it should have been.

When he came back to Treya’s room, though, she was crying and Zachary was gone. Dr. Gavelin had come in for
a more formal secondary examination of the newborn. But what began as a routine and cursory procedure changed as soon as she pressed her stethoscope to the baby’s chest. Immediately, her normally upbeat, cheerleader demeanor underwent a transformation. “What is it? Joyce, talk to me. Is everything all right?”

But Dr. Gavelin, frowning now, held up a hand to quiet Treya and moved the stethoscope to another location on the baby’s chest, then another, another, around to his back. She let out a long breath and closed her eyes briefly, perhaps against the pain she was about to inflict. “I don’t want to worry you, Treya, but your little boy’s got a heart murmur,” she said. “I’d like to have one of my colleagues give a listen and maybe run a couple of tests on him. We’ll need to take Zachary away for a while.”

“Take him away! What for?”

The doctor put what she might have hoped was a comforting hand on Treya’s arm. “As I said, to run a few tests, shoot some X-rays. Maybe get a little better sense of the cause of the murmur. We’ve got a terrific pediatric cardiologist….”

“Couldn’t you just do it here? Have somebody come down…?”

“I don’t think so. We’ll want to do an X-ray and an echocardiogram at least. And then maybe some other testing.”

“What kind of testing?”

“To get a handle on what we might be dealing with, Treya.”

“But you just said it was a murmur. Aren’t murmurs fairly common?”

“Some kinds, yes.”

“But not this kind?”

Dr. Gavelin hadn’t moved her hand, and now she squeezed Treya’s arm. “I don’t know,” she said gently.

“That’s why I want to have a specialist look at him.”

And then, somehow, by the time Glitsky got back from his phone call, Zachary was gone.

Sometime later, the volunteer maternity staff people wheeled in the special dinner that had been ordered for this room and seemed confused that the baby wasn’t with
the parents, who were both on the bed, silent, clearly distraught, each holding the other’s hands. They didn’t even look at the food. Finally, when the orderlies came back to remove the untouched trays, Glitsky decided he had to move. He didn’t have any idea how long he and Treya had been sitting together waiting, but suddenly he had to get proactive. He needed to get information. Like, first, where was his son? And what exactly was wrong with him?

He told Treya that he’d be back when he’d learned something, and walked out into the hallway. He at once had recognized Gavelin and an older man approaching, heads down in consultation. One of them must have looked up and seen him, because without exchanging too many words, it seems that they decided that Joyce would go back in to talk to Treya, and the other doctor—the stooped, sad and kind-looking one—would break the news to Glitsky.

Too worried to argue the logistics—why weren’t they seeing him and Treya together?—he followed Trueblood into the tiny room, but they weren’t even seated when Glitsky said, “When can I see my son?”

“I can’t tell you that exactly.” Glitsky recognized something in Trueblood’s voice—the same sympathetic but oddly disembodied tone he’d used numerous times before, when he had to inform relatives about the death of someone in their family. He knew that your words had to be clear and carefully chosen to forestall denial. You were recounting an objective fact that could not be undone, painful as it was to hear. At that tone—by itself—Glitsky felt his heart contract in panic’s grip. Trueblood’s next words, even more gently expressed, were a depth charge in his psyche. “I’m sorry, but this may be very serious.”

“You mean he might die?”

Trueblood hesitated, then nodded. “It’s not impossible. We’re still not sure exactly what we’re dealing with.”

Arguing, as though it would change anything, Glitsky said, “But my wife said it was just a murmur.”

Trueblood’s red-rimmed, exhausted, unfathomably cheerless eyes held Glitsky’s. His hands were folded in front of him on the table and he spoke with an exaggerated care. “Yes, but there are different kinds of murmurs. Your
son’s, Zachary’s, is a very loud murmur,” he said. “Now this can mean one of two things—the first not very good and the second very bad.”

“So not very good is the best that we’re talking about?”

Trueblood nodded. He piled the words up as Glitsky struggled to comprehend. “It could be, and this is the not very good option, that it’s just a hole in his heart….”

“Just?”

A matter-of-fact nod. “It’s called a VSD, a ventricular septal defect. It’s a very small, pinhole-sized hole that can produce a murmur of this volume. Sometimes.”

“So the very bad option is more likely?”

“Statistically, with this type of murmur, perhaps slightly.”

Glitsky couldn’t hold his head up anymore. They shouldn’t have tried for this baby. He shouldn’t have let Treya talk him into it. She was already in love with it, with
him
, with Zachary, as was Glitsky himself. After the long wait to welcome him, in only a couple of hours Zachary had moved into their hearts and minds. And not just the thought of him. The presence, the person.

But Trueblood was going on. “In any event, the other option is called aortic stenosis, which in a newborn can be very difficult to correct.” He let the statement hang between them for a second. “But that’s what we’re testing to see now. We’ve X-rayed the heart already, and it doesn’t seem to be enlarged, which is the most obvious sign of aortic stenosis.”

Glitsky, grasping at anything resembling hope, said, “And you’re saying it doesn’t seem enlarged?”

“No. But at his age, we’ll need to analyze the X-rays more closely. A heart that size, we’re talking millimeters of difference between healthy and damaged. We’ll need to have a radiologist give us a definitive read on it.”

“And when will that be?”

“We’ve got a call in for someone right now, but he may not get his messages until morning. In any case, it won’t be for a few hours at best. And the echocardiogram couldn’t be scheduled until tomorrow. We felt we had to talk to you and your wife before then.”

Glitsky met the doctor’s eyes again. “What if it’s the VSD, the hole in the heart? The better option.”

“Well, if it’s a big hole, we operate, but I don’t think it’s a big one.”

“Why not?”

“The murmur is too loud. It’s either a tiny, tiny hole or…or aortic stenosis.”

“A death sentence.”

“Not necessarily, not always.”

“But most of the time?”

“Not infrequently.”

“So what about this tiny hole? What do you do with that?”

“We just let it alone as long as we can. Sometimes they close up by themselves. Sometimes they never do, but they don’t affect the person’s life. But if the hole does cause…problems, we can operate.”

“On the heart?”

“Yes.”

“Open-heart surgery?”

“Yes. That’s what it is. And it’s successful a vast majority of the time.”

Glitsky was trying to analyze it all, fit it in somewhere. “So best case, we’re looking at heart surgery. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. Best case is a tiny hole that closes by itself.”

“And how often does that happen?”

Trueblood paused. “About one out of eight. We’ll have a better idea by the morning.”

Glitsky spoke half to himself. “What are we supposed to do until then?”

The doctor knew the bitter truth of his suggestion, but it was the only thing he could bring himself to say. “You might pray that it’s only a hole in his heart.”

“
Only
a hole in his heart? That’s the best we can hope for?”

“Considering the alternative, that would be good news, yes.”

It was eight thirty and Hardy told himself that he should close the shop and go home. He reached up and turned the switch on the green banker’s lamp that he’d been reading under. His office and the lobby through his open door were
now dark. A wash of indirect light from down the associates’ hallway kept the place from utter blackness, but he felt effectively isolated and alone. It wasn’t a bad way to feel. He knew he could call Yet Wah and have his shrimp lo mein order waiting for him by the time he got there, but something rendered him immobile, and he’d learned over the years to trust these intuitive inclinations, especially when he was in trial.

The primary reality in a trial like this is that there was just too much to remember. You could have pretty damned close to a photographic memory, as Hardy did, and still find yourself struggling to remember a fact, a detail, a snatch of conflicting testimony. The big picture, the individual witness strategies, the evidence trail, the alternative theories—to keep all these straight and reasonably accessible, some unconscious process prompted him to shut down from time to time—to let his mind go empty and see what claimed his attention. It was almost always something he’d once known and then forgotten, or dismissed as unimportant before he’d had all the facts, and which a new fact or previously unseen connection had suddenly rendered critical.

Once in a while, he’d use the irrational downtime to leaf through his wall of binders, pulling a few down at random and turning pages for snatches of a police report, witness testimony, photographs. Other times, he’d throw darts—no particular game, just the back and forth from his throw line to the board and back again. Tonight, he backed his chair away from his desk and simply sat in the dark, waiting for inspiration or enlightenment.

He hadn’t noticed her approach, but a female figure was suddenly standing in the doorway. She reached for the doorknob and started to pull the door closed.

“Hello?” Hardy said.

“Oh, sorry.” The voice of Gina Roake, his other partner. “Diz, is that you? I saw your door open, I thought you’d left and forgotten to close it.”